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PLATFORM AND PULPIT by Bernard Shaw. Hitherto uncollected material edited by Dan H. Laurence. (Hart-Davis.)

Unfortunately, not a word of this book (and the first one was spoken in 1885) is out of date.

     Mr Dan H. Laurence has gathered the contemporary reports of thirty-seven (that is, about 2 per cent) of the occasions when Shaw used the platform as a pulpit and the pulpit (of the City Temple) as a platform. Mr Laurence has annotated the local allusions, reduced the texts to coherence where the reporter had broken down, and translated them into Shavian spelling; and the publisher has put the whole into a type-face, binding and format so delicately in the mood of the Shaw Standard Edition as to count as architectural reconstruction.

     The result is indeed a monument: to Shaw’s resolve to make himself a master speaker; and to his audiences’ complete inability to master what he was speaking about. Hence the tragic topicality of speeches half a century old. Shaw on vaccination during smallpox epidemics; Shaw (irrefutably) against vivisection; Shaw for smoke abatement: we still haven’t taken the point. ‘I have said enough’ (so he winds up one speech) to make myself thoroughly misunderstood.’

     In fact, it wasn’t Shaw who was misunderstood, but his subjects. Audiences knew well enough what Shaw was. The reports record their acquiescent laughter whenever Shaw, borrowing the effrontery of Oscar Wilde, informed them he was a man of genius. Of course, people did show the resentment they always will of anything which is new to them and original to the person who tells it them. But this resentment passes with the newness. By the time Shaw was fifty and the author of several excellent plays and one masterpiece, the world no longer held it against him that he was a genius and an originator. What we have still not forgiven him that he reasoned.

     If you are the sort of genius who presents a vision so alarmingly personal that only you could have had it, and providing you have the stamina to keep yourself before the public and the fortitude to withstand abuse, you need only hang on and you will be praised in the end. Keats would have had to live only half the age Shaw reached and address only half as many public meetings, to be made Poet Laureate. Shaw’s trouble was that he presented a vision everyone could have had. It was part of the eighteenth-century quality he often marked in himself. Thus Shaw, in one of these speeches, on the soldier: ‘a cheap article who has but to obey orders, charge with the bayonet at men with whom he has no quarrel, shoot and be shot at, and give three cheers when titled persons inspect his buttons’. The purity of vision might be Candide’s. (Ten years later, it was Candida’s.)

     If everyone had seen as lucidly as this in 1885, we should have had no more armies and no more wars. That is why there was really no alternative left to us except to misunderstand.

     Likewise, if everyone had seen the force of Shaw’s socialist vision, we should have had no more class war. Picking up Samuel Butler’s point that illness is an eyesore and an offence, and applying it where it fits much better, namely to poverty, Shaw announced that the poor were ‘useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished’. If he had been prepared to announce that blessed were the poor and that anyone who would not embrace their poverty ought to be abolished, he might have led a political party (tributes to his oratory make him seem twice the spellbinder Lloyd George was) and eventually played Lenin to a communist Great Britain. But he persisted in reasoning. The result was that he had to work through the Fabian Society, which he describes here as ‘in many ways a feeble and ridiculous society’. He spoke as a celebrated author and declined to speak as one having authority.

     Shaw chose to go on speaking as well as writing not merely because it gave him an opportunity to use his preliminary sketches (a chunk of the Preface to Back to Methuselah was delivered, rough-hewn, to the Hampstead Ethical Institute two years beforehand) but because it perfected his expertise in his natural medium, spoken words. Platform is only another name for stage.

     In the report (drafted by himself) of a paper he read to the Church and Stage Guild, Shaw describes his early novels as ‘bad sermons’. They are bad precisely because novels have to be read instead of heard. All that is wrong with them is that they are not plays. Such narrative as The Irrational Knot possesses is pastiche Jane Austen of the stiffest kind. The dialogue, however, is already brilliant; and so is the opening chapter, because Shaw is, without knowing it, employing the idiom of stage directions and scene-setting. We are shown a room, with a closed door leading to the adjoining room. A noise is said to be audible behind the closed door. It ceases; and a young woman enters. Shaw already has no use for the novelist’s privilege of penetrating closed doors.

     When he did take to the dramatic art, Shaw made his major dramatis personae just what he had already made himself in real life: captivatingly articulate public speakers, with a fluent turn for repartee. Adherents of naturalism will always object to this type of drama on the grounds that people in real life do not speak like this but in grunts. (Grunts are at present occupying our theatres, but the only new thing about them is that they are often working-class grunts. The middle-class grunt was popularized decades ago by Noël Coward.) The best answer is not to enter into the artistic ethics of naturalism, a very soggy problem, but to make yourself a masterly speaker, thereby proving that people can speak like that in real life. That was what Shaw did. That, he would have explained, is how evolution works.

     It worked, however, to the perfecting of Shaw, not of the rest of us. Shaw knew this, but evidently he could not abandon hope. Hope, combined with his tremendous generosity, accounts for one of the few illusions he entertained. He over-estimated his contemporaries. He must have found it unbearable to admit that even the best brains evolution had produced in his own time were feeble. Only that can have persuaded him that Dean Inge had ‘a splendid mind’ and that Gilbert Murray ‘reincarnated Euripides’.

     On the subject of himself, whom he if anything under-estimated and who really did bear some likeness to Euripides, Shaw had two further illusions and gave them currency in his speeches. He thought he was a puritan, and he thought he was visually sensitive. That Shaw, like most of his compatriots, had no visual sensibility whatever is demonstrated to the eyes of anyone who has seen from photographs the way he furnished his house and the still more unfeeling way he furnished his body — with tweed apparently woven from the clippings of his beard. I possess a postcard on which Shaw told an editor who had inquired about Shaw’s education that he was educated in the National Gallery of Dublin, at musical rehearsals and by books. As a matter of fact the National Gallery of Dublin is not a collection capable of giving anyone a comprehensive visual education; and it shows the conventionality (that is, the blindness) of Shaw’s response to visible beauty that he bothers to mention the Gallery but not that he was brought up in the most architecturally beautiful city in Europe. Even the fact that Dublin’s is eighteenth-century architecture could not make him see it.

     Most Irishmen think they are puritans, and most are. But not Shaw (unless visual deficiency is puritanical): not the man who described intellect as a passion, diagnosed philistinism as a species of puritanism and never shaped a sentence without making it sensuously attractive. Even about sex directly, he was much less of a puritan than he made out— which he did in order to point up the pruriency of the proper. In his open letter to Frank Harris (Sixteen Self Sketches) he wrote: ‘You were amazed and incredulous when I told you that . . . I lived, a continent virgin, . . . until I was twenty-nine.’ Any Irish puritan worth his salt would comment ‘Only till then?’

     This same open letter contains a clue which so far as I know Shavian biographers have not yet picked up, and which suggests Shaw must have begotten a child — though that is not to say it was born. Writing of his sexual experiences as a young man, Shaw asserts: ‘I was not impotent; I was not sterile; I was not homosexual.’ Unless this is the sole moment in history when Shaw used a word imprecisely, there seems only one way he could have known he was not sterile.

     So far from being a puritan, Shaw in these speeches is still in a position to shame our puritanism. In 1928 he was warning a conference of Chief Constables of the dangers of making rules about obscenity. He himself had taken a ‘sun cure’ in Italy, and the illustrated papers had been full of ‘pictures of me with nothing whatever on except a bathing slip. I can remember the time when that would have been considered shocking indecent exposure’. This sort of thing is obviously out of date, the very language drooping: sun cure; bathing slip (what was it, and how much did it expose?). Yet consider the case of the young man who pleaded guilty to using insulting behaviour after going for a run in Shoreditch wearing only ‘a singlet, a brief pair of briefs and a peaked cap’. A police inspector told the court how ‘anxious mothers tried to shield their children’s eyes’. This took place on (I have been quoting The Guardian of the day after) January 30, 1962.

     I wish Shaw was still alive and that it was he who had gone for a run in his bathing slip. At least the mothers would have told their children to be certain to look. But I suppose it is foolish to hope they would have told them to go home and find out what he had to say.