FRANK HARRIS: BERNARD SHAW.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20488, 5 March 1932, Page 13

FRANK HARRIS: BERNARD SHAW.

AN ANTITHESIS. [By 'I. L'urle Welliy. in (lie "Forlnigluly Kevievv.'' ] The posthumously published book by Frank Ilai'ris on Mr Bernard Shaw has elicited in many quarters estimates not so much of its qualities as of the qualities of the two writers. There are thus brought to the bar of criticism two reputations, the one, as I think, considerably exaggerated, the other still not commensurate with the narrow, vivid, unpleasing genius of its possessor; and here is a case in which the typical jury will certainly prove incompetent.

For as to Frank Harris, we have a man against whose character and against many of whose journalistic and literary activities tho public has long and justly been incensed. He was a braggart, he could be something of a bully, he had very few scruples, and his personality, when it came through his work, could not possibly excite affection or pity. Add that his claim to a permanent place in literature rests almost entirely on a few short stories repellent to the average reader by the brutality of their action or by an acrid flavour, or—and perhaps not least—bv the writer's disconcerting refusal to interpose any mitigating charm of stylo between reader and subject. Not since (Jrabbe announced his programme, "nudity of description and poetry without an atmosphere," had there been uncompromisingly set up in English literature an ideal so repulsive to the plain man; and —a point particularly to be made—Frank Harris's ideal was set up in none of that feverish revolt against gracious things which is, after all, a tribute to them, but simply in obedience to the law of his own small, hard genius. The pl&in man, given time, has no great difficulty with what Tennyson called "wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism," and has come by now, poor soul! to a comprehension uf the female fever for saying ineffable things defiantly: nothing can ever bring him to a comprehension of an art, in its own way austere, which seems to forgo not only the luxuries of sentimental idealism, but the ignoble delights of the trough, the baso rapture of release from all reticence. And even a subtler and more flexible typo of reader may be somewhat taken aback by an art which acems to renounce so many of the privileges of art as defined (amusingly enough, by Zola!) as.life seen through a temperament, and offers us only such a view of persons as we may have through a colourless pane of glass. There may well be moments when even the subtler and more flexible reader of my hypothesis supports the plain man by crying out over some page of Frank Harris's best stories, "This is not writing, this is only a way of making mo an eye-witness!" There shall be no question here, for all the little portraits inset in tho popular reviews ot the Harris-Shaw book, and for all the legends of Mr Shaw and Frank Harris, of Hyperion and Satyr; but look at the other picture. And, while looking at it, call to mind what seems to me the capital truth about Irish writers born before the period in which Mr Yeats and -iE imposed complete artistic integrity on the literature of their nation: that Irish writers wore much concerned to produce effects and extremely anxious to avoid giving opportunities for strictly esthetic judgment of . any part of their work. "t)oes the'.doctrine shock you? It was only my joke. Do you take that for a "flippancy! It is part of my doctrine. And, anyhow, we are having a very enjoyable time, and at least we c»n agree in being, no one knows how seriously, agin' the Government in matters of literature, art, and social conduct, no less than in matters of politics." * Between the loose responsiveness of this art—if thiat be art which spends the most of its energy in evading judgment as art—and the ferocious consistency of the art of Frank Harris in the few stories that matter there is a violent antithesis. Another antithesis presents itself when we observe the mode of the attack on the public made by these two writers. Frank Harris, in his most prosperous and useful period, tried to accommodate himself to English society, bat only as a man, or porhaps rather, as a chameleon which strives to its utmost and is the more infuriated by its eventual failure; as a writer ha made no concessions whatsoever to English expectations. Bernard Shaw understood instinctively that a man who has not, so to speak, a ready-made place in English society is wise in flouting everything it values and in being not a definable but an incalculable rebel. Had Bernard Shaw remained and written in Ireland, where before tho ago of Mr Yeats and M cheeks suffered attrition from tongues, he would haye been another of those very clever Irishmen who are always on the verge of delivering goods and not-so-goods~ to a public little exercised to distinguish things in one, category from things in the other. His genius for a career brought him to England, where, the public was probably more muddled than anywhere else in Europe, but, to its pitiful credit, unable to believe that anyone- talking about the reconstruction of society fcould be mainly a buffoon. And having como to England he proceeded, after some years of doing nothing in particular, to create a public for himself; whereas Frank Harris did little but aljetfate successively every section of his .potential public. Mr Shaw- had great talent for the conduct of his life;_and Frank Harris, for all his resourcefulness in shady enterprises, had next to none. So it comes about that to-day the man of genius is posthumously enjoying only a sort of success of disesteetn, and even that only because his book happens to be

about Mr Bernard Shaw, whereas the man of many talents is universally applauded. No one more adroit than Mr Shaw in securing postponement of artistic judgment 011 his work; the cleverest lawyer in Chicago, never got the evil day for his gunman client put off more ingeniously. But there is a limit to allowing a writer to evade judgment as he frisks about betwixt ■jest and earnest; would have us enjoy as economics what may not wholly delight us as drama, and applaud as drama what may seem perverse to us as would have us tolerate the play for the brilliance of the preface, or find importance in the preface because it emanates from the author of the play. It has been a great game, played with immense skill and unflagging energy, but it is about time someone called "Stop!" to it.

It is about time, I say, because there has lately been a development far less to be suffered than any in the earlier history of Mr Shaw's reputation. I mean, persons of great artistic endowment are now being made to appear of consequence only in the degree that they arc or have been entangled with r Shaw. The Ellen Terry of the moment is not the actress, but Mr Shaw's correspondent; Ellen Terry's son is not a designer of genius, but somebody who has had some sort of row with Mr Shaw; and Frank Harris is not the man who wrote "Montes," "Elder Conklin," "Tho Miracle of the Stigmata," "Eating Grow," but the ill-advised biographer of Mr Shaw.

The time, then, has come to say that there is a great difference between the brightest and best assortment of talents and genius. But no sooner has one used the word genius than one is forced into explanations; for people in general have a strange notion, quite unwarranted by the facts in the history of art, that the word invariably carries with it an implication of greatness, so .that the man of genius will always .and at all points be enormously more important than the man of talent. Vet genius may reside in an artist as small as the writer of some songs in the Elizabethan song-books, and mere talents may enable their possessor to agitate a contemporary world not even aware of the small man of genius at work within it. Mr Shaw is very naturally given immense importance in our time; the only trouble is that, for the most part, he is given it for the wrong reasons and in the wrong departments. As every kind of gadfly on the flanks of John Bull, he has been a sometimes useful stimulant, an occasional nuisance, and a frequent entertainment. He is easily the best living pamphleteer. Between thirty and forty years ago lie did more than any other man to shock the English theatre into admitting the possibility that ideas might as much be part of a dramatist's material as amours; as the critic of follies isolated for examination he has had in these forty years no superior, and only in one department one rival, the Mallock of that "Critical Examination of Socialism'' which is Euclid working with laughter to a reductio ad absurdum. But it has been hidden from Mr Shaw that the isolation of a folly is a grossly discourteous and a self-defeating action. It is not" the true sages or the true artists who have been anxious to segregate foolishness and examine it under tho microscope. Life is all of a piece, and to wrench things out of it one at a time, except for the purpose of farce or the cheaper kind of satire, is not the part of wisdom. Mr Shaw, as everybody knows, is wonderfully acute in his attack on his selected aspects of life, yet he seems never to have suspected that the wisdom of the artist is not the sum of conscious and clever judgment on separate aspects of life, but an emanation from what must in a way be a humble rendering of a whole experience. . . , . Frank Harris's way of writing short stories was not the way that most appeals to me; and as I never knew the man, and as he affronted a scholar of my special admiration, and slandered a poet who is my friend, I can hardly be suspected of wishing to praise him for personal reasons. But when I And critics of repute implying that Frank Harris's only claim on our attention is that he has written a book, and, as it happens, rather a bad book, on Mr Shaw, I am moved t6 protest on behalf of the man of narrow and sometimes repellent genius whose half-dozen best stories will abide the question of posterity, to protest against the prevalent belief that the planets become important in the degree in which they approach Mr Shaw. ' In our time (and to the strange great prints of I.leet Street which we flatter by calling them our contemporaries) Mr Shaw is important almost beyond words of description; he is always "news"; but the latest news, to my knowledge as a fairly old worker on newspapers, goes into what the public regards as the "Stop Press" and a disillusioned profession calls "the Fudge"; and the peculiarity of fudge in "the Fudge is that it eventually falls into the class of mformation associated with the doccase of Queen Anne. On the other hand, the thing, however small, however harsh, which, has been done in perfect accordance with the principle of its artistic conception, that endures. Mr Shaw will unquestionably have his place in tho history or the English theatre, in the history of English pamphleteering, and in the extremely comic history of what Socialists thought they thought; but under the only aspect which concerns a critic or literature,' 'Elder Conklin,'' and the rest of a Small and unattractive and memorable procession, will matter, to a few fit judges, when only the writers of Teutonic and American theses are occupied with tho majority of Mr Shaw's worksu These things are the more difficult to say because Mr Shaw, with the 8^ er " osity that has always distinguished him when dealing with individuals instead of with ideas, pays handsome enough tribute to Frank Harris in his proposed epitaph:

Here lies » man of letters who huted cruelty and injustice and bad art, and never spared them in his own interest, it.i.x - .

And Mr Shaw is sometimes more exactly appreciative of Frank Harris than Frank Harris is of him. Frank Harris, he tells us rightly, had not one career, but two, simultaneous and on different planes.

On the imajinative plane, the invariable generosity of hU transports of indignation, scorn, pity, chivalry, and" defiance. Of snoOberiea, powers, and principalities, > enabled him to. retain the regard of people who hatt the same sympathies. But on the plane of efeTyday life lie got into dilhcalties and incurred maledictions from which it was not always possible to defend him.

"Not always possible- to defend him" is as mild a thing as cotild be paid. In circumstances such as those in which Mr< Shaw writes, generosity and gentleness are highly to bo esteemed, but critical truth is more important than praise of courtesies exchanged between Mr Shaw and Harris; and though, the mind of Frank Harris was swaying between admiration and ropulsiop. when he wrote tills book on' a subject not very well suited to him, there are among his brutal misunderstandings of Mr Shaw some criticisms against which the most eloquent of the Shavians will nevei find an effective defehce. For example, Frank Harris suggests, not in these words, that Mr Shaw is of those revolutionaries who get most of the intellectual benefit out of being revolutionary without suffering the disadvantages of that position. To jug—anil even a Tory eyo can sotiie-

*Guiif» Din dispensed water only.

times have some appreciation of revolutionaries who pay the price—Mr Shaw, in his capacity in the army ■ of subvertors, has long seemed to bear some resemblanco to Mr Kipling's Gunga Din:

If we charged of broke or cut, You could bet your bloomin' nut, 'E'd be waiting fifty uaces right flank REAR.

"With 'is man'seript on 'is back, 'e would skip with their attack, an' watch 'em till the bugles made 'Retire'," doubtless the "pleasantest moment in Mr Shaw's attack on the forts of what he deems folly; but the parallel could be continued to Mr Shaw'B credit, for where "It's always double dole and no canteen," obviously the Socialist heaven, "VII be squattin' on the coals givin' drink" to poor damned souls," and Frank Harris will get a : s\vig from Mr. Shaw.