Seldom can any author have taken Horace’s dictum that the artist should delight and instruct as seriously as did Bernard Shaw. The notion of art for art’s sake, the guiding principle for so many writers of his generation, repelled him, and he insisted that he “would not lift a finger to produce a work of art if I thought there was nothing more than that in it.” All of his plays, novels, and essays are intensely conceived political statements.
It is, of course, a paradox of Shavian dimension that these serious sociological tracts in fact delight even more than they instruct, that they continue to delight, indeed, in an age when the historical setting of Shaw’s theories and political credenda has receded into the past. One by one the mainstays of Shaw’s worldview—the Fabian creed of “permeation,” eventually his Stalinism, his faith in “Creative Evolution” and the “Life Force”—have been toppled; but the iconoclasm, the lacerating common sense, the passionate social conscience, and the insistence upon man’s common responsibility for the state of his world live on because of the incomparable wit with which they are served up. “Why should humour and laughter be excommunicated?” Shaw once asked Tolstoy. “Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?”
The final volume of Michael Holroyd’s biography of Shaw has just been published.
The final volume of Michael Holroyd’s biography of
