REVOLUTIONS HAVE NEVER LIGHTENED THE BURDEN OF TYRANNY. THEY HAVE ONLY SHIFTED IT TO ANOTHER SHOULDER.

Although this is a well-known quotation for most Shavians, I must admit that I felt compelled to write about it when I found it in an article in an edited volume entitled The State of Social Progress of Islamic Societies (p. 572). The world Shaw lived in saw its fair share of revolutions, and the world today seems to be headed in a similar direction, especially in some Islamic societies. It should come as no surprise, then, that this should be the closing words of the foreword to The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion.

And it is precisely the disparity between what those words meant for Shaw and his readers in the context of Man and Superman and how they have been used by different people afterwards that I would like to illustrate today. 

This fragment has been quoted by several Shaw critics, although each of them has used it to exemplify a rather different aspect. So, for example, Richard M. Ohmann (Shaw: The Style and the Man) makes a purely stylistic claim when he argues that this is one of the many examples where 

"...Shaw frequently compounds the structure of a whole piece from a set of negations. Take that quintessence of Shavianism, “The Revolutionist’s Handbook.” After a preface concluding that “Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny” (italics mine), John Tanner’s first chapter outlines the need for controlled breeding, but in doing so it begins with a denial that transfiguration of institutions is evermore than change from Tweedledum to Tweedledee, and ends with a warn­ing that the goal of breeding must be neither a race of mindless athletes nor a race of Sunday School prigs."

H.P. Hackett (Shaw: George versus Bernard), in turn, focuses on how Man and Superman reveals itself as a major turning point in Shaw's philosophy, or rather, that by then 

"He was summing up the results of twenty years' experience as a reformer, confessing failure of the old method, and trying for a new one. He looked back and said that reforms were useless till man had reformed himself, and looked forward and said that man couldn't reform himself till the Life Force had reformed him. He cleared the decks of everything else in a single sweep—or rather in a series of them called a Preface, a Philosophy, and a Revolutionist's Handbook. He did it with that magnifi­cent openness and thoroughness which is the joy and despair of his biographers—for it gives them the fullest inside information about him, and yet when they try to present it to the public, they find that it was all so much better in the original."

Outside the Shavian circles, however, there has been a motley corpus of appropriations of this quotation - sometimes stretching its original sense beyond recognition. 

So, for example, we find wild claims such as the argument found in Competition Science Vision that "having seen the iron-curtain of Stalin after the 1917 Revolution, the great English dramatist G.B. Shaw gave this lucid comment that 'Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny..." Either Shaw mastered time travel or I fail to see how this is even possible. 

Some other times (The New Management: Democracy and Enterprise are Transforming Organizations), the quotation is used as a foreboding, gloomy summary of historical evolution, without taking into consideration the ability of humankind to evolve, according to Shaw. So, for Halal

"By embracing the icon of capitalism held up by the West, communism has shed its old ideology only to submit to a new ideology. Many Russians bitterly condemn the blind faith in capitalism that now imprisons them as badly as communism used to. George Bernard Shaw put it best: Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny..."

Others have used Shaw's words to summarize the corrpution of the ideals of the French Revolution and the age of Enlightenment. Take, for instance, this passage from Violence: The Enduring Problem; or the opening quotation in Chapter III of A Cultural History of the Modern Age Vol. 2: Baroque, Rococo and Enlightenment. The bottomline is usually the same and I believe it neglects another key passage from The Revolutionist's Handbook that underscores where the real revolution lies: 

"Our only hope, then, is in evolution. We must replace the man by the superman. It is frightful for the citizen, as the years pass him, to see his own contemporaries so exactly reproduced by the younger generation, that his companions of thirty years ago have their counterparts in every city crowd, where he had to check himself repeatedly in the act of saluting as an old friend some young man to whom he is only an elderly stranger. All hope of advance dies in his bosom as he watches them: he knows that they will do just what their fathers did, and that the few voices which will still, as always before, exhort them to do something else and be something better, might as well spare their breath to cool their porridge (if they can get any). Men like Ruskin and Carlyle will preach to Smith and Brown for the sake of preaching, just as St Francis preached to the birds and St Anthony to the fishes. But Smith and Brown, like the fishes and birds, remain as they are; and poets who plan Utopias and prove that nothing is necessary for their realization but that Man should will them, perceive at last, like Richard Wagner, that the fact to be faced is that Man does not effectively will them. And he never will until he becomes Superman."

However, ascertaining what Shaw, Wagner, Nietzsche, and everybody else in the history of ideas might mean by "Superman" will have to wait for another day. 

A REVOLUTION ALWAYS SEEMS HOPELESS AND IMPOSSIBLE THE DAY BEFORE IT BREAKS OUT

A few days ago I discovered that the terrorist who was responsible for the 2011 Norway attacks had written a manifesto in which he quotes Shaw twice. The first quotation is one of the aphorisms in "Maxims for Revolutionists," one of the addenda to Man and Superman, and it reads: 

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."

The other quotation is a little bit more complex. Not only because the whole sentence has the usual convolute syntax that so many of us have grown to enjoy, but because it is part of a longer context that needs to be discussed as well. The quotation in question is the following: 

"A revolution always seems hopeless and impossible the day before it breaks out and indeed never does break out until it seems hopeless and impossible."

As many of you may remember, this fragment is from the Preface to Back to Methuselah. Specifically, it is part of the section called "The Betrayal of Western Civilization." In this section, before writing the sentence I have quoted above, Shaw is complaining about the abuses on the part of allegedly democratic governments in the form of censorship and repression (though not exclusively) because they are afraid.

"Statesmen are afraid of the suburbs, of the newspapers, of the profiteers, of the diplomatists, of the militarists, of the country houses, of the trade unions, of everything ephemeral on earth except the revolutions they are provoking; and they would be afraid of these if they were not too breaks out, and indeed never does break out until it seems hopeless and ignorant of society and history to appreciate the risk, and to know that a revolution always seems hopeless and impossible the day before it impossible; for rulers who think it possible take care to insure the risk by ruling reasonably."

In other words, what may seem like encouragement for revolutionists is actually a plea for reasonable government. This surprises no-one among Shavians, for we know Shaw was not a man of action. 

That is perhaps why Lenin called him "a good man fallen among Fabians."

That is perhaps why he decided to walk away from the Bloody Sunday riots.

That is perhaps why he joined and promoted a political (Fabian) society that was named after a Roman general that defeated Hannibal with delaying tactics.  

And that is perhaps why we find interesting connections between censorship and revolution in Shaw's writings. So, for example, we can read something to the same effect of the above in the Statement of the evidence in chief of George Bernard Shaw before the Joint-Committee on Stage Plays (1909).

"The Inquisition and the Star Chamber, which were nothing but censorships, made ruthless war on impiety and immorality. The result was once familiar to English­men, though of late years it seems to have been for­gotten. It cost England a revolution to get rid of the Star Chamber. Spain did not get rid of the Inquisition, and paid for that omission by becoming a barely third-rate power politically, and intellectually no power at all, in the Europe she had once domin­ated as the mightiest of the Christian empires."

Paradoxically (not quite), as he points out in his famous letter to H. M. Hyndman (28 April 1900), Shaw is a revolutionary himself, but a "moral revolutionary"

"I am a moral revolutionary, interested, not in the class war, but in the struggle between human vitality and the artificial system of morality, and distinguishing, not between capitalist & proletarian, but between moralist and natural historian." 

Shavians of the world, unite! 

SHAW AND ISLAM (I)

A few days ago, someone posted a question on the ISS Facebook page wondering if Bernard Shaw ever "praised Islam or Mohamed in any of his books or statements." It is no wonder someone should ask such a question, because the issue is all over the Internet. Admittedly, very few of these claims are based on known sources or sound research, as some have noted. 

At any rate, there is no gainsaying the fact that Shaw's opinions on Islam are certainly of interest to many, given that I have found more than 450 mentions of words like "Islam," "Mohammed," Mahometan," and "Muslim" - in their various forms and spellings - in Shaw's works and, more importantly, in the pieces of criticism in my database.  I will try to bring to light as much material as I possibly can, and I am sure my intelligent readers will be able to draw their own conclusions. 

Well, where do I begin? Perhaps the plays are a safe choice (there will be another entry devoted to his non-dramatic texts exclusively). Generally speaking, Shaw does not go beyond a few scattered cultural commonplaces in the text of his plays, albeit with a pinch of Shavian humor on occasion. The most trite include the phraseological "If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must come to the mountain" (The Doctor's Dilemma) and the merely descriptive, like the Egyptian doctor in The Millionairess, who is "what you call a Mahometan" and keeps "a clinic for penniless Mahometan refugees." 

More often than not, however, there is a conventional component in the references to muslims and their religious practices. Thus, in the first act of Captain Brassbound's Conversion, which takes place in "Mogador, a seaport on the west coast of Morocco," we are reminded that "Mahometans never spend money in drink." Likewise, in Man and Superman Jack Tanner urges Straker to take him to "any port from which we can sail to a Mahometan country where men are protected from women" - but not viceversa, I may add. In this play, like in the rest - as we shall see - most references to Islam are intertwined with other creeds, amidst a general sense of religious relativism, at least as regards the established religions Shaw was acquainted with. Fittingly, it is in the "Don Juan in Hell Scene" that we find this type of discussion: 

DON JUAN. That is perhaps why battles are so useless. But men never really overcome fear until they imagine they are fighting to further a universal purpose—fighting for an idea, as they call it. Why was the Crusader braver than the pirate? Because he fought, not for himself, but for the Cross. What force was it that met him with a valor as reckless as his own? The force of men who fought, not for themselves, but for Islam. They took Spain from us, though we were fighting for our very hearths and homes; but when we, too, fought for that mighty idea, a Catholic Church, we swept them back to Africa.

THE DEVIL. [ironically] What! you a Catholic, Senor Don Juan! A devotee! My congratulations.

THE STATUE. [seriously] Come come! as a soldier, I can listen to nothing against the Church.

DON JUAN. Have no fear, Commander: this idea of a Catholic Church will survive Islam, will survive the Cross, will survive even that vulgar pageant of incompetent schoolboyish gladiators which you call the Army.

THE STATUE. Juan: you will force me to call you to account for this.

DON JUAN. Useless: I cannot fence. Every idea for which Man will die will be a Catholic idea. When the Spaniard learns at last that he is no better than the Saracen, and his prophet no better than Mahomet, he will arise, more Catholic than ever, and die on a barricade across the filthy slum he starves in, for universal liberty and equality.

Similarly, in Major Barbara, Undershaft expresses an equally relativistic idea about faith with special reference to Islam when he claims that "It is cheap work converting starving men with a Bible in one hand and a slice of bread in the other. I will undertake to convert West Ham to Mahometanism on the same terms."

In addition, the social, political, and cultural nature of religion allows for hilarious scenes with a running thread of earnestness "in the womb of time." Take, for instance, the different takes on marriage that three different religions (including Islam) have, as discussed in The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles: 

HYERING. Anything fresh from London or Delhi?

SIR CHARLES. The same old songs. The Church of England wont tolerate polygamy on any terms, and insists on our prosecuting Iddy if we cannot whitewash him. Delhi declares that any attempt to persecute polygamy would be an insult to the religions of India.

PRA. The Cultural Minister at Delhi adds a postscript to say that as he has been married two hundred and thirtyfour times, and could not have lived on his salary without the dowries, the protest of the Church of England shews a great want of consideration for his position. He has a hundred and seventeen children surviving.

SIR CHARLES. Then there's a chap I never heard of, calling himself the Caliph of British Islam. He demands that Iddy shall put away all his wives except four.

HYERING. What does the Foreign Office say to that?

PRA. The Foreign Office hails it as a happy solution of a difficulty that threatened to be very serious.

There exists, however, a very peculiar element shared by a few of Shaw's plays that is worth commenting on. On two different occasions, characters of Shaw's plays foresee (or live in) a world in which Mohammedanism is the dominant religion. So, for example, Hotchkiss (Getting Married) remarks that 

HOTCHKISS. [...] I happen, like Napoleon, to prefer Mohammedanism. [Mrs George, associating   Mohammedanism with polygamy, looks at him with quick suspicion]. I believe the whole British Empire will adopt a reformed Mohammedanism before the end of the century. The character of Mahomet is congenial to me. I admire him, and share his views of life to a considerable extent.

Although Hotchkiss's speech ends with the explicit acknowledgement of "the quintessential equality of all the religions," it is also true that this idea of Islam as the official religion of the world remained in Shaw's dramatic arsenal for decades. So, for instance, part IV of Back to Methuselah (Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman) depicts a futuristic world where the long-lived want to destroy the British Commonwealth (Capital City: Baghdad) before its short-lived inhabitants destroy themselves. The British Envoy is shocked to learn that "the old uns prefer Mahometans." As the Elderly Gentleman explains: 

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [...] There can be no doubt, I am afraid, that by clinging too long to the obsolete features of the old pseudo-Christian Churches we allowed the Mahometans to get ahead of us at a very critical period of the development of the Eastern world. When the Mahometan Reformation took place, it left its followers with the enormous advantage of having the only established religion in the world in whose articles of faith any intelligent and educated person could believe.

If I may interrupt my train of thought for a second, reading Shaw makes many of the so-called "enfants terribles" of literature appear outmoded and conventional - I don't know what the hype is about. 

At any rate, I personally believe that Shaw tries to provoke his audiences when he portrays a muslim future, especially as a counterpoint to the prevailing religious (not exclusively religious) bigotry of his time - an issue that also pervades some of his plays, hence the following exchange from On the Rocks: 

SIR ARTHUR. [...] The Archbishop says "Avoid figures; and stick to the fact that Socialism would break up the family." I believe he is right: a bit of sentiment about the family always goes down well. Just jot this down for me. [Dictating] Family. Foundation of civilization.  Foundation of the empire. 

HILDA.  Will there be any Hindus or Mahometans present? 

SIR ARTHUR. No. No polygamists at the Church House. Besides, everybody knows that The Family means the British family.

Needless to say, there is a play where the religious element is so strong and the tone so serious that any reference to Islam should be considered carefully. I am talking, as you have rightly guesssed, about Saint Joan. Towards the end of Scene IV, there is a lively discussion between Cauchon and Warwick that involves several references to the muslims in the Middle Ages. Shaw's natural tendency to anachronism in his historical plays, and his habit of comparing even the most remote places and eras to the British Isles of his own lifetime, would lead anyone to believe that there is a bit of twentieth-century philosophy in what follows. In fact, as we shall see, practically all the notions that have been discussed hitherto can be found in this scene. 

To begin with, Cauchon, the man of the Church, certifies Joan's heresy on the grounds that she does not use the Church as the rightful interlocutor in her conversations with God. 

CAUCHON. [...] She sends letters to the king of England giving him God's command through her to return to his island on pain of God's vengeance, which she will execute. Let me tell you that the writing of such letters was the practice of the accursed Mahomet, the anti-Christ. Has she ever in all her utterances said one word of The Church? Never. It is always God and herself.

The idea that Mahometanism may one day be successful because it has a philosophy/creed but not a caste of clergymen seems to be turned on its head here for dramatic purposes, but it remains basically unaltered. 

Warwick, the seasoned soldier who has travelled the world, embodies the idea of religious relativism that has previously been discussed. 

WARWICK. I am a soldier, not a churchman. As a pilgrim I saw something of the Mahometans. They were not so ill-bred as I had been led to believe. In some respects their conduct compared favorably with ours.

After these words, when Cauchon reprimands him for his lack of theological knowledge and the boldness of his statement, Warwick once again stands his ground and addresses the question of religious bigotry as the basis for religious conflict - be it the Crusades or any of their present-day counterparts, I guess. 

WARWICK. [...] I am sorry you think I must be either a heretic or a blockhead because, as a travelled man, I know that the followers of Mahomet profess great respect for our Lord, and are more ready to forgive St Peter for being a fisherman than your lordship is to forgive Mahomet for being a camel driver. But at least we can proceed in this matter without bigotry.

After all, in Warwick's own words, Christendom and Islam "are only east and west views of the same thing."

If we forget for a moment about the abstract - and sometimes abstruse - concept of religion, Shaw also makes some personal comments about the figure of the prophet Mohammed (Mahomet). Although most of the juicy bits about him belong in the second part of this post, I think it is fair to end this one with the comments included in Buoyant Billions, especially because they frame Shaw's vision of Mohammed. First of all, this play lists the prophet of Islam as one of the "World Betterers" the world has known, with some illustrious company: 

SON. No: you have always been a model father. But the profession I contemplate is not one that a model father could recommend to his son. 

FATHER. And what profession is that, pray?

SON. One that is always unsuccessful. Marx's profession. Lenin's profession. Stalin's profession. Ruskin's profession. Plato's profession. Confucius, Gautama, Jesus, Mahomet, Luther, William Morris. The profession of world betterer.

Despite this, we have to take Mahomet as a "righteous man" who perhaps had no other choice but to do what he did: 

SON. Yes; and when they find them why do they run after them? Only to crucify them. The righteous man takes his life in his hand whenever he utters the truth. Charlemagne, Mahomet, St Dominic: these were righteous men according to their lights; but with Charlemagne it was embrace Christianity instantly or die; with Mahomet the slaying of the infidel was a passport to Heaven; with Dominic and his Dogs of God it was Recant or burn.

Finally, in a brilliant flash of Shavian wit, we cannot possibly forget that Mahomet's wisdom may have something very earthly about it.

THE WIDOWER. Oh, she is not dead: I let her divorce me. We are now quite good friends again. But to understand this question it is not enough to have been married once. Henry the Eighth would be the leading authority if he were alive. The prophet Mahomet was married more than fourteen times.

In this blog entry, the first of a series of posts on "Shaw and Islam," I have tried to illustrate how this religion and its symbols are portrayed in Shaw's plays. Because of the filter of literary language and dramatic technique, one cannot take the above excerpts as representing Shaw's personal opinions - at least not faithfully. However, they provide a background against which I hope the next set of fragments (from prefaces, letters, speeches, and interviews) will stand out. Let us hope we can shed some light on the subject and leave unsourced voices to the sphere of mysticism. 

IN THE ARTS OF LIFE MAN INVENTS NOTHING; BUT IN THE ARTS OF DEATH HE OUTDOES NATURE HERSELF

A couple of weeks ago I received a message whereby the sender requested my help in finding an alleged Shaw quotation "to the effect that we have surpassed ourselves in the art of war, but not so in the art of peace." 

After trying many different word combinations, I finally found the passage the original query referred to. It belongs to a long speech from Don Juan in Hell by the mouth of the Devil. The relevant fragment reads as follows: 

THE DEVIL. [...] And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness.

View image | gettyimages.com

We cannot disagree with Shaw in that "homo homini lupus;" in fact, many readers will find a certain parallelism between the words quoted above and Undershaft's (Major Barbara) peculiar philosophy of constant improvement in the "arts of death": 

UNDERSHAFT. Not at all. The more destructive war becomes the more fascinating we find it. No, Mr Lomax, I am obliged to you for making the usual excuse for my trade; but I am not ashamed of it. I am not one of those men who keep their morals and their business in watertight compartments. All the spare money my trade rivals spend on hospitals, cathedrals and other receptacles for conscience money, I devote to experiments and researches in improved methods of destroying life and property. I have always done so; and I always shall.

Another interesting thing that I've learned in the process of finding this quotation is that Shaw quite often connects the concepts of life and death in the form of another dichotomy with more social and political implications: war and peace. Let us take a look at some examples. I have decided to focus solely on quotations from the plays, because one could write a book if the prefaces, letters, pamphlets and speeches are considered.  

To begin with, and despite the socio-political implications I've alluded to, the drive for both war and peace are to be found within each individual person. For example, when Anderson (The Devil's Disciple) learns that the soldiers had come for him, the stage direction tells us that "the man of peace vanishes, transfigured into a choleric and formidable man of war." 

Conversely, as Aubrey (Too True to Be Good) argues when the Sergeant excuses his behaviour because "that was war,"

AUBREY. It was me, sergeant: ME. You cannot divide my conscience into a war department and a peace department. Do you suppose that a man who will commit murder for political ends will hesitate to commit theft for personal ends? Do you suppose you can make a man the mortal enemy of sixty millions of his fellow creatures without making him a little less scrupulous about his next door neighbour?

Of course, war and peace are closely connected in collective terms as well. First, because the existence of either does not depend on their ethical superiority, but on business questions instead - as Undershaft reminds us once again: 

UNDERSHAFT [with a touch of brutality] The government of your country! I am the government of your country: I, and Lazarus. Do you suppose that you and half a dozen amateurs like you, sitting in a row in that foolish gabble shop, can govern Undershaft and Lazarus? No, my friend: you will do what pays US. You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace when it doesn't.

The consequence of all this is that the dividing line between war and peace in practical terms gets thinner and thinner. The second part of Back to Methuselah ("The Gospel of the Brother Barnabas") contains some words to that effect: 

BURGE. We won the war: don't forget that.

FRANKLYN. No: the soldiers and sailors won it, and left you to finish it. And you were so utterly incompetent that the multitudes of children slain by hunger in the first years of peace made us all wish we were at war again.

Likewise, the Commander-in-Chief in the second of the Farfetched Fables knows all too well what the outcome of the situation will be, but he also knows that he cannot intervene because of certain technicalities: 

C.-IN-C. Not a bit of it. Ketch is far too cunning to go to war with us. He did not go to war with anybody. He dropped his bombs on the Isle of Wight just to shew Capetown and the rest that the world was at his mercy. He selected the Isle of Wight because it's a safe distance from his own people, just as we selected Hiroshima in 1945. He thinks islands are out-of-the-way little places that dont matter to us. But he maintains that his relations with the Commonwealth are friendly; and as you have not declared war on him we are still technically at peace. That makes it your job, not mine, though as usual when there is anything to be done except what was done last time, I shall have to do it.

Given all the grey areas between war and peace, I have to agree with Shaw's Caesar and proclaim that both war and peace are sophisticated arts that only the greatest artists can master, preferrably if an imperialist. 

CAESAR. What! Rome produces no art! Is peace not an art? Is war not an art? Is government not an art? Is civilization not an art? All these we give you in exchange for a few ornaments. You will have the best of the bargain.

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WHAT IS VIRTUE BUT THE TRADE UNIONISM OF THE MARRIED?

You can hear these words in Don Juan in Hell, the oneiric third act of Man and Superman that is often played separately, just like our friends from ShawChicago recently did. Don Juan is discussing life, love, and the Life-Force with Ana and the Statue. The conversation reaches a particularly articulate point when Ana argues that there is a certain ethical virtue in procreation. Don Juan, of course, replies that the act of "begetting" - to use Biblical lexis - is no more virtuous because it happens in wedlock. In that sense, marriage is nothing but a conventional way of doing things that has been perpetuated because it is practical and efficient. These are the actual words:

DON JUAN. [...] Dona Ana has, I admit, gone straight to the real point—yet it is not a difference of love or chastity, or even constancy; for twelve children by twelve different husbands would have replenished the earth perhaps more effectively. Suppose my friend Ottavio had died when you were thirty, you would never have remained a widow: you were too beautiful. Suppose the successor of Ottavio had died when you were forty, you would still have been irresistible; and a woman who marries twice marries three times if she becomes free to do so. Twelve lawful children borne by one highly respectable lady to three different fathers is not impossible nor condemned by public opinion. That such a lady may be more law abiding than the poor girl whom we used to spurn into the gutter for bearing one unlawful infant is no doubt true; but dare you say she is less self-indulgent?

ANA. She is less virtuous: that is enough for me.

DON JUAN. In that case, what is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married? Let us face the facts, dear Ana. The Life Force respects marriage only because marriage is a contrivance of its own to secure the greatest number of children and the closest care of them. For honor, chastity and all the rest of your moral figments it cares not a rap. Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions—

One may think that this remark is rather ambiguous, given that Shaw was a Fabian socialist and, as such, rather on the side of trade unionism. Not quite. 

In his introduction to the 1913 Waverley edition of Hard Times, Shaw finds fault with Dickens's depiction of Slackbridge because he is just an extravagant "figment of the middle-class imagination. No such man would be listened to by a meeting of English factory hands." But Slackbridge is not an inaccurate portrayal of the typical trade union leader because they are not corrupt, superficial, or trite. Mind you, 

"Not that such meetings are less susceptible to humbug than meetings of any other class. Not that trade union organizers, worn out by the terribly wearisome and trying work of going from place to place repeating the same commonplaces and trying to “stoke up" meetings to enthusiasm with them, are less apt than other politicians to end as windbags, and sometimes to depend on stimulants to pull them through their work. Not, in short, that the trade union platform is any less humbug-ridden than the platforms of our more highly placed political parties." 

In light of this, we can easily equate trade unionism to conventionality, boredom, empty words, and many other negative elements of social organization. Thus, by extension, what most people call virtue is an equally deplorable notion, as Shaw reminds us on many an occasion.

Already in The Irrational Knot (1880), Douglas tries to talk Marian into leaving her husband by saying: "You know what a hollow thing conventional virtue is." A similar conception can be found in one of Shaw's pieces of dramatic criticism. In a review of Sydney Grundy's The Silver Key (an adaptation of Alexandre Duma's Mademoiselle de Belle Isle), Shaw admits to finding something recognizable in Richelieu. After all, "What people call vice is eternal: what they call virtue is mere fashion." The ethics of conventional virtue is systematically attacked by Shaw in an attempt to shake the conscience of his readers. Just like Isabella asks Mr Smith in Immaturity: "do you really believe that virtue is its own reward in this world?" 

Although, to be fair, the preface to Androcles and the Lion contains a more elaborate train of thought in which both sides of the matter are considered: 

"When Talleyrand said that a married man with a family is capable of anything, he meant anything evil; but an optimist may declare, with equal half truth, that a married man is capable of anything good; that marriage turns vagabonds into steady citizens; and that men and women will, for love of their mates and children, practise virtues that unattached individuals are incapable of. It is true that too much of this domestic virtue is self-denial, which is not a virtue at all; but then the following of the inner light at all costs is largely self-indulgence, which is just as suicidal, just as weak, just as cowardly as self-denial."

At any rate, even outside his literary endeavors Shaw still has an axe to grind against this thing called 'virtue'. In a letter to fellow Fabian E. D. Girdlestone (26 Sept. 1890. Bernard Shaw Collected Letters, 1874-1897, p. 266), he points his finger at the real enemy of the born world-betterer: 

"Our enemy is not essentially the landlord or capitalist: these are but accidental forms of the true enemy—the Good Man. Virtue is only a mask for the revolting features of Unhappiness. Let us be religious, if you will, but not virtuous, not moral, not good—anything but that. My only boast is that in these days when it is so easy & cheap to be a Christ, I have ventured to follow the poor, despised, but always right Devil."

Whether Shaw followed God, the Devil, or tried to impersonate either of them, has always been open to interpretation. What is unquestionably true is that, all things considered, the most sensible thing Shaw ever said about virtue is probably written in an unfinished essay entitled "From Dickens to Ibsen." There we read what we all know, that "sham virtue is by no means less poisonous than sham skill in architecture."

Paolo Veronese. "The Triumph of Virtue over Vice." (1554-1556)

MOST VOTED PLAYS

Here are the results of the poll I shared a couple of weeks ago. It will remain open until further notice, so you can still vote HERE. 

There seems to be a consensus among respondents that the five MVPs (Most Valuable Plays) in the Shavian canon are Man and Superman, Heartbreak House, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, and Saint Joan. Even if these results are as valid as those of the Eurovision Song Contest, it is still a nice conversation starter, I guess. 

YOU USE A GLASS MIRROR TO SEE YOUR FACE; YOU USE A WORK OF ART TO SEE YOUR SOUL

Shaw's Corner Twitter feed recently incorporated a Shaw quotation that had been posted by Vintage Books. The quotation reads as follows: 

The source of the quotation is quite easy to find. Towards the end of "As Far As Thought Can Reach," the fifth and last part of Back to Methuselah, the She-Ancient supports Ecrasia's impression that art brings happiness to one's life. 

ECRASIA. You have no right to say that I am not sincere. I have found a happiness in art that real life has never given me. I am intensely in earnest about art. There is a magic and mystery in art that you know nothing of.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Yes, child: art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul.

The first time one reads this quotation (at least the bit quoted by Vintage Books), you may have the impression that both Ecrasia and the She-Ancient support a view of art that is not in consonance with Shaw's personal ideas. Nothing new there. After all, why would all Shaw characters think like "the master of puppets"?

However, I must admit that I have omitted some of the She-Ancient's words. Specifically, her final sentence suggests that art as a medium to experience life - and the Life Force - must be superseded by more direct means in order to achieve the ultimate stage in the realization of human beings. 

THE SHE-ANCIENT. [...] But we who are older use neither glass mirrors nor works of art. We have a direct sense of life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues, your toys and your dolls.

Thus, these words should perhaps be understood along the lines of the many other instances of Shavian contempt for "art for art's sake". Among these, two oft-quoted passages stand out. The first, from the Epistle Dedicatory to Man and Superman, summarizes Shaw's views on the necessary didacticism of art (and drama): 

"No doubt I must recognize, as even the Ancient Mariner did, that I must tell my story entertainingly if I am to hold the wedding guest spellbound in spite of the siren sounds of the loud bassoon. But 'for art’s sake' alone I would not face the toil of writing a single sentence."

The other example is from Caesar and Cleopatra, where Apollodorus is the quintessential example (comically distorted, in this case) of the aesthete whose motto is "art for art's sake."

SENTINEL. So you are the carpet merchant
APOLLODORUS (hurt). My friend: I am a patrician.
SENTINEL. A patrician! A patrician keeping a shop instead of following arms!
APOLLODORUS. I do not keep a shop. Mine is a temple of the arts. I am a worshipper of beauty. My calling is to choose beautiful things for beautiful Queens. My motto is Art for Art's sake.
SENTINEL. That is not the password.
APOLLODORUS. It is a universal password.

Even in the preface to one of his latest plays (Farfetched Fables), Shaw could not help but insist on this idea that "the Shavian idiosyncrasy...disgusts the Art for Art's Sake Faction."

It is not difficult to trace this neglect for this idea of art to the seemingly antithetical views that Shaw and Oscar Wilde held in this respect. Indeed, this notion seems to have caught on among critics, because the Introduction to Arms and the Man (written by some mysterious "M.") includes a clear definition of Shavian poetics with special reference to the "Art for Art's sake" controversy: 

"There never was an author who showed less predilection for a specific medium by which to accomplish his results. He recognized, early in his days, many things awry in the world and he assumed the task of mundane reformation with a confident spirit. It seems such a small job at twenty to set the times aright. He began as an Essayist, but who reads essays now-a-days?—he then turned novelist with no better success, for no one would read such preposterous stuff as he chose to emit. He only succeeded in proving that absolutely rational men and women—although he has created few of the latter—can be most extremely disagreeable to our conventional way of thinking.

As a last resort, he turned to the stage, not that he cared for the dramatic art, for no man seems to care less about "Art for Art's sake," being in this a perfect foil to his brilliant compatriot and contemporary, Wilde. He cast his theories in dramatic forms merely because no other course except silence or physical revolt was open to him."

Of course, as was always the case with Shaw, his approach to aestheticism and the theory of literary art is far more complex than these lines can possibly express, even summarily. Others have tried their hand at that, luckily for me. Be that as it may, and regardless of your personal philosophical preferences, we may as well sit back and enjoy good drama, whether for art's sake, for world betterment, or simply for fun. This is something the a Monty Python Flying Circus gag does exceedingly well. 

NO MAN FULLY CAPABLE OF HIS OWN LANGUAGE EVER MASTERS ANOTHER

Although - as a member of a Philology Department - I know a few people who are living proof that the above quotation is less than accurate, it is hard to tell to what extent Shaw's words are true - especially because there is no definition of what "fully capable" means. What I can tell you, though, is that these words can be found in Maxims for Revolutionists, a sort of annexe to The Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion. This, in turn, is an addendum to Man and Superman, as many of you already know. 

Shaw's interest in foreign languages was rather limited, with the exception of the translation of his plays. Whether because of the incompetence of many of his translators or because he wanted to oversee everything concerning the publication of his works, Shaw exchanged a number of letters over specific words, phrases or passages in translation. His Collected Letters contain many examples of these, particularly with the Hamons (Augustin and Henriette), his French translators, and with Siegfried Trebitsch, the German one. 

On a more personal note, however, Shaw was quite aware of his lack of ability for foreign languages, as he conceded on a number of occasions. Perhaps one of the most oft-quoted anecdotes in this respect is recounted in his letter to Dino Grandi, Italian ambassador to Britain at the time, who had invited the Shaws to dine. (Bernard Shaw Collected Letters Vol. IV, p. 371-2) Shaw politely declined the invitation, partially on the grounds of what had happened the last time: 

"Your lady graciously came and spoke to me. I lost my head completely and tried to speak in Italian (which I cannot speak). The result was a stammering in very bad French (I am the worst of linguistis - not like you, who speak English better than any Englishman). It was evident to the Signora Grande that I was very drunk; and the conversation ended abruptly before I recovered my presence of mind."

Despite these shortcomings, Shaw was regarded by some as a very good speaker of a few foreign languages - although for reasons beyond his actual mastery of any of them. As Archibald Henderson puts it in his Bernard Shaw: A Critical Biography (p. 492):

"[Shaw] speaks no language but his own, and reads no foreign language, save French, with ease. I remember hearing someone ask Rodin whether Shaw really spoke French. "Ah! no!" replied Rodin, with his genial smile and a faint twinkle of the eyes; "Monsieur Shaw does not speak French. But somehow or other, by the very violence of his manner and gesticulation, he succeeds in imposing his meaning upon you!" Shaw is fond of relating the incident which laid the foundation for his reputation as an Italian scholar. “Once I was in Milan with a party of English folk. We were dining at the railway restaurant, and our waiter spoke no language other than his own. When the moment came to pay and rush for the train, we were unable to make him understand that we wanted not one bill, but twenty-four separate ones. My friends insisted that I must know Italian, so to act as interpreter, I racked my memory for chips from the language of Dante, but in vain. All of a sudden, a line from The Huguenots flashed to my brain: Ognuno per se / per tutti il ciel (‘Every man for himself / and heaven for all) I declaimed it with triumphant success. The army of waiters was doubled up with laughter, and my fame as an Italian scholar has been on the increase ever since.”

At any rate, nobody can blame Shaw for trying to pass as a great linguist. As he himself acknowledged in a note he wrote on the occasion of the premiere of The Devil's Disciple at the Raimund Theatre, Vienna (the manuscript is transcribed and annotated in The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, Vol. 20, pages 247-252): 

"Like all really able men I am congenitally incapable of acquiring foreign languages; but I have been so steeped in German music, and consequently in German poetry, all my life (having indeed learned more of my art as a writer for the stage from Mozart than from Shakespear, Molière or any literary dramatist) that I cannot help believing that I know German. I sometimes speak it; and my German friends are all agreed that nobody else in Europe speaks it in quite the same manner."

"Shaw and Foreign Languages and Literature." Sounds like something someone should write a book on. 

MUSIC IS ITS OWN REWARD

If you type the above words in your favorite internet search engine, you'll see that they have been pronounced by a number of musicians and/or music critics, including Sting. This phrase has also been used to entitle studies on the alleged benefits of music as a skill-building tool. 

What everybody who I've heard use this phrase has missed so far, however, is the earliest known source of this maxim in a literary text. Such honor belongs to Shaw's Love Among the Artists. In this novel, one of the main characters (a composer), complains about how little one can make out of music for different reasons. And yet, when interrogated about the rationale behind his love for music, money does not rank very high: 

“…That fantasia of mine has been pirated and played in every musical capital in Europe ; and I could not afford to buy you a sable jacket out of what I have made by it.”

"It is very hard, certainly. But do you really care about money?"

"Ha! ha! No, of course not. Music is its own reward. Composers are not human: they can live on diminished sevenths ; and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartette for a family.”

It is not too difficult to link the main idea in these words with Shaw's general insights on music, as demonstrated in his music criticism and his general appraisal of performers, composers, and people in the music business. To begin with, this idea of music being its own reward is further elaborated in Love Among the Artists, just like some sort of fundamental axiom, when Aurelie remarks: 

"Music is my destiny, as painting is thine."

In principle, this may seem like an early contradiction to Shaw's notion that "art for art's sake" is just nonsense, as he put it in the Epistle Dedicatory to Man and Superman. 

"No doubt I must recognize, as even the Ancient Mariner did, that I must tell my story entertainingly if I am to hold the wedding guest spellbound in spite of the siren sounds of the loud bassoon. But "for art's sake" alone I would not face the toil of writing a single sentence."

However, music seems to be quite a different realm for Shaw, for whom it still remains as "the chastest of the muses" in many respects. 

"In Mr Cellier’s scores, music is still the chastest of the Muses. In Offenbach’s she is—what shall I say?—I am ashamed of her. I no longer wonder that the Germans came to Paris and sup­pressed her with fire and thunder. Here in England how respect­able she is! Virtuous and rustically innocent her 6-8 measures are, even when Dorothy sings ’‘Come, fill up your glass to the brim!’' She learnt her morals from Handel, her ladylike manners from Mendelssohn, her sentiment from the Bailiff's Daughter of Islington."

At any rate, I shall not go on about a topic I know so little about, lest I become one of those music critics Shaw dreaded: 

"Nobody knows better than I do that a musical critic who is always talking about music is quite as odious as an ordinary man who is always talking about himself. I venture to hope that I have never been guilty of the latter vice; and I shall try to steer dear of the former."

I will not go as far as to say that Shaw succeeded in his ethical endeavors, but that's one of the reasons we still talk about him!