GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
C. L. R. SASTRI
[“Bernard Shaw is an old man who is still
young: in an age when the young men are most of them very old. There is a real
score for his negative eccentricities, when we can still see him making merry
over cold water and cabbages, while men who would be his grandsons or
great-grandsons are making themselves miserable over cocktails and champagne...Hope, hearty conviction, the fighting spirit – these
are things not so abounding
among the youth of our time, that we can fail to salute them in the chief
literary veteran of the age.”
– G. K. Chesterton: George Bernard Shaw.]
The above, it will be seen, is mighty praise,
indeed: thus does royalty salute royalty. It is an intensely moving tribute
from one celebrity to another:
“When the high heart we magnify,
And the sure vision celebrate,
And worship greatness passing by,
Ourselves are great.”
Alas, Chesterton is no more–as
well as he whom he has celebrated in the above passage. We could have
ill-spared him in an age of small men. There was (God be thanked!) nothing
small about him He was Falstaffian in nearly
every sense of the term. There was a largeness, a
magnificence, even about his chivalry. Did he not, for instance, boast once
that he had vacated his seat on the tram for three ladies? And to
reflect that the archreviler of the French Revolution
should have been impelled to make such a “to-do” about “the age of chivalry
being gone!” It must, to be sure, have disappeared now – with the
disappearance, from our midst, of Gilbert Keith Chesterton.
English letters lost decidedly their most
brilliant figure when, quite a few decades ago, tiring of a mean world, a world
incessantly given to cheese-paring, to counting its candle-ends (both
literally and metaphorically), he was
in a desperate hurry to leave us: doubtless to commune with kindred souls in a
more spacious universe.
“G. K. C.” and “G. B. S.”
I have brought in the august name of G. K. C.
with malice prepense, as it were. There has never been anyone who
was a fitter antagonist of
Bernard Shaw, a foeman worthy of his steel, than he. G. K. C. was G. B. S’s real foil: they were strophe and anti-strophe. They met on the battlefield “like two clouds
over the Caspian.” Many were the intellectual bouts between them: and I consider
it a great good fortune that it fell to my lot to have been a keenly interested
spectator at not a few of them. It was superb fun to watch these two wily
disputants – both carrying great guns of wit and learning – going at one
another like two heavyweights in the boxing-ring.
More often than not, I found myself sharing
Shaw’s views on men and affairs. But, if the truth is to be told, my heart was
nearly always with Chesterton. Loving the man as I did, and feeling in my
bones, so to speak, that, in sheer brain-power, he was the undoubted superior,
I felt impelled to side with him rather than with Shaw. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and
there are some things that simply cannot be helped: some things in which, as
“Each one of us has an author who is a favourite, a friend, an idol, whose immutable perfection he
maintains against all comers. For example, things are urged against Scott:
I receive them in the attitude of the deaf adder of
G. K. C.’s book on G. B. S.
There is no need for anyone to remind me that
this is supposed to be an article on Bernard Shaw, not on Gilbert Chesterton. I
shall bear it in mind at reasonable intervals, as the Master himself suavely
retorted in his scintillating monograph on Shaw. Chesterton on Shaw! A Daniel come to judgment, indeed! The motto that_I
have appended to my article is from that book. Even if, as is commonly true of
most books of Chesterton, it is more a revelation of Chesterton than of Shaw,
it is still a revelation of Shaw, and by far the best revelation of him extant.
I would have given a good deal to have read Shaw on Chesterton. But that pleasure has been denied us. Of the
two, Shaw was the older man as
well as the more considerable author. Chesterton was the wisest interpreter
that Shaw has had so far: the most sympathetic and the most penetrating.
Shaw is all mind:
he is one solid mass of intellect. I have often toyed with the notion that when
the Philosopher-Prince, in that celebrated rhapsody of his:
“What a piece of work is man!
How nimble in reason: How infinite in faculties: in form and moving how express
and admirable: in action how like an angel: in apprehension how like a god: the
beauty of the world: the paragon of animals!”
he must have had an inexplicable provision of the sage of
Shaw himself speaks somewhere of his having
“cut cerebral capers” in this or that play of his. He has, let me remind him,
done nothing else since he broke loose from his comfortable berth in the firm
of a land-agent in Dublin in the fateful March of 1876 to win laurels in London
as a literary figure “of importance in his day,” as Browning would have put it.
“Cutting cerebral capers” is the mot juste: in
other words, performing intellectual acrobatics on the political, scientific,
economic and theological trapezes. It has been a merry game throughout, and he
has eminently deserved all the chuckles he has got out of it: so, let me add,
his innumerable readers.
The most important fact one has to remember
about him is, of course, that he was an Irishman: he was Irish de haut en
bas. I like Irishmen “more than somewhat”, in Danon
Runyon’s phrase and I can bear no grudge against any son of
“Of many of Landor’s
sentences we are fain to remember what was said of those of Socrates, that they
are cubes which will stand firm, place them how or where you will.”
What Elizabeth Barrett Browning also says of Landor is true, once again, of Shaw himself:
“In marble, indeed, he seems to work, for
there is an angularity in the workmanship, whether of prose or of verse, which
the very exquisiteness of his polish renders more conspicuous.”
With me a writer possessing such a bewitching
manner of “putting it across” has already won more than half the battle. Add
that he is Irish, and I am
prepared to eat out of his hand. That is why I feel that he would have done
well not to underline the fact of his being an Irishman to the extent he has
done. Besides, Shaw was not typically Irish. The typical Irishman is a Catholic: Shaw was a
Protestant. Nearly as wide a gulf separates a Protestant Irishman from a
Catholic Irishman as both from a true-blue Englishman. That Shaw himself had a
faint suspicion that the Catholic Irish are the typical Irish is
evidenced by this remark of his in one of his prefaces to his plays:
“ ‘The
It was fortunate that, though a Protestant,
he was not an “Orange-man”; if, by that term, it is implied a Belfast Tory. He
says somewhere that, though it is the rule for a Protestant Irishman to be an
anti-Home-Ruler, he is apt to become a more fierce
Home-Ruler even than a Catholic Irishman once he sees the Light and enters the
Radical tabernacle. Well, Powell also was a Protestant, so, perhaps, we may
take Shaw at his word. He was a Home-Ruler–“with knobs on.” If
In that preface Shaw demolishes, once for
all, the case for one country dominating another. I can quote passage after
passage from it, piling Palion on Ossa,
as it were, but my space is limited. It is difficult to write a short article on Shaw. He never could write a short article himself, or a
short play, or a short preface: least of all, a short preface. He can be
excruciatingly entertaining on any topic: else, read his Revolutionist’s Handbook, which is a sort of tail-piece to his magnificent Preface to Man
and Superman. He can write on
anything – from a lady’s commerce
with her looking-glass to a
man’s intercourse with his Maker. It is, therefore, a little difficult to select
passages from his writings.
I should like to linger over the play, John
Bull’s Other Island; a while longer. It was the first play I read of Shaw. I like that
“Other Island” even if I do not like “John Bull”, and I like Larry Doyle
(though a prolonged residence in London appears to have turned him into a
prig), and even Matthew Haffigan, that “gnarled snag
of a man”, as C. E. Montague has called him, I may be wrong, but I feel that
there is a lot of Larry Doyle in Shaw himself. I wonder whether every Irishman – like Shaw and
Sean O’ Casey and Larry Doyle in the play – is determined never to return to Ireland once he leaves its elfin
shores.
Shaw’s memories of his early Dublin life seem
to be the reason for his being so allergic to revisiting his native country.
And yet his lines were not cast in such hard places! He had not belonged to the
“submerged tenth” of society. He was a “younger son” of a “younger son”, as he
has been at such considerable pains to inform us, and the proverbial “wolf” was
nowhere to be seen near his door. It may not have been a veritable “Paradise”,
but neither was it “the other place.” There was, however, that trouble about
Shaw (“Senior”) : that was the one crumpled rose-leaf under our hero’s bed.
His paterfamilas was given to a little tipsyness: he was often “under the weather.” That was the
skeleton in the family cupboard.
London made Shaw as it has made many another
of his countrymen, and it is worth remembering that even in London his lines
were not cast in hard places. For was there not his mother to support him? He
has made much of the fact, that, instead of him supporting his mother, she supported
him. Self-confessedly, other men were not like him. Did not a physician assure
him once that his eyesight was perfectly normal–“normal sight conferring the
power of seeing things accurately and being enjoyed only by about ten per cent
of the population, the remaining ninety per cent being abnormal?”
I have written that London made him as it has
made many another of his countrymen. I should have written, rather, that it was
that distinguished dramatic critic and translator and populariser
of Ibsen in England, William Archer, who, more than
any other individual, made him. It was he who pulled the right strings, at the
right time, and established Shaw as the dramatic critic of the Saturday
Review. After that–and only
after that–Shaw made
himself. It is a moot point whether he could have made himself but for this
fortunate accident: because, all said and done, the starting point of his fame
and career was this same appointment of himself as the arbiter elegentarium of European drama on that famous weekly.
The Saturday Review specialised in dramatic
critics: the list runs from Bernard Shaw to James Agate. And Agate has
confessed that what induced him to forsake calico-selling for the far
more onerous job of play-boosting, or play-damning, was the reading of Shaw’s
dramatic criticism in the Saturday.
Frankly, I have not read that dramatic
criticism. But I have read Agate’s dramatic criticism–heaps and heaps of it–and what I feel is that, if the disciple
could write such magnoperative stuff, the Master’s
productions must have been epoch-making, indeed! It is my confirmed opinion
that English journalism is the father, the mother, and the wet nurse combined
of English literature. Most considerable English authors started in life as
journalists. It was quite appropriate, therefore, that Shaw should have
commenced his journalistic career in the hospitable column of the Saturday
Review. It was as good a jumping-off place for his future, marvellous success as any other.
Though Shaw had been many things in his time,
he will be remembered chiefly as a dramatist, and as a dramatist who broke
entirely new ground in the theatre. To him largely belongs the credit for
inaugurating what has been called “the play of ideas”. or “the
discussion-drama.” Stated in such bald terms, of course, it may very well be a
fruitful source of confusion. It can hardly be that, before his advent, plays
had been totally devoid of ideas or the discussion of them. Besides, it is
rather difficult to visualise a play that is so full
of the Agatian “cogitabundities
of cogitation.” It cannot be a
play, properly so called, if it is overflowing with
“Thoughts hardly to be packed
In a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and
escaped,”
There must be a teeny-weeny framework of
action within which those tremendous cerebrations can find full scope for
functioning. Shaw, I must confess, confuses me here with his Getting
Married. Like the Cheshire cat, which is said to be all grin and not enough
of cat, that play is all discussion and not enough of play. That does not,
however, invalidate my contention that the primary duty of a play is to
be as compact of action as possible: without any noticeable detriment (let me
interpolate) to the copious cornucopia of ideas.
I am, frankly, a heretic in this matter. W.
Somerset Maugham administers the coup de grace to the idolisation of Shaw as the innovator of the “discussion-drama.” In his
revealing autobiography, Summing Up, he has no hesitation in asserting
that the influence of Shaw on the English stage of today has well-nigh been
devastating. He further opines that Shaw has succeeded on the stage, not because he is a
dramatist of ideas, but
because he is a dramatist. Maugham
was himself a dramatist of considerable repute and, as such, has a peculiar
right to be heard in this connection. I worship Shaw like most persons, but
worship him “this side idolatry.”
I am certain that he has not written a
slovenly sentence in all his life. But I am certain also that he has written
many (far too many, in fact) that he need not have written. His Preface to what
he himself regards as his finest play, Man and Superman, is, judged by
whatever standard, a wonderful piece of workmanship. It is my considered
opinion, however, that it would have been even a more considerable piece of
workmanship if he could have brought himself to delete huge chunks from it. One
not seldom gets bored by his endless divagations. The amusing story has
been narrated of Swinburne flinging himself on the
floor at Dr. Jowett’s feet and exclaiming:
“Master, I have never thanked you enough for
cutting 4,000 lines from Bothwell.”
Congenitally prolific writers like Shaw will
do well to remember it when they are in the throes of composition. Coming back
to the play of ideas it may interest my readers to note what that eminent
dramatic critic of the London Times, the late Mr. A. B. Walkley has to say on Shaw’s contribution to it:
“It is better not to enter into so
dangerously controversial a subject as the value of Shaw’s criticism of life;
nor is there any need, seeing that he fails to express it in terms of drama.
The essential law of the theatre is thought through emotion. No character exhibits real emotion in the
fascinating exercises in dialectic which Shaw miscalls plays.”
I have mentioned that, forsaking a fairly
comfortable berth in the firm of a land-agent in Dublin in the fateful March of
1876, Shaw the unpredictable left Dublin for London. Why did he do so? He
himself furnishes the answer. He had already begun to experience a strange
longing for writing: a malady, let me mention, most incident to callow youth.
Words early began to make an irresistible appeal to him: their sounds and their
nuances. He, so to speak, lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. Finding himself
thus a prey to this malady, he took the only step that was feasible in the
circumstances: he hid himself to London, the intellectual metropolis of the
world as well as, in his own inimitable words, “the literary centre of the English language and for such artistic culture as the realm of the English language (of
which I propose to be King) could afford.”
That, and nothing less, was the impulse that
prompted the future author of St. Joan, Man and Superman and Back to Methuselah to make the pilgrimage to London and thus
to choose a career to which, as everyone knows, many are called but few chosen.
Our hero, needless to say, saw to it that he would be among the few chosen and
not among the many that fell by the wayside. He aspired to be “the King of the
realm of the English language.” Who dares to suggest, at this time of day, that
he has not succeeded in this overpowering ambition and that, in his hands,
English prose has not
“…….become a trumpet, whence he (has blown)
Soul-animating strains?”
Shaw is, undoubtedly, a lord of language. He wrote like one that had been inspired. I shall now conclude my article: “even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.” Shaw believes in “Supermen”. I do not: no, not even “north-north-west.” We have been condemned to see some “Supermen” in our times: they have gone the way of “the many Ninevehs and Hecatempoli.” Shaw performed not a few astonishing somersaults in his political convictions: and one of these has been the mystifying recantation of his own full-blooded faith in democracy in favour of an unstinted glorification of dictatorship. His play, Geneva, and, to a lesser extent, his play, The Apple Cart, fully bear me out on this point. His Battler and his Bombordonne are now less than the dust under the chariot-wheels of that much-despised human being, “the man in the street.”
In Man and Superman, he gives full
rein to his pet notion that, in this eternal amorous game, it is not the man
who pursues the woman but the
woman the man. In his previous play, You Never Can Tell, we
had been given a rather piquant foretaste of this same pet notion of his.
Gloria in the earlier drama, and Anne in the latter, throw all womanly decency
to the four winds when they find that their men are about to give them the
slip.
In a sense, Shaw was his own “Superman” come
to life not withstanding a few astounding political recantations.