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