George Bernard Shaw: Theory, Language, and Drama in the Nineties

Abstract

'Never have an Ism: never be an ist' Shaw wrote to Lady Mary Murray, declaring in the same letter that 'the object of Fabianism is to destroy Impossibilism'. Shaw's preoccupation with 'right' as well as 'wrong' Isms and ists is evident in the letters, reviews, political and critical essays, and plays of the nineties. A demonstration of the systematic character of this preoccupation may provide a useful perspective for a consideration of Shaw's understanding and dramaturgical use of rhetoric in that decade. As a self professed meliorist, Shaw could hardly have gone through the nineties without identifying and challenging pessimism. His enthusiasm for the theoretical side of the task is evident in his essays, letters, and prefaces, but the occasional nature of his writing tends to obscure his consistent approach to the subject. A coherent view of pessimism only really becomes apparent when his discussions of its various kinds are collated. Shaw's descriptions of pessimism can broadly be classified as 'philosophical', 'scientific', and 'ethical'. His speculations on philosophical pessimism are most concentrated in The Perfect Wagnerite. There, the relationship of Schopenhauer to Wagner is seen as one of a pessimist to a meliorist with pessimistic inclinations. Schopenhauer's theory of the Will (as Shaw understood it) is set out: 'to Schopenhauer the Will is the universal tormentor of man, the author of that great evil, Life; whilst reason is the divine gift that is finally to overcome this life-creating will and lead, through its abnegation, to cessation and peace, annihilation and Nirvana. This is the doctrine of Pessimism'.1 Shaw's own attitude to this was mixed admiration and contempt. Writing to William Archer for instance, he accepts 'his metaphysics' and denies 'his philosophy' by inverting the Schopenhauerist process: 'the real and of course eternally indispensable function of Reason is to devise the means for the satisfaction of the will'. This assertion explains his indignation at being thought anything other than a meliorist: 'His pessimism, and his conviction that the will was the devil and the intellect the divine saviour, marks him off from me ... in the clearest and most fundamental way.'2 The opposition