George Bernard Shaw: The Uncle of the Human Race

A Comment upon the Singular Intellectual Quality of the Foremost Living British Playwright

PHILIP GUEDALLA

MR. SHAW, like Tithonus, has discovered the secret of eternal age. He is emphatically the Boy who would, however young he might appear, Grow Up. Other men spend half a lifetime in the laborious acquisition of enough grey hairs to lecture their countrymen. They write; they travel; they govern remote parts of the Empire. They wait until at least half the community believe them to be dead; and then, in measured accents, they begin to be didactic.

But this long probation was distasteful to Mr. Shaw. He was confronted at birth by the challenging spectacle of his countrymen spread out in rows before him, waiting to learn. It seemed superfluous to qualify for their attention; and, instead, he promptly claimed it. At twenty-five he was telling them how to do it, with the bland assurance of an Elder Statesman. Before he was thirty, he had instructed them in the arts of music, literature, and the drama; and at thirty-five he was reconstructing their morality upon lines which he attributed, with some temerity, to Ibsen.

He dealt in certainties, because he made it a rule to know better than his audience. Yet this impetuous flow of instruction was not due to arrogance. The instructor of the English-speaking race was the humblest of men. He has always talked like an uncle to his countrymen, because he has always been old enough to be their uncle. Perhaps he is a rare, an almost alarming case of accelerated development. One seems to think him a sort of inverted Peter Pan.

But his native modesty is uncontaminated by the stern duty of setting every body right. One of the most engaging features of his method is an unassuming habit of attaching to his strictly personal opinions the name of some recognized (and, if possible, Continental) authority. He invoked the almost spectral name of Ibsen to sanctify his views about romance. Secure in the certainty that nobody read Nietzsche, he attributed to that shadowy figure his own curious convictions upon the future of the race. Schopenhauer, Wagner, Tchekhov, Mozart, even the persevering M. Brieux, each found himself involved in these embarrassing attentions, as Mr. Shaw demurely deposited his intellectual offspring on their doorsteps, with a shy intimation of the paternity of his opinions.

This prehensile modesty has wriggled behind half the great names in Europe. It enveloped their startled owners with his own views, as the serpents once enveloped Laocoon and his sons. There were no limits to his coyness. He even helped his friends to form a Fabian Society, in order that there might be in existence a body to which he could attribute his own views on current politics. The attribution was successful beyond the founder's most guileful dreams. Suburban statisticians simper proudly at imputations of wicked heterodoxy; and those dismal zealots stand, in the public mind, for freakish qualities which belong exclusively to Mr. Shaw.

Yet the gifts which he most cherishes are the least significant things about him. He seems, sometimes, to see himself as a statesman. He has never under-rated his own significance as a thinker. His opinions upon typography, oratorio, and municipal politics extort his unqualified admiration; and he has almost equalled his cwn expectations as a clothing, food, or even spelling reformer. But there is one light which he has an odd tendency to hide beneath impenetrable bushels, while he uncovers, with a sweeping gesture, other and far, far briefer candles. He writes plays.

Mr. Shaw, as dramatist, enjoys a peculiar advantage over his competitors. They spend laborious lives in a long endeavour to convert the actions and conversation of human beings into an attractive entertainment. Mr. Galsworthy pretends that they are all ill-treated; Sir James Barrie (with him, Mr. A. A. Milne) lends them wings; Mr. John Drinkwater dresses them up in a persevering series of mild historical charades. But sooner or later in the evening, since audiences are human as well as the characters in their play, come the longueurs, the stifled yawns, the faint regrets that we are not safe at home, which invariably result from several hours passed in the uninterrupted society of our fellow-creatures. The figures in their plays are, as Nietzsche ecstatically observed in another context, "human, all too human".

But Mr. Shaw has soared, from the very first, superior to this vulgar limitation. To him occurred the happy notion of relieving the British drama from its intolerable burden of human beings and substituting, as the docile vehicles of his inimitable monologue, a procession of fantastic puppets. Impressed, as so many serious critics have been, with the manifest superiority of Punch and Judy to almost all competing plays, he realized that their inspired author triumphed because he interposed no flicker of reality, no faint, disturbing touch of human character, between the mind of his audience and that magnificently bleak conception of crime and punishment. Mr. Shaw, as one seems to see him, resolved to do likewise ; to project the cold light of his magic lantern on the screen without the baffling intervention of any human figure, of any remotest touch of sordid reality.

His audiences breathe an air that is unreal beyond transpontine melodrama and the transformation scenes of pantomimes. He opens a not particularly magic casement on the foam of perilous seas in lands which, though questionably faery, are indubitably forlorn; and he hears the horns of Elfland blowing unearthly, but distinctly novel, airs. His parables are performed by figures of the wildest romance—an inspired headwaiter, an intelligent General, some homicidal surgeons, a saint or so, and a few historical characters neatly inverted. Their lives, their utterances, their motives bear no relation to the normal, anq hardly any to the more exotic, standards of those rococo types which specialize in Movements and have made Mr. Shaw the uncomplaining victim of their social ambitions. One passes, with the rise of the curtain, into a grotesque fairyland in which all things are possible. King's Counsel wear false noses; Regius Professors of Greek join the Salvation Arm) and play the drum; Miss Ellen Terr) appears suddenly in Mogador; and lion? chase Roman Emperors round the stage,

BUT the oddities of motive and opinion are even stranger than the superficial queerness of Mr. Shaw's scene. As he jerks the wires, his little figures fall into strange, exaggerated postures, which bear no resemblance to the easy attitudes of human beings. Their tiny mouths fall open; but the voice which reaches the audience has a uniform, a familiar, Irish accent. They expose, with admirable lucidity, their author's personality; but they do it at the sacrifice of their own. How much of Mr. Shaw one may learn from his Caesar, and how little of Caesar! Even his comic dustman, one feels, would be more at home on a Fabian platform than in the humbler exercise of his calling. Perhaps the dramatist's main concern with his characters should be to present a little set of lightning biographies: Mr. Shaw seems to have chosen to compose, instead, his own intellectual autobiography, and to offer it in a series of mildly dramatic installments.

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Yet there is something else with which playwrights are concerned. Their business, as solemn gentlemen remind them in print on the morning after the first performance, is to write plays, to construct an entertainment round some dramatic pivot. Even the Greeks achieved it; although they had not, for the most part, the advantage of reading Aristotle. Modern writers, with the voluble assistance of modern critics, have persevered in the attempt to be dramatic. But Mr. Shaw has intermittently scandalized the experts by a bland refusal to play the game according to the rules and a complete omission of all dramatic point. It is a healthy insurrection, since justice requires that, if Wagner is permitted to write a drama that is all music, Mr. Shaw should not be excommunicated for writing a drama that is all words. The words, in his case, are excellent words, since he is primarily a good talker who manages to put his talk on paper. But one winces a little at the thought of possible "Discussions", composed by the more earnest of his younger imitators. Mr. Shaw has a wide influence on the young Intelligentsia. But one hopes that, in this instance, his departure from tradition will be a purely personal insurrection, and not a standard of revolt.

His influence is strong in those daring circles which strive to keep abreast of the best thought of King Edward's reign. He shares the politics of the Labour Party—those queer pietists who direct the onward march of Progress with eyes turned back to the vague, Victorian figure of Karl Marx. In moral matters, he has always marched breast-forward to be advanced, emulating a little the progressive lady in one of Mr. Wells' novels whose "place was in the van. She did not mind very much where the van u'as going, so long as she was in it."

In the result, perhaps, he pays the penalty of his persevering modernity, since persons whose main determination is to be in advance of the fashion are apt eventually to be overtaken by it and left behind. His Ibsen and his Nietzsche bear date, as the dressmakers say. Even his Tchekhov begins to look a trifle douxly. Mr. Chesterton once wrote that "going to The Philanderers is like going among perhvigs and rapiers, and hearing that the young men are now all for Racine." But even Mr. Chesterton's comment has been overtaken by the fashion, since the young men are once more all for Racine; and as the wheel swdngs slowly round again, there is still hope for Mr. Shaw\