The Ascent to Heaven: A Shavian Pattern (Early Plays, 1894-1898)

THE ASCENT TO HEAVEN: A SHAVIAN PATTERN (Early Plays, 1894.. 1898) IT IS THE PECULIAR CHARACTER OF Shaw's plays that from the first they embody Romantic optimism and Romantic disillusion simultaneously . One is reminded of William Archer's account of seeing Shaw for the first time in the British Museum studying alternately the French translation of Das Kapital and the score of Tristan und Isolde. Characteristically Shaw could be attracted not only by optimism, progress, and social action but by their opposites, passivity, withdrawal , and fulfillment in death. The continuing dramatic tension in Shaw's work is generated, at least in part, by the clash of a vision of man as perfectible and the world as capable of continuing reform and improvement with an opposing vision of man as distasteful and irredeemable and the world as forever the abode of vulgarity and brute stupidity. The optimistic vision is by far the more conscious one. It is the vision of the man of ideas, the social reformer, the satirist determined to laugh men into a recognition of their follies. Ostensibly it is the vision that underlies the theory of Creative Evolution, that notable example of Romantic optimism, with its commitment to eternal progress and unlimited possibilities. But in fact that curious theory is an aspect of the negative, pessimistic vision, for the ultimate end of Creative Evolution is a withdrawal from the failures and limitations of the human condition into a realm of pure, self-contemplating intellect. Though Shaw the activist embodies a sense of Romantic optimism, a faith in progress and perfectibility, Shaw the negativist embodies with equal force a sense of Romantic disillusion and its attendant withdrawal and rejection. We can recognize the preachments of the optimistic Shaw easily enough, but the presence of the other is usually, though not always, harder to perceive. It appears most strikingly in a pattern of dramatic action which we may appropriately characterize as an ascent to heaven, sometimes a literal ascent, usually a figurative one. At the end of some process of education or discovery the central character in a Shavian play will usually withdraw from the world of action, of commitment, of life in fact, to a different one, sometimes conceived of as a world of pure intellectual contemplation, always remote from the ordinary human world, supposedly superior to it. Though this intellectual "heaven" takes many different forms in the plays, it is 253 254 MODERN DRAMA December always an alternative to, in some sense a refuge from, the failures and imperfections of existence. When Shaw is most aware of these failures and distressed by these imperfections, the act of withdrawal from the human world is made most deliberately and decisively. Then it is seen as the necessary act, the ultimate and unqualified response to the limitations of life. But Shaw's vision is not always so dark. In many plays the heaven to which one withdraws is comparatively near the ordinary world; the ascent to it is not immutable. Some counterbalancing commitment to life and social action is made, that mitigates the absoluteness of the withdrawal. Much of the interest in following the progress of Shaw's world lies in tracing the variety and complexity of the balances he contrives between his conflicting impulses. But inevitably it is not always easy to do so: though the optimistic Shaw is a public personage, the despairing Shaw is a private one. His commitments to life and action can be made openly and directly, but his impulse to withdraw must be expressed through such metaphors as the one which this study develops: the ascent to heaven. Only at its harshest and most remote is this strange heaven directly recognizable. Edmund Wilson, for example, speaks of the "lunar horror" of Back to Methuselah, in which the Ancients of the final play aspire to ascend from the flesh and become pure intelligences .! Earlier Ludwig Lewisohn had described this "bleak parable" as "the monument of a great despair."2 Lewisohn implies that this despairing position is one that Shaw arrived at only in old age and after contemplating the horrors of the first world war. But such a conception of Shaw's mind or its...