The Voltaire of Our Age

The body of his drama is an enlivening as his prefaces and interviews. Zweig and others have called him the Voltaire of our age. His intention was certainly to wipe out the infamous, and in using the stage as his stamping-ground he was following Ibsen and the lesser men of the '80s. Only Shaw smiled where others wept.

The Plays Unpleasant, for instance, are all good entertainment. His protestant if not rationalist, Joan, who identifies God with "My own commonsense," is not a remote and unreal tragic heroine, like the Dame aux Camelias or even Mrs. Alving. Like his idol Shakespeare, Shaw took great liberties with times and climes, but the moral was always one for the here and now. No-one could mistake Major Barbara for a mere sneer at Salvationism: another and far more powerful religion was the writer's concern: The Gospel of Saint Andrew Undershaft, munitions magnate. And his story of Androcles is treated avowedly "as all such persecutions are: an attempt to suppress a propaganda that seemed to threaten the interests involved in the established law and order."

His plays were his big guns. Through them to an extent we cannot know his philosophy has become a great material force in our world. His small fire was just as effective on the young: his cryptic comments on this and that. New Zealanders might well recall his 1934 advice: "See that everybody in N.Z. has plenty of butter to his bread. Then stop producing butter and produce something else." (Voice: "What?") "Brains perhaps." (Voice: "They take all the bright brains away.") "Do as Russia does, and don't let them go." And we up here might remember his comment on New Zealand's colleges. "Universities where Moslem and Hindu religions, Buddhism, Shinto, Communism, Fascism, capitalism, and all the forces really alive in the world to-day, are not discussed, are not universities at all: they are booby-traps, and should be turned into mental hospitals."

Shaw wrote once: "This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognised by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap-heap; the being a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."

He has done right by his own life. Dame Sybil Thorndyke, a close coworker, friend and fellow-Socialist, said the day he died: "I don't think it is sad. After a life of such terrific usefulness, there must be some sort of glory in it all."

There still is. That is his finest epitaph.

—Partisan.