As a young man of twenty-four, Bernard Shaw began to evolve a moral
code. He perceived in those phases of contemporary existence which
either intimately touched his life or daily challenged his critical
scrutiny, a shocking discrepancy between things as they are and things
as they should be. He has never been a “whole hogger,” like Pope
or Omar Khayyam: he neither believed that whatever is is right nor
wished to shatter this sorry scheme of things _entire_. The arch-foe
of idealism, he paradoxically prefaced his attack by hoisting the
banner of an ideal. Shaw has spent more than a quarter of a century in
formulating his ideal, in attempting to concretize his individual code
into a universal ethical system.
Let us not fall into the crass error of supposing that Shaw has never
come under the spell of the fascination of idealism and romance. Shaw
the realist paid his toll to Romance before the moral passion ever
dawned upon his soul. Just as Zola always bore the brand of Hugo, just
as Ibsen worked his way through romance to real life, so Shaw found
his feet in realism only after tripping several times over the novels
of a romantic imagination. Shaw's novels are the products of a riotous
and fanciful imagination, if not, as he dubs them, the compounds of
ignorance and intuition. In a celebrated discussion with Mr. W. H.
Mallock, we have Shaw's frank confession:
“We are both novelists, privileged as such to make fancy
pictures of Society and individuals, and to circulate them
as narratives of things that have actually been; and the
critics will gravely find fault with our fictitious law, or
our fictitious history, or our fictitious psychology, if
we depart therein from perfect verisimilitude. Why have we
this extraordinary privilege? Because, I submit, we are both
natural-born tellers of the thing that is not. Not, observe,
vulgar impostors who lie for motives of gain, to extort alms,
to conceal or excuse discreditable facts in our history, to
glorify ourselves, to facilitate the sale of a horse, or to
avoid unpleasantness. All humanity lies like that, more or
less. But Mr. Mallock and I belong to those who lie for the
sheer love of lying, who forsake everything else for it, who
put into it laborious extra touches of art for which there is
no extra pay, whose whole life, if it were looked into closely
enough, would be found to have been spent more in the world of
fiction than of reality.”[24]
Shaw has somewhere placed on record his boast that such insight
as he had in criticism was due to the fact that he exhausted
romanticism before he was ten years old. “Your popular novelists,” he
contemptuously declared, “are now gravely writing the stories I told to
myself before I replaced my first set of teeth. Some day I will try to
found a genuine psychology of fiction by writing down the history of my
imagined life, duels, battles, love-affairs with queens and all. They
say that man in embryo is successively a fish, a bird, a mammal, and so
on, before he develops into a man. Well, popular novel-writing is the
fish stage of your Jonathan Swift. I have never been so dishonest as to
sneer at our popular novelists. I once went on like that myself. Why
does the imaginative man always end by writing comedy if only he has
also a sense of reality? Clearly because of the stupendous irony of the
contrast between his imaginary adventures and his real circumstances
and powers. At night, a conquering hero, an Admirable Crichton, a Don
Juan; by day, a cowardly little brat cuffed by his nurse for stealing
lumps of sugar.... My real name,” he added, “is Alnaschar.”[25]
As a matter of fact, Shaw has anticipated his exhaustion of romanticism
by some seventeen years. It was not until he finished the novels of
his nonage that he could justly boast of having “worked off” that
romanticism which always appears to be latent in every creative
imagination in the stage of incipiency. Remember what Stevenson wrote
to William Archer of _Cashel Byron's Profession_:
“As a whole, it is (of course) a fever dream of the most
feverish.... It is all mad, mad and deliriously delightful; the
author has a taste in chivalry like Walter Scott's or Dumas's,
and then he daubs in little bits of Socialism; he soars away
on the wings of the romantic griffon--even the griffon, as
he cleaves air, shouting with laughter at the nature of the
quest--and I believe in his heart he thinks he is labouring in
a quarry of solid granite realism.
“It is this that makes me--the most hardened adviser now
extant--stand back and hold my peace. If Mr. Shaw is below
five-and-twenty, let him go his path; if he is thirty, he had
best be told that he is a romantic, and pursue romance with
his eyes open; perhaps he knows it; God knows!--my brain is
softened.”[26]
It is all very well for Shaw to say that he used Bizet's _Carmen_ as a
safety valve for his romantic impulses. But the testimony of his own
novels flatly contradicts his complacent assertion that he was romantic
enough to have come to the end of romance before he began to create in
art for himself.
These novels, in spite of their youthful romanticism, nevertheless
constitute the record of the adventures of an earnest and anarchic
young man, with a knack of keen observation and terse portraiture,
striving to give voice to and interpret the spirit of the century.
When someone, in 1892, suggested that Shaw was, of course, a follower
of Ibsen, Shaw replied with a great show of indignation: “What! _I_
a follower of Ibsen! My good sir, as far as England is concerned,
Ibsen is a follower of mine. In 1880, when I was only twenty-four, I
wrote a book called 'The Irrational Knot,' which reads nowadays like
an Ibsenite novel.” And in the postscript to the preface to the new
edition of that novel, after having declared with familiar Shavian
wiliness in the preface that he “couldn't stand” his own book, he
makes a sudden _bouleversement_ as follows: “Since writing the above
I have looked through the proof-sheets of this book, and found, with
some access of respect for my youth, that it is a fiction of the first
order.... It is one of those fictions in which the morality is original
and not ready-made.... I seriously suggest that 'The Irrational Knot'
may be regarded as an early attempt on the part of the life force to
write 'A Doll's House' in English by the instrumentality of a very
immature writer aged twenty-four. And though I say it that should not,
the choice was not such a bad shot for a stupid instinctive force that
has to work and become conscious of itself by means of human brains.”
With all its immaturity, _The Irrational Knot_ is undoubtedly in
the “tone of our time.” It is the ill-chosen title, however, rather
than the contents which recalls Nora and Torvald. The institution of
marriage is not shown to be irrational; Shaw's shafts were aimed at
the code of social morality which renders marriages such as the one
described inevitable failures. Shaw not only seeks to expose the fatal
inconsistencies of this social code, but also damns the feeble shams
with which Society attempts to bolster up those inconsistencies.
Endowed with much of the bluntness of Bluntschli, but with an added
sensitiveness, the “hero” of this novel may be described as the crude
and repellent prototype of the later Shavian males. Believing more in
force than in _savoir faire_, in brutal sincerity than in conventional
graces, Conolly stands out for literal truth and violent tactlessness
as against social propriety and observance of _les convenances_. He is
acting with perfect validity to himself when he says, in answer to the
question as to what he is going to do about his wife's elopement with a
former lover: “Eat my supper. I am as hungry as a bear.” After Marian's
desertion by her lover, Conolly urges her to return to him, assuring
her that now she is just the wife he wants, since she is at last rid
of “fashionable society, of her family, her position, her principles,
and all the rest of her chains for ever.” Marian refuses, because
she cannot “respect herself for breaking loose from what is called
her duty.” Their definitive words epitomize the failure of their life
together.
“'You are too wise, Ned,' she said, suffering him to replace her gently
in the chair.
“'It is impossible to be too wise, dearest,' he said, and
unhesitatingly turned and left her.”
The subjects which inspired Shaw's maturer genius are the same subjects
which so actively, if crudely and imperfectly, struggle for expression
in this early work. Much acuteness is exhibited by the young man of
twenty-four in spying out the weak points in the armour of “that
corporate knave, Society.” When the “high-bred” wife of the “self-made”
man elopes with a “gentleman,” Society's dismay is only feigned. Like
Roebuck Ramsden, Marian's relatives are quite willing to forgive, and
even to thank, the cur if he will only marry her: by ousting a rank
outsider like Conolly, Douglas appears to Society almost in the light
of a champion of its cause. Shaw was too close an observer of life,
even at twenty-four, to attempt to make out a case against matrimony
by celebrating the success of an unblessed union. His point is turned
against Society, less for upholding traditional morality than for
making the preservation of its class distinctions its highest laws.
Society is ready enough to forgive Douglas; but Marmaduke Lind, in
setting up an unblessed union with Conolly's sister, Mademoiselle
Lalage Virtue, of the Bijou Theatre, places himself beyond the pale.
For she is socially “impossible”; and, consequently, there can be no
relenting towards Marmaduke until he return, and, in the odour of
sanctity and respectability, marry Lady Constance Carberry!
_The Irrational Knot_ cannot be called novel on account of its rather
commonplace thought that “a girl who lives in Belgravia ought not
to marry with a man who is familiar with the Mile End Road.” But
as Mr. W. L. Courtney suggestively remarks: “What is novel is the
illustration, in clever and mordant fashion, of the absurd folly and
wastefulness of social conditions which obstinately make intelligence
subservient to aristocratic prestige. Even in our much-abused country
there is, and has been for a long time, a career open for talent;
but the aspiring male must not encumber himself by taking a partner
out of ranks to which he does not belong. Thus, 'The Irrational Knot'
is nothing more nor less than an early tract in defence of Socialism
or Communism, or whatever other term should be applied to theories
which seek to equalize the chances and opportunities of human beings.”
In _The Irrational Knot_ are found the marks of that individual mode
of observing and reflecting life, which is popularly denominated
“Shavian.” Here is the first clear testimony to that rationalistic
mood in Shaw which permeates so much of his subsequent work. And yet
this book contains intimations of that deeper philosophy of life which
conceives of rationality merely as an instrumentality for carrying out
its designs. This knot is irrational only because it is too rational.
Marian shrinks from reconcilement with Conolly: she cannot breathe in
the icy atmosphere of his rationalistic cocksureness. Conolly expresses
Shaw's fundamental protestantism in his assertion that Marian's
ill-considered flight with Douglas was the first sensible action of
her whole life. It was admirable in his eyes because it was her first
vigorous assertion of will, of vital purpose. The human being can and
will find freedom only in overriding convention, repudiating “duty,”
and solving every problem in terms of its own factors. The book,
indeed, is marked less by immaturity of thought than by crudeness of
execution. The characters are deficient in the flexibility and pliancy
of human beings, and the book lacks suggestion of “the slow, irregular
rhythm of life,” of which Henry James somewhere speaks. To Shaw, the
depiction of Conolly was evidently a labour of love; and, consequently,
we have an execution of force, if not always of convincing veracity.
Elinor McQuinch, shrewd, sharp-tongued, acid--the familiar _advocatus
diaboli_, and Shaw in petticoats of the later Shavian drama--is
delightfully refreshing in her piquancy, and truly Ibsenic in her
determination to “be herself.” The nascent dramatist often speaks
out in this book--note the melodramatic Lalage Virtue--but nowhere
more characteristically than in the trenchant deliverance of the
justly-vexed Elinor:
[Illustration: =Facsimile (reduced) of first and last pages of the
original manuscript of _Love Among the Artists_.=]
_Courtesy of Mr. D. J. Rider_.
“Henceforth Uncle Reginald is welcome to my heartiest
detestation. I have been waiting ever since I knew him for an
excuse to hate him; and now he has given me one. He has taken
part--like a true parent--against you with a self-intoxicated
young fool whom he ought to have put out of the house. He has
told me to mind my own business. I shall be even with him for
that some day. I am as vindictive as an elephant: I hate people
who are not vindictive; they are never grateful either, only
incapable of any enduring sentiment.... I am thoroughly well
satisfied with myself altogether; at last I have come out of a
scene without having forgotten the right thing to say!”
Imagination lingers fondly, as Mr. Hubert Bland once remarked, over the
spectacle of Elinor standing in the middle of the stage, three-quarters
face to the audience, and firing off those acute generalizations
about people who are not vindictive. Shaw's cleverness has begun
thus early to betray him; a number of the characters are smart, but
quite unnatural. The “Literary Great-grandfather” of the present Shaw
unerringly pointed out many of the weak spots of Society; but his
fundamental Socialism, impatient of class distinctions and social
barriers, leads him occasionally into crude caricature. The book's
greatest fault lies, perhaps, in the fact that his characters employ,
not the natural, ductile speech of to-day, but the stilted diction of
Dumas and Scott.
Commonplace as is the characterization, Shaw's next novel, _Love Among
the Artists_, is a tract--less a novel than a critical essay with a
purpose, in narrative form. Shaw confesses that he wrote this book for
the purpose of illustrating “the difference between that enthusiasm
for the fine arts which people gather from reading about them, and the
genuine artistic faculty which cannot help creating, interpreting, or,
at least, unaffectedly enjoying music and pictures.”
I have often wondered if it might not be possible for one who did not
know Shaw personally to construct a quite credible biography by making
a composite of the peculiarly Shavian types presented in his novels and
plays. Without carrying the analogy to extremes, I think it mediately
true that Shaw has one by one exhibited, in semi-autobiographic
form, the distinguishing hall-marks of his individual and many-sided
character. To what extent Owen Jack is a projection of the Shaw of
this period, how graphically, if unconsciously, Shaw has revealed
in this droll original his own ideals of music and his defence of a
certain impudently exasperating assertiveness of manner in himself,
is difficult to decide. Shaw insists that Jack is partly founded on
Beethoven. And yet there is an undoubted resemblance between the real
Irishman and the imagined Welshman who plays the Hyde of Jack to the
Jekyll of Shaw. Like “C. di B.” and G. B. S., Jack is the first of the
“privileged lunatics.” He scorns the pedantry of the schools, sneers at
mechanical music of academic origin, jibes at “analytic criticism,” and
fiercely denounces the antiquated views of the musical organizations
of England, with their old fogeyism, their cowardice in the face of
novelty, their dread of innovation, and their cringing subservience
to obsolescent and outworn models. Like Shaw, Jack is always tolerant
of sincerity, always sympathetic with true effort, unrestrainedly
enthusiastic over any vital outpouring of the creative spirit; rebuking
tyranny wherever he sees it, exposing falsehood whenever he hears it,
eternally vigilant in exposing frauds and unmasking shams. And yet,
with all his offensive brusqueness, fierce intolerance, and colossal
self-sufficiency, gentle-hearted, compassionate, and, in the presence
of beauty, deeply humble.
Shaw once called _Love Among the Artists_ a novel with a purpose.
Viewed from another standpoint, it is a collection of types, a study in
temperaments. The author preaches the arrogance of genius as opposed
to a false humility in the presence of great art works. The shallow
artist, Adrian Herbert, “spends whole days in explaining to you what
a man of genius is and feels, knowing neither the one nor the other”;
Mary Sutherland never surpasses mediocrity as an artist because her
knowledge is based upon hearsay instead of upon experience. She stands
in sharp contrast to Madge Brailsford, who tersely puts her case to
Mary--the case, one might say, of the whole book--“If you don't like
your own pictures, depend upon it no one else will. I am going to be
an actress because I think I can act. You are going to be a painter
because you think you can't paint.” Mr. Huneker declares that Mary
Sutherland, “lymphatically selfish and utterly unsympathetic,” is
his prime favourite in the story. “Her taste in flaring colours,
her feet, her habit of breathing heavily when aroused emotionally,
her cowardices, her artistic failures, her eye-glasses, her treacly
sentiment--what a study of the tribe artistic! And truly British
withal.” The only other noteworthy figure in the book is the evasive,
elusive Mademoiselle Szczympliça--a study searching in the closeness
and delicacy of its observation. This charming and piquant Polish
pianist, although emanating poetry and romance, has, as she puts it,
the “soul commercial” within her. She cannot see why, even if she does
love her husband, she should therefore dispense with her piano practice!
Unlike the classic model for a play, this novel has neither beginning,
middle, nor ending; and yet it has many brilliantly executed scenes.
Who could ever forget the street fight in Paris, the humorous
“love-scene” between Madge Brailsford and Owen Jack, and the rehearsal,
so acute in its satire--fitting companion-piece to the Wagner lecture
in _Cashel Byron's Profession_?
It is noteworthy that _Love Among the Artists_ heralds a favourite
thesis of Shaw's--the natural antipathy between blood relations--a
thesis expounded many years later by John Tanner in the rather leaden
epigram “I suspect that the tables of consanguinity have a natural
basis in a natural repugnance.” Cashel Byron is always catching himself
in the act of “shying” when his mother is around--she used to throw
things at him when he was a boy! Blanche Sartorius is quite ready to
hate her father at a moment's notice; no love is lost between Julia
and Colonel Craven; Vivie Warren stands out determinedly against her
mother's authority; and Frank, with nauseating levity, takes great
delight in “jollying” his reprobate father upon the indiscretions of
his youth. Phil and Dolly are breezily disrespectful of parental rule;
and Anne uses her maudlin mother as an excuse to do just whatever
she wants. The thesis is part of Shaw's stock-in-trade, and might
be regarded as a mere comic _motif_, were it not for the “damnable
iteration” of the thing. Adrian Herbert avows his positive dislike for
his mother, because, as he affirms, their natures are antagonistic,
their views of life and duty incompatible--because they have nothing
in common. We must take Shaw's insistence upon incompatibility of
temperament between blood-relations with a good many grains of salt. It
is not even half true that every mother tries to defeat every cherished
project of her sons “by sarcasms, by threats, and, failing these,
by cajolery”; that everyone's childhood has been “embittered by the
dislike of his mother and the ill-temper of his father”; that every
man's wife soon ceases to care for him and that he soon tires of her;
that every man's brother goes to law with him over the division of the
family property; and that every man's son acts in studied defiance of
his plans and wishes. These things are only true enough to be funny;
just enough of them happen in real life to give Shaw's thesis a sort of
comic plausibility. It is the phrases, “love is eternal,” and “blood
is thicker than water,” rather than the facts themselves, which make
the iconoclastic Shaw see red. I find some explanation of his view in
pardonable revolt, as a dramatist, against that persistent superstition
of French melodrama--the _voix du sang_. Some explanation of Shaw's
views in the matter may possibly be found in the facts of his own
personal experience; at any rate, he once said that the word education
brought to his mind four successive schools where his parents got him
out of the way for half a day. Indeed, his campaign against the modern
system of education springs from his recently expressed disgust with
educators for _concealing_ the fact that “the real object of that
system is to relieve parents from the insufferable company and anxious
care of their children.” Continuing in the same strain, he says:
“Until it is frankly recognized that children are nuisances to
adults except at playful moments, and that the first social
need that arises from the necessary existence of children in
a community is that there should be some adequate defence of
the comparative quiet and order of adult life against the
comparative noise, racket, untidiness, inquisitiveness,
restlessness, fitfulness, shiftlessness, dirt, destruction and
mischief, which are healthy and natural for children, and which
are no reason for denying them the personal respect without
which their characters cannot grow and set properly, we shall
have the present pretence of inexhaustible parental tenderness,
moulding of character, inculcation of principles, and so forth,
to cloak the imprisoning, drilling, punishing, tormenting,
brigading, boy and girl farming, which saves those who can
afford it from having to scream ten times every hour, 'Stop
that noise, Tommy, or I'll clout your head for you.'”[27]
With gradual, yet unhalting steps, Shaw works his way to those
startling and topsy-turvy theories which are so delightfully credible
to the _intellectuels_ and so bewilderingly exasperating to the
Philistines. In _Love Among the Artists_, Madge Brailsford's open
avowal to Owen Jack of her love for him gives a hint that the theory
of woman as the huntress and man as the quarry is upon us. But quite
the contrary course is taken in _Cashel Byron's Profession_, Shaw's
next novel. Cashel Byron, the perfect pugilist, fights his way into the
good graces of the “high-born” heiress, Lydia Carew, by the straight
exhibition of his physical prowess. The whole book is conceived in
such broadly satirical vein that it is impossible for me to accept it
as anything except a boyishly irrepressible pasquinade. Fortunately,
the “little bits of Socialism that were daubed in” here and there at
first, were afterwards deleted; the current version is a novel, pure
and simple, with no discoverable Socialistic thesis behind it. Shaw's
explanation that the book was written as an offset to the “abominable
vein of retaliatory violence” that runs all through the literature of
the nineteenth century need not detain us here; Shaw has made out his
own case with sufficiently paradoxical cleverness in the inevitable
preface. He spends one-half of his time in explaining his actions
during the other half; and it has even been unkindly hinted that
each new book of his serves merely as an excuse for writing another
preface. And it should be remembered that the preface to _Cashel
Byron's Profession_ was written some eighteen years later than was the
book itself--ample time for Shaw to devise any excuse for representing
his book as a deliberate challenge to British ideals. Suffice it to say
that a comparison of _Cashel Byron's Profession_ with _Rodney Stone_,
for example, will make plain the distinction between the realism and
the romance of pugilism. And while Byron's exhibitions of physical
prowess are the most “howlingly funny” incidents in the book, it is
nevertheless true that Shaw has done nothing to surround the “noble art
of _sluggerei_” with any halo of fictitious romance.[28] “Its novelty,”
as Shaw himself maintains, “consists in the fact that an attempt is
made to treat the art of punching seriously, and to detach it from the
general elevation of moral character with which the ordinary novelist
persists in associating it.”
The real novelty, and, indeed, the chief charm, of the book consists
rather in the fact that no attempt is made to treat anything seriously.
So far as the prize-ring is concerned, the book's realism is veracious;
the rest is the frankest of popular melodrama. What appeals more
strongly to the popular heart than a low-born but invincible slugger
fighting his way, round after round, to the side of a noble and
fabulously wealthy heroine! What more oracularly Adelphic in its
melodrama than the “finger of fate” upon the “long arm of coincidence”
directing Cashel's mother to the mansion of Miss Lydia Carew! And what
an exquisite fulfilment of poetic justice--the ultimate discovery that
Cashel is a scion of one of the oldest county families in England, and
heir to a great estate! The thing that makes the book go, of course,
is its peculiarly Shavian cast--the combination of what Stevenson
called “struggling, overlaid original talent” and “blooming gaseous
folly.” Shaw's sense of dramatic situation continually foreshadows the
future playwright. The abounding humour of the exquisitely ludicrous
scene at the reception--the devastating comicality of the brute, with
his native “mother-wit,” turned rough-and-ready philosopher! When
Cashel is set down in the midst of this ethical-artistic circle, he
breezily excels all the professors--for he discusses art _positively_,
in the terminology of his own profession, in which he is a past
master. The sublime hardihood of elucidating Beethoven and Wagner in
terms of the pugilistic art of Jack Randall! And Bashville, over whom
Stevenson howled with derision and delight, what a brief for democratic
Socialism is Bashville--prototype for the Admirable Crichton and 'Enry
Straker--keenly conscious of his own absurdity, yet zealously standing
out in defence of his mistress and in insistence upon the truly
democratic doctrine of “equal rights for all, special privileges for
none.” Who cannot sympathize with Stevenson: “I dote on Bashville--I
could read of him for ever; _de Bashville je suis le fervent_--there
is only one Bashville, and I am his devoted slave; _Bashville
est magnifique, mais il n'est guère possible_.” Or when he says:
“Bashville--O Bashville! _j'en_ chortle (which is finely polyglot).”
Service is as sacred to Bashville as pugilism is to Cashel. Each is
the “ideal” professional man, who magnifies his office and measures
up to the height of his own profession. Each demands recognition for
fulfilling to the best of his ability his own special function in life.
Shaw insists that the real worth of a man is not to be measured by the
social standing of his profession, but in terms of his professional
efficiency.
Shaw's mastery of the portrayal of striking contrasts is exhibited in
the case of Cashel Byron and Lydia Carew. There is a strong hint of
the “female Yahoo” in Lydia's avowal to her aristocratic suitor: “I
practically believe in the doctrine of heredity; and as my body is
frail and my brain morbidly active, I think my impulse towards a man
strong in body and untroubled in mind is a trustworthy one. You can
understand that; it is a plain proposition in eugenics.” This was fun
to Stevenson--but “horrid fun.” His postscript is laconically eloquent:
“(I say, Archer, my God! what women!)” William Morris seems to have
had the rights in the matter in describing Lydia, to Shaw privately,
as a “prig-ess.” Shaw grandiloquently speaks of her as “superhuman all
through,” a “working model” of an “improved type” of womanhood. “Let me
not deny, however ...,” he remarks, “that a post-mortem examination by
a capable critical anatomist--probably my biographer--will reveal the
fact that her inside is full of wheels and springs.” The book closes on
a mildly Shavian note--the romance has dwindled to banality. “Cashel's
admiration for his wife survived the ardour of his first love for her;
and her habitual forethought saved her from disappointing his reliance
on her judgment.”
All that was needed to expose the threadbare plot of _Cashel
Byron's Profession_ was _The Admirable Bashville: or Constancy
Unrewarded_--Shaw's blank-verse stage version of the novel. This
delightful jest was perpetrated in defence of the stage-right of the
novel, which threatened to pass into unworthy hands through the malign
workings of that “foolish anomaly,” the English Copyright Law. In
Shaw's celebrated lecture on Shakespeare, at Kensington Town Hall,
section 10, as given in his abstract, reads as follows:
“That to anyone with the requisite ear and command of words,
blank verse, written under the amazingly loose conditions
which Shakespeare claimed, with full liberty to use all sorts
of words, colloquial, technical, rhetorical, and obscurely
technical, to indulge in the most far-fetched ellipses, and
to impress ignorant people with every possible extremity of
fantasy and affectation, is the easiest of all known modes
of literary expression, and that this is why whole oceans of
dull bombast and drivel have been emptied on the heads of
England since Shakespeare's time in this form by people who
could not have written _Box and Cox_ to save their lives. Also
(this on being challenged) that I can write blank verse myself
more swiftly than prose, and that, too, of full Elizabethan
quality plus the Shakespearian sense of the absurdity of it as
expressed in the lines of Antient Pistol. What is more, that I
have done it, published it, and had it performed on the stage
with huge applause.”[29]
Liking the “melodious sing-song, the clear, simple, one-line and
two-line sayings, and the occasional rhymed tags, like the half-closes
in an eighteenth-century symphony, in Peele, Kid, Greene, and the
histories of Shakespeare,” Shaw quite naturally “poetasted _The
Admirable Bashville_ in the rigmarole style.” After illustrating how
unspeakably bad Shakespearean blank verse is, Shaw ludicrously claims
that his own is “just as good.” Nor is it possible to deny that his
own blank verse positively scintillates with the Shakespearean--or is
it Shavian?--sense of its absurdity. The preface to _The Admirable
Bashville_ has the genuine Shavian _timbre_, with its solemn fooling,
its portentous levity, its false premises and ludicrous conclusions. In
that preface, as Mr. Archer puts it, Shaw “defends the woodenness of
his blank verse by arguing that wooden blank verse is the best. That,
at any rate, is the gist of his contention, though he does not put it
in just that way.”
The play--for despite Shaw's prefaces, the play's the thing--is a
truly admirable burlesque of rhetorical drama. Not Bashville, but
Cashel only is admirable; it is Cashel's constancy that is rewarded.
The piece is couched in a tone of the most delicious extravagance--a
hit, a palpable hit, in every line. I cannot resist the temptation
to quote from the scene in which Lydia, Lucian, and Bashville, fast
locked against intrusion, debate the question of admitting Cashel, the
presumably infuriated ruffian, who has just been successfully tripped
up by Bashville as he is trying to enter the Carew mansion.
LYDIA: We must not fail in courage with a fighter.
Unlock the door.
LUCIAN: Like all women, Lydia,
You have the courage of immunity.
To strike _you_ were against his code of honour;
But _me_, above the belt, he may perform on
T' th' height of his profession. Also Bashville.
BASHVILLE: Think not of me, sir. Let him do his worst.
Oh, if the valour of my heart could weigh
The fatal difference 'twixt his weight and mine,
A second battle should he do this day:
Nay, though outmatched I be, let but my mistress
Give me the word: instant I'll take him on
Here--now--at catchweight. Better bite the carpet
A man, than fly, a coward.
LUCIAN: Bravely said:
I will assist you with the poker.
And well worth remembering is the naïve autobiography, delivered at the
request of the Zulu king, of that celestially denominated “bruiser”
concerning whom Cashel once said: “Slave to the ring I rest until the
face of Paradise be changed.”
CETEWAYO: Ye sons of the white queen:
Tell me your names and deeds ere ye fall to.
PARADISE: Your royal highness, you beholds a bloke
What gets his living honest by his fists.
I may not have the polish of some toffs
As I could mention on; but up to now
No man has took my number down. I scale
Close on twelve stun; my age is twenty-three;
And at Bill Richardson's “Blue Anchor” pub
Am to be heard of any day by such
As likes the job. I don't know, governor,
As ennythink remains for me to say.
Those who witnessed the original production of the play by the London
Stage Society in 1903, and also the later production in 1909 at the
“Afternoon Theatre” (His Majesty's), unhesitatingly gave it that
“huge applause” of which Shaw speaks so frankly. “The best burlesque
of rhetorical drama in the language,” is Mr. Archer's sweeping
dictum. Even the most hardened of Philistines might find it easy
to agree with his statement: “Fielding's 'Tom Thumb' and Carey's
'Chrononhotonthologos' are, it seems to me, not in the running.”
Not until the appearance of _An Unsocial Socialist_, fifth of the
novels of his nonage, is the Pandora's box of Shavian theories opened.
There now begin to troop forth those startling and anarchic views with
which the name of Shaw is popularly associated. This modern “_École
des Maris_” heralds the reign of the “literature of effrontery”;
Shaw is beginning to take his stride. With all its extravagance and
waywardness, _An Unsocial Socialist_ has been declared by at least one
critic of authority to be as brilliant as anything George Meredith
ever wrote. Let us recall Stevenson's warning to Shaw: “Let him beware
of his damned century; his gifts of insane chivalry and animated
narration are just those that might be slain and thrown out like an
untimely birth by the Daemon of the Epoch.” Gone are the chivalry and
romance--the winds of Socialism have blown them all away. But the book
fairly reeks of the “damned century,” with its mad irresponsibility,
its exasperating levity, its religious and social revolt. Written
in 1883, it seethes and bubbles with the scum of the Socialist brew
just then beginning to ferment. Shaw's original design, he tells us,
was to “produce a novel which should be a gigantic grapple with the
whole social problem.... When I had finished two chapters of this
enterprise--chapters of colossal length, but containing the merest
preliminary matter--I broke down in sheer ignorance and incapacity.”
Eventually the two prodigious chapters of Shaw's _magnum opus_ were
published as a complete novel, in two “books,” under the title _An
Unsocial Socialist_. Shaw begins fiercely to sermonize humanity,
to deride all customs and institutions which have not their roots
sunk in individualism and in social justice. The Seven Deadly Sins
are: respectability, conventional virtue, filial affection, modesty,
sentiment, devotion to woman, romance. Sidney Trefusis is the
philosopher of the New Order, revolted by the rottenness of present
civilization and resolved, by any means, to set in motion some schemes
for its reformation. Discovering too late that marriage to him, as to
Tanner, means “apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of his soul,
violation of his manhood, sale of his birthright, shameful surrender,
ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat,” Trefusis deliberately
deserts his wife, _not_ because, as with Falk and Svanhild in Ibsen's
_Love's Comedy_, love seems too exquisite, too ethereal to be put to
the illusion-shattering test of marriage, but because marriage involves
the triumph of senses over sense, of passion over reason. Even after
he has ceased to love Henrietta, her love for him continues to set in
motion the mechanism of passion, and he is revolted by the fact that
she is satisfied so long as “the wheels go round.”
The millionaire son of a captain of industry, Trefusis has, by a
strange freak of fate, drunk deep of the Socialist draught of the
epoch. Respecting his dead father for his energy and bravery among
unscrupulous competitors in the struggle for existence, Trefusis curses
his memory for the inhuman means employed in his business dealings and
the social crimes concealed by the shimmer of his “ill-gotten gold.”
His most significant utterance--an outburst before the wealthy
landowner, Sir Charles Brandon--gives us a clear picture of Shaw's
Socialist views at this time:
“A man cannot be a Christian: I have tried it, and found it
impossible both in law and in fact. I am a capitalist and a
landholder. I have railway shares, mining shares, building
shares, bank shares, and stock of most kinds; and a great
trouble they are to me. But these shares do not represent
wealth actually in existence: they are a mortgage on the labour
of unborn generations of labourers, who must work to keep me
and mine in idleness and luxury. If I sold them, would the
mortgage be cancelled and the unborn generations released from
its thrall? No. It would only pass into the hands of some
other capitalist; and the working classes would be no better
off for my self-sacrifice. Sir Charles cannot obey the command
of Christ: I defy him to do it. Let him give his land for a
public park: only the richer classes will have leisure to enjoy
it. Plant it at the very doors of the poor, so that they may
at least breathe its air; and it will raise the value of the
neighbouring houses and drive the poor away. Let him endow a
school for the poor, like Eton or Christ's Hospital; and the
rich will take it for their own children as they do in the two
instances I have named. Sir Charles does not want to minister
to poverty, but to abolish it. No matter how much you give
to the poor, everything but a bare subsistence wage will be
taken away from them again by force. All talk of practising
Christianity, or even bare justice, is at present mere waste of
words. How can you justly reward the labourer when you cannot
ascertain the value of what he makes, owing to the prevalent
custom of stealing it?... The principle on which we farm out
our national industry to private marauders, who recompense
themselves by blackmail, so corrupts and paralyses us that we
cannot be honest even when we want to. And the reason we bear
it so calmly is that very few of us really want to.”
A Marx in Shaw's clothing, Trefusis devotes all his energies, all his
wealth, to the task of forming an international association--“The
International,” history gives it--of men pledged “to share the world's
work justly; to share the produce of the work justly; to yield not
a farthing--charity apart--to any full-grown and able-bodied idler
or malingerer, and to treat as vermin in the commonwealth persons
attempting to get more than their share of wealth or give less than
their share of work.” Whole-souledly committed to Socialism in its
iconoclastic aspects, Trefusis defies convention, prudery, delicacy,
good-taste, and tact in all his actions, convinced beyond reclaim that
“vile or not, whatever is true is to the purpose.” His philosophy
holds it a short-sighted policy to run away from a mistake or a
misunderstanding, instead of “facing the music” and clearing the matter
up. A licensed eccentric like his prototypic creator in real life,
Trefusis is permitted to take liberties granted to no one else; and by
the “exercise of a certain considerate tact (which, on the outside,
perhaps, seems the opposite of tact),” but which in reality consists
in the most ingenious double-dealing, he somehow or other contrives to
have his way and go scot-free.
In the early part of the story, disguised as that “terrific combination
of nerves, gall, and brains,” Smilash, he dexterously philanders to
his heart's content with several young girls at the boarding-school
where his wife was educated. The verisimilitude of the portraits,
the acute psychology exhibited in the portrayal of the feelings,
sentiments, and sentimentalities of young girls in the boarding-school
stage of evolution, testify to Shaw's remarkable gifts as a genuine
realist. That forerunner of Julia Craven, the romantic little Henrietta
Jansenius, is portrayed with insight, and not without delicacy and
restraint. The most unreal, most unhuman scene in the book is that in
which Trefusis apostrophizes the body of his dead wife. His reflections
impress me as both flippant and callous in their solemn setting. It
is with a sense of profound shock that we hear him rudely flout the
“funereal sanctimoniousness” of the family physician, mock at the
“harrowing mummeries” of religious and social observance, and “damn the
feelings” of a father and mother who regarded their daughter as their
chattel and showed no true feeling for her when she was alive. Trefusis
is devoured with the conviction that the first, if the hardest, of all
duties is one's duty to one's self. His fine Italian hand is betrayed
in his later philanderings with the whilom loves of Smilash, now grown
up into disagreeable, hard, calculating women. Trefusis's trickery of
Sir Charles Brandon, his unfeeling deception of Gertrude Lindsay, his
base flattery of Lady Brandon, his misleading promise to Erskine, are
all exhibitions of his Jesuitical policy. The exponent of Socialism and
the New Morality, Trefusis has no scruples in employing unfair means to
secure whatsoever he wants--for the cause of labour and for himself.[30]
[Illustration: =_George Bernard Shaw._=]
_From a photograph by Eduard J Steichen made at 10 Adelphi Terrace,
London, W.C. August, 1907._
Mr. W. L. Courtney has somewhere called attention to the curious
triumph achieved by “our only modern dramatist,” as he calls Bernard
Shaw, in view of the fact that Shaw has never hesitated at interpreting
women as beasts of prey. In the novels we find premonitions of Shaw's
later attitude toward women. Some suspicion of Shaw's theory that
woman “takes the initiative in sex business” dawns upon us when Madge
Brailsford openly courts Owen Jack; but Lydia Carew, that bloodless
Ibsen type, is anything but the huntress. _An Unsocial Socialist_ opens
our eyes; for Henrietta shamelessly pursues the mocking Trefusis and
exhausts every feminine wile in the effort to induce him to return
to the chains of wedlock. The idea is also uppermost in the final
scene, in which Trefusis, by means of a little diabolically-concocted
sentiment, persuades the pursuing Gertrude to give him up, and, “for
his sake,” to marry Erskine. When Shaw came to erect his theory into a
system in _Man and Superman_, he threw a flood of light upon all his
former work. There is a keynote to the philosophy of every great or
pioneer thinker: Shakespeare had his Hamlet, Wagner his Free-willing
of Necessity, Schopenhauer his Will to Live, and Nietzsche his Will
to Power. So Shaw is the apostle of the Life Force, as he calls
it; and woman is incarnate life force--potent instrument of that
irresistible, secret, blind impulse which Nature wields for her own
transcendent purposes, heedless of the feelings, welfare, or happiness
of individuals. Recognizing woman as the primal vital agency in the
fulfilment of Nature's laws, he has not unnaturally come to regard
her as “much more formidable than man, because she is, as it were,
archetypal, belonging to the original structure of things, and has
behind her activity, sometimes benevolent and more often malevolent,
the great authority of Nature herself.”[31] Under the spell of this
plausible conviction, Shaw endows woman with all the attributes of a
blind, unreasoning, unscrupulous force of nature. And for his faith
he can find ample support in the literature of an age which produced
Schopenhauer's _Essay on Woman_, _The Master Builder_, _Little Eyolf_,
_The Triumph of Death_, _Gräfin Julie_, _Erdgeist_, _The Confounding of
Camellia_. With great adroitness, but with a curious inconsistency in
one who has spent years of his life in “blaming the Bard,” Shaw finds
the chief support for his claim in the plays of Shakespeare himself.
By blandishment, Rosalind accomplishes her purpose; Miranda ensnares
Ferdinand with the words, “I would not wish any companion in the world
but you. I am your wife if you will marry me.” Juliet scales Romeo's
defences one by one, and there is Desdemona with her fond “hint”;
Mariana, the strategist; Helena, pursuing the recreant Bertram; Olivia,
powerless to hide her passion; and poor, mad, melancholy Ophelia.
One has only to pass in review Shaw's work, from _An Unsocial
Socialist_ to _Man and Superman_, to discover that persistent
exemplification of his theory that “woman is the pursuer and contriver,
man the pursued and disposed of.” Indeed, in his very first play, we
find Shaw's concrete illustration of Don Juan's statement that “a woman
seeking a husband is the most unscrupulous of all the beasts of prey.”
All the men in Shaw's plays seem to suffer, not from Prossy's, but
from Charteris's complaint: “At no time have I taken the initiative
and pursued women with my advances as women have persecuted me.”
All seem to labour under the conviction that the woman's need of a
man “does not prevail against him until his resistance gathers her
energy to a climax, at which she dares to throw away her customary
exploitations of the conventional affectionate and dutiful poses, and
claim him by natural right for a purpose that far transcends their
mortal personal purposes.” The quintessence of the Shavian woman is Ann
Whitefield, that “most gorgeous of all my female creatures,” as Shaw
calls her--incarnation of fecundity in Nature, wilful, unscrupulous,
immodest, aggressive, dominant--compelling Tanner to obey her
biological imperative.
The appearance of Shaw's theory in _An Unsocial Socialist_ is
responsible for this divagation of mine from the theme of the
novels, this anticipation of the feminine psychology of the plays.
It is highly unreasonable to suppose that the exploitation of such
a theory on Shaw's part is a perverse and impish trick, designed
solely _épater le bourgeois_: Shaw has driven home his theory in
countless deliberate statements. As a philosophic concept, as an
interpretation of woman by an a-priorist, little fault can be found
with Shaw in the matter. No one can question Shaw's right to his
opinion. Even as an effort to make the natural attraction of the
sexes the mainspring of the action in modern English drama, Shaw's
delineation of woman is far from being unworthy of consideration,
though it has swung wide of the mark in exaggerative reaction against
the romantic sentimentalities of the English stage. Shaw's women
are full of purpose and vitality--the most “advanced” of women in
assertion of their rights, in resolute determination to override all
the barriers of current respectability and “prurient prudery,” in
perfect readiness to forego all considerations of good taste, tact,
delicacy, modesty, conventional virtue. They ruthlessly repudiate
all those qualities which have led man to dub her his “better half.”
Shaw's mistake consists in painting woman, not as she really, normally
is, but as his preconceived philosophic system requires her to be. He
planks down for our inspection less a life-like portrait of the eternal
feminine than a philosophic interpretation of the “superior sex.”
Shaw is a remarkable critic of life. Certain phases of human nature,
unnoticed or unaccented by others, he has depicted with a veracity, a
cleverness, a sparkling brilliancy beyond all praise. But it is one
thing to portray an individual, a totally different thing to announce a
universal type. A soldier like Bluntschli, a dare-devil like Dudgeon,
a minister like Gardner, a hero like Cæsar or Napoleon, a wooer like
Valentine, a Socialist like Trefusis, a pugilist like Byron--all these
may have lived. Shaw doubtless can--indeed, sometimes does--point to
their counterparts, if not in literature, certainly in real life.
But to say that all soldiers are like Bluntschli, for example, is
little more foolish than to say that all women are like Blanche, like
Julia, like Ann. The vital defect in Shaw's women is that they are
too blatant, too obvious, too crude. They are lacking in mystery, in
finer subtlety, in the subconscious and obscurer instincts of sex, in
the arts of exquisite seduction, of keenly-felt yet only half-divined
allurement.[32] The Life Force goes about its business, one would
fain remind Mr. Shaw, not openly and with a blare of trumpets, but by
a thousand devious and hidden paths. Of course, there is always the
danger of taking Shaw too seriously. Mr. Archer wittily, but, above
all, entirely truthfully, dubbed Ann a “mythological monster.” As a
pendant to Everyman of the Dutch morality, Ann may be the Everywoman of
the Shavian morality. But even Shaw himself admits, with wily fairness,
that while, philosophically, Ann may be Everywoman according to the
Shavian dispensation, yet in practical, everyday existence there are
countless women who are not Ann.
If faith is to be placed in M. Émile Faguet's dictum that no
exceptional work of art is ever written by anyone before reaching
the age of thirty, then Shaw's novels are debarred by the Statute of
Limitations. The “ineptitude” of his novels, of which Mr. Shaw once
spoke to me, is attributable to the fact that during this early period
he fed upon his imagination. He had not yet come into any deep or
really vital communion with humanity. Produced in that impressionable
period when dreaming seems preferable to living, the novels bristle
with faults--immaturities of form, crudenesses of expression, blatant
didactics. They are often loose and disjointed, generally lacking
in closely articulated structure. With all his pretended effort at
realism, Shaw has failed to impart to his novels that one quality
without which no modern work of fictive art can take the very highest
rank--inevitableness. To Shaw, as to Zola, art is life seen through
a temperament. And I often receive the impression that Shaw's novels
are less faithful records of contemporary existence than documents
revelative of Bernard Shaw. Shaw is lacking in artistic self-restraint;
like the true propagandist, he seems almost unwilling to accept facts
as they are, so eager is he to impose upon them the stamp of his
individual predilections. It is the strangest of paradoxes that one who
claims for himself that rare and priceless gift--the abnormally normal
eyesight of the realist--should have spent his life in the endeavour to
fix the mask of Shaw upon the face of life.
“The gods know that Bernard Shaw has many sins of omission to answer
for when he reaches the remotest peak of Parnassus,” writes Mr.
Huneker; “but for no one of his many gifts will he be so sternly taken
to task as the wasted one of novelist.... There is more native talent
for sturdy, clear-visioned, character-creating fiction in the one
prize-fighting novel of Bernard Shaw than in the entire cobweb work
of the stylistic Stevenson!... Shaw could rank higher as a novelist
than as a dramatist--always selecting for judgment the supreme pages
of his tales, pages wherein character, wit, humour, pathos, fantasy,
and observation are mingled with an overwhelming effect.”[33] While
there is much of truth in what Mr. Huneker says, I should hold quite
the opposite opinion concerning Shaw's relative merits as novelist and
dramatist. Not the least significant feature of the novels, to my mind,
is their foreshadowing of the future dramatist.[34] Turning over the
pages of the novels, from first to last one cannot but observe this
recurrent trait: Shaw always sees his characters in a “situation.”
It is difficult to read one of Shaw's novels without unconsciously
looking for the stage directions. Proud as he is of his gifts as a
“fictionist,” no one is more conscious than is Shaw himself of his
deficiencies in this _rôle_. With his customary succinctness, he once
put the case to me as it really is: “My novels are very green things,
very carefully written.”
FOOTNOTES:
[24] _On Mr. Mallock's Proposed Trumpet Performance._ In the
_Fortnightly Review_, April, 1894.
[25] _Who I Am, and What I Think._ Part I. In the _Candid Friend_, May
11th, 1901.
[26] _The Letters of R. L. Stevenson_, Vol. II. Edited by Sidney
Colvin, pp. 107 _et seq._
[27] _Does Modern Education Ennoble?_ In _Great Thoughts_, October 7th,
1905.
[28] A dramatization of the novel, by Mr. Stanislaus Stange, was
produced with moderate success in New York several years ago. Unique
interest attached to the production because the part of Cashel Byron
was taken by Mr. James J. Corbett, some time pugilistic champion of the
world--and incidentally quite a clever actor. There is much of Cashel
in Mr. Corbett, whose popular sobriquet is “Gentleman Jim.”
[29] _Bernard Shaw Abashed._ In the _Daily News_, April 17th, 1905.
[30] “The hero is remarkable because, without losing his pre-eminence
as hero, he not only violates every canon of propriety, like Tom Jones
or Des Grieux, but every canon of sentiment as well. In an age when
the average man's character is rotted at the core by the lust to be
a true gentleman, the moral value of such an example as Trefusis is
incalculable.”--_Mr. Bernard Shaw's Works of Fiction. Reviewed by
Himself._ In the _Novel Review_, February, 1892.
[31] The words are those of Mr. W. L. Courtney.
[32] There are exceptions to this generalization, of course--Lady
Cicely, Candida, Nora, Jennifer, Barbara.
[33] _Bernard Shaw and Woman._ In _Harper's Bazaar_, June, 1905.
[34] It is worthy of remark that the conclusion of _Love Among the
Artists_, as Julius Bab has pointed out, accurately prefigures the
conclusion of _Candida_. The situation, the very words, are almost
identical.
THE FABIAN SOCIETY
“If ever there was a society which lived by its wits, and by
its wits alone, that society was the Fabian.”--_The Fabian
Society._ Tract No. 41. By G. B. Shaw.