THE PULL-LENGTH SHAW

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21580, 27 February 1932, Page 4

THE PULL-LENGTH SHAW

CHILD AS FATHER OF THE REBEL

Readers of Punch may recall a series of rhymes in that journal,_ inspired by the statement that there existed in England a man who had never heard of Bernard Shaw. Had the education of this blissfully ignorant gentleman been our concern we would have approached him in various ways, according to our own equipment. For my own part I would have pressed into hie hand that excellent monograph of Mr G. K. Chesterton. I can recall a little book by one Rene Deakin which was proffered me as an antidote to the Chestertonian bias. Some of us carry about with us little vigqettes of Shaw which result from actual contact. There was an address he delivered to the undergraduates of Cambridge in the days of the Granville BarkcrtVcdrenne regime at the Court Theatre, when everyone, including the chucker-out, wore a Fabian air. This was after Shaw had discarded the famous Jaeger suit, for he was severely habited in Nonconformist black. He began by exhorting any members of the aristocracy who might be present to go home, as the address did not concern them. I cannot say whether the formation of the M.C.U. (Middle Class Union) was the outcome of this address. It might well have been, for the purport of Shaw’s address on that occasion was the need of the middle class to stave off the proletariat on the one side and the aristocratic capitalist on the other. One recalls how much of the harshness that one encountered in the prefaces to his plays and elsewhere seemed to be softened by the pervasive and persuasive tones of his voice, which was extraordinarily clear and musical. He attributed this clarity to an excellent set of false teeth upon which he rapped with his fingers in a manner that recalled the Biblical allusion to the fathers who ate grapes to the discomfiture of their children. It is thus that he must have swum into the ken of many a young man, and I think there was a tendency on the part of many such young men to accept the phenomenon of the bearded prophet without much speculation as to his antecedents.

Not a Nice Boy It is only on reading the much-bruited biography by Frank Harris that one realises that Shaw was once a child. In the course of the plays and prefaces one comes upon hints, shadowy recollections, which, be they what they may, are yet the masterlight of nil our being. There is a speech of John Tanner’s, for instance, in_ which he recalls with satisfaction certain acts of vandalism committed during boyhood. , We always vaguely suspected that here, as elsewhere in the course of the play, Shaw was revealing himself through the lineaments of Tanner. But on the whole there is little that is Wordsworthian in Shaw’s attitude towards his own age of innocence. Everyone knows that Mr Chesterton read penny dreadfuls as a boy, and everyone approves this sign and seal of orthodoxy in him. All nice boys read penny dreadfuls, but Shaw was not a nice boy. He has authorised Frank Harris to declare that he concealed a profound pusillanimity under a great show of combativeness. Shaw never knew that pause in the day’s occupation when the night is beginning to lower, between the dark and the daylight, which is known as the children’s hour. Any time was talking time for him. The boy Shaw was forbidden to play with the children in the street, and he laboured under the disadvantage of attending, by day, a school where most of the pupils were boarders. He seems to have been thrown much into - the company of an uncle with a taste for limericks and mild blasphemy. It is nqj recorded that he ever handled a cricket bat or kicked a football. It is inconceivable that h» ever kept his hero’s batting average. He was admitted into the full citizenship of the family at an age when the average English boy is still entirely, preoccupied with his own possessions and dreams. The Real Rebel We are inclined to think of Shaw as constantly defying conventions, whereas the truth is that he was completely ignorant of many such conventions. The public school convention, for instance, did not gradually manifest itself through the nursery, and so on to the preparatory school, as it has done for so many. The real rebel is one who has lived with an idea before he refutes it. Shaw came to the contemplation of more than one convention with the virginity of a savage. There was one department of life in which he did manifest himself as a rebel, and that was in the department of music. For here the young Shaw inherited as definite a tradition as a young Lyttelton inherits from an Etonian father. His mother was an operatic singer, trained in the pre-Wagner school. Shaw imbibed music from her as he had imbibed nourishment, and yet he became as violently heretical in his support of Wagner as any Luther in his support of Swiss theology. It was while he was a musical critic that Shaw announced his intention of founding his own church, and becoming his own hierarch. It may be that this vaunt of his has been misinterpreted by most of us. In the province of music he is the heretic. In religion and politics he is the untutored voyager seeking enlightenment. It would almost seem that enlightenment came when, at the instigation of his wife, he undertook to write “ St. Joan.”

This full-length portrait of Bernard Shaw by one whose aim has been to flout the obvious at all costs has caused just the kind of stir that its author desired for it, . . . Errors of taste there may be in plenty, but a perusal of the book will help us to clear our minds of much recent cant about Shaw. To those of us who have gnashed our teeth > impotently at him in times past, and in the end have become reconciled to the deification of this Mephistophelean Christ, there is provocation in this book to take stock of our Shavian store. The egotism of the biographer need not deter us from making use of his book, and with its aid we should be able to discourse sapiently upon Shaw to all and sundry, whether they have heard of him or not. ' C. E. A.