Shaw’s four published novels both suffer and gain by the widespread
public interest in his plays; gain because this interest serves to
keep them somewhat in the foreground, and suffer because, as the work
of a very young man, they are ill-fitted to stand comparison with
the literary offspring of his maturity. Of the four, “Love Among the
Artists” is the best and “Cashel Byron’s Profession” the most popular.
“An Unsocial Socialist” is a wild extravaganza that has lived its day
and done its task, and “The Irrational Knot” is forgotten. The author’s
first novel, written in his early twenties, has never seen the light.
The publishers of that time would have none of it, and later on, when
Shaw “copy” began to find a market and there even arose a mild demand
for it, Shaw wisely decided that the yellowing manuscript should remain
in the twilight of its tomb.
The hero of “Cashel Byron’s Profession” has become one of the most
familiar characters of latter-day fiction. References to him are made
in the newspapers frequently and every time a star of the roped arena
marries a chorus girl the love making of Mr. Byron is recalled. He was
not the first bruiser to grace the pages of an English romance--as
admirers of “Pendennis” and _The Spectator_ well know--but he has
become, by long odds, the most conspicuous. It is to be deplored
that Shaw did not save him for a play. “The Admirable Bashville,” a
burlesque dramatization of the novel, does not answer. Cashel should be
the hero of a melodrama _a la_ “Arms and the Man.” What an opportunity
he would give to our Greek god stars!
Cashel is the son of an actress and becoming tired of her variable
moods and the exactions of his instructors, runs away from boarding
school in England and journeys to Australia. There, by chance, he
is taken into the household of Mr. “Ned” Skene, an eminent retired
pugilist, as secretary and gymnasium assistant. The alert Skene
discerns in him a rare “find” and before long he is back in England
again, battling his way to fame and fortune.
Before long, through one Lord Worthington, a man of vast acquaintance
and catholic taste, Cashel is introduced to the notice of Miss Lydia
Carew, a young Englishwoman of huge fortune and most marvellous
intellectuality. It is not until page 189--more than half way
through the 330 page book--that Lydia learns that Cashel is a
prize-fighter. Very naturally she recoils from him, but all the while,
half-unconsciously, she has been falling desperately in love with him,
and in the end, despite his profession, she marries him.
“I practically believe,” she explains to his rejected rival, “in the
doctrine of heredity; and as my body is frail and my brain morbidly
active, I think my impulse toward a man strong in body and untroubled
in mind is a trustworthy one. You can understand that; it is a plain
proposition in eugenics.”
And so Cashel retires from the ring and gradually, though never
completely, takes on the polish of civilization. It is a union so happy
that it soon descends into the commonplace.
The author was born with the dramatic instinct of a Sardou or a Hal
Reid and throughout the book there are scenes of tremendous excitement
and clatter. Cashel fights fairly terrific battles--among others one
with Miss Carew’s footman, Bashville, who also loves her--and the
general air of the book is distinctly warlike. Most of the minor
characters are commonplace. Skene and his wife and Lord Worthington
are old friends from Thackeray and Lucian Webber, Lydia’s cousin
and unsuccessful Romeo, is the ready-made rising young statesman of
contemporary English fiction.
“An Unsocial Socialist” is a tract born of the nights that Shaw passed
in pondering the philosophies. All of the ten articles in the manifesto
of 1845 are preached in it, and in addition there is much that the Hon.
“Tom” Watson, the Hon. Eugene Debs, and various other earnest gentlemen
were destined to spout forth years later. “I suppose,” says Max
Beerbohm, “that there is not under heaven a subject on which Shaw has
not thought deeply and indignantly.” “An Unsocial Socialist” justifies
this venture. It is the most riotous hodge-podge of cart-tail oratory
and low comedy in the language.
Sidney Trefusis, a millionaire, takes to wife Henriette Jansenius,
the daughter of a millionaire, and after a brief honeymoon bids her
good-bye. He is no ordinary money-king, this strange young man, but
a Rothschild with the ideas of a Marx. The times, he decides, are
out of joint. Things have grown rotten in Denmark. To live as men of
his fortune live would be to give his tacit consent to the immoral
scheme of things. And so he deserts his wife, assumes the name of
Smilash, and going to a small country town, sets up shop as the local
jack-of-all-trades.
From this point on, for a hundred pages, the book is a socialist tract.
To his wife, who pursues him, and to everyone else he encounters--the
faculty and student body of a refined young ladies’ seminary, the
village politicians, chance passersby, enemies, and friends--he
expounds his theories. Also--and this is what makes him rise from the
common level of propagandists--he practices many (though not all) of
the things he preaches. In the end, his neglect kills his wife and he
goes ranging England in search of a real affinity. When he finds her he
marries her and the book ends--with a most marvellous letter from the
hero to the author.
As in the case of “The Philanderer” a great many persons have wondered
how Shaw could make such a ridiculous character of a man whose
doctrines apparently coincide with his own. In truth, it is highly
improbable that Shaw, or any other sane man, ever held to the ideas
expressed by Trefusis. The latter’s speech beside the corpse of his
wife is without parallel in fiction. And some of his other utterances
and acts--how royally and deliciously sacrilegious they are! Certainly
an age that finds Schopenhauer’s essay on women a never-ending delight
should be better acquainted with the ecstatic shocks of “An Unsocial
Socialist.” Trefusis, being utterly beyond the pale, is as productive
of wicked little thrills to the orthodox and virtuous as McIntosh
Jellaludin, David, Pantagruel, or the latest popular murderer.
“The Irrational Knot”--the theme of which is evident from the title--is
now but a name. It was one of a vast multitude of similar books that
saw the light at the time of its birth. Not one of the reviewers,
eulogists or enemies of Shaw seems to think much of it. “Love Among
the Artists,” on the contrary, is a novel that deserves to rank with
the really important fiction of the time. The theme is not startlingly
original and in the 400-odd pages there are oceans of tiresome talk,
but the work, as a whole, bears the stamp of distinction, and if only
for the admirable searching portrait of the Polish _pianiste_, Aurélie
Szczympliça, it deserves some share of attention.
The story has the amiably discursive cast of the other Shaw stories
and ill bears translation into a brief summary. Adrian Herbert, an
artist, is a character about whom others, in a sense, revolve, though,
in himself, he is little interesting. At the start he is affianced to
Mary Sutherland, a young woman of artistic longings. The chief business
of the book is to show how he is won away from Mary by the Szczympliça
and duly and regularly married by that remarkable young woman. As for
Mary, she finds consolation in the arms of John Hoskyn, an eminently
practical and matter-of-fact gentleman, who wanders into Bohemia quite
by accident, and is much astonished by what he sees there.
Shaw was a newcomer in Bohemia himself when he wrote this book and to
this fact may be ascribed the freshness and virility of some of the
characters--the Szczympliça in particular, and Owen Jack, the eccentric
composer. In the former the vagaries of the artistic mind are revealed
with considerable originality and delicacy. If he was tempted to make a
burlesque of the soulful little Aurélie, he kept a tight rein upon the
impulse. Jack, on the contrary, is frankly a figure out of low comedy.
Nothing more grotesque than his struggles with the Philistines is to
be found in any of the Shaw plays. Like Cashel Byron, he and Aurélie
deserve to be translated from the closet to the stage. Jack especially
is sufficiently obvious to give any comedian of fair talents the
opportunity of a lifetime.
Shaw’s pair of critical pamphlets--“The Perfect Wagnerite” and “The
Quintessence of Ibsenism”--will go down into history beside Robert
Schumann’s early reviews of the compositions of Chopin and Huxley’s
opening broadsides for Darwin. Each paved the way for better knowledge
and better understanding. In 1888, when “The Perfect Wagnerite” was
published, the composer of “The Ring of the Nibelung” was still caviare
to the Britons. The professors of the day knew him and feared that the
great gaping public would come to know him, and so, like the ancient
monks who kept the Scriptures under lock and key, they greatly desired
that he be ignored. Shaw undertook the vain task of proving the younger
Siegfried a socialist--and succeeded in making his readers meditate
upon Wagner. Thus he earned whatever money and fame he got from his
pains.
“The Quintessence of Ibsenism” includes some wonderfully illuminative
and searching passages, but on the whole it is rather out of date. Shaw
makes the Norwegian a social-philosopher of most earnest purposes, and
hangs upon the book an elaborate and ingenious theory of sham-smashing.
As a matter of fact, we have Ibsen’s own word for it that few of his
plays contain much conscious preaching, and no doubt many of the
alarming doctrines Shaw found in them were not there before he conjured
them up. Nevertheless, the book remains the best estimate of Ibsen yet
written in English.
Incidentally, it gave birth to the tumultuous discussion of the
so-called “symbolic” play which raged over England and America half a
dozen years ago. Nowadays one hears little of “symbolism” and even the
comic papers have ceased to regard Ibsen and his company as men who
write in mysterious cryptograms. But persons who follow the trend of
things dramatic remember the disputations that once awoke the echoes.
You will find the germ of them in Shaw’s half-forgotten discourses upon
“Brand,” “Peer Gynt,” and “Emperor and Galilean.”
In the early ’90’s, when Max Nordau’s mighty tome, “Degeneration,”
was making a stir like a new best-selling novel, Shaw published a
counter-blast to it. Even exceeding Nordau in the minuteness of his
knowledge, he made an answer that, in the words of one admirer,
“wiped Nordau off the field of discussion.” Unhappily, this effort at
regeneration has been forgotten with “Degeneration.”
Shaw’s remarkable essay “On Going to Church,” which was recently
republished in book form, is an earnest plea for less humbug in public
worship. The average church, he argues, is so hopelessly ugly, tawdry,
and irritating, that it straightway dissipates any religious emotion
the stray comer may harbor when he enters.
The socialistic and political essays, while by no means unimportant to
the students of the Shaw plays, are scarcely within the province of
this book.