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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 14, No. 12. March 15, 1951

G. B. S. — Smasher of Idols, Builder of New Worlds

page 6

G. B. S.

Smasher of Idols, Builder of New Worlds

"We can hardly grieve at the passing of Bernard Shaw at 94," said Pandit Nehru on November 3, "but Shaw had become so much a part of the mental climate of our times, that his death comes as a blow."

How did Shaw become part of the mental climate of our times?

Two years ago Joad described the tremendous impact of Shaw on the young men of the 1910's who heard him speak. "Shaw came home to me with the effect of a revelation," he wrote. From public school and the idle rich between which his life was divided "with the rapier of his wit and the bludgeoning of his argument Shaw delivered me . . . He stripped them of their trappings . . . A whole house of cards came fluttering about my ears, never, thank God, to be rebuilt."

Millions of young people who could meet Shaw only through print, have at some time felt that impact. At 14, I first read Androcles and the Lion and its shocking preface where Jesus is described as "arrogant, dictatorial . . . . obsessed with a conviction of his divinity," and where Shaw remarks that "Whether you think Jesus was God or not, you must admit that he was a first-rate political economist"—that is, after proving to his own satisfaction that Jesus was an Ultimate Socialist.

To an adolescent Christian faith, this was TNT.

That was how Shaw did it.

Low once said of cartoonists, that "Their function is not to please but to provoke; for in this way they contribute to progress by shocking the indifferent into action and stirring fools out of their folly." This Shaw saw an the writer's function,

Stirring Fools Out of Their Folly

From his earliest years, Shaw was a convinced Socialist, and he was passionately concerned about converting the world. But being an Irishman, he set about evangelising in rather out-of-the-ordinary ways. Seeing reality himself very clearly, he felt he could afford to distort it in his art sufficiently to present the world with something that would startle them into thinking. British Communist Party Chairman, Palme Dutt, describes a conversation concerning the Versailles Treaty which took place in 1919: "Walking with Shaw, I asked him his opinion of it. He said, "The Germans are prodigiously lucky; they are freed from the burden of armaments, and will forge ahead while we shall be ruined . . .' With all the impetuous crudity of youth I set out to teach my grandfather, and declared: "That may be witty but it is not true,' and argued that Versailles placed heavy burdens on the Germans, against which they would sooner or later revolt. Shaw looked at me compassionately, as at a neophyte, and said, "That may be true, but it is not witty, and if you only speak the truth in England, however brilliantly, no-one will listen to you.' . . . He explained how a young Socialist must . . . reach out to the millions by mixing up the truth with a fantastic amount of nonsense and conversational fictions, which would enable them to swallow the truth without knowing it."

That was Shaw's aim, and it very largely succeeded.

Shaw himself was young once, believe it or not. He remained young in some respects to the last. His enthusiasms for Darwin and Marx sprung in the first days of there being such enthusiasms. "We were quite sure," he wrote in the preface to Methuselah,". . . that whatever lingering superstition might have daunted the men of the 18th century, we Darwinians could do without God, and had made a good riddance of Him." And in his essay on The Webbs, he says: "When Karl Marx first published the facts as to the condition to which capitalism had reduced the masses, it was like lifting the lid off hell. Capitalism has not yet recovered from the shock of that revelation, and never will."

Ifor Evans, forty years Shaw's junior, likened the jolt of the Bolshevik Revolution on his generation to that of the Bastille on the Romantics. It was as great to 60-year-old Shaw. He saw Socialism coming true. As he said later: "The two hyperfabian Fabians, Webb and Shaw, have stuck to their guns like Fox in the French Revolution, whilst the sentimental socialists have bolted in all directions from Stalin, screaming, like Saint Peter, 'I know not the man'."

His enthusiasm of youth never faded. Even for Beethoven, Shakespeare, Blake and Shelley, he never lost the dream of the young man. Shelley, in particular, the god of all young Socialists, had a lasting influence on him. Not only the poet's humanism and revolution, but his teetotalism and his vegeterianism, Shaw took him for keeps.

As Shaw boasts, the cynicism of most middle-aged Fabians never overcame him. He loved to blast romanticism-for-its-own sake, but in the socialist sense, Shaw was always himself an incurable romanticist. In the Daily Herald two years ago he wrote: "Our Labour front bench oratory is reaching a point at which it will be impossible for any Socialist who knows what he is talking about to . . . even remain in the Labour Party."

Forty years before, he had written:

"A House of Commons consisting of 660 gentlemen and 10 workers will order the soldier to take money from the people for the landlord. A House consisting of 660 workers and 10 gentlemen will, unless the 660 are fools, order the soldiers to take money from the landlords to buy land for the people."

In the interim he would certainly have added "or rogues" to that "fools." In Wellington in 1934. he asked "Why is it that immediately a Labour man gets into Parliament he becomes no use whatever?" Mr. Peter Fraser interjected, "As a Labour M.P. I cannot accept that." And G.B.S. replied, "As a Labour M.P. you know it is true." Workers or gentlemen, the landlords suffered not.

On the same visit, asked "Do you consider that a dictatorship of the proletariat with socialism, as in Russia, is the same as dictatorships in Germany and Italy where production is in private hands?" he replied, "You have to choose between a dictatorship of the proletariat and a dictatorship of the plutocracy." No middle-road confusion of fascism and socialism ever confused Shaw, though his whole political testament has been called a "bundle of confusion."

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."

The New St. Bernard

The New St. Bernard

One feels that he must go on directing things, even when he has finished with us here.

August 28, 1935

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.