Bernard Shaw & [sic] The Art of Destroying Ideals: The Early Plays by Charles A. Carpenter (review)

BOOK REVIEWS BERNARD SHAW rb [sic] THE ART OF DESTROYING IDEALS: THE EARLY PLAYS, by Charles A. Carpenter. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. 262 pp. $6.50. Many good books have been written on unoriginal subjects-that is, on topics that have long been recognized and admitted as self-evident, but that lend themselves to development through the offering of concrete illustrations and analyses of the material that has led to their generalized truth. Such a book is Charles A. Carpenter's Bernard Shaw rb the Art of Destroying Ideals. Although Carpenter is far from being the first critic to realize and point out that Shaw from the beginning regarded himself as an iconoclast-that is, as a destroyer of images, or ideals-he has nevertheless produced a vigorously written book with many new insights on Shaw's first ten plays, as contained in the first three volumes of Unpleasant Plays, Pleasant Plays, and Plays for Puritans. These insights are provided both through generalized critical discussions and through long (at times perhaps overlong) interpretative synopses of these plays, their characters, and their themes. On the other hand, Carpenter has sapped the validity of many of his conclusions by his surprising failure to employ satisfactory and allowable definitions of some of his fundamental terms, such as ideal, idealism and realism, idealist and realist. All through his book he uses these terms almost invariably in their popular senses, without reminding his readers that Shaw attached his own specialized meanings to them-and was roundly attacked in some quarters for doing so. This failure is particularly surprising since, of course, Carpenter makes considerable use of Shaw's The Quintessence of Ibsenism, especially of the chapters on "Ideals and Idealism" and "The Womanly Woman." Yet it is not until page 52 that Carpenter remarks casually and incidentally that "Shaw focuses his dramatic attacks on ideals that mask realities," nor does he recur to this idea before page 78, when he uses a phrase about the constructive side of Shaw's "campaign to supplant ideals with realities." And it is not until page 108 that he even mentions Shaw's basic triple classification of mankind into idealists, realists, and Philistines, according to their acceptance of, rejection of, or indifference to the masks (or "ideals'') which many human beings have constructed to hide the face of the realities which they are afraid to face. Shaw himself makes a careful distinction between "the institution which the ideal masks and the ideal itself." As Carpenter does not seem to realize, Shaw never preached against true ideals, and admitted that realists themselves have ideals in the sense of goals to be attained; but he also pointed out that they do not confuse these goals with the existent truths. As Shaw put it, the realist himself recognizes that life is always a case of "The ideal is dead: long live the ideal." In other words new ideals replace the old after the exposure of the old, but each new one is "less of an illusion than the one it has supplanted." Thus it is through the destruction of old and deceptive ideals and their constant replacement with new and better ones that human progress takes place. Yet on page 10 Carpenter states unequivocally that to Shaw "there is no such thing as a real ideal." It is for such reasons that I remain unpersuaded by Carpenter's attempt to correct my interpretation of the characters in Candida in my Men and Supermen and to decide that Shaw really intended Candida to be a realist and Eugene to be an idealist who "pits his own poetic illusions against the ministerial ones 100 1970 BOOK REVIEWS 101 of Morell." I am of course flattered to see that Carpenter admits that my "interpretation of the play has been highly influential" and to note that I am the only critic he discusses at length and by name in his analysis of any of his ten plays. But I still stick to my conclusions that Shaw's own definitions and comments justify classifying Candida as a Shavian Philistine, Morell as a Shavian idealist, and Marchbanks as a Shavian idealist who in the course of...