Introduction: Enchanted Shaw (and Other Shavian Modernities)

Shaw knew he was one of the creators of modern consciousness and modern conscience. He told us so himself many times, and with perfect seriousness.

—John Gassner, “Bernard Shaw and the Making of the Modern Mind” (1962)

The prime fact which stamps Shaw’s art into close correspondence with life is the fundamental note of disillusionment which is struck fearlessly and unfailingly throughout the entire range of his work. Just as all life is an evolutionary process, and all progress follows vision clarified through the falling of the scales from the eyes of the brain, so Shaw’s drama is an ordered sequence of pictured incidents in which pitfalls are uncovered, illusions unmasked, and vital secrets displayed.

—Archibald Henderson, Interpreters of Life and the Modern Spirit (1911)

When Archibald Henderson described Bernard Shaw as a virtuoso of disillusionment, he was sounding a note that Shaw often sounded himself. “I assure you I am as skeptical and scientific and modern a thinker as you will find anywhere,” Shaw writes in the 1912 “Preface on the Prospects of Christianity” to Androcles and the Lion.¹ Skeptical and scientific and modern serve as his credentials to evaluate Christ as an early socialist with a cold, clinical eye rather than uncritical premodern faith, and Shaw deploys the word “modern” like a battering ram throughout the preface: he is “turning our modern lights” (461) on the gospels to disentangle superstition from common sense; “any modern reader” (506) of the Gospel of John would ask why Jesus didn’t defend himself at his trial; the untutored genius of Jesus must yield to “modern experience and sociology” (519). On the other hand, the image of a meek and mild savior is “a sniveling modern invention” (463). “Modern fashions” (510) in belief are just as credulous as medieval fashions, except that the numbers modern scientists conjure with—millions instead of the mystical number seven—appeal more readily to the tumid scale of the twentieth-century imagination.

For Shaw, modernity was characterized by unexamined contradictions. It was an era freed from past illusions but hampered by its own myths: barbarism and arrogance persisted alongside legitimate advances in thought and conduct. Like the god Ra in the 1912 prologue to Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Shaw often seems to “[survey] the modern audience with great contempt” before announcing “that men twenty centuries ago were already such as you, and spoke and lived as ye speak and live, no worse and no better, no wiser and no sillier.”² Yet Shaw was keen to recognize that much had changed since imperial Rome, and particularly since the beginning of the industrial revolution: women had new leadership roles in public life; manufacturing had become more efficient, pervasive, and destructive; new technologies, like cars, airplanes, and phonographs, appeared in his plays before nearly all of his fellow dramatists took note of them. Shaw may be one of the greatest chroniclers of the psychic aftershocks of disillusionment. “You have learnt something,” Andrew Undershaft tells his daughter Barbara in Major Barbara (1905). “That always feels at first as if you had lost something.”³ But we diminish Shaw’s imagination and cultural voraciousness if we do not see him as a spectator, an inventor, a consumer, and occasionally a victim of modern life’s enchantments as well.

The words “modern” and “modernity” act like what linguists call shifters—they invoke different features of experience depending on when they are written or spoken.⁴ Matei Calinescu points out, for instance, that before the early twentieth century “‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ were not felt to be crucially different,” but that a sense of unprecedented innovation in art, politics, and science beginning roughly in the 1860s required a designation—“the modern”—that would recognize a specific period of rupture and crisis.⁵ Shaw’s sardonic, double-edged modernity embraces the modern as at once an absolutely distinct epoch and part of the historically continuous posture of thinking that the contemporary knows more and knows better than the past. Much recent scholarship on modernity recognizes a similar split between a shared general sense of modernity and the charting of...