BOOKS
• THE JESTER WITH A PURPOSE.*
Hitherto the prefaces, if not the best part, have been as good as any part of the fare Mr. Shaw sets before us when he publishes a volume of plays. We cannot say that of the present volume. Both in the preface to The Doctor's Dilemma and in the preface to Getting Married he pushes a good deal too far the methods of the jester who wants to make us think. In each case the note is forced, the paradox overdone, and the irony hard and laboured. The result is vulgarity, bad taste, and so failure. No doubt Mr. Shaw will tell us that there is and can be no failure, because he fully intended to be what we call vulgar and in bad taste. He will therefore declare that he has triumphantly countered our blow. Never- theless he has pushed his jester's licence too far and over- jibed—passed the limits of his own particular method. In Elizabethan days the jester was very unpleasantly dealt with for such excesses. We are glad that such treatment is wholly out of date. We must, however, take leave to tell Mr. Shaw that on both the subjects—the behaviour of the medical profession and the question of marriage—be is, as Cromwell said to the Dean of Ely, "very offensive and unedifying." We are not complaining of his "clowning," but only of his "clowning" ineffectively and in a way that is neither fair nor pleasant. Much as we regret it, we cannot say with Sir Andrew " Thou wast in very gracious fooling last night, when thou spokest of Pigrogromitus, of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus."
Mr. Shaw's method is, as we have said, the method of that very useful person, the jester with a purpose, the jester who wants to make you think, the jester who aims at playing the part of
*The Doctor's Dilemma; Getting Married ; The Mewing Up of Blanco Pawl. By Bernard Shaw. London: Constable and Co. Vs.) the Socratic gadfly, who stings the community into taking itself seriously and considering its immortal soul. His chief artifice is to single out and isolate some admitted folly and inconveni- encein an institution which he dislikes, and next, by the use of devices which the dialectician has employed ever since primitive man sat in the month of his cave and dissected his neighbours and showed up their " goatish dispositions," to throw the limelight of his humour and irony straight in our eyes. It is very dazzling, but it does not make for cool reasoning. Everyone remembers the manner in which the Clown in Twelfth Night proved to the Lady Olivia that she was a fool to grieve for her brother's death. That, with a little more subtlety and a little more sophistry, is Mr. Shaw's way, and a very successful one it sometimes is. Even though it may involve a certain amount of exaggeration and injustice and the ignoring of true proportion and true per- spective, it does very often make men think who could not be made to think by any other method. Unfortunately, it is a method which is apt to become stiff and rigid. Mr. Shaw delights to think himself—though, of course, he would not admit it—very unconventional, whereas he is in reality the most conventional of writers. One wants very little know- ledge of his works to realise exactly how, in any given case, he will twist his paradox, set the pyramid on its apex, and generally turn things inside out and bottom upwards. If the truth be told, he often attacks us with an equivalent of the circus clown's strident " How are we to-morrow P" We shall not deal with the preface on Doctors, except to say that, though it contains some brilliant obiter dicta, its general tone is marked by a want of reality. It would not be fair to Mr. Shaw to accuse him of being unjust and insulting and so forth to a noble profession, for it is part of the jester's licence to make game of anybody and everybody. When once a man has acquired the jester's privilege, and Mr. Shaw has, we admit, distinctly acquired it, any person or profession which complains of rudeness on his part puts himself or itself out of court. The jester's metier—nay, his duty—is to be rude to us all and to say the most offensive things he can think of, and the things which are most likely to wound, in order to keep us up to the mark and sting us into doing better. It was never thought good form in a king to complain of his jester's gibes, and the British public has no right to be more sensitive than a sovereign. We can never complain of the blow because it is too hard, but only if it is done offensively and in bad taste, and this, of course, is a question not of argument but of opinion. We say, however, that Mr. Shaw, in the preface on Doctors, has passed the bounds of good taste which exist even for jesters. The verdict we leave in the hands of Mr. Shaw's readers.
In the preface to Getting Married Mr. Shaw is also guilty of passing the jester's limits ; but here our complaint is chiefly that he forgets his jesting in dreary paradox and solemn sophistry. His main object is to attack the existing institution of marriage and to substitute for it divorce at will and without cause assigned. Side by side with his free divorce we are to have a wonderful new institution which he designates the "right to motherhood." In order to support this right and to obtain equality in marriage you must first, he tells no, give women economic independence. By this Mr. Shaw no doubt means what other Socialist writers have termed the" endowment of motherhood." Unquestionably, one of the greatest of social difficulties is the economic depen- dence of women, and undoubtedly we want to endow mother- hood. Bat apparently it does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Shaw that Society has already organised a most effective form of the endowment of motherhood in the institution of marriage. Consider-for a moment what marriage means for the woman. The law which embodies the instinctive sense of the community will not give its sanction to the procreation of chil- dren and the establishment of a family unless the man under- takes to provide for the woman throughout her life and also to make provision for his and her children. No doubt the mar- riage bond is frequently broken, and no doubt it might be better enforced in certain respects ; but, in spite of these imperfec- tion% marriage remains the most potent instrument .for the endowment of motherhood that can be imagined. To suggest that it would be better for women to substitute for such an endowment as this a paltry five or ten shillings a week from the State is utterly absurd.
Let us look at the matter in another way. Does Mr. Shaw way believe that the father counts for nothing in the family
and in the bringing-up of children P One would certainly believe so from his preface. Women who object to marriage but who want to have children are, we are told, to be allowed by the State to have them and are to be held in honour• for establishing such fatherless families. Apparently Mr. Shaw considers the woman alone will be able to do with success the work that in the normal family is done jointly by the father and the mother. Again, are these fatherless families, the families of women who are supposed to love children but hate husbands, to be restricted to one child P If not—and they certainly cannot be, for we may be sure that the maternal instinct will grow by what it feeds on—is the father to be always the same, or is be to be different ? But if he is different, how will the institution of the mixed fatherless family differ from that promiscuity which we understand Mr. Shaw to repudiate ? The thing is fantastic nonsense. It has been tried, of course, under various names in various times, and in various places throughout the recorded history of mankind, but never with success. Christian marriage, however impel.- feet, is infinitely the best method of protecting women and of securing the continuance of the family which has ever been devised.
It would not be fair to argue with Mr. Shaw on religious grounds, but it must not be supposed because we argue for marriage on the utilitarian basis that we do not feel and recognise its higher claim as a Divine institution. In dealing with his paradoxes, however, we are quite content to meet bins on his own terms.
The truth is Mr. Shaw has got a wholly distorted idea of marriage. He seems to think that the normal marriage is one of jarring nerves and unkindly nagging, varied by actual physical violence and the communication of loathsome diseases. The actual establishment of the tie is "a general mist of error," and its continuance "a hideous storm of terror." Mr. Shaw will, of course, tell us that he has never said so. Of course, he is much too clever a dialectician to do that, but in such cases one must judge by the general impression created, and that is the general impression made by his book upon our mind. Before we leave the subject, let us say we are not alarmed by Mr. Shaw's attack upon marriage. Marriage will remain the best possible device for the endowment of motherhood and the protection of women. Just as the Atlantic beat Mrs. Partington, so marriage will beat Mr. Shaw.
Mr. Shaw's book contains the text of his striking little melodrama The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet. We are bound to say that the fact that this play was proscribed by the Censor and Getting Married was allowed to be performed affords strong proof of the folly—nay, we would rather say the idiocy—of our present system of censoring plays. We could quite understand a Censor saying that there were things so offensive in the play of Getting Married that it might very easily lead to protests which would end in a breach of the peace. At any rate, the play is meant to undermine what Mr. Shaw would. call our worn-out ideas of sexual morality, and so is, in our opinion, highly objectionable. The Spewing Up of Blanco Posnet is, on the other band, an exceedingly moving story in dramatic form of the kind to which Bret Harte accustomed us. in the " Outcasts of Poker Flat." The hardened villain is rather melodramatically and sentimentally turned into a noble creature by the touch of a little child and the pleading of a woman. The hardened and perjured prostitute suffers a similar conversion. Just as in Bret Harte's books, the characters use strong language, but in the plot itself there is nothing but what is sound, wholesome, and of good report- Posnet's conception of the two games, " the rotten game " and " the other one," is not only fine in itself, but put, as Mr. Shaw• knows how to put it, with real feeling. " Todgers can do it when it likes," and he has certainly done it here. The lynchers are very well drawn, and the whole play might with great advantage be acted in the South and South-Western States of America, or wherever lynching is prevalent. It holds up the mirror to a blood-lusting crowd with admirable force and lucidity.
We cannot leave Mr. Shaw's volume without entering ap caveat against the notion that we are condemning Mr. Shaw's
book on grounds similar to those which have induced us to condemn certain notorious examples of poisonous literature. Though we dislike many of Mr. Shaw's views profoundly, we realise that, however perverted his views in the abstracts he Is in the concrete example usually on the right side. He has a :wonderful knack of discovering something of a right line in ',obliquity. He is sincere even when most mistaken. Again, we do not want to appear to under-value the literary quality Of Mr. Shaw's plays. His style, whether in the plays or -prefaces, is a model of vividness and clarity. It exactly suits -his purposes, and could hardly be improved. The humour, again, is often admirable and full of a certain irrelevant malice which is irresistible. His moralizing is another matter., We admire Mr. Shaw for wanting to preach, but it is im- possible for us to pretend that his actual sermons are either wise or witty.
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