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OVATION FOR SHAWo (Translated by GERHARD H. W. ZUTHER) I. SHAW'S TERROR SHAW himself has experienced and subsequently suggested that any person, in order to express frankly an opinion on anything, has to overcome a certain congenital fear-that of being presumptuous. He has taken care early in his career to prevent people from molesting him with insincere incense burning. (But he has done it without shrinking from being considered famous. He knows that the tools of an honest man must always include boisterous self-advertising. He proudly declines to hide his light under a bushel.) Shaw has used a large part of his ingenuity to inhibit people to such a degree that they would need to have extreme insensitivity to prostrate themselves in admiration before him. It should be clear by now that Shaw is a terrorist. The Shavian terror is an unusual one, and he employs an unusual weapon-that of humor. This unusual man seems to be of the opinion that there is nothing fearful in the world except the calm and incorruptible eye of the common man. But this eye must be feared, always and unconditionally. This theory endows him with a remarkable natural superiority; and by his unfaltering practice in accordance with it, he has made it impossible for anyone who ever comes into contact with him-be it in person, through his books, or through his theater-to assume that he ever committed a deed or uttered a sentence without fearful respect for this incorruptible eye. In fact, young people, whose main qualification is often their love of mettle, are often held to a minimum of aggressiveness by their premonition that any attack on Shaw's habits, even if it were his insistence on wearing peculiar underwear, would inevitably result in a terrible defeat of their own thoughtlessly selected apparel. If one adds to this his exploding of the thoughtless, habitual assumption that anything that might possibly be considered venerable should be treated in a subdued manner instead of energetically and joyously; if one adds to this his suc': cessful proof that in the face of truly significant ideas a relaxed (even snotty) attitude is the only proper one, since it alone facilitates true concentration, it becomes evident what measure of personal freedom he has achieved. The Shavian terror consists of Shaw's insistence on the prerogative of every man to act decently, logically, and with a sense of humor, and on°Originally published in Berliner Borsen-Courier, 25 July, 1926. 184 1959 OVATION FOR SHAW 185 the obligation to act in this manner even in the face of opposition. He knows very well how much courage it takes to laugh about the ridiculous and how much seriousness it takes to discover the amusing. And, like all purposeful people, he knows, on the other hand, that the most timeconsuming and distracting pursuit is a certain kind of seriousness which pervades literature but does not exist anywhere else. (Like us, the young generation, he considers it naive to write for the theater, and he does not show the sIlghtest inclination to pretend that he is not aware of this: he makes far-reaching use of his naivete. He furnishes the tl~eater with as much fun as it can take. And it can take a lot. What draws people to the theater is, strictly speaking, so much nonsense, which constitutes a tremendous buoyancy for those problems which really interest the progressive dramatic writer and which are the real value of his pieces. It follows that his problems must be so pertinent that he can be as buoyant about them as he wishes to be, for the buoyancy is what people want.) II. SHAW VINDICATED IN THE FACE OF HIS OWN DARK PREMONITIONS I seem to remember that Shaw recently expressed his opinion about the future of the drama. He says that in the future people will no longer go to the theater in order to understand. He probably means that mere reproduction of reality curiously fails to give the impression of verisimilitude. The younger generation will not contradict Shaw on this point. But I feel that Shaw's own dramatic works were able to...

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