BERNARD SHAW and the Aesthetes - Knowledge Bank - The Ohio

232 Pages·2006·17.87 MB·English

BERNARD

SHAW

and the Aesthetes

by
Elsie B. Adams
OHIO .STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BERNARD SHAW
AND THE AESTHETES
By Elsie B. Adams
Though a genius of his stature defies any
easy categorization, George Bernard Shaw was
enough a man of his age not to have escaped
the undeniably pervasive influence of the Eng­
lish aesthetic movement. The movement was
at its height when he began writing and pub­
lishing in the 1870s and remained an active
force in British artistic and literary circles dur­
ing a substantial part of his long career.
The movement had two distinct branches,
and Shaw found himself sympathetic to at
least some of the tenets of both. Like the Pre-
Raphaelites, he based his art on observed phe­
nomena; and, with Ruskin and William
Morris, he saw art as the product of a healthy
milieu and a genuine religious impulse.
With the fin-de-siecle aesthetes, who often
tended to languish in a haughty and fashion­
able despair that he rejected, the ever vigorous
Shaw held in common the conviction that art
does not uphold conventional morality and
that art must be free from censorship. It is the
artist's business, he maintained, to create with­
out restriction a meaningful form, appropriate
and faithful to his inner vision — to depict a
reshaped, motivated, and articulated reality
that, as Oscar Wilde put it, serves as a model
for life.
Though Shaw was often at pains to dissoci­
ate himself from the art-for-art's-sake faction
of the aesthetic movement, he was closer to it
than he was ready to admit or realize. The
genuine artists (as distinct from the dilettantes
and artistic hangers-on) who appear in his
plays are alienated, temperamental, and sensi­
tive—often hypersensitive—individuals; they
devote themselves to the perfection of their
craft and are not afraid of being thought
immoral.

BERNARD SHAW AND THE AESTHETES

BERNARD

SHAW

and the Aesthetes

by
Elsie B. Adams
OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
J
Copyright © 1971

by the Ohio State University Press

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 76-153421

Standard Book Number: 8142-0155-5

Manufactured in the United States of America