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| George Bernard Shaw |
G.B.S.—Mankind’s Friend
Thomas Mann
March 1, 1951
ES DIEUX S’EN VONT. The gods pass. With George Bernard Shaw another of Europe’s Old Guard has departed—the Nestor of that great-statured generation, gifted with enduring vitality, unwinded, productive to the last—leaving behind what must be called, in comparison, a race not without interest, but frail, somber, endangered, and withered before its time. He was preceded in death by Gerhart Hauptmann, of whom G.B.S. scarcely took notice, though plays like “The Weavers” and “The Rats” should have greatly pleased him, and by Richard Strauss, whom he knew quite well and in whom he admired the great tradition as well as the brash revolutionary efficiency of a man born under a lucky star. Still among us are the octogenarian André Gide, Shaw’s kinsman in capricious genius and Protestant morality, and the aged Knut Hamsun, now merely vegetating, a man broken by politics, though the quondam creator of highly discriminate narrative works that yield nothing in richness and charm to Shaw’s dramatic works. Shaw, judging by his writings, was sublimely unconcerned with this compeer; and it is true that in many respects the two of them were counterpoles, especially in the matter of socialism. The bond between them in the personal sphere was a sense of obligation towards Germany, well-founded in either case, though it spelled Hamsun’s political doom, while in the more intelligent Shaw it maintained the character of a well-tempered gratitude which, for the rest, laid little claim to any very extensive intimacy.
