Shaw and History

Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 SHAW AND HISTORY J. L. Wisenthal. Shaw's Sense of History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. $45.00 WITH ALL THE GOOD WORK DONE on Shaw's thinking and the influences upon that thinking (Irvine, Bentley and Turco, for example), one would think that Shaw's attitude toward history would have been well explored and defined by now; one would be wrong. Of course, the specifically historical plays give various and sometimes contradictory impressions of Shaw's sense of history. Prof. Wisenthal 's latest work on Shaw, however, turns those impressions into firm understanding, and the strategy he adapts to achieve his goal is a beautiful one. He sets Macaulay and Carlyle as the two opposite extremes that Shaw had as models from Victorian historiography, and proceeds to show how contrary to one's expectations—that Shaw would follow Carlyle—Shaw in fact finds Macaulay useful as well, and this in spite of several Shavian references to Macaulay as a superannuated thinker. Wisenthal schematizes the contrasts between Macaulay and Carlyle in such a way as to make clear their power in shaping Shaw's thought. For Macaulay, the hero of history will compromise; for Carlyle, the hero of history refuses to compromise (a rigidity of behavior that Shaw generally ridicules in his comedies). Macaulay will acknowledge his hero's weaknesses; for Carlyle heroism renders the hero's failings insignificant (Shaw's Caesar will fit either of those approaches). Macaulay believes in progress; Carlyle opposes faith in progress because of its tendency to make people smug and complacent about their own time, to make them feel superior to the past. Here, Shaw is squarely on Carlyle's side. As Lilith says at the end of Back to Methuselah, "Let them dread, of all things, stagnation." For Shaw, there are no permanent institutions or truths; change is the law of life, and that is grounds for optimism. And yet, temperamentally, Shaw is much attracted to the idea of progress. Believing as he did in creative evolution, he has to like the idea of progress; he dislikes it when it becomes an excuse for standing still to admire oneself. Shaw is enough of a disciple of Goethe to think that the moment you dwell on the beauty of the moment and wish it to linger, that moment is death. Long ago Eric Bentley detected a principle governing Shaw's thinking, namely that for Shaw it's rarely either /or but rather both/and. Wisenthal demonstrates that Shaw's view of history borrows elements from Macaulay's (and even Tennyson's) approach to history, as well as from Carlyle's, mighty opposites though they were. 358 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 Shaw's assault on the complacency of the present begins with his refusal to separate the past and the present. In an important formulation of his own, Wisenthal asserts that, "Tb Shaw the past is not something separate from the present, but rather a way of looking at the present." In that way the present loses any special status as a pinnacle of progress "and becomes just another point in the historical continuum." In other words, Shaw looks at current events as if they were the past, and looks at the past as if it were the present. This viewpoint affords him a certain detachment which in turn allows him to fill his historical plays with anachronisms (and paradoxical ones at that—St. Joan as a Protestant, for example), and permits him to find some good even in the fascist dictators. I should add here that Wisenthal rightly points out that if one goes looking for devotion to dictatorship in Shaw one can find it (and one would think from the many reviews of Shaw's Collected Letters, Vol IV, that there was little else to find), but one ends by distorting Shaw's position on military dictators which was by no means simple. One of the many pleasures in Wisenthal 's work here lies in following his analysis of how Shaw's representation of Napoleon evolves, from the masterful leader who engages in a contest of wit and feeling with a veiled lady in The Man...