[In the following essay, Adams considers the significance of Shaw's repeated use of “heart” in compound words and phrases throughout his plays, and the association of these terms with particular characters.]

It has been a critical cliché of long standing that Shaw is a writer of intellect, not passion—appealing to the brain and not to the heart. Shaw was of course aware of this critical opinion, and objected to it as an oversimplification of his matter and method. For example, in his satire on drama critics in the Epilogue to Fanny's First Play (1911), he has the appropriately named Bannal offer the opinion that Shaw is “Intellect without emotion.” In trying to guess the anonymous author of Fanny's First Play, the critics reject the notion that it might be Shaw:

VAUGHAN:
… Poor as this play is, theres the note of passion in it. … Now Ive repeatedly proved that Shaw is physiologically incapable of the note of passion.
BANNAL:
Yes, I know. Intellect without emotion. Thats right. I always say that myself. A giant brain, if you ask me; but no heart.(1)

Shaw then has the critic Gunn (a satire on the Star's Gilbert Cannan) object to the “crude medieval psychology” that makes a distinction between heart and brain, echoing Shaw's earlier statement of the same point in his Preface to Three Plays for Puritans (1900). In this Preface, Shaw brags, “As to philosophy, I taught my critics the little they know in my Quintessence of Ibsenism; and now they turn their guns—the guns I loaded for them—on me, and proclaim that I write as if mankind had intellect without will, or heart, as they call it. Ingrates: who was it that directed your attention to the distinction between Will and Intellect? Not Schopenhauer, I think, but Shaw” (p. xxi).

Though Shaw objected to the dichotomy between heart and brain, he in fact encouraged it in his numerous dramatic portraits of the heartless hero and the hero with a heart. He frequently juxtaposes the two character types, giving the edge to the heartless person, whom Shaw portrays as businesslike, self-sufficient, and sensible. Examples are Vivie Warren, Grace Tranfield, Captain Bluntschli, Don Juan, Henry Higgins, the Maiden in As Far As Thought Can Reach, the Ancients, “She” (Clementina Alexandra) and the Secondborn (Dick) in Buoyant Billions. His parade of heartless heroes from his earliest to his latest works suggests to us why critics might conclude that Shaw himself was all brain and no heart. As one reads the entire Shaw canon, one observes the recurrence of character types and situations along with the recurrence of words or phrases to identify them. In particular, “heartless,” “heartbroken,” and “have a heart” appear throughout Shaw's work, usually in association with similar characters or situations or ideas.²

When a character in Shaw is called “heartless,” one can be sure that he or she will be one of Shaw's incipient Superheroes—the pragmatic, unscrupulous iconoclast opposing conventional morality. In the early play Mrs. Warren's Profession (1894), Shaw presents Vivie Warren as heartless. In the central scene, in which Vivie learns that her mother earns her living by prostitution, Mrs. Warren behaves conventionally, melodramatically hiding her face in shame. In contrast, Vivie accepts the news thoughtfully and calmly; she admonishes her mother not to hide her face since “you know you dont feel it a bit,” matter of factly inquires about breakfast time tomorrow, and tells her mother to pull herself together. At his point Mrs. Warren accuses Vivie, “You! youve no heart” (p. 208). This scene is a familiar one in Shaw: a crisis occurs in which the hero is expected to respond conventionally; the hero proceeds instead in a common sense way about his or her business and is therefore accused of want of heart. For example, when Bluntschli (Arms and the Man, 1894) receives the news of his father's death, he sheds no tears and immediately begins making arrangements for the disposal of his father's estate. Louka observes, “He has not much heart, that Swiss. He has not a word of grief for his poor father” (p. 53).

Henry Higgins (Pygmalion, 1913) is perhaps Shaw's most famous heartless hero. He refuses to worry about what will become of Eliza when she leaves the gutter; for this Eliza accurately observes, “Oh, youve no feeling heart in you” (p. 223). At the end of the play, refusing to play Prince Charming to Eliza's Cinderella, Higgins lectures on the life of the mind as over against the life of feeling; for him, it is the difference between the rarefied atmosphere of art and science and the brutal violence of gutter life:

If you cant stand the coldness of my sort of life, and the strain of it, go back to the gutter. Work til youre more a brute than a human being; and then cuddle and squabble and drink til you fall asleep. Oh, it's a fine life, the life of the gutter. It's real: it's warm: it's violent: you can feel it through the thickest skin: you can taste it and smell it without any training or any work. Not like Science and Literature and Classical Music and Philosophy and Art. You find me cold, unfeeling, selfish, dont you? Very well: be off with you to the sort of people you like. Marry some sentimental hog or other with lots of money, and a thick pair of lips to kiss you with and a thick pair of boots to kick you with. If you cant appreciate what youve got, youd better get what you can appreciate.

(p. 292)

The same coldness of feeling and disgust for the life of the senses replaces the love of the Maiden (Chloe) for Strephon in As Far As Thought Can Reach (1920). The Maiden finds talk with the Ancients and contemplation of the properties of numbers more interesting than making love with Strephon. He feels that “Something horrible is happening to you. You are losing all heart, all feeling” (p. 203).

She admits that earlier “I lost my heart to you at once. But now I seem to have lost it altogether: bigger things are taking possession of me” (p. 204). The scene in which she rejects Strephon's love echoes Higgins' earlier rejection of Eliza's bid for personal affection:

LIZA:
… you dont care a bit for me.
HIGGINS:
I care for life, for humanity; and you are a part of it. …

(p. 289)

.....

STREPHON:
You no longer care for me at all, then?
THE Maiden:
Nonsense! I care for you much more seriously than before; though perhaps not so much for you in particular. I mean I care more for everybody.

(p. 205)

The Maiden leaves Strephon in despair at the idea of decaying “into unnatural, heartless, loveless, joyless monsters” (p. 207) like the Ancients.

In the late play Buoyant Billions (1948) the self-sufficient heroine, who has retreated to the tropics to escape suitors, gentility, and her father's billions, says to the intruder who is sexually drawn to her, “Young man: I spent years waiting for somebody to break my heart before I discovered that I havent got one” (p. 21). Just as she echoes the Maiden, so too Bill Buoyant's Secondborn ends the play “talking heartless nonsense” in a speech echoing other heartless heroes, especially Higgins and the Ancients:

And who dares say that mathematics and reasoning are not passions? Mathematic perception is the noblest of all the faculties! … Who has done more for enlightenment and civilization than Giordano Bruno, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Rutherford, Einstein, all of them far seeing guessers carried away by the passion for measuring truth and knowledge that possessed and drove them? Will you set above this great passion the vulgar concupiscences of Don Juan and Casanova, and the romance of Beatrice and Francesca, of Irish Deirdre, the greatest bores in literature, mere names incidentally immortalized by a few lines in a great poem? … God is not Love: Love is not Enough: the appetite for more truth, more knowledge, for measurement and precision, is far more universal: even the dullest fools have some glimmer of it.

(pp. 59-60)

This passion for knowledge as over against “vulgar concupiscences” receives its fullest defense in the dialog in hell in Man and Superman (1903). With characteristic irony, Shaw gives the defense of mind over sense to the reputed libertine, Don Juan, and uses the defenders of conventional morality as his foils. Don Juan is uncomfortable as the Devil extols the joys of love and beauty; he shrinks from the Devil's assertion that he (Don Juan) has a warm heart beneath his “affected cynicism” (p. 96). Insisting on the value of contemplation over the pursuit of pleasure, Don Juan is accused of “want of heart” (p. 112). He describes hell to Donna Ana as a place where “old age is not tolerated. It is too real. Here we worship Love and Beauty. Our souls being entirely damned, we cultivate our hearts” (p. 88). Thus we see in the plays an association of heart not with will, as in the Preface to Three Plays for Puritans, but with convention, sensualism, and sentimental idealization of love and beauty. The heartless hero stands in contrast to the persons of “heart,” those hypocrites, romantic fools, and worshippers of love who are often also specialists in heartbreak.

More often than not talk of “heart” masks foolish or inhumane behavior; those with “heart” usually believe it acceptable to be self-serving, even dangerously so, as long as the reality is covered by the illusion of fellow-feeling and an admission of human fallibility. For example, Sartorius, defending his slum landlordism to Harry Trench, hypocritically admits that “Every man who has a heart must wish that a better state of things was practicable” (Widowers' Houses, 1892, p. 43). The tempestuous and possessive Julia Craven accuses Grace Tranfield of “a cold heart” and says, “Thank heaven, I have a heart” (The Philanderer, 1893, p. 124). Saranoff makes “sincere” love to his fiancée one moment, then to the servant girl the next: “he has plenty of heart left,” says Louka (Arms and the Man, p. 53). The Statue in Man and Superman professes shock at Don Juan's realistic appraisal of the sex game but admits that he himself lied to women; his sincerity is his defense: “I had a heart: not like you” (p. 122). Another character who talks of heart is Tom Broadbent, who appeals to “every Irish heart” in his campaign for Parliament and who thanks his constituents “from the bottom of my heart” (John Bull's Other Island, 1904, pp. 140, 147). He promises to be successful in his stand for office, just as he has been successful in love, by catering, “to the heart, not to the head” (p. 121).

Most characters of heart are not so fortunate in love: they usually suffer heartache, often revelling in the luxurious emotion of a broken heart. The largest collection of broken-hearted lovers is in Getting Married (1908) and Heartbreak House (1919). In Getting Married, Mrs. George rules the broken hearted: she is introduced as an expert in love, with wide experience and “a wonderful temperament and instinct in affairs of the heart” (p. 305). Her latest conquest is young Hotchkiss, devastated by love for her and challenged to try to touch her “wasted exhausted heart,” her “poor dying heart” (pp. 324, 326). As goddess of the heartbroken, she offers sympathy to General Boxer, who has nursed a broken heart for twenty years and is still capable of breaking down in sorrow; she offers companionship and the possibility of love to the heartsmitten Hotchkiss; she warns the clergyman Soames against “an empty heart,” tempting him with a song of heartbreak (p. 337).³

Heartbreak has also become a way of life in Heartbreak House: Ellie Dunn's heart breaks for Hector Hushabye; Randall the Rotter's heart breaks for Lady Utterword; Boss Mangan's heart breaks for Hesione Hushabye. Ellie names “this silly house, this strangely happy house, this agonizing house, this house without foundations” Heartbreak House (p. 134). In the climatic scene, Hector says that the inhabitants are “all heartbroken imbeciles,” and Mazzini Dunn promptly disagrees: “Oh no. Surely, if I may say so, rather a favorable specimen of what is best in our English culture” (p. 135). Both statements are of course accurate. Shaw's pessimistic message is clear as the bombs explode at the end of the play and the inhabitants wait expectantly for the next destructive raid: the cultivation of the heart at the expense of the brain has led to the threat of total destruction. There is no “heartless” hero to save Heartbreak House.

In surveying Shaw's treatment of the “heartless” versus the “heartfelt” and “heartbroken” theme in the plays cited, it is not difficult to see how critics would be tempted to speak of a split between intellect and sensibility in Shaw. But, as we know, Shaw objected to this critical opinion. The easiest way to reconcile Shaw's protest and the evidence of the plays is to note that Shaw often uses words equivocally, and that “heart” is such a word. When it is applied to Sartorius, Saranoff, the Statue, Tom Broadbent, or Shaw's collection of heartbroken lovers, to “have a heart” means to be self-indulgent and sometimes self-deluded. But, in contrast to these socially destructive persons of heart are some of Shaw's strongest characters—Eugene Marchbanks, Richard Dudgeon, Major Barbara, Father Keegan, Doctor Ridgeon, Saint Joan—who are also people of heart.

The sensitive adolescent poet of Candida (1895), Marchbanks, is able to appeal to “the cry of [Prossy's] heart,” drawing out her confession of a secret love and intuiting that it is Morell (pp. 104-5). Marchbanks can also understand, when Candida cannot, Morell's pain as she taunts him about his conventional views of women and wifehood: “Eugene looks [at Morell], and instantly presses his hand to his heart, as if some pain had shot through it.” He explains to Candida, who continues not to see her husband's distress, “I feel his pain in my own heart” (p. 118). Just as the poet responds with heartfelt emotion to others' pain, so too does the sinner/saint Richard Dudgeon “Putting his hand to his breast as if to a wound” (a gesture like Marchbanks'), Dudgeon says to the weeping Judith Anderson: “He [Anthony Anderson] wrung my heart by being a man. Need you tear it by being a woman?” (The Devil's Disciple, 1897, p. 35). Major Barbara appeals to Bill Walker's heart when she attempts to convert him (Major Barbara, 1905, p. 281), and reveals that she too has one when it breaks after she learns that the Salvation Army is in Undershaft's power (p. 299). Even Doctor Ridgeon suspects that he may have a heart, diagnosing his “curious aching” after he meets the beautiful Jennifer Dubedat thusly: “Sometimes I think it's my heart: sometimes I suspect my spine” (The Doctor's Dilemma, 1906, p. 91).

The most remarkable of Shaw's heroes of heart is Father Keegan, in John Bull's Other Island. Just as earlier Shaw identified heart with will, in this play he identifies it with imagination: “an Irishman's heart is nothing but his imagination,” says Doyle (p. 83). Whereas the Englishman Tom Broadbent uses an appeal to the heart to woo a woman or a constituency, Keegan's Irish heart is wrung by a vision of heaven which makes him unable to accept earth as it is; and he breaks his heart brooding over “the dead heart and blinded soul” of Ireland (p. 168). Finally, as he watches plans for the commercial development of Ireland by Broadbent and Doyle, he is in despair, but he nevertheless opens his heart to them: “Standing here between you the Englishman, so clever in your foolishness, and this Irishman, so foolish in his cleverness, I cannot in my ignorance be sure which of you is the more deeply damned; but I should be unfaithful to my calling if I opened the gates of my heart less widely to one than to the other” (pp. 175-76).

These and other examples show that Shaw can strike the note of passion when he wants to, and that he values on occasion heartfelt emotion. In his use of the recurrent theme of “heart,” he makes a distinction between the heart of sentimental romance and the heart of imaginative humane feeling. Saranoff's or Broadbent's or Julia Craven's deluded, hypocritical, and manipulative heart is very different from that of the sensitive Marchbanks or the self-sacrificing Richard Dudgeon—or of Saint Joan, whose “heart would not burn” (Saint Joan, 1923, p. 148). Admittedly, most of the time “heart” in Shaw refers to an insincere, potentially destructive emotion. But it can also offer hope for humanity: a poet can come to understand others; a devil's disciple can give his life for another; a disillusioned Salvation Army lass or Irish Priest can continue to dream and hope. Shaw's last word on heartbreak occurs in the puppet play, Shakes versus Shav (1949); here Shav says to Shakes, “You were not the first / To sing of broken hearts. I was the first / that taught your faithless Timons how to mend them” (p. 142). Characteristically, in Shaw the emphasis is on heart mending, on recovering—on having the heart (will, imagination) to survive.

Notes

1. Misalliance, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, & Fanny's First Play (Lond: Constable, 1932), p. 323. All of my quotations from Shaw are from the Standard Edition of the Works of Bernard Shaw (Lond: Constable, 1931-52); page references in parentheses in my text are to this edition. The date of a play given in my text is the date of completion of the play, as recorded in Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, Theatrical Companion to Shaw (Lond: Rockliff, 1954).

2. A Concordance to the Plays and Prefaces of Bernard Shaw, ed by E. Dean Bevan, 10 vols. (Detroit: Gale, 1971). Lists hundreds of uses of “heart,” “heartbreak,” “heartless.”

3. Other notable heartbroken lovers in Shaw are Mendoza, pining for Louisa in Man and Superman, and Strephon, pining for the Maiden in As Far As Thought Can Reach.