An Authoritative Book on Shaw

4. AN AUTHORITATIVE BOOK ON SHAW Warren Sylvester Smith. Bishop of Everywhere: Bernard Shaw and the Life Force. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1982. $16.95 My only major objection to this volume is that it is too short for the range and importance of its concerns. In less than 200 pages Professor Smith considers the formulations of Shaw's philosophic-religious position ("Part I: The Emergence of the Life Force"), the presence of that religion in Shaw's plays and time as well as In our time ("Part II: Serendipity or the Life Force? The Darwinians, Teilhard de Chardin, and Back to Methuselah"), and the testing of that religion in Shaw's public and private life ("Part III: Ambiguity and Anguish"). But I am willing to forgive him this sin of succinctness, as I am sure it would have been forgiven by the "unofficial Bishop of Everywhere"—Shaw's self-description in The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God. Smith has provided us—by us I mean Shavian scholars, drama dabblers, concerned citizens—with a clear, readable , authoritative guide to "everywhere" in Shaw by focusing on the main tenets of Shaw's religion of evolutionary Pantheism. Shaw would have welcomed the volume because at the close of his career the Bishop saw his "see" was not seeing and he came to regard his life in large part a failure. The fourth entry for "bishop" in the Webster Unabridged (2nd ed.) is "The Lord, or Abbot, of Misrule." Shaw had conditioned his audience to see only that feature of his role. Smith does real service to Shaw and those who see only his cap and bells by emphasizing G. B. S.'s instinct for order and desperate seriousness . And he does this with reassuring balance: So it is probable that the Life Force, by whatever name, will continue to inhabit our thinking whether mechanistic science approves or not. And it is probable that Bernard Shaw will continue to be its leading prophet. I cannot guess how long people will continue to read his letters and treatises. Certainly his comprehension of the problems of government may seem to us inadequate or even . . . naive. ... It should no longer be necessary to enroll either as a disparager or a Shavolator. It ought to be possible to recognize his profound contributions to the twentieth-century mind without having to accept him as an infallible guru on every subject on which he chose to pontificate. We ought to be prepared, in other words, to recognize Shaw's shortcomings as Samuel Johnson was prepared to recognize Shakespeares : "without envious malignity or superstitious veneration." The fact that he had foibles of his own does not invalidate his clear-headed perception of the foibles of the rest of humanity. That rather dry, basically positive appraisal comes in the concluding chapter, "Reasonable Mystic, Laughing Prophet." It recalls Tennyson's Introduction to In Memorlam—written after the poem's completion—whose uneasy qualifications make the poem's visions and revisions about the meaning and purpose of evolution all the more moving and trustworthy. Smith is not a "true-believer" but a steady evaluator who can make a "probable . . . guess" about the "Inadequate . . . comprehension," the "shortcomings", the "foibles" of a "clear-headed" perceiver. Smith knows what Shaw has written and spoken on religion—he has edited books on both—and here combines that material with his knowledge of the plays, of Shaw's 141 life and of his correspondence to demonstrate how essentially informed by belief in the Life Force his life and art were. One way the Life Force's impact on Shaw's private life can be seen is in the way Shaw was attracted to others who selflessly served their own versions of the Life Force. This accounts for the unexpected names on the'list of Shaw's life-long correspondents, as, for example, the Benedictine Abbess, Dame Laurentia McLachlan. Smith recounts the story of that relationship and correspondence which dates from the publication of Saint Joan to his death in a way that tells us much about Shaw: "These letters are not obviously love-letters, but, in a sense, what else are...