Why George Bernard Shaw was an overrated babbler

When I was a kid, I was taught by a kindly old Jesuit whose youth had been beguiled by George Bernard Shaw. The provocative ironies of ‘GBS’ were quoted everywhere and he was, for several decades, the world’s leading public intellectual. But as a schoolboy I found it hard to assent to the infatuations of my elders and though I relished Shaw’s aphorisms (‘we learn from history that we learn nothing from history’) I conceived a suspicion that he was smug and overrated. A babbler. Perhaps even a bore. Man and Superman, rarely revived at full length, offers us GBS with all the taps running. Imagine Fry, Brand and Norton rolled into one and given a bushel of coke to snort.

The plot transposes the Don Juan myth to the English upper classes and features a supremely articulate lothario, Jack Tanner, who becomes embroiled in various marital complexities. As soon as Shaw had finished writing this four-hour epic, he accused himself of taciturnity and decided to append The Revolutionist’s Handbook (78pp), in which he explores his themes further. How does the play feel today? Well, GBS seems like a cross between GBH and BS. He assaults the audience with stifling torrents of brainy rhetoric. Some of it amuses. Parts of it dazzle. But the nuggets are all too rare. It’s like reading a billion tweets at one sitting. His tilts at ‘the English’ seem formulaic and stagey. ‘An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.’ Why an Englishman in particular? Why not a German or a Greek or an Aztec? Why not an Irish Protestant? And there’s a nagging suspicion that Shaw’s advocacy of political chaos is a glamorous hoax. He’s a drawing-room revolutionary, an avaricious bluffer posing as a heretic in order to make the enjoyment of his wealth more palatable to himself.