The Wanganui Chronicle. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1950. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Wanganui Chronicle, 4 November 1950, Page 4

The Wanganui Chronicle. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1950. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

THE last stunt has been enacted, the last jibe spoken, the last line written for George Bernard Shaw. The pen was the man.

Shaw was a Londoner. Born in Dublin he could pay no tribute to the city of his birth because he had to go counter to the general habit of men which is to hold their hometown in affection. “I left Dublin” he once said, “and like every other sensible Irishman I never went back.” In common with many another man who made his living in Letters, from Dr. Johnson onwards, Shaw found the City of London his natural centre of gravity. He could never get away from it, it claimed him body and soul for - one of her own and made him what he was as much as did any external circumstances.

Shaw was an egotist of egotists. He had to be to survive. His lack of schooling, which he attributed to his unwillingness to learn anything that his teachers sought to impart to him, accentuated his peculiar nature. It could be said with sound reason that Shaw was an unbalanced boy who grew up into an unbalanced man. This condition of unbalance was particularly in evidence in his willingness to discuss publicly his own sex history, claiming in earlier years a discipline which was nobody’s business and as he grew to old age delighting in detailing his rabellasian adventures which more than likely were kindled more in his own imagination than based on fact.

Shaw’s good fortune was that he had a persistent desire to show off. In private life his conduct from early youth was incalculable and frequently outrageous. But this self-same desire which never left him was the result of an urge to express himself in an undisciplined manner, nevertheless gave him the stability to pursue the craft of letters until he mastered it. He was fortunate enough, and callous enough, to live on his mother’s earnings which could not have been but slender seeing she was a music teacher. Thus supported he wrote five books one after another, each of which was somewhat better than the previous one and none of which was worth reading. But they constituted his apprenticeship to his trade and it is remarkable that, he could haw persisted for so long in his period of training without any perceptible encouragement save the assuagement of his own egotistical urge. Attracted by the out-of-doors meetings that were-a feature of London life he tried himself out, first asking awkward questions to embarrass speakers. If the speaker was a teetotaller, Shaw heckled with him as a drinker of alcohol. If the platform was that of an anti-vivisectionist society, Shaw sought soon to mount it and expound the opposite view. If the speaker was a Conservative, Shaw was a Libera]. If a Socialist, Shaw advanced biological arguments in opposition thereto. Thus he overcame his sense of inferiority and found out an important point, the value of giving an audience a mental shock. This discovery he never forgot and in all his writings the shock treatment is to be discerned.

Shaw had not a scientific mind, but he had a penetrating one. The ascertainment of truth was not his objective, the knocking out of shams, be they the pomposities of the medical profession, the posings of the literati, or the smugness of the middle-classes to which he belonged and from which he never removed himself, or the chocolate soldiers who are foisted upon the public as heroes, were his particular pigeon. He loved talking at shams, and as an occupation he enjoyed it to the full, for it provided him with that sense of power which he so much desired and for which he was not qualified to use in any other way. The selfishness of Shaw which enabled him as a young man to live for so long on his mother never seems to have left him. It does not appear that he at any time was moved to compassionate acts, his egocentrism would make him blind mentally to others’ concerns. Yet when Frank Harris, the erratic genius who became editor of the Saturday Review, and who appointed Shaw its dramatic critic, fell into the half light Shaw seems to have remained loyal to this seedy character. When Harris determined to write on Shaw the playwright helped his erstwhile editor as much as possible. When Professor Pearson, of California, decided to write a study of Shaw, the latter, replying to a letter, said that the work might as well be accurate and again helped to build his own monument.

Notwithstanding the absence of regular schooling and his inability to attend a university, Shaw was a highly educated man. He was one of the best examples of what self education can achieve. He was learned in the Greek classics, knowing not only the principles upon which the great dramas were built up, but also appreciating very really the principles which animated the writers thereof. His study of Shakespeare was close and intimate and the rich ore he extracted from these mines enabled him to become the fine dramatist that he was. The general public of the early part of the century was intrigued with his “Arms and the Man” with its rollicking comedy. The “Doctor’s Dilemma” fostered a great deal of the intellectual snobbery of suburbia, which was shallow and unscientific. “Major Barbara” seemed to strike at the Salvation Army, but in fact it struck in the preface at the theatre audience, he remarking there that it was the people who went to religious exercise that had the good time rather than those who stood dolefully for hours in theatre queues in order to snatch some brief period of illusion. His play prefaces were propaganda pamphlets. They may be the worse for wear when subjected to keen analysis, but they were stimulating or maddening, according to the equipment of the reader. Shaw was also a stimulant to journalism. It was not his constant breaks into the news with a eheap jibe or slick answer to a correspondent that, made his service to the Press, but those trenchant reviews of the drama and of music that were his own and which were impressed with the full force of his personality, even though it were a mocking one. The critic should stand on his own ground. The more he knows the better will be his criticism, but the padding and the puffing should be for the advance agent, not for the critic. The critic, however, in order to criticise should know what he is writing about and he should have some definite measures of assessment. He must at all times be ready to say what is his footrule. Shaw delighted in controversy for its own sake, but he was a shrewd calculator and made every light a monetary one.

Born in 1856, Shaw did not come to success easily. He was making his way in London journalism in the nineties of the last century, he came fully into his own in the first decade of the present century, lost his audience during the first world war where bis contribution was ill timed and uninspiring: he regained his place in English life and letters and as is the custom with those who pursue the journalistic path, failed to win recognition by way of the Honours List until such recognition could not add to his merit or distinction. When a man has io wait until he is seventy-three years old before an honour that he has well earned is offered to him he is entitled to say in scoffing tones that he has no use for such bauble. Literature scored off the politicians when Shaw replied to the offer of the peerage and Order of Merit that he had already conferred the Order of Merit on himself. That put a tarnish on the Order that has not yet been rubbed off.