I have constantly in these columns defended Mr. Bernard Shaw from the entirely frivolous charge of frivolity; I shall not, therefore, be in any danger of finding my complaint classed with the commonplace attacks upon him which represent him as a mountebank or a perverse jester if I animadvert upon his attitude on the subject of Shakespeare—an attitude which he has always professed with a considerable consistence and regularity, but of which he gave recently a rather special example in a lecture. Indeed, the two points of view do not contradict, but rather corroborate, each other. Mr. Shaw does not highly admire or profoundly enjoy Shakespeare, and this is not because Mr. Shaw is frivolous, but, on the contrary, because Mr. Shaw is serious. The fault of Mr. Shaw as a philosopher or a critic of life (for every philosopher or critic of life may be allowed to have a fault) is altogether on the side of being too grave, too stern, too fanatical, too unbending and austere. Mr. Bernard Shaw is too serious to enjoy Shakespeare. Mr. Bernard Shaw is too serious properly to enjoy life. Both these things are illogical where he is logical, chaotic where he is orderly, mystical where he is clear. In all the great Elizabethan writers there is present a certain thing which Mr. Shaw, with all his astonishing abilities, does not really understand—exuberance, an outrageous excess of words, a violent physical pleasure in mere vocabulary, an animal spirit in intellectual things. The moderns, to do them justice, are not realists. They are not under any influence from the babyish notion that art should imitate life. They realise pretty clearly that it is the business of art to exaggerate life. But they are used to seeing life (in the modern books) exaggerated in the direction of pain or sensibility or differentiation or mystery or delicacy or despair or candour or cruelty; they are well used to seeing life exaggerated in all these directions. But they are not used to seeing life exaggerated in the direction of life. That is why the moderns do not like Dickens. That is why Mr. Bernard Shaw does not like Shakespeare.
But the case of Shakespeare, and of all the men who belong to the age and spirit of Shakespeare, is, I admit, a much harder one, especially for the fastidious modern mind, than any case like the case of Dickens. Dickens was always to some extent successful, even at his worst, along a line of neat and obvious facetiousness; but the great men of the Renaissance were sometimes so exuberant and exultant in their mere joy of existence that their mirth is not even obvious, and not even facetious. These giants are shaken with a mysterious laughter. They seem torn by the agony of jokes as incommunicable as the wisdom of the gods. Dickens was sometimes vulgar; he was sometimes quite fatuous and inept; but amusing he almost always was. But Shakespeare was sometimes too much amused even to be amusing. He is writing so much to please himself that he not only does not succeed in pleasing us, but does not even in any sense try to do so. Sometimes he seems, like Rabelais, and indeed like all the humanistic comedians of the Renaissance, to be, as it were, raging at his audience in a kind of friendly fury. Now all this kind of staggering laughter and terrible plenitude of life happens to be outside Mr. Bernard Shaw’s purview altogether. Mr. Bernard Shaw, as I have said before, is perfectly grave and reasonable about this matter; he is too grave; he is too reasonable. It is not Mr. Bernard Shaw who is making game of Shakespeare at all. On the contrary, it is Shakespeare who is making game of Mr. Bernard Shaw, pelting him with preposterous words, deluging him with a kind of divine dribble, hurling at him huge jokes so simple and so stupid that only the giants can understand them.
I know quite well that this is foolishness in the eyes of Mr. Shaw. I know quite well that he would say that this is a dribble which is by no means divine. But that is merely because what I say is true, that he has left out of him for some reason or other this almost animal joy of self-expression which is the main basis of all song. A great many of the most able and most indispensable of geniuses of the world have an advantage which arises in this way from defect. Many very great men are most great because of some qualities that they have not got. If you suddenly took St. Paul’s Cathedral off the top of Ludgate-hill we should all see the rest of Ludgate-hill with a splendid and startling clearness, as if it had been made that moment, as if we had never seen it before. In the same way, if we take out of the mind of a man an essential human quality, it may often happen that what we leave behind is sometimes something like inspiration. A prophet may sometimes be an ordinary man minus an ordinary quality. Thus, Schopenhauer saw the vast cosmic unity of the will to live outside him for the simple reason that he had not got it inside him. Thus, Carlyle made it possible for us not to be contented with mere smug utilitarianism and mechanical politics, simply because he happened to be lacking in that vital and essential human quality which enables a man to be contented with anything. Thus, Maeterlinck has been enabled to express the primal fear which lies behind all living merely because he has never gained the masculine firmness, and so never lost the boyish. Thus, again, Tolstoy has been enabled to see all the blows which fall on mankind by having himself an insane notion that it is wicked to strike a blow. Thus, lastly, Mr. Shaw has been enabled to give a living and startling photograph of the prose of our existence through the simple fact that, with all his talents, he does not possess an ear for its poetry. He has one half of human sanity to perfection; he has plenty of commonsense. But he has not the other half of sanity at all: he has no common nonsense.
(Daily News, April 15, 1905)
I think, quite seriously, that it was like Mr. Shaw’s generosity to say, even in the heat of debate, that I was as good as the Elizabethans. But once having uttered that magnanimous but insane opinion, I think it is rather hard that I should be flung down from the dizzy height for the reason given. I think it hard that he should discover that I am not as good as the Elizabethans merely because I did not go to his lecture. After all, the Elizabethans did not go to his lecture. And I assure him most earnestly that the obstacle which prevented me from having the pleasure I had promised myself was quite as insurmountable as any slight difficulty which the Elizabethans could advance as an excuse.
It is quite true that I was absent, owing to indisposition. It is equally true that Mr. Shaw and I were both absent, owing to inclination, from the South African War. But I do not think that this prevented us giving our opinions on the subject or from conducting, if I remember right, an animated correspondence on it in these columns. If Mr. Shaw really means that nobody has any right to speak of a lecture unless he has physically heard the lecture and physically seen the lecturer, then the results are rather serious. But I think that there is a great deal in Mr. Shaw’s contention in this matter. I fancy the world is really governed neither by acts nor words; it is governed by tones of voice. We shall never have real justice in a law court until the witness is obliged not merely to repeat the words, but to imitate the special and indefinable squeak or grunt with which the words were uttered. I can imagine that a man might say, for instance, “I’ll be the death of Uncle Herbert yet,” and the thing not sound like a threat of murder or anything at all resembling it. And in the same way I can quite imagine that when Mr. Shaw, in his admirable Irish voice, said that As You Like It was romantic nonsense, the remark did not seem to be the unromantic nonsense that it looks in print.
But if Mr. Shaw is really going to adopt this very defensible principle that everything ought to be tested by the personal experience of an auditor, then he must give up altogether the greater part of his present politics. He must give up all this talk about world states and large combinations. World states cannot come to his lectures. Large combinations cannot hear his admirable Irish voice. World combinations and world empires will only hear of Mr. Shaw and his message through journalism. That is how I heard of Mr. Shaw’s lecture; and apparently Mr. Shaw distrusts that medium, and says that it has misrepresented him. If this is so, he will, in any conceivable world state, be misrepresented all over the world. The only state which is to some extent governed by the tones of voice (that is, by reality) is the small state, the small nationality. I salute a convert to the small nationality. They are coming in fast.
But, as a matter of fact, Mr. Shaw has fallen into a preliminary mistake. I was not criticising his lecture, and I never professed to do so. I knew long before he ever delivered it that he had expressed a view of Shakespeare which placed that poet lower in the scheme of criticism than he is usually placed. I suggested an explanation of this fact. I suggested that the presence among most people of a greater admiration of Shakespeare and the presence in Mr. Shaw of a less admiration of him was due to a certain psychological trait in Mr. Shaw which makes him unresponsive to a tone which is very specially a tone of Shakespeare. I did not, as a matter of fact, hear Mr. Shaw’s lecture, and I did not, as a matter of fact, criticise it. But now that I have heard the correct version of it from Mr. Shaw himself, I will proceed to criticise it with considerable joy.
Mr. Shaw numbers his theses about Shakespeare. With the first four of them, which are purely biographical, I have no quarrel. With the fifth, which is partly critical, the quarrel begins.
5. Mr. Shaw maintains that Shakespeare wrote As You Like It because he found that romantic nonsense paid, and gave it its title as an expression of contempt for the public taste. I say Shakespeare wrote romantic plays because Shakespeare was romantic; and I say that romantic plays paid because Man is romantic. In these undemocratic days we cannot grasp the possibility of the great man enjoying the same things as the ordinary man. Shakespeare enjoyed the same romance as the ordinary man, just as he enjoyed the same beer. And if Mr. Shaw really wished to compare himself with Shakespeare (which I think he never did) the comparison is really very simple. Mr. Shaw may be quite as extraordinary a man as Shakespeare; but he is only an extraordinary man. Shakespeare, like all the heroes, was an extraordinary man and an ordinary man too.
As for the title As You Like It, Mr. Shaw is reading an ingenious priggishness into what is really one of a welter of wild and careless Elizabethan titles. The point is not whether, in the Elizabethan spirit, As You Like It meant exactly the same as What You Will. The point is whether in the Elizabethan spirit either of them meant anything, except a sort of hilarious bosh. Anyone who knows the Elizabethan drama knows that it is strewn with such reckless titles, and a man who tried to find a critical meaning in each of them would end in an asylum. To take the first that comes, I think there is a play called “If it be not good the devil is in it.” Perhaps Mr. Shaw thinks that is a grave expression of the author’s satisfaction with his work. Mr. Shaw is so anti-Elizabethan that he makes the Elizabethans sensible even where they meant to be silly.
6. I feel the limits of my column closing in upon me; some of Mr. Shaw’s errors I shall have to defer to next week. But error No. 6 is a peculiarly fascinating one, and really is the master-error of the whole Shavian criticism. Mr. Shaw says that in manner nothing could be done better than As You Like It, but in matter he himself would never do anything so bad. When I read this, I saw suddenly how simple is the whole mistake. I can only draw Mr. Shaw’s attention to the fact that As You Like It is poetry. What can anybody mean by talking of the matter or manner of a poem? I will give Mr. Shaw three lines out of As You Like It from the exquisite and irrational song of Hymen at the end:
Then is there mirth in Heaven
When earthly things made even
Atone together.
Limit the matter to the single incomparable line, “When earthly things made even.” And I defy Mr. Shaw to say which is matter and which is manner. The matter is quite as artistic as the manner, and the manner is quite as solid and spiritual as the matter. The meaning is essential to the words; the words would not be so good if they happened to mean, “There are six tom-cats in the back garden.” But the words are quite equally essential to the meaning. If the words, “When earthly things made even” were presented to us in the form of, “When terrestrial affairs are reduced to an equilibrium,” the meaning would not merely have been spoilt, the meaning would have entirely disappeared. This identity between the matter and the manner is simply the definition of poetry. The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say. When Shakespeare says (in one of the long philosophical speeches which Mr. Shaw does not quote because they do not happen to be pessimistic),
For valour is not Love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides—
it is difficult, or rather impossible, to use any other language to express what he conveys. You cannot convey a sense of sunrise and an ancient hope and the colours of the ends of the earth. But if Mr. Shaw thinks that the lines mean, “Is not the sexual instinct like Hercules in the matter of velour, and is it not like him in the garden of the Hesperides and climbing a tree?” I can assure him most sincerely of his mistake.
(Daily News, April 22, 1905)
On The Alleged Pessimism of Shakespeare
It is certainly quite curious to notice how old superstitions cling to the corners of the world. In dark and outlying places there are still even in this age of an imagined enlightenment the weirdest beliefs.
Let me take an example. I saw the other day in a newspaper, I am not sure that it was not this newspaper, the report of the examination of some Irish peasant who told a magistrate that he had had on a particular night seen what looked like fires and figures dancing, and that he believed it to be the fairies. Will it be credited that the magistrate broke out into expressions of the most astonishing anger, telling the man that the thing was nonsense, that he did not believe the tale, and implying, though not verbally stating, that he thought it impossible? Here was a man of the twentieth century, in the conventional sense of the term at least, an educated man, a man living I admit in an out-of-the-way district, but still a man who must have mixed to some extent with the men of the modern world, and he actually clings to the queer old belief that fairies cannot possibly exist. Nor do I think that his attitude was a mere affectation of the reactionary or obscurantist spirit; a dandified and half-ironical Toryism such as is too common among the more frivolous of our young men today. I really believe that it was a case of the genuine traditional survival of the old materialistic legend. I really believe that he really believed that a belief in fairies was irrational. Of course he, like anybody else, would be stumped and silenced finally if he were asked to give any sort of argument or logical reason why there should not be spirits in the universe other than man. But then this asking for an argument or a logical reason is by its nature a somewhat insolent and unamiable method for us to pursue when we are dealing with any of these dark, but delicate prejudices of simple folk.
For my part, I think the Irish peasant was to blame for thus in an almost unfeeling manner flaunting his much deeper psychological knowledge and his much wider psychological experience in the face of a man who may have been none the less honourable and wise because he happened to have a fad of not believing in the fairies. There will not be many of that good old company left soon, if spiritual science goes on as it is going at present. And I think we might respect their genial autumn. But the explanation of the peasant, whether justifiable or not in the particular circumstances in which he was placed, served indirectly one excellent purpose. It reminded me of the subject of fairies. And in fairies and the natural history of fairies is to be found the true view of the subject. I had no space to discuss last week the subject which Mr. Shaw raised at the end of his string of pregnant paragraphs—I mean the subject of the optimism or pessimism of Shakespeare.
With Mr. Shaw’s contention that Shakespeare was not primarily a very positive teacher, or even a man with a very definite doctrinal view of life, I am somewhat disposed to agree. To live in the thick of the Renaissance and the Reformation was to live in the thick of a scepticism and philosophical confusion as great, if not greater, than our own. He had a great deal of traditional and inherent religious emotion, and what there was of it was mainly Catholic. He talked a great deal of rather futile rhetorical scepticism, and all that was purely Renaissance. With some such reservations I should agree with Mr. Shaw if he said that Shakespeare had no philosophical creed. But I disagree with him entirely when he attempts to represent that Shakespeare had the wrong philosophical creed. I deny altogether that Shakespeare was a pessimist; the worst that you can say of him is that he was a poet.
The instance chosen by Mr. Shaw to prove the pessimism of Shakespeare, the “out brief candle” soliloquy, seems a curious instance to select. Surely it cannot have escaped Mr. Shaw that this speech has a special and definite dramatic value, a dramatic value so special and definite that it absolves one from all necessity to find in it any philosophical meaning at all. It is a speech by Macbeth just before his defeat and destruction; that is to say, it is a speech made by a wicked and wasted human soul confronted by his own colossal failure. If Shakespeare had been as much of an optimist as Walt Whitman, and had wished to make that play artistic, he would have made that speech pessimistic. The speech is not a metaphysical statement at all; it is an emotional exclamation. Mr. Shaw has no right at all to call Shakespeare a pessimist for having written the words “out, out, brief candle”; he might as well call Shakespeare a champion of the ideal of celibacy for having written the words, “Get thee to the nunnery.” He might as well call Shakespeare a philosophical apologist for the duel for having written the words, “Kill Claudio.” It is not Shakespeare’s fault that, having to write pessimism for the purpose of a theatrical point, he happened to write much better pessimism than the people who are silly enough to be pessimists.
I could find many speeches in Shakespeare, philosophical or semi-philosophical, criticisms of life or descriptions of humanity, which have the happier note, and could be set over against the soliloquy of Macbeth—Biron’s speech on love in Love’s Labour’s Lost, several speeches of Portia, one of Orlando, and so on. But I do not think that I should attach much importance to them, any more than I attach much importance to the speeches called pessimistic. I do not think that Shakespeare meant any of these speeches as statements of his complete convictions. I am not sure whether in this exact sense he had any complete convictions. But another thing he had which is worth a word in conclusion. He had an atmosphere or spirit—an atmosphere not confined to him but common in some degree to the whole of the England before the Puritans. And about this atmosphere or spirit there is one particular thing to be remarked. It can be remarked best by simply reading such a play as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The quality I mean may be called the comic supernatural. The greater part of that world, like the more thinking part of our modern world, believed in a general way in the existence of things deeper and higher than man himself, in energies beyond his energy, in destinies beyond his ken. In short, they believed in gods, in devils; and they also believed in fairies. We have mysticism in the modern world, but all our mysticism is sad mysticism; at the best it is serious mysticism; it is never a farcical mysticism. We believe in devils most firmly of the three; that can easily be seen in our sombre modern fiction. We believe in gods to some extent—in moderation. But it is our tendency, or has been until lately our tendency, not to believe in fairies with a proper firmness. We never think of any energies in the universe being actually merrier than we; though it comes quite easy to us to think of energies which are grimmer. In this larger and looser sense, then, Shakespeare, or rather Shakespeare’s England, was the very reverse of pessimistic. It thought of the universe itself as being capable of a sort of lightness. It thought sometimes of the world itself as going round like a boy’s humming-top. Now, if we dream of the ultimate mysteries the effect is generally at least a sombre one. Our Midsummer Night’s Dream is uncommonly like a nightmare.
(Daily News, April 29, 1905)
The Realities of Romantic Drama
Shaw and all the other Ibsenites were fond of insisting that a defect in the romantic drama was its tendency to end with wedding-bells. Against this they set the modern drama of middle-age, the drama which described marriage itself instead of its poetic preliminaries. Now if Bernard Shaw had been more patient with popular tradition, more prone to think that there might be some sense in its survival, he might have seen this particular problem much more clearly. The old playwrights have left us plenty of plays of marriage and middle-age. Othello is as much about what follows the wedding-bells as The Doll’s House. Macbeth is about a middle-aged couple as much as Little Eyolf. But if we ask ourselves what is the real difference, we shall, I think, find that it can fairly be stated thus. The old tragedies of marriage, though not love stories, are like love stories in this, that they work up to some act or stroke which is irrevocable as marriage is irrevocable; to the fact of death or of adultery.
(“The Philosopher,” George Bernard Shaw)
It may often be remarked that mathematicians love and understand music more than they love or understand poetry. Bernard Shaw is in much the same condition; indeed, in attempting to do justice to Shakespeare’s poetry, he always calls it “word music.” It is not difficult to explain this special attachment of the mere logician to music. The logician, like every other man on earth, must have sentiment and romance in his existence; in every man’s life, indeed, which can be called a life at all, sentiment is the most solid thing. But if the extreme logician turns for his emotions to poetry, he is exasperated and bewildered by discovering that the words of his own trade are used in an entirely different meaning. He conceives that he understands the word “visible,” and then finds Milton applying it to darkness, in which nothing is visible. He supposes that he understands the word “hide,” and then finds Shelley talking of a poet hidden in the light. He has reason to believe that he understands the common word “hung”; and then William Shakespeare, Esquire, of Stratford-on-Avon, gravely assures him that the tops of the tall sea waves were hung with deafening clamours on the slippery clouds. That is why the common arithmetician prefers music to poetry. Words are his scientific instruments. It irritates him that they should be anyone else’s musical instruments. He is willing to see men juggling, but not men juggling with his own private tools and possessions—his terms. It is then that he turns with an utter relief to music. Here is all the same fascination and inspiration, all the same purity and plunging force as in poetry; but not requiring any verbal confession that light conceals things or that darkness can be seen in the dark. Music is mere beauty; it is beauty in the abstract, beauty in solution. It is a shapeless and liquid element of beauty, in which a man may really float, not indeed affirming the truth, but not denying it. Bernard Shaw, as I have already said, is infinitely far above all such mere mathematicians and pedantic reasoners; still his feeling is partly the same. He adores music because it cannot deal with romantic terms either in their right or their wrong sense. Music can be romantic without reminding him of Shakespeare and Walter Scott, with whom he has had personal quarrels. Music can be Catholic without reminding him verbally of the Catholic Church, which he has never seen, and is sure he does not like. …
Shaw’s attack on Shakespeare, though exaggerated for the fun of the thing, was not by any means the mere folly or firework paradox that has been supposed. He meant what he said; what was called his levity was merely the laughter of a man who enjoyed saying what he meant—an occupation which is indeed one of the greatest larks in life. Moreover, it can honestly be said that Shaw did good by shaking the mere idolatry of Him of Avon. That idolatry was bad for England; it buttressed our perilous self-complacency by making us think that we alone had, not merely a great poet, but the one poet above criticism. It was bad for literature; it made a minute model out of work that was really a hasty and faulty masterpiece. And it was bad for religion and morals that there should be so huge a terrestrial idol, that we should put such utter and unreasoning trust in any child of man. It is true that it was largely through Shaw’s own defects that he beheld the defects of Shakespeare. But it needed some one equally prosaic to resist what was perilous in the charm of such poetry; it may not be altogether a mistake to send a deaf man to destroy the rock of the sirens.
This attitude of Shaw illustrates of course all three of the divisions or aspects to which the reader’s attention has been drawn. It was partly the attitude of the Irishman objecting to the Englishman turning his mere artistic taste into a religion; especially when it was a taste merely taught him by his aunts and uncles. In Shaw’s opinion (one might say) the English do not really enjoy Shakespeare or even admire Shakespeare; one can only say, in the strong colloquialism, that they swear by Shakespeare. He is a mere god; a thing to be invoked. And Shaw’s whole business was to set up the things which were to be sworn by as things to be sworn at. It was partly again the revolutionist in pursuit of pure novelty, hating primarily the oppression of the past, almost hating history itself. For Bernard Shaw the prophets were to be stoned after, and not before, men had built their sepulchres. There was a Yankee smartness in the man which was irritated at the idea of being dominated by a person dead for three hundred years; like Mark Twain, he wanted a fresher corpse.
These two motives there were, but they were small compared with the other. It was the third part of him, the Puritan, that was really at war with Shakespeare. He denounced that playwright almost exactly as any contemporary Puritan coming out of a conventicle in a steeple-crowned hat and stiff bands might have denounced the playwright coming out of the stage door of the old Globe Theatre.
This is not a mere fancy; it is philosophically true. A legend has run round the newspapers that Bernard Shaw offered himself as a better writer than Shakespeare. This is false and quite unjust; Bernard Shaw never said anything of the kind. The writer whom he did say was better than Shakespeare was not himself, but Bunyan. And he justified it by attributing to Bunyan a virile acceptance of life as a high and harsh adventure, while in Shakespeare he saw nothing but profligate pessimism, the vanitas vanitatum [“vanity of vanities” from Ecclesiastes 1:2] of a disappointed voluptuary. According to this view Shakespeare was always saying, “Out, out, brief candle,” because his was only a ballroom candle; while Bunyan was seeking to light such a candle as by God’s grace should never be put out. …
His misunderstanding of Shakespeare arose largely from the fact that he is a Puritan, while Shakespeare was spiritually a Catholic. The former is always screwing himself up to see truth; the latter is often content that truth is there. The Puritan is only strong enough to stiffen; the Catholic is strong enough to relax. Shaw, I think has entirely misunderstood the pessimistic passages of Shakespeare. They are flying moods which a man with a fixed faith can afford to entertain. That all is vanity, that life is dust and love is ashes, these are frivolities, these are jokes that a Catholic can afford to utter. He knows well enough that there is a life that is not dust and a love that is not ashes. But just as he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the matter of enjoyment, so he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the matter of melancholy. The sad exuberances of Hamlet are merely like the glad exuberances of Falstaff. This is not conjecture; it is the text of Shakespeare. In the very act of uttering his pessimism, Hamlet admits that it is a mood and not the truth. Heaven is a heavenly thing, only to him it seems a foul congregation of vapours. Man is the paragon of animals, only to him he seems a quintessence of dust. Hamlet is quite the reverse of a sceptic. He is a man whose strong intellect believes much more than his weak temperament can make vivid to him. But this power of knowing a thing without feeling it, this power of believing a thing without experiencing it, this is an old Catholic complexity, and the Puritan has never understood it. Shakespeare confesses his moods (mostly by the mouths of villains and failures), but he never sets up his moods against his mind. His cry of vanitas vanitatum is itself only a harmless vanity. Readers may not agree with my calling him Catholic with a big C; but they will hardly complain of my calling him catholic with a small one. And that is here the principal point. Shakespeare was not in any sense a pessimist; he was, if anything, an optimist so universal as to be able to enjoy even pessimism. And this is exactly where he differs from the Puritan. The true Puritan is not squeamish: the true Puritan is free to say “Damn it!” But the Catholic Elizabethan was free (on passing provocation) to say “Damn it all!”
(“The Critic,” George Bernard Shaw)
Many critics of my own modest writings, as I have had occasion to note elsewhere, have charged me with an excessive love of alliteration. To these it would be apparent that the subject of Shakespeare and Shaw has been created out of the void to satisfy this appetite; whichever of the two surnames I am supposed to have invented or assimilated to the other. Of course there is always the possibility of avoiding it by saying that the works of Shakespeare were written by Bacon; or (what seems to me rather more probable) the works of Shaw written by Sidney Webb. But the truth is, of course, that the two names have been brought together long ago by the deliberate and provocative policy of the bearer of one of them. Shaw has frequently compared himself with Shakespeare; Shakespeare was so unfortunate as to have few opportunities of comparing himself with Shaw. This was perhaps what some of the Shavians have meant by saying that Shakespeare wrote under the disadvantages of his age. This may be, in some respects, true; but it is less universally recognised that Shakespeare wrote under all the advantages of his age and Shaw under all the almost crushing disadvantages of his.
The real truth about this is as much obscured by the conventional or authoritarian appreciation of Shakespeare as by any pert or juvenile depreciation of Shakespeare; let alone depreciation of Shaw. The view of those who professed to be most disgusted at the Shavian impertinence of twenty years ago, the view of those who constituted themselves the guardians of the sacred Swan of Avon against the impudent little boy to whom all swans were geese—this view was in fact equally mistaken about the older and the younger dramatists, about the poet and about the critic. The swan was none the less a swan because, having sung its swan-song and died, it was worshipped largely by geese. But the point is that the whole conception in both cases was wrong. The conservatives regarded Shakespeare as a sort of earnest and elevating Modern Thinker, with a Noble Brow; a hero according to Carlyle and talking in the grand style as laid down by Matthew Arnold. And that was all wrong. The same conservatives regarded Bernard Shaw as a flippant and frivolous mocker of all holy things, refusing to kiss the Pope’s toe and preferring to pull the poet’s leg. And that was all wrong. To sum it up in two pretty adequate parallels; they made the appalling mistake of supposing that Shakespeare was like Goethe and of supposing that Shaw was like Mephistopheles. But Shakespeare was not a German, in spite of the unblessed conclusion of German scholarship in the matter; he was the very last man in the world to be cut out for a German hero or a German god. And Shaw is not a devil; far less an imp. The truth is that of the two, it is Shakespeare who is frivolous, or who is at least capable of being irresponsible and gay. It is Shaw, in spite of his real humour, who is much more cut out to be a Goethe, an earnest sage and seer, worshipped by German audiences.
The reason of the greater richness and depth of Shakespeare’s gaiety, when he is gay, is in the fact that he came at the end of an epoch of civilization and inherited, however indirectly, all the best of a very ancient culture. The reason for the greater earnestness, or what might even be called the sharper morality, in Shaw and some modern moralists, is that they came after a sort of barbaric interruption that had cut off the countries of the north from Classicism and from Humanism. Goethe was serious, because he had to struggle to recover the lost civilization for the Germans. He had to stretch himself in order to balance and stagger before he could stand upright. But Shakespeare, though he had small Latin and less Greek, had much more in him of the Greek spirit and the Latin order than most of the moderns have ever had; because he received it through a tradition and an atmosphere that had been clear and uninterrupted for some time. For instance, all that light Renaissance pessimism is perfectly incomprehensible to our heavy realistic pessimists. Schopenhauer or Hardy would never be able to understand how cheerfully an Elizabethan said that all roses must fade or that life is brief as a butterfly. Modern sceptics could never understand the subtlety and spiritual complexity with which a Humanist of that age will be talking one moment about Adonis or Apollo, as if they really existed, and the next moment be acknowledging, like Michael Angelo in his last sonnets, that nothing truly exists except Christ upon the Cross. The modern free-thinkers are more simple and in a sense more serious than this. It is they who say that life is real, life is earnest; though curiously enough it is now generally they who go on to say that the grave is certainly its goal.
The Renaissance came late to England; and Shakespeare came late even in the English Renaissance. Only the brilliant accident of a still more belated inheritor, John Milton, makes Shakespeare seem to us to stand somewhere in the middle. But the Humanism, the Hellenism and the pagan mythology mixed with Catholic theology, upon which he fed, had been flowing together from their Italian fountains since the fifteenth century; and long before those great voices of antiquity, the voice of Virgil in poetry and of Aristotle in philosophy, had spoken directly to the whole Christendom of the Middle Ages. Shakespeare was therefore familiar with a mixture of all sorts of moods, memories and fancies, and was not sharply hostile to any of them, save perhaps a little to the Puritans. He could consider a Republican hero of Plutarch, a mediaeval king, shining with the sacred chrism as with a nimbus, a pagan misanthrope cursing the world, a Franciscan friar cheerfully and charitably reuniting lovers, a god of the Greek oracles, a goblin of the English country lanes, a fool who was happy or a wise man who was foolish—all without setting one against the other, or thinking there was any particular conflict in the traditions; or asking himself whether he was Classic or Romantic or Mediaevalist or Modernist or black or white or buff or blue. Culture was not one strained agony or controversy. That is what I mean by a man inheriting a whole civilization and having the immense advantage of being born three hundred years ago.
By the time that Bernard Shaw was born, the national and religious divisions of Europe had been dug so deep, and had so long sustained what was at once a vigilant rivalry and a fight in the dark, that this sort of varied and varying balance had become almost impossible. European culture was no longer a many-coloured and stratified thing; it had been split into great fragments by earthquakes. Whatever virtues it might possess, and in a man like Bernard Shaw it does possess some of the most vital of all public virtues, it had produced that curious sort of concentration which did in fact bring forth, first the Shakespearian idolatry by the end of the eighteenth century, and then the Shavian iconoclasm by the end of the nineteenth. Both were not only serious, but entirely serious; in other words, neither was really Shakespearian. Hence arises the paradox upon which I would remark here; that the relations between the idol and the iconoclast are really the very opposite to those which seemed obvious to the idolaters in the days of my youth. It is rather Mr. Bernard Shaw who really has the gravity of the god, or at least of the prophet or oracle of the god; seeing visions of the future and speaking words of the fate of nations. And it is really Shakespeare who passes by in the woods with the elusive laughter of a Faun, and a mystery that has something of mockery.
(Shakespeare Review, May 1928)