The Thinking Corner

Yeats and Shaw

Yeats once wrote to Dorothy Wellesley: "Shaw has written a long, rambling, vegetarian, sexless letter, disturbed by my causing 'bad blood' between the nations."

It is curious to find any act of the most efficient fighter of our day described thus. The very efficiency of Shaw's fighting seems to have misled Yeats. Measured against Shaw, Yeats on the war-path can be nothing but frustrated rage, a weakling with a sword in his hand but unable to wield it; he can only scowl and spit. Shaw is like a fencing expert, parrying blows and dealing death-wounds with such smooth ease, such effortlessness, such absence of violent waste that he appears to many eyes "vegetarian" and "sexless". But you have just to look around and you will see the corpses mounting up. It is also a certain intellectual impersonality in Shaw, a freedom from pseudo-romantic fog, that creates that impression and hides from Yeats the clean supple strength. Shaw may not strike out of sheer feeling; he lifts everything to the cerebral plane - above mere meat and sex, so to speak - but that does not make his activity anaemic and impotent. He sublimates his elemental nature into idea-force: that is all. The force is superb and intense - only, it issues through the channel of thought.

"Long" and "rambling" are another pair of inapt and superficial adjectives. If Shaw is "long", it is because he is both inexhaustible and many-angered - he has much to fight and plenty of energy to go on fighting. "Rambling" is a misobservation of his intellectual fecundity: he has everywhere the fencing-expert's skill that never fails to touch the right spot, but he has a multiplicity of strokes and a delight in complex movements and gestures - leaping here, prancing there, driving at the midriff, thrusting at the heart, sticking into the jugular. He loves to play with his opponents in an intricate all-wounding manner; he does not want merely to kill, he wants also to expose on as many sides as possible the

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rottenness of which his opponents are composed; he "rambles" over their whole bodies and attacks them from every quarter and with his entire repertory of strokes either fiercely pointed or furiously sweeping.

And then there is the laughter running through each rapier-flash. Such confidence is Shaw's that he pokes fun with his deadly jabs and cuts capers while slashing at people's follies. The caper-cutting has another aspect too: he acts a bit of a clown while making his antagonists look fools, because he wishes to relieve the duel of overgrimness on either side and to save himself from pompous pretentiousness and the pride that may render him forgetful of his own humanity.

Yeats makes no mention of this double-edged humour. Just as he missed the Shavian idea-force and ingenious gusto, I suppose he would have dubbed the Shavian laughter lack of seriousness.

Yeats's "blind spot" towards Shaw is regrettable. However, we must not conclude he has less valuable things to give us than Shaw. The two men are different and bring us different treasures. Shaw is the analyst mind and the ironic spirit taking art as their instrument; Yeats the mind of insight and the spirit of aristocracy, fused with the artist. Yeats is certainly more artistic and has in his work a closer touch with "inner" realities. Shaw does not know these realities intimately even when he champions some mode of them like the Life Force as conceived by him, a vast urge in the world to attain through trial and error a deific consciousness. The occult, the visionary, the hierophantic are not truly his domain: he can probe them but without getting to their heart, for to get to their heart one needs a glowing intuitive faculty plucking words out of one's depths and not just a sharp intellect with a gift for imaginative rhetoric. Yeats in his own sphere cannot be equalled by Shaw: there is much more food for our souls in a few "Celtic" or else "Byzantine" poems of Yeats's than in all the forceful argumentation set to drama in Man and Superman or Back to Methuselah. The same

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holds good between Yeats's essays and Shaw's prefaces.

But when Yeats impinges on the field of the intellect, with its demand for an argus-eyed acuteness, he must suffer by comparison with the Shavian genius. Political science, whether concerned with national or international affairs, is not, generally speaking, a poet's metier, what though the poet may have passed from reveries and wizardries to "passionate masterful personality". The early Yeats was a rapt whisperer of enchantments, the later Yeats a man of intense will dabbling in ideas and handling many matters besides soul-secrets. Still, "passionate masterful personality", go as it may through a noticeable thought-process, does not tend to a satisfying play of the intellect proper if made the keynote not merely of poetry where it is quite in place but also of all the departments of one's life. It leads to a marked self-grooved condition, not caring to enter into the skins of those who hold a vision dissimilar to one's own; it encourages neither an open mind nor a real detachment -states that are requisite for genuine intellectual activity.

Shaw too is full of personal penchants: he nonetheless works them out like a logician, capable of seeing all the points of his antagonists and therefore capable of refuting them if they are weak or readjusting his own case to make it more strong: Yeats's temper as well as method is unShavian: even outside poetry he feels like a pontiff and the reasons he brings forth have an air as of revelation, a tincture of poetry, but he is mostly blind to the merits or demerits of a case from the standpoint of the pure intellect which has to preserve a calm dispassionate centre amidst the whirl of personality. A certain intolerant heat and a leaning towards Fascism were characteristic of Yeats in old age. The latter came from a confusion of Fascism with aristocracy and the superman's strength, the former from that strain in him which developed as a reaction against his early dreaminess and which insisted on the "vigour of blood" and even made him ribald in his last writings. Shaw does not lack zest and energy but they are more of the nerves than of the blood and his penetrating

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intellect is lord over them. He seems to Yeats bloodless and to be insufficiently gripping the stuff of the world. The impression is not false if Shaw's dramatic characters are put by, say, Shakespeare's: it is wrong if meant to charge him everywhere with defective force and dispersed light. Shaw is one of the greatest breakers of Victorian hypocrisy and sentimentality: the nineteenth century's citadel of sham received the strongest, most vital blows from Shaw; its unhealthy air was made bright and clean most by the laughing and penetrating Shavian sunshine. Shaw gets indeed dwarfed by Yeats when that poet is profound and mystical, but on the planes of politics and sociology and moral convention as well as of the critical intellect in general it is Yeats who becomes the pigmy - wholly unconvincing when he denies edge and elan to G. B. S. on his own grounds and pronounces him a long-winded bore or an empty meanderer.

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