Bernard Shaw at Eighty

I

IT has usually been said of Bernard Shaw that he was primarily not an artist but a promulgator of certain ideas. The future will probably reverse this opinion. The truth is, I believe, that he is a considerable artist, but that his ideas — his social philosophy proper — have always been uncertain and confused.

Let us look back over his long career.

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, July 26, 1856, the son of shabbygenteel parents who had connections with the Irish nobility. The elder Shaw became an alcoholic, and the boy had to go to work as a clerk at the age of fifteen. Mrs. Shaw finally left her husband and went to London, where she made a living by teaching music. Her son came to live with her when he was twenty and wrote novels which he was unable to sell and picked up through journalism such money as he could. He remained with his mother till he was forty-two.

In the fall of 1882 he happened to attend a lecture on land nationalization delivered by Henry George in London. The result was a revelation: ‘It flashed on me,’ he writes, ‘that “the conflict, between religion and science” . . . the overthrow of the Bible, the higher education of women, Mill on Liberty and all the rest of the storm that raged around Darwin, Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer and the rest, on which I had brought myself up intellectually, was a mere middle-class business. . . . The importance of the economic basis dawned on me.’ He read George’s Progress and Poverty — then someone told him to read Das Kapital. ‘Karl Marx,’ he once said, ‘made a man of me.’

The result of the depression of the eighties was a revival of socialist agitation. Bernard Shaw became a socialist and spoke in halls, on street corners, in Hyde Park. The ‘ insurrectionism ’ of the period reached a climax in the ‘Bloody Sunday’ of November 1887, when the socialists, at the head of a working-class demonstration, invaded Trafalgar Square and were routed by the police. After this, business revived and took up the slack of unemployment, and the agitation quieted down.

In the meantime, Shaw had attached himself to the socialist statistician, Sidney Webb, and with others they had founded the Fabian Society, which had ‘agreed to give up the delightful ease of revolutionary heroics and take to the hard work of practical reform on ordinary parliamentary lines.’ Webb was a civil servant with a post in the colonial office and later a member of the London County Council; Shaw became a vestryman, then a borough councilor. The Fabians continued to treat Marx with respect, but the polite and reasonable criticism to which they subjected him was designed to discredit some of his main assumptions. Marx had asserted that the value of commodities was derived from the labor which had gone to produce them; and the Fabians, by elaborating a counter-theory which made value depend on demand, shifted the emphasis from the working class to the ‘consumer.’ They also repudiated the class war, showed that it would never occur. Socialist nationalization was to be accomplished by a corps of experts who should ‘permeate’ government and business, quietly invading Whitehall and setting up state departments which, unassisted by the action of the masses, should put socialist ideas into effect.

This development of Marxism in England was natural to the place and time. A period of prosperity during the seventies had deflated the Chartist agitation (I am indebted to Mr. Mark Starr for a Marxist analysis of Fabian Marxism); and it was not until the eighties, when British commercial domination was being challenged by the United States and Germany, that the dangers of the capitalist system began to become generally plain. But now attention was principally directed upon the evils of competition. The development of large-scale industry was eliminating competition and making municipal ownership seem desirable, not only to the lower layers of the middle class, but even to private enterprise itself, which benefited from good housing and cheap tram lines. The professional middle class were in a position to see the value of nationalization, and the working class had not yet discovered that for them there was not very much difference between being exploited by a private employer and being exploited by a government which was controlled by the propertied classes. The Fabians looked no further than their reforms.

In Bernard Shaw’s case, this compromise Marxism played in with the elements of his character and influenced its subsequent development. Coming to London, as he has recently told us, with a conviction of his own superiority and a snobbish family tradition, but with no money and no social experience, Shaw was himself one of the dispossessed, and the socialist criticism of the class system based on property strongly recommended itself to him. Yet at the same time that he felt a moral necessity to work for a future society consistent with his sense of justice, he felt, also, a social necessity to vindicate his rightful position in the society in which he lived. He has told us that his father’s bad habits had caused his family to be dropped socially in Dublin, and that when he first came to London he was so shy that he would not accept dinner invitations and would ‘sometimes walk up and down the Embankment for twenty minutes or more before venturing to knock at the door’ of a house to which he had been asked. He goes on to say, ‘The house and its artistic atmosphere were most congenial to me; and I liked all the Lawsons; but I had not mastered the art of society at that time and could not bear making an inartistic exhibition of myself; so I soon ceased to plague them.’ There has always been thus in Shaw a certain amount of social snobbery mixed up with his intellectual snobbery.

The confusion produced in his thought by these two conflicting tendencies is curiously illustrated in a passage from his autobiographical preface to the collected edition of his works: ‘Finding one’s place may be made very puzzling,’ he writes, ‘by the fact that there is no place in ordinary society for extraordinary individuals. For the worldly wiseman, with common ambitions, the matter is simple enough: money, title, precedence, a seat in parliament, a portfolio in the cabinet, will mean success both to him and to his circle. But what about people like Saint Francis and Saint Clare? Of what use to them are the means to live the life of the country house and the West End mansion? They have literally no business in them, and must necessarily cut an unhappy and ridiculous figure there. They have to make a society of Franciscans and Poor Clares for themselves before they can work or live socially. It is true that those who are called saints are not saintly all the time and in everything. In eating and drinking, lodging and sleeping, chatting and playing: in short, in everything but working out their destiny as saints, what is good enough for a ploughman is good enough for a poet, a philosopher, a saint or a higher mathematician. But Hodge’s work is not good enough for Newton, nor Falstaff’s conversation holy enough for Shelley. Christ adapted himself so amicably to the fashionable life of his time in his leisure that he was reproached for being a gluttonous man and a winebibber, and for frequenting frivolous and worthless sets. But he did not work where he feasted, nor flatter the Pharisees, nor ask the Romans to buy him with a sinecure. He knew when he was being entertained, well treated, lionized: not an unpleasant adventure for once in a way; and he did not quarrel with the people who were so nice to him. Besides, to sample society is part of a prophet’s business: he must sample the governing class above all, because his inborn knowledge of human nature will not explain the anomalies produced in it by Capitalism and Sacerdotalism. But he can never feel at home in it.’

But which is true: that the Saint Francis and the Saint Clare can’t ‘ live socially ’ till they have ‘made a society of Franciscans and Poor Clares,’ or that ‘in eating and drinking, lodging and sleeping, chatting and playing . . . what is good enough for a ploughman is good enough for a saint’? And as for Shaw’s description of Christ, it evokes an incongruous picture: what one sees is the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount very much pleased with himself on the beach at the Riviera or playing Santa Claus at Lady Astor’s Christmas party.

And other influences, from his early education, came to deflect the straight line of Shaw’s socialism.

The escapades of the romantic hero, from Childe Harold through Don César de Bazan, with his ‘ Tant pis! C’est moi,’ to Siegfried, had been a protest against the meanness and dullness of the commercial bourgeois world; but this revolt was itself merely a further development of the tradition of individual self-assertion which, deriving from the Protestant conscience, had produced the anarchic individualism itself of the competitive commercial system. The romantic, like the old-fashioned capitalist, proclaimed the power of the personal will in defiance of society and God.

William Archer tells us that the first time he ever saw Shaw the latter was sitting in the British Museum studying alternately the French translation of Das Kapital and the score of Tristan und Isolde. When Shaw first came before the public, he fell instinctively into dramatizing himself as a semi-romantic character — and this in spite of the fact that he was managing to figure at the same time as the arch-enemy and blasphemer of romanticism. The impulse to satirize romanticism implies, as in the case of Flaubert, a strong predisposition toward it; and the exploded romantic, Captain Brassbound, is offset by the Devil’s Disciple.

It is true that Bernard Shaw was attempting to laugh and shame people out of preoccupation with their petty personal emotions — especially with romantic love — and to interest them in the larger concerns of society. Here is the fine and well-known passage from Man and Superman, in which he defends what he calls the ‘artist-philosophers’ against the ‘mere artists’: ‘This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized 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.’ Yet this is romanticism par excellence: the ego has now, to be sure, identified itself with a force of Nature, but this simply makes the ego seem godlike. There is nothing to guarantee that it will respect either the feelings or the interests of others. The ideal artistphilosopher of Bernard Shaw has always a strong social conscience, and his heroes are likely to be philosopher-statesmen or social prophets or saviors of society; but there is nothing to guarantee that they shall be, in the socialist sense, genuine popular leaders, deriving their power from, as well as guiding, the dispossessed: they may be simply despot-heroes — as Shaw’s Julius Cæsar actually is — acting in the right of their own superiority and giving people what they know to be good for them.

And finally, of course, Bernard Shaw was not only a political prophet struggling for socialist ideas, but an artist trying to realize himself through art. There was a poet in Shaw, still partly suppressed, or at any rate terribly overtaxed, by the round of political meetings, the functions of vestryman and borough councilor, and the years of theatregoing and weekly article writing about the theatre, which he had come to judge almost exclusively in terms of the sort of thing that he wanted to do himself. His own plays he had been writing in notebooks while traveling on the tops of buses between one engagement and another. Now in 1898, when he was fortytwo, he had what seems to have been a general collapse as the result of a bad fall and a serious injury to his foot. When he recovered, he married an Irish lady, well-to-do but belonging, like Shaw, to the general ‘advanced’ movement, who gave him for apparently the first time in his life a comfortable place to live and took the most excellent care of him. Thereafter, he was able to give up the journalism on which he had depended for a living and to devote all his best energies to his plays. He remained a public man, but he spoke no more at dockers’ strikes.

By 1905 he was writing Major Barbara, in which the type of Christian sainthood, an aristocratic Salvation Army worker, is confronted with a self-made munitions manufacturer, the type of successful capitalism, and ending the play with an alliance between them. In his preface, he made out a ringing case for the man who recognizes poverty as the worst of all the evils and consequently the worst of all the sins, and who saves himself from it at any cost. Major Barbara contains one of the best expositions of the capitalist point of view ever written. Bernard Shaw, like his hero, Andrew Undershaft, had come by that time to know what it was to make one’s way in capitalist society and to occupy a position of power, He had himself become the type of the critic, who, by scolding the bourgeoisie, makes good with it and becomes one of its idols. He was gradually, for all the scandal of his beginnings, turning into one of the solidest and most sensible members of the British propertied classes; and he was to end as an esteemed public figure and a brilliant social success in a country where an aristocratic governing class was still able to invest public and social life with a certain amount of distinction and glamour.

II

The real Shaw has thus never been the single-minded crusader that people at one time used to think him. Except for a limited period during the eighties and early nineties — when he wrote his only straight socialist plays, Widowers’ Houses and Mrs. Warren’s Profession — he has never really been a practising socialist. And as he has grown older and as the world has been shaken out of the pattern to which he had adapted his early attitudes, the inadequacy of those attitudes has been exposed.

Going through the new collected edition of Shaw, in which he includes a good deal of his journalism, one is struck by the fact that, though his writing on musical and theatrical and literary subjects remains remarkably fresh, the pieces on public affairs and on social questions in general prove a great deal less satisfactory than one has remembered their seeming when they were written. There are passages of beautiful exposition and passages of wonderful eloquence — some of which, such as the peroration to The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, will probably always stand among the classics of socialist literature. But the political writing of Shaw does not drive you into taking up a position as the greatest socialist writing does: indeed before he has finished — and he is likely to go on talking too long — he has often seemed to compromise the points which you had imagined he was trying to make and has produced, with much earnestness and emphasis, an impression ultimately blurred by rhetoric. And he is not able to mobilize against capitalism the kind of intense and unscrupulous resentment which Voltaire trained on the Church. With Voltaire, it is the crusader that counts; with Shaw, it is the dramatic poet.

The volume which covers the war time exposes Bernard Shaw’s contradictions in a particularly striking manner. Though he was perfectly familiar with the Marxist theory of capitalist expansion and aggression, and had expounded it on many occasions, he had always been liable to fits of admiration for the exploits of the British Empire. Irishman though he was, he had never been an Irish patriot; and, critical though he was of the English, he had in John Bull’s Other Island — which was written for but declined by the Abbey Theatre — backed them against the Irish on account of what he regarded as their superior enterprise and practicality. And though he denounced the Denshawai massacre in Egypt, he supported the British against the Boers at the time of the South African War, because the Boers represented for him a backward civilization and the British a progressive one.

When the civilizing forces of the various nations had finally collided in 1914, it was Lenin, the revolutionary exile, not Shaw, the successful British citizen, who wrote Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism.

What Bernard Shaw did write was Common Sense about the War, which, although it raised a terrible outcry in the fall of 1914 on the part of certain elements of the British public who thought that Shaw ought to be put in the Tower, seems to-day rather a double-facing document. Shaw, to be sure, makes a certain amount of effort still to keep before the minds of his readers the socialist interpretation of the war. ‘Will you,’ he writes, ‘now at last believe, O stupid British, German and French patriots, what the Socialists have been telling you for so many years: that your Union Jacks and tricolors and Imperial Eagles (“where the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered”) are only toys to keep you amused, and that there are only two real flags in the world henceforth: the red flag of Democratic Socialism and the black flag of Capitalism, the flag of God and the flag of Mammon ? What earthly or heavenly good is done when Tom Fool shoots Hans Narr? The plain fact is that if we leave our capital to be dealt with according to the selfishness of the private man he will send it where wages are low and workers enslaved and docile: that is, as many thousand miles as possible from the Trade Unions and Trade Union rates and parliamentary Labor parties of civilization; and Germany, at his sordid behest, will plunge the world into war for the sake of disgracing herself with a few rubber plantations, poetically described by her orators and journalists as “a place in the sun.” When you do what the Socialists tell you by keeping your capital jealously under national control and reserving your shrapnel for the wasters who not only shirk their share of the industrial service of their country, but intend that their children and children’s children shall be idle wasters like themselves, you will find that not a farthing of our capital will go abroad as long as there is a British slum to be cleared and rebuilt or a hungry, ragged and ignorant British child to be fed, clothed and educated.’

This sounds spirited enough by itself, yet the burden of Common Sense about the War is that the war must be supported and vigorously prosecuted. Shaw afterwards visited and wrote about the front at the invitation of Sir Douglas Haig and even did some work for the propaganda department of the government. In his discussion of compulsory military service in Common Sense about the War, he defends his position as follows: ‘In my own case, the question of conscientious objection did not arise: I was past military age. I did not counsel others to object, and should not have objected myself if I had been liable to serve: for intensely as I loathed the War, and free as I was from any illusion as to its character, and from the patriotic urge (patriotism in my native country taking the form of an implacable hostility to England), I knew that when war is once let loose, and it becomes a question of kill or be killed, there is no stopping to argue about it: one must just stand by one’s neighbors and take a hand with the rest. If England had adopted me, as some of my critics alleged in their attempts to convict me of gross ingratitude, I could have pleaded that she must take the consequences without claiming any return; but as I had practically adopted England by thrusting myself and my opinions on her in the face of every possible rebuff, it was for me to take the consequences, which certainly included an obligation to help my reluctant ward in her extremity as far as my means allowed.’

Frank Harris, in his book about Shaw, reproached him for supporting the war; and Shaw retorted in a postscript that Harris ‘could not stop to ask himself the first question ... of the intellectually honest judicious critic, “What else could I have done had it been my own case?”’ Yet surely there were other courses open to a man of Shaw’s opinions. He could have expressed his disapproval and shut up, as John Morley and others did. But it is impossible for Shaw to shut up, and he went on talking incessantly through the whole four years of slaughter. Much of what he had to say was intelligent, and it required some courage to say it. Compared with most of the British writers, he seemed at the time remarkably cool and sagacious. The atmosphere was feverish with panic and stupefying with the fumes of propaganda, and Shaw did do something to clear the air for a realistic discussion of the origins and aims of the war. But when we reread what he wrote to-day, he looks a little foolish. The old socialist has gone down into the mêlée and sacrificed something of his moral dignity: we hear him remonstrating, scolding, exhorting, making fun of the politicians and at the same time lending a hand to the government, pleading for the conscientious objectors and at the same time ‘joy-riding at the front ’ — and doing everything with equal cocksureness.

Before the Peace Conference, he had great hopes of Wilson. Before the Washington Disarmament Conference, he was cynical. Later, he spoke a kind word for the League of Nations. And in the meantime the Russian Revolution had set him off on a different tack. He would alternately lecture Lenin and Trotsky on the foolishness of what they were trying to do and applaud them for succeeding in doing it: he was alternately a middleclass socialist using Fabianism against the Marxists and a Marxist using Lenin and Trotsky against the British governing class. In his political utterances since the war, it is not too much to say that Bernard Shaw has made a blatant jackass of himself. In the autumn of 1927, he was staying in Italy on the Lago Maggiore and throwing bouquets at Mussolini. It was his old admiration for the romantic hero, his old glorification — which was as likely to be set off by an imperialist as a Marxist theme — of the great statesman who makes people stand around. Mussolini had, according to Shaw, ‘ achieved a dictatorship in a great modern state without a single advantage, social, official, or academic, to assist him, after marching to Rome with a force of Black Shirts which a single disciplined regiment backed by a competent government could have routed at any moment. . . . After the war the government of Italy’ had been ‘ so feeble that silly Syndicalists were seizing factories, and fanatical devotees of that curious attempt at a new Catholic church called the Third International were preaching a coup d’état and a Crusade in all directions, and imagining that this sort of thing was Socialism and Communism. Mussolini, without any of Napoleon’s prestige, has done for Italy what Napoleon did for France, except that for the Due d’Enghien you must read Matteotti.’

When Gaetano Salvemini reminded Shaw that, so far from being ‘without a single advantage,’ Mussolini had had behind him ‘the money of the banks, the big industrialists and the landowners,’ and that his Black Shirts had been ‘equipped with rifles, bombs, machineguns, and motor-lorries by the military authorities, and assured of impunity by the police and the magistracy, while their adversaries were disarmed and severely punished if they attempted resistance,’ Shaw’s rebuttal was almost unbelievable: Why, he demanded, had Mussolini been able to command the support of the army officers and capitalists ‘instead of Signors Salvemini, Giolitti, Turati, Matteotti, and their friends, in spite of the fact that he was farther to the Left in his political opinions than any of them? The answer, as it seems to me, is that he combined with extreme opinions the knowledge that the first duty of any Government, no matter what its opinions are, is to carry on, and make its citizens carry on, liberty or no liberty, democracy or no democracy, socialism or no socialism, capitalism or no capitalism. Until Salvemini and his friends convince Italy that they understand this necessity as well as Mussolini does they will never shake his hold on the situation. To rail at him as Shelley railed at Castlereagh and Eldon, Marx at Napoleon III and Thiers, Kautsky at Lenin, is to play the amusing but inglorious part of Thersites.'

Now a dramatist in his capacity of dramatist may make out a very interesting case for a Castlereagh or a Napoleon III; but why should Shaw in his capacity as a political figure take the part of such politicians against their philosophical opponents? He is himself of the company of Shelley and Marx — the company of the poets and prophets; and railing at the Castlereaghs and the Napoleons — of which Shaw himself has done plenty on occasion — is by no means the least valuable of their functions. The analogy between these other cases and Kautsky complaining against Lenin is certainly a silly and dishonest one.

That spring he had finished a long treatise — The Intelligent Woman’s Guide — in which he had made a more comprehensive effort than he had ever done in his socialist days in the eighties to analyze capitalist society and to argue the case for socialism. Perhaps the book should have been written in the eighties. Ramsay MacDonald and Sidney Webb had come to power with the Labor Government in 1924, and MacDonald had not yet definitely sold out; and the whole story is repeated in general in the familiar Fabian terms — to which Shaw, without Fabian sanction, had added equality of income as a prime tenet of his socialist system. Through many pages of swift exposition, perhaps Shaw’s most precise and limpid writing, which, together with the magnificent close, give the book an enduring value, he makes his way to conclusions, confusing in proportion as the reasoning becomes more and more fine-spun, which do not seem to land us in any very realistic relation to the England of after the war. ‘A series of properly prepared nationalizations may not only be understood and voted for by people who would be quite shocked if they were called Socialists, but would fit in perfectly with the habits of the masses who take their bread as it comes and never think about anything of a public nature.’ And in the meantime the road to socialism remains for a good part of the way — through ‘nationalizations, expropriative taxation, and all the constructive political machinery’ — identical with the road to state capitalism. So that Lenin, says Shaw, had been quite in the wrong when he had denounced the methods of the Fabians as state capitalism.

But Lenin had scented the psychological pitfalls in the approach of the Fabians toward socialism — pitfalls which no amount of lucid explanation were able to get them over and which Shaw continued to stumble into himself. From the moment that you propose to benefit people from the point of view of imposing upon them what is best for them rather than of showing them the way to what they ought to have and awaiting the moment when they will know that they must have it, what is to prevent your slipping — the post-Lenin period in Russia has proved it as much as the Ramsay MacDonald Labor Government — into imposing upon the people something which will benefit you yourself?

In 1931 Shaw visited Soviet Russia in company with the Tory Lady Astor and with the liberal Marquess of Lothian, had an audience with Stalin, at which, as he said, they treated Stalin like ‘a friendly emperor,’ and, on his return, began loudly endorsing Russia and especially scolding the United States for not following the Soviet example. Later, in his ‘Preface on Bosses’ in his volume of plays of 1936, he was back praising Mussolini again and even throwing a few kind words to Hitler, whom he described as ‘not a stupid German’ (perhaps because he is merely a crazy Austrian) and whose persecution of the Jews he characterized considerately as ‘a craze, a complex, a bee in his bonnet, a hole in his armor, a hitch in his statesmanship, one of those lesions which sometimes prove fatal.’ Of the systematic persecution by the Nazis of Communists, Socialists, and Pacifists, of everybody — including critics and artists — who belongs to Bernard Shaw’s own camp, he has nothing whatever to say save to mention it and minimize it in passing as ‘plundering raids and coups d’état against inconvenient Liberals or Marxists.’ At the time of the Ethiopian War, he came out strongly for Mussolini on the same grounds on which he had formerly defended the behavior of the British in South Africa, and insisted that the League of Nations, on behalf of which in 1928 he had written a Fabian pamphlet, should never have tried to interfere.

Thus in this period of disastrous dictatorships, when it was particularly important for a socialist to keep clear in the eyes of the public the difference between the backing and aims of Lenin and the backing and aims of Mussolini, — all the more important as the socialist dictatorship in Russia was to be drawn into the magnetic field of Fascism, — Bernard Shaw has done a good deal to confuse them and, parliamentary socialist though he is, to exalt the ideal of dictatorship.

All this he has handled, of course, with his marvelous cleverness and style. Analyzing everybody perpetually, he is a great master of the smoke screen against criticism. It is done partly by sheer personal hypnotism and Irish gift of gab. Before you arrive at any book of Bernard Shaw’s — from What I Really Wrote about the War to his correspondence with Ellen Terry — you have almost invariably been told what to think of it in a preface by which Shaw has protected himself against your possible perception of his weakness. If you submit to his spell, you will allow him to manipulate the lights in such a way that, by the time the curtain goes up, you find Shaw looking noble in the centre of the stage with everything else left in semi-obscurity, and yourself with your discriminatory powers in a temporary state of suspension, under the illusion that you must either accept or reject him.

But there has been also an odd kind of trickery involved in the whole of Bernard Shaw’s career. It depends on a technique which he has mastered of functioning on three distinct planes and of shifting from one to another. His air of certainty, his moralist’s tone, his well-drilled sentences, his regular emphasis, all go to create an impression of straightforwardness. But actually the mind of Bernard Shaw is always fluctuating between various emotions which give rise to various points of view.

The mechanics seem to be somewhat as follows: at the bottom of Shaw is a common-sense sphere of everyday practical considerations; above this is a plane of socialism, of the anticipated reorganization of society in the interests of ideal values; and above this a poet-philosopher’s ether from which he commands a longer view of life sub specie œternitatis and where the poet allows himself many doubts which neither the socialist nor the bourgeois citizen can admit. Shaw has never really taken up his residence for any great length of time on any one of these three planes of thinking. The socialist, for example, denounces war; but when England actually goes to war the respectable householder backs her. The moralist denounces marriage; but the conventional married man always advises young people to get married. The socialist takes sword in hand to battle for a sounder society based on a redistribution of income; and the longview philosopher-poet comes to sap the socialist’s faith with misgivings as to the capacity for righteousness and soundness of the material of common humanity as contrasted with philosopher-poets. The poet gets a good way above the earth in the ecstasy of imaginative vision; but the socialist reminds him that it is the duty of art to teach a useful social lesson, and the householder damps the fires of both by admonishing them that the young people in the audience ought n’t to be told anything that will get them into trouble. The result is that reading Shaw is like looking through a pair of field glasses where the focus is always equally sharp and clear but where the range may be changed without warning.

So adroit are Shaw’s transitions that we are usually unaware of what has happened; and when we have come to be conscious of them we wonder how much Shaw is aware. It is curious to go back over his work and see him juggling with his various impersonations: the socialist, the Fascist, the saint, the shrewd business man, the world genius, the human being, the clever journalist who knows how to be politic, the popular speaker who knows how to be tactful. It is quite as if they were the characters in a comedy, which he can always pick up just where he has dropped them.

III

But comedies are best presented in the theatre; and in the theatre Shaw’s conflicts of impulse, his intellectual flexibility, and his genius for legerdemain — all the qualities which have had the effect of weakening his work as a publicist — have contributed to his success as an artist.

Bernard Shaw’s great achievement as a dramatist has been to exploit the full possibilities of a type of English comedy which had first been given its characteristic form during the seventies of the nineteenth century in the comedies of W. S. Gilbert. The comedy of the Restoration, which had culminated in Congreve, had been the product of an aristocratic society, which depended for its ironic effects on the contrast between artificial social conventions and natural animal instincts, between fine manners and fine intelligence on the one hand, and the crudest carnal appetites on the other. The comedy of the nineteenth century — setting aside Oscar Wilde — depended on the contrast between the respectable conventions of a pious middle-class society and the mean practical realities behind them, between the pretension to high moral principles and the cold complacency which underlay it. As with the dramatists of the Restoration it was always the pursuit of pleasure which was turning out to be at the bottom of the formalities, so in the comedies of Gilbert which preceded his Savoy operas, and of which the most famous and successful was Engaged (1877), it is always the hardboiled preoccupation with money which is being laid bare behind the virtuous ideals.

But neither Gilbert nor Dickens nor Samuel Butler — those two other great satirists of the money-minded English, to whom Shaw has also been indebted — could teach him to analyze society in terms of money motivation and to understand and criticize the profit system. This he learned to do from Karl Marx, whose work during his English residence, the period when Das Kapital was written, was itself of course a product of and an ironical protest against English nineteenth-century civilization. Bernard Shaw thus brought something quite new into English imaginative literature. His study of economics had served him, as he said, for his plays as the study of anatomy had served Michael Angelo. And with economic insight and training he joined literary qualities of a kind which had never yet appeared in combination with them — qualities, in fact, which, since the century before, had been absent from English literature entirely.

The Irish of Bernard Shaw’s period enjoyed, in the field of literature, certain special advantages over the English, owing to the fact that, Irish society remaining largely in the pre-industrial stage, they were closer to eighteenthcentury standards. If we compare Shaw, Yeats, and Joyce to, say, Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells, we are at once struck by the extent to which these latter have suffered from their submergence in the commercial world. In their worst phases of sentimentality and philistinism, there is almost nothing to choose between them and the frankly trashy popular novelist; whereas the Irish have preserved for English literature classical qualities of hardness and elegance.

Bernard Shaw has had the further advantage of a musical education. ‘Do not suppose for a moment,’ he writes, ‘that I learnt my art from English men of letters. True, they showed me how to handle English words; but if I had known no more than that, my works would never have crossed the Channel. My masters were the masters of a universal language; they were, to go from summit to summit, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner.’ And if we allow for some nineteenth-century prolixity, we can see in Shaw’s dramatic work a logic and grace, a formal precision, like those of the eighteenth-century composers.

Take The Apple Cart, for example. The fact that Shaw is here working exclusively with economic and political materials has caused its art to be insufficiently appreciated. If it had been a sentimental comedy by Molnar, the critics would have applauded its deftness; yet Shaw is a finer artist than all the Molnars in Budapest. The first act of The Apple Cart is a good example of the scoring for a small orchestra at which Shaw is particularly skillful. After what he has himself called the overture before the curtain of the conversation between the two secretaries, in which the music of King Magnus is foreshadowed, the urbane and intelligent King and the ‘bull-roarer Boanerges’ play a duet against one another. Then the King plays a single instrument against the whole nine of the cabinet. The themes emerge: the King’s disinterestedness and the labor government’s sordid selfinterest. The development is lively: the music is tossed from one instrument to another with, to use the old cliché, a combination of inevitableness and surprise. Finally, the King’s theme gets a full and splendid statement in the long speech in which he declares his principles: ‘I stand for the great abstractions: for conscience and virtue; for the eternal against the expedient; for the evolutionary appetite against the day’s gluttony,’ and so forth.

This silver voice of the King lifts the development to a climax; and now a dramatic reversal carries the climax further and rounds out and balances the harmony. Unexpectedly, one of the brasses of the ministry takes up the theme of the King and repeats it more passionately and loudly: ‘Just so! . . . Listen to me, sir,’ bursts out the Powermistress, ‘and judge whether I have not reason to feel everything you have just said to the very marrow of my bones. Here am I, the Powermistress Royal. I have to organize and administer all the motor power in the country for the good of the country. I have to harness the winds and the tides, the oils and the coal seams.’ And she launches into an extraordinary tirade in which the idea of political disinterestedness is taken out of the realm of elegant abstraction in which it has hitherto remained with the King and reiterated in terms of engineering: ‘every little sewing machine in the Hebrides, every dentist’s drill in Shetland, every carpet sweeper in Margate,’ and so forth. This ends on crashing chords, but immediately the music of the cabinet snarlingly reasserts itself. The act ends on the light note of the secretaries.

This music is a music of ideas — or rather, perhaps, it is a music of moralities. Bernard Shaw is a writer of the same kind as Plato. There are not many such writers in literature — the Drames Philosophiques of Renan would supply another example — and they have a confusing effect on the critics. Shaw, like Plato, repudiates as a dangerous form of drunkenness the indulgence in literature for its own sake; but, like Plato, he then proceeds, not simply to expound a useful morality, but himself to indulge in an art in which moralities are used as the pigments. It is partly on this account, certainly, that Bernard Shaw has been underrated as an artist. Whether people admire or dislike him, whether they find his plays didactically boring or morally stimulating, they fail to take account of the fact that it is the enchantment of a highly accomplished art which has brought them to and kept them in the playhouse. It is an art which has even had the power to keep alive such pieces as Getting Married, of which the 1908 heresies on marriage already seemed out of date twenty years later, but of which the symphonic development still remains brilliant and fresh. So far from being relentlessly didactic, Shaw’s mind has reflected in all its complexity the intellectual life of his time; and his chief achievement is to have reflected it faithfully. He has not imposed a cogent system, but he has provided a vivid picture. It is, to be sure, not a passive picture, like that of Santayana or Proust: it is a picture in which action plays a prominent part. But it does not play a consistent part: the dynamic principle in Shaw is made to animate a variety of forces.

Let us see what these forces are and to what purpose they interact.

IV

What are the real themes of Bernard Shaw’s plays?

He has not been a socialist dramatist in the sense that, say, Upton Sinclair has been a socialist novelist. His economics have served him, it is true, as anatomy served Michael Angelo; but to say that is to give as little idea of what kind of characters he creates and what his plays are about as to say of the figures of the sculptor that they were produced by an artist who understood the skeleton and the muscles. It is quite wrong to assume, as has sometimes been done, that the possession of the social-economic intelligence must imply that the writer who has it writes tracts for social reform.

Shaw is himself partly responsible for this assumption. In his early days, when he was a social reformer, he wrote books about Wagner and Ibsen which introduced them to the English-speaking public as primarily social reformers, too. There is of course a social revolutionist, a man of 1848, in Wagner, and a critic of bourgeois institutions in Ibsen. But Bernard Shaw, in his brilliant little books, by emphasizing these aspects of their work at the expense of everything else, seriously misrepresents them. He appreciates Siegfried and Brunhilde in their heroic and rebellious phases; but Wagner’s tragedies of love he poohpoohs; and it is sometimes just when Ibsen is at his strongest — as in Brand and Rosmersholm — that Bernard Shaw is least satisfactory, because the real tragic spirit of Ibsen does not fit into Shaw’s notion about him. In Ibsen’s case, Shaw is particularly misleading, because Ibsen disclaimed again and again any social-reforming intentions. His great theme, characteristic though it is of nineteenth-century society, is not a doctrine of social salvation: it is the conflict between one’s duty to society as a unit in the social organism and the individual’s duty to himself.

Now is there any such basic theme in Bernard Shaw? Has he been deceiving us not only about Ibsen but also about himself? Certainly the prefaces he prefixes to his plays do not really explain them any more than The Quintessence of Ibsenism really explains Ibsen.

The principal pattern which recurs in Bernard Shaw — aside from the duel between male and female, which seems to me of much less importance — is the polar opposition between the type of the saint and the type of the successful practical man. This conflict, when it is present in his other writing, has a blurring, a demoralizing, effect, as in the passage on Saint Francis and Saint Clare which I quoted at the beginning of this essay; but it is the principle of life of his plays. We find it in its clearest presentation in the opposition between Father Keegan and Tom Broadbent in John Bull’s Other Island and between Major Barbara and Undershaft — where the moral scales are pretty evenly weighted and where the actual predominance of the practical man, far from carrying ominous implications, produces a certain effect of reassurance. This was apparently the period — when Shaw had outgrown his early battles and struggles and before the war had come to disturb him — of his most comfortable and self-confident exercise of powers which had fully matured. But these opposites have also a tendency to dissociate themselves from one another and to feature themselves sometimes, not correlatively, but alternatively in successive plays. In The Devil’s Disciple and The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, the heroes are dashing fellows who have melodramatic flashes of saintliness; their opponents are made comic or base. Cœsar and Cleopatra is a play that glorifies the practical man; Androcles and the Lion is a play that glorifies the saint. So is Saint Joan, with the difference that here the worldly antagonists of the saint are presented as intelligent and effective.

Certainly it is this theme of the saint and the world which has inspired those scenes of Shaw’s plays which are most moving and most real on the stage — which are able to shock us for the moment, as even the ‘Life Force’ passages hardly do, out of the amiable and objective attention which has been induced by the bright play of the intelligence. It is the moment when Major Barbara, brought at last to the realization of the powder of the capitalist’s money and of her own weakness when she has n’t it to back her, is left alone on the stage with the unregenerate bums whose souls she has been trying to save; the moment when Androcles is sent into the arena with the lion; the moment in the emptied courtroom when Joan has been taken out to be burned and the Bishop and the Earl of Warwick are trying each to pin the responsibility on the other. It is the scene in Heartbreak House between Captain Shotover and Hector, when they give voice to their common antagonism toward the world which seems to have them at its mercy: ‘ We must win powers of life and death over them. . . . There is enmity between our seed and their seed. They know it and act on it, strangling our souls. They believe in themselves. When we believe in ourselves, we shall kill them. . . . We kill the better half of ourselves every day to propitiate them.’ It is the scene in Back to Methuselah where the Elderly Gentleman declares to the Oracle: ‘They [the political delegation with whom he has come there] have gone back to lie about your answer. I cannot go with them. I cannot live among people to whom nothing is real! ’ — and where she shows him her face and strikes him dead.

But now let us note — for the light they throw on Bernard Shaw in his various phases — the upshots of these several situations. In Major Barbara, the Christian saint, the man of learning, and the industrial superman form an alliance from which much is to be hoped. In Androcles and the Lion, written in 1913, in Shaw’s amusing but least earnest middle period just before the war, Androcles and the lion form an alliance, too, of which something is also to be hoped, but go out arm in arm after a harlequinade on the level of a Christmas pantomime. In Heartbreak House, which was begun in 1913 and not finished till 1916, the declaration of war by the unworldlings takes place in the midst of confusion and does not lead to any action on their part.

In Back to Methuselah, of the postwar period, the Elderly Gentleman is blasted by the Oracle in a strange scene of which we must stop a moment to examine the implications. The fate of the Elderly Gentleman is evidently intended by Shaw to have some sort of application to himself; out of date with the backward society from which he has come into the world of the long-livers, he at least differs from his fellows in this: that he finds he cannot stand any longer to live among people to whom nothing is real. So the Oracle shrivels him up with her glance.

But what is this supposed to mean? What is this higher wisdom which the Elderly Gentleman cannot contemplate and live? So far as the reader is concerned, the revelation of the Oracle is a blank. The old system of Bernard Shaw, which was plausible enough to pass before the war, has just taken a terrible blow, and its efforts to pull itself together and still function result in fantasies gruesome and grotesque. The Life Force of the man and woman in Man and Superman no longer leads either to human procreation or to social-revolutionary activity. The Life Force has been finally detached from socialism altogether. In the Intelligent Woman’s Guide, Shaw will reject the Marxist dialectic as a false religion of social salvation; but the Life Force is also a religious idea, which we have always supposed in the past to be directed toward social betterment, and now, in Back to Methuselah, we find that it has misfired with socialism. Socialism has come and gone; the planet has been laid waste by wars; the ordinary people have all perished, and there is nobody left on earth but a race of selected supermen.

And now the race of superior human beings, which was invoked in Man and Superman as the prime indispensable condition for any kind of progress whatever, but which was regarded by Shaw at that time as producible through eugenic breeding, has taken here a most unearthly turn. It has always been through the superman idea that Shaw has found it possible to escape from the implications of his socialism; and he now no longer even imagines that the superior being can be created by human idealism through human science. The superior beings of Back to Methuselah are people who live forever; but they have achieved this superiority through an unconscious act of the will. When they have achieved it, what the Life Force turns out to have had in store for them is the master of abstruse branches of knowledge and the extra-uterine development of embryos. Beyond this, there is still to be attained the liberation of the spirit from the flesh, existence as a ‘whirlpool in pure force.’ ‘And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond.’

In the Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, the Elderly Gentleman is frightened, but his tragedy is not a real tragedy. But Saint Joan (1924) is an even more frightened play, and, softened though it is by the historical perspective into which Shaw manages to throw it through his epilogue, it was the first genuine tragedy that Shaw had written. The horror of Back to Methuselah is a lunar horror; the horror of Saint Joan is human. The saint is destroyed by the practical man; and even when she comes back to earth, though all those who used her or undid her are now obliged to acknowledge her holiness, none wants her to remain among them: each would do the same thing again. Only the soldier who handed her the cross when she was burning is willing to accept her now, but he is only a poor helpless clown condemned to the dungeon of the flesh.

V

Back to Methuselah is a flight into the future; Saint Joan is a flight into the past. But with Heartbreak House Bernard Shaw had already begun a series of plays in which he was to deal with the post-war world and his own relation to it in terms of contemporary England — a section of his work which, it seems to me, has had too little appreciation or comprehension.

Heartbreak House has the look at first sight of one of his elaborate sociological conversations of the type of Getting Married and Misalliance; but it is really something new for Shaw. There is no diagram of social relations, no tying-up of threads at the end. Heartbreak House, Shaw says in his preface, is ‘cultured leisured Europe before the war’; but the play, he told Archibald Henderson, ‘began with an atmosphere and does not contain a word that was foreseen before it was written,’ and it is the only one of his plays which he has persistently refused to explain. ‘How should I know ?’ he replied, when he was asked by his actors what it meant. ’I am only the author.’ Heartbreak House, built like a ship, with its old drunken and halfcrazy master, — the retired adventurer, Captain Shotover, — is cultured and leisured England; but the characters are no longer pinned down and examined as social specimens: in an atmosphere heavily charged, through a strange cumulation of contacts and collisions, they give out thunder and lightning like storm clouds. Brooding frustrations and disillusions, childlike hurts and furious resentments, which have dropped the old Shavian masks, rush suddenly into an utterance which for the moment has burst out of the old rationalistic wit. For once, where Shaw has so often reduced historical myths to the sharp focus of contemporary satire, he now raises contemporary figures to the heroic proportions of myth. An air raid brings down the final curtain: Heartbreak House has been finally split wide. The capitalist Mangan gets killed, and there is a suggestion that they may all be the better for it.

But in 1924 the Labor Party came to power, with Ramsay MacDonald as Prime Minister. MacDonald had been a member of the Executive Committee of the Fabian Society, and he brought with him two other Fabians, Sidney Webb and Sydney Olivier, who took the portfolios of Minister of Labor and Secretary of State for India. When MacDonald was reelected in 1929, he was accompanied by no less than twenty Fabians, of whom eight were cabinet members. The Fabians had now achieved the aim which was to have been the condition for the success of their ideas: they had ‘interpenetrated’ the government. But in the meantime the competition of the British Empire with the German had culminated in a four years’ war; and in England of after the war, with the top manhood of her society slaughtered and the lower classes laid off from their wartime jobs, and with English commercial domination further damaged by the United States, the influence of the Fabians could do little to bridge over the abyss which had been blasted between the extremes of the British class society. The best measures of the Labor Government were able to accomplish no more than just to keep the unemployed alive; and when the capitalists began to feel the pinch, they openly took over control. Ramsay MacDonald, in 1931, became Prime Minister in a Nationalist Government and cleared his socialists out of office.

At the moment of the second accession of the Labor Party to power, Shaw had written The Apple Cart, in which MacDonald is caricatured as Proteus, the Prime Minister of a labor government. This government is represented as really controlled by Breakages, Limited, a great monopoly which opposes industrial progress for the reason that it has an interest in perpetuating the inferior and less durable machinery which requires more frequent repairs. But there is in The Apple Cart no criticism of the Fabianism which, after all, has been partly responsible for Proteus: the blame is laid at the door, not of that socialism by interpenetration which has ended by itself being interpenetrated, but of something which Shaw calls ‘democracy’; and what is opposed to the corrupted socialism of Proteus is not socialism of a more thoroughgoing kind, but the super-constitutional monarch, King Magnus. Again, Shaw has given the slip to his problems through recourse to the cult of the superior person.

Yet in 1931, after the final collapse of the Labor Government, Bernard Shaw visited Russia and, for the first time since the war, incurred unpopularity in England by applauding the Soviet system. And in the same year he wrote Too True to Be Good, a curious ‘political extravaganza,’ in which for the first time he turns back upon and criticizes his own career, infusing his disillusionment with his own bourgeois radicalism of the eighties, under the stress of the disasters of the new century, with the same kind of idealist poetry, now grown frankly elegiac and despairing, which had constituted the real beauty of The Apple Cart and which stems from Heartbreak House.

A rich young English girl of the upper middle class is languishing with an imaginary illness in a gloomy Victorian chamber, fussed over by a Victorian mother. Into this sickroom erupt two rebels: a young preacher and a former chambermaid, who is an illegitimate child of the aristocracy. The chambermaid has been masquerading as the heiress’s trained nurse, and she and the preacher have a plot to steal the heiress’s pearl necklace. The girl comes to from her megrims and puts up an unexpected struggle. The preacher becomes interested in his victim and says that he has always wondered why she does not steal the necklace herself. Why does n’t she take it and go and do what she pleases, instead of staying home with her mother, moping and fancying herself sick? Why does n’t she let him and his accomplice sell the necklace for her, taking 25 per cent of the price apiece and giving her the other 50? The girl enthusiastically agrees, and while she is getting dressed to go with them the preacher jumps up on the bed and delivers one of those liveyour-own-life sermons which Shaw made his first success with in the nineties. Then he is off — in the excitement of his own rhetoric completely forgetting the necklace, which the heiress herself has to remind him they need.

All three sail away together to an imaginary Balkan country reminiscent of Arms and the Man, where they are able to do whatever they please, but where their revolt turns out to lead to nothing and eventually to bore them to death. Shaw has evidently put into Too True to Be Good a sort of recapitulation of his earlier themes, the shams of bourgeois society: the capitalistic doctor of The Doctor’s Dilemma is as much a fraud as ever; the pompous British military officer, though retaining an air of authority, has practically ceased even to pretend to be anything other than a fraud and is quite willing to leave the command to a private (drawn from Lawrence of Arabia) if he can only be left in peace with his water colors; the oldfashioned materialist-atheist who is also the most rigorous of moralists, of the type of Roebuck Ramsden in Man and Superman, has lived through into a world where his morality has no power to prevent his son turning thief, and so forth. Finally everyone except the preacher sets out for the ‘Union of Sensible Republics.’

The preacher is left alone on the shore, abandoned between two worlds. He had come too late for the old and too early for the new. He had had the courage once to steal a necklace, but he had n’t carried through his idea. He had given it back to the owner and they had made common cause together: the liberated bourgeois girl had got 50 per cent of the price, the radicals only 25 apiece. In the last scene, the darkness comes, the clouds gather; the morale of the preacher breaks down. He can only go on explaining and exhorting, whether or not he has anything to say. A keen wind is blowing in and it may be the breath of life, but it is too fierce for him to bear.

This, Shaw tells us, is a political fable; and now he returns to politics proper. In On the Rocks (1933), he appears to drive himself into a corner as he has never before done, and then comes out with a political position which still manages to remain somewhat equivocal.

The first act shows a liberal Prime Minister hard beset during a period of depression. Pall Mall and Trafalgar Square are full of excited crowds. The Prime Minister, on the verge of a breakdown, can think of nothing to do except to call out the police against them, but he is dissuaded by the Police Commissioner himself and finally induced to go away for a rest. He has just been visited by a labor delegation who have impressed him with the importance of Marxism, and he takes volumes of Marx and Lenin away with him.

When the curtain goes up on the second act, the Prime Minister has read Marx and Lenin; but the effect upon him is unexpected. He has gained an insight into economic motivation, an understanding of the technique of making use of it; but he has not been converted to socialism: he has worked out, on the contrary, an exceedingly clever scheme for preserving the capitalist state through a programme, essentially Fascist, of partial nationalization and taxation of unearned incomes. He will conciliate the various social groups which would normally be antagonistic by promising a concession to each. The plan seems bidding fair to succeed when it runs aground on Sir Dexter Rightside, the Libera! Prime Minister’s Tory colleague in a coalition National Government. Sir Dexter represents the blind conservatism which sticks to the status quo through sheer obstinacy and inability to imagine anything else: he threatens to put colored shirts on ‘fifty thousand patriotic young Londoners’ and to call them into the streets against the proposed programme of the government. The Prime Minister has to give up his attempt, but he is now forced to face his situation: ‘Do you think I did n’t know,’ he confesses to his wife, ‘in the days of my great speeches and my roaring popularity, that I was only whitewashing the slums? I could n’t help knowing as well as any of those damned Socialists that though the West End of London was chockful of money and nice people all calling one another by their Christian names, the lives of the millions of people whose labor was keeping the whole show going were not worth living; but I was able to put it out of my mind because I thought it could n’t be helped and I was doing the best that could be done.

I know better now! I know that it can be helped, and how it can be helped. And rather than go back to the old whitewashing job, I’d seize you tight around the waist and make a hole in the river with you. . . . Why don’t I lead the revolt against it all? Because I’m not the man for the job, darling. . . . And I shall hate the man who will carry it through for his cruelty and the desolation he will bring on us and our like.’

The shouting of the crowd and the crash of glass are suddenly heard outside. The people have broken into Downing Street. The police begin to club them and ride them down. The people sing, ‘England, arise!’

Sir Arthur Chavender’s more or less liberal Fascism has been defeated by the reactionary Fascism of his Tory colleague in the National Government, with whom he is indissolubly united. (There is no question any longer of the superior man: King Magnus has disappeared from the scene.) Yet it is not clear that the point of view opposed to both is anything other than Fascist itself. Old Hipney, the disillusioned labor veteran, who speaks for the dissatisfied classes, seems to be looking for a Man on Horseback, too: ’Adult suffrage: that was what was to save us all. My God! It delivered us into the hands of our spoilers and oppressors, bound hand and foot by our own folly and ignorance. It took the heart out of old Hipney; and now I’m for any Napoleon or Mussolini or Lenin or Chavender that has the stuff in him to take both the people and the spoilers and oppressors by the scruffs of their silly necks and just sling them into the way they should go with as many kicks as may be needful to make a thorough job of it.’ But Chavender declines the job; and the people begin throwing bricks.

The conclusion we are apparently to draw is that parlimentary Fascism must fail; and that we may then get either Mussolini or Lenin. Is that also a final confession of the failure of Fabianism, which depended on parliament, too?

We seem to have come to the end of Shaw. With the eruption of this desperate uprising, we should be plunged into a situation which could no longer be appropriately handled by the characteristic methods of his comedy. He is still splendid when he is showing the bewilderment of the liberal governingclass Prime Minister; it is surprising how he is still able to summon his old flickering and piercing wit, his old skill at juggling points of view, to illuminate a new social situation — how quick and skillful he is at describing a new social type: the Communist viscount, with his brutal language, which shocks his proletarian allies. But, with the shouts and the broken glass, we are made to take account of the fact that Shaw’s comedy, for all its greater freedom in dealing with social conditions, is almost as much dependent on a cultivated and stable society as the comedy of Molière. Shaw, as much as Molière, must speak the same language as his audience; he must observe the same conventions of manners. And further than On the Rocks — in depicting the realities of the present — it seems that he cannot go.

His subsequent pieces bear out this impression. The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934) is the only one of his plays which has ever struck me as downright silly. In it, the Day of Judgment comes to the British Empire, and the privilege of surviving on earth is made to depend upon social utility. But, by setting up a purely theocratic tribunal, Shaw deprives this scene of social point: the principle of selection is so general that it might be applied by the Fascists as readily as by the socialists, at the same time that the policy of wholesale extinction seems inspired by an admiration for the repressive tactics of both. The play ends with a salute to the unknown future, which, like the vision of infinity of Back to Methuselah, seems perfectly directionless and blank. The Millionairess (1936) makes a farce out of the idea that a born boss, even deprived of every advantage, will inevitably gravitate again to a position where he can bully and control people, and sounds as if it had been suggested by the later phases of Stalin.

Here it cannot be denied that Bernard Shaw begins to show signs of old age. As the pace of his mind slackens and the texture of his work becomes less close, the contradictory impulses and ideas, which have hitherto made the action of his dramas, gape widely and fall apart. In his ‘Preface on Bosses’ to The Millionairess, he talks about ‘beginning a Reformation well to the left of Russia,’ but composes the panegyric to Mussolini, with the respectful compliments to Hitler, to which I have already referred.

Yet the openings — the prologue to The Simpleton, with its skit on the decay of the British Empire, and the knockabout domestic agonies of the first act or two of The Millionairess — still explode their comic situations with something of the old energy and wit; and the oneacter, The Six of Calais, though it does not crackle quite with the old spark, is not so very far inferior to such an earlier trifle as How He Lied to Her Husband. It is interesting to note — and it confirms my theory that it is the artist in Shaw that is most authentic — that apparently the last thing he is to lose is his gift for pure comic invention.

And the integrity of the artist as a recorder of the processes in which he finds himself involved has also survived in Shaw. He has not played a straight role as a socialist; a lot of his writing on public affairs has been blather. But his plays down to the very end have been a truthful and continually developing chronicle of a soul in relation to society. Artistically as well as physically — he has just turned eighty-one as I write — he is outliving all the rest of his generation.

Nor have his political confusions invalidated his social criticism: of his influence it is unnecessary to speak. After all, the very methods we use to check him have partly been learned in his school.