20 
Land & Water 
February 14, igio 
Life and Letters Gj J. C Souire 
Mr. Shaw's Critics 
ITHIXK I have read more books about Mr. Bernard 
Shaw than about any author, not exceptmg Shake- 
speare : which, of course, is what Mr. Shaw wou d 
think most reasonable. I cannot remember them all. 
There was Mr. Chesterton's. There was Professor 
Archibald Henderson's. There was Mr. Joseph M-Cabe s. 
There ^vas M. Augustin Hamon's. Tliere was Mr. P. P. Howe s. 
There was one by a Miss Somebody. Jhere vv-ere others. 
And now there is one more. It is called Bernard Shaw : 7 he 
Man and His Work (Allen & Unwin, 4s. 6<f . net) and its author 
is Herbert Skimpole, B.A., hitherto, unlike the island of 
Tenedos, not known to fame. 
» • ♦ * * 
It is a wonderful coUection. Mr. Chesterton's book is a 
sane, amusing-and. incidentally, a very chivalrous, piece of 
criticism But the rest make the most grotesque body of 
critical literature in existence. The great salient fact about 
them is that they are about a man who.'if he is allowed nothmg 
else must be allowed to be funny, and that they are aU utterly 
humourless. Some of them are soberly antipathetic ; most 
of them are soberly reverential ; all of them, whilst their 
subject gambols like a jackpudding, stand about the platform 
in grave attitudes with constricted brows. 
M Hamon, the unique French translator of Mr. Shaw, 
was candid enough (in his B. Shaw : the Tieenlieth Century 
Moliire) to confess— though he hadn't the least idea what he 
was doing— that it was jears before he. realized that his hero 
made jokes : 
Impressed by the profundity of the ideas, by the penetrating, 
terse and logical criticism of society, I gradually came to enter- 
tain an enthusiastic admiration for your plays, which voiced 
so many of the ideas which I myself had at heart. Yet their 
essential comedy remained largely unperceived. I saw. only 
the substance of the ideas, and this was so intensely luminous 
as actually to bhnd me to the spirit of comedy. It was not 
until at Brussels, on February 7th, 1907, Candida was staged, 
that my eyes were opened, although still incompletely, to the 
beauties of your drama. 
This passage alone made M. Hamon's book worth having, 
but he keeps it up all through. He tells one that " Shaw is 
a Socialist to the marrow of his bones, so much a Socialist 
that when he married in i8g8 he married another Socialist " ; 
that '.' in the country Shaw wears a Norfolk jacket and 
knickerbockers, the traditional dress of the English sports- 
man . . . Since he attained to wealth he has had a motor- 
car, and this leads him to neglect the bicycle " ; and that 
" it is untrue to assert that he acts as he does in order to 
make people dislike him." That is a book worth haying. 
So was Mr. M'Cabe's. Professor Henderson beat them both. 
He, in a volume which vied in size with Masson's Life of 
Milton, not merely gave one photographs of every house in 
which Mr. Shaw had ever lodged, but (unless my memory 
deceives me) took the greatest pains to discover with what 
brand of ink Mrs. Shaw senior used to mark her son's baby- 
clothes. There never was such detail. And there never was 
such profound awe. Whenever the word " Shaw " appeared' 
it was delivered as though it were " Mumbo- Jumbo " and 
this amazing professor high priest of the cult. 
m * * * * 
Why is it that there are innumerable books about Mr. Shaw 
and (I think) only one about (say) Mr. Conrad ? And why 
have the books about Mr. Shaw so peculiar and distinctive a 
badness ? Mr. Herbert Skimpole, at whom I now arrive, is 
fully equal to his illustrious predecessors. I thought he would 
be when I saw this on the paper wrapper of his book : 
What is the true Shaw ? In this work Mr. Skimpole takes a 
new view-point of Shaw the Man, and depicts him not as a 
living legend, but as a very contemporary human being. 
There is a prudence and exactitude about that " very 
contemporary " ; observe how Mr. Skimpole eschews the 
customary exaggerations of hero-worship and refrains from 
describing Mr. Shaw as " the only contemporary man on 
earth." He is merely more than usually contemporary, more 
contemporary than most : and the definiteness of this promises 
well. The preface clinches it. " I must not," concludes Mr. 
Skimpole, 
omit to convey my gratitude to Nordau, Henderson and the 
others whose works I have freely used in my study of Shaw, 
and particularly to Gilbert Chesterton, whoni I have imbibed 
through the medium of all his books. 
Which certainly sounds as though Mr. Chestferton, perhaps 
as a punishment, perhaps as a reward, for his insistence upon 
liquor, had been turned into beer. 
So we go on : 
There can be no mistake about the effect that Shaw has had 
on the English. He has awakened them out of their self- 
complacency, like a clap of thunder, instead of lulling them to 
sleep with sweet sentimentalities, like a prose Tennyson. 
***** 
This panegyric is followed by a sentence which has that 
unconscious ambiguity which finally stamps Mr. Skimpole as 
a worthy successor of Mr. Henderson : " Round the cradle 
of Bernard Shaw moved little messengers of evil, bearing 
tidings of the woes and wailings that were falling upon the 
whole nation." The magnificenf movement of Mr. Skimpole's 
prose continues : _ 
The tall compact form is an excellent symbol of his lofty but 
orderly ideals ; the strange shape of his face and cranium, 
whose two halves are so asymmetrical that the profiles, when 
photographed, cannot be recognized as belonging to the same 
person, is a significant parallel to the way in which his soul 
is divided by eternal conflicts ; the burning hair is a mark 
of the hot strife within the skull . . . 
Where, I wondered, had t seen this before ? Then I 
remembered the seaside speeches of the mad Moslem in 
The Flying Inn. I cannot go on quoting indefinitely ; but 
a few more extracts will give the quality of this remarkable 
study : 
' Shaw was right. London was just then in an unusually 
heated state of fervid discontent. Reformers and revolution- 
aries were spreading their nets like entomologists throughout 
the city, catching up as disciples all the af-dour and impetu- 
osity of the youths of the city. 
It is only when we are out in the cool air of the evening again 
that we remember that Shaw is our great satirist, and that he 
is probably laughing in his sleeve at our horror all the time. 
Of little infants and schoolchildren I cannot remember any 
examples in the plays. 
I see in a sort of prophetic vision the works of Shaw studied 
in the schoolroom when his fame is already a half-remembered 
legend on the stage. 
The one amusing sentence in the work is that in which he 
proves that Shaw is not merely perverse by saying : " If 
Shaw had merely wished to be against ordinary diet because 
it was ordinary, he might as well have become a Cannibal."' 
But perhaps he has ; it is in the nature of things a develop- 
ment one would keep pretty dark. 
« * * * * 
Mr. Shaw is a great wit, and he has written at least one 
perfect comedy. He has economic doctrines, solid, and not 
peculiar to himself. But what attracts all these queer people- 
is his habit of promiscuous speculation about established 
morals and ideals, and about the even more established 
emotions which underlie them. 
The followers are grim eccentrics who are always ready to- 
believe that black is white, and are fascinated by anyone who- 
_ throws out, however his cheek may bulge with his tongue, the 
suggestion that polyandry has its points or that our ape-like 
ancestors made a mistake in relinquishing the horizontal for 
the upright posture. Mr. Shaw scatters, amidst a good deal 
of hard rational thinking, little blasphemies against every- 
thing that men believe and feel, and casual challenges of 
the truth of almost anything generally accepted as a fact. 
He does it partly in order (as a man may) to discover which of 
his shots hit some sort of a mark, and partly because a 
blasphemy (I don't mean in the purely theological sense) is- 
the kind of joke that amuses him most, and raises the most 
piquant laugh, and he cannot resist one even if it spoils a 
careful serious effect. Then along come these bottomless 
cranks to genuflect before or gloomily analyse the pseudo- 
philosophical persiflage and the speculative potshots. The 
accident that Mr. Shaw writes plays instead of treatises leads 
them to foUow literary precedent and discuss " Shaw the 
Man," his relations, marriage, and sportsman's breeches,, 
instead of concentrating entirely upon his remarkable succes- 
sion of tentative theories. The result is the most compre- 
h,ensively silly series of biographies on record. 
No man of Mr. Shaw's literary performance has ever been- 
so ill praised ; no man of his brains has ever had so asinine a 
herd of followers. It is all his own fault, and he could only- 
put himself right by composing a really candid play about 
his biographers. For let there be no mistake, he is not the- 
sort of crank that they are. 
