Shaw and the Passion of the Mind

Shaw and the Passion of the Mind ERIC SALMON • SHAW HAS BEEN PRAISED FOR ALMOST AS MANY ATTRIBUTES and qualities as he has been condemned for and, indeed, his stature (by which I do not mean merely reputation) as a dramatist is such that it would be very surprising if the nature of his plays were a simple monolith capable of being described in one simple way. His great plays - of which there are not many, but what there are, are very great indeed - have all the variety and complexity which all great works of art possess. Nevertheless, in spite of all the variety and complexity, there is discernible in his work as a whole one particular total gesture which is readily identifiable and which constitutes a unique contribution to English-speaking drama. It appears in no other playwright - at least not in so pure, so concentrated and so extended a form. It is the capacity for seeing the dramatic experience itself in terms of pure intellect: Shaw sees the dramatic tension of the world as if represented by a system of intellectual concepts held in a true and perfect balance. This is not at all what he himself thought he was doing, or said he was doing, but that is hardly to the point: very few major artists are aware of the nature of the final entity of the work they have created and Shaw, who was beguiled by the particular bent of his genius into an over-belief in explication and the discursive mode was more susceptible than most to the temptation to explain what he thought a play "meant." "There is a foolish opinion prevalent that an author should allow his works to speak for themselves" he says in the preface to Three Plays for Puritans and goes on a little later (cleverly shifting ground - as he often does - in order to win the argument with a resounding last stroke) "I am ashamed neither of my work nor of the way it is done. I like explaining its merits to the huge majority who don't know good work from bad. It does them good; and it does me good, curing 239 240 ERIC SALMON me of nervousness, laziness and snobbishness. I write prefaces as Dryden did, and treatises as Wagner, because I can; and I would give half a dozen of Shakespeare's plays for one of the prefaces he ought to have written." Shaw seems to have believed, in the case of most of his plays at any rate, that the particularities of the arguments and ideas themselves, and their capacity for changing people's actual opinions about specific issues, were the things that gave those plays importance. He thought of a play, in other words, as performing the same kind of function as an essay or a lecture but, by going about the task in a more beguiling way, performing it more effectively. A great play, however, is not a means of communication (at least, not in any literal sense); it is an organic entity with a life and posture of its own. It is as complex, idiosyncratic and self-contradictory as an individual person; but it is superior to most individual persons in that at its heart the contradictions are resolved and the entity has an identifiable, recognizable stance in the world: it can be said to "mean" something (though it follows that this "meaning" cannot ultimately be explained, or expressed in terms other than those of the play itself. Useful hints as to the best means to approach it can be given; more or less relevant parallels can be quoted; glosses and histories and backgrounds can be provided: but one can no more give a full account of that meaning in didactic prose, whether written or spoken, than one can explain the "meaning" of a particular personality; all that one ultimately can do, having described the person's background, parentage, interests and appearance, is to say "Come and meet him: come and see.") The fact that Shaw the man, the creator of the Shavian plays, did not view their function in this way need not detain us: it is interesting but part...