George Bernard Shaw: A Critical Study

From the PREFACE. A FEW years ago I was invited to break a courteous lance with Mr. G. K. Chesterton, The ensuing experience - the uncomfortable feeling that one was wasting good blows on a display of fireworks - is instinctively recalled by an invitation to discuss Mr. G. B. Shaw. One needs, however, little acquaintance with the two to discover a large and important difference. In Chesterton's work it is difficult to dissociate the wit from the thought; in Shaw the pyrotechnic element is but the advertisement of a very serious and original view of life, which existed before the humour, and can easily be formulated apart from it. The common habit of linking the names of the two humorists as "birds of paradox" is unsound. Paradox is truth disguised as untruth and the disguise must be something subtler than exaggeration and more frivolous than honest error. But most of what is regarded as paradox in Shaw's personal expressions is either a strategical exaggeration of what he believes to be a fact or a sincere conviction which is so unusual as to seem insincere. Shaw has a set of entirely original first principles, and these send their branching arteries through the whole mass of his publications and pronouncements. You find him making some puzzling statement to an interviewer or in a letter to the Press, or you hear him amuse an audience with what are called Shavian paradoxes, and you conclude that he is merely sustaining the character of Jester Laureate which the age has thrust on him. In all probability he was as serious as the Bishop of London. Many a jester of ancient times had a sharp and penetrative wit, and shook his bells only for the purpose of distracting attention at the time from the deliberate. If not malicious, aim of his shaft. Not otherwise would his words ever have reached the ears of princes. So Shaw retired from his first unsuccessful assault on the ears of King Demos, to return with the cap and bells and be installed with honour! Take him seriously! It is precisely a part of the Shavian entertainment, which in the last ten years has added to the gaiety of every civilized nation, that there are dull folk who are seduced into taking him seriously. So even learned critics say. Does Shaw desire us to take him seriously? It is characteristic of the subtle and elusive policy of the man that he is saying what he conceives to be the most serious things in the world, and trusts that they will eventually be recognised as such, but does not wish the majority of people to take him seriously. Otherwise they would not listen to him at all. Some day, when the laughter is forgotten, when the burlesque has dropped out of consciousness, he trusts that the idea will return and irritate, if not convince. To have merely amused his generation he would regard as a tragic and criminal prostitution of a great power. He is a man of the most austere sentiments and lofty ideals. No man was ever more anxious to cut deep into the solid substance of life, instead of creating ripples which the calm of to-morrow will obliterate. Behind the laughter of the familiar blue-grey eyes is a stern purpose. Even if you say that he has not merely amused his generation with his wit, but has by his high artistic power added to the dramatic wealth of the world, he will reject your homage with scorn. Art includes a moral purpose, he insists, or it is as mean as pantomime. Art for art's sake he loathes, as he loathes childless marriage. If it be not written of him that he made a deep mark on the mind, the convictions, of his time, his life will have been, from his point of view, a failure. He does not utter paradoxes: he is a paradox - the most moral immoralist, the most unselfish preacher of egoism, the gravest humorist, the most ascetic denouncer of the Ten Commandments that ever lived. He does not smile at the people who take him seriously: he smiles at the people who do not....