Professor David Kornhaber’s innovative “Introduction” to Shaw’s Major Cultural Essays focuses at first on Shaw’s lifelong commitment to being a critic of a society certainly needing criticism, especially in its contributions to “the arts” and its social/political/economic organization, which, collectively, make up the soul of a nation or culture. Shaw thought such criticism was needed to inform and motivate a society needing to evolve morally and intellectually, which Shaw admitted he was always “electioneering” for in all his writings (xiv). As Shaw himself moved in the 1890s from criticism to playwrighting (since his drama criticism called for a “new drama” in the English-speaking world that, lacking New Dramatists, he felt forced to provide) he evolved into a playwright by paradoxically not leaving the best part of himself, the critic, behind. Kornhaber’s main argument is that it was as “the artist as critic” that Shaw made his playwrighting serve his criticism (xiv). And then, so too with his philosophy, as his criticism and playwrighting served an encompassing philosophy, the larger view that stimulates growth of mind and heart simply by thinking logically, then sharing that with the world for its enlightenment.Point taken. If Shaw’s plays are to be viewed as artistic embodiments of his thinking as a critic or a philosopher, Kornhaber makes a very good case for that in his presentation and general elucidation of Shaw’s cultural essays in his “Introduction.”For the sake of an instructive contrast, however, a more conventional view has been Shaw as a “triple thinker” who appears as a sort of Three Musketeers all rolled into one when on the attack; his criticism, philosophy, and playwrighting can be seen as so interwoven they are hard to separate or see one as primary. But either way, seen hierarchically or not, all three were certainly “in play” in the “action” that was Shaw’s life. Taking the hierarchical option, Kornhaber’s thoughtful argument places philosophy at the top of the pyramid, as is revealed in his discussions of the major cultural essays.As for the collection itself in this volume from the Oxford World’s Classics series, if the choosing of what was to be in it were assigned randomly to any ten Shaw scholars, each would probably have come out with a somewhat different list, especially in Part III, labeled “Shorter Essays and Reviews,” since there is so much else to pick from. But whatever might be thought missing, I think most Shaw scholars would be happy to see, as picks in the major essays part, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, The Perfect Wagnerite, and The Sanity of Art, although Shaw’s Preface to Three Plays by Brieux, an intriguing pick, might be questioned. As for Shaw’s “Prefaces” to his plays, they are omitted here because major examples of them are attached to the several volumes of Shaw’s plays in this Oxford collection, but Kornhaber points out that those prefaces can be viewed as anticipatory reviews of his own plays, amusingly so as that implied that no further criticism from other drama reviewers was needed, Shaw’s characteristic one-upmanship winning the argument before argued. At any rate, my point is that if I had been assigned to pick out the best examples of Shaw’s major cultural essays with such riches to consider, I might still be arguing with myself instead of writing this review! Kudos to Kornhaber for taking on this very tough job.Kornhaber begins his “Introduction” with a very good point: “Had . . . Shaw never written a single play, he would still have been remembered as a pivotal figure of the late nineteenth century British stage, and of turn-of-the-century culture more generally, due to the impact of his voluminous criticism. Before he was Bernard Shaw, dramatist, he was Bernard Shaw, drama critic. And before that, music critic” (ix). And don’t forget art critic as well, even if disguised. Then Shaw is quoted as summing things up at age ninety-two that it was all those years as drama critic that equipped him to survive as a dramatist. The point in general is that “cultural criticism was Shaw’s entry point into the life of letters he so desperately sought as a young man” (ix).Getting into the specifics of the major cultural essays, Kornhaber starts with The Quintessence of Ibsenism, which gave Shaw the occasion, at the time that Ibsen’s plays were first being produced in English on London stages, to explain Ibsen’s art to a public and a gaggle of drama critics who, scandalized by Ibsen’s apparent attack on accepted morality, totally misunderstood it. Shaw described The Quintessence as “contributing to the literature of philosophy” (xvi) in an effort to elevate Ibsen’s “new drama” that he himself was soon to emulate in his own unique style. “He wanted the English to understand Ibsen not as a firebrand but as a philosopher” (xvii). Shaw argues that Ibsen’s moral code (of “the Realist”) was way above the conventional morality (of “the idealists”) of his day, in a sense beyond good and evil, as Nietzsche put it, and so Shaw fought the critics who led the misunderstanding. Kornhaber asks us to notice how Shaw’s use of conflicts between “realists” and “idealists” in many of his own plays was anticipated by his use of such terms in The Quintessence to point out that “like all of Shaw’s art, they grew out of his perceptions as a critic” (xix). Thus in explaining Ibsen’s philosophy, Shaw also “inadvertently provided a decoder key for his own” (xviii). The quintessence of Ibsenism is that there is no quintessence, no nailed-down moral or morality, because life is always evolving and its moral codes with it, which is also the quintessence of Shavianism and its gospel of Creative Evolution. Hmmm, which came first?Moving on to The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), Kornhaber first reminds us of the difference between this essay and The Quintessence. Wagner was already well known and admired in England, Shaw himself had been sent to Bayreuth as a music critic, and there was no scandal to talk down at the moment. But Shaw thought there was a certain misunderstanding of Wagner’s art even by his supporters that could be likened to the misunderstanding of Ibsen’s. Shaw’s attempt to overcome such misunderstandings, however, led to some confusion. Shaw not surprisingly found Wagner, working in a new genre of music-drama severed from classical opera, responding to contemporary politics in his mythic tales, which needed interpretation as allegorical and politically radical. Wagner when younger did have his radical moments, which may have been referred to in his earlier works, but at the time Shaw wrote Wagner had already succumbed to “a nationalist conservatism” that received Shaw’s criticism (xx). Though he bowed to Wagner in describing his own plays as functioning like “verbal operas,” he ultimately saw Wagner’s work “as a counterpoint and challenge to his own dramatic mission” (xxii).Next to be introduced is Shaw’s The Sanity of Art (1895), which was a rebuttal to Max Nordau’s book Degeneration, which demonstrated “the supposed degeneracy of modern art” (xxiii). Shaw’s rebuttal began as an open letter to a journal called Liberty criticizing Nordau’s book. Nordau was the perfect example of the lost-in-the-past idealist as described in The Quintessence, and Shaw the realist brought him up to date. Far from being degenerate, modern art was “the engine of social change . . . and takes its place alongside the law and the Church as an institutional pillar of society” (xxiv).Shaw’s Preface to Three Plays by Brieux in a long introduction to a 1914 English translation of his plays connects to The Sanity of Art by explaining how a controversial French playwright of the later nineteenth century, Eugene Brieux, “known for his social problem plays and for his frank treatment of scandalous subjects from syphilis to birth control,” was to be praised for his use of the stage to alert society to such realities (xxiv). Shaw hailed Brieux as second only to Ibsen in creating the “new drama.”Kornhaber concludes his “Introduction” with eleven pages (xxv–xxxvi) devoted to brief commentary on “Selected Short Essays and Reviews” (there are twenty-one of them), which is followed by a summing up in “GBS, Artist Critic” and “The Legacy of Shaw’s Cultural Essays.” I’ll leave these little gems to you, but I’d like to quote some of the final words. Toward the end we find that to those who complained that he failed in solving the riddle of the universe, Shaw replied, “Of course not. Nobody knows . . . the point is to wonder and to probe, to challenge and to debate—to offer critique always” (xxxvi). Amen to that.In all this scrutinizing of Shaw’s cultural essays, Kornhaber has found a certain omnipresent force, generated from his criticism and philosophy, that powers his drama, as lively characters in lively actions embody the Life Force and send its illuminations upon the world. I like to think of Shaw’s writing hut in his garden as lit up like a giant light bulb, night or day since the day often brings moral darkness, signaling to the world that he was busily at work on “world betterment.” Never fear.Kornhaber is like most experienced Shaw scholars, I think, in that the longer they contemplate Shaw’s work, the more they long for a center. Shaw’s variety is splendid and often unmatched, but what’s the central point? “World betterment,” but how? Kornhaber has made a strong argument that the philosophical conclusions Shaw came to provide that center, as demonstrated in his criticism and drama. But philosophy is mostly just thinking about all the ideas. I think Shaw had action uppermost in his mind, with “electioneering” for socialism given a long run, but what call to action was with him from the beginning to the end?For my own two cents, after over sixty years of trying to figure Shaw out, I’ve decided that the dramatic art that serves criticism and philosophy, important as all three were, was ultimately serving all three with a unique religion that provided all the answers to all the questions, with all resolved in an action, the action of Creative Evolution. That is how. That’s the gospel (the “good news”). You don’t have to do anything but be you. In just being this experiment in life you are creating evolution. Mostly making mistakes in the process, of course, since at this point we’re only “Super Monkeys” descending from the tree to the ground, but the universe will give us plenty of room and time to improve, despite a threat of universal entropy mathematically arrived at by some astrophysicists.You might think of Shaw’s religion as relatively late-blooming if derived only from Henri Bergson’s 1907 “Creative Evolution” (1911 in its English translation), but it was there from the beginning, in Shaw’s very first play, now called Passion Play (1878), unfinished but very clear about its world-bettering intentions that will be primarily achieved by religion as reformed and updated by GBS and company. That religion, always in the process of updating, was insinuated in play after play, explicitly in the likes of the 1892 Widowers’ Houses, the 1897 The Devil’s Disciple, the 1903 Man and Superman, the biblical 1921 Back to Methuselah, and the 1923 Saint Joan (its Christ crucified offstage and then resurrected onstage as a Saint [a demotion, true] to have the last laugh at her crucifiers), and many others.Creative Evolution was designed by Shaw (developing Bergson’s ideas) as a religion without literal members, but as Shaw calculated it, there were billions who didn’t know that that was the name of their religion or that they belonged to it, and he hoped that he was recruiting more, none of whom would dream of calling themselves Creative Evolutionists. One of the best features of this religion is that you don’t have to go to a church or temple now and then to practice it; it’s with you every step of the way. Or not. Some people insist on the freedom to not evolve!Philosophy and religion are defined in various ways, but philosophy seems to be more about theorizing rationally and religion more about emotional practice, with theology being a combination of both to some degree. The intent of both is to interpret Life to know how best to live it by bettering it with understanding, and Shaw thought of that as his primary purpose.Thanks to David Kornhaber for making it clearer that there was a center to Shaw’s work and being and for making it clearer how his drama served whatever center you choose—criticism, philosophy, or religion—or all three at once, as they work together. The central point is that Shaw’s major cultural essays served to explain an all-encompassing, centering force to confront the challenge called “life.”