GBS and the ABC

CBS AND THE ABC BERNARD SHAW WAS ESSENTIALLY A CRAFTSMAN. His own description of his job.was "that of a master of language." One of the many popular fallacies concerning him is that he was an original thinker. He was not. The original thinker gives his original thought-rarely more than oneto the rest of mankind, and bores them stiff with it. Shaw was teeming with ideas-other people's-and scattered them with exuberant vitality. What he did, as most thinking people do, was to take ideas from this philosopher and that, from this economist and that, from this biologist and that, and select all the ideas that fitted in with his own general outlook, rejecting the rest. He himself never claimed that any of his ideas were original. Even when he was not sure where the ideas had come from in the first place, he was careful to admit his indebtedness to somebody. "What I say today," he wrote, "everybody will say tomorrow , though they will not remember who put it into their heads. Indeed, they will be right; for I never remember who puts the things into my head: it is the Zeitgeist." Another time he described himself as ..the mouthpiece of the Webbs" ---the pioneers of British socialism, whose ideas· he made his own and brought within the popular grasp. So, too, with ideas from Buffon, Lamarck, Butler, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Mar~-but an exhaustive list, if possible to compile, would use up the rest of my space. To deny that Shaw was an original thinker is not to belittle him or his contribution to civilisation. How many of us who drink from Shaw's bubbling decanter of ideas would ever go to the original sources for them? Or, if we did, would find them digestible, let alone palatable? Since Shaw's profession was that of a master craftsman in the craft of putting ideas on paper, he was in all his other activities an amateur. Not amateurish, but a ~round' man, participating in ma~y different fields for the love of the game, and, without attempting to specialise, acquiring a good general grasp of most of them. What this century is most in need of, perhaps,- is the non-specialist with a wide range of interests and a keen mind capable of seizing on the main points in the great mass of knowledge accumulating around every subject. Shaw was such a man. A writer has to write about something; and Shaw wrote about almost everything. After some years spent in writing essays, novels, short stories, a book about Ibsen, political pamphlets, book reviews, and critiques of painting and music, he began writing plays; and it is 139 140 MODERN DRAMA September his plays, of course, that assure him immortality, in spite of-or, perhaps , partly because of-the fact that they deal with the problems and controversies of the day when they were written. Shaw left sixty plays, of which the earliest were written before some of Pinero's and Oscar Wilde's and the latest after some of Peter Ustinov's and Arthur Miller's. He took the lid off slum landlordism, prostitution, the medical profession , and the Irish question; he denounced hypocritical respectability and romantic idealism; he preached socialism and sex equality; he expounded the philosophy of creative evolution; and he urged social reforms ranging from easier divorce to the foundation of a National Theatre. Few dramatists would have considered these themes promising material for their art, but Shaw wove them into some of the best plays ever written. So one amateur interest after another provided him with material for his plays, and one Shavian hobby-horse after another was ridden round the stages of the world's theatres. One of Shaw's amateur interests was phonetics, and one of his hobbyhorses was the introduction of a modem phonetic alphabet for English. But even Shaw found this subject a difficult one to dramatise. He set out tOf write Pygmalion as an advertisement for the science of phonetics, but it turned out as a Cinderella story about the transformation of a Cockney flower-girl into a duchess and thence into an independent woman...