BRAIN AND BRAWN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19508, 11 December 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

BRAIN AND BRAWN.

BY KOTARE.

BERNARD SHAW AND TUNNEY.

As my worthy friend " Matanga " has noted, the literary world has probably marked with amazement the tame and inadequate counterblast of Bernard Shaw to the scathing criticism of Gene Tunney, champion of the world. In another ring, Bernard has long been hailed as the most redoubtable fighter of our time. Rapier work is his specialty, though he can wield the bludgeon on occasion with devastating effect. It may be that Bernard is growing old, and the dust of the arena has ceased to hold him as in the brave days •of old. It is more likely that he admits the justice of the heavyweight's literary criticism, and he says nothing because he has nothing to Bay. Anyway, it adds something to the gaiety of the nations to find the champion bruiser of our day, the true and legitimate successor of Daniel Mendoza and Jem Belcher, of Henry Pearc'e, the " Game Chicken," and Tom Sayers, entering the lists to challenge the latest Nobel prizewinner on a question of literary criticism.

Did anyone suggest the cobbler and his last? But if a prize-fighter cannot speak itith authority on the psychology of the prize-fighter, then who is entitled to speak for him ? I think Tunney is on pretty safe ground. We have had an advertising and publicity stunt by Tunney's supporters, which practically endeavoured to prove that the champion was different from all other champions; if Cincinnatus had to be dragged from his plough to save his country, Tunney wearily laid aside for a few months his profound studies in literature and philosophy, presented his classic features, sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, to the furious onslaught of the astounded Dempsey, plucked in a highly philosophical fashion the world's crown from Dempsey's head, a.nd hastened back to his beloved study and his books. The Philosophic Pugilist.

Here for a moment let us become lyrical with an American scribe. " Almost an ascetic in his outlook on life, Tunney is "well read. In his conversations with representatives of the press he has amazed his auditors with the breadth of his learning and the depth of his philosophy. Socially Tunney is a charming, cultured gentleman, as much at home in the smartest of smart drawing rooms as he is in the company of men big in all walks of life. If you find him reading it will not be some story where ' twenty red men bite the dust' or some novel that is spicy. Rather it will be one of Shakespeare's works, or some philosophical treatise that only one who thinks and not one who merely thinks he thinks can master." That is the chorus which has rung from Atlantic to Pacific since Tunney won the championship. Of course, there is the possibility that it may be true. Sometimes there is a basis of truth even in an, American write-up. Not often, we hasten to acknowledge, but cases have been known. There is more chance that a wise reading of the American mind has shown that the sort of boxer America wants is the exponent of a vigorous muscular Christianity, a la Charles Kingsley; and Tunney is remodelled to fill the bill. ' Robert Louis Stevenson once asked " What young man will readily forego the reputation of vice? " It may have been true in his time;, but to-day we have chapged aU that. America wants a champion boxer who can do more with his head than bruise his opponent's knuckles; he must add Shakespeare to his straight left, purity /to his punch, philosophy to his foot-work. All very admirable as an expression of the character of modern America, but it does not bring us very near Tunney. The Picture and the Subject.

The trouble with these reputations manipulated to meet the public taste is that they invariably set the original seeking to make actual the purely imaginary portrait his publicity men have drawn. If the picture is not like him, he must try to be like the picture. Our own Prime Minister finds himself in a similar' situation. Willy nilly, he ..must be to the end tho plain, blunt man who gets things done. When first I read Tunney's judgment on Shaw's early novel, I thought it was his initial attempt to conform to the portrait his backers ,and advertisers had drawn.

The great objection to that assumption is the unexpected fact that Tunneys criticism is perfectly sound, as I conceive Bernard Shaw would be the first to admit. In fact he admitted it years ago. When Shaw,.the brilliant young Irishman, was struggling to get his feet in London, enjoying himself to the top of Ins bent in a menagerie of crank societies, spouting on public platforms, constructing Utopias on paper, expressing his vivid pugnacious mind' on music and art and literature —in these days of hectic energy Bernard Shaw wrote several novels. He was feeling his way to his own medium, sorting out from a wilderness of incipient ideas the things he would stand for. These early novels, which he published in later years under the apologetic title " Novels of My Nonage," are immature, formless and frankly melodramatic for the most part. " Cashel Byron's Profession " is easily the best of them. America's own " Billy " Phelps (in such friendly fashion do people of that wonderful land designate a famous Yale professor who exercises a benevolent dictatorship over a very large section of the American reading public) thinks very highly of the Nonage novels. 1 The Admirable Bashville. "'Cashel Byron's Profession,'" he writes," is just as good a novel to-day as it was in the eighties, when it was written; and we all know the enthusiasm it. awakened in Stevenson, who read it when its author's name had no significance. In sheer literary excellence Shaw's later and more famous works do not surpass this book; and it possesses one quality absent in all the plays, both pleasant and unpleasant; it has an irresistible charm. Like many pacifists, Shaw is not greatly shocked at prize-fighting; the way of the world, of course," is to regard professional boxing as brutal, and war as noble and sublime, even holy." For mv sins, no doubt, _ I have never been able to appreciate this novel, either in its original form or later when Shaw made it into a play, " The Admirable Bashville." Shaw dramatised it because he learned that if he did not put the story into stage form someone else would do it. In self-defence he put his boxer into a play, and by some inexplicable whimsy, perhaps through sheer cussedness, he wrote the play in blank verse, " rigmarole " as he calls it; not the magnificent blank verse of Marlowe sfnd Shakespeare, but in what Shaw considers a much finer form, the stilted mechanical style df Greene and Peele.

Even in blank verse,. " Cashel Byron's Profession" is foolish' melodrama; and Cashel Byron is just what Gene Tur.ney calls him.