102
PARTISAN REVIEW
theaters are the least reassuring things in the whole season, for they
are the expressions of a younger generation that has absolutely noth–
ing to say; there is no sign of a new and creative sense of the
theater, of what the stage might do or be at the present time, of the
kind of statement it might make for this generation-a sense of the
kind Shaw had and made use of for the late Victorian and Edwardian
generations. This kind of vacuum the Shaw revival fits perfectly. For
a retrograde audience he is still daring, full of profound ideas, a:nd
very amusing even in the places where he is most kittenish. The audience
comes away with a sense, however vague, that the theater has been used
for some purpose, that it has challenged them in some way-which can
hardly be said of most of the dramatic productions that live and
die over a single Broadway season.
Shaw, however, is not to be finally measured by this audience. He
is one of those writers who can be appreciated only after we have
assimilated all the worst things that can be said against him, even
though the worst will always be the things that make him popular
with a large section of the audience and so make possible the pleasure
of seeing him produced. Among artists Shaw is the Perfect Middlebrow,
and so the King of the Middlebrows, for whom he has even that
cachet
indispensable for all middlebrow admiration, namely that at bottom he
may be secretly and profoundly highbrow. Shaw was no thinker but an
intelligent and tireless journalist of ideas, and of course the middle–
brow appropriation of all experience is journalistic to the core. This is
the aspect of Shaw that Yeats said was revealed to him once in a dream
in which Shaw appeared as a sewing machine clicking away and grin–
ning grinning. Certainly Ould Barney was a tiresome noodle, spinning
out ideas with a brisk and extrovert cheerfulness never daunted by a
poet's sense of the obscure and dense substance of life that all very clear
ideas must violate. But even as a journalist of ideas Shaw performed a
unique and valuable service for his period, and one which British in–
sularity would have permitted only to a maverick and extraordinary
Irishman.
The Irishman who escapes Ireland usually turns, in his culture,
to the Continent, whether or not he stays on bodily in London; and
since the English have a profound indifference to all ideas spawned
across the Channel, Shaw was lucky enough to have a role perfectly cut
out for him as the journalistic spokesman for the very radical ideas
of the Continent-lbsen, Wagner, Nietszche, Tolstoy, and Marx. Since
he was no thinker, it did not matter at all to him that these ideas
might be inconsistent among themselves, and he was perfectly able to
reconcile Tolstoy's pacifism and vegetarianism with Nietzsche's Will to
