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Old and New Masters, essay(s) by Robert Lynd |
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Chapter 16. Mr. Bernard Shaw |
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_ CHAPTER XVI. MR. BERNARD SHAW Mr. Shaw came for a short time recently to be regarded less as an author than as an incident in the European War. In the opinion of many people, it seemed as if the Allies were fighting against a combination composed of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Mr. Shaw. Mr. Shaw's gift of infuriating people is unfailing. He is one of those rare public men who can hardly express an opinion on potato-culture--and he does express an opinion on everything--without making a multitude of people shake their fists in impotent anger. His life--at least, his public life--has been a jibe opposed to a rage. He has gone about, like a pickpocket of illusions, from the world of literature to the world of morals, and from the world of morals to the world of politics, and, everywhere he has gone, an innumerable growl has followed him. Not that he has not had his disciples--men and women who believe that what Mr. Shaw says on any conceivable subject is far more important than what _The Times_ or the _Manchester Guardian_ says. He has never founded a church, however, because he has always been able to laugh at his disciples as unfeelingly as at anybody else. He has courted unpopularity as other men have courted popularity. He has refused to assume the vacuous countenance either of an idol or a worshipper, and in the result those of us to whom life without reverence seems like life in ruins are filled at times with a wild lust to denounce and belittle him. He has been called more names than any other man of letters alive. When all the other names have been exhausted and we are about to become inarticulate, we even denounce him as a bore. But this is only the Billingsgate of our exasperation. Mr. Shaw is not a bore, whatever else he may be. He has succeeded in the mere business of interesting us beyond any other writer of his time. He has succeeded in interesting us largely by inventing himself as a public figure, as Oscar Wilde and Stevenson did before him. Whether he could have helped becoming a figure, even if he had never painted that elongated comic portrait of himself, it is difficult to say. Probably he was doomed to be a figure just as Dr. Johnson was. If he had not told us legends about himself, other people would have told them, and they could scarcely have told them so well: that would have been the chief difference. Even if Mr. Shaw's plays should ever become as dead as the essays in _The Rambler_, his lineaments and his laughter will survive in a hundred stories which will bring the feet of pilgrims to Adelphi Terrace in search of a ghost with its beard on fire. His critics often accuse him, in regard to the invention of the Shaw myth, of having designed a poster rather than painted a portrait. And Mr. Shaw always hastens to agree with those who declare he is an advertiser in an age of advertisement. M. Hamon quotes him as saying:-- Stop advertising myself! On the contrary, I must do it more than ever. Look at Pears's Soap. There is a solid house if you like, but every wall is still plastered with their advertisements. If I were to give up advertising, my business would immediately begin to fall off. You blame me for having declared myself to be the most remarkable man of my time. But the claim is an arguable one. Why should I not say it when I believe that it is true? One suspects that there is as much fun as commerce in Mr. Shaw's advertisement. Mr. Shaw would advertise himself in this sense even if he were the inmate of a workhouse. He is something of a natural peacock. He is in the line of all those tramps and stage Irishmen who have gone through! life with so fine a swagger of words. This only means that in his life he is an artist. He is an artist in his life to an even greater extent than he is a moralist in his art. The mistake his depreciators make, however, is in thinking that his story ends here. The truth about Mr. Shaw is not quite so simple as that. The truth about Mt. Shaw cannot be told until we realize that he is an artist, not only in the invention of his own life, but in the observation of the lives of other people. His Broadbent is as wonderful a figure as his George Bernard Shaw. Not that his portraiture is always faithful. He sees men and women too frequently in the refracting shallows of theories. He is a doctrinaire, and his characters are often comic statements of his doctrines rather than the reflections of men and women. "When I present true human nature," he observes in one of the many passages in which he justifies himself, "the audience thinks it is being made fun of. In reality I am simply a very careful writer of natural history." One is bound to contradict him. Mr. Shaw often thinks he is presenting true human nature when he is merely presenting his opinions about human nature--the human nature of soldiers, of artists, of women. Or, rather, when he is presenting a queer fizzing mixture of human nature and his opinions about it. This may be sometimes actually a virtue in his comedy. Certainly, from the time of Aristophanes onwards, comedy has again and again been a vehicle of opinions as well as a branch of natural history. But it is not always a virtue. Thus in _The Doctors Dilemma_, when Dubedat is dying, his self-defence and his egoism are for the most part admirably true both to human nature and to Mr. Shaw's view of the human nature of artists. But when he goes on with his last breath to utter his artistic creed: "I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of colour, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen, Amen," these sentences are no more natural or naturalistic than the death-bed utterances in one of Mr. G.R. Sims's ballads. Dubedat would not have thought these things, he would not have said these things; in saying them he becomes a mere mechanical figure, without any admixture of humanity, repeating Mr. Shaw's opinion of the nature of the creed of artists. There is a similar falsification in the same play in the characterization of the newspaper man who is present at Dubedat's death and immediately afterwards is anxious to interview the widow. "Do you think," he asks, "she would give me a few words on 'How it Feels to be a Widow?' Rather a good title for an article, isn't it?" These sentences are bad because into an atmosphere of more or less naturalistic comedy they simply introduce a farcical exaggeration of Mr. Shaw's opinion of the incompetence and impudence of journalists. Mr. Shaw's comedies are repeatedly injured by a hurried alteration of atmosphere in this manner. Comedy, as well as tragedy, must create some kind of illusion, and the destruction of the illusion, even for the sake of a joke, may mean the destruction of laughter. But, compared with the degree of reality in his characterization, the proportion of unreality is not overwhelming. It has been enormously exaggerated. After all, if the character of the newspaper man in _The Doctor's Dilemma_ is machine-made, the much more important character of B.B., the soothing and incompetent doctor, is a creation of the true comic genius. Nine people out of ten harp on Mr. Shaw's errors. It is much more necessary that we should recognize that, amid all his falsifications, doctrinal and jocular, he has a genuine comic sense of character. "Most French critics," M. Hamon tells us ... "declare that Bernard Shaw does depict characters. M. Remy de Gourmont writes: 'Moliere has never drawn a doctor more comically "the doctor" than Paramore, nor more characteristic figures of women than those in the same play, _The Philanderer._ The character-drawing is admirable.'" M. Hamon himself goes on, however, to suggest an important contrast between the characterization in Mr. Shaw and the characterization in Moliere:-- In Shaw's plays the characters are less representative of vices or passions than those of Moliere, and more representative of class, profession, or sect. Moliere depicts the miser, the jealous man, the misanthrope, the hypocrite; whereas Shaw depicts the bourgeois, the rebel, the capitalist, the workman, the Socialist, the doctor. A few only of these latter types are given us by Moliere. M. Hamon's comparison, made in the course of a long book, between the genius of Mr. Shaw and the genius of Moliere is extraordinarily detailed. Perhaps the detail is overdone in such a passage as that which informs us regarding the work of both authors that "suicide is never one of the central features of the comedy; if mentioned, it is only to be made fun of." The comparison, however, between the sins that have been alleged against both Moliere and Mr. Shaw--sins of style, of form, of morals, of disrespect, of irreligion, of anti-romanticism, of farce, and so forth--is a suggestive contribution to criticism. I am not sure that the comparison would not have been more effectively put in a chapter than a book, but it is only fair to remember that M. Hamon's book is intended as a biography and general criticism of Mr. Shaw as well as a comparison between his work and Moliere's. It contains, it must be confessed, a great deal that is not new to English readers, but then so do all books about Mr. Shaw. And it has also this fault that, though it is about a master of laughter, it does not contain even the shadow of a smile. Mr. Shaw is made an idol in spite of himself: M. Hamon's volume is an offering at a shrine. The true things it contains, however, make it worth reading. M. Hamon sees, for instance, what many critics have failed to see, that in his dramatic work Mr. Shaw is less a wit than a humorist:-- In Shaw's work we find few studied jests, few epigrams even, except those which are the necessary outcome of the characters and the situations. He does not labour to be witty, nor does he play upon words.... Shaw's brilliancy does not consist in wit, but in humour. Mr. Shaw was at one time commonly regarded as a wit of the school of Oscar Wilde. That view, I imagine, is seldom found nowadays, but even now many people do not realize that humour, and not wit, is the ruling characteristic of Mr. Shaw's plays. He is not content with witty conversation about life, as Wilde was: he has an actual comic vision of human society. His humour, it is true, is not the sympathetic humour of Elia or Dickens; but then neither was Moliere's. As M. Hamon reminds us, Moliere anticipated Mr. Shaw in outraging the sentiment, for instance, which has gathered round the family. "Moliere and Shaw," as he puts it with quaint seriousness, "appear to be unaware of what a father is, what a father is worth." The defence of Mr. Shaw, however, does not depend on any real or imaginary resemblance of his plays to Moliere's. His joy and his misery before the ludicrous spectacle of human life are his own, and his expression of them is his own. He has studied with his own eyes the swollen-bellied pretences of preachers and poets and rich men and lovers and politicians, and he has derided them as they have never been derided on the English stage before. He has derided them with both an artistic and a moral energy. He has brought them all into a Palace of Truth, where they have revealed themselves with an unaccustomed and startling frankness. He has done this sometimes with all the exuberance of mirth, sometimes with all the bitterness of a satirist. Even his bitterness is never venomous, however. He is genial beyond the majority of inveterate controversialists and propagandists. He does not hesitate to wound and he does not hesitate to misunderstand, but he is free from malice. The geniality of his comedy, on the other hand, is often more offensive than malice, because it is from an orthodox point of view geniality in the wrong place. It is like a grin in church, a laugh at a marriage service. It is this that has caused all the trouble about Mr. Shaw's writings on the war. He saw, not the war so much as the international diplomacy that led up to the war, under the anti-romantic and satirical comic vision. I do not mean that he was not intensely serious in all that he wrote about the war. But his seriousness is essentially the seriousness of (in the higher sense of the word) the comic artist, of the disillusionist. He sees current history from the absolutely opposite point of view, say, to the lyric poet. He was so occupied with his satiric vision of the pretences of the diplomatic world that, though his attitude to the war was as anti-Prussian as M. Vandervelde's, a great number of people thought he must be a pro-German. The fact is, in war time more than at any other time, people dread the vision of the satirist and the sceptic. It is a vision of only one-half of the truth, and of the half that the average man always feels to be more or less irrelevant. And, even at this, it is not infallible. This is not to disparage Mr. Shaw's contributions to the discussion of politics. That contribution has been brilliant, challenging, and humane, and not more wayward than the contribution of the partisan and the sentimentalist. It may be said of Mr. Shaw that in his politics, as in his plays, he has sought Utopia along the path of disillusion as other men have sought it along the path of idealism and romance. _ |
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