The Portrait of the Artist in Bernard Shaw's Novels

130 THE PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN BERNARD SHAW'S NOVELS By Elsie B. Adams (Wisconsin State University - Whitewater) Recurring character types In Bernard Shaw's five novels reveal Shaw's early formulation of a theory of art and his progressive refinement of that theory. These types—the artist, the aesthete, the Philistine, and the practical man—appear, with little variation , In Immaturity (written I879), The Irrational Knot (1880), and Love Among the Artists (1881); In Cashel Byron's Profession (1882) the artistic types are relegated to only two chapters, but in Shaw's last completed novel. An Unsocial Socialist (1883), they return, with the artist and man of affairs combined and transformed in the character of Sidney Trefusis. An examination of these character types, with special attention to their attitudes toward art, serves three purposes: it helps to define Shaw's theory of art; it reveals préfigurations of later Shaw characters such as Praed, Apollodorus, Marchbanks, Octavius, Dubedat, or Hlggins; and It helps to place Shaw in the English aesthetic movement . When Shaw was writing his first novel, the English aesthetic movement was at its height. The highly publicized Whistler-Ruskin trial occurred in 1878; in that year George Moore's Flowers of Passion appeared, the second series of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads" was published, and young Oscar Wilde won the Newdigate prize at Oxford for his Ravenna; in I879 Henry James's The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales appeared. Popular aestheticism, influenced by thirty years of Pre-Raphaelite exhibits and especially influenced by the success of Morris and Company, was receiving widespread advertisement in the pages of Punch. In this artistic milieu, it is no surprise that Shaw's Immaturity contains a section called "Aesthetics" and that its romantic hero, Cyril Scott, Is modelled on an artist who Shaw says was "very much 'in the movement1 at the old Grosvenor Gallery."1 Cyril Scott Is based on Cecil Lawson (I85I-I882), a landscape painter whose "The Hop Gardens of England," exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1876, and "The Minister's Garden," at the Grosvenor Gallery in I878, had brought him critical attention and some acclaim .2 However, in acknowledging his model, Shaw is careful to point out that Scott is not meant to be "an authentic portrait" of Lawson. Scott is Shaw's early version of a truly successful artist: he has served his apprenticeship in art and is beginning to receive a well-deserved recognition for his artistic achievement . Though he Is satirized for his quick temper and tender sensibility, on the whole he is treated sympathetically in the novel. Indeedt one could argue that the financially, socially, and artistically secure Scott is an autobiographical projection of the artist the young Shaw hoped to become. 131 Scott, like his prototype Lawson, has both Pre-Raphaelite and Impressionist leanings; his artistic reputation is growing partly because he has become "an aesthetic pet" (Immaturity, p. 259). The name of his best-known painting, "Fretted with Golden Fires," suggests Pre-Raphaelite affinities, and his dress reflects that love of "gray frieze" which according to Ford Madox Ford distinguishes Pre-Raphaelite dress: "He [Scott] was dressed in a short loose coat of light grey, which he wore unbuttoned. His hat was shaped in the Swiss fashion, and made of felt of the same color as his clothes" (Immaturity, p. 106).3 Like the Pre-Raphaelites, Scott advocates a return to nature, saying of the artist Porson's sketch, "It is an honor to be selected as lay figure by Porson. . . .It may suggest to him the advisability of studying nature at last" (p. 188); he also insists that "the nearest unfashionable square" in London isas suitable a subject for the artist "as the bay of Naples, or a sunset at Damascus" (p. 274).^ Like the Impressionists, Scott is noted for painting foggy landscapes (p. 147). And like both the Pre-Raphaelites and Impressionists, he scorns amateurism in art, believing that "it takes a man all his life, working as hard as he can, to get any sort of power to paint" (p. 149).5 Scott's combination of Pre-Raphaelite fidelity to nature and devotion to...