NOT THAT THEY reveal him as a 'mystic.' This is
what Mr. Colin Wilson, in the Sunday Times, asserts that Shaw was. Shaw also, says he, 'is a psychologist; not, like Freud, a super- ficial recorder of animal neuroses.' (Has there, I wonder, been some confusion between Freud and Pavlov?) Mr. Wilson is nothing if not bold : 'The vision behind Shaw's greatest work.' he says, 'has yet to make itself apparent. . . . His figure is too vast for our age to be able to comprehend.' But if so much of Shaw's greatness is hidden (by what?), how has Mr. Wilson been able to arrive at such an enormously emphatic judge- ment about it? If it is hidden, how does he even know it exists? The answer, it seems, is that Mr. Wilson has been putting his ear to the ground, trying to detect the historical trend, in an effort to judge what will be said about Shaw in fifty years' time when everything will be clear. (Why is an X-ray insight reserved for critics of the next century?) 'Nothing is so difficult to assess as an historical trend while it is still under way.' Nevertheless, 'I believe that half a century hence will find Shaw acknowledged as being among a dozen or so writers who are the mainstream of European literary tradition.' When in doubt' call in the future—I can't detail the errors in your ideas but I can assure you that they'll look pretty silly in fifty (100, 500) years' time! The critics' job, it seems, is not so much to judge a man's work as to judge what future critics will say about his work. Where ancestor-worship is practised, old men are esteemed as being close to the spirits of the dead. Mr. Wilson, who looks to the judgement of the future, hints, at the end of his article, that young men like himself are pecu- liarly fitted to act as a medium between the rest of us and the spirits of the unborn critics of the twenty-first century—a happy justification for the juvenile literary pontiff. SQUADRON-LEADER WATERTON'S book The Quick and the Dead (published by Muller at 15s.) is causing a tremendous rumpus. I am not surprised : when the former chief test pilot of a great aircraft-manufacturing Um looses off a stream of criti- cisms with the speed and punch of a rocket salvo he must obviously, be taken seriously. Questions are to be asked in the House next week; meanwhile Gloster's and their present chief test pilot have made somewhat pained statements to the press. I have not met Squadron-Leader Waterton and I don't know what there is (or isn't) in his criticisms, but he is a Canadian, and if he is anything like the two Canadian test pilots I knew during the war, he'll stick to his guns. No doubt he will keep up verbally what he has begun in print. PHAROS
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