BOOKS
The Two Shaws
By ANTHONY BURGESS
WI I LN I was in the sixth 'form in the late 1930s, it was considered smart to say that Shaw's prefaces were better than his plays. Young intellectuals are very austere people, and they Prefer a straight draught of didacticism to a tract disguised as entertainment. Shaw, in our view, \‘tis a teacher, not a playwright, and as a teacher he seemed, even as an old man, revolutionary. 1 he revolutionary spirit had, to us young men, little to do with time: it was a sharp rational illile that appeared at intervals throughout his- tory to cut into cant. Ecrasez l'infdine. We had already met Shaw as Voltaire. The only differ- ences were the beard and the language, but, after the bombast of Hugo, Candide was as easy to read as The Black Girl in Search of God. Indeed, It was very nearly the same book. And, for that Platter, as far as I can remember, Shaw told us that he was really Voltaire.
When schoolboys are fighting their way out of the irrationalities of childhood and pubescence, 19 order life on a basis of reason seems the most desirable thing in the world. Also, in the heady li,ixth-form climate of privilege—hands in pockets, c.igarettes between lessons—it seems capable of fulfilment. It takes a long time to realise that the .Igional is only a small segment of the human lamplex, that the spirit of reason is difficult to llIvoke, and that there are as many dangers in the rational as in the irrational. God help us all k everything we did had to be justified syllogisti- '411Y. But the adolescent, though given to iBgression and lust, is emotionally cold, and ;Ptiocination can be a substitute for feeling. In I1Y day, adolescents homed to Shaw as to an he liberal adult.. In fact, of course, QC m as only an adolescent like themselves, our- 'elves. Shaw had to wait nearly forty years to rake the sixth form, but when he got' there he stayed there.
This is not a disparagement; it is an expression of envy that Shaw should be able to maintain all
his life the virtues of adolescence with so few of its vices. Moreover, he himself could hardly lake this predication as a sneer, since he yearned for the world's adulthood and, in Back to Plethuselah, wrote a long allegory of growing up. But to be an adolescent was imposed upon him ;aY history. The great science masters of the nine- 'enth century made decent religious boys doubt and even lose their faith. Something had to be y 1113: erected in the place of religion, and this turned mtv °litd to be a brand of liberalism which, inevitably, something of the aspirational flavour of religion about it. Wells dreamed adolescent utopias, but grew disillusioned and, at the end, fried to the world: 'You damned fools!' Shaw Over grew disillusioned; he merely wondered at the stick-in-the-mud torpor of 'our supposedly progressive civilisation.' He thinks that new 'elders of his Prefaces 'will conclude that I am 4 daring young innovator of eighteen instead of what I am in fact: a sage of seventy-eight who, having long ago given up his contemporaries as hopeless, looks to future generations, brought up quite differently, to make a better job of life than 'Jur present respectables and right honourables
c,
THI: COMPLETE PLAYS 01' BERNARD SHAW. THE MPLETI: PREFACES OF BERNARD SHAW. (Paul "mlYn, 35s. each.)
and reverends can.' Wells despaired of horn() sapiens; Shaw merely of his own time.
The tone of that introduction to the collected Prefaces is the tone of Samuel Butler, Shaw's master. Why many of us approach the Prefaces dubiously in adulthood is because Shaw shows evidence of having learnt from too many masters. Express Darwinianism or Bergsonianism or Sweetism or Webbism in that prose which Pitman taught to flow, a prose variously reminis- cent (Defoe, Tom Paine, the King James Bible, the garrulous tinker who has belonged to a Corresponding Society), and you seem to get the quintessence of a new thing called Shavianism. But Shavianism is not a philosophy; it is a bundle of disparate manifestoes unified by a personality. Shavianisms are things said by an unforgettable voice, associated with the look of a 'milk-fed satyr' (Eric Linklater's phrase) and a persona recognisable chiefly by idiosyncrasies like left- foot and right-foot socks, vegetarianism, 'rational' clothes, and that postcard-sending habit which, this summer, we shall all be taking up. If you want an intellectual unifier you will find it only in the dim word `rationalism,' which stands for a skeleton. Finally the personality itself dis- appears. Shaw was not egotistic, but he was egoistic. The comic assertion of self often looks like an attempt to convince himself that he exists, that `G.B.S.' is not just the string that ties up a parcel, but a genuine identity.
The last play in the collected volume is a moderately amusing libretto for puppets called Shakes and Shay. Shay browbeats Shakes, crying his own superiority as a playwright. This is a joke that went on all Shaw's life, and he perhaps so wearisomely cracked it because he recognised that he was too like Shakespeare for his own comfort. Not, of course, like in the poetic and tragic gifts, but like enough in a dramaturgical instinct so powerful that it swamped the dramaturgist and threatened to rob him of his identity. Shakespeare has no personality, only a mask; Shaw, anxious to be the known, feared and respected teacher, had to construct an ani- mated statue, finger-pointing, beard-wagging, called GBS. He was forced to be both Pygmalion and Galatea. But none of this could prevent his being a great dramatist, perhaps second only to Shakespeare. As in our sixth-form days, we are still compelled to choose between the plays and the prefaces. It is the plays, of course, that win.
And yet, clearly, both are constructed by the same man, if we can talk of construction with a playwright so willing to let the vis dramatica exert its plastic power, unchecked by formal exigencies. The typical Shaw hero is a great be- liever in reason, and Shaw will impose reason where—as with his historical characters, for in- stance—we are least disposed to find reason reasonable. His Caesar and Charles II are emi- nently cool and tolerant, philosopher kings, and we feel that Shaw would be compelled to present, say, Tamburlaine as fundamentally very decent and open to any public-spirited St. Pancras argument. Yet, as Ophelia says, 'we know what we are but know not what we may be,' and what makes Shaw great is the sudden thrust of the prophetic or a sense of the numinous. Shaw will not admit this in himself, only in his characters. If there is a shaping force beyond our knowledge or volition, this is probably the élan vital, which knows very well what it is doing and is perhaps informed by the best Fabian principles. But the life force doesn't cause Caesar's shaft of rage at a needless death and his brief vision of the Christ, nor does it speak to Saint Joan in bells or heavenly voices. Shaw has to rationalise his interest in Joan by calling her the first Protestant, a manifestation of the life force in history, but, when he is dramatising and not rationalising, he accepts the religious temperament and is fascin- ated by it. The smooth and amusing dialectic of In Good King Charles's Golden Days is broken tellingly, almost frighteningly, by George Fox's fanatical madness at the noise of the church bells. And when Lilith speaks at the end of Back to Methuselah, we hear the rhythms and tones of Biblical prophecy and experience the authentic shudder of those who know they are in the presence of a mystery.
I am not trying to make out that Shaw was a crypto-Christian, though one has the impression that he is a crypto-Anglican like Samuel Butler. But the artist dealing with imponderables fights against the WEA lecturer reasoning from self- evident premises. Yet ultimately both playwright and preface-maker meet in a tradition of dissent whose prose is inspired by the Bible. Once we have either of these two fat volumes on our knees we can almost hear Shaw encouraging us to go on with our self-education and adding that, at thirty-five shillings each, they are marvellous
value. They sit there, a pair of interchangeable cats, immovable but not asleep. The great craft of readability holds them there, and, with the plays, one is tempted to think that readability may last longer than actability. We don't need actors when we have such satisfying word-por- traits, nor a decor when the settings are so firmly described (in time as well as space). Shaw the failed novelist writes fine novels when he pretends to be writing plays, and Pygmalion—his most popular—gets fed up with being a play and ends up as a novel. Shaw was closer to Ben Jonson than to Shakespeare in liking to publish 'works,' not just write scripts for actors. Prefaces helped to fill out a published play to book-size, as well as, by a kind of con-trick, to seem to transfer a mere entertainment to a zone of puritanical respectability. An age more permissive than his own is happy to take the plays neat. They, in this new, fine, strong, cheap edition, can stand on a permanent lectern; the Prefaces will serve as a door-stopper.
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