Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Third Series

Fragment ID: 21110

I refuse to accept the men you name, with the exception of Russell, as serious thinkers. Wells is a super-journalist, super-pamphleteer and storyteller. I imagine that within a generation of his death his speculations will cease to be read or remembered; his stories may endure longer. Chesterton is a brilliant essayist who has written verse too of an appreciable brilliance and managed some good stories. Unlike Wells he has some gift of style and he has caught the trick of wit and constant paradox which gives a fictitious semblance of enhanced value to his ideas. These are men of a high and wide contemporary fame but we are not sure how long their work will last, though we may venture to predict some durability for a good part of Chesterton’s poetry and Wells’ short stories. Shaw has a better chance of lasting, but there is no certain certitude, because he has no pre-eminent height or greatness in his constructive powers. He has constructed nothing supreme, but he has criticised most things. In page after page he shows the dissolvent critical mind and it is a dissolvent of great power; beyond that he has popularised the ideas of Fabian socialism and other constructive view-points caught up by him from the surrounding atmosphere, but with temperamental qualifications and variations, for the inordinately critical character of his mind prevents him from entirely agreeing with anybody. Criticism is also a great power and there are some mainly critical minds that have become immortals, Voltaire for instance; Shaw on his own level may survive – only, his thinking is more of a personal type and not classic and typical of a fundamental current of the human intellect like Voltaire’s. His personality may help him as Johnson was helped by his personality to live.

Shaw is not really a dramatist; I don’t think he ever wrote anything in the manner of the true drama; Candida is perhaps the nearest he came to one. He is a first-class play-writer,– a brilliant conversationalist in stage dialogue and a manufacturer of speaking intellectualised puppets made to develop and represent by their talk and carefully wire-pulled movements his ideas about men, life and things. He gives his characters minds of various quality and they are expressing their minds all the time; sometimes he paints on them some striking vital colour, but with a few exceptions they are not living beings like those of the great or even of the lesser dramatists. There are, however, exceptions, such as the three characters in Candida, and as a supremely clever playwright with a strong intellectual force and some genius he may very well survive. He has a very striking and cogent and incisive style admirably fitted for its work, and he sometimes tries his hand at eloquence, but “heights of passionate eloquence” is a very unreal phrase. I never found that in Shaw anywhere; whatever mental ardours he may have, his mind as a whole is too cool, balanced, incisive to let itself go in that manner.