The Evening Star WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20, 1932. LITERARY “RUFFIANS.”

Evening Star, Issue 21005, 20 January 1932, Page 8

The Evening Star WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20, 1932. LITERARY “RUFFIANS.”

Though he was called worse things when he died a few months ago and during his lifetime, the brilliant literary man, Frank Harris, seems to have taken offence when a greater literary man, George Bernard Shaw, called him a ruffian. Harris, who was an Ishmael of letters, gifted, vituperative, erotic, had known Shaw from an early time. It has been said that when he was editor Kf tho ‘ Saturday Review ’ he first picked Shaw from Grub street, and set him in the pathway of fame. And Shaw lent his money to Harris when the latter was in bad ,circumstances during the war. Asked later why he called him by the opprobrious term, Shaw replied: “I tell you you are a ruffian just as an oculist might tell you that you are astigmatic. ... I have had to admit that you are a monster and that, clever as you are, it is impossible to ask anyone to meet you unless they are prepared to stand anything that the uttermost freemasonry of the very freest thbught and expression in the boldest can venture.” “The most impossible ruffian on the face of the earth,” was Shaw’s enlargement of the charge, to which he added: “As to myself, of course I am a ruffian.” Harris had his revenge, though how much that was in his mind it would be hard to say. In his last years he wrote a life of Shaw, and at his death left him the proof sheets to correct. Shaw has performed the task, though most men might have shrunk from it, and -he book has been published. It is the most scathing disparagement of “ G. 8.5.” that is ever likely to be published. Credit is given to Shaw for “ always wanting things to be better than ’they were.” That was despite his contradictions of opinions, which are mercilessly set forth. He was “ a scoffer and religious at the same time; an atheist and pew renter, a Socialistic supporter of war, a peace-loving Fabian favouring a strong army, a libertarian eulogising Mussolini, a zealous champion of State control fighting the Government censor,’ a believer in freedom advocating compulsory equalisation of incomes, a zealot of the ‘ true joy of life ’ scoffing at love and sox, and a man of many other parts like a crazyquilt.” His greatest weakness was, according to Harris, that he had no real ideas for improving anything. “ All ho had was a clear eye for seeing what the trouble was. He didn’t kill nor was ho killed by it. In philosophy ho has given us no new or vital truth; no now word in religion, no glimpse even of any great human vision. Ho is neither philosopher nor scientist; neither passionate prophet nor selfsacrificing martyr. How then hope to hold the human stage 1 for generations to come’?” All this, no doubt, would bo advertisement for Shaw, Avho may have been moved to still more tolerance for it by the reflection that no rampagings of Frank Harris woidd be likely to do much damage to “G. 8.5.” But some darts must have stung. “We live in a democratic ago, and Shaw lias justly said; ‘Democracy always prefers the second-bests.’ True

and tragic, and Shaw is the preferred.” Again, “ all the world loves a jester and stones the true prophet. The future forgets the jester and immortalises the prophet.”- It is conceded that Shaw is “ the wittiest author of our times,” granted that he may ho even the wittiest in English literature, but his paradoxes are not allowed to be original, his “wisdom is too light,” and the judgment is passed: “He will not live. His rhetoric is racy, intuitively good, but it lacks inspiration; and, though often fine, never reaches genius. A play here and there may be ranked with those of Sheridan, Congreve, and Wilde, but certainly nob above them. Though he remains a writer of importance, his plays on rereading are dull. Only a few seem to me likely to live. The others will be as out of date before Shaw is dead twenty years as Ibsen is out of date to-day.” But as a personality, Harris believes, Shaw will bo remembered.

It has been suggested that Harris, although he was born in Ireland (of Welsh parentage), did not understand Shaw’s Irish quality, made to explain both his attitude to Socialism (given the place of a religion) and his attitude to sex. Harris’s book has not impressed the critics; the most interesting part of it, it has been said, is Shaw’s own letters which are contained in it. Nothing certainly could be less ruffianly than “ G.B.S.’s ” easy tolerance of the volume. From an interview which he gave to the ‘ Observer ’ one might gather that he would have been better pleased with the reviews if they had been more concerned with himself and less with denouncing Harris, described by him as being, “ with all his vulnerability to every sort of disparagement, not the negligible fellow you can all so glibly prove him to be.” The final proof of that, to Shaw’s mind, was the laboriousness of the thwackings he has received. Simultaneously with the appearance of Harris’s biography, Shaw has published, tor general reading, an account by himself of his own early days, which had place before only in the limited edition of his works. In so doing he leaves future readers to distinguish for themselves the iron from the earthen pot as they bump together.