Word: shavianly
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...great Irish evil, which all Irishmen fear, is romanticism; Shaw's conversion was real enough, but common sense, sanity, shrewdness, the practical were the Shavian aims. He was neither a visionary nor a crank; but rather, in the manner of Swift-though far more successful in his mission to the English-a negotiator. By eloquent attack, irony, laughter, bounce, by the intrigue of words and a wit that cut everything to ribbons, in a prose so clear, fast and pure that it was like a charmer's music to the snake, Shaw hypnotized England. People became Socialists without...
Chesterton accused Shaw of the gloom of a general Puritanism, and this naturally rankled. The weakness of the Puritan, especially of the Shavian kind, is his dangerous levity and cheerfulness, the merry, practical streak which evades the ungovernable tumult of feeling. The theory that the Life Force was driving on and on was felt by his audiences to be an escape from the crucifying emotional matter of the gains and losses. One more dazzling Irishman had talked himself out of life into the heavens like a whizzing rocket and had come down dead and extinct like the stick. One more...
...exalted. Their virtue was that they were practical. Shaw appeared to agree with the scientists that what succeeds is good and he had been careful, as a Marxist, to say that capitalism had been good in the days when it succeeded. Failure, like poverty, had always been the Shavian crime. The only failure he seems to have been proud of was his own failure to earn more than ?6 by novels and casual writing before he was 40. To the hostile, Shaw's trotting to Moscow and his defense of tyrants seemed a mixture of cynicism, contemptible prudence...
Taken together, the two big scenes are profoundly Shavian. In the first, the college-bred daughter understands and forgives her slum-born mother for having made a living out of brothels. In the second, she denounces her mother for making a fortune out of them. As a notorious woman's daughter, Vivie is naturally stiff-necked and stern in judgment; as a bad woman who has tried to be a good mother, Kitty Warren is naturally sentimental and defensive. Their personal relationship-beyond all considerations of economics or ethics-is irreconcilable. Few Broadway playwrights now in full bloom would...
...rubbing together of Law School minds may produce better grades and better lawyers, and the rubbing together of G.S.A.S. minds may produce anything from a new theory of the universe to a keener analysis of Shavian wit. But a cross-rubbing of the two is what we need most in these days of General Education...