GEORGE iERNARD SHAW HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? BY JOHN PALMER LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF 1 SAN DU-GO j GEORGE BERNARD SHAW HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? From a photograph by Alvin Lang-don Coburn GEORGE BERNARD SHAW GEORGE BERNARD SHAW HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? BY JOHN PALMER NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1915 Copyright, 1915, by THE CENTURY Co. Published March, 1915 CONTENTS CHAPTER I SHAW THE ENIGMA II SHAW NOT AN ORIGINAL, THINKER . 14 HI THE "BETTER THAN SHAKESPEARE" FALLACY 20 IV SHAW NOT A JESTER .... 29 V HIS REPUDIATION OF REASON . . VI SHAW FAR FROM BEING AN ANARCH- IST 88 Vn SHAW A PRECISION RATHER THAN A CARELESS MAN OF LETTERS . . 45 VHI THE REAL. SHAW 58 IX PASSION AND STYLE THE SECRETS OF SHAW'S SUCCESS 64 X OUR MODERN TREATMENT OF PROPH- ETS . 71 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? GEORGE BERNARD SHAW HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? I SHAW THE ENIGMA THE first fallacy is that Bernard Shaw is an immensely public per- son; that he is a sort of twentieth cen- tury Grand Monarch who, if manners allowed, would dine like Louis XIV in the presence of the people and receive the press in his dressing-gown. Now, it is true that Bernard Shaw has been photographed by Alvin Langdon Co- burn without a stitch ; that at one period of his career he almost lived upon a pub- lic platform; that he invariably tells us 3 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW the private history of each of his books and plays; that, partly from a sense of fun, and partly from a determination that what he has seriously to say shall be heard, he talks and writes a good deal about himself; and that he has al- lowed Mr. Archibald Henderson to compile a sort of concordance to his per- sonality. Nevertheless, it is not true that Ber- nard Shaw is an immensely public per- son. Or perhaps I should put it this way: Bernard Shaw whom the public knows is not an authentic revelation of the extremely private gentleman who lives in Adelphi Terrace. The Ber- nard Shaw whom the public knows might more accurately be described as a screen. What the public knows about Bernard Shaw is either trivial or mis- leading. Thus the public knows that 4 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? Bernard Shaw can read diamond type with his left eye at a distance of twenty- eight inches ; that he can hear a note the pitch of which does not exceed 30,000 vibrations per second ; that, when he sits down upon a chair, the distance between the crown of his head and the seat is 3 feet, 1.8 inches. These things are triv- ial. Or the public knows that Ber- nard Shaw is a very striking and pro- vocative writer of plays, that he is also a socialist and a vegetarian; and these things are misleading. That is why any satisfactory account of Bernard Shaw rendered to those who have allowed themselves to be deceived by common fame must necessarily take the form of a schedule of popular fal- lacies. Such a schedule will at any rate be found more useful, and certainly less hackneyed, than a personal "interview" 5 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW and description of one who has been more often photographed and handled in the picturesque and familiar way of the expert pressman than the most pop- ular member of the British Cabinet. Perhaps, therefore, I may regard my- self as excused from accurately sketch- ing the wicket-gate which leads to Ber- nard Shaw's private dwelling, or from telling the story of his velvet coat, or from recording the number of times he has been met upon the top of an omni- bus (where he used virtually to live), or betraying what he writes to young people in confidence about the nose of a celebrated author. Intimate revelations of this kind do not take the public far. They do not seriously disturb the inaccessible privacy which Bernard Shaw has always con- trived to maintain. The truth is that 6 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? the authentic author of "Man and Superman" has never really been in- terviewed; has never really "plucked me ope his doublet and offered them his throat to cut" to visitors who are likely to be hiding a kodak under their coat or to be surreptitiously fin- gering a note-book. Bernard Shaw of the interviews and the funny stories is public enough ; but this Bernard Shaw is almost entirely a legend. Before this legend gets as firm a hold upon New York as it has upon London, it may be well to number some of the more strik- ing fallacies of which it is composed. There is only one serious drawback to this method of approach, and this draw- back vanishes almost as soon as it is ex- plained. Exploding popular fallacies is disagreeable work, and it usually gives to the sentences of the author en- 7 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW gaged upon it an air of quarreling vio- lently with his readers and with his sub- ject. Such is not the intention or mood of this present article. I have an immense enthusiasm and liking for Bernard Shaw and for the greater part of most of what Bernard Shaw has written. I claim, indeed, to admire Bernard Shaw for sounder and weightier reasons than have yet occurred to Bernard Shaw him- self. These reasons will be presented later in a postscript of appreciation. When the worst fallacies regarding Bernard Shaw have been briefly de- scribed and contradicted (it would re- quire a large volume to describe and con- tradict them in detail) , I shall be in a better position to assert, briefly again, wherein Bernard Shaw's genius truly consists ; exactly how serious he is ; and, 8 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? more particularly, why he has just writ- ten a pamphlet about the war, and why he ought not to have done so. Mean- time I hope that readers of this article will agree to digest the fallacies and to wait for the postscript; also to believe that my habitually indignant manner is simply the result of writing regularly about the British theater. The first fallacy is already declared; namely, that Bernard Shaw is a public person. The second fallacy is that Ber- nard Shaw is an easy and profitable sub- ject to write about. He is not. It is true that Bernard Shaw's interviews with the press are the best interviews, and that he invariably galvanizes the dullest of his appreciators into liveli- ness. Pronounce the name of Bernard Shaw in almost any company, and im- mediately every one perks up with an 9 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW epigram or a paradox or an anecdote. Bernard Shaw like Falstaff is not only witty himself ; he is the occasion that wit is in other men. Nevertheless, Bernard Shaw is not a good subject. It is not encouraging to embark upon an enterprise with the sure knowledge that the thing has been done before and better done. Bernard Shaw is not a good subject because he has al- ready been exhausted. There is not more than one expert upon Bernard Shaw. Every one professionally re- quired to write about Bernard Shaw sets out under an unfortunate sense that the ground has already been covered; that the job has already been done bril- liantly, thoroughly and finally. The best essays on the work of Ber- nard Shaw, the most impartial authori- tative, and penetrating, are by Bernard 10 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? Shaw himself. The best stories about Bernard Shaw, whether they are the cruel, illuminating anecdotes which de- light the envious, or the flashes of re- sources and honesty which are cherished by his friends and admirers, are once again by Bernard Shaw himself. Should you set out to extol or to ad- vertise Bernard Shaw, you know that this has already been done with incom- parable energy and talent, and that it has been done by one who knows. Should you, on the other hand, set out to expose or pull to tatters the reputa- tion and character of Bernard Shaw, again you know that you are the merest amateur compared with G. B. S. ; know also that, if you want to do the busi- ness effectively, and leave Bernard Shaw obviously for dead on the field of controversy, you will have to call in 11 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW G. B. S. to help you. It is possible to slay Bernard Shaw; but it is possible to slay him only in alliance with himself. It is a joke of the two hemispheres that Bernard Shaw better understands his merits than any one else in the world. It is a finer joke, and not so thread- worn, that he better understands his limitations. Either way, whether you are celebrating his genius or asserting your position as the candid friend, you are forced to acknowledge at the last that your researches into Bernard Shaw are simply not in the same class with his own either in intimacy (which is sur- prising in an age when the press is often more intimate with a man than his own tooth-brush) ; in detachment and ab- sence of favor (which, again, is surpris- ing, in an age when men of letters take themselves very seriously) ; or in a se- HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? verely just recognition of the subject's merit (more surprising still in an age when public men carefully cultivate a reputation for modesty) . 13 II SHAW NOT AN ORIGINAL THINKER THE third fallacy is that Bernard Shaw is a profoundly original thinker and a propagandist of abso- lutely new ideas. He has repeatedly told his readers and his friends that he is nothing of the kind. His biographer somewhere quotes him as saying, "I am an expert picker of men's brains, and I have been extremely fortunate in my friends." Nor need we go to Bernard Shaw's biographer for this. Bernard Shaw has spent half his life in telling the world the exact scientific truth about himself, and of course the world has refused to believe him. It is hardly ex- 14 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? aggeration to say that whenever Ber- nard Shaw tells people soberly and hon- estly exactly the sort of man he is, and exactly the kind of work he has done, they laugh heartily, and say that Ber- nard Shaw is a very funny and inventive person. Similarly, whenever he ven- tures into fun and fiction, his hearers in- sist upon taking him seriously as they would take a prophet. It follows that Bernard Shaw, who is a modest, conscientious, kindly, in- dustrious, and well-read man of letters, is commonly regarded as a reckless fire- brand who lives by the cart and the trumpet, is up to his neck in all that is lawless and improper, is without com- passion or shame, speaks always in par- adoxes, and claims to be greater than Shakspere. Not fewer than fourteen years ago Bernard Shaw told the world 15 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW that he was an elderly gentleman who had made an immense reputation by being the best of a bad lot and by plagiarizing the English classics. He really meant what he said; but the pref- ace in which he said it is still supposed to be the locus classicus of his claim to supersede the author of "Macbeth." Here, again, it is impossible to say of Bernard Shaw any true thing he has not already said of himself. He has repeatedly urged his critics and follow- ers to reject utterly the legend of G. B. S. "I find myself," Bernard Shaw wrote in 1900, "while still in middle life almost as legendary a person as the Flying Dutchman. Critics, like other people, see what they look for, not what is actually before them. In my plays they look for my legendary qualities, and find originality and brilliancy in 16 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? my most hackneyed claptrap. Were I to republish Buckstone's 'Wreck Ashore' as my latest comedy, it would be hailed as a masterpiece of perverse paradox and scintillating satire." Nothing in modern literary history is more remarkable than the reputation of G. B. S. for original and daring specu- lation; and no one, myself possibly ex- cepted, more thoroughly appreciates the funny side of G. B. S. as philoso- pher than the man to whom this repu- tation is so persistently attached. Five years ago I came to London burdened with the classic wisdom of an ancient university. I had read some philoso- phy in one school and some economy in another. As a musician I had read Wagner for a venerable classic. As the merest Philistine in connoisseurship, I recognized in Rodin a great sculptor 17 of the last generation, as firmly estab- lished in immortality as Michelangelo, and I saluted in the New English Art Club a thoroughly respectable academy of painting. As a playgoer destined to succeed Max Beerbohm, who himself in remote antiquity had succeeded G. B. S. on the "Saturday Review," I had be- come weary of Ibsen, and had begun to wonder why Granville Barker seemed old enough to be my uncle. Now, I do not regard myself as being in the least in advance of my time; yet when I came to London I found that Bernard Shaw, who still preached Ibsen and Wagner, who spoke with Rodin as a contemporary, who preached a phi- losophy which was already introduced into examination-papers at a place not suspected of modernism, who talked economy out of university text-books 18 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? which it was a scholarly and pedantic exercise to confute in the lecture-rooms of Oxford that this thoroughly safe, orthodox, and almost medieval Bernard Shaw was being received by the literary societies and the press of London as an original and revolutionary thinker. I then began to understand why Bernard Shaw has very little respect for some of his contemporaries. 19 Ill THE BETTER THAN SHAKE- SPEARE " FALLACY THIS brings us to the fourth fal- lacy. The fourth fallacy is that Bernard Shaw has made enormous and extravagant claims for himself as a critic, philosopher, sociologist, and dramatist. Let us take a passage of Bernard Shaw's preface to the "Plays for Puritans." It is the famous "Bet- ter than Shakespeare" passage, the foundation of a public charge that George Bernard Shaw thinks too highly of himself. It is a conclusive proof that he does nothing of the kind. Ob- serve also that it harks back to our second fallacy: 20 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? My stories are the old stories, my charac- ters are the familiar harlequin and colum- bine, clown and pantaloon (note the harle- quin's leap in the third act of Ccesar and Cleopatra} ; my stage tricks and suspenses and thrills and jests are the ones in vogue when I was a boy, by which time my grand- father was tired of them. ... It is a dan- gerous thing to be hailed at once, as a few rash admirers have hailed me, as above all things original ; what the world calls origi- nality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it. Meyerbeer seemed prodigiously original to the Parisians, when he first burst on them. To-day he is only the crow who followed Beethoven's plough. I am a crow who have followed many ploughs. No doubt I seem prodigiously clever to those who have never hopped hungry and curious across the fields of philosophy, politics and art. Karl Marx said of Stuart Mill that his eminence was due to the flatness of the surrounding country. In these days of Board Schools, universal reading, newspa- GEORGE BERNARD SHAW pers and the inevitable ensuing demand for notabilities of all sorts, literary, military, political and fashionable, to write paragraphs about, that sort of eminence is within the reach of very moderate ability. Reputa- tions are cheap nowadays. Who, after that, will say that Bernard Shaw has in him a particle of author's conceit? He has never claimed more than is due to him. There is not the least evidence of vanity or self-impor- tance in the printed work of George Bernard Shaw, there is even less in his speeches, letters (the private letters of George Bernard Shaw will be his masterpiece when, and if, they ever come to be published), conversation, or general demeanor. It is true that he has frequently and vigorously claimed not to be entirely foolish, and that some- times he has insisted that he really does HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? know what he is writing about. But it is also true that no critic has more persistently assured the public that there is nothing really important or new in any of the ideas and devices which so curiously amazed the first audiences of his early plays. Has he not soberly assured the American public that "the novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last"? And has he not proved this with instances out of "The Devil's Disciple"? Did he not prophesy out- right in 1900 that the lapse of a few years would expose that play for "the threadbare popular melodrama it tech- nically is"? Nevertheless, though it is possible for any one read in the works of Ber- nard Shaw to parallel these instances of self-assessment from almost any 23 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW volume, pamphlet, speech, or anecdote of his life, the helief still rules that Bernard Shaw is too highly appreciated by Bernard Shaw. The truth is that Bernard Shaw has had to expend vast stores of energy and time in reproving his friends for thinking too much of him and in snubbing the worship of his followers. He has had continually to explain to the superior socialists that he is not really a great orator; to the dra- matic critics that he is not really the supreme dramatist who ever lived; to men of science that he is not the erudite physician they have imagined from "The Doctor's Dilemma" and not the expert in acoustics they have inferred from "Pygmalion"; to distracted heads of families that he is not in the least qualified to tell them how to control their marriageable daughters. Ber- HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? nard Shaw has worked harder to escape the greatness which is thrust upon him than many of his contemporaries have worked to achieve wealth and a blue ribbon; and the harder he has worked, the more convinced the public has be- come that he is an incorrigibly insolent and pertinacious champion of his title to be infallible. It is essential to get this notion of Bernard Shaw as the miles gloriosus corrected at the start, otherwise we shall never handle the key to his achievement. You will ask how it has arisen. It has arisen simply and inevitably from the fact that Bernard Shaw was for many years of his life a professional critic, and that he was by nature able to re- gard himself and his own performances with complete detachment. Naturally, when he came to write plays, and 25 found that the said plays were incom- petently criticized, he used his native gift for regarding himself impartially, and his acquired skill as a professional critic, to inform his readers exactly how good and how bad his plays really were, Hence he has acquired a reputation for vainglory, for it is a rooted idea with some people that a man who talks about himself is necessarily vainglorious. Bernard Shaw's detached and disin- terested observation of his own career and achievements is not within the power of the average man of letters. It was accordingly misunderstood. Not every one can discuss his own work as though it were the work of a stran- ger. The self-criticism of Bernard Shaw, read as a whole, shows an amaz- ing literary altruism. It shows exactly how far he is from consenting to occupy HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? the throne into which he has been thrust. Bernard Shaw, in his prefaces, is not a prophet claiming inspiration for his script ; he is one of the crowd that reads and judges for itself; only he reads and judges a little more closely and severely than the rest. Bernard Shaw's mod- esty his curious aloofness from his own fame is the more attractive in that it is absolutely innocent of stage- management. There are men who have made corners in retirement men of whom it is at once exclaimed how humble and unspoiled they are. Shrewd observers will always suspect the man of letters who is famous for his modesty; who seems to think it posi- tively indecent that his face should be seen; who has always "just left the theater" when there is a call to be taken ; who has a reputation for inaccessibil- 27 ity. Bernard Shaw, of course, is en- tirely free of this organized and blush- ing humility. His very real modesty consists in his being able to assess him- self correctly. He is one of the few living authors who has not been taken in by his own performances. It does not occur to him to divide the literature of the day into (a) the works of Ber- nard Shaw and (b) other people's works. He thinks of "Man and Super- man" as he thinks of "The Silver Box." It is a play of contemporary interest and of some merit, and he does not see why he should be barred from discuss- ing it as an expert critic just because he happens to be the author. Bernard Shaw has certainly imposed upon many of his friends and observers. He has not imposed upon himself. IV SHAW NOT A JESTER THE fifth fallacy is that Bernard Shaw is an incorrigible jester, that he is never serious, that he is ready to sacrifice his best friend and his firm- est conviction for the sake of a really good joke. Now, the first thing to re- alize about Bernard Shaw is his over- flowing gravity. He has taken more things seriously in his career than any living and notable person. He has taken music seriously, and painting and socialism and philosophy and politics and public speaking. He has taken the trouble to make up his mind upon scores of things to which the average 29 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW heedless man hardly gives a second thought things like diet, hygiene, vac- cination, phonetic spelling, and vivisec- tion. He has even taken seriously the English theater, unlike virtually every other English man of letters who has had anything to do with it. Compare for a moment the conduct of Bernard Shaw at a rehearsal of one of his own plays with the conduct, say, of Barrie. Barrie is happy so long as no one takes any notice of him. He has so immense a disdain for the minutiae of theatrical production that he would rather write ten plays than control the rehearsal of one. Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, with the amazing industry of a really serious person, turns up with a closely written volume of notes, deter- mining down to the minutest detail where, how, and when his company shall 30 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? deliver their lines and do their necessary "business." It is only because Ber- nard Shaw is so immensely serious that he can be so tremendously casual and brilliant. He is ready for everything and everybody because he has seriously considered everything and seriously re- garded everybody. A first-rate im- promptu usually indicates a mind richly stored and well arranged. Bernard Shaw can extemporize on most sub- jects because he has seriously thought about them. The more brilliantly he sparkles upon a given theme, the more sober has been his education in its rudi- ments. Unfortunately, many people have come to exactly the opposite con- clusion. Because Bernard Shaw has a rapid and vital way of writing, because he presents his argument at a maximum, seasons it with boisterous analogies, 31 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW and frequently drives it home at the point of a hearty joke, he is suspected of sacrificing sense to sound. The dancing of his manner conceals the se- vere decorum of his matter. It is true that Bernard Shaw can be funny, but it is wholly false that he is in the least a flippant writer or a careless thinker. He is as serious as Praise-God Bare- bones and as careful as Octavius Cassar. HIS REPUDIATION OF REASON THE sixth fallacy has to do with the all-head-and-no-heart for- mula. It is said of Bernard Shaw by some very excellent critics that he is an expert logician arguing in vacuo, that he has exalted reason as a god, that his mind is a wonderful machine which never goes wrong because its owner is not swayed by the ordinary passions, likes, prejudices, sentiments, impulses, infatuations, enthusiasms, and weak- nesses of ordinary mankind. How the critics square this notion of Bernard Shaw with the kind friend and coun- selor who lives in Adelphi Terrace they 33 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW alone can tell. It is probably this idea of Bernard Shaw which most heartily tickles him. Bernard Shaw greatly en- joys contemplating the motley crowd of his legendary selves; but none can please him more thoroughly because none could be more outrageously ficti- tious than Bernard Shaw the vivisec- tor of his kind, the high priest of rea- son and common sense. This last superstition has grown mainly out of the simple fact that G. B. S. as a critic of music, art, and the drama was actually a critic. He took his criticism as seriously as he took his socialism or his conviction that tobacco was a noxious weed. Being a serious critic, he found it necessary to tell the truth concerning the artistic achieve- ments of many sensitive and amiable young people. Naturally, Bernard 34, HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? Shaw got the reputation of being a heartless brute for his candor, and a log- ical brute, owing to the soundness of his arguments. Then, when Bernard Shaw came to write plays, it was dis- covered that his young women behaved like reasonable creatures and that his young men appreciated the importance of five per cent. This was unusual in the soft, romantic stage creatures of the late nineties; so here was more evi- dence of Bernard Shaw's insensibility, of his arid and merciless rationalism, of his impenetrable indifference to all that warms the blood of common hu- manity. Of course there was not the slightest real evidence of all this. If there is one idea more than another that per- sists all through the work of Bernard Shaw, and defines his personality, it 35 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW is to be found in his perpetual repudia- tion of reason. Almost his whole lit- erary career has been spent in adapting the message of Schopenhauer to his own optimism and belief in the good- ness of life. Not reason and not the categories determine or create, but pas- sion and will. Bernard Shaw has al- ways insisted that reason is no motive power; that the true motive power is will ; that the setting up of reason above will is a damnable error. Life is the satisfaction of a power in us of which we can give no rational account what- ever that is the final declaration of Bernard Shaw; and his doctrine corre- sponds with his temperament. Rud- yard Kipling has described the ration- alists as men who "deal with people's insides from the point of view of men who have no stomachs." Bernard 36 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? Shaw would agree. No one, in habit or opinion, lives more remotely than Bernard Shaw from the clear, hard, logical, devitalised, and sapless world of Comte and Spencer. VI SHAW FAR FROM BEING AN ANARCHIST THE seventh fallacy is that Ber- nard Shaw is an anarchist, a dis- turber of, the peace, a champion of the right of every man to do as he pleases and to think for himself. This idea of Bernard Shaw is so deeply rooted in the public mind, despite Bernard Shaw's serious and repeated disclaim- ers of its accuracy, that, if any young person in London runs away from her parents, or if any elderly gentleman abandons his wife and family, these things are not only regarded as the re- sults of Bernard Shaw's pernicious 38 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? teaching, but their perpetrators are up- held and justified by the belief that they are disciples following the lead of G. B. S. as prophet and master. These startling misconceptions have arisen from the fact that Bernard Shaw has pointed out in a popular play that chil- dren do not always agree in all points with their parents, and that he has ar- gued in a less popular play that one or two reforms in the marriage laws of Great Britain are already overdue. Was ever a reputation won upon slen- derer evidence? Why, Shakspere told us three hundred years ago how The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long That it had its head bit off by its young, and it is now on record in a British blue- book that a committee of the most re- spectable gentlemen of the British bar GEORGE BERNARD SHAW and church have agreed with Bernard Shaw that British divorce is unneces- sarily expensive, inequitable, and hu- miliating. The practical extent of Bernard Shaw's anarchism coincides with the anarchism of our judges and our bishops. Those who dig deeper than this, with the preconceived resolution to find that Bernard Shaw is an anarchist, will only be more hopelessly misled. They will find that he preaches, as we have al- ready discovered, the ultimate suprem- acy of passion and will; that he sees the gods and the laws of each genera- tion as mere expressions of the will and passion of their generation; and that he claims for posterity the right to su- persede them as soon as posterity is moved by a higher will and a finer pas- sion. But this is not anarchism. It is 40 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? so far from being anarchism that side by side with these doctrines Bernard Shaw has, in "The Sanity of Art," written down one of the best defenses of law and order of the convenience and necessity of policemen, churches, and all kinds of public authority that has appeared in popular form within re- cent years. It is true that Bernard Shaw pleads for liberty, and points out that it is better for a man to act and think responsibly for himself than to run to the nearest constable or parish priest. But it is also true that he wants people to have no more liberty than is good for them, and that he very seri- ously distrusts the ability of the aver- age man to think for himself. Bernard Shaw knows that the average man has neither the time nor the brains nor the imagination to be original in such mat- GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ters as crossing the road or getting mar- ried or determining whether he ought or ought not to cut the throat of his neighbor. Nothing could be further from the mind of Bernard Shaw than the philo- sophic anarchy of Godwin or John Stuart Mill. Bernard Shaw is not an anarchist either in speculation or in practice. He is as sound on the ques- tion of law and order as Mr. Asquith. He is as correct in deportment and as regular in his conduct as the Vice- Chan- cellor of Oxford. The most pictorial way of emphasizing the difference be- tween a real anarchist and Bernard Shaw is to compare the handwriting of Bernard Shaw and, say, of Cunning- hame Graham. Bernard Shaw writes like a sensible citizen who intends his pages to be read. It is true that he as- HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? serts his individuality as one who values what is comely by writing the most beautiful hand of any author living, just as he insists that his books shall be printed in a style that proclaims him a pupil of William Morris. But he writes mainly to be read, aware that the liberty of writing illegibly is not worth the trouble it would give to a commu- nity which practised it. The writing of Cunninghame Graham, on the other hand, requires an expert in caligraphy. It has baffled half the big printing- houses in London. It is the last, in- solent assertion that every man has the right to do as he pleases regardless of the discomfort and loss of time he thereby inflicts upon his neighbors. It is, in one word, anarchic, a graphic illus- tration of the great gulf that is fixed between two public figures of the time GEORGE BERNARD SHAW who, nevertheless, have impartially been described by the careless as an- archists. SHAW A PRECISION RATHER THAN A CARELESS MAN OF LETTERS THE eighth fallacy is that Ber- nard Shaw is a headlong, dash- ing, and opiniative writer, without tech- nical equipment, who succeeds by an impudent trust in his unassisted genius, and brings off his best efforts by a happy fluke. This fallacy has stuck to Bernard Shaw all through his career as a critic of music, painting, the drama, as a playwright, as a pamphleteer, as a public speaker. When G. B. S., as Corno di Bassett, was writing about music for a London newspaper, the 45 public insisted that his appointment was a joke. It was the public's own joke, and the public enjoyed it immensely. Indeed, it chuckled so heartily that G. B. S. had not the malice to undeceive it. He played with this popular legend of himself, as he has so often played with a hundred others. He was thought to be merely a rude young man who knocked the professors' heads to- gether without the least idea of what they contained. Bernard Shaw's char- acteristic confutation of this public er- ror was to reduce it to absurdity. When people handed him a score, he held it carefully upside down and studied it in that position. When he was asked to play the piano, he walked to the wrong end. Bernard Shaw's conduct as a critic of music, acting under provo- cation, was very natural; but it was in 46 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? the result unfortunate. Popularly imagined to be an irresponsible ama- teur with a literary knack, Bernard Shaw, in all he has undertaken, has, if anything, erred from an excessive knowledge and interest in the expert professional and technical side of his subject. Bernard Shaw knew years ago all about the enormity of explod- ing undiminished chords of the ninth and thirteenth on the unsuspecting ear, just as to-day he thoroughly under- stands the appallingly scientific pro- gressions of Scriabin. Similarly he can tell you the difference at a glance be- tween real sunshine in an open field and the good north light of a Chelsea stu- dio, or explain why "values" are more difficult to capture when colors are bright than when they are looked for in a dark interior. As to the technic 47 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW of the theater well, the subject is hardly worth discussing. Some of his later plays are nothing if they are not technical. The fallacy that Bernard Shaw is a happy savage among critics and artists, ignorant and careless of form, unread in the necessary conventions, speaking al- ways at random with the confidence that only a perfect ignorance can give, is particularly deplorable, because it nec- essarily blinds its adherents to Bernard Shaw's most serious defect both as critic and creator. Usually Bernard Shaw knows too much, rather than too little, of his subject. He is too keenly interested in its bones and its mechan- ism. His famous distinction between music which is decorative and music which is dramatic is quite unsound, as I would undertake to show in nothing HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? less than a small pamphlet ; but it is not the mistake of a critic ignorant of mu- sic. It is rather the mistake of a critic too keenly absorbed in the technic of music. If the professors in the early nineties had objected to G. B. S. because he was liable to lapse into the pedantry of which they themselves were accused, they would have been nearer the mark than they were in foolishly dismissing him as an ignoramus. Similarly, as a dramatic critic, G. B. S. erred not by at- taching too little value to the forms and conventions of the theater, but by at- taching too much. It is true that he did not make the absurd mistake of some of his followers, and regard Ibsen as a great dramatist on account of one or two pettifogging and questionable reforms in dramatic convention, such 49 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW as the abolishing of soliloquies and asides and extra doors to the sitting- room. But he certainly attached too much importance to these things, mainly because he knew so much about them; and this critical insistence of his as a Saturday Reviewer has had its revenge in some of his own plays, where his purely technical mastery of theatrical devices, his stage-cleverness, and crafts- man's virtuosity have led him into me- chanical horse-play and stock positions unworthy of the author of "John Bull's Other Island" and "Major Barbara." Bernard Shaw has continually suffered from knowing his subject too well from the angle of the expert, and he has fre- quently fallen into the mistakes of the expert. Far from being the happy and careless privateer of popular belief, he is usually to be found struggling for 50 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? freedom under the oppression of things stored for reference in his capacious memory. The great critic, like any or- dinary, unskilled spectator, should be able to look at a work of art without prejudice in favor of any particular form or fashion. It should not matter to him a jot or influence his judgment in the slightest whether the music he hears is symphonic or metrical, whether the thirteenth is exploded as a thir- teenth or prepared as a six-four chord. He should be similarly indifferent whether a dramatist talks to him in blank-verse soliloquy or in conversa- tional duologue. Preoccupation with manner, apart from matter usually implying an a priori prejudice in favor of one manner over another is the mark of pedantry; and of this pedantry always the pedantry of a man who 51 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW is expert and knows too much Ber- nard Shaw is not always free, though he is far too good a critic to be often at fault. VIII THE REAL SHAW) WE have not yet exhausted the popular fallacies about Ber- nard Shaw, but as most of my readers will already be wondering what is left of the man who has just described Sir Edward Grey as a Junker, I will turn now from George Bernard Shaw, who is as legendary as the Flying Dutch- man, to the very positive and substan- tial author of "Commonsense and the War." I have yet to explain why Ber- nard Shaw, stripped of his professional masks, and rescued from the miscon- ceptions of his admirers, remains one of the most striking public figures of our day, and must fairly be regarded GEORGE BERNARD SHAW as the most important apparition in the British theater since Goldsmith and Sheridan. We have seen that Bernard Shaw is not original in what he preaches, is erudite rather than adven- turous, is in no sense revolutionary or anarchical, is extremely serious, and is far from being an orgiastic and impu- dent rationalist for whom drifting hu- manity is stuff for a paradox. Ber- nard Shaw has not won the notice of mankind because he has thought of things which have hitherto occurred to no one else; nor has he won the notice of mankind because he has a native gift of buffoonery and a talent for the stage. The merit of Bernard Shaw has to be sought outside his doctrine. The se- cret of his genius lies deeper than his fun, and has scarcely anything to do with his craft. 54 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? It ironically happens that Bernard Shaw as a critic has virtually made it impossible for those who accept his crit- icism to allow that Bernard Shaw as a dramatic author has any right to be really famous. We have seen that Ber- nard Shaw as a critic repeatedly fell into the grievous error of separating the stuff he was criticizing into manner and matter. Thus, confronted with the Elizabethan dramatists, Bernard Shaw always maintained that they had noth- ing to say and that they were only toler- able because they had an incomparably wonderful way of saying it. Compar- ing Shakspere with Ibsen, for example, he would point out that, if you para- phrased Ibsen's "Peter Gynt," it still remained good intellectual stuff, and that, if you paraphrased Shakspere's "Life 's but a walking shadow," it be- 55 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW came the merest commonplace. Ber- nard Shaw thence proceeded to draw the moral that Ibsen, apart from mere favor and prettiness, was the greater and more penetrating dramatist. For- tunately for Bernard Shaw, as we shall shortly realize, this criticism of his is not only false in fact, but it is also non- sense in theory. It is false in fact, be- cause it is quite untrue that Shakspere paraphrased is commonplace whereas Ibsen paraphrased is an intellectual feast. It would be more to the point if Bernard Shaw had said that Shak- spere paraphrased is commonplace for all time and that Ibsen paraphrased is commonplace for only the nineteenth century. It would be still more to the point if Bernard Shaw had said that it is quite impossible to paraphrase any work of genius in so far as genius has 56 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? gone to its making. It is absurd to talk of paraphrasing Shakspere, be- cause Shakspere is of genius all com- pact; and it is as true of Ibsen as of Shakspere that, so far as he is a genius and not merely a scientific naturalist, it is absurd to separate what he says from his way of saying it. When Shakspere has written: . . . Out, out, brief candle ! Life 's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. he has written more than the equiva- lent of "life is not worth living." If Bernard Shaw will not admit that Shak- spere in this passage is no more than an utterer of a universal platitude for 57 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW pessimists, he will have to agree that Ibsen is no more than an utterer of parochial platitude for the suffragette platform. Probably, however, now that Bernard Shaw has himself become a classical author, he has realized that to distinguish between the ideas of a literary genius and the language in which they are expressed is as absurd as to distinguish between the subject of a painter and the way in which it is (painted, or between the themes of a musician and the notes in which they are rendered. At any rate, Bernard Shaw must re- alize how very badly he himself would fare under such a distinction. We have seen that Bernard Shaw in doc- trine and idea is in no sense original. His celebration of the state is as old as Plato. His particular sort of puri- 58 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? tanism is as old as Cromwell. His par- ticular brand of socialism is as old as Owen. A paraphrase of Bernard Shaw a reduction of Bernard Shaw to the bare bones of his subject matter would be as intolerable as the speeches of his disciples and some of his masters usually are. In a word, if Bernard Shaw is a genius, he is a genius for the same reason that Shakspere is a genius. He is a genius not because he has anything new to say, but because he has a passionate and a personal way of saying it. If I had the time to go deeper into this matter, I should like to ask whether it is really possible to get hold of a new idea as distinguished from a new way of presenting an old one. But, at all events, I have already said enough to justify the assumption that, if Bernard Shaw can claim an immor- 59 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW tality, however brief, it will not be by virtue of his original, novel, and start- ling opinions, but by virtue of his liter- ary presentation of them in a manner entirely his own. The equations read: The ideas of Bernard Shaw = the commonplaces of his time. The ideas of Bernard Shaw -j- his way of presenting them = G. B. S. 60 IX PASSION AND STYLE THE SECRETS OF SHAW'S SUCCESS BERNARD SHAW, then, has won the attention of the present generation, and he will hold the atten- tion of posterity not because he has new theories about the world, but because, by virtue of strictly personal and in- alienable qualities, he is able to give to the most "hackneyed clap-trap" (Ber- nard Shaw's own description) an air of novelty. Were he baldly to tell us that incomes should be equally divided, and that interest is an iniquitous and profoundly unsocial device invented by those who have too much money for the 61 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW purpose of levying blackmail upon those who have not enough, we should simply remember that we had read all this years ago in an old book and turn to something rather more worth our time and attention. But when Bernard Shaw writes "Widower's Houses" or "Socialism and Superior Brains," it is quite an- other matter. Here we have original work of the first quality. The ideas are common to us all; but Bernard Shaw's presentation of these ideas thrills us with a conviction that nothing quite like it has ever come within our experience. We realize that we have never before encountered just this blend of wit and sense, this intellectual wrestle and thrust, this fervor and fun, this ar- gumentative and syllabic virtuosity, this apparently impudent disregard of 62 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? style that only the more piquantly em- phasizes a perfectly individual and highly cultivated literary art. Then we begin to wonder what is the inspira- tion of this rapid Jehu ; whence does he get his impulse to drive all these ancient ideas so furiously through the modern world. How are we to explain the pas- sion that fills him and lifts his work to levels higher than the platform he un- dertakes to fill? We are sensible in Bernard Shaw's best work of a horse- power, of a spiritual energy, which is no more the product of his doctrinal prejudice against rent and interest than the energy which drove Wagner to com- pose the Nibelung's Ring was the prod- uct of his desire to justify his revolu- tionary principles or to improve the operatic stage scenery of his genera- tion. We know that the inspiration of 63 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW Bernard Shaw must be something deeper than a dislike of Roebuck Rams- den or a desire to abolish Mr. Sartorius. We know, in fact, that Bernard Shaw, like every man of genius, is the happy agent of a power and a passion which uses his prejudices, memories, and doc- trines in a way he is intellectually pow- erless to resist. The real thrill of his work is con- veyed in some sentences of his preface to "Man and Superman" sentences used by him in quite another connec- tion: This is the true joy of life: the being used for a purpose recognised by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap-heap ; the being a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. 64 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? To apply this passage to the work of Bernard Shaw is again to destroy the popular conception of him as merely the acute raisowieur, the intellectual critic of his kind, with a wallet of revo- lutionary propaganda whereby his rep- utation lives or dies. Not his doctrine and not his deliberate pulpiteering make Bernard Shaw a vital influence in modern literature. The real secret of his influence can be explained in a sentence. Bernard Shaw has passion and he has style. Therefore, like every man of genius, he is driven to say more than he intends, and to say it in an ar- resting voice. It remains to ask what is the prime irritant of this passion in Bernard Shaw. Where are we to look for the catfish which keeps his mental aquarium alive and astir? First, without preliminary, 65 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW let us dart on that preface "Why for Puritans.," which more than any other gives us the key to Bernard Shaw's work and character. Bernard Shaw writes as follows: I have, I think, always been a Puritan in my attitude towards Art. I am as fond of fine music and handsome buildings as Mil- ton was, or Cromwell, or Bunyan; but if I found that they were becoming the instru- ments of a systematic idolatry of sensuous- ness, I would hold it good statesmanship to blow every cathedral in the world to pieces with dynamite, organ and all, without the least heed to the screams of the art critics and cultured voluptuaries. Bernard Shaw's primal inspiration, that is to say, is not esthetic or intellec- tual, but moral. We have to reckon with a moral fury where he most indi- vidually rages. The demon which HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? seizes his pen at the critical moment, and uses him for its own enthusiastic purpose, is the demon which drove Mil- ton to destroy Arminius. When Ber- nard Shaw imagines that he coolly and reasonably desires, simply as a practical socialist and in the name of common sense, to nationalize land and capital, and give to everybody as much money as he requires, he is mistaken. Like every other prophet who has succeeded in moving his generation, Bernard Shaw begins with a passion and a prej- udice, and afterward manufactures and systematizes the evidence. That Ber- nard Shaw is a socialist is an accident of the time. The essential thing is that Bernard Shaw passionately hates all that is complacent, malevolent, callous, inequitable, oppressive, unsocial, stu- pid, irreligious, enervating, narrow, 67 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW misinformed, unimaginative, lazy, en- vious, unclean, disloyal, mercenary, and extravagant. Hating all this with the positive, energetic, and proselytiz- ing hatred of an incorrigible moralist, he has naturally seized on the biggest and most adequate stick in reach with which to beat the nineteenth-century sinner. This stick happened to be the socialist stick. If G. B. S. had lived with Grosseteste in the thirteenth cen- tury, it would have been the no-taxa- tion-without-representation stick. If he had lived with Star Chamber in the sixteenth century, it would have been the Habeas Corpus stick. If he had lived with Rousseau in the eighteenth century, it would have been the social- contract-and-law-of-nature stick. Ber- nard Shaw's socialism stick is simply his weapon the most convenient 68 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? weapon to hand with which to convict a society founded upon capitalism of the greatest possible amount of sin with the least possible opportunity of an overwhelming retort from the sinner. The important thing is not that Ber- nard Shaw preaches socialism, but that he uses the doctrines of socialism as Cromwell's troopers used the psalms of David or as Tolstoy used the gospels of Christ namely, to put the unjust man and his evil ways out of court and countenance. To this end he employs also his craft as a dialectician, his gift as a stylist, his clear exposition and wit, his fun, irony, observation of men, gen- ius for mystification and effective pose all, indeed, that enters into the public idea of G. B. S. These things are merely auxiliary ; any moment they are likely to be caught up in the service of 69 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW his passionate mission a mission of which Bernard Shaw is often himself aware when he is most firmly under its dominion. 70 OUR MODERN TREATMENT OF PROPHETS THIS brings us within view of Ber- nard Shaw's pamphlet on the war. It is natural in a preacher that the most unpardonable sin of the many he is called to denounce should be the sin of complacency; for the sin of com- placency virtually amounts to the sin of refusing to hear what the preacher has to say, or, at all events, of refusing to take it seriously. Bernard Shaw has said continuously for many years that the average man is an unsocial sinner; and the average man, instead of hang- ing his head and mending his ways, has smiled in the face of the prophet. At 71 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW one time the prophet was stoned, and at another time he was poisoned or ostra- cized or pelted in the pillory. But we have lately learned a more effective way of dealing with a prophet: either we turn him into a society preacher and enjoy his denunciation of what our neighbors do, or we pay him hand- somely to amuse us in the theater. We have thus improved immensely on the methods of the scribe and the Pharisee ; for where the scribe and the Pharisee destroyed only the bodies of their prophets, we, with an even more thor- ough complacency, aim also at destroy- ing their souls usually with some suc- cess. But the British public has not suc- ceeded with Bernard Shaw, who con- tinues to be periodically stirred to frenzy by his inability to make every 72 . HAKLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? one realize that he or she is directly re- sponsible for all the crimes and miseries of modern civilization. Moreover, be- cause Bernard Shaw has lived most of his life in England, and has therefore been less seriously taken in England than elsewhere, he has concluded that the English are more complacent than any other people in the world. More and more he has come to regard it as his special mission to humble this com- placency, to convict the Englishman, above all men, of sin, and of the neces- sity for humility and repentance. Therefore, whenever the British public becomes, in the view of Bernard Shaw, unduly exalted, whenever, in fact, it thinks it has a reason to be proud of the British name, Bernard Shaw is at once suspicious and usually incensed. Latterly he has been unable to resist 73 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW any occasion of pricking the inflation, real or imagined, of the British spirit; and latterly, misled by habit, and ex- aggerating the sins he was born to chastise, Bernard Shaw has made some serious mistakes. Thus when, more than two years ago, the whole British nation was struck with grief at the loss of the Titanic, and was reading with a reasonable pride of the splendid behavior of her heroic crew, Bernard Shaw rose in his robe of the prophet and told the public not to ex- aggerate its vicarious gallantry. Then in August, 1914, when Great Britain was straining every nerve to get her army to the Continent in time to save Belgium from the worst of war, Ber- nard Shaw published an article in the British press virtually to the effect that Great Britain was not fighting for the 74 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? sanctity of treaties or the rights of a little nation, but for British homes and British skins. Maliciously he chose for the publication of this assault upon British complacency the most obsti- nately and hatefully complacent British newspaper at his disposal. Finally there came the celebrated pamphlet "Commonsense and the War." This must be read as Bernard Shaw's most audacious effort to punc- ture the self-esteem of the British pub- lic. It has caused much brain-search- ing among those who have simply re- garded George Bernard Shaw as a very discreet and financially successful mountebank; for Bernard Shaw, in writing this pamphlet, has done a clearly unpopular thing. Undoubtedly he has angered and estranged many of his admirers. Some regard the pam- 75 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW phlet as an obscure attempt to discredit the allied cause. Others regard it as an escapade of revolting levity, inex- pedient from a patriotic point of view and essentially wrong in its conclusions. The real point that concerns us here is that the pamphlet is not a new, unex- pected, or isolated performance of Ber- nard Shaw, but a natural sequel of all he has hitherto written. Those who have followed Bernard Shaw to the threshold of his pamphlet on the war have no right at this time to be aston- ished or to refuse him their applause. "Commonsense and the War" is simply a topical and a later edition of "Widow- er's Houses." That is to say, it is a tract in which the case against British complacency is put at a maximum by a fearless and passionate advocate for the prosecution. 76 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? Not Bernard Shaw, but the time, has changed. Here we strike at the root of Bernard Shaw's mistake. Hitherto, he was doing salutary work in his cam- paign against the silent self-assurance of the mean, sensual man. There are as many complacent persons in Great Britain as elsewhere, and so long as Great Britain was at peace with her neighbors, it was beneficial that Ber- nard Shaw should imagine that the British, among whom he lived, were more guilty in this respect than any other extant community, and that he should lose no opportunity for satirical, ironical, comic, or didactic reproof. But when Great Britain and her allies had their back to the wall, when there were opponents to be countered and met, Bernard Shaw's insular mistake that the British as a nation are any more 77 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW complacent than any other nation with a past to be proud of and a future to believe in became a really injurious heresy. It began, indeed, to look rather like giving away his people to the enemy. Of course it was nothing of the kind. "Commonsense and the War," intelligently read, vibrates with patriotism, and it proudly proclaims the essential Tightness of the struggle in which Great Britain is now engaged. But the patriotism of "Commonsense and the War" is less apparent to the audiences which laugh at Bernard Shaw in the theater and outrageously regard him as a privileged fool at the court of King Demos, than the fact that it be- gins by asserting that Sir Edward Grey is a Junker, and goes on to examine very particularly whether we really have the right to condemn our enemies 78 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? without a preliminary inquiry into our own consciences and affairs. Bernard Shaw has made a mistake, but it is a natural, not an ignoble, mis- take. It will have no permanent effect upon those who are sensible, even in Bernard Shaw's most special pleading, of the passionate moral sincerity which gives consistency and fire to all he writes. "Commonsense and the War" was a blunder; but it was also an act of disinterested courage. It was not dic- tated by any wish to stand in front of the picture or to splash in a sea too deep for purposes of exhibition. Bernard Shaw, in writing "Commonsense and the War," is simply the priest who insists upon sacrifice before going into battle, or believe that every good fight should be preceded by confession, absolution, and high mass. 79 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW One word more. Bernard Shaw, the prophet and the puritan, lives in his work. But the passion which gives him uniformity and purpose as a public fig- ure has not impaired his personal humor, his tolerance for all that is sweet and commendable, his broadness of view and eagerly inquisitive outlook upon life, his candor and honesty of mind, his gener- ous welcome of new ideas, his love of beautiful things, his ability to appreciate and sympathize even with those forces which are banded to destroy him. These are the qualities which have obscured from contemporaries the essential sim- plicity of his mind, and have warmly endeared him to the younger generation of authors and critics who have learned from their master how profitably they may supersede him. This younger generation, though it very frequently 80 HARLEQUIN OR PATRIOT? turns the weapons of Bernard Shaw against himself, will never forget or neglect the debt it owes to the helpful, patient, and wise counselor it has been privileged to observe and know; FINIS 81 11S719 IlilHllltt"'' A Ad ft