Volume 2, Number 4 · April 2, 1964
Pshaw!
By Marvin Mudrick
On Language
by George Bernard Shaw, edited by Abraham Tauber
Philosophical Library, 205 pp., $4.75
The Religious Speeches of Bernard Shaw
edited by Warren S. Smith
Pennsylvania State University, 104 pp., $3.50
G.B.S. and the Lunatic
by Lawrence Langner
Atheneum, 313 pp., $6.95
The Loves of George Bernard Shaw
by C.G.L. DuCann
Funk & Wagnalls, 300 pp., $5.00
A Guide to the Plays of Bernard Shaw
by C.B. Purdom
Crowell, 344 pp., $4.95
Almost the easiest thing to do with Shaw is to compile a list of his errors and inadequacies as playwright, pamphleteer, vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist, lover, husband, human being, self-confessed great man. Quite the easiest thing is to read him. Except his plays, that is, which (not to embarrass Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, and the other big boys) are to Volpone, The Country Wife, The Way of the World, even The Importance of Being Earnest, as Paul Henry Lang's music criticism is to Shaw's: not the difference between tenth and first, but between nothing and something. The wrangle about Shaw's reputation dashes off on the track of this false scent; but Shaw is no more a dramatist than Voltaire. Intelligence having been banished from the English theater since 1700 (the sole anomaly is The Importance of Being Earnest, that fantasia on muffins and cucumber sandwiches), Shaw's mere rigid simulacra of intelligence on the stage dazed audiences into the hallucination that they were participating in a renaissance. The point is not that Shaw's plays are tracts, but that they are so much duller, clumsier, more banal than his undramatized tracts, prefaces, reminiscences, feuilletons on the arts, letters to newspapers and random correspondents. Any five consecutive pages of Shaw's four volumes of music criticism are superior in wit, humor, taste, discrimination, accuracy, robustness, exuberance, and human understanding to Saint Joan, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Candida, Major Barbara, Heart-break House, The Devil's Disciple, and The Doctor's Dilemma singly, in combination, or quintessentially distilled. Eight years after his centenary, Shaw continues to elude judicious criticism (begging Eric Bentley's pardon) because the critics are either bemused or horrified by the wooden Leviathan of his drama. Meanwhile the Shaw bibliography proliferates. Of these five books, three are the most recent ones about him, the others belated gleanings from his polemical output.
Review, 3134 words
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