Shaw's amusing freethinkers

Yesterday Nancy and I spent the day in lovely Niagara-on-the-Lake, an historic community not quite an hour away which served as the first capital of Upper Canada at the end of the 18th century. Now it is a scenic and heavily touristed town boasting beautiful parks and gardens, quaint horse-drawn carriages, 19th-century architecture and, most notably, the Shaw Festival. The Shaw Festival consists of a series of theatres presenting stage plays written either by George Bernard Shaw himself (1856-1950) or by other playwrights during the nearly century-long course of his life. The Festival has run from April through October every year since 1962.


Today in Literature

George Bernard Shaw

Yesterday we saw Shaw's You Never Can Tell, which was first performed in 1898. Although I've not made a study of Shaw and his writings, I find him a fascinating figure because he is in many ways the paradigmatic 19th-century freethinker who retained much of the charm and naïveté of his type well into a very different age. He was, of course, one of the leading figures in Britain's socialistic Fabian Society, along with the likes of H. G. Wells and Sydney and Beatrice Webb. Out of all Shaw's works, I have personally seen, in addition to this play, Major Barbara (at the Shaw and on the screen) and the cinematic version of Pygmalion. And of course everyone has seen the latter's musical version, My Fair Lady. I may have seen one or two others as well over the decades.

You Never Can Tell is a comedy populated by amusing and eccentric characters, its plot revolving around a search for a lost father, a dentist unable to make a living on his own devices, an unlikely romance between a cad and a woman with "modern" ideas and, last but not least, changing mores at the end of a bourgeois century. Despite being well acted, yesterday's performance got off to a somewhat slow start, but Shaw's witty dialogue successfully carried the second half.

One of the characters is Finch M'Comas, a one-time bohemian in his youth who, by the time he has reached middle age, has cut his hair and donned a suit to become the Clandon family's solicitor. Here is M'Comas responding to Mrs. Clandon on their first meeting in many years:

You reproached me just now for having become respectable. You were wrong: I hold to our old opinions as strongly as ever. I don't go to church; and I don't pretend I do. I call myself what I am: a Philosophic Radical, standing for liberty and the rights of the individual, as I learnt to do from my master Herbert Spencer. Am I howled at? No: I'm indulged as an old fogey. I'm out of everything, because I've refused to bow the knee to Socialism.

With my interest in political ideologies, I like this line because it illustrates the way one philosophical school, considered trendy by one generation, is so quickly supplanted by another in the next. Spencer's social darwinism may have seemed the cutting edge of progressive opinion when it was first articulated, but socialists had by the end of the century effectively sidelined it as retrogressive. One wonders from this line whether Shaw might have had an intimation that his own socialist commitments might one day be deemed old-fashioned and superseded by something new.

It is also worth noting that this play's freethinkers all appear to have independent means. Most seem not to have to work for a living, and those who do are in the employ of those who don't. The lesson? If you are wealthy enough, you can indulge in all the freethinking and lifestyle eccentricities you wish, simply because you have the material resources to support them and are freed from the poverty to which such quirks will inevitably lead those of ordinary means. How many colourful eccentrics would Shaw have found amongst the Welsh coalminers of his day or the striking Pullman workers a few years earlier in far off Chicago? Not many, I venture to say. In a society characterized by widespread affluence, might such eccentrics multiply endlessly, with freethinking becoming the norm rather than the exception? Perhaps. It certainly seems to be the case that our society is more tolerant than were previous generations of social experimentation because the latter appears — at least in the short term — to have few if any deleterious consequences for that society as a whole.

All the same, if extensive affluence makes everyone a potential eccentric, it cannot make everyone a George Bernard Shaw. Shaw's plays are worth reading and, if you have the opportunity, viewing on stage. If you're ever in southern Ontario, the Shaw Festival is the place to see them.