Bernard Shaw’s dominance of modern high comedy is undisputed, even though he consistently sought political and intellectual preeminence rather than artistic fame.
W. B. Yeats’s career in the theatre is equally as long, beginning and ending a decade earlier, and the attitudes of both are sharply divided between the utopian zest of the visionary statesman and the objectivity of the disinterested maker.
Ironically, it is Yeats rather than Shaw who exhibits the growing self-mastery of the Methuselan Long Livers visualized by Shaw as the next-to-last stage of mankind’s evolution toward spiritual purity, although his later stress on sensuality and decay counters Shaw’s fix on the “higher passions.” Yeats’s contemptuous term for Shaw was “barbarian of the barricades,” a phrase which probably fit Shaw’s disciple and fellow expatriate Sean O’Casey more snugly, allowing for the exaggeration. Shaw is far more complex than detractors such as D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, or James Joyce would allow, but he deliberately underplayed his far greater success in the commercial theatre for the sake of reform, preachment, and moral impact.
At the same time, Shaw’s values were much more deeply rooted in the nineteenth-century currents of liberal skepticism than were those of most of his Irish contemporaries in the theatre.
As a result, the growth of his fame as a European man of letters in the second and third decades of this century paralleled a decline in his influence as a polemicist, socialist, and iconoclast. Yeats’s monarchism, which he expressed so markedly in the Cuchulain plays which span his entire productive life, was more retrospective and mythic than Shaw’s, though it led to similar disillusioned flirtations with fascism in the twenties and thirties. And both men formulated and amplified their theories of social improvement primarily through societies of intellectuals, the press, and appointive office. However, Yeats’s energetic acceptance of rhythmic pendulations of growth, attainment, decay, and dissolution in character, society, and history freed him from Shaw’s preoccupation with future social betterment.