The Puppet Player: Bernard Shaw (one-volume definitive edition)by Michael Holroyd Random House 833 pp.; $45
When George Bernard Shaw was born—in Dublin, Ireland, in 1856—Franklin Pierce was President of the United States, and the rumblings of civil war were still distant. In Britain, the thirtysomething Queen Victoria had yet to lose her be loved consort, Albert. William Wordsworth, an eyewitness to France’s Revolution and a poetic innovator before the turn of the century, had been dead but six years. Europeans were growing accustomed to the noise and speed of railways, but the telegraph promised to overcome space in a very different way. And in London, personal and family problems were distracting Karl Marx from the studies in political economy he had been pursuing so assiduously in the British Museum’s Reading Room.
When Shaw died—at Ayot Saint Lawrence, England, in 1950—Harry Truman was President of the United States. Nagasaki and Hiroshima still lay in radioactive rubble, as did much of Germany. Mao Zedong was consolidating his power after his successful revolution in China; war was breaking out in Korea. Many of the great figures of international modernism were dead, or had their best work behind them. Elvis Presley was a 15-year-old in Tupelo, singing and playing his guitar. The first baby boomers—including Bill Clinton—were approaching school age.
No previous period of human history had seen such wide-ranging and pervasive change. Shaw not only witnessed it; he was a key part of much of it. While Victoria still sat on the throne, Shaw the music critic taught London audiences to appreciate the strange new music of Wagner; Shaw the drama critic praised the innovative drama of Strindberg and Ibsen; Shaw the political activist helped to shape the Fabian Society, that curious attempt to convert the British ruling classes to socialism. Somewhat later, he reinvigorated the London stage by introducing fierce social debates—about prostitution, evangelical Christianity, the industrial foundations of war-making, the place of Ireland in the British Empire, and much more—into the staid theaters of the West End. He be came the self-appointed spokesman and chief evangelist for a new religion, the religion of the “Life Force,” as he called it (claiming, perhaps implausibly, to owe nothing to Henri Bergson’s elan vital).
In “The New Theology,” a “lay sermon” he preached (that is, wrote and published) in 1907, Shaw defined the key elements of his creed:
In a sense there is no God as yet achieved, but there is [a] force at work making God, struggling through us to become an actual organised existence, enjoying what to many of us is the greatest conceivable ecstasy, the ecstasy of a brain, an intelligence, actually conscious of the whole, and with executive force capable of guiding it to a perfectly benevolent and harmonious end. That is what we are working to. When you are asked, “Where is God? Who is God?” stand up and say, “I am God and here is God, not as yet completed, but still advancing to ward completion, just in as much as I am working for the purpose of the universe, working for the good of the whole of society and the whole world, instead of merely looking after my personal ends.”
He had particular hopes of converting G. K. Chesterton—with whom he engaged, over a period of 15 years, in a series of witty and entertaining public debates—but Chesterton disappointed Shaw terribly by converting to Catholicism instead. Later still, Shaw articulated a version of socialism for the masses, especially the female masses: he was 72 years old when he wrote The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928), perhaps the first book in English to use from be ginning to end the feminine pronoun to refer to generic humanity. But this was a book for both sexes; Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s first Labour party prime minister, could but gush: “After the Bible this is in my eyes the most important book that humanity possesses.” (To which Shaw re plied that MacDonald was “more of a wit than I suspected.”) By this time Shaw was one of the most famous and wealthy writers in the world, having won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925—on the receipt of which he commented that the Nobel Committee had in effect thrown a life preserver to a swimmer who had already struggled to shore.
Michael Holroyd’s magisterial biography was originally published in three volumes—or four if you count The Last Laugh, Holroyd’s account of the farcical history of attempts to execute the peculiar provisions of Shaw’s will. When I read the original volumes, I thought that they provided not only as good a biography of Shaw as we are ever likely to have, but also one of the best over views I knew of modern British intellectual and social history. As I have already indicated, there were few significant developments during his lifetime that Shaw did not in some way have a hand in—or at least have a set of witty comments about—and when I heard of this abridgment I suspected that much valuable contextual detail would be lost.
Happily, I was wrong. Because it is longer and more densely printed than its predecessors, this one-volume edition may be more than half as long as the original version, and Holroyd has edited it so seamlessly that one could in good conscience prefer it. None of the key events in Shaw’s life and times is scanted here; if anything, the lineaments of his unique character stand out still more clearly than they did in the more diffuse version.
What particularly stands out, from my reading of this new edition, is the sense that Shaw was above all else an enthusiast and a proselytizer. What an evangelist he would have made! His life was an endless tournament; like Don Quixote, Shaw sees every event or person in the most luridly moralistic light. He is forever discovering some noble but helpless cause that desperately needs defending, and can be properly defended only by the famously indefatigable “G.B.S.”—as he invariably referred to the public persona he had over the years perfected. So onto the field G.B.S. rides, bristling with weapons and chutzpah, to drive the cruel, barbarous, but ultimately ludicrous opponent from the field. The reader of Holroyd’s great biography never tires of the narrative, indeed, never tires of Shaw; but G.B.S. becomes rather a pain at times.
One of Shaw’s last works was a “puppet play” in the Punch and Judy tradition called “Shakes vs. Shav,” in which the two playwrights smack one another (verbally and physically) for a few pages be fore a final moment of reconciliation. For almost his entire career as a dramatist, Shaw had compared himself to Shakespeare—a comparison which could only be plausible if the reputation of the great Bard of Avon could be diminished, a task which Shaw often set himself to: for instance, he coined the witty term “Bardolatry” to describe the unreflective celebration of Shakespeare, and proclaimed, “With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.” Yet, as Holroyd points out, the young Shaw had virtually lived in Shakespeare’s dramatic world, and some of his most wittily vitriolic theater criticism is directed against actors and directors who fail to do justice to Shakespeare’s great plays.
But there is almost no sense in which the comparison holds. The diversity and richness of Shakespeare’s world stands out all the more vividly in contrast to Shaw’s theater of talking heads—vigorous and witty though the heads be. “The ecstasy of a brain,” as he called it in his “lay sermon,” may have been the only ecstasy he could understand. There is, therefore, in the end, something puppetlike about Shaw himself, or at least about the G.B.S. into whom he gradually transformed himself: no one could ever confuse Shakespeare with “Shakes,” but Shaw and “Shav” are indeed half-a-letter apart. The stringed limbs of Shaw/Shav/G.B.S. dance wildly about the stage, but only the mouth’s movements convince. Shaw always entertains, often provokes, but rarely can he move us as the more fully human writers can. Chesterton said it better than I, or anyone else, could: “Shaw is like the Venus de Milo. All that there is of him is admirable.”
—Alan Jacobs
Black Baptists and African Missions: The Origins of a Movement, 1880-1915by Sandy D. Martin Mercer Univ. Press 242 pp.; $19.95, paper
Sandy D. Martin’s Black Baptists and African Missions, originally published in 1989 and now reprinted in paperback with a new introduction by Robert T. Handy, highlights the importance of theology in the lives of black Christians. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, black Baptists not only developed a general approach to missiology, but were especially active in missions to Africa. The results of their missionary efforts were twofold: the “missionary quest on behalf of the ancestral homeland contributed to the development of and conflicts among black Baptist de nominations” and helped foster the realization that “blacks the world over faced similar oppressions and threats and that their separate paths all led to one destiny.”
At the same time, Martin shows that the missionary program of black Baptists between 1880 and 1915 cannot be understood outside the context of the theological commitments of “most missionary-minded Christians of nineteenth-century America” and their belief that “their efforts of foreign mission work would result in the spread of Christian civilization throughout the world.” Indeed, black Baptists worked closely with white Baptist missionaries when it served their purposes, and, Martin hammers home, the basic outlines of their approach to missions were shaped by antebellum white missiology.
Out of that context, black Baptists developed a theology “that was concerned with a providential plan for the black race. Afro-Americans and Liberians were supposed to join hands with their indigenous African counterparts, and under the guidance of God they were to erect a Christian civilization that would loose Africa from all bonds political, economic, and religious.” Thus, if both white and black Baptists’ commitment to converting Africa derived from Psalm 68:31—”Let bronze be brought from Egypt; let Ethiopia hasten to stretch out its hands to God”—black Baptists understood that verse in radically different ways from their white coreligionists.
—Lauren F. Winner
Alan Jacobs is associate professor of English at Wheaton College.
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