CAESAR, SHAW, AND Mr. NASH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 436, 31 October 1947, Page 18

CAESAR, SHAW, AND Mr. NASH

Written for "The Listener"

by

ANTON

VOGT

T has become fashionable since Pascal made a screen version which out-de-Milled de Mille to say that Caesar and Cleopatra is second-rate Shaw. For a while I succumbed to this, but on maturer reflection I am prepared to believe that the spectacle of the film has overshadowed the message of the play, and that there is more to it than most people think. What is Shaw driving at? The general idea seems to be that he is debunking Caesar, but as usual the general idea is wrong. All the bunk comes from people so wrapped up in the romantic tradition even when they are picking holes in it, that they can’t recognise a real hero when he appears without romantic trappings. The Doer as Artist Shaw’s*interest in Caesar is no paradox. From his point of view Caesar was not merely a great man, but a great artist; which he would regard as the indispensable corollary. That he practised the arts of peace and war placed him head and shoulders above the painters of pictures end the makers of poems and trinkets. Like Shaw, Caesar

considered good government the greatest of the arts and civilisation as the synthesis of all art, and like Shaw he was guided by his head rather than his heart. Even his ruthlessness was devoid of venom: it. was moral ard antellectual, and became increasingly so as he entered what Shaw would call his third phase. He planned conquests in the way engineers build bridges, with ends and means equally within his reach. With fewer and weaker legions he ‘would have made an admirable Fabius. As it was, their strength and number were the product of draughtsmanship rather than inspiration, for Caesar crossed his‘ Rubicons on homemade bridges. This Caesar is said to be debunked by Shaw because the dramatist makes him human rather than divine. Shakespeare’s Caesar is a demi-god living in the mouths of romantics who feared him. Shaw’s Caesar is a demi-god only in a half-line spoken wryly by himself, and even then he loses interest in the Sphinx as soon as Cleopatra comes. He had both eyes for a woman and two ears tuned to the music of taxes. He was, if you will, more like you and me and Mr. Nash than Nietzche. I bring in Mr. Nash to point a moral. Most people can see merit in a balanced

budget without recognising it as a work of art; but it does not follow that one can expect Caesar, Shaw, or Mr. Nash to share their point of view. To carry the argument a step further, Michaelangelo and da Vinci put together didn't produce anything half so beautiful as 30,000 State houses with electric fittings and modern. plumbing, Mozart ‘didn’t produce sounds half so pleasing as children’s padded foot-falls on a decent stretch of lawn, and the pedestrian creator of the Venus de Milo was a poor hack compared to the man who made -Cleopatra a queen. That most people haven’t got around to recognising this isn’t Shaw’s fault, let alone Mr. Nash’s of mine. It is simply that people’s instinctive reactions have been clouded over by a lot of hocus-pocus about art bearing no relation to life. In a word, they have been corrupted by the romantic tradition. Exit the Hero This tradition dies hard, and it is only because it dies hard that heroes in the accepted sense can continue to live. The romantics celebrate history’s saints and desperadoes, surrounding them with an aura, while dismissing with a shrug that much‘rarer bird, the efficient and practical man. The administrator, the

scientist, and the engineer are ignored while flamboyant little men on white horses ride into the popular imagination on badly written textbooks. Even for them planned success is no substitute for spectacular failure. The soldier has to die to live for ever. Leonidas living would be Leonidas forgotten. The saint must burn to win his flaming halo. Even the explorer must get lost to be saved. And it doesn’t matter how they do it, as long as they are single minded, obstinate, gallant, and absurd. Consider Scott and Amundsen. Scott didn’t know enough about the Antarctic to get-out of it alive. Amundsen knew so much about it that his journey to the Pole was like , a conducted tour. Scott, the failure, emerged a heroic legend. Amundsen, the success, remains a difficult name to pronounce, As always, people are only interested in conducted tours when a bus strikes the headlines by way of the kerb. Shaw, for whom thought means nothing without action, naturally admires Caesar, the man of thought and action, ° He recognises that only the doer can (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) be the perfect artist, not merely projecting the image of a world but shaping the world to his design. There would be danger in this if his hero were merely a man of action. The significant thing about Caesar was that he was not just a man of action but a man of good action. But in any case there is no danger of Shaw substituting a Hitlerian ideology for a Platonic one, because he sees that both in essence are the same, Shaw’s Caesar is like the real Caesar in that he has no ideals at all. But he had ideas. He was a practical man who stood for good government in so far as it could be achieved in his own time by himself. He was a thinker with an original turn of mind who chose to see no further than his Roman nose, and if it took him from the Elbe to the Nile it was because it was an uncommonly long one with a keen olfactory sense. He stood above self-interest, because having everything, he had nothing to gain. Caesar, the Lover When such a man falls in love he can even fall off the Pharos without losing his balance. But it would be wrong to assume because of this that he was not the complete man, l'homme moyen sensue/. It was merely that his sensuality was refined by his intelligence, and that he preferred the role of Caesar to that of Lothario because it was both more satisfying and more comfortable. Shaw takes liberties with his subject here, by allowing Caesar fewer liberties with the Queen than the birth of Caesarion can justify historically... But in essence he portrays the truth in the only way roméntics can understand it. Sensuality is most intense when it is cerebral. Shaw makes Caesar prefer the more subtle satisfaction, but only an ape-man would consider that the root of the matter is that Shaw is a vegetarian, This leads me to a major theme of the play, which would stand on its own merits were it not overshadowed by the characterisation of Caesar. The love story anticipates the Pygmalion-Galatea

theme of Shaw’s later, lighter and therefore more popular play. Like Higgins, Caesar renounces his Galatea after he has made her a Queen in his own image; but he doesn’t do it rudely and callously like Higgins. After |. all, he is a Roman gentleman and not a British bourgois. His acceptance of the avuncular role marks him not merely a conqueror of the world but a .conqueror of himself. By this device Shaw creates a newer and higher form of tragedy, in which a man loses what he desires most, not by some inherent weakness, but by an acquired strength. Shaw’s Caesar does not need Cleopatra. His only need is that she should need, him: and therefore he makes himself irdispensable. Since he can-

not compete physically with an idealised Mare Antony, he routs him mentally and spiritually. Anyone who asks of a play what it is driving at, increases its life by as much time and effort as he is prepared to put into the answer.