t 4 Is Shaw Dead ? "
SIR,—Is not the short answer to St. John Ervine's question that Bernard Shaw will not survive because he was not sincere ? He was a skilled controversialist, but he was more inspired by his desire to overthrow an adversary than to express what he really believed to be true. It would not be difficult to establish this from his own pen; there is hardly a dogmatic sta*ment that he advanced on any large issue that could not be controverted from some other of his own writings.
His Commonsense about the War must have been written with his tongue in his cheek, but it was published when our soldiers were dying in their thousands on foreign fields for ideals that they seriously believed in, and his indecent .levity infuriated the British public in consequence. He wrote his Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, but he must have known that his arguments were invalid, for no leading State Socialist has ever accepted them. He allowed Frank Harris to write his "life," which he himself edited, and this held up his mother to ridicule. He was none-the-less willing to live on her earnings—with a brief interval—till he was twenty-eight years old. He professed to be a religious agnostic, but one of his best plays —r-St. Joan—advanced convincingly the reasons for a religious faith. He condemned the possession of large personal wealth, but he left 000,000. Some--but by no means all—of his plays were brilliantly controversial and challenging, but the foundations of them are easily overthrown He was .a poseur and a self-advertiser, frequently willing to score a point at the cost of his self-respect. His published letters to Mrs. Patrick Campbell show that he was prepared in his correspondence to offer an unworthy criticikm of his own wife. It is perhaps statMg the case too highly to describe him as a charlatan, but his dialectical skill does not excuse his many personal failings.. His writings on his boasted sexual irregularities—true or untrue—were lamentable. He was an artist in words, but quite unscrupulous' in his literary devices. Much of his work is already out of date, save in some repertory theatres, where adolescent audiences have always been attracted by its superficial brilliance.
He has nothing to offer to the present generation of realists: who have long ago discarded his plausible opportunism.—Yours faithfully,
ANGUS WATSON.
Sunlight Chambers, 2-4 Bigg Market, Newcastle-on-Tyne, I.
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