258
PARTISAN REVIEW
he was a pesslImst. He saw warring antinomies, doomed to everlasting
strife, men against women, youth against age, intelligence against stu–
pidity, the few against the many, the artist against the citizen. And the
difficulty between them was a failure of communication, that is, of ra–
tionality: you could never get a woman to look at things from a man's
point of view. But
if
rationality fails and must fail forever (except in
the matter of money), the alternative is despair or a kind of nihilistic
relativism, in which everyone is right, from his own point of view, and
these points of view are isolated, each revolving on its axis in inter–
planetary space.
Shaw was personally a generous man, chivalrous, quick with sym–
pathy and the kind of understanding known as feminine. He was always
able to put himself in another person's place. In his letters, he appears
to know his friends-Chesterton, Mrs. Pat Campbell, Florence Farr, the
Irish actress-better than they know themselves. He gives them advice
continually, sensitive, wise advice, the advice they would give themselves
if
they had Shaw's intelligence and clearsightedness. Yet this very clair–
voyance becomes a source of despair to him. He sees and they do not.
He tells them and they will not listen.
It
is the same with the public.
The tragedy of a rational man is that the world is deaf.
The result of this isolation was that Shaw became a crank. His
passion to simplify got the better of him, and he peddled panaceas:
equal distribution of money as the sole immediate social remedy, vege–
tarianism, anti-vivisectionism, anti-vaccinationism, phonetic spelling. He
himself came to prescribe like the chorus of physicians in
The Doctor's
Dilemma.
"Stimulate the phagocytes," says Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bon–
ington. "The nuciforn1 sac," says Cutler Walpole. "Greengages," cries
poor Blenkinsop. "Don't eat meat or take stimulants and you will live
to my age," twinkles Bernard Shaw.
He played the barker for his remedies very early in life, as soon,
he says, as his critics convinced him that he would not get a hearing
unless he practiced the art of self-advertising. In this respect, he was a
deliberate charlatan like Dr. Schutzmacher, with his country practice,
who put up a sign: "Cure Guaranteed." The charlatanism was only a
decoy, but was Shaw himself snared by it? It is hard to be sure. He
called himself a socialist all his life, but his political infatuations in the
'20s and '30s make one wonder whether he had privately lost faith in
the single, simple, easily digestible idea to which he had reduced socialist
theory. And did he really think that he was an improvement, in many
ways, on Shakespeare, thanks to a law of progress in art? In the end,
did he believe in anything? Including Bernard Shaw? As an old man,
