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Bishop of Everywhere: Bernard Shaw and the Life Force by Warren Sylvester Smith (review)
- Modern Drama
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 28, Number 3, Fall 1985
- pp. 508-510
- 10.1353/mdr.1985.0005
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
508 Book Reviews evidence: instead of quoting precisely what shows her to be "arch, condescending and self-congratulatory," he merely claims that "a long speech" near the end does so despite its aim "to show her in an attractive light" (p. 82). Some of the book has va1ue, and Gibbs's chapter on YOIl Never Can Tell, demonstrating how the play's title "reigns over its action," how the opening scene "announces the pattern and function of the subsequent comic action," and how Gloria combines "characteristics ofboth her parents" (pp. 91- 92,95), has raised my estimation of it. Several of his insights are sound: for example, in his treatment of sexual themes, Shaw is "an advanced Victorian rather than ... a failed D.H. Lawrence"; and in love scenes in Widowers' Houses, You Never Can Tell. and Man and Supennan, "Shaw deals more directly with sexual attraction than any of his predecessors and early contemporaries in the Victorian and Edwardian theatre" (pp. 11- 12). Yet at best, the quality of most of Gibbs's chapters is mixed. In "Critical Perspectives," for instance, he does well on Shaw's verbal art but is inconsistent and weak in his study ofShaw's "use of non-verbal devices" (p. 22) ~ dealing, for example, with the ftrst act but not the second or third ofArms and the Man, and considering two of the four sets of John Bull's Other Island, but ignoring such matters as contrasting sets and lighting in the two duologues between Mrs. Warren and Vivie. In brief, The Artand Mind of Shaw is a disappointing mixed bag. The best study of Shaw's art and mind remains Eric Bentley's Bernard Shaw, fIrst published almost forty years ago. BERNARD F. DUKORE, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAU WARREN SYLVESTER SMITH. Bishop ofEverywhere: Bernard Shaw and the Life Force. University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press 1982. pp. viii, 19I. $16·95· Professor Smith's sympathetic spiritual biography of Shaw is a welcome addition to studies ofShaw's religion and dramaturgy. A Shavian scholar. editor, and director ofthe plays. Smith brings a substantial mastery of the thought ofGBS to his study. His title is taken from the Postscript to The Adventures ofthe Black Girl in Her Search for God (1943), where Shaw declares himself "a sort of unofficial Bishop of Everywhere." Together. title and subtitle announce Smith's basic approach: to examine, more or less chronologically, the development of Shaw's religion ofCreative Evolution and the Life Force, and the relationship of this religion to certain of the dramas. Smith's Prologue suggests that Broadbent, Doyle, and Keegan ofJohn Bull's Other Island represent three significant insights into Shaw's own nature, and, consequently, continue to appear in different guises in later plays dealing with politics and religion. Smith then divides his study into three somewhat unequal parts followed by a brief "Envoy." Part I reviews the evolution ofShaw's spiritual growth from the Passion Play of 1878, unpublished and fragmentary, to the development of his religion of Creative Evolution, the Life Force, and the Supennan. Smith ends this first section with an Book Reviews 509 analysis of Shaw's despair and "struggle against cynicism" during the war years, best dramatized in the characters ofHeartbreak House. Following this play symbolizing the lack of moral sense in Western society, Shaw, to suppon his belief in Creative Evolution, was inevitably drawn to the creation of a mythology of his own, dramatized in the five plays of Back to Methuselah (1921). Part D details the creation of Shaw's "myth"; and it places his theory of Creative Evolution and the Life Force between the evolutionary theories of the Neo-Darwinians, as represented primarily by Sir Julian Huxley. and those of the theologian and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. All three men proposed a "religion of the future" and conceived it as a religion of evolution of one sort or another. Shaw's question, however, was not how evolution happens, but why. More concerned with social order than theology. Shaw linked will with morality and rejecled the Darwinian dogma of natural seJection. Instead, he turned to the evolutionary theories of Jean Baptiste Lamarck and his affirmation ofbeliefin...