Reappraisal of G.B.S.

The oracular old man in knickerbockers loved controversy, but he might not have liked the one going on in London only six years since his death. To mark the centennial of the birth of the 20th century's No. 1 playwright, wit and sage, London's critics turned their pens to fresh appraisals of George Bernard Shaw. To an extent that aroused passionate Shavians to cries of protest, many of the appraisers found both the man and his works wanting. Sample second thoughts of those who joined in the sport of tearing down:

Oxford Don A. J. P. TAYLOR, in the Observer--Sooner or later we must ask--what of Shaw as a writer? Still more, what of Shaw as he claimed to be, a sage and philosopher? Will he last . . . ? Or will he be forgotten like his contemporary Stephen Phillips?* . . . Shaw had one superlative quality. He was the greatest arguer there has ever been . . . marvelous over a short distance; but he could not sustain an argument for more than a paragraph ... On all serious questions Shaw came down firmly on the side of the stronger . . . Even when he glorified a heretic he took care to choose Joan of Arc--someone safely canonized and not associated with any really dangerous idea . . . Shaw was never unhappy; and therefore he was never happy either. He knew only pleasure, a very different thing. At the end of his life Shaw confessed that he stood for Nothing.

Critic KENNETH TYNAN, also in the Observer--He was without doubt a great writer ... He attempted, and almost pulled off, two mountainous tasks: he cleared the English stage of humbug, and the English mind of cant ... As a demolition expert he has no rivals: and we are being grossly irrelevant if we ask a demolition expert, when his work is done: "But what have you created?" It is like expecting a bulldozer to build the Tower of Pisa; or condemning a bayonet for not being a plough. Shaw's genius was for intellectual slum-clearance, not for town planning . . . If Chaucer is the father of English literature, Shaw is the spinster aunt. By this I do not mean to imply that he was sexless ... It is only in his writing that the aunt in him rises up, full of warnings, wagged fingers and brandished umbrellas . . . Shaw was unique. An Irish aunt so gorgeously drunk with wit is something English literature will never see again. But there is fruit for the symbolist in the fact that, prolific as he was, he left no children.

Editor MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE of Punch --There can be no question . . . about Shaw's immense talent as a writer and as a controversialist. His comedies will go on being played as long as Sheridan's or Wilde's; his prose ... is still pleasurable to read ... As long as he was alive the effervescence of his wit, and the carefully cultivated attractiveness of his Irish accent and appearance . . . obscured the essential disparity between what he preached and what he practiced. He was, in fact, a humbug; and though, heaven knows, at different times many humbugs have been adulated, they are rarely much regarded in posthumous retrospect. Thus Shaw was a Fabian Socialist who grovelled indiscriminately before Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini; an advocate of equality of income who ceaselessly complained about supertax; an ardent opponent of vivisection who found no difficulty in condoning, and even applauding, purges, deportations and . . . other terroristic practices . . . The thought of killing an animal for food or sport appalled him; the thought of killing a man for an idea gave him no unease . . . Posterity will judge him less ebulliently than did his contemporaries while he was alive, and less coldly than they have after his death.

W. A. DARLINGTON, in the Daily Telegraph--Shaw was one of the great men of his time, but lacking in humanity.

THE TIMES or LONDON--Shaw, during the whole of his creative life (which perhaps ended somewhere in the 1920's) yielded himself unreservedly to the passion of which he could give no account. It aimed him at an objective dismally called world betterment, but it made him vivacious, courageous and pertinacious . . . It is natural that theatrical enthusiasm for the plays should have cooled a little since his death, but ... the best of them are established as classics ... It is even more natural that interest in the man and his iconoclastic opinions should have declined. For his continually changing legend had assumed in the end truly daunting proportions. The new generation has hesitated to lose itself in the apparently endless political, economic, theatrical and personal ramifications of Shavianism.

The urge to reassess a man who had made such a tremendous impact on his time was inevitable. Also inevitable: the rebuttal. "The fact that he became a travesty of himself in his decline is no reason why his achievements as critic, playwright, prosewriter, politician, debater and conversationalist should now be obscured," wrote the Spectator's critic, Brian Inglis. And there were dozens of angry Shaw disciples preparing to put it a lot more strongly than that.

* Stephen Phillips (1868-1915), English poet (Christ in Hades), dramatist (Paolo and Franccsca) and onetime actor, flared brilliantly as the leader of poetic drama in England for ten years, faded into obscurity after 1906.

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