The Nobel Prize in Literature 1925
George Bernard Shaw
Presentation Speech by Per Hallström, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy, on December 10, 1926*
George Bernard Shaw showed in the novels of
his youth the same conception of the world and the same attitude
to social problems that he has maintained ever since. This
provides a better defence for him than anything else against the
repeated accusations of lack of honesty and of acting as a
professional buffoon at the court of democracy. From the very
beginning his convictions have been so firm that it seems as if
the general process of development, without having any
substantial influence on himself, has carried him along to the
tribune from which he now speaks. His ideas were those of a
somewhat abstract logical radicalism; hence they were far from
new, but they received from him a new definiteness and
brilliance. In him these ideas combined with a ready wit, a
complete absence of respect for any kind of convention, and the
merriest humour - all gathered together in an extravagance which
has scarcely ever before appeared in literature.
What puzzled people most was his rollicking gaiety: they were
ready to believe that the whole thing was a game and a desire to
startle. This was so far from being true that Shaw himself has
been able to declare with a greater justice that his careless
attitude was a mere stratagem: he had to fool people into
laughing so they should not hit upon the idea of hanging him. But
we know very well that he would hardly have been frightened out
of his outspokenness by anything that might have happened, and
that he chose his weapons just as much because they suited him as
because they were the most effective. He wielded them with the
certitude of genius, which rested on an absolutely quiet
conscience and on a faithful conviction.
Early he became a prophet of revolutionary doctrines, quite
varied in their value, in the spheres of aesthetics and
sociology, and he soon won for himself a notable position as a
debater, a popular speaker, and a journalist. He set his mark on
the English theatre as a champion of Ibsen and as an opponent of
superficial tradition, both English and Parisian. His own
dramatic production began quite late, at the age of thirty-six,
in order to help satisfy the demands that he had aroused. He
wrote his plays with instinctive sureness, based on the certainty
that he had a great deal to say.
In this casual manner he came to create what is to some extent a
new kind of dramatic art, which must be judged according to its
own special principles. Its novelty does not lie so much in
structure and form; from his wide-awake and trained knowledge of
the theatre, he promptly and quite simply obtains any scenic
effect he feels necessary for his ends. But the directness with
which he puts his ideas into practice is entirely his own; and so
too are the bellicosity, the mobility, and the multiplicity of
his ideas.
In France he has been called the Molière of the twentieth
century; and there is some truth in the parallel, for Shaw
himself believes that he was following classical tendencies in
dramatic art. By classicism he means the rigorously rational and
dialectical bent of mind and the opposition to everything that
could be called romanticism.
He began with what he calls Plays Unpleasant (1898), so
named because they brought the spectator face to face with
unpleasant facts and cheated him of the thoughtless entertainment
or sentimental edification that he expected from the stage. These
plays dwell on serious abuses - the exploitation and prostitution
of poor people, while those who perpetrate these abuses manage to
retain their respectability.
It is characteristic of Shaw that his orthodox socialistic
severity toward the community is combined with a great freedom
from prejudice and a genuine psychological insight when he deals
with the individual sinner. Even in these early pieces one of his
finest qualities, his humanity, is fully and clearly
marked.
Plays Pleasant (1898), with which he varied his program,
have on the whole the same purport but are lighter in tone. With
one of these he gained his first great success. This was Arms
and the Man, an attempt to demonstrate the flimsiness of
military and heroic romance, in contrast to the sober and prosaic
work of peace. Its pacifist tendency won from the audience a more
ready approbation than the author had generally received. In
Candida, a kind of Doll's House with a happy
ending, he created the work which for a long time was his most
poetical one. This was due chiefly to the fact that in this play
the strong superior woman which for him - for reasons unknown to
us - has become the normal type, has here been given a richer,
warmer, and more gentle soul than elsewhere.
In Man and Superman (1903) he took his revenge by
proclaiming that woman, because of her resolute and undisguisedly
practical nature, is destined to be the superman whose coming has
been so long prophesied with such earnest yearning. The jest is
amusing, but its creator seems to regard it more or less
seriously, even if one takes into account his spirit of
opposition to the earlier English worship of the gentle female
saint.
His next great drama of ideas, Major Barbara (1905), has a
deeper significance. It discusses the problem of whether evil
ought to be conquered by the inner way, the spirit of joyful and
religious sacrifice; or by the outer way, the eradication of
poverty, the real foundation of all social defects. Shaw's
heroine, one of his most remarkable female characters, ends in a
compromise between the power of money and that of the Salvation
Army. The process of thought is here carried out with great
force, and naturally with a great deal of paradox. The drama is
not entirely consistent, but it reveals a surprisingly fresh and
clear conception of the joy and poetry of the life of practical
faith. Shaw the rationalist here shows himself more liberal and
more chivalrous than is customary with the type.
Time does not permit us to hint at the course of his further
campaign even in his more outstanding works: suffice it to say
that without a trace of opportunism he turns his weapons against
everything that he conceives as prejudice in whatever camp it may
be found. His boldest assault would seem to be in Heartbreak
House (1919), where he sought to embody - always in the light
of the comic spirit - every kind of perversity, artificiality,
and morbidity that flourishes in a state of advanced
civilization, playing with vital values, the hardening of the
conscience, and the ossification of the heart, under a frivolous
preoccupation with art and science, politics, money-hunting, and
erotic philandering. But, whether owing to the excessive wealth
of the material or to the difficulty of treating it gaily, the
piece has sunk into a mere museum of eccentricities with the
ghost-like appearance of a shadowy symbolism.
In Back to Methuselah (1921) he achieved an introductory
essay that was even more brilliant than usual, but his dramatic
presentation of the thesis, that man must have his natural age
doubled many times over in order to acquire enough sense to
manage his world, furnished but little hope and little joy. It
looked as if the writer of the play had hypertrophied his wealth
of ideas to the great injury of his power of organic
creation.
But then came Saint Joan (1923), which showed this man of
surprises at the height of his power as a poet. This it did
especially on the stage, where all that was most valuable and
central in the play was thrown into due relief and revealed its
real weight, even against the parts that might evoke opposition.
Shaw had not been happy in his previous essays in historical
drama; and this was natural enough, as he happened to combine
with his abundant and quick intelligence a decided lack of
historical imagination and sense of historical reality. His world
lacked one dimension, that of time, which according to the newest
theories is not without significance for space. This led to an
unfortunate lack of respect for all that had once been and to a
tendency to represent everything as diametrically opposite to
what ordinary mortals had previously believed or said.
In Saint Joan his good head still cherishes the same
opinion on the whole, but his good heart has found in his heroine
a fixed point in the realm of the unsubstantial, from which it
has been able to give flesh and blood to the visions of the
imagination. With doubtful correctness he has simplified her
image, but he has also made uncommonly fresh and living the lines
that remain, and he has endowed Saint Joan with the power
of directly holding the multitude. This imaginative work stands
more or less alone as a revelation of heroism in an age hardly
favourable to genuine heroism. The mere fact that it did not fail
makes it highly remarkable; and the fact that it was able to make
a triumphal progress all around the world is in this case
evidence of considerable artistic worth.
If from this point we look back on Shaw's best works, we find it
easier in many places, beneath all his sportiveness and defiance,
to discern something of the same idealism that has found
expression in the heroic figure of Saint Joan. His criticism of
society and his perspective of its course of development may have
appeared too nakedly logical, too hastily thought out, too
unorganically simplified; but his struggle against traditional
conceptions that rest on no solid basis and against traditional
feelings that are either spurious or only half genuine, have
borne witness to the loftiness of his aims. Still more striking
is his humanity; and the virtues to which he has paid homage in
his unemotional way - spiritual freedom, honesty, courage, and
clearness of thought - have had so very few stout champions in
our times.
What I have said has given a mere glimpse of Shaw's life-work,
and scarcely anything has been said about his famous prefaces -
or rather treatises - accompanying most of the plays. Great parts
of them are insurpassable in their clarity, their quickness, and
their brilliance. The plays themselves have given him the
position of one of the most fascinating dramatic authors of our
day, while his prefaces have given him the rank of the Voltaire
of our time - if we think only of the best of Voltaire. From the
point of view of a pure and simple style they would seem to
provide a supreme, and in its way classic, expression of the
thought and polemics of an age highly journalistic in tone, and,
even more important, they strengthen Shaw's distinguished
position in English literature.
At the banquet, Mr. Shaw's thanks were presented by the British Ambassador, Sir Arthur Grant Duff, who expressed particular appreciation of the fact that the Prize given to Mr. Shaw would be used to strengthen the cultural relations between Sweden and Great Britain.
* The Nobel Prize in Literature 1925 was announced on November 11, 1926
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1925
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