Bernard Shaw as Artist-Fabian

5. “Irritate”

5 “Irritate” To a much greater degree than other prominent Fabians, Shaw thrived on attention—attention to his appearance, his personality, his ideas, perhaps above all his verbalizing. The last of these set all the rest in motion. Riveting words brought a sharpened focus on the distinctive qualities of his being and behavior, and carved out clear channels for strikingly unexpected arguments . A newspaper report of an 1888 address before a group of scientists conveys the effect he made: The dovecots were much fluttered . . . by the appearance of a strange and rather startling figure . . . [who] calmly denounced as robbers some of the men the world is accustomed to regard as the ornaments of society, the patterns of morality, and the pillars of the church. This was Mr George Bernard Shaw. The whole thing was done, not with the savagery of a wild and illiterate controversialist, but with the light touch, the deadly playfulness, and the rapier thrusts of a cultivated and thoughtful man.1 Shaw aired an important aspect of his own point of view when he told Beatrice Webb in 1925, “What we need is more thought—more new thought, thoughts that will wake people up.” In light of her long acquaintance with him she deduced that “What he means by new thought is some hypothesis which will startle people because it is wildly at variance with their experience. To him it is irrelevant whether it turns out to be in accordance with fact; so long as the idea has ‘troubled the waters,’ that is sufficient justification” (The Diary of Beatrice Webb, IV, 51). Shaw would probably have seconded all but her last deduction; simply “troubling the waters” would not have sufficed for him. He regarded irritation as a calculated melioristic weapon, and prided himself on its accordance with reality, if not mere “fact.” Shaw advertised his intention to irritate time and time again, perhaps most cogently in an 1896 review of an actress’s autobiography. After admitting that he has been “formulating a commonplace in an irritatingly inconsiderate way,” he adds: “But in this world if you do not say a thing in an “Irritate” / 77 irritating way, you may just as well not say it at all, since nobody will trouble themselves about anything that does not trouble them. The attention given to a criticism is in direct proportion to its indigestibility” (The Drama Observed , 562). In somewhat more extreme terms, “The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often ” (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 122). A 1903 letter not published until 2009 admonishes a publisher who had rejected Man and Superman: “my business is to shock people into thinking, not to soothe them into apathy. I am an assayer of people’s beliefs; and I have to do it with hydrochloric acid, not with sugar and water. Do you remember what Newman said when they told him that he should try to be controversial without being offensive. ‘I have tried it,’ he said, ‘and nobody listened to me.’” Profiting by his experience , “I have never tried it, and don’t intend to.”2 He repeated the same radical litany as late as 1944: “It is always necessary to overstate a case startlingly to make people sit up and listen to it, and to frighten them into acting on it. I do this myself habitually and deliberately” (Everybody’s Political What’s What?, 49). Irritation in the sense of shocking, scandalizing, or keenly frustrating is a common effect in Shaw’s plays, as we have seen illustrated in Mrs Warren ’s Profession and Major Barbara especially. Vivie Warren’s effusion that her former-prostitute mother is “stronger than all England” and Andrew Undershaft’s “Here I am, a profiteer in mutilation and murder” speech are prime examples. The permeative strategy of the deliberately unresolved ending creates reactions that are closely akin to irritation. As Dukore states, many of Shaw’s plays “provocatively, or irritatingly, leave spectators with a disquieting sense that they themselves must find a way out of the predicament ” (“Shaw’s Irritating Ways,” 2, 3). When Shaw chooses to call John Bull’s Other Island one of his plays which “irritate,” he is probably thinking mainly about its finale (although Broadbent’s obtuseness is at least irking). What I am focusing on here, however, is mainly irritation at the start of a composition...