It is obvious that a man so shy and easily embarrassed as Mr. Shaw is
cannot hope to make a swift impression upon his contemporaries unless
he commits an outrage upon his own nature. A world which regards
modesty as a sign of incompetence, if not of actual imbecility, is
slow to recognize the real merits of a man unless he lays claim to
merits which he has not got. In the long run, the crowd pays tribute to
great men, but Mr. Shaw was anxious that tribute should be paid to him
immediately. Fame at the age of eighty offered few inducements to him,
and posthumous fame offered no inducements at all. He had something to
say to a world disinclined to listen to him, and he felt that he could
not persuade it to do so unless he first of all performed some unusual
platform tricks to catch its attention. Something of his principle
seemed to be in the mind of a tipster whom I saw on Epsom racecourse
before the war began. I was walking in the crowd on the course, which
the police were not yet clearing, when suddenly a very well-dressed man
in my neighbourhood seemed to go out of his mind. He whirled violently
round, uttered a fierce yell, flung an expensive silk hat into the
air and waved his gold-headed cane in a very disturbing fashion. He
then began to chant in a manner not unlike the way in which Mr. Vachel
Lindsay recites his poem on the Congo!... By the time he had finished
this performance, a considerable crowd had collected around him. I was
in the forefront of it, and while I was wondering how long it would
be before the police arrived to take charge of the demented man, he
recovered his sanity and proceeded to sell tips for the two-thirty
race. I bought one of them. I put money that was rare and precious
on the horse which he commended to my patronage. And the horse lost
the race!... Mr. Shaw climbed on to platforms and into newspapers,
shouting at the top of his voice, "I am better than Shakespeare" in the
hope that he might convince the world that he had any merit at all.
He performed tricks in public in order to make people believe that he
could think in the theatre. He wore comic clothes and refused to shave
and conducted a rebellion against evening dress and silk hats and
boiled shirts. He declined to eat meat, to smoke tobacco or to drink
wine. He said that he was an atheist and an immoral writer. He tried to
train his eyebrows into the shape which is called Mephistophelian. He
saw himself in the role of the Fat Boy in "Pickwick Papers" trying to
make men's flesh creep, and was disgusted to find that the Fat Boy's
most valuable asset, his obesity, had been denied to him and given to
Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, who would not make any one's flesh creep for
the value of the world! Finally, he announced that he was a Socialist.
His Socialism was not a platform trick: it was his serious faith; but
it became so associated in the public mind with his platform tricks
that he had only to say in public that he was a Socialist and his
audience would giggle as if that were the most amusing thing they had
ever heard. This habit of performing platform tricks undoubtedly drew
a large crowd to listen to him, and he did not fail to deliver himself
of his peculiar faith to that crowd when he had collected it; but
there were considerable drawbacks to his method of securing attention.
The crowd could never quite rid itself of the belief that he was "one
of those comic chaps." It admitted that he was a very clever "comic
chap," but firmly at the back of the popular mind was the belief that
he did not mean one half of what he said and was not entirely sincere
about the remaining half. It liked to see him performing in public,
and it paid large sums of money to hear him lecture in behalf of
causes that were abhorrent to it. Duchesses, for example, contributed
heavily to the funds of Socialist societies simply for the privilege
of hearing him speak, and duchesses do not love Socialist societies.
The crowd talked about him to a remarkable extent; it read his books;
it attended performances of his plays; it went to hear him lecture
... but it insisted that what was important about him was, not his
advocacy of this or that, but his power to excite laughter. When he was
most in earnest, the crowd said, "He's so witty!" and left the matter
there. That, perhaps, is why "Common Sense and the War" aroused so
much wrath in England. The crowd, accustomed to tittering behind its
hand or laughing outright at Mr. Shaw's wit, was disconcerted by the
serious way in which he dealt with the War in that notorious pamphlet.
It was so shocked by what he said that it professed to be indignant
that any man could cut comic capers at so awful a moment. Mr. Shaw was
not cutting any capers, comic or otherwise, but the crowd, trained by
him to believe that he was a comedian, could not believe that he was
capable of being anything else. That pamphlet, ill-timed, perhaps, in
some respects, was yet well-timed in this respect, that it reminded
the British people of their most priceless privilege, the right of
free speech. The whole of the British press collapsed before the Press
Censor, and editors were afraid to open their mouths about things which
were scandalous. Mr. Shaw restored the freedom of the press. He said
what he had to say and he said it with the utmost courage and force,
and within a week or two from the date of publication of his pamphlet,
the timid editors were rearing up their heads and daring to say "Bo!"
to the political geese.
There were times, perhaps, when he seemed to be yielding to the mob's
desire to be tickled, when the one thing apparently that moved him
was his delight in making the crowd giggle and guffaw; and now and
then his friends felt that he was overdoing the tricks, that he was
monotonously informing people that he was "better than Shakespeare," a
statement that seemed as idle as if Anatole France were to say that he
was "better than" Victor Hugo, when in fact the men are so dissimilar
that there is no means of comparing them. But the danger, such as it
was, amounted to little, for when all the discount is made that can
be made for possible charlatanry in his character, there remains this
indisputable fact that he has left a mark on the thought and life
not only of the English-speaking world, but of the whole of Western
civilization, which cannot be eradicated. We may go to the theatre to
laugh at Mr. Shaw, but we remain to think with him.