v míše jeho duchovního ústrojení, kniha Collisova (J. S. Collis, Shaw, London, J. Cape, 1925, pp. 192) se jeví jako úhrnné dílo samostatně oceňující a kriticky hodnotící. Collis je psal ze stanoviska jakéhosi irského, pokrokového idealismu a měl dosti dechu i síly k původnímu, plastickému pojetí, které je plno vlastních myšlenek. Collis je nejlepším Shawovým vykladačem. Je to duch samostatně myslící, který dalek rozmělňování, docílil kromě kritiky i toho, že doplnil často Shawovu subjektivitu výkladem objektivnějším, a proto jeho knihu o Shawovi lze řadit, pokud běží o myšlenkový přínos, vedle knihy Chestertonovy. Pružný a nedogmatický Collis je ovšem shawian, ale to mu nevadí, aby byl v podstatě kritický. I když se konec konců projevuje jako následník Shawův, umí pokračovat na Shawových základech a dělá Shawovu dílu čest. Collisovo hodnocení divadelních předností Shawových, pochopení všech jeho kladných stránek právě jako kritické určení jeho rozporů je z nejlepšího co bylo o Shawovi napsáno. Je to anglický tím se také rozumí mnohem samostatněji myšlený a neodvislý pendant k Babovi, kniha nikoli literárního historika, nýbrž vzdělaného kritika s jasným a ostrým rozhledem, napsaná poutavě současnou řečí ze zážitků a nikoliv z mrtvých citátů. Ač jeho výhrad není málo, a ačkoliv přistupoval k Shawovi s úzkostlivou kritičností, byl na konec stržen téměř v nadšení, aniž se jeho kniha proto stala panegyrickou.

Zcela jiná než většina předcházejících prací je kniha Robertsonova. (J. M. Robertson, Mr. Shaw and The Maid, London, Cobden-Sanderson, 1926, pp. 115.) Je to v jádře polemika se Shawovým pojetím Jany d'Arc a jeho negativní kritika. Námět se však autorovi rozrůstá a tak vlastně kniha se vztahuje na celého Shawa. Robertson, znalec doby alžbětinské, je bystrý, byť nijak pokrokářský vědec, a jeho polemika se Shawem, která se jistě dlouho připravovala a zrála, je zásadní. Autor chtěl prokázat Shawovi tutéž službu, kterou Shaw prokázal Shakespearovi: službu ikonoklasta. Je to tedy svým způsobem druh vědecké krevní msty. Ačkoliv Robertson prohlašuje v úvodě, že nechce býti k Shawovi,,,privilegovanému humoristovi", zlomyslný, prohřešuje se proti tomuto tvrzení často. Ne snad svou věcnou kritikou, která je záslužná, nýbrž zlomyslným pointováním závěrů, bezohledně pichlavými epithety, ironickými glosami a celkovým tónem jistého shovívavého pohrdání a znehodnocování. Dokazuje prostě, že Shawova znepokojivá osobnost ho vydráždila, a tak vedle cenných hodnocení kritických setkáváme se v jeho knize is invektivou rázu nevědeckého. Východiskem je Robertsenovi přesvědčení, že Shaw pod maskou předbojníka nové osvícenosti vede vlastně boj za novou zatemnělost. Svou knihu psal Robertson s bezpečnými a podrobnými znalostmi historickými s hlediska konservativního znalce Shakespearea a

zdá se, s méně bezpečnými a podrobnými znalostmi celého díla Shawova. Robertson si toho druhého byl jistě vědom, poněvadž zamýšlel svou ironicky nazvanou knihu jako monografii o jedné hře. Dokázal tak, že Shawovo pojetí Jany ve svých složkách už bylo známo před Shawem, ale nedokázal, že Shaw je cele jen převzal. Robertson ex post očividně ví o Janě d'Arc materiálově víc, neotřásl však při tom nepochybnou subjektivní originalitou Shawova pojetí. Shaw se svým feministickým pojetím mohl se prohřešiti na historické pravdivosti. Umělecky však měl právo na jakékoli pojetí umělecké. Proto odsouzení se nemůže vztahovat na hru. Pokud běží o předmluvu, je jisto, že Shaw si protivědecky zapytlačil v oblasti historických faktů, ale to je jediná stránka, kde vzdělaný shakespearovec Shawa plně po svém potřel. Je však otázka, zda by se nedalo udělat totéž se Shakespearem kdyby byl totiž psal ke svým hrám předmluvy jako Shaw. Ve vlastní kritice dramatické Robertson už neměl tak snadného postavení a naprosto už nedospěl k nějakým objevům. Kromě ošemetného rozdělení na dramatiky s fantasií a imaginací, neudělal Robertson nic než že opakoval novým způsobem staré známé výtky, s nimiž se Shaw setkával ode dávna a přidal jen zdůrazněné tvrzení o Shawově naprosté neklasičnosti, ostatně už dávno předem vyvrácené Hamonem. Jediné kritické vítězství Robertsonovo je tedy veskrze provedený důkaz o Shawově historické nevědeckosti, ale to je jen porážka Shawovy snahy po universálnosti a nikoliv odsouzení jeho dramatiky. „Pan Shaw a Panna", jediná zcela negativní kniha o Shawovi, neměla tedy úspěchu, pokud se snažila o kritické znehodnocení Shawa dramatika. Práce fanatického staromilce je dobrou protiváhou nekritických panegyriků (pokud vůbec nějací jsou) a přispěla podstatně svou škodolibou kritičností kladně, i rozhořčenými bludy záporně, k poznání a určení hodnot Shawova díla, jež ovšem nemůže býti universálně pravdivé ani snad vždy a ve všem vědecky objektivní.

SUMMARY.

Bernard Shaw is one of those geniuses of English literature who desired to be not only a literary or artistic creator but a prophet and law-giver at the same time. Like Milton in the seventeenth and Ruskin in the nineteenth centuries, Shaw began his career as a mere writer and critic of art, though with considerable sociological predilections, but was gradually forced to realize that art and literature were not enough. Milton, leaving his poetical efforts behind him, became a moral and political legislator of the Puritanical England of his time. Ruskin, similarly, could not help but abandon his primordial aestheticism and gave himself over to the task of establishing new moral and social values, and organizing a new ethical order as the necessary basis for the real art to come. In spite of the fact that Shaw never gave up his favorite means of expressing his ideas and himself the dramatic form the same process of a literary artist growing and maturing into a prophet showed itself in his choice of themes. Though many of his ideas had been expressed before, he interpreted them in a particularly stimulating way and, using his authority as a recognized writer and philosopher, became an initiator of new ways of practical thinking and, consequently, of living, one of the most powerful stimulators of human evolution.

If, from this point of view, the life and work of Shaw, although having an international and revolutionary significance, appear to be typically English and essentially traditional, there is another side to his personality and activity which is exclusively his own, a side new and quite different from the analogous aspect displayed by both Milton and Ruskin, his forerunners, in the role of spiritual leaders of their respective eras. Bernard Shaw soon thoroughly realized the immensity and difficulty of his task, and attacked it at its very root. Milton was saturated with traditional religion, and Ruskin, though well aware of the general crisis of values, tried to regain the lost paradise through a moral and aesthetic renaissance of a somewhat gothic colour. Shaw, on the other hand, saw that a new religion, which up to his time had been the religion of a few choice. spirits, must be made popular and become a matter of necessity

for all. His whole life and work are imbued with the sole desire to implant that religion into the spiritual as well as material life of mankind.

Therein lies the significance of both his life and work. From this angle the development of his literary activities appears logical, organic and harmonious. All his principal writings are nothing but contributions to the modern cosmology and practice of that new religion. After phases of uncertainty, chaotic in some degree as to the direction of his endeavors at the outset of his career, Shaw very soon reached that spiritual level, which he kept ever after, where the philosophy of Creative Evolution became the firm axis of his activity. In that distinctness of purpose, and in its precise quality, he differs from Wells, who entered a similar path after many wanderings and experimentations in analogous, though sometimes even opposite, directions. From the first climax of his philosophical and poetic thinking, apparent in the "Man and Superman" group, up to its culmination in the Methusalah pentalogy (which occupies in his work a similar place cosmologically to that of "Paradise Lost" in the work of Milton) Shaw, not unlike Wells, was looking for human exponents of the Creative Evolution. His plays are dramatic representations of the conflicts resulting from the contacts of such evolutionary exponents, namely, men with missions, with the rest of mankind, namely, the common people, including common capitalists and aristocrats.

Shaw, having early converted himself to the religion of Creative Evolution, attempted to discover the manifestations of evolution in ordinary life. From that point of view he studied history and criticized contemporary life with a desire to identify such embodiments of life-force, but chiefly conceived them in his imagination and wrote plays about such imaginary leaders of life and men. That was also the driving force of his interest in the epic metamorphoses of his own early life, as represented in the outstanding revolutionary characters of his "immature" novels, in which his creation of Conolly, dealing in exclusive spiritualism of will, almost equals that of the ,,ancients" in his most mature philosophical play. That was also the source of his interest in Caesar, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, and above all, in Jesus; and in a lesser degree in other historical figures which appear in the galaxy of his dramatic characters. The same interest is discovered in the particular attention he paid to the great political leaders of to-day, such as Wilson, Lenin, Masaryk, Lawrence of Arabia, Mussolini and others. And an equal concern has given birth to all his imaginary geniuses or philosophical heroes from poor Tanner up to the great Undershaft, and farther on to the conception of a superhuman race.

Creation or re-creation of all those leading exponents of life

force in the light of Shavian philosophy and art was not an easy matter nor a mere mechanical trick of repeating a readymade conception. The characters mentioned above, as well as those of Father Keegan and Captain Shotover, all so varied and yet of the same stock, show the wide range of the author's poetic experiments. They also reveal his process of production which was always original and not routine as might be expected in the work of an author whose mind was so heavily laden with ideology. Shaw was never quite certain what their final shape would be like, and was possibly no less surprised at results than his readers, enjoying them as much and perhaps more than the latter. He tried to define those life-force heroes theoretically, and offered three divisions of mankind: he called them, as contrasted to the "philistines" and "idealists" (by which word he means romanticists), first, realists; then constructivists or utopic realists; and lastly coined the dignified term of "ancients".

Being himself such an unusual incarnation of life-force, Shaw based his creation upon his inner experience and that accounts for the spiritual affinity of all his heroes. When his hostile critics were saying that his outstanding characters were all alike, they were right as to the spiritual quality itself, but they were emphatically wrong in so far as they meant the artistic uniformity of those characters or their lack of individual vivid life.

Consequently, Shavian dramas may be defined as plays representing conflicts of unusual, heroic men or women, with their conventional, indifferent and always hostile environment; or as works of art showing the most dramatic moments of Creative Evolution, that is reproducing climaxes of the struggle, on the one side, between the life-force represented by its superhuman achievements, and, on the other side, between the material, antievolutionary, yahoo-like rest of mankind. Shavian prefaces, again, may be defined as essays attempting to codify all the Shavianly-interpreted material, out of which some Shavian idea dramatized prior to, during, or after, the writing of the preface, took its literary form. This explains why some of Shaw's prefaces went farther than their respective plays in cases where the magnitude of the theme did not allow even such a competent playwright as Shaw to dramatize it in a single play or even in a cycle of plays.

The above shown attitude of Shaw as a professional prophet of Creative Evolution will help the Shavian student to understand Shaw's treatment of science, art, politics, and religion. Though far from underestimating the results of scientific endeavor in general, Shaw does not hesitate to make an apparently unscientific jump when an inspired guess leads him to do it.