The Comic Sublime

Abstract

At the outset of his first major work, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw salutes the ‘pioneers of the march to the plains of heaven’ (C 19: 15). The combination in this figure of ‘pioneers’ and ‘plains of heaven’, of a word evoking the progress of society and a phrase evoking the progress of self into new moral territory, this fusion of social Darwinism and Bunyanesque Christianity, describes the most characteristic thrust of his imagination. Both his dramatic and discursive writing carry forward, under the banner of Socialism, a vision of perfectibility at once collective and individual. The imperative of general progress is at the same time a psychological imperative, for Shaw’s work typically dramatises conflict between the egoism of the commonplace social self and the higher egoism of moral passion.