My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyreporter; he had been studying the trial of St. Joan and was simply recording what shehad actually said. Shaw's strange relations with the Cliveden hostess, Lady Astor, canperhaps only be explained by a paradox, for she was rather like one of thoseimpossible women in some of his plays who obviously never existed in real life. Hewrote much about women, only to demonstrate that it was the one subject he knewabsolutely nothing about, and even the best efforts of Mrs. Patrick Campbell couldhardly bring them to life.Where Shaw was supreme was in his understanding of the great men of action and inhis adumbration of what men might one day become. It was this which first fascinatedme in him. It was not that he was himself a man of action, for he lacked that decisivecharacter; though in his early days of advocating an unpopular socialism in the roughhouse of Trafalgar Square he had more contact with action than any other intellectualof his time and faced up to it manfully. Yet he understood men of action—verydifferent from himself because they were in some respects as cold and ruthless as hewas kind, warm and human—by some extraordinary intuitive process, and was able topresent them in moments of decision in an almost photographic likeness which cansometimes reveal more than all the tomes written about them; his mind was like thesensitive lens of a first-rate camera.Toward men engaged in great affairs he had three distinct attitudes; a completecontempt for contemporary politicians, of whom he had much experience, whichemerges in his plays through the caricatures almost amounting to burlesque; arealisation that a far higher type had already appeared on the human stage, far morecapable of effective action but doomed to be surpassed because of the ruthlessness oftheir natures, which was possibly a contemporary necessity; and a concept of a futureman combining the capacity for government with wisdom and compassion. The firsttype is seen in Burge-Lubin and all the other parodies of politicians; the secondappears in Caesar and Cleopatra and in his profound observations on the character ofCaesar in his work on Wagner, also in his short but incisive sketch of Bonaparte inThe Man of Destiny; the third is revealed in shadowy outline through the 'ancients' ofhis Methuselah, 'as far as thought can see'.His conscious derivations from the history and philosophy of the last century are clear,and he added much to them. It is less clear how conscious was his derivation from thewhole sequence of this European thinking which stems from Heraclitus even morethan from Plato, but his erudition was wide and deep. He realised the essential truththat nothing conceived by man can be entirely original when he said that he could seefarther than Shakespeare because he was standing on Shakespeare's shoulders.Rosebery grasped something of the same fact when he remarked that an entirelyoriginal speech would be understood by no one. Shaw derived but also added, andwill more and more be regarded as a considerable creative thinker.What Shaw desired for the world was the adult mind, and how right he was. Are notmany of mankind's troubles simply due to the behaviour of spoilt brats? His cure forthis bother in Methuselah was to live longer, until we can grow up. As this is not yetattainable, we must rely on the slower processes of evolution, and meantime mustmake do with a study of the highest types which have yet existed with a view tofinding or producing more of them. For this purpose he turned primarily to thecharacter of Julius Caesar, because he was attracted by the combination of an188 of 424