'^^^mj
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Sr THE SAME AUTHOR
HERETICS.
ORTHODOXY.
THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING
HILL: A Romance. Illustrated by
W. Graham Robertson.
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
THE BALL AND THE CROSS.
GEORGE BERNARD
:: SHAW ::
By
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
NEW YORK : JOHN LANE COMPANY
MCMX
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY
JOHN LANE COMPANY
REP. CZK. LI 3.
ACCESS. NO.
Gin
THE PLIMPTON PRESS, NORWOOD, MASS,
ftr"
653,4-
Introduction to the First Edition
MOST people either say that they
agree with Bernard Shaw or that
they do not understand him. I
am the only person who understands him, and
I do not agree with him.
G. K. C.
S^8S03?e2
The Problem of a Preface
A PECULIAR difficulty arrests the
writer of this rough study at the
very start. Many people know
Mr. Bernard Shaw chiefly as a man
who would write a very long preface even to a
very short play. And there is truth in the
idea; he is indeed a very prefatory sort of
person. He always gives the explanation
before the incident; but so, for the matter
of that, does the Gospel of St. John. For
Bernard Shaw, as for the mystics, Christian and
heathen (and Shaw is best described as a
heathen mystic), the philosophy of facts is
anterior to the facts themselves. In due time we
come to the fact, the incarnation; but in the
beginning was the Word.
This produces upon many minds an impres-
sion of needless preparation and a kind of
bustling proHxity. But the truth is that the 1
very rapidity of such a man's mind makes
him seem slow in getting to the point. It is
positively because he is quick-witted that he is
long-winded. A quick eye for ideas may
actually make a writer slow in reaching his
7
George Bernard Shaw
goal, just as a quick eye for landscapes might
Lmake a motorist slow in reaching Brighton.
An original man has to pause at every allusion
or simile to re-explain historical parallels, to
re-shape distorted words. Any ordinary leader-
writer (let us say) might write swiftly and
smoothly something Hke this: **The element
of religion in the Puritan rebellion, if hostile
to art, yet saved the movement from some
of the evils in which the French Revolution
involved morality." Now a man like Mr. Shaw,
who has his own views on everything, would
be forced to make the sentence long and broken
instead of swift and smooth. He would say
something like: **The element of religion,
as I explain religion, in the Puritan rebellion
(which you wholly misunderstand) if hostile to
art — that is what I mean by art — may have saved
it from some evils (remember my definition of
evil) in which the French Revolution — of which
I have my own opinion — involved morality,
which I will define for you in a minute." That
is the worst of being a really universal sceptic
and philosopher; it is such slow work. The
very forest of the man's thoughts chokes up
his thoroughfare. A man must be orthodox
upon most things, or he will never even have
time to preach his own heresy.
8
The Problem of a Preface
Now the same difficulty which affects the
work of Bernard Shaw affects also any book
about him. There is an unavoidable artistic
necessity to put the preface before the play;
that is, there is a necessity to say something
of what Bernard Shaw's experience means
before one even says what it was. We have
to mention what he did when we have already
explained why he did it. Viewed superficially,
his life consists of fairly conventional incidents,
and might easily fall under fairly conventional
phrases. It might be the life of any Dublin
clerk or Manchester Socialist or London
author. If I touch on the man's life before
his work, it will seem trivial; yet taken with
his work it is most important. In short, one
could scarcely know what Shaw's doings meant
unless one knew what he meant by them.
This difficulty in mere order and construction
has puzzled me very much. I am going to
overcome it, clumsily perhaps, but in the way
which affects me as most sincere. Before
I write even a slight suggestion of his relation
to the stage, I am going to vvrite of three soils
or atmospheres out of which that relation
grew. In other words, before I write of Shaw
I will write of the three great influences upon
Shaw. They were all three there before he
9
George Bernard Shaw
was born, yet each one of them is himself and
a very vivid portrait of him from one point
of view. I have called these three traditions:
"The Irishman," '*The Puritan," and "The
Progressive." I do not see how this prefatory
theorising is to be avoided; for if I simply
said, for instance, that Bernard Shaw was an
Irishman, the impression produced on the
reader might be remote from my thought and,
what is more important, from Shaw's. People
might think, for instance, that I meant that he
was "irresponsible." That would throw out
the whole plan of these pages, for if there
is one thing that Shaw is not, it is irresponsible.
The responsibiHty in him rings like steel. Or,
again, if I simply called him a Puritan, it
might mean something about nude statues or
"prudes on the prowl." Or if I called him
a Progressive, it might be supposed to mean
that he votes for Progressives at the County
Council election, which I very much doubt.
I have no other course but this: of briefly
explaining such matters as Shaw himself might
explain them. Some fastidious persons may
object to my thus putting the moral in front
of the fable. Some may imagine in their
innocence that they already understand the
word Puritan or the yet more mysterious
10
The Problem of a Preface
word Irishman. The only person, indeed,
of whose approval I feel fairly certain is
Mr. Bernard Shaw himself, the man of many
introductions.
II
CONTENTS
Page
Introduction to the First Edition .... 5
The Problem of a Preface 7
The Irishman 17
The Puritan 34
The Progressive 53
The Critic 87
The Dramatist 114
The Philosopher 165
13
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
GEORGE BERNARD
: : SHAW : :
The Irishman
THE English public has commonly
professed, with a kind of pride,
that it cannot understand Mr.
Bernard Shaw. There are many
reasons for it which ought to be adequately
considered in such a book as this. But the
first and most obvious reason is the mere
statement that George Bernard Shaw was born
in Dublin in 1856. At least one reason why
Englishmen cannot understand Mr. Shaw is
that Englishmen have never taken the trouble
to understand Irishmen. They will some-
times be generous to Ireland; but never just
to Ireland. They will speak to Ireland; they
will speak for Ireland; but they will not hear
Ireland speak. All the real amiability which
most Englishmen undoubtedly feel towards
Irishmen is lavished upon a class of Irishmen
which unfortunately does not exist. The
B 17
George Bernard SJiaw
Irishman of the English farce, with his brogue,
his buoyancy, and his tender-hearted irrespon-
sibiHty, is a man who ought to have been
thoroughly pampered with praise and sym-
pathy, if he had only existed to receive them.
Unfortunately, all the time that we were
creating a comic Irishman in fiction, we were
creating a tragic Irishman in fact. Never
perhaps has there been a situation of such
excruciating cross-purposes even in the three-
act farce. The more we saw in the Irishman a
sort of warm and weak fidelity, the more he
regarded us with a sort of icy anger. The
more the oppressor looked down with an
amiable pity, the more did the oppressed look
down with a somewhat unamiable contempt.
But, indeed, it is needless to say that such
comic cross-purposes could be put into a
play; they have been put into a play. They
have been put into what is perhaps the most
real of Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays, John BulFs
Other Island.
It is somewhat absurd to imagine that any
one who has not read a play by Mr. Shaw will
be reading a book about him. But if it comes
to that it is (as I clearly perceive) absurd to
be writing a book about Mr. Bernard Shaw at
all. It is indefensibly foolish to attempt to
i8
The Irishman
explain a man whose whole object through life
has been to explain himself. But even in non-
sense there is a need for logic and consistency;
therefore let us proceed on the assumption
that w^hen I say that all Mr. Shaw's blood and
origin may be found in John BulFs Other Island,
some reader may answer that he does not
know the play. Besides, it is more important
to put the reader right about England and
Ireland even than to put him right about
Shaw. If he reminds me that this is a book
about Shaw, I can only assure him that I will
reasonably, and at proper intervals, remember
the fact.
Mr. Shaw himself said once, "I am a typical
Irishman; my family came from Yorkshire."
Scarcely anyone but a typical Irishman could
have made the remark. It is in fact a bull, a
conscious bull. A bull is only a paradox
which people are too stupid to understand. It
is the rapid summary of something which is at
once so true and so complex that the speaker
who has the swift intelligence to perceive it,
has not the slow patience to explain it. Mys-
tical dogmas are much of this kind. Dog-
mas are often spoken of as if they were signs
of the slowness or endurance of the human
mind. As a matter of fact, they are marks of
19
George Bernard Shaw
mental promptitude and lucid impatience. A
man will put his meaning mystically because
he cannot waste time in putting it rationally.
Dogmas are not dark and mysterious; rather
a dogma Is like a flash of lightning — an instan-
taneous lucidity that opens across a whole
landscape. Of the same nature are Irish bulls;
they are summaries which are too true to be
consistent. The Irish make Irish bulls for the
same reason that they accept Papal bulls. It is
because It Is better to speak wisdom foolishly,
like the Saints, rather than to speak folly
wisely, like the Dons.
This Is the truth about mystical dogmas
and the truth about Irish bulls; It Is also the
truth about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw.
Each of them Is an argument Impatiently
shortened into an epigram. Each of them
represents a truth hammered and hardened,
with an almost disdainful violence until it is
compressed Into a small space, until It Is made
brief and almost incomprehensible. The case
of that curt remark about Ireland and York-
shire is a very typical one. If Mr. Shav/ had
really attempted to set out all the sensible
stages of his joke, the sentence would have
run something like this: "That I am an
Irishman is a fact of psychology which I can
20
The Irishman
trace In many of the things that come out of
me, my fastidiousness, my frigid fierceness
and my distrust of mere pleasure. But the
thing must be tested by what comes from me;
do not try on me the dodge of asking where
I came from, how many batches of three hun-
dred and sixty-five days my family was in
Ireland. Do not play any games on me about
whether I am a Celt, a word that is dim to the
anthropologist and utterly unmeaning to any-
body else. Do not start any drivelling dis-
cussions about whether the word Shaw is
German or Scandinavian or Iberian or Basque.
You know you are human; I know I am
Irish. I know I belong to a certain type and
temper of society; and I know that all sorts
of people of all sorts of blood live in that
society and by that society; and are therefore
Irish. You can take your books of anthro-
pology to hell or to Oxford." Thus gently,
elaborately and at length, Mr. Shaw would
have explained his meaning, if he had thought
it worth his while. As he did not he merely
flung the symbolic, but very complete sentence,
"I am a typical Irishman; my family came
from Yorkshire."
What then is the colour of this Irish society
of which Bernard Shaw, with all his individual
21
George Bernard Shaw
oddity, is yet an essential type ? One generali-
sation, I think, may at least be made. Ireland
has in it a quality which caused it (in the most
ascetic age of Christianity) to be called the
"Land of Saints"; and which still might give
it a claim to be called the Land of Virgins.
An Irish Catholic priest once said to me,
"There is in our people a fear of the passions
which is older even than Christianity." Every-
one who has read Shaw's play upon Ireland
will remember the thing in the horror of the
Irish girl at being kissed in the public streets.
But anyone who knows Shaw's work will
recognize it in Shaw himself. There exists
by accident an early and beardless portrait of
him which really suggests in the severity and
purity of its lines some of the early ascetic
pictures of the beardless Christ. However he
may shout profanities or seek to shatter the
shrines, there is always something about him
which suggests that in a sweeter and more
solid civilisation he would have been a great
saint. He would have been a saint of a sternly
ascetic, perhaps of a sternly negative type.
But he has this strange note of the saint in
him: that he is literally unworldly. Worldli-
ness has no human magic for him; he is not
bewitched by rank nor drawn on by conviviality
22
The Irishman
at all. He could not understand the intel-
lectural surrender of the snob. He Is perhaps
a defective character; but he is not a mixed
one. All the virtues he has are heroic virtues.
Shaw is like the Venus of ]\Iilo; all that there
is of him is admirable.
But In any case this Irish innocence is
peculiar and fundamental in him; and strange
as It may sound, I think that his Innocence has
a great deal to do with his suggestions of
sexual revolution. Such a man is comparatively
audacious in theory because he is comparatively
clean in thought. Powerful men who have
povN^erful passions use m.uch of their strength
in forging chains for themselves; they alone
know how strong the chains need to be. But
there are other souls who walk the w^oods like
Diana, with a sort of wild chastity. I confess
I think that this Irish purity a little disables a
critic in dealing, as Air. Shaw has dealt, with
the roots and reality of the marriage law.
He forgets that those fierce and elementary
functions which drive the universe have an
impetus which goes beyond itself and cannot
always easily be recovered. So the healthiest
men may often erect a law to watch them,
just as the healthiest sleepers may want an
alarum clock to wake them up. However
23
George Bernard Shaw
this may be, Bernard Shaw certainly has all
the virtues and all the powers that go with this
original quality in Ireland. One of them is a
sort of awful elegance; a dangerous and some-
what inhuman daintiness of taste which some-
times seems to shrink from matter itself, as
though it were mud. Of the many sincere
things Mr. Shaw has said he never said
a more sincere one than when he stated he
was a vegetarian, not because eating meat
was bad morality, but because it was bad taste.
It would be fanciful to say that Mr. Shaw is a
vegetarian because he comes of a race of
vegetarians, of peasants who are compelled to
accept the simple life in the shape of potatoes.
But I am sure that his fierce fastidiousness in
such matters is one of the allotropic forms of
the Irish purity; it is to the virtue of Father
Matthew what a coal is to a diamond. It has,
of course, the quality common to all special
and unbalanced types of virtue, that you never
know where it will stop. I can feel what Mr.
Shaw probably means when he says that it is
disgusting to feast off dead bodies, or to cut
lumps off what was once a living thing. But
I can never know at what moment he may not
feel in the same way that it is disgusting to
mutilate a pear-tree, or to root out of the
24
The Irishman
earth those miserable mandrakes which cannot
even groan. There is no natural Hmit to this
rush and riotous gallop of refinement.
But it is not this physical and fantastic
purity which I should chiefly count among the
legacies of the old Irish morality. A much
more important gift is that which all the saints
declared to be the reward of chastity: a queer
clearness of the intellect, like the hard clear-
ness of a crystal. This certainly Mr. Shaw
possesses; in such degree that at certain times
the hardness seems rather clearer than the
clearness. But so it does in all the most typical
Irish characters and Irish attitudes of mind.
This is probably why Irishmen succeed so
much in such professions as require a certain
crystalline realism, especially about results.
Such professions are the soldier and the law-
yer; these give ample opportunity for crimes
but not much for mere illusions. If you have
composed a bad opera you may persuade your-
self that it is a good one; if you have carved
a bad statue you can think yourself better than
Michael Angelo. But if you have lost a battle
you cannot believe you have won it; if your
client is hanged you cannot pretend that you
have got him off.
There must be some sense in every popular
25
George Bernard Shaw
prejudice, even about foreigners. And the
English people certainly have somehow got an
impression and a tradition that the Irishman
is genial, unreasonable, and sentimental. This
legend of the tender, irresponsible Paddy has
two roots; there are two elements in the Irish
which made the mistake possible. First, the
very logic of the Irishm.an makes him regard
war or revolution as extra-logical, an ultima
ratio w4iich is beyond reason. When fighting
a powerful enemy he no more worries whether
all his charges are exact or all his attitudes
dignified than a soldier worries whether a
cannon-ball is shapely or a plan of campaign
picturesque. He is aggressive; he attacks.
He seems merely to be rowdy in Ireland
when he is really carrying the war into Africa
— or England. A Dublin tradesman printed
his name and trade in archaic Erse on his
cart. He knew that hardly anybody could
read it; he did it to annoy. In his position
I think he was quite right. When one is
oppressed it is a mark of chivalry to hurt
oneself in order to hurt the oppressor. But
the English (never having had a real revolu-
tion since the Middle Ages) find it very hard
to understand this steady passion for being a
nuisance, and mistake it for mere whimsical
26
The Irishman
impulsiveness and folly. When an Irish
member holds up the whole business of the
House of Commons by talking of his bleed-
ing country for five or six hours, the simple
English members suppose that he is a senti-
mentalist. The truth is that he is a scornful
realist who alone remains unaffected by the
sentimentalism of the House of Commons.
The Irishman is neither poet enough nor
snob enough to be swept away by those
smooth social and historical tides and tenden-
cies which carry Radicals and Labour members
comfortably off their feet. He goes on asking
for a thing because he wants it; and he tries
really to hurt his enemies because they are his
enemies. This is the first of the queer con-
fusions which make the hard Irishman look
soft. He seems to us wild and unreasonable
because he is really much too reasonable to be
anything but fierce when he is fighting.
In all this it will not be difficult to see the
Irishman in Bernard Shaw. Though person-
ally one of the kindest men in the world,
he has often written really in order to hurt;
not because he hated any particular men (he is
hardly hot and animal enough for that), but
because he really hated certain ideas even
unto slaying. He provokes; he will not let
27
George Bernard Shaw
people alone. One might even say that he
bulHes, only that this would be unfair, because
he always wishes the other man to hit back.
At least he always challenges, like a true
Green Islander. An even stronger instance of
this national trait can be found in another
eminent Irishman, Oscar Wilde. His philos-
ophy (which was vile) was a philosophy of
ease, of acceptance, and luxurious illusion;
yet, being Irish, he could not help putting
it in pugnacious and propagandist epigrams.
He preached his softness with hard decision;
he praised pleasure in the words most calcu-
lated to give pain. This armed insolence,
which was the noblest thing about him, was
also the Irish thing; he challenged all comers.
It is a good instance of how right popular
tradition is even when it is most wrong, that
the English have perceived and preserved this
essential trait of Ireland in a proverbial phrase.
It is true that the Irishman says, "Who will
tread on the tail of my coat ?"
But there is a second cause which creates
the English fallacy that the Irish are weak and
emotional. This again springs from the very
fact that the Irish are lucid and logical. For
being logical they strictly separate poetry from
prose; and as in prose they are strictly pro-
28
The Irishman
saic, so in poetry they are purely poetical. In
this, as in one or two other things, they re-
semble the French, who make their gardens
beautiful because they are gardens, but their
fields ugly because they are only fields. An
Irishman may like romance, but he will say,
to use a frequent Shavian phrase, that it is
"only romance." A great part of the English
energy in fiction arises from the very fact that
their fiction half deceives them. If Rudyard
Kipling, for instance, had written his short
stories in France, they would have been
praised as cool, clever little works of art,
rather cruel, and very nervous and feminine;
Kipling's short stories would have been ap-
preciated like Maupassant's short stories. In
England they were not appreciated but be-
lieved. They were taken seriously by a
startled nation as a true picture of the empire
and the universe. The English people made
haste to abandon England in favour of Mr.
Kipling and his imaginary colonies; they
made haste to abandon Christianity in favour
of Mr. Kipling's rather morbid version of
Judaism. Such a moral boom of a book
would be almost impossible in Ireland, be-
cause the Irish mind distinguishes between
life and literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw him-
29
George Bernard Shaiv
self summed this up as he sums up so
many things in a compact sentence which he
uttered in conversation with the present
writer, ''An Irishman has two eyes." He
meant that with one eye an Irishman saw that
a dream was inspiring, bewitching, or subHme,
and with the other eye that after all it was a
dream. Both the humour and the sentiment
of an Englishman cause him to wink the other
eye. Two other small examples will illustrate
the English mistake. Take, for instance, that
noble survival from a nobler age of politics —
I mean Irish oratory. The English imagine
that Irish politicians are so hot-headed and
poetical that they have to pour out a torrent
of burning words. The truth is that the
Irish are so clear-headed and critical that they
still regard rhetoric as a distinct art, as the
ancients did. Thus a man makes a speech as
a man plays a violin, not necessarily without
feeling, but chiefly because he knows how to
do it. Another instance of the same thing is
that quality which is always called the Irish
charm. The Irish are agreeable, not because
they are particularly emotional, but because they
are very highly civilised. Blarney is a ritual;
as much of a ritual as kissing the Blarney Stone.
Lastly, there is one general truth about
30
The Irishman
Ireland which may very well have influenced
Bernard Shaw from the first; and almost
certainly influenced him for good. Ireland is
a country in which the political conflicts are at
least genuine; they are about something.
They are about patriotism, about religion, or
about money: the three great realities. In
other w^ords, they are concerned with what
commonwealth a man lives in or with w^hat
universe a man lives in or with how he is to
manage to live in either. But they are not
concerned with which of two wealthy cousins
in the same governing class shall be allowed
to bring in the same Parish Councils Bill;
there is no party system in Ireland. The party
system in England is an enormous and most
efficient machine for preventing political con-
flicts. The party system is arranged on the
same principle as a three-legged race: the
principle that union is not always strength and
is never activity. Nobody asks for what he
really wants. But in Ireland the loyalist is
just as ready to throw over the King as the
Fenian to throw over Mr. Gladstone; each
wall throw over anything except the thing that
he wants. Hence it happens that even the
follies or the frauds of Irish politics are more
genuine as symptoms and more honourable as
31
George Bernard Shaw
symbols than the lumbering hypocrisies of the
prosperous Parliamentarian. The very lies of
Dublin and Belfast are truer than the truisms
of Westminster. They have an object; they
refer to a state of things. There was more
honesty, in the sense of actuality, about
Piggott's letters than about the Times' leading
articles on them. When Parnell said calmly
before the Royal Commission that he had
made a certain remark *'in order to mislead
the House" he proved himself to be one of
the few truthful men of his time. An ordinary
British statesman would never have made the
confession, because he would have grown quite
accustomed to committing the crime. The
party system itself implies a habit of stating
something other than the actual truth. A
Leader of the House means a Misleader of
the House.
Bernard Shaw was born outside all this;
and he carries that freedom upon his face.
Whether what he heard in boyhood was
violent Nationalism or virulent Unionism, it
was at least something which wanted a certain
principle to be in force, not a certain clique to be
in office. Of him the great Gilbertian general-
isation is untrue; he was not born either a
little Liberal or else a little Conservative. He
32
The Irishman
did not, like most of us, pass through the
stage of being a good party man on his way to
the difficult business of being a good man.
He came to stare at our general elections as a
Red Indian might stare at the Oxford and
Cambridge boat-race, blind to all its irrelevant
sentimentalities and to some of its legitimate
sentiments. Bernard Shaw entered England
as an alien, as an invader, as a conqueror. In
other words, he entered England as an Irish-
man.
22
The Puritan
IT has been said in the first section that
Bernard Shaw draws from his own nation
two unquestionable qualities, a kind of
intellectual chastity, and the fighting
spirit. He is so much of an idealist about his
ideals that he can be a ruthless realist in his
methods. His soul has (in short) the virginity
and the violence of Ireland. But Bernard
Shaw is not merely an Irishman; he is not
even a typical one. He is a certain separated
and peculiar kind of Irishman, which is not
easy to describe. Some Nationalist Irishmen
have referred to him contemptuously as a
"West Briton." But this is really unfair;
for whatever Mr. Shaw's mental faults may be,
the easy adoption of an unmeaning phrase
like "Briton" is certainly not one of them.
It would be much nearer the truth to put the
thing in the bold and bald terms of the old
Irish song, and to call him "The anti-Irish
Irishman." But it is only fair to say that the
description is far less of a monstrosity than
the anti-English EngHshman would be; be-
cause the Irish are so much stronger in self-
criticism. Compared with the constant self-
34
The Puritan
flattery of the English, nearly every Irishman
is an anti-Irish Irishman. But here asain
popular phraseology hits the right word. This
fairly educated and fairly wealthy Protestant
wedge which is driven into the country at
Dublin and elsewhere is a thing not easy
superficially to summarise in any term. It
cannot be described merely as a minority; for
a minority means the part of a nation which is
conquered. But this thing means something
that conquers, and is not entirely part of a
nation. Nor can one even fall back on the
phrase of aristocracy. For an aristocracy
implies at least some chorus of snobbish en-
thusiasm; it implies that some at least are
willingly led by the leaders, if only towards
vulgarity and vice. There is only one word
for the minority in Ireland, and that is the
word that public phraseology has found; I
mean the word "Garrison." The Irish are
essentially right when they talk as if all
Protestant Unionists lived inside "The Castle."
They have all the virtues and limitations
of a literal garrison in a fort. That is,
they are valiant, consistent, reliable in an
obvious public sense; but their curse is that
they can only tread the flagstones of the court-
yard or the cold rock of the ramparts; they
George Bernard Shaw
have never so much as set their foot upon
their native soil.
We have considered Bernard Shaw as an
Irishman. The next step is to consider him
as an exile from Ireland living in Ireland;
that, some people would say, is a paradox
after his own heart. But, indeed, such a
complication is not really difficult to expound.
The great religion and the great national
tradition which have persisted for so many
centuries in Ireland have encouraged these
clean and cutting elements; but they have
encouraged many other things which serve to
balance them. The Irish peasant has these
qualities which are somewhat peculiar to Ire-
landy, a strange purity and a strange pugnacity ^^
But the Irish peasant also has qualities which
are common to all peasants, and his nation
has qualities that are common to all healthy
nations. I mean chiefly the things that most
(of us absorb in childhood; especially the sense
of the supernatural and the sense of the
natural; the love of the sky with its infinity
of vision, and the love of the soil with its
strict hedges and solid shapes of ownershipJ
But here comes the paradox of Shaw; the
^ greatest of all his paradoxes and the one of
which he is unconscious. These one or two
36
The Puritan
plain truths which quite stupid people learn
at the beginning are exactly the one or two
truths which Bernard Shaw may not learn
even at the end. He is a daring pilgrim who ^
has set out from the grave to find the cradle. 1
He started from points of view which no one
else was clever enough to discover, and he is
at last discovering points of view which no
one else was ever stupid enough to ignore.
This absence of the red-hot truisms of boy-
hood; this sense that he is not rooted in the
ancient sagacities of infancy, has, I think, a
great deal to do with his position as a member
of an alien minority in Ireland. He who has
no real country can have no real home. The
average autochthonous Irishman is close to
patriotism because he is close to the earth;
he is close to domesticity because he is close
to the earth; he is close to doctrinal theology
and elaborate ritual because he is close to the
earth, i In short, he is close to the heavens
because he is close to the earth. ' But we must
not expect any of these elemental and collective
virtues in the man of the garrison. He can-
not be expected to exhibit the virtues of a
people, but only (as Ibsen would say) of an
enemy of the people. Mr. Shaw has no living
traditions, no schoolboy tricks, no college cus-
Z7
George Bernard Shaw
toms, to link him with other men. Nothing
about him can be supposed to refer to a
family feud or to a family joke. He does not
drink toasts; he does not keep anniversaries;
musical as he is I doubt if he would consent
to sing. All this has something in it of a
tree with its roots in the air. The best way
to shorten winter is to prolong Christmas;
and the only way to enjoy the sun of April is
to be an April Fool. When people asked
Bernard Shaw to attend the Stratford Ter-
centenary, he wrote back with characteristic
contempt: "I do not keep my own birthday,
and I cannot see why I should keep Shake-
speare's." I think that if Mr. Shaw had
always kept his own birthday he would be
better able to understand Shakespeare's birth-
day— and Shakespeare's poetry.
In conjecturally referring this negative side
of the man, his lack of the smaller charities of
our common childhood, to his birth in the
dominant Irish sect, I do not write without
historic memory or reference to other cases.
That minority of Protestant exiles which
mainly represented Ireland to England during
the eighteenth century did contain some speci-
mens of the Irish lounger and even of the
Irish blackguard; Sheridan and even Gold-
38
The Puritan
smith suggest the type. Even in their irre-
sponsibility these figures had a touch of Irish
tartness and realism; but the type has been
too much insisted on to the exclusion of
others equally national and interesting. To
one of these it is worth while to draw atten-
tion. At intervals during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries there has appeared a "^
peculiar kind of Irishman. He is so unlike
the English image of Ireland that the English
have actually fallen back on the pretence that
he was not Irish at all. The type is com- k
monly Protestant; and sometimes seems to
be almost anti-national in its acrid instinct for
judging itself. Its nationalism only appears
when it flings itself with even bitterer pleas-
ure into judging the foreigner or the invader.
The first and greatest of such figures was ^
Swift. Thackeray simply denied that Swift
was an Irishman, because he was not a stage
Irishman. He was not (in the English
novelist's opinion) winning and agreeable
enough to be Irish. The truth is that Swiftj
was much too harsh and disagreeable to bei
English. There is a great deal of Jonathan
Swift in Bernard Shaw. Shaw is like Swift,
for instance, in combining extravagant fancy ^
with a curious sort of coldness. But he is
39
George Bernard Shaw
most like Swift In that very quality which
Thackeray said was impossible in an Irish-
man, benevolent bullying, a pity touched with
contempt, and a habit of knocking men down
I for their own good. Characters in novels are
often described as so amiable that they hate
to be thanked. It Is not an amiable quality,
and It Is an extremely rare one; but Swift
possessed it. When Swift was burled the
Dublin poor came In crowds and wept by
the grave of the broadest and most free-
handed of their benefactors. Swift deserved
the public tribute; but he might have writhed
and kicked in his grave at the thought of
receiving It. ( There Is In G. B. S. some-
thing of the same inhumane humanity. Irish
history has offered a third Instance of this
particular type of educated and Protestant
Irishman, sincere, unsympathetic, aggressive,
alone. I mean Parnell; and with him also
a bewildered England tried the desperate
dodge of saying that he was not Irish at all.
As If any thinkable sensible snobbish law-
abiding Englishman would ever have defied
all the drawing-rooms by disdaining the
House of Commons! ; Despite the differ-
ence between taciturnity and a torrent of
fluency there Is much in common also be-
40
The Puritan
tween Shaw and Parnell; something in com-
mon even in the figures of the two men,
in the bony bearded faces with their almost ^
Satanic self-possession. It will not do to
pretend that none of these three men belong
to their own nation; but it is true that they
belonged to one special, though recurring,
type of that nation. And they all three have
this peculiar mark, that w^hile Nationalists in
their various ways they all give to the more
genial English one common impression; I
mean the impression that they do not so b
much love Ireland as hate England. '
I will not dogmatise upon the difficult ques-
tion as to w^hether there is any religious sig-
nificance in the fact that these three rather
ruthless Irishmen were Protestant Irishmen. ^I
incline to think myself that the Catholic Church
has added charity and gentleness to the virtues
of a people which w^ould otherwise have been
too keen and contemptuous, too aristocratic.
But however this may be, there can surely be
no question that Bernard Shaw's Protestant
education in a Catholic country has made a
great deal of difference to his mind. It has
affected it in two ways, the first negative and
the second positive. It has affected him by
cutting him off (as we have said) from the
41
George Bernard Share
fields and fountains of his real home and his-
tory; by making him an Orangeman. And
it has affected him by the particular colour of
the particular religion which he received; by
making him a Puritan.
In one of his numerous prefaces he says,
"I have always been on the side of the
Puritans in the matter of Art"; and a closer
study will, I think, reveal that he is on the
side of the Puritans in almost everything.
Puritanism was not a mere code of cruel
regulations, though some of Its regulations
were more cruel than any that have disgraced
Europe. Nor was Puritanism a mere night-
mare, an evil shadow of eastern gloom and
fatalism, though this element did enter it, and
was as it were the symptom and punishment
of its essential error. Something much nobler
(even if almost equally mistaken) was the
original energy in the Puritan creed. And it
must be defined with a little more delicacy if
we are really to understand the attitude of
G. B. S., who Is the greatest of the modern
Puritans and perhaps the last.
I should roughly define the first spirit in
Puritanism thus. It was a refusal to contem-
plate God or goodness with anything lighter
or milder than the most fierce concentration
42
The Puritan
of the intellect. A Puritan meant originally
a man whose mind had no holidays. ^ To use
his own favourite phrase, he would let no
living thing come between him and his God;
an attitude which involved eternal torture for \
him and a cruel contempt for all the living
things. It was better to worship in a barn
than in a cathedral for the specific and specified
reason that the cathedral was beautiful. Physi-
cal beauty was a false and sensual symbol
coming in between the intellect and the object
of its intellectual worship. The human brain
ought to be at every instant a consuming fire
which burns through all conventional images
until they were as transparent as glass.
This is the essential Puritan idea, that God
can only be praised by direct contemplation'.
of Him. You must praise God only with
your brain; it is wicked to praise Him with
your passions or your physical habits or your
gesture or instinct of beauty. Therefore it
is wicked to worship by singing or dancing or
drinking sacramental wines or building beauti-
ful churches or saying prayers when you are
half asleep. We must not worship by dancing,
drinking, building or singing; we can only '
worship by thinking. Our heads can praise
God, but never our hands and feet. That
43
George Bernard Shaw
is the true and original impulse of the Puritans.
There is a great deal to be said for it, and
a great deal was said for it in Great Britain
steadily for two hundred years. It has
gradually decayed in England and Scotland,
not because of the advance of modern thought
(which means nothing), but because of the
slow revival of the mediaeval energy and
character in the two peoples. The English
were always hearty and humane, and they
have made up their minds to be hearty and
humane in spite of the Puritans. - The result
is that Dickens and W. W. Jacobs have
picked up the tradition of Chaucer and Robin
Hood. . The Scotch were always romantic, and
they have made up their minds to be romantic
in spite of the Puritans. The result is that
Scott and Stevenson have picked up the tradi-
tion of Bruce, Blind Harry and the vagabond
Scottish kings. England has become English
again; Scotland has become Scottish again, in
spite of the splendid incubus, the noble night-
mare of Calvin. There is only one place in
the British Islands where one may naturally
expect to find still surviving in its fulness the
fierce detachment of the true Puritan. That
ace is the Protestant part of Ireland. The
Orange Calvinists can be disturbed by no
44
Ipi
The Puritan
national resurrection, for they have no nation.
In them, if in any people, will be found the
rectangular consistency of the Calvinist. The
Irish Protestant rioters are at least immeasur-
ably finer fellows than any of their brethren
in England. They have the two enormous
superiorities: first, that the Irish Protestant
rioters really believe in Protestant theology;
and second, that the Irish Protestant rioters
do really riot. Among these people, if any-
where, should be found the cult of theological
clarity combined with barbarous external
simplicity. Among these people Bernard Shaw
was born.
There is at least one outstanding fact about
the man we are studying; Bernard Shaw is
never frivolous. He never gives his opinions
a holiday; he is never irresponsible even for
an instant. He has no nonsensical second
self which he can get into as one gets into a
dressing-gown; that ridiculous disguise which
is yet more real than the real person. That
collapse and humorous confession of futility
was much of the force in Charles Lamb and in
Stevenson. There is nothing of this in Shaw;
his wit is never a weakness; therefore it is
never a sense of humour. For wit is always
connected with the idea that truth is close and
45
George Bernard Shaw
clear. Humour, on the other hand, is always
connected with the idea that truth is tricky
and mystical and easily mistaken. What
Charles Lamb said of the Scotchman is far
truer of this type of Puritan Irishman; he
does not see things suddenly in a new light;
all his brilliancy is a blindingly rapid calcula-
tion and deduction. Bernard Shaw never said
an indefensible thing; that is, he never said a
thing that he was not prepared brilliantly to
defend. He never breaks out into that cry
beyond reason and conviction, that cry of
Lamb when he cried, "We would indict our
dreams!" or of Stevenson, "Shall we never
shed blood .^'' In short he is not a humorist,
-^ but a great wit, almost as great as Voltaire.
Humour is akin to agnosticism, which is only
the negative side of mysticism. But pure
wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and
painful consciousness of the final fact in the
universe. ..Very briefly,- the man who sees the
consistency in things is a wit — and a Calvinist.
The man who sees the inconsistency in things
is a humorist — and a Catholic.) However
this may be, Bernard Shaw exhibits all that is
purest in the Puritan; the desire to see truth
face to face even if it slay us, the high im-
patience with irrelevant sentiment or obstruc-
46
The Puritan
tive symbol; the constant effort to keep the
soul at its highest pressure and speed. His
instincts upon all social customs and ques-
tions are Puritan. His favourite author is X,
Bunyan.
But along with what was inspiring and direct
in Puritanism Bernard Shaw has inherited also
some of the things that were cumbersome and
traditional. If ever Shaw exhibits a prejudice
it is always a Puritan prejudice. For Puritan-
ism has not been able to sustain through three
centuries that native ecstacy of the direct con-
templation of truth; indeed it was the whole
mistake of Puritanism to imagine for a moment
that it could. One cannot be serious for three .^
hundred years. In institutions built so as to *
endure for ages you must have relaxation,
symboHc relativity and healthy routine. In
eternal temples you must have frivolity. You
must "be at ease in Zion" unless you are only
paying it a flying visit.
By the middle of the nineteenth century
this old austerity and actuality in the Puritan
vision had fallen away into two principal lower
forms. The first is a sort of idealistic gar-
rulity upon which Bernard Shaw has made
fierce and on the whole fruitful war. Per-
petual talk about righteousness and unselfish-
47
George Bernard Shaw
ness, about things that should elevate and
things which cannot but degrade, about social
purity and true Christian manhood, all poured
out with fatal fluency and with very little
reference to the real facts of anybody's soul or
salary — into this weak and lukewarm torrent
has melted down much of that mountainous
ice which sparkled in the seventeenth century,
bleak indeed, but blazing. The hardest thing
of the seventeenth century bids fair to be the
softest thing of the twentieth.
Of all this sentimental and deliquescent
Puritanism Bernard Shaw has always been the
antagonist; and the only respect in which it has
soiled him was that he believed for only too
long that such sloppy idealism was the whole
idealism of Christendom and so used "ideal-
ist" itself as a term of reproach. But there
were other and negative effects of Puritanism
which he did not escape so completely. I
cannot think that he has wholly escaped that
element in Puritanism which may fairly bear
the title of the taboo. For it is a singular
fact that although extreme Protestantism is
dying in elaborate and over-refined civilisa-
tion, yet it is the barbaric patches of it that live
longest and die last. Of the creed of John
Knox the modern Protestant has abandoned
48
The Puritan
the civilised part and retained only the savage
part. He has given up that great and sys-
tematic philosophy of Calvinism which had
much in common with modern science and
strongly resembles ordinar}^ and recurrent de-
terminisim. But he has retained the accidental
veto upon cards or comic plays, which Knox
only valued as mere proof of his people's
concentration on their theolog-y. All the awful
but sublime affirmations of Puritan theology
are gone. Only savage negations remain y
such as that by which in Scotland on eveiyj
seventh day the creed of fear lays his finger
on all hearts and makes an evil silence ini
i
the streets.
By the middle of the nineteenth century
when Shaw was born this dim and barbaric
element in Puritanism, being all that remained
of it, had added another taboo to its philosophy
of taboos; there had grown up a mystical
horror of those fermented drinks which are
part of the food of civilised mankind. Doubt-
less many persons take an extreme line on this
matter solely because of some calculation of
social harm; many, but not all and not even
most. Many people think that paper money
is a mistake and does much harm. But they
do not shudder or snigger when they see a
D 49
George Bernard Shaw
cheque-book. They do not whisper with
unsavoury slyness that such and such a man
was "seen'' going into a bank. I am quite
convinced that the English aristocracy is the
curse of England, but I have not noticed either
in myself or others any disposition to ostracise
a man simply for accepting a peerage, as the
modern Puritans would certainly ostracise him
(from any of their positions of trust) for
accepting a drink. The sentiment is certainly
very largely a mystical one, like the sentiment
about the seventh day. Like the Sabbath, it
is defended with sociological reasons; but
those reasons can be simply and sharply tested.
If a Puritan tells you that all humanity should
rest once a week, you have only to propose
that they should rest on Wednesday. And if
a Puritan tells you that he does not object to
beer but to the tragedies of excess in beer,
simply propose to him that in prisons and
workhouses (where the amount can be abso-
lutely regulated) the inmates should have
three glasses of beer a day. The Puritan
cannot call that excess; but he will find some-
thing to call it. For it is not the excess he
objects to, but the beer. It is a transcendental
taboo, and it is one of the two or three
positive and painful prejudices with which
50
The Puritan
Bernard Shaw began. A similar severity of
outlook ran through all his earlier attitude
towards the drama; especially towards the
lighter or looser drama. His Puritan teachers 1
could not prevent him from taking up theatri- {
cals, but they made him take theatricals |
seriously. All his plays were indeed "plays
for Puritans." All his criticisms quiver with
a refined and almost tortured contempt for the
indulgencies of ballet and burlesque, for the
tights and the double entente. He can endure
lawlessness but not levity. He is not repelled i
by the divorces and the adulteries as he is by
the "splits." And he has always been fore-
most among the fierce modern critics who ask
indignantly, "Why do you object to a thing
full of sincere philosophy like The Wild Duck
while you tolerate a mere dirty joke like The
Spring Chicken?'' I do not think he has ever
understood what seems to me the very sensible
answer of the man In the street, "I laugh at
the dirty joke of The Spring Chicken because it
is a joke. I criticise the philosophy of The
Wild Duck because it Is a philosophy."
Shaw does not do justice to the democratic
ease and sanity on this subject; but indeed,
whatever else he Is, he Is not democratic. As
an Irishman he Is an aristocrat, as a Calvinlst
George Bernard Shaw
he Is a soul apart; he drew the breath of his
nostrils from a land of fallen principalities and
proud gentility, and the breath of his spirit
from a creed which made a wall of crystal
around the elect. The two forces between
them produced this potent and slender figure,
swift, scornful, dainty and full of dry mag-
nanimity; and it only needed the last touch
of oligarchic mastery to be given by the over-
whelming oligarchic atmosphere of our present
age. Such was the Puritan Irishman who
stepped out into the world. Into what kind
of world did he step ?
5*
The Progressive
IT Is now partly possible to Justify the
Shavian method of putting the explana-
tions before the events. I can now give
a fact or two with a partial certainty at
least that the reader will give to the affairs of
Bernard Shaw something of the same kind
of significance which they have for Bernard
Shaw himself. Thus, if I had simply said that
Shaw was born in Dublin the average reader
might exclaim, "Ah yes — a wild Irishman,
gay, emotional and untrustworthy." The
wrong note would be struck at the start.
I have attempted to give some idea of what
being born in Ireland meant to the man who
was really born there. Now therefore for the
first time I may be permitted to confess that
Bernard Shaw was, like other men, born. He
was born in Dublin on the 26th of July, 1856.
Just as his birth can only be appreciated
through some vision of Ireland, so his family
can only be appreciated by some reaHsation of
the Puritan. He was the youngest son of one
George Carr Shaw, who had been a civil servant
and was afterwards a somewhat unsuccessful
George Bernard Shaw
business man. If I had merely said that his
family was Protestant (which in Ireland means
Puritan) it might have been passed over as a
quite colourless detail. But if the reader will
keep in mind w4iat has been said about the
degeneration of Calvinism into a few clumsy
vetoes, he will see in its full and frightful sig-
nificance such a sentence as this which comes
from Shaw himself: "My father was in theory
a vehement teetotaler, but in practice often a
furtive drinker." The two things of course
rest upon exactly the same philosophy; the
philosophy of the taboo. There is a mystical
substance, and it can give monstrous pleasures
or call down monstrous punishments. The
dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both
mistaken, but they both make the same mistake.
They both regard wine as a drug and not as a
drink. But if I had mentioned that fragment of
family information vvithout any ethical preface,
people would have begun at once to talk non-
sense about artistic heredity and Celtic weak-
ness, and would have gained the general
impression that Bernard Shaw was an Irish
wastrel and the child of Irish wastrels.
Whereas It is the whole point of the matter
that Bernard Shaw comes of a Puritan middle-
class family of the most solid respectability;
54
The Progressive
and the only admission of error arises from
the fact that one member of that Puritan
family took a particularly Puritan view of
strong drink. That is, he regarded it generally
as a poison and sometimes as a medicine, if
only a mental medicine. But a poison and a
medicine are very closely akin, as the nearest
chemist knows; and they are chiefly akin in
this; that no one will drink either of them
for fun. Moreover, medicine and a poison are
also alike in this; that no one will by preference
drink either of them in public. And this
medical or poisonous view of alcohol is not
confined to the one Puritan to whose failure
I have referred, it is spread all over the whole
of our dying Puritan civilisation. For instance,
social reformers have fired a hundred shots
against the public-house; but never one
against its really shameful feature. The sign
of decay is not in the public-house, but In the
private bar; or rather the row of five or six
private bars, into each of which a respectable
dipsomaniac can go in solitude, and by indulg-
ing his own half-witted sin violate his own
half-witted morality. Nearly all these places
are equipped with an atrocious apparatus of
ground-glass windows which can be so closed
that they practically conceal the face of the
SS
George Bernard Shaw
buyer from the seller. Words cannot express
the abysses of human infamy and hateful
shame expressed by that elaborate piece of
furniture. Whenever I go into a public-house,
which happens fairly often, I always carefully
open all these apertures and then leave the place,
in every way refreshed.
In other ways also It is necessary to insist
not only on the fact of an extreme Protestant-
ism, but on that of the Protestantism of a
garrison; a world where that religious force
both grew and festered all the more for
being at once isolated and protected. All the
influences surrounding Bernard Shaw in boy-
hood were not only Puritan, but such that
no non-Puritan force could possibly pierce or
counteract. He belonged to that Irish group
which, according to Catholicism, has hardened
its heart, which, according to Protestantism
has hardened its head, but which, as I fancy,
has chiefly hardened its hide, lost its sensibility
to the contact of the things around it. In
reading about his youth, one forgets that it
was passed in the island which is still one
flame before the altar of St. Peter and St.
Patrick. The whole thing might be happening
in Wimbledon. He went to the Wesleyan
Connexional School. He went to hear Moody
56
The Progressive
and Sankey. "I was," he writes, "wholly
unmoved by their eloquence; and felt bound
to inform the public that I was, on the whole,
an atheist. My letter was solemnly printed
in Public Opinion^ to the extreme horror of
my numerous aunts and uncles." That is
the philosophical atmosphere; those are the
religious postulates. It could never cross
the mind of a man of the Garrison that before
becoming an atheist he might stroll into one
of the churches of his own country, and learn
something of the philosophy that had satisfied
Dante and Bossuet, Pascal and Descartes.
In the same way I have to appeal to my theo-
retic preface at this third point of the drama of
Shaw's career. On leaving school he stepped
into a secure business position which he held
steadily for four years and which he flung
away almost in one day. He rushed even
recklessly to London; where he was quite
unsuccessful and practically starved for six
years. If I had mentioned this act on the first
page of this book it would have seemed to have
either the simplicity of a mere fanatic or
else to cover some ugly escapade of youth or
some quite criminal looseness of temperament.
But Bernard Shaw did not act thus because he
was careless, but because he was ferociously
S7
George Bernard Shaw
careful, careful especially of the one thing
needful. What was he thinking about when
he threw away his last halfpence and went to
a strange place; what was he thinking about
when he endured hunger and small-pox in
London almost without hope ? He was think-
ing of what he has ever since thought of, the
slow but sure surge of the social revolution;
you must read into all those bald sentences
and empty years what I shall attempt to
, sketch in the third section. You must read
/ the revolutionary movement of the later nine-
teenth century, darkened indeed by materialism
and made mutable by fear and free thought,
but full of awful vistas of an escape from the
curse of Adam.
Bernard Shaw happened to be born in an
epoch, or rather at the end of an epoch, which
was in its way unique in the ages of history.
The nineteenth century was not unique in the
success or rapidity of its reforms or in their
ultimate cessation; but it was unique in the
peculiar character of the failure which followed
the success. The French Revolution was an
enormous act of human realisation; it has
altered the terms of every law and the shape
of every town in Europe; but it was by no
means the only example of a strong and swift
58
The Progressive
period of reform. What was really peculiar
about the Republican energy was this, that It
left behind It, not an ordinary reaction but a
kind of dreary, drawn out and utterly un-
meaning hope. The strong and evident Idea
of reform sank lower and lower until it became
the timid and feeble Idea of progress. Towards
the end of the nineteenth century there appeared
its two incredible figures; they were the pure
Conservative and the pure Progressive; two
figures which would have been overwhelmed
with laughter by any other intellectual common-
wealth of history. There was hardly a human
generation which could not have seen the folly
of merely going fon,vard or merely standing
still; of mere progressing or mere conserving.
In the coarsest Greek Comedy we might have
a joke about a man who wanted to keep what
he had, whether it w^as yellow gold or yellow
fever. In the dullest mediaeval morality we
might have a joke about a progressive gentle-
man who, having passed heaven and come
to purgatory, decided to go further and fare
worse. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries
were an age of quite Impetuous progress; men
made in one rush, roads, trades, synthetic phi-
losophies, parliaments, university settlements,
a law that could cover the world and such
59
George Bernard Shaw
spires as had never struck the sky. But they
would not have said that they wanted progress,
but that they wanted the road, the parliaments,
and the spires. In the same way the time
from Richelieu to the Revolution was upon the
whole a time of conservation, often of harsh
and hideous conservation; it preserved tor-
tures, legal quibbles, and despotism. But if you
had asked the rulers they would not have said
that they wanted conservation; but that they
wanted the torture and the despotism. The
old reformers and the old despots alike desired
definite things, powers, licenses, payments,
vetoes, and permissions. Only the modern
progressive and the modern conservative have
been content with two words.
Other periods of active improvement have
died by stiffening at last into some routine.
Thus the Gothic gaiety of the thirteenth
century stiffening into the mere Gothic ugli-
ness of the fifteenth. Thus the mighty wave
of the Renaissance, whose crest was lifted to
heaven, was touched by a wintry witchery of
classicism and frozen for ever before it fell.
Alone of all such movements the democratic
movement of the last two centuries has not
frozen, but loosened and liquefied. Instead of
becoming more pedantic in its old age, it has
60
The Progressive
grown more bewildered. By the analogy of
healthy history we ought to have gone on
worshipping the republic and calling each other
citizen with increasing seriousness until some
other part of the truth broke into our repub-
lican temple. But in fact we have turned the
freedom of democracy into a mere scepticism,
destructive of everything, including democracy
itself. It is none the less destructive because
it is, so to speak, an optimistic scepticism —
or, as I have said, a dreary hope. It was none
the better because the destroyers were always
talking about the new vistas and enlighten-
ments which their new negations opened to us.
The republican temple, like any other strong
building, rested on certain definite limits and
supports. But the modern man inside it went
on indefinitely knocking holes in his own house
and saying that they were windows. The
result is not hard to calculate: the moral
world was pretty well all windows and no
house by the time that Bernard Shaw arrived
on the scene.
Then there entered into full swing that
great game of which he soon became the
greatest master. A progressive or advanced
person was now to mean not a man who wanted
democracy, but a man who wanted something
6i
George Bernard Shaw
newer than democracy. A reformer was to be,
not a man who wanted a parliament or a
\ \ republic, but a man who wanted anything that
he hadn't got. The emancipated man must
cast a weird and suspicious eye round him at
all the institutions of the world, wondering
which of them was destined to die in the next
few centuries. Each one of them was whisper-
ing to himself, "What can I alter?''
This quite vague and varied discontent
probably did lead to the revelation of many
incidental wrongs and to much humane hard
work in certain holes and corners. It also
gave birth to a great deal of quite futile and
frantic speculation, which seemed destined to
take away babies from women, or to give votes
to tom-cats. But it had an evil in it much
deeper and more psychologically poisonous
than any superficial absurdities. There was in
this thirst to be "progressive" a subtle sort of
double-mindedness and falsity. A man was so
eager to be in advance of his age that he pre-
tended to be in advance of himself. Institu-
tions that his wholesome nature and habit fully
accepted he had to sneer at as old-fashioned,
out of a servile and snobbish fear of the future.
Out of the primal forests, through all the real
progress of history, man had picked his way
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obeying his human instinct, or (in the excellent
phrase) following his nose. But now he was
trying, by violent athletic exertions, to get in
front of his nose.
Into this riot of all imaginary innovations
Shaw brought the sharp edge of the Irishman
and the concentration of the Puritan, and
thoroughly thrashed all competitors in the
difficult art of being at once modern and
intelligent. In twenty twopenny controversies
he took the revolutionary side, I fear in most
cases because it was called revolutionary. But
the other revolutionists were abruptly startled
by the presentation of quite rational and in-
genious arguments on their own side. The
dreary thing about most new causes is that
they are praised in such very old terms. Every
new reHgion bores us with the same stale
rhetoric about closer fellowship and the higher
life. No one ever approximately equalled
Bernard Shaw in the power of finding really
fresh and personal arguments for these recent
schemes and creeds. No one ever came within
a mile of him in the knack of actually produc-
ing a new argument for a new philosophy. I
give two instances to cover the kind of thing I
mean. Bernard Shaw (being honestly eager
to put himself on the modern side in every-
63
George Bernard Shaw
thing) put himself on the side of what is
i/ called the feminist movement; the proposal
to give the two sexes not merely equal social
^, privileges, but identical. To this it is often
answered that women cannot be soldiers; and
to this again the sensible feminists answer that
women run their own kind of physical risk,
while the silly feminists answer that war is an
outworn barbaric thing which women would
abolish. But Bernard Shaw took the line of
saying that women had been soldiers. In all
occasions of natural and unofficial war, as in
the French Revolution. That has the great
fighting value of being an unexpected argu-
ment; it takes the other pugilist's breath
away for one Important Instant. To take the
other case, Mr. Shaw has found himself, led
by the same mad imp of modernity, on the
side of the people who want to have phonetic
spelling. The people who want phonetic spell-
ing generally depress the world with tireless
and tasteless explanations of how much easier
It would be for children or foreign bagmen
if "height" were spelt "hite." Now children
would curse spelling whatever it was, and we are
not going to permit foreign bagmen to Improve
Shakespeare. Bernard Shaw charged along
quite a different line; he urged that Shake-
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speare himself believed In phonetic spelling,
since he spelt his own name In six different
ways. According to Shaw, phonetic spelling
is merely a return to the freedom and flexi-
bility of Elizabethan literature. That, agaln,^
is exactly the kind of blow the old speller
does not expect. As a matter of fact there
is an answer to both the ingenuities I have
quoted. When women have fought in revo-
lutions they have generally shown that it was
not natural to them, by their hysterical cruelty
and insolence; it was the men who fought in
the Revolution; it was the women who tortured
the prisoners and mutilated the dead. And
because Shakespeare could sing better than he
could spell. It does not follow that his spelling
and ours ought to be abruptly altered by a
race that has lost all instinct for singing. But
I do not wish to discuss these points; I only
quote them as examples of the startling ability
which really brought Shaw to the front; the
ability to brighten even our modern move-
ments with original and suggestive thoughts.
But while Bernard Shaw pleasantly sur-
prised Innumerable cranks and revolutionists
by finding quite rational arguments for them,
he surprised them unpleasantly also by dis-
covering something else. He discovered a
E 65
George Bernard Shaw
turn of argument or trick of thought which
has ever since been the plague of their Hves,
and given him in all assemblies of their
kind, in the Fabian Society or in the whole
Socialist movement, a fantastic but most for-
midable domination. This method may be
approximately defined as that of revolu-
tionising the revolutionists by turning their
rationalism against their remaining senti-
mentalism. But definition leaves the matter
dark unless we give one or two examples.
Thus Bernard Shaw threw himself as thor-
oughly as any New Woman into the cause
of the emancipation of women. But while the
New Woman praised woman as a prophetess,
the new man took the opportunity to curse
her and kick her as a comrade. For the
others sex equality meant the emancipation of
women, which allowed them to be equal to
men. For Shaw it mainly meant the eman-
cipation of men, which allowed them to be
rude to women. Indeed, almost every one
of Bernard Shaw's earlier plays might be
called an argument between a man and a
woman, in which the woman is thumped and
thrashed and outwitted until she admits that
she is the equal of her conqueror. This is
the first case of the Shavian trick of turning
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on the romantic rationalists with their own
rationaHsm. He said in substance, "If we
are democrats, let us have votes for women;
but if we are democrats, why on earth should
we have respect for women?" I take one
other example out of many. Bernard Shaw
was thrown early into what may be called
the cosmopolitan club of revolution. The
Socialists of the S.D.F. call it " L'lnter-
nationale," but the club covers more than
Socialists. It covers many who consider them-
selves the champions of oppressed nationalities
— Poland, Finland, and even Ireland; and
thus a strong nationaHst tendency exists in
the revolutionary movement. Against this
nationalist tendency Shaw set himself with
sudden violence. If the flag of England was
a piece of piratical humbug, was not the flag
of Poland a piece of piratical humbug too t
If we hated the jingoism of the existing armies
and frontiers, why should we bring into
existence new jingo armies and new jingo
frontiers } All the other revolutionists fell
in instinctively with Home Rule for Ireland.
Shaw urged, in effect, that Home Rule was as
bad as Home Influences and Home Cooking,
and all the other degrading domesticities that
began with the word "Home." His ultimate
67
George Bernard Shaw
support of the South African war was largely
created by his irritation against the other
revolutionists for favouring a nationalist re-
sistance. The ordinary Imperialists objected
to Pro-Boers because they were anti-patriots.
Bernard Shaw objected to Pro-Boers because
they were pro-patriots.
But among these surprise attacks of G. B. S.,
these turnings of scepticism against the sceptics,
there was one which has figured largely in his
life; the most amusing and perhaps the most
salutary of all these reactions. The "progres-
sive" world being in revolt against religion
had naturally felt itself allied to science; and
against the authority of priests it would per-
petually hurl the authority of scientific men.
Shaw gazed for a few moments at this new
authority, the veiled god of Huxley and Tyn-
dall, and then with the greatest placidity
and precision kicked it in the stomach. He
declared to the astounded progressives around
him that physical science was a mystical fake
like sacerdotalism; that scientists, like priests,
spoke with authority because they could not
speak with proof or reason; that the very
wonders of science were mostly lies, like the
wonders of religion. "When astonomers tell
me," he says somewhere, "that a star is so far
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off that its light takes a thousand years to reach
us, the magnitude of the lie seems to me in-
artistic." The paralysing impudence of such
remarks left every^one quite breathless; and
even to this day this particular part of Shaw's
satiric war has been far less followed up than
it deserves. For there was present in it an
element ver}' marked in Shaw's controversies;
I mean that his apparent exaggerations are
generally much better backed up by knowl-
edge than would appear from their nature.
He can lure his enemy on with fantasies and then
overwhelm him with facts. Thus the man of
science, when he read some wild passage in which
Shaw compared Huxley to a tribal soothsayer
grubbing in the entrails of animals, supposed the
writer to be a mere fantastic whom science could
crush with one fing-er. He would therefore en-
gage in a controversy with Shaw about (let us
say) vivisection, and discover to his horror that
Shaw really knew a great deal about the subject,
and could pelt him with expert witnesses and
hospital reports. Among the many singular
contradictions in a singular character, there is
none more interesting than this combination
of exactitude and industry in the detail of
opinions with audacity and a certain wildness
in their outline.
69
George Bernard Shaw
This great game of catching revolutionists
napping, of catching the unconventional people
in conventional poses, of outmarching and
outmanoeuvring progressives till they felt like
conservatives, of undermining the mines of
Nihilists till they felt like the House of Lords,
this great game of dishing the anarchists con-
tinued for some time to be his most effective
business. It w^ould be untrue to say that he was
a cynic; he v^as never a cynic, for that implies
a certain corrupt fatigue about human affairs,
whereas he was vibrating with virtue and
energy. Nor would it be fair to call him
even a sceptic, for that implies a dogma of
hopelessness and definite belief in unbelief.
But it would be strictly just to describe
him at this time, at any rate, as a merely
destructive person. He was one whose . main
business was, in his own view, the pricking
of illusions, the stripping away of disguises,
and even the destruction of ideals. He was
a sort of anti-confectioner whose whole busi-
ness it was to take the gilt off the ginger-
bread.
Now I have no particular objection to
people who take the gilt off the ginger-
bread; if only for this excellent reason, that
I am much fonder of gingerbread than I am
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of gilt. But there are some objections to
this task when it becomes a crusade or
an obsession. One of them is this: that
people who have really scraped the gilt off
gingerbread generally waste the rest of their
lives in attempting to scrape the gilt off
gigantic lumps of gold. Such has too often
been the case of Shaw. He can, if he likes,
scrape the romance off the armaments of
Europe or the party system of Great Britain.
But he cannot scrape the romance off love
or military valour, because it is all romance,
and three thousand miles thick. It cannot,
I think, be denied that much of Bernard
Shaw's splendid mental energy has been wasted
in this weary business of gnawing at the
necessary pillars of all possible society. But
it would be grossly unfair to indicate that
even in his first and most destructive stage
he uttered nothing except these accidental, if
arresting, negations. He threw his whole
genius heavily into the scale in favour of two
positive projects or causes of the period.
When we have stated these we have really
stated the full intellectual equipment with
which he started his literary life.
I have said that Shaw was on the insurgent
side in everv^thing; but in the case of these
71
George Bernard Shaw
two important convictions he exercised a solid
power of choice. When he first went to
London he mixed with every kind of revolu-
tionary society, and met every kind of person
except the ordinary person. He knew every-
body, so to speak, except everybody. He
was more than once a momentary apparition
among the respectable atheists. He knew
Bradlaugh and spoke on the platforms of that
Hall of Science in which very simple and
sincere masses of men used to hail with shouts
of joy the assurance that they were not im-
mortal. He retains to this day something of
the noise and narrowness of that room; as, for
instance, when he says that it is contemptible
to have a craving for eternal life. This pre-
judice remains in direct opposition to all his
present opinions, which are all to the effect that
it is glorious to desire power, consciousness,
and vitality even for one's self. But this old
secularist tag, that it is selfish to save one's
soul, remains with him long after he has
practically glorified selfishness. It is a relic of
those chaotic early days. And just as he
mingled with the atheists he mingled with the
anarchists, who were in the eighties a much
more formidable body than now, disputing
with the Socialists on almost equal terms the
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claim to be the true heirs of the Revolution.
Shaw still talks entertainingly about this group.
As far as I can make out, it was almost entirely
female. When a book came out called A Girl
among the Anarchists, G. B. S. was provoked to
a sort of explosive reminiscence. "A girl
among the anarchists!" he exclaimed to his
present biographer; "if they had said *A man
among the anarchists' it w^ould have been
more of an adventure." He is ready to tell
other tales of this eccentric environment, most
of which does not convey an impression of a
very bracing atmosphere. That revolutionary
society must have contained many high public
ideals, but also a fair number of low private
desires. And when people blame Bernard Shaw
for his pitiless and prosaic coldness, his cutting
refusal to reverence or admire, I think they
should remember this riff-raff of lawless senti-
mentalism against which his commonsense had to
strive, all the grandiloquent *' comrades" and all
the gushing " affinities, " all the sweetstuff sensu-
ality and senseless sulking against law. If Ber-
nard Shaw became a little too fond of throwing
cold water upon prophecies or ideals, remember
that he must have passed much of his youth
among cosmopolitan idealists who wanted a
little cold water in every sense of the word.
7Z
George Bernard Shaw
Upon two of these modern crusades he
concentrated, and, as I have said, he chose them
well. The first was broadly what was called
the Humanitarian cause. It did not mean the
cause of humanity, but rather, if anything, the
cause of everything else. At its noblest it
meant a sort of mystical identification of our
life with the whole life of nature. So a man
might wince when a snail was crushed as if
his toe were trodden on; so a man might shrink
when a moth shrivelled as if his own hair had
caught fire. Man might be a network of
exquisite nerves running over the whole
universe, a subtle spider's web of pity. This
was a fine conception; though perhaps a some-
what severe enforcement of the theological
conception of the special divinity of man. For
the humanitarians certainly asked of humanity
what can be asked of no other creature; no
man ever required a dog to understand a cat
or expected the cow to cry for the sorrows of
the nightingale.
Hence this sense has been strongest in
saints of a very mystical sort; such as St.
Francis who spoke of Sister Sparrow and
Brother Wolf. Shaw adopted this crusade of
cosmic pity but adopted it very much in his
own style, severe, explanatory, and even un-
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sympathetic. He had no affectionate impulse
to say "Brother Wolf"; at the best he would
have said "Citizen Wolf," like a sound re-
publican. In fact, he was full of healthy
human compassion for the sufferings of
animals; but in phraseology he loved to put
the matter unemotionally and even harshly.
I was once at a debating club at which Bernard '
Shaw said that he was not a humanitarian at
all, but only an economist, that he merely
hated to see life wasted by carelessness or
cruelty. I felt inclined to get up and address
to him the following lucid question: "If
when you spare a herring you are only being
oikonomikal, for what oikos are you being
nomikal?" But in an average debating club
I thought this question might not be quite
clear; so I abandoned the idea. But certainly
it is not plain for whom Bernard Shaw is
economising if he rescues a rhinoceros from
an early grave. But the truth is that Shaw
only took this economic pose from his hatred
of appearing sentimental. If Bernard Shaw
killed a dragon and rescued a princess of
romance, he would try to say "I have saved a
princess" with exactly the same intonation as
"I have saved a shilling." He tries to turn
his own heroism into a sort of superhuman
75
George Bernard Shaw
thrift. He would thoroughly sympathise
with that passage in his favourite dramatic
author in which the Button Moulder tells
Peer Gynt that there is a sort of cosmic
housekeeping; that God Himself is very
economical, "and that is why He is so well
to do." '
This combination of the widest kindness and
consideration with a consistent ungraciousness
of tone runs through all Shaw's ethical utter-
ance, and is nowhere more evident than in his
attitude towards animals. He would waste
himself to a white-haired shadow to save a
shark in an aquarium from inconvenience or
to add any little comforts to the life of a
carrion-crow. He would defy any laws or
lose any friends to show mercy to the humblest
beast or the most hidden bird. Yet I cannot
recall in the whole of his works or in the
whole of his conversation a single word of any
tenderness or Intimacy with any bird or beast.
It was under the influence of this high and
almost superhuman sense of duty that he
became a vegetarian; and I seem to remember
that when he was lying sick and near to death
at the end of his Saturday Review career
he wrote a fine fantastic article, declaring that
his hearse ought to be drawn by all the
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animals that he had not eaten. Whenever
that evil day comes there will be no need to fall
back on the ranks of the brute creation; there
will be no lack of men and women who owe
him so much as to be glad to take the place of
the animals; and the present writer for one
will be glad to express his gratitude as an
elephant. There is no doubt about the
essential manhood and decency of Bernard
Shaw's instincts in such matters. And quite
apart from the vegetarian controversy, I do
not doubt that the beasts also owe him much.
But when we come to positive things (and
passions are the only truly positive things)
that obstinate doubt remains which remains
after all eulogies of Shaw. That fixed fancy
sticks to the mind; that Bernard Shaw is a
vegetarian more because he dislikes dead
beasts than because he likes live ones.
It was the same with the other great cause
to which Shaw more politically though not
more publicly committed himself. The actual
English people, without representation in
Press or Parliament, but faintly expressed in
public-houses and music-halls, would connect
Shaw (so far as they have heard of him) with
two ideas; they would say first that he was
a vegetarian, and second that he was a
71
George Bernard Shaw
Socialist. Like most of the impressions of
the ignorant, these impressions would be on
the whole very just. My only purpose here
is to urge that Shaw's Socialism exemplifies
the same trait of temperament as his vege-
tarianism. This book is not concerned with
Bernard Shaw as a politician or a sociologist,
but as a critic and creator of drama. I will
therefore end in this chapter all that I have to
say about Bernard Shaw as a politician or a
political philosopher. I propose here to
dismiss this aspect of Shaw: only let it be
remembered, once and for all, that I am here
dismissing the most important aspect of Shaw.
It is as if one dismissed the sculpture of
Michael Angelo and went on to his sonnets.
Perhaps the highest and purest thing in him is
simply that he cares more for politics than for
anything else; more than for art or for philos-
ophy. Socialism is the noblest thing for
Bernard Shaw; and it is the noblest thing in
him. He really desires less to win fame than
to bear fruit. He is an absolute follower of
that early sage who wished only to make two
blades of grass grow instead of one. He is
a loyal subject of Henri Quatre, who said
that he only wanted every Frenchman to have
a chicken in his pot on Sunday; except, of
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course, that he would call the repast cannibal-
ism. But ccBteris paribus he thinks more of
that chicken than of the eagle of the universal
empire; and he is always ready to support
the grass against the laurel.
Yet by the nature of this book the account
of the most important Shaw, who is the
Socialist, must be also the most brief. Social-
ism (which I am not here concerned either to
attack or defend) is, as everyone knows, the
proposal that all property should be nationally
owned that it may be more decently distributed.
It is a proposal resting upon two principles,
unimpeachable as far as they go: first, that
frightful human calamities call for immediate
human aid; second, that such aid must almost
always be collectively organised. If a ship is
being wrecked, we organise a lifeboat; if a
house is on fire, we organise a blanket; if half
a nation is starving, we must organise work
and food. That is the primary and powerful
argument of the Socialist, and everything
that he adds to it weakens it. The only
possible line of protest is to suggest that it is
rather shocking that we have to treat a normal
nation as something exceptional, like a house
on fire or a shipwreck. But of such things it
may be necessary to speak later. The point
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George Bernard Shaw
here is that Shaw behaved towards Socialism
just as he behaved towards vegetarianism; he
offered every reason except the emotional
reason, which was the real one. When taxed in a
Daily News discussion with being a Socialist for
the obvious reason that poverty was cruel, he
said this was quite wrong; it was only because
poverty was wasteful. He practically professed
that modern society annoyed him, not so much
like an unrighteous kingdom, but rather like
an untidy room. Everyone who knew him
knew, of course, that he was full of a proper
brotherly bitterness about the oppression of
the poor. But here again he would not admit
that he was anything but an Economist.
In thus setting his face like flint against
sentimental methods of argument he un-
doubtedly did one great service to the causes
for which he stood. Every vulgar anti-
humanitarian, every snob who wants monkeys
vivisected or beggars flogged has always fallen
back upon stereotyped phrases like ** maudlin"
and "sentimental," which indicated the humani-
tarian as a man in a weak condition of tears.
The mere personality of Shaw has shattered
those foolish phrases for ever. Shaw the
humanitarian was like Voltaire the humani-
tarian, a man whose satire was like steel, the
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hardest and coolest of fighters, upon whose
piercing point the wretched defenders of a
masculine brutality wriggled like worms.
In this quarrel one cannot wish Shaw even^
an inch less contemptuous, for the people who
call compassion "sentimentalism" deserve
nothing but contempt. In this one does not
even regret his coldness; it is an honourable
contrast to the blunderino- emotionalism of the
jingoes and flagellomaniacs. The truth is that
the ordinary anti-humanitarian only manages
to harden his heart by having already softened
his head. It is the reverse of sentimental to
insist that a nigger is being burned alive; for
sentimentalism must be the clinging to pleasant
thoughts. And no one, not even a Higher
Evolutionist, can think a nigger burned
alive a pleasant thought. The sentimental
thing is to warm your hands at the fire while
denying the existence of the nigger, and that
is the ruling habit in England, as it has been
the chief business of Bernard Shaw to show.
And in this the brutalitarians hate him not
because he is soft, but because he is hard,
because he is not to be softened by conventional
excuses; because he looks hard at a thing —
and hits harder. Some foolish fellow of the
Henley-Whibley reaction wrote that if we
F 8i
George Bernard Shaw
were to be conquerors we must be less tender
and more ruthless. Shaw answered with really
avenging irony, "What a light this principle
throws on the defeat of the tender Dervish,
the compassionate Zulu, and the morbidly
humane Boxer at the hands of the hardy
savages of England, France, and Germany."
In that sentence an idiot is obliterated and the
whole story of Europe told; but it is im-
mensely stiffened by its ironic form. In the
same way Shaw washed away for ever the idea
that Socialists were weak dreamers, who said
that things might be only because they wished
them to be. G. B. S. in argument with an
individualist showed himself, as a rule, much
the better economist and much the worse
rhetorician. In this atmosphere arose a
celebrated Fabian Society, of which he is still
the leading spirit — a society which answered
all charges of impracticable idealism by push-
ing both its theoretic statements and its
practical negotiations to the verge of cynicism.
Bernard Shaw was the literary expert who
wrote most of its pamphlets. In one of them,
among such sections as Fabian Temperance
Reform^ Fabian Education and so on, there
was an entry gravely headed "Fabian Nat-
ural Science," which stated that in the
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Socialist cause lisiht was needed more than heat.
Thus the Irish detachment and the Puritan
austerity did much good to the country and
to the causes for which they were embattled.
But there was one thing they did not do; they
did nothing for Shaw himself in the matter
of his primary mistakes and his real Hmitation.
His great defect was and is the lack of demo-
cratic sentiment. And there was nothing
democratic either in his humanitarianism or
his Socialism. These new and refined faiths
tended rather to make the Irishman yet more
aristocratic, the Puritan yet more exclusive.
To be a Socialist was to look down on all the
peasant owners of the earth, especially on the
peasant owners of his own island. To be a
Vegetarian was to be a man with a strange
and mysterious morality, a man who thought
the good lord who roasted oxen for his vassals
only less bad than the bad lord who roasted
the vassals. None of these advanced view^s could
the common people hear gladly; nor indeed
was Shaw specially anxious to please the com-
mon people. It was his glor}^ that he pitied
animals like men; it was his defect that he
pitied men only too much like animals. Foulon
said of the democracy, "Let them eat grass."
Shaw said, "Let them eat greens." He had
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George Bernard Shaw
more benevolence, but almost as much disdain.
"I have never had any feelings about the
English working classes/' he said elsewhere,
"except a desire to abolish them and replace
them by sensible people." This is the un-
sympathetic side of the thing; but it had
another and much nobler side, which must at
least be seriously recognised before we pass on
to much lighter things.
Bernard Shaw is not a democrat; but he is
a splendid republican. The nuance of differ-
ence between those terms precisely depicts
him. And there is after all a good deal of dim
democracy in England, in the sense that there
is much of a blind sense of brotherhood, and
nowhere more than among old-fashioned and
even reactionary people. But a republican is
a rare bird, and a noble one. Shaw is a
republican in the literal and Latin sense; he
cares more for the Public Thing than for any
private thing. The interest of the State is
with him a sincere thirst of the soul, as it was
in the little pagan cities. Now this public
passion, this clean appetite for order and
equity, had fallen to a lower ebb, had more
nearly disappeared altogether, during Shaw's
earlier epoch than at any other time. In-
dividualism of the worst type was on the top
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of the wave; I mean artistic individualism,
which is so much crueller, so much blinder
and so much more irrational even than com-
mercial individualism. The decay of society '
was praised by artists as the decay of a corpse
is praised by worms. The aesthete was all
receptiveness, like the flea. His only aff'air in
this world was to feed on its facts and colours,
like a parasite upon blood. The ego was the
all; and the praise of it was enunciated in
madder and madder rhythms by poets whose
Helicon was absinthe and whose Pegasus was
the nightmare. This diseased pride was not
even conscious of a public interest, and would
have found all political terms utterly tasteless
and insignificant. It was no longer a question
of one man one vote, but of one man one
universe.
I have in my time had my fling at the
Fabian Society, at the pedantry of schemes,
the arrogance of experts; nor do I regret it
now. But when I remember that other world
against which it reared its bourgeois banner of
cleanliness and common sense, I will not end
this chapter without doing it decent honour.
Give me the drain pipes of the Fabians rather
than the panpipes of the later poets; the drain
pipes have a nicer smell. Give me even that
85
George Bernard Shaw
businesslike benevolence that herded men like
beasts rather than that exquisite art which iso-
lated them like devils; give me even the sup-
pression of "Zaeo" rather than the triumph of
'* Salome." And if I feel such a confession to
be due to those Fabians who could hardly have
been anything but experts in any society, such
as Mr. Sidney Webb or Mr. Edward Pease,
it is due yet more strongly to the greatest of
the Fabians. Here was a man who could
have enjoyed art among the artists, who could
have been the wittiest of all the flaneurs; who
could have made epigrams like diamonds and
drunk music like wine. He has instead
laboured in a mill of statistics and crammed
his mind with all the most dreary and the
most filthy details, so that he can argue on
the spur of the moment about sewing-machines
or sewage, about typhus fever or twopenny
tubes. The usual mean theory of motives
will not cover the case; it is not ambition, for
he could have been twenty times more promi-
nent as a plausible and popular humorist. It
is the real and ancient emotion of the salus
populi, almost extinct in our oligarchical chaos;
nor will I for one, as I pass on to many
matters of argument or quarrel, neglect to
salute a passion so implacable and so pure.
86
The Critic
IT appears a point of some mystery to the
present writer that Bernard Shaw should
have been so long unrecognised and al-
most in beggary. I should have thought
his talent was of the ringing and arresting
sort; such as even editors and publishers
would have sense enough to seize. Yet it is
quite certain that he almost starved in London
for many years, writing occasional columns
for an advertisement or words for a picture.
And it is equally certain (it is proved by
twenty anecdotes, but no one who knows
Shaw needs any anecdotes to prove it) that in
those days of desperation he again and again
threw up chances and flung back good bar-
gains which did not suit his unique and
erratic sense of honour. The fame of having
first offered Shaw to the public upon a plat-
form worthy of him belongs, like many other
public services, to Mr. William Archer.
I say it seems odd that such a writer should
not be appreciated in a flash; but upon this
point there is evidently a real difference of
opinion, and it constitutes for me the strangest
87
George Bernard Shaw
difficulty of the subject. I hear many people
complain that Bernard Shaw deliberately mysti-
fies them. I cannot imagine what they mean;
it seems to me that he deliberately insults
them. His language, especially on moral
questions, is generally as straight and solid as
that of a bargee and far less ornate and sym-
bolic than that of a hansom-cabman. The
prosperous English Philistine complains that
Mr. Shaw is making a fool of him. Whereas
Mr. Shaw is not in the least making a fool of
him; Mr. Shaw is, with laborious lucidity,
calling him a fool. G. B. S. calls a landlord
a thief; and the landlord, instead of denying
or resenting it, says, "Ah, that fellow hides
his meaning so cleverly that one can never
make out what he means, it is all so fine spun
and fantastical." G. B. S. calls a statesman a
liar to his face, and the statesman cries in a
kind of ecstasy, "Ah, what quaint, intricate
and half-tangled trains of thought! Ah,
what elusive and many-coloured mysteries of
half-meaning!" I think it is always quite
plain what Mr. Shaw means, even when he is
joking, and it generally means that the people
he is talking to ought to howl aloud for their
sins. But the average representative of them
undoubtedly treats the Shavian meaning as
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The Critic
tricky and complex, when It is really direct
and offensive. He always accuses Shaw of
pulling his leg, at the exact moment when
Shaw is pulling his nose.
This prompt and pungent style he learnt in
the open, upon political tubs and platforms; and
he is very legitimately proud of it. He boasts
of being a demagogue; "The cart and the
trumpet for me," he says, with admirable good
sense. Everyone will remember the effective
appearance of Cyrano de Bergerac in the first act
of the fine play of that name; when instead
of leaping in by any hackneyed door or window,
he suddenly springs upon a chair above the
crowd that has so far kept him invisible; "les
bras croises, le feutre en bataille, la moustache
herissee, le nez terrible." I will not go so
far as to say that when Bernard Shaw sprang
upon a chair or tub in Trafalgar Square he
had the hat in battle, or even that he had the
nose terrible. But just as we see Cyrano best
when he thus leaps above the crowd, I think
we may take this moment of Shaw stepping
on his little platform to see him clearly as he
then was, and even as he has largely not ceased
to be. I, at least, have only known him in his
middle age; yet I think I can see him, younger
yet only a little more alert, with hair more red
89
George Bernard Shaw
but with face yet paler, as he first stood up upon
some cart or barrow in the tossing glare of the
gas.
The first fact that one realises about Shaw
(independent of all one has read and often
contradicting it) is his voice. Primarily it is
the voice of an Irishman, and then something
of the voice of a musician. It possibly ex-
plains much of his career; a man may be
permitted to say so many impudent things
with so pleasant an intonation. But the voice
is not only Irish and agreeable, it is also frank
and as it were inviting conference. This goes
with a style and gesture which can only be
described as at once very casual and very
emphatic. He assumes that bodily supremacy
which goes with oratory, but he assumes it
with almost ostentatious carelessness; he
throws back the head, but loosely and laugh-
ingly. He is at once swaggering and yet shrug-
ging his shoulders, as if to drop from them the
mantle of the orator which he has confidently
assumed. Lastly, no man ever used voice or
gesture better for the purpose of expressing
certainty; no man can say "I tell Mr. Jones
he is totally wrong" with more air of unforced
and even casual conviction.
This particular play of feature or pitch of
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The Critic
voice, at once didactic and yet not uncomrade-
like, must be counted a very important fact,
especially in connection with the period when
that voice was first heard. It must be remem-
bered that Shaw emerged as a wit in a sort of
secondary age of w4ts; one of those stale inter-
ludes of prematurely old young m.en, which
separate the serious epochs of history. Oscar
Wilde was its god; but he was somewhat more
mystical, not to say monstrous, than the average
of its dried and decorous impudence. The
two survivals of that time, as far as I know,
are Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. Graham
Robertson; two most charming people; but
the air they had to live in was the devil.
One of its notes was an artificial reticence of »
speech, which waited till it could plant the
perfect epigram. Its typical products were far
too conceited to lay down the law. Now when
people heard that Bernard Shaw was witty, as
he most certainly was, when they heard his
mots repeated Hke those of Whistler or Wilde,
when they heard things like "the Seven deadly
Virtues" or "Who %vas Hall Caine?" they
expected another of these silent sarcastic
dandies who went about with one epigram,
patient and poisonous, like a bee with his one
sting. And when they saw and heard the new
91
George Bernard Shaw
humorist they found no fixed sneer, no frock
coat, no green carnation, no silent Savoy
Restaurant good manners, no fear of looking a
fool, no particular notion of looking a gentleman.
They found a talkative Irishman v^ith a kind
voice and a brown coat; open gestures and an
evident desire to make people really agree
w^ith him. He had his own kind of affectations
no doubt, and his own kind of tricks of debate;
but he broke, and, thank God, forever the
spell of the little man with the single eye glass
who had frozen both faith and fun at so many
tea-tables. Shaw's humane voice and hearty
manner were so obviously more the things of a
great man than the hard, gem-like brilliancy
of Wilde or the careful ill-temper of Whistler.
He brought in a breezier sort of insolence;
the single eye-glass fled before the single eye.
Added to the effect of the amiable dogmatic
voice and lean, loose swaggering figure, is
that of the face with which so many carica-
turists have fantastically delighted themselves,
the Mephistophilean face with the fierce tufted
eyebrows and forked red beard. Yet those
caricaturists in their natural delight in com-
ing upon so striking a face, have somewhat
misrepresented it, making it merely Satanic;
whereas its actual expression has quite as
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The Critic
much benevolence as mockery. By this time
his costume has become a part of his person-
ality; one has come to think of the reddish
brown Jaeger suit as if it were a sort of reddish
brown fur, and were, like the hair and eyebrows,
a part of the animal; yet there are those who
claim to remember a Bernard Shaw of yet
more awful aspect before Jaeger came to his
assistance; a Bernard Shaw in a dilapidated
frock-coat and some sort of straw hat. I can
hardly believe it; the man is so much of a
piece, and must always have dressed appropri-
ately. In any case his brown woollen clothes,
at once artistic and hygienic, completed the
appeal for which he stood; which might be
defined as an eccentric healthy-mindedness.
But something of the vagueness and equivoca-
tion of his first fame is probably due to the
different functions which he performed in the
contemporary world of art.
He began by writing novels. They are
not much read, and indeed not imperatively
worth reading, with the one exception of the
crude and magnificent Cashel Byron s Pro-
fession. Mr. William Archer, in the course
of his kindly efforts on behalf of his young
Irish friend, sent this book to Samoa, for the
opinion of the most elvish and yet efficient
93
George Bernard Shaw
of modern critics. Stevenson summed up
much of Shaw even from that fragment when
he spoke of a romantic griffin roaring with
laughter at the nature of his own quest. He
also added the not wholly unjustified post-
script: "I say, Archer, — my God, what
women!"
The fiction was largely dropped; but when
he began work he felt his way by the avenues
of three arts. He was an art critic, a dramatic
critic, and a musical critic; and in all three,
it need hardly be said, he fought for the
newest style and the most revolutionary
school. He wrote on all these as he would
have written on anything; but it was, I fancy,
about the music that he cared most.
It may often be remarked that mathe-
maticians love and understand music more
than they love or understand poetry. Bernard
Shaw is in much the same condition; indeed,
in attempting to do justice to Shakespeare's
poetry, he always calls it "word music." It
is not difficult to explain this special attach-
ment of the mere logician to music. The
logician, like every other man on earth, must
have sentiment and romance in his existence;
in every man's life, indeed, which can be called
a life at all, sentiment is the most solid thing.
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The Critic
But if the extreme logician turns for his emo-
tions to poetry, he is exasperated and bewildered
by discovering that the words of his own trade
are used in an entirely different meaning.
He conceives that he understands the word
"visible," and then finds Milton applying it
to darkness, in which nothing is visible. He
supposes that he understands the word "hide,"
and then finds Shelley talking of a poet hidden
in the light. He has reason to believe that
he understands the common word "hung";
and then William Shakespeare, Esquire, of
Stratford-on-Avon, gravely assures him that
the tops of the tall sea waves were hung
with deafening clamours on the slippery clouds.
That is why the common arithmetician prefers
music to poetry. Words are his scientific in-
struments. It irritates him that they should
be anyone else's musical instruments. He is
willing to see men juggling, but not men
juggling with his own private tools and pos-
sessions— his terms. It is then that he turns
with an utter relief to music. Here are all the
same fascination and inspiration, all the same
purity and plunging force as in poetry; but
not requiring any verbal confession that light
conceals things or that darkness can be seen
in the dark. Music is mere beauty; it is
95
George Bernard Shaiv
beauty in the abstract, beauty In solution. It
is a shapeless and Hquid element of beauty, in
which a man may really float, not indeed affirm-
ing the truth, but not denying it. Bernard
Shaw, as I have already said, is infinitely far
above all such mere mathematicians and pe-
dantic reasoners; still his feeling is partly the
same. He adores music because it cannot
deal with romantic terms either in their right
or their wrong sense. Music can be romantic
without reminding him of Shakespeare and
Walter Scott, with whom he has had personal
quarrels. Music can be Catholic without
reminding him verbally of the Catholic
Church, which he has never seen, and is
sure he does not like. Bernard Shaw can
agree with Wagner, the musician, because
he speaks without words; if it had been
Wagner the man he would certainly have
had words with him. Therefore I would
suggest that Shaw's love of music (which
is so fundamental that it must be men-
tioned early, if not first, in his story) may
itself be considered in the first case as the
imaginative safety-valve of the rationalistic
Irishman.
This much may be said conjecturally over
the present signature; but more must not be
96
The Critic
said. Bernard Shaw understands music so
much better than I do that it is just possible
that he is, in that tongue and atmosphere, all
that he is not elsewhere. While he is writing
with a pen I know his limitations as much as
I admire his genius; and I know it is true to
say that he does not appreciate romance. But
while he is playing on the piano he may be
cocking a feather, drawing a sword or draining
a flagon for all I know. While he is speaking I
am sure that there are some things he does not
understand. But while he is listening (at the
Queen's Hall) he may understand everything,
including God and me. Upon this part of
him I am a reverent agnostic; it is well to
have some such dark continent in the character
of a man of whom one writes. It preserves
two very important things — modesty in the biog-
rapher and mystery in the biography.
For the purpose of our present generalisa-
tion it is only necessary to say that Shaw, as a
musical critic, summed himself up as "The
Perfect Wagnerite"; he threw himself into
subtle and yet trenchant eulogy of that revolu-
tionary voice in music. It was the same with
the other arts. As he was a Perfect Wagnerite
in music, so he was a Perfect Whistlerite in
painting; so above all he was a Perfect Ibsenite
G 97
George Ber7iard Shmv
in drama. And with this we enter that part
of his career with which this book is more
I specially concerned. When Mr. William
Archer got him established as dramatic critic
of the Saturday Review, he became for the first
time "a star of the stage"; a shooting star
* and sometimes a destroying comet.
On the day of that appointment opened
one of the very few exhilarating and honest
battles that broke the silence of the slow and
/ cynical collapse of the nineteenth century.
j Bernard Shaw the demagogue had got his
cart and his trumpet; and was resolved to
make them like the car of destiny and the
trumpet of judgment. He had not the ser-
vility of the ordinary rebel, who is content to
go on rebelling against kings and priests,
because such rebellion is as old and as estab-
lished as any priests or kings. He cast about
him for something to attack which was not
merely powerful or placid, but was unattacked.
After a little quite sincere reflection, he found
it. He would not be content to be a common
atheist; he wished to blaspheme something
in which even atheists believed. He was not
satisfied with being revolutionary; there were
so many revolutionists. He wanted to pick
out some prominent institution which had been
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The Critic
irrationally and instinctively accepted by the
most violent and profane; something of which
j\Ir. Foote would speak as respectfully on the
front page of the Freethinker as Mr. St. Loe
Strachey on the front page of the Spectator,
He found the thing; he found the great
unassailed English institution — Shakespeare.
But Shawn's attack on Shakespeare, though .
exaggerated for the fun of the thing, vv^as not
by any means the mere folly or firework
paradox that has been supposed. He meant
what he said; what was called his levity was
merely the laughter of a man who enjoyed \
saying what he meant — an occupation which
is indeed one of the greatest larks in life. 1
Moreover, it can honestly be said that Shaw
did good by shaking the mere idolatry of Him
of Avon. That idolatry was bad for England;
it buttressed our perilous self-complacency by
makinp; us think that we alone had, not
merely a great poet, but the one poet above
criticism. It w^as bad for literature; it made
a minute model out of work that was really
a hasty and faulty masterpiece. And it was
bad for religion and morals that there should
be so huge a terrestrial idol, that we should
put such utter and unreasoning trust in any
child of man. It is true that it was largely
99
George Bernard Shaw
throuo;h Shaw's own defects that he beheld the
defects of Shakespeare. But it needed some-
one equally prosaic to resist what was perilous
in the charm of such poetry; it may not be
altogether a mistake to send a deaf man to
destroy the rock of the sirens.
This attitude of Shaw illustrates of course
all three of the divisions or aspects to which
the reader's attention has been drawn. It was
partly the attitude of the Irishman objecting
to the Englishman turning his mere artistic
taste into a religion; especially when it was
a taste merely taught him by his aunts and
uncles. In Shaw's opinion (one might say)
the English do not really enjoy Shakespeare
or even admire Shakespeare; one can only
say, in the strong colloquialism, that they swear
by Shakespeare. He is a mere god; a thing
to be invoked. And Shaw's whole business
was to set up the things which were to be
sworn by as things to be sworn at. It was
partly again the revolutionist in pursuit of
pure novelty, hating primarily the oppression
of the past, almost hating history itself. For
Bernard Shaw the prophets were to be stoned
after, and not before, men had built their
sepulchres. There was a Yankee smartness
in the man which was irritated at the idea of
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The Critic
being dominated by a person dead for three
hundred years; like Mark Twain, he wanted
a fresher corpse.
These two motives there were, but they
were small compared with the other. It was
the third part of him, the Puritan, that was
really at war with Shakespeare. He denounced
that plapvright almost exactly as any contem-
porary Puritan coming out of a conventicle
in a steeple-crowned hat and stiff bands might
have denounced the playwright coming out of
the stage door of the old Globe Theatre. This
is not a mere fancy; it is philosophically true.
A legend has run round the newspapers that
Bernard Shaw offered himself as a better
writer than Shakespeare. This is false and
quite unjust; Bernard Shaw never said any-
thing of the kind. The writer whom he did
say was better than Shakespeare was not him-
self, but Bunyan. And he justified it by attrib-
uting to Bunyan a virile acceptance of life as
a high and harsh adventure, while in Shake-
speare he saw nothing but profligate pessimism,
the vanitas vanitatum of a disappointed volup-
tuary. According to this view Shakespeare
was always saying, "Out, out, brief candle,"
because his was only a ballroom candle; while
Bunyan was seeking to light such a candle
lOI
George Bernard Shaw
as by God's grace should never be put out.
It is odd that Bernard Shaw's chief error
or insensibihty should have been the instru-
ment of his noblest affirmation. The
denunciation of Shakespeare was a mere
misunderstanding. But the denunciation of
Shakespeare's pessimism was the most splen-
didly understanding of all his utterances.
This is the greatest thing in Shaw, a serious
optimism — even a tragic optimism. Life is
a thing too glorious to be enjoyed. To be
is an exacting and exhausting business; the
trumpet though inspiring is terrible. Nothing
that he ever wrote is so noble as his simple
reference to the sturdy man who stepped up to
^^the Keeper of the Book of Life and said,
Put down my name. Sir." It is true that
Shaw called this heroic philosophy by wrong
names and buttressed it with false meta-
physics; that was the weakness of the age.
The temporary decline of theology had in-
volved the neglect of philosophy and all fine
thinking; and Bernard Shaw had to find
shaky justifications in Schopenhauer for the
sons of God shouting for joy. He called it
the Will to Live — a phrase Invented by
Prussian professors who would like to exist,
but can't. Afterwards he asked people to
102
it<
The Critic
worship the Life-Force; as if one could
worship a hyphen. But though he covered
it with crude new names (which are now
fortunately crumbling everywhere like bad
mortar) he was on the side of the good old
cause; the oldest and the best of all causes,
the cause of creation against destruction, the
cause of yes against no, the cause of the seed
against the stony earth and the star against
the abyss.
His misunderstanding of Shakespeare arose
largely from the fact that he is a Puritan,^
.while Shakespeare was spiritually a CathoHc.j
The former is always screwing himself up to
see truth; the latter is often content that
truth is there. The Puritan is only strong
enough to stiffen; the Catholic is strong
enough to relax. Shaw, I think, has entirely
misunderstood the pessimistic passages of
Shakespeare. They are flying moods which
a man with a fixed faith can afford to entertain.
That all is vanity, that life is dust and love
is ashes, these are frivolities, these are jokes
that a Catholic can afford to utter. He knows
well enough that there is a life that is not
dust and a love that is not ashes. But just ,
as he may let himself go more than the \
Puritan in the matter of enjoyment, so he }
103 I
George Bernard Shaw
may let himself go more than the Puritan in
the matter of melancholy. The sad exuber-
ances of Hamlet are merely like the glad
exuberances of Falstaff. This is not con-
jecture; it is the text of Shakespeare. In
the very act of uttering his pessimism, Hamlet
admits that it is a mood and not the truth.
Heaven is a heavenly thing, only to him it
seems a foul congregation of vapours. Man
ts the paragon of animals, only to him he
seems a quintessence of dust. Hamlet is
quite the reverse of a sceptic. He is a man
whose strong intellect believes much more
than his weak temperament can make vivid
to him. But this power of knowing a thing
without feeling it, this power of believing a
thing without experiencing it, this is an old
Catholic complexity, and the Puritan has never
understood it. Shakespeare confesses his
moods (mostly by the mouths of villains and
failures), but he never sets up his moods
against his mind. His cry of vanitas vani-
tatum is itself only a harmless vanity. Readers
may not agree with my calling him Catholic
with a big C; but they will hardly complain
of my calling him catholic with a small one.
And that is here the principal point. Shake-
speare was not in any sense a pessimist; he
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The Critic
was, if anything, an optimist so universal as
to be able to enjoy even pessimism. And this
is exactly where he differs from the Puritan.
The true Puritan is not squeamish: the true
Puritan is free to say "Damn It!" But the
Catholic Elizabethan was free (on passing prov-
ocation) to say "Damn it all!'*
It need hardly be explained that Bernard
Shaw added to his negative case of a dramatist
to be depreciated a corresponding affirmative
case of a dramatist to be exalted and advanced.
He was not content with so remote a com-
parison as that between Shakespeare and Bun-
yan. In his vivacious weekly articles in the
Saturday Review, the real comparison upon
which everything turned was the comparison
between Shakespeare and Ibsen. He early
threw himself with all possible eagerness Into
the public disputes about the great Scandi-
navian; and though there was no doubt
whatever about which side he supported, there
was much that was individual in the line he
took. It is not our business here to explore
that extinct volcano. You may say that antl-
Ibsenism Is dead, or you may say that Ibsen Is
dead; in any case, that controversy is dead,
and death, as the Roman poet says, can alone
confess of what small atoms we are made.
105
George Bernard Shaw
r
The opponents of Ibsen largely exhibited the
permanent qualities of the populace; that is,
their instincts were right and their reasons
wrong. They made the complete controver-
sial mistake of calling Ibsen a pessimist;
whereas, indeed, his chief weakness is a rather
childish confidence in mere nature and free-
dom, and a blindness (either of experience or
of culture) in the matter of original sin. In
this sense Ibsen is not so much a pessimist as
a highly crude kind of optimist. Nevertheless
the man in the street was right in his funda-
mental instinct, as he always is. Ibsen, in his
pale northern style, is an optimist; but for all
that he is a depressing person. The optimism
of Ibsen is less comforting than the pessi-
mism of Dante; just as a Norwegian sunrise,
however splendid, is colder than a southern
night.
But on the side of those who fought for
Ibsen there was also a disagreement, and per-
haps also a mistake. The vague army of "the
advanced" (an army which advances in all
directions) were united in feeling that they
ought to be the friends of Ibsen because he
also was advancing somewhere somehow. But
they were also seriously impressed by Flau-
bert, by Oscar Wilde and all the rest who
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The Critic
told them that a work of art was in another
universe from ethics and social good. There-
fore many, I think most, of the Ibsenites
praised the Ibsen plays merely as choses vues,
aesthetic affirmations of what can be without
any reference to what ought to be. Mr.
• William Archer himself inclined to this view,
though his strong sagacity kept him in a haze
of healthy doubt on the subject. J\Ir. Walk-
ley certainly took this view. But this view
Mr. George Bernard Shaw abruptly and vio-
lently refused to take.
With the full Puritan combination of
passion and precision he informed everybody
that Ibsen was not artistic, but moral; that
his dramas were didactic, that all great art
was didactic, that Ibsen was strongly on the
side of some of his characters and strongly
against others, that there was preaching and
public spirit in the work of good dramatists;
and that if this were not so, dramatists and
all other artists would be mere panders of
intellectual debaucher)', to be locked up as
the Puritans locked up the stage players. No
one can understand Bernard Shaw who does
not give full value to this early revolt of his
on behalf of ethics against the ruling school
of Fart pour Fart. It is interesting because
107
George Bernard Shaw
it is connected with other ambitions in the
man, especially with that which has made him
somewhat vainer of being a Parish Councillor
than of being one of the most popular
dramatists in Europe. But its chief interest
is again to be referred to our stratification
of the pyschology; it is the lover of true
things rebelling for once against merely new
things; it is the Puritan suddenly refusing
to be the mere Progressive.
But this attitude obviously laid on the
ethical lover of Ibsen a not inconsiderable
obligation. If the new drama had an ethical
purpose, what was it ^ and if Ibsen was a
moral teacher, what the deuce was he teach-
ing ? Answers to this question, answers of
manifold brilliancy and promise, were scattered
through all the dramatic criticisms of those
years on the Saturday Review. But even
Bernard Shaw grew tired after a time of dis-
cussing Ibsen only in connection with the
current pantomime or the latest musical
comedy. It was felt that so much sincerity
and fertility of explanation justified a con-
centrated attack; and in 1891 appeared the
brilliant book called The Quintessence of
Ibsenism, which some have declared to be
merely the quintessence of Shaw. However
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The Critic
this may be, it was in fact and profession /
the quintessence of Shaw's theory of the /
moraHty or propaganda of Ibsen. i
The book itseh' is much longer than the
book that I am writing; and as is only right
in so spirited an apologist, every paragraph is
provocative. I could write an essay on every
sentence which I accept and three essays on
every sentence which I deny. Bernard Shaw
himself is a master of compression; he can
put a conception more compactly than any
other man alive. It is therefore rather
difficult to compress his compression; one
feels as If one were trying to extract a beef
essence from Bovril. But the shortest form
in which I can state the idea of The Quin-
tessence of Ihsemsm is that it Is the idea of
distrusting ideals, which are universal. In com-
parison with facts, which are miscellaneous.
The man whom he attacks throughout he
calls "The Idealist"; that is the man who
permits himself to be mainly moved by a
moral generalisation. "Actions," he says,
"are to be judged by their effect on happi- j
ness, and not by their conformity to any
ideal." As we have already seen, there is a
certain inconsistency here; for while Shaw
had always chucked all ideals overboard the
109
George Bernard Shaw
one he had chucked first was the ideal of
happiness. Passing this however for tHe
present, we may mark the above as the most
satisfying summary. If I tell a lie I am not
to blame myself for having violated the ideal
of truth, but only for having perhaps got
myself into a mess and made things worse
than they were before. If I have broken my
word I need not feel (as my fathers did) that
I have broken something inside of me, as one
who breaks a blood vessel. It all depends on
whether I have broken up something outside
me; as one who breaks up an evening party.
If I shoot my father the only question is
whether I have made him happy. I must
not admit the ideaHstic conception that the
mere shooting of my father might possibly
make me unhappy. We are to judge of
every individual case as it arises, apparently
without any social summary or moral ready-
reckoner at all. "The Golden Rule is that
there is no Golden Rule." We must not
say that it is right to keep promises, but
that it may be right to keep this promise.
Essentially it is anarchy; nor is it very easy
to see how a state could be very comfort-
able which was Socialist in all its public
morality and Anarchist in all its private.
no
The Critic
But if it is anarchy, it is anarchy without
any of the abandon and exuberance of anarchy.
It is a worried and conscientious anarchy; an
anarchy of painful delicacy and even caution.
For it refuses to trust in traditional experi-
ments or plainly trodden tracks; every case
must be considered anew from the beginning,
and yet considered w4th the most wide-eyed
care for human welfare; every man must act
as if he were the first man made. Briefly,
we must always be worrying about what is
best for our children, and we must not take
one hint or rule of thumb from our fathers.
Some think that this anarchism would make
a man tread down mighty cities in his mad-
ness. I think it would make a man walk
down the street as if he were walking on egg-
shells. I do not think this experiment in
opportunism would end in frantic license; I
think it would end in frozen timidity. If a
man was forbidden to solve moral problems
by moral science or the help of mankind, his
course would be quite easy — he would not
solve the problems. The world instead of
being a knot so tangled as to need unravel-
ling, would simply become a piece of clock-
work too complicated to be touched. I cannot
think that this untutored worry was what
III
George Bernard Shaw
Ibsen meant; I have my doubts as to whether
it was what Shaw meant; but I do not think
that it can be substantially doubted that it was
what he said.
In any case it can be asserted that the
general aim of the work was to exalt the
immediate conclusions of practice against
the general conclusions of theory. Shaw
objected to the solution of every problem in
a play being by its nature a general solution,
applicable to all other such problems. He
disliked the entrance of a universal justice at
the end of the last act; treading down all the
personal ultimatums and all the varied cer-
tainties of men. He disliked the god from
the machine — because he was from a machine.
But even without the machine he tended to
dislike the god; because a god is more general
than a man. His enemies have accused Shaw
of being anti-domestic, a shaker of the roof-
tree. But in this sense Shaw may be called
almost madly domestic. He wishes each pri-
vate problem to be settled in private, without
reference to sociological ethics. And the only
objection to this kind of gigantic casuistry is
that the theatre is really too small to discuss
it. It would not be fair to play David and
Goliath on a stage too small to admit Goliath.
112
The Critic
And it Is not fair to discuss private morality
on a stage too small to admit the enormous
presence of public morality; that character
which has not appeared in a play since the
Middle Ages; whose name is Every-man and
whose honour we have all in our keeping.
H
in
The Dramatist
N^O one who was alive at the time
and interested in such matters
will ever forget the first acting
of Arms and the Man. It was
applauded by that indescribable element in
all of us which rejoices to see the genuine '
thing prevail against the plausible; that ele-
ment which rejoices that even its enemies are
alive. Apart from the problems raised in the j
play, the very form of it was an attractive/
and forcible innovation. Classic plays which,
were wholly heroic, comic plays which were'
wholly and even heartlessly ironical, were
common enough. Commonest of all in this
particular time was the play that began play-
fully, with plenty of comic business, and was
gradually sobered by sentiment until it ended
on a note of romance or even of pathos. A
commonplace little officer, the butt of the
mess, becomes by the last act as high and
hopeless a lover as Dante. Or a vulgar and
violent pork-butcher remembers his own youth
before the curtain goes down. The first thing
that Bernard Shaw did when he stepped before
114
The Drmnatist
the footlights was to reverse this process. He
resolved to build a play not on pathos, but on
bathos. The officer should be heroic first
and then ever}'one should laugh at him; the
curtain should go up on a man remembering
his youth, and he should only reveal himself
as a violent pork-butcher when someone in-
terrupted him with an order for pork. This
merely technical originality is indicated in the
very title of the play. The Arma Virumque
of Virgil is a mounting and ascending phrase,
the man is more than his weapons. The Latin
line suggests a superb procession which should
bring on to the stage the brazen and resound-
ing armour, the shield and shattering axe, but
end with the hero himself, taller and more
terrible because unarmed. The technical effect
of Shaw's scheme is like the same scene,
in which a crowd should carry even more
gigantic shapes of shield and helmet, but when
the horns and howls were at their highest,
should end with the figure of Little Tich.
The name itself is meant to be a bathos;
arms — and the man.
It is well to begin with the superficial; and
this is the superficial effectiveness of Shaw;
the brilliancy of bathos. But of course the
vitality and value of his plays does not lie
"5
George Bernard Shaw
merely in this; any more than the value of
Swinburne lies in alliteration or the value of
Hood in puns. This is not his message; but
it is his method; it is his style. The first
taste we had of it was in this play of Arms and
the Man; but even at the very first it was
evident that there was much more in the play
than that. Among other things there was one
thing not unimportant; there was savage
, sincerity. Indeed, only a ferociously sincere
/ person can produce such effective flippancies
on a matter Hke war; just as only a strong
man could juggle with cannon balls. It is all
very well to use the word "fool" as synony-
mous with "jester"; but daily experience
shows that it is generally the solemn and
silent man who is the fool. It is all very well
to accuse Mr. Shaw of standing on his head;
but if you stand on your head you must have
a hard and solid head to stand on. In Arms
and the Man the bathos of form was strictly
the incarnation of a strong satire in the idea.
The play opens in an atmosphere of mihtary
melodrama; the dashing officer of cavalry
going off to death in an attitude, the lovely
heroine left in tearful rapture; the brass band,
the noise of guns and the red fire. Into all this
enters Bluntschli, the little sturdy crop-haired
ii6
The Dramatist
Swiss professional soldier, a man without a
country but w^th a trade. He tells the army-
adoring'heroine frankly that she is a humbug;
and she, after a moment's reflection, appears
to agree with him. The play is like nearly
all Shaw's plays, the dialogue of a conversion.
By the end of it the young lady has lost all
her military illusions and admires this mer-
cenary soldier not because he faces guns, but
because he faces facts.
This was a fitting entrance for Shaw to his
didactic drama; because the commonplace
courage which he respects in Bluntschli was the
one virtue w^hich he was destined to praise
throughout. We can best see how the play
symbolises and summarises Bernard Shaw if we
compare it with some other attack by modern
humanitarians upon war. Shaw has many of
the actual opinions of Tolstoy. Like Tolstoy
he tells men, with coarse innocence, that
romantic war is only butchery and that roman-
tic love is only lust. But Tolstoy objects to
these things because they are real; he really
washes to abolish them. Shaw only objects to
them in so far as they are ideal; that is in so
far as they are idealised. Shaw objects not so
much to war as to the attractiveness of war.
He does not so much dislike love as the love
117
George Bernard Shaw
.of love. Before the temple of Mars, Tolstoy
stands and thunders, "There shall be no wars";
Bernard Shaw merely murmurs, "Wars if you
must; but for God's sake, not war songs."
Before the temple of Venus, Tolstoy cries
terribly, "Come out of it!"; Shaw is quite
content to say, "Do not be taken in by it."
Tolstoy seems really to propose that high
passion and patriotic valour should be destroyed.
Shaw is more mioderate; and only asks that
they should be desecrated. Upon this note,
both about sex and conflict, he was destined to
dwell through much of his work with the most
wonderful variations of witty adventure and
intellectual surprise. It may be doubted per-
haps whether this realism in love and war is
quite so sensible as it looks. Securus judicat
orhis terrarum; the world is wiser than the
moderns. The world has kept sentimentalities
simply because they are the most practical
things in the world. They alone make men
do things. The world does not encourage a
quite rational lover, simply because a perfectly
rational lover would never get married. The
world does not encourage a perfectly rational
army, because a perfectly rational army would
run away.
The brain of Bernard Shaw was like a wedge
ii8
The Dramatist
in the literal sense. Its sharpest end was
always in front; and it split our society from
end to end the moment it had entrance at all.
As I have said he was long unheard of; but
he had not the tragedy of many authors, who
were heard of long before they were heard.
When you had read any Shaw you read all
Shaw. When you had seen one of his plays you
waited for more. And when he brought them
out in volume form, you did what is repugnant
to any literary man — you bought a book.
The dramatic volume with which Shaw
dazzled the public was called, Plays, Pleasant
and Unpleasant. I think the most striking
and typical thing about it was that he did not
know very clearly which plays were unpleasant
and which were pleasant. " Pleasant" is a word
which is almost unmeaning to Bernard Shaw.
Except, as I suppose, in music (where I cannot
follow him), relish and receptivity are things
that simply do not appear. He has the best
of tongues and the worst of palates. With the
possible exception of Mrs. Warren s Profession
(which was at least unpleasant in the sense
of being forbidden) I can see no particular
reason why any of the seven plays should be
held specially to please or displease. First in
fame and contemporary importance came the
119
George Bernard Shaw
reprint of Arms and the Man, of which I have
already spoken. Over all the rest towered un-
questionably the two figures of Mrs. Warren
and of Candida. They were neither of them
pleasant, except as all good art is pleasant.
They were neither of them really unpleasant
except as all truth is unpleasant. But they did
represent the author's normal preference and
his principal fear; and those two sculptured
giantesses largely upheld his fame.
I fancy that the author rather dislikes
Candida because it is so generally liked. I give
my own feeling for what it is worth (a foolish
phrase), but I think that there were only two
moments when this powerful writer was truly,
in the ancient and popular sense, inspired;
that is, breathing from a bigger self and telling
more truth than he knew. One is that scene
in a later play where after the secrets and
revenges of Egypt have rioted and rotted all
round him, the colossal sanity of Caesar is
suddenly acclaimed with swords. The other
is that great last scene in Candida where the
wife, stung into final speech, declared her pur-
pose of remaining with the strong man because
he is the weak man. The wife is asked to
decide between two men, one a strenuous self-
confident popular preacher, her husband, the
120
The Dramatist
other a wild and weak young poet, logically
futile and physically timid, her lover; and she
chooses the former because he has more weak-
ness and more need of her. Even among the
plain and ringing paradoxes of the Shaw play
this is one of the best reversals or turnovers
ever effected. A paradoxical writer like Ber-
nard Shaw is perpetually and tiresomely told
that he stands on his head. But all romance
and all religion consist in making the whole
universe stand on its head. That reversal is
the whole idea of virtue; that the last shall
be first and the first last. Considered as a
pure piece of Shaw therefore, the thing is of
the best. But it is also something much
better than Shaw. The writer touches certain
realities commonly outside his scope; especi-
ally the reality of the normal wife's attitude to
the normal husband, an attitude which is not
romantic but which is yet quite quixotic;
which is insanely unselfish and yet quite cynic-
ally clear-sighted. It involves human sacrifice
without in the least involving idolatry.
The truth is that in this place Bernard
Shaw comes within an inch of expressing
something that is not properly expressed any-
where else; the idea of marriage. Marriage
is not a mere chain upon love as the anarchists
121
George Bernard Shaw
say; nor is it a mere crown upon love as the
sentimentalists say. Marriage is a fact, an
actual human relation like that of motherhood
which has certain human habits and loyalties,
except in a few monstrous cases where it is
turned to torture by special insanity and sin.
A marriage is neither an ecstasy nor a slavery;
it is a commonwealth; it is a separate working
and fighting thing Hke a nation. Kings and
diplomatists talk of "forming alliances" when
they make weddings; but indeed every wed-
ding is primarily an alliance. The family is a
fact even when it is not an agreeable fact, and
a man is part of his wife even when he wishes
he wasn't. The twain are one flesh — yes,
even when they are not one spirit. Man is
duplex. Man is a quadruped.
Of this ancient and essential relation there
are certain emotional results, which are subtle,
like all the growths of nature. And one of
them is the attitude of the wife to the husband,
whom she regards at once as the strongest and
most helpless of human figures. She regards
him in some strange fashion at once as a
warrior who must make his way and as an
infant who is sure to lose his way. The man
has emotions which exactly correspond; some-
times looking down at his wife and sometimes
122
The Dramatist
up at her; for marriage is like a splendid
game of see-saw. Whatever else it is, it is
not comradeship. This living, ancestral bond
(not of love or fear, but strictly of marriage)
has been twice expressed splendidly in litera-
ture. The man's incurable sense of the
mother in his lawful wife was uttered by
Browning in one of his two or three truly
shattering lines of genius, when he makes the
execrable Guido fall back finally upon the fact
of marriage and the wife whom he has trodden
like mire:
"Christ! Mada! God,
Pompilia, will you let them murder me ?"
And the woman's witness to the same fact
has been best expressed by Bernard Shaw in
this great scene where she remains with the
great stalwart successful public man because
he is really too little to run alone.
There are one or two errors in the play;
and they are all due to the primary error of
despising the mental attitude of romance, which
is the only key to real human conduct. For
instance, the love making of the young poet is
all wrong. He is supposed to be a romantic
and amorous boy; and therefore the dramatist
tries to make him talk turgidly, about seeking
123
George Bernard Shaw
for "an archangel with purple wings" who
shall be worthy of his lady. But a lad in love
would never talk in this mock heroic style;
there is no period at which the young male is
more sensitive and serious and afraid of look-
ing a fool. This is a blunder; but there is
another much bigger and blacker. It is com-
pletely and disastrously false to the whole
nature of falling in love to make the young
Eugene complain of the cruelty which makes
Candida defile her fair hands with domestic
duties. No boy in love with a beautiful
woman would ever feel disgusted when she
peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. He would
like her to be domestic. He would simply
feel that the potatoes had become poetical and
the lamps gained an extra light. This may be
irrational; but we are not talking of ration-
ality, but of the psychology of first love. It
may be very unfair to women that the toil
and triviality of potato peeling should be seen
through a glamour of romance; but the
glamour is quite as certain a fact as the
potatoes. It may be a bad thing in sociology
that men should deify domesticity in girls as
something dainty and magical; but all men
do. Personally I do not think it a bad thing
at all; but that is another argument. The
124
The Dramatist
argument here is that Bernard Shaw, in aim-
ing at mere realism, makes a big mistake in
reality. Misled by his great heresy of looking
at emotions from the outside, he makes Eu-
gene a cold-blooded prig at the very moment
when he is tr)'ing, for his own dramatic pur-
poses, to make him a hot-blooded lover.
He makes the young lover an idealistic the-
oriser about the very things about which he
really would have been a sort of mystical
materialist. Here the romantic Irishman is
much more right than the very rational one;
and there is far more truth to life as it is
in Lover's couplet —
"And envied the chicken
That Peggy was pickin'.**
than in Eugene's solemn, aesthetic protest
against the potato-skins and the lamp-oil.
For dramatic purposes, G. B. S., even if he
despises romance, ought to comprehend it.
But then, if once he comprehended romance,
he would not despise it.
The series contained, besides its more sub-
stantial work, tragic and comic, a compara-
tive frivolity called The Man of Destiny. It
is a little comedy about Napoleon, and is
chiefly interesting as a foreshadowing of his
125
George Bernard Shaw
after sketches of heroes and strong men; it
is a kind of parody of Ccesar and Cleopatra
before it was written. In this connection
the mere title of this Napoleonic play is of
interest. All Shaw's generation and school of
thought remembered Napoleon only by his
late and corrupt title of "The Man of
Destiny/' a title only given to him when he
was already fat and tired and destined to exile.
They forgot that through all the really thrill-
ing and creative part of his career he was not
the man of destiny, but the man who defied
destiny. Shaw's sketch is extraordinarily
clever; but it is tinged with this unmilitary
notion of an inevitable conquest; and this wx
must remember when we come to those larger
canvases on which he painted his more serious
heroes. As for the play, it is packed with
good things, of which the last is perhaps the
best. The long duologue between Bonaparte
and the Irish lady ends with the General
declaring that he will only be beaten when
he meets an English army under an Irish
general. It has always been one of Shaw's
paradoxes that the English mind has the force to
fulfil orders, while the Irish mind has the intel-
ligence to give them, and it is among those
of his paradoxes which contain a certain truth.
126
The Dramatist
A far more important play is The Philanderer,
an ironic comedy which is full of fine strokes
and real satire; it is more especially the
vehicle of some of Shaw's best satire upon
physical science. Nothing could be cleverer
than the picture of the young, strenuous
doctor, in the utter innocence of his profes-
sional ambition, who has discovered a new
disease, and is delighted when he finds people
suffering from it and cast down to despair
when he finds that it does not exist. The
point is worth a pause, because it is a good,
short way of stating Shaw's attitude, right or
wrong, upon the whole of formal morality.
What he dislikes in young Doctor Paramore
is that he has interposed a secondary and false
conscience betvv^een himself and the facts.
When his disease is disproved, instead of
seeing the escape of a human being who
thought he was going to die of it, Paramore
sees the downfall of a kind of flag or cause.
This is the whole contention of The Quin-
tessence of Ibsenism, put better than the book
puts it; it is a really sharp exposition of the
dangers of "idealism," the sacrifice of people
to principles, and Shaw is even wiser in his
suggestion that this excessive idealism exists
nowhere so strongly as in the world of
127
George Bernard Shaw
physical science. He shows that the scientist
tends to be more concerned about the sickness
than about the sick man; but it was certainly
in his mind to suggest here also that the
idealist is more concerned about the sin than
about the sinner.
This business of Dr. Paramore's disease
while it is the most farcical thing in the play
is also the most philosophic and important.
The rest of the figures, including the Philan-
derer himself, are in the full sense of those
blasting and obliterating words "funny with-
out being vulgar," that is, funny without
being of any importance to the masses of
men. It is a play about a dashing and ad-
vanced "Ibsen Club," and the squabble
between the young Ibsenites and the old
people who are not yet up to Ibsen. It
would be hard to find a stronger example of
Shaw's only essential error, modernity —
which means the seeking for truth in terms
of time. Only a few years have passed and
already almost half the wit of that wonderful
play is wasted, because it all turns on the
newness of a fashion that is no longer new.
Doubtless many people still think the Ibsen
drama a great thing, like the French classical
drama. But going to " The Philanderer" is like
128
The Dramatist
going among periwigs and rapiers and hearing
that the young men are now all for Racine.
What makes such work sound unreal is not the
praise of Ibsen, but the praise of the novelty
of Ibsen. Any advantage that Bernard Shaw
had over Colonel Craven I have over Bernard
Shaw; we who happen to be born last have
the meaningless and paltry triumph in that
meaningless and paltr}' war. W e are the
superiors by that silliest and most snobbish
of all superiorities, the mere aristocracy of
time. All works must become thus old and
insipid which have ever tried to be '^modern,"
which have consented to smell of time rather
than of eternity. Only those who have
stooped to be in advance of their time will
ever find themselves behind it.
But it is irritating to think what diamonds,
what dazzling silver of Shavian wit has been
sunk in such an out-of-date warship. In The
Philanderer there are five hundred excellent
and about five magnificent things. The rattle
of repartees bet^veen the doctor and the
soldier about the humanity of their two trades
is admirable. Or again, when the colonel tells
Chartaris that ''in his young days" he would
have no more behaved like Chartaris than he
would have cheated at cards. After a pause
I i2g
George Bernard Shaw
Chartaris says, "You're getting old, Craven,
and you make a virtue of it as usual." And
there is an altitude of aerial tragedy in the
words of Grace, who has refused the man she
loves, to Julia, who is marrying the man
she doesn't, "This is what they call a happy
ending — these men."
There is an acrid taste in The Philanderer;
and certainly he might be considered a super-
sensitive person who should find anything acrid
in Tou Never Can Tell. This play is the nearest
approach to frank and objectless exuberance in
the whole of Shaw's work. Punchy with wisdom
as well as wit, said that it might well be called
not "You Never Can Tell" but "You Never
Can be Shaw." And yet if anyone will read this
blazing farce and then after it any of the romantic
farces, such as Pickwick or even The Wrong Box,
I do not think he will be disposed to erase or even
to modify what I said at the beginning about
the ingrained grimness and even inhumanity
of Shaw's art. To take but one test: love, in
an "extravaganza," may be hght love or love
in idleness, but it should be hearty and happy
love if it is to add to the general hilarity.
Such are the ludicrous but lucky love affairs of
the sportsman Winkle and the Maestro Jimson.
In Gloria's collapse before her bullying lover
130
The Dramatist
there is something at once cold and unclean;
it calls up all the modern supermen with their
cruel and fishy eyes. Such farces should begin
in a friendly air, in a tavern. There is some-
thing very symbolic of Shaw in the fact that
his farce begins in a dentist's.
The only one out of this brilliant batch of
plays in which I think that the method adopted
really fails, is the one called Widoivers
Houses. The best touch of Shaw is simply
in the title. The simple substitution of
widowers for widows contains almost the
whole bitter and yet boisterous protest of
Shaw; all his preference for undignified fact
over dignified phrase; all his dislike of those
subtle trends of sex or mystery which swing
the logician off the straight line. We can
imagine him crying, "Why in the name of
death and conscience should it be tragic to be
a widow but comic to be a widower?" But
the rationalistic method is here applied quite
wrong as regards the production of a drama.
The most dramatic point in the affair is when
the open and indecent rack-renter turns on the
decent young man of means and proves to him
that he is equally guilty, that he also can only
grind his corn by grinding the faces of the
poor. But even here the point is undramatic
George Bernard Shaw
because it is indirect; it is indirect because it
is merely sociological. It may be the truth
that a young man living on an unexamined
income which ultimately covers a great deal of
house-property is as dangerous as any despot
or thief. But it is a truth that you can no
more put into a play than into a triolet. You
can make a play out of one man robbing
another man, but not out of one man robbing
a million men; still less out of his robbing
them unconsciously.
Of the plays collected in this book I have
kept Mrs. Warren s Profession to the last,
because, fine as it is, it is even finer and more
important because of its fate, v^hich v^as to
rouse a long and serious storm and to be vetoed
by the Censor of Plays. I say that this drama
is most important because of the quarrel that
came out of it. If I v^ere speaking of some
mere artist this might be an insult. But there
are high and heroic things in Bernard Shaw;
and one of the highest and most heroic is this,
that he certainly cares much more for a quarrel
than for a play. And this quarrel about the
censorship is one on which he feels so strongly
that in a book embodying any sort of sympathy
it would be much better to leave out Mrs.
Warren than to leave out Mr. Redford. The
132
The Dramatist
veto was the pivot of so very personal a
movement by the dramatist, of so very positive
an assertion of his own attitude towards things,
that it is only just and necessary to state what
were the two essential parties to the dispute;
the play and the official who prevented the
play.
The play of Mri*. Warren's Profession is con-
cerned with a coarse mother and a cold daughter;
the mother drives the ordinary and dirty trade
of harlotry; the daughter does not know until
the end the atrocious origin of all her own
comfort and refinement. The daughter, when
the discovery is made, freezes up into an ice-
berg of contempt; which is indeed a very
womanly thing to do. The mother explodes
into pulverising cynicism and practicality;
which is also very womanly. The dialogue is
drastic and sweeping; the daughter says the
trade is loathsome; the mother answers that
she loathes it herself; that every healthy per-
son does loathe the trade by which she lives.
And beyond question the general effect of the
play is that the trade is loathsome; supposing
anyone to be so insensible as to require to be
told of the fact. Undoubtedly the upshot is
that a brothel is a miserable business, and
a brothel-keeper a miserable woman. The
^33
George Bernard Shaw
whole dramatic art of Shaw is in the literal
sense of the word, tragi-comic; I mean that
the comic part comes after the tragedy. But
just as Tou Never Can Tell represents the
nearest approach of Shaw to the purely comic,
so Mrs. Warren^ s Profession represents his only
complete, or nearly complete, tragedy. There
is no twopenny modernism in it, as in The
Philanderer. Mrs. Warren is as old as the Old
Testament; "for she hath cast down many
wounded, yea, many strong men have been
slain by her; her house is in the gates of hell,
going down into the chamber of death." Here
is no subtle ethics, as in Widowers' Houses; for
even those moderns who think it noble that a
woman should throw away her honour, surely
cannot think it especially noble that she should
sell it. Here is no lighting up by laughter,
astonishment, and happy coincidence, as in Tou
Never Can Tell. The play is a pure tragedy
about a permanent and quite plain human
problem; the problem is as plain and perma-
nent, the tragedy is as proud and pure, as in
CEdipus or Macbeth. This play was presented
in the ordinary way for public performance
and was suddenly stopped by the Censor of
Plays.
The Censor of Plays is a small and acci-
134
The Dramatist
dental eighteenth-century official. Like nearly
all the powers which Englishmen now respect
as ancient and rooted, he is very recent.
Novels and newspapers still talk of the English
aristocracy that came over with William the
Conqueror. Little of our effective oligarchy
is as old as the Reformation; and none of it
came over with William the Conqueror. Some
of the older English landlords came over with
William of Orange; the rest have come by
ordinar)^ alien immigration. In the same way
we always talk of the Victorian woman (with
her smelling salts and sentiment) as the old-
fashioned woman. But she really was a quite
new-fashioned woman; she considered herself,
and was, an advance in delicacy and civilisa-
tion upon the coarse and candid Elizabethan
woman to whom we are now returning. We
are never oppressed by old things; it is recent
things that can really oppress. And in accord-
ance with this principle modern England has
accepted, as if it were a part of perennial
morality, a tenth-rate job of Walpole's w^orst
days called the Censorship of the Drama. Just
as they have supposed the eighteenth-century
parvenus to date from Hastings, just as they
have supposed the eighteenth-centur}^ ladies
to date from Eve, so they have supposed the
ns
George Bernard SJiaw
eighteenth-century Censorship to date from
Sinai. The origin of the thing was in truth
purely political. Its first and principal achieve-
ment was to prevent Fielding from writing
plays; not at all because the plays were coarse,
but because they criticised the Government.
Fielding was a free writer; but they did not
resent his sexual freedom; the Censor would
not have objected if he had torn away the most
intimate curtains of decency or rent the last
rag from private life. What the Censor dis-
liked was his rending the curtain from public
life. There is still much of that spirit in our
country; there are no affairs which men seek
so much to cover up as public affairs. But
the thing was done somewhat more boldly
and baldly in Walpole's day; and the Censor-
ship of plays has its origin, not merely in
tyranny, but in a quite trifling and temporary
and partisan piece of tyranny; a thing in its
nature far more ephemeral, far less essential,
than Ship Money. Perhaps its brightest moment
was when the office of censor was held by that
filthy writer, Colman the younger; and when
he gravely refused to license a work by the
author of Our Village. Few funnier notions
can ever have actually been facts than this
notion that the restraint and chastity of George
136
The Dramatist
Colman saved the English pubHc from the
eroticism and obscenity of Miss Mitford.
Such was the play; and such was the power
that stopped the play. A private man wrote
it; another private man forbade it; nor was
there any difference between Mr. Shaw's au-
thority and Mr. Redford's, except that Mr.
Shaw did defend his action on public grounds
and Mr. Redford did not. The dramatist had
simply been suppressed by a despot; and what
was worse (because it was modern) by a silent
and evasive despot; a despot in hiding.
People talk about the pride of tyrants; but
we at the present day suffer from the modesty
of tyrants; from the shyness and the shrink-
ing secrecy of the strong. Shaw's preface to
Mrs. Warren s Profession was far more fit to be
called a public document than the slovenly
refusal of the individual official; it had more
exactness, more universal application, more
authority. Shaw on Redford was far more
national and responsible than Redford on
Shaw.
The dramatist found in the quarrel one of
the important occasions of his life, because
the crisis called out somethino- in him which is
in many ways his highest quality — righteous
indignation. As a mere matter of the art of
^Z7
George Bernard Shaw
controversy of course he carried the war into
the enemy's camp at once. He did not linger
over loose excuses for licence; he declared at
once that the Censor was licentious, while he,
Bernard Shaw, was clean. He did not discuss
whether a Censorship ought to make the
drama moral. He declared that it made the
drama immoral. With a fine strategic audacity
he attacked the Censor quite as much for what
he permitted as for what he prevented. He
charged him with encouraging all plays that
attracted men to vice and only stopping those
which discouraged them from it. Nor was
this attitude by any means an idle paradox.
Many plays appear (as Shaw pointed out) in
which the prostitute and the procuress are
practically obvious, and in which they are
represented as revelling in beautiful surround-
ings and basking in brilliant popularity. The
crime of Shaw was not that he introduced the
Gaiety Girl; that had been done, with little
enough decorum, in a hundred musical come-
dies. The crime of Shaw was that he intro-
duced the Gaiety Girl, but did not represent
her life as all gaiety. The pleasures of vice
were already flaunted before the playgoers.
It was the perils of vice that were carefully
concealed from them. The gay adventures.
The Dramatist
the gorgeous dresses, the champagne and
oysters, the diamonds and motor-cars, drama-
tists were allowed to drag all these dazzHng
temptations before any silly housemaid in the
gallery who was grumbling at her wages. But
they were not allowed to warn her of the vul-
garity and the nausea, the dreary deceptions
and the blasting diseases of that life. Mrs.
Warren s Profession was not up to a sufficient
standard of immorality; it was not spicy
enough to pass the Censor. The acceptable
and the accepted plays were those which made
the fall of a woman fashionable and fascinating;
for all the world as if the Censor's profession
were the same as Mrs. Warren's profession.
Such was the angle of Shaw's energetic
attack; and it is not to be denied that there
was exaggeration in it, and what is so much
worse, omission. The argument might easily
be carried too far; it might end with a scene
of screaming torture in the Inquisition as a
corrective to the too amiable view of a clergy-
man in The Private Secretary. But the con-
troversy is definitely worth recording, if only
as an excellent example of the author's
aggressive attitude and his love of turning
the tables in debate. Moreover, though this
point of view involves a potential overstate-
139
George Bernard Shaw
ment, it also involves an important truth.
One of the best points urged in the course of
it v^as this, that though vice is punished in
conventional drama, the punishment is not
really impressive, because it is not inevit-
able or even probable. It does not arise out
of the evil act. Years afterwards Bernard
Shaw^ urged this argument again in connec-
tion v^ith his friend Mr. Granville Barker's
play of Waste, in which the woman dies from
an illegal operation. Bernard Shaw said, truly
enough, that if she had died from poison or a
pistol shot it would have left everyone un-
moved, for pistols do not in their nature
follow female unchastity. Illegal operations
very often do. The punishment was one
which might follow the crime, not only in
that case, but in many cases. Here, I think,
the whole argument might be sufficiently
cleared up by saying that the objection to
such things on the stage is a purely artistic
objection. There is nothing wrong in talk-
ing about an illegal operation; there are
plenty of occasions when it would be very
wrong not to talk about it. But it may
easily be just a shade too ugly for the shape
of any work of art. There is nothing wrong
about being sick; but if Bernard Shaw wrote
140
The Dramatist
a play in which all the characters expressed
their dislike of animal food by vomiting on
the stage, I think we should be justified in
saying that the thing was outside, not the
laws of morality, but the framework of
civilised literature. The instinctive move-
ment of repulsion which everyone has when
hearing of the operation in Waste is not an
ethical repulsion at all. But it is an aesthetic
repulsion, and a right one.
But I have only dwelt on this particular
fighting phase because it leaves us facing the
ultimate characteristics which I mentioned first.
Bernard Shaw cares nothing for art; in com-
parison with morals, literally nothing. Bernard
Shaw is a Puritan and his work is Puritan
work. He has all the essentials of the old,
virile and extinct Protestant type. In his
work he is as ugly as a Puritan. He is as
indecent as a Puritan. He is as full of gross
words and sensual facts as a sermon of the
seventeenth century. Up to this point of his
life indeed hardly anyone would have dreamed
of calling him a Puritan; he was called some-
times an anarchist, sometimes a buffoon, some-
times (by the more discerning stupid people)
a prig. His attitude towards current problems
was felt to be arresting and even indecent; I
141
George Bernard SJiaw
do not think that anyone thought of connect-
ing it with the old Calvinistic morality. But
Shaw, who knew better than the Shavians, was
at this moment on the very eve of confessing
his moral origin. The next book of plays
he produced (including The Devil's Disciple,
Captain Brasshound's Co77verswn, and Caesar and
Cleopatra), actually bore the title of Plays for
Puritans.
The play called The DeviFs Disciple has great
merits, but the merits are incidental. Some
of its jokes are serious and important, but its
general plan can only be called a joke. Almost
alone among Bernard Shaw's plays (except of
course such things as How he Lied to her Hus-
band and The Admirable Bashville) this drama
does not turn on any very plain pivot of
ethical or philosophical conviction. The artis-
tic idea seems to be the notion of a melodrama
in which all the conventional melodramatic
situations shall suddenly take unconventional
turns. Just where the melodramatic clergy-
man would show courage he appears to show
cowardice; just where the melodramatic sinner
would confess his love he confesses his in-
difference. This is a little too like the Shaw
of the newspaper critics rather than the Shaw
of reality. There are indeed present in the
142
The Dramatist
play two of the writer's principal moral con-
ceptions. The first is the idea of a great
heroic action coming in a sense from nowhere;
that is, not coming from any commonplace
motive; being born in the soul in naked
beauty, coming with its own authority and
testifying only to itself. Shaw's agent does
not act towards something, but from some-
thing. The hero dies, not because he desires
heroism, but because he has it. So in this
particular play the Devil's Disciple finds that
his own nature will not permit him to put the
rope around another man's neck; he has no
reasons of desire, affection, or even equity; his
death is a sort of divine whim. And in con-
nection with this the dramatist introduces
another favourite moral; the objection to per-
petual playing upon the motive of sex. He
deliberately lures the onlooker into the net of
Cupid in order to tell him with salutary
decision that Cupid is not there at all. Mil-
lions of melodramatic dramatists have made a
man face death for the woman he loves; Shaw
makes him face death for the woman he does
not love — merely in order to put woman in
her place. He objects to that idolatry of
sexualism which makes it the fountain of all
forcible enthusiasms; he dislikes the amorous
143
George Bernard Shaw
drama which makes the female the only key to
the male. He is Feminist in politics, but
Anti-feminist in emotion. His key to most
problems is, "Ne cherchez pas la femme."
As has been observed, the incidental felici-
ties of the play are frequent and memorable,
especially those connected with the character
of General Burgoyne, the real full-blooded,
free-thinking eighteenth century gentleman,
who was much too much of an aristocrat not
to be a liberal. One of the best thrusts in
all the Shavian fencing matches is that which
occurs when Richard Dudgeon, condemned to
be hanged, asks rhetorically why he cannot be
shot like a soldier. "Now there you speak
like a civilian," replies General Burgoyne.
"Have you formed any conception of the
condition of marksmanship in the British
Army?" Excellent, too, is the passage in
which his subordinate speaks of crushing the
enemy in America, and Burgoyne asks him
who will crush their enemies in England,
snobbery and jobbery and incurable careless-
ness and sloth. And in one sentence towards
the end, Shaw reaches a wider and more genial
comprehension of mankind than he shows
anywhere else; "it takes all sorts to make a
world, saints as well as soldiers." If Shaw
144
The Dramatist
had remembered that sentence on other occa-
sions he would have avoided his mistake
about Caesar and Brutus. It is not only true
that it takes all sorts to make a world; but
the world cannot succeed without its failures.
Perhaps the most doubtful point of all in the
play is why it is a play for Puritans; except
the hideous picture of a Calvinistic home is
meant to destroy Puritanism. And indeed in
this connection it is constantly necessary to
fall back upon the facts of which I have
spoken at the beginning of this brief study;
it is necessary especially to remember that
Shaw could in all probability speak of Puritan-
ism from the inside. In that domestic circle
which took him to hear Moody and Sankey,
in that domestic circle w^hich was teetotal even
when it vv^as intoxicated, in that atmosphere
and society Shaw might even have met the
monstrous mother in The DeviVs Disciple,
the horrible old woman who declares that she
has hardened her heart to hate her children,
because the heart of man is desperately wicked,
the old ghoul who has made one of her chil-
dren an imbecile and the other an outcast.
Such types do occur in small societies drunk
with the dismal wine of Puritan determinism.
It is possible that there w^ere among Irish
J H5
George Bernard Shaw
Calvinlsts people who denied that chanty was
a Christian virtue. It is possible that among
Puritans there were people who thought a
heart was a kind of heart disease. But it is
enough to make one tear one's hair to think
that a man of genius received his first im-
pressions in so small a corner of Europe that
he could for a long time suppose that this
Puritanism was current among Christian men.
The question, however, need not detain us,
for the batch of plays contained two others
about which it is easier to speak.
The third play in order in the series called
Plays for Puritans is a very charming one;
Captain Brasshound^s Conversion. This also
turns, as does so much of the Caesar drama, on
the idea of vanity of revenge — the idea that
it is too slight and silly a thing for a man
to allow to occupy and corrupt his conscious-
ness. It is not, of course, the morality that
is new here, but the touch of cold laughter
in the core of the morality. Many saints and
sages have denounced vengeance. But they
treated vengeance as something too great for
man. "Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord;
I will repay." Shaw treats vengeance as some-
thing too small for man — a monkey trick he
ought to have outlived, a childish storm
146
The Dramatist
of tears which he ought to be able to control.
In the story in question Captain Brassbound
has nourished through his whole erratic exist-
ence, racketting about all the unsavoury parts
of Africa — a mission of private punishment
which appears to him as a mission of holy
justice. His mother has died in consequence
of a judge's decision, and Brassbound roams
and schemes until the judge falls into his
hands. Then a pleasant society lady, Lady
Cicely Waynefleet tells him in an easy con-
versational undertone — a rivulet of speech
which ripples while she is mending his coat —
that he is making a fool of himself, that his
wrong is Irrelevant, that his vengeance is
objectless, that he would be much better if he
flung his morbid fancy away for ever; in
short, she tells him he is ruining himself for
the sake of ruining a total stranger. Here
again we have the note of the economist, the
hatred of mere loss. Shaw (one might almost
say) dislikes murder, not so much because it
wastes the life of the corpse as because it
wastes the time of the murderer. If he were
endeavouring to persuade one of his moon-
lighting fellow-countrymen not to shoot his
landlord, I can imagine him explaining with
benevolent emphasis that it was not so much
147
George Bernard Shaw
a question of losing a life as of throwing away
a bullet. But indeed the Irish comparison
alone suggests a doubt which wriggles in the
recesses of my mind about the complete re-
liability of the philosophy of Lady Cicely
Waynefleet, the complete finality of the moral
of Captain Brassbound's Conversion. Of course,
it was very natural in an aristocrat like Lady
Cicely Waynefleet to wish to let sleeping dogs
lie, especially those whom Mr. Blatchford calls
under-dogs. Of course it was natural for her
to wish everything to be smooth and sweet-
tempered. But I have the obstinate question
in the corner of my brain, whether if a few
Captain Brassbounds did revenge themselves
on judges, the quality of our judges might not
materially improve.
When this doubt is once ofF one's conscience
one can lose oneself in the bottomless beati-
tude of Lady Cicely Waynefleet, one of the
most living and laughing things that her
maker has made. I do not know any stronger
way of stating the beauty of the character than
by saying that it was written specially for
Ellen Terry, and that it is, with Beatrice, one
of the very few characters in which the drama-
tist can claim some part of her triumph.
We may now pass to the more important
148
The Dramatist
of the plays. For some time Bernard Shaw
would seem to have been brooding upon the
soul of Julius Caesar. There must always be
a strong human curiosity about the soul of
Julius Caesar; and, among other things, about
whether he had a soul. The conjunction of
Shaw and Caesar has about it something
smooth and inevitable; for this decisive reason,
that Caesar is really the only great man of
history to whom the Shaw theories apply.
Caesar ivas a Shaw hero. Caesar was merciful
without being in the least pitiful; his mercy
was colder than justice. Caesar was a con-
queror without being in any hearty sense a
soldier; his courage was lonelier than fear.
Caesar was a demagogue without being a
democrat. In the same way Bernard Shaw is
a demagogue without being a democrat. If
he had tried to prove his principle from any
of the other heroes or sages of mankind he
would have found it much more difficult.
Napoleon achieved more miraculous conquest;
but during his most conquering epoch he was
a burning boy suicidally in love with a woman
far beyond his age. Joan of Arc achieved
far more instant and incredible worldly suc-
cess; but Joan of Arc achieved worldly
success because she believed in another world.
149
George Bernard Shaw
Nelson was a figure fully as fascinating and
dramatically decisive; but Nelson was "ro-
mantic"; Nelson was a devoted patriot and a
devoted lover. Alexander was passionate;
Cromwell could shed tears; Bismarck had
some suburban religion; Frederick was a
poet; Charlemagne was fond of children.
But Julius Caesar attracted Shaw not less by
his positive than by his negative enormous-
ness. Nobody can say with certainty that
Caesar cared for anything. It is unjust to call
Caesar an egoist; for there is no proof that he
cared even for Caesar. He may not have been
either an atheist or a pessimist. But he may
have been; that is exactly the rub. He may
have been an ordinary decently good man
slightly deficient in spiritual expansiveness.
On the other hand, he may have been the
incarnation of paganism in the sense that
Christ was the incarnation of Christianity. As
Christ expressed how great a man can be
humble and humane, Caesar may have ex-
pressed how great a man can be frigid and
flippant. According to most legends Anti-
christ was to come soon after Christ. One
has only to suppose that Antichrist came
shortly before Christ; and Antichrist might
very well be Caesar.
150
The Dramatist
It IS, I think, no injustice to Bernard Shaw
to say that he does not attempt to make his
Caesar superior except in this naked and nega-
tive sense. There is no suggestion, as there
is in the Jehovah of the Old Testament, that
the very cruelty of the higher being conceals
some tremendous and even tortured love.
Caesar is superior to other men not because
he loves more, but because he hates less.
Caesar is magnanimous not because he is
warm-hearted enough to pardon, but because
he is not warm-hearted enough to avenge.
There is no suggestion anywhere in the play
that he is hiding any great genial purpose or
powerful tenderness towards men. In order
to put this point beyond a doubt the dramatist
has introduced a soliloquy of Caesar alone with
the Sphinx. There if anywhere he w^ould
have broken out into ultimate brotherhood or
burning pity for the people. But in that
scene between the Sphinx and Caesar, Caesar is
as cold and as lonely and as dead as the
Sphinx.
But whether the Shavian Caesar is a sound
ideal or no, there can be Httle doubt that he is
a very fine reality. Shaw has done nothing
greater as a piece of artistic creation. If the
man is a little like a statue, it is a statue by a
151
George Bernard Shaw
great sculptor; a statue of the best period.
If his nobility is a little negative in its char-
acter, it is the negative darkness of the great
dome of night; not as in some "new mor-
alities'' the mere mystery of the coal-hole.
Indeed, this somewhat austere method of work
is very suitable to Shaw when he is serious.
There is nothing Gothic about his real genius;
he could not build a mediaeval cathedral in
which laughter and terror are twisted together
in stone, molten by mystical passion. He can
build, by way of amusement, a Chinese pagoda;
but when he is in earnest, only a Roman
temple. He has a keen eye for truth; but he
is one of those people who like, as the saying
goes, to put down the truth in black and
white. He is always girding and jeering at
romantics and idealists because they will not
put down the truth in black and white. But
black and w^hite are not the only two colours
in the world. The modern man of science
who writes down a fact in black and white is
not more but less accurate than the mediaeval
monk who wrote it down in gold and scarlet,
sea-green and turquoise. Nevertheless, it is a
good thing that the more austere method
should exist separately, and that some men
should be specially good at it. Bernard Shaw
152
The Dramatist
is specially good at it; he is pre-eminently a
black and white artist.
And as a study in black and white nothing
could be better than this sketch of Julius
Caesar. He is not so much represented as
"bestriding the earth Hke a Colossus" (which
is indeed a rather comic attitude for a hero to
stand in), but rather walking the earth with
a sort of stern levity, lightly touching the
planet and yet spurning it away like a stone.
He walks like a winged man who has chosen
to fold his wings. There is something creepy
even about his kindness; it makes the men
in front of him feel as if they were made of
glass. The nature of the Caesarian mercy
is massively suggested. Caesar dislikes a
massacre, not because it is a great sin, but
because it is a small sin. It is felt that he
classes it with a flirtation or a fit of the sulks;
a senseless temporary subjugation of man's
permanent purpose by his passing and trivial
feelings. He will plunge into slaughter for
a great purpose, just as he plunges into the
sea. But to be stung into such action he
deems as undignified as to be tipped off the
pier. In a singularly fine passage Cleopatra,
having hired assassins to stab an enemy,
appeals to her wrongs as justifying her
153
George Bernard Shaw
revenge, and says, "If you can find one man
in all Africa who says that I did wrong, I will
be crucified by my own slaves." "If you
can find one man in all the world," replies
Caesar, "who can see that you did wrong, he
will either conquer the world as I have done
or be crucified by it/' That is the high water
mark of this heathen sublimity; and we do
not feel it inappropriate, or unlike Shaw,
when a few minutes afterwards the hero is
saluted with a blaze of swords.
As usually happens in the author's works,
there is even more about Julius Caesar in the
preface than there is in the play. But in the
preface I think the portrait is less imaginative
and more fanciful. He attempts to connect
his somewhat chilly type of superman with
the heroes of the old fairy tales. But Shaw
V should not talk about the fairy tales; for he
does not feel them from the inside. As I
have said, on all this side of historic and
domestic traditions Bernard Shaw is weak and
deficient. He does not approach them as
fairy tales, as if he were four, but as "folk-
lore" as if he were forty. And he makes
a big mistake about them which he would
never have made if he had kept his birthday
and hung up his stocking, and generally kept
154
The Dramatist
alive Inside him the firelight of a home.
The point Is so peculiarly characteristic of
Bernard Shaw, and is indeed so much of a
summary of his most Interesting assertion and
his most interesting error, that It deserves
a word by itself, though it Is a word which
must be remembered in connection with nearly
all the other plays.
His primary and defiant proposition Is the
Calvlnistic proposition: that the elect do not
earn virtue, but possess it. The goodness of
a man does not consist in trying to be good,
but in being good. Julius Caesar prevails over
other people by possessing more virtus than
they; not by having striven or suffered or
bought his virtue; not because he has
struggled heroically, but because he is a hero.
So far Bernard Shaw Is only what I have
called him at the beginning; he is simply a
seventeenth-century Calvinlst. Caesar Is not
saved by works, or even by faith; he Is saved
because he is one of the elect. Unfortunately
for himself, however, Bernard Shaw went back
further than the seventeenth century; and
professing his opinion to be yet more anti-
quated, invoked the original legends of man-
kind. He argued that when the fairy tales
gave Jack the Giant Killer a coat of dark-
155
George Bernard Shaw
ness or a magic sword it removed all credit
from Jack in the "common moral" sense;
he won as Caesar won only because he was
superior. I will confess, in passing, to the
conviction that Bernard Shaw in the course of
his whole simple and strenuous life was never
quite so near to hell as at the moment when
he wrote down those words. But in this
question of fairy tales my immediate point is,
not how near he was to hell, but how very far
off he was from fairyland. That notion about
the hero with a magic sword being the super-
man with a magic superiority is the caprice
of a pedant; no child, boy, or man ever felt
it in the story of Jack the Giant Killer.
Obviously the moral is all the other way.
Jack's fairy sword and invisible coat are
clumsy expedients for enabling him to fight
at all with something which is by nature
stronger. They are a rough, savage substi-
tute for psychological descriptions of special
valour or unwearied patience. But no one in
his five wits can doubt that the idea of "Jack
the Giant Killer" is exactly the opposite to
Shaw's idea. If it were not a tale of effort
and triumph hardly earned it would not be
called "Jack the Giant Killer." If it were a
tale of the victory of natural advantages it
156
The Dramatist
would be called "Giant the Jack Killer." If
the teller of fairy tales had merely wanted to
urge that some beings are born stronger than
others he would not have fallen back on
elaborate tricks of weapon and costume for
conquering an ogre. He would simply have
let the ogre conquer. I will not speak of my
own emotions in connection with this in-
credibly caddish doctrine that the strength of
the strong is admirable, but not the valour
of the weak. It is enough to say that I have
to summon up the physical presence of Shaw,
his frank gestures, kind eyes, and exquisite
Irish voice, to cure me of a mere sensation of
contempt. But I do not dwell upon the point
for any such purpose; but merely to show
how we must be always casting back to those
concrete foundations with which we began.
Bernard Shaw, as I have said, was never
national enough to be domestic; he was
never a part of his past; hence when he tries
to interpret tradition he comes a terrible
cropper, as in this case. Bernard Shaw (I
strongly suspect) began to disbelieve in Santa
Claus at a discreditably early age. And by
this time Santa Claus has avenged himself by
taking away the key of all the prehistoric
scriptures; so that a noble and honourable
157
George Bernard Shaw
artist flounders about like any German pro-
fessor. Here is a whole fairy literature which
is almost exclusively devoted to the unex-
pected victory of the weak over the strong;
and Bernard Shaw manages to make it mean
the inevitable victory of the strong over the
weak — which, among other things, would not
make a story at all. It all comes of that
mistake about not keeping his birthday. A
man should be always tied to his mother's
apron strings; he should always have a hold
on his childhood, and be ready at intervals to
start anew from a childish standpoint. Theo-
logically the thing is best expressed by saying,
"You must be born again.'' Secularly it is
best expressed by saying, "You must keep
your birthday." Even if you will not be born
again, at least remind yourself occasionally
that you were born once.
Some of the incidental wit in the Caesarian
drama is excellent although it is upon the
whole less spontaneous and perfect than in the
previous plays. One of its jests may be men-
tioned in passing, not merely to draw attention
to its failure (though Shaw is brilliant enough
to aflFord many failures) but because it is the
best opportunity for mentioning one of the
writer's minor notions to which he obstinately
158
The Dramatist
adheres. He describes the Ancient Briton in
Caesar's train as being exactly like a modern
respectable Englishman. As a joke for a
Christmas pantomime this would be all very
well; but one expects the jokes of Bernard
Shaw to have some intellectual root, however
fantastic the flower. And obviously all historic
common sense is against the idea that that dim
Druid people, whoever they were, who dwelt
in our land before it was lit up by Rome or
loaded with varied invasions, were a precise
facsimile of the commercial society of Bir-
mingham or Brighton. But it is a part of the
Puritan in Bernard Shaw, a part of the taut
and high-strung quality of his mind, that he
will never admit of any of his jokes that it
was only a joke. When he has been most
witty he will passionately deny his own wit;
he will say something which Voltaire might
envy and then declare that he has got it all out
of a Blue book. And in connection with this
eccentric type of self-denial, we may notice
this mere detail about the Ancient Briton.
Someone faintly hinted that a blue Briton
when first found by Caesar might not be quite
like Mr. Broadbent; at the touch Shaw
poured forth a torrent of theory, explain-
ing that climate was the only thing that
159
George Bernard Shaw
affected nationality; and that whatever races
came into the English or Irish climate would
become like the English or Irish. Now the
modern theory of race is certainly a piece of
stupid materialism; it is an attempt to explain
the things we are sure of, France, Scotland,
Rome, Japan, by means of the things we are
not sure of at all, prehistoric conjectures,
Celts, Mongols, and Iberians. Of course
there is a reality in race; but there is no
reality in the theories of race offered by some
ethnological professors. Blood, perhaps, is
thicker than water; but brains are sometimes
thicker than anything. But if there is one
thing yet more thick and obscure and senseless
than this theory of the omnipotence of race
it is, I think, that to which Shaw has fled for
refuge from it; this doctrine of the omni-
potence of climate. Climate again is something;
but if climate were everything, Anglo-Indians
would grow more and more to look Hke
Hindoos, which is far from being the case.
Something in the evil spirit of our time forces
people always to pretend to have found some
material and mechanical explanation. Bernard
Shaw has filled all his last days with affirma-
tions about the divinity of the non-mechanical
part of man, the sacred quahty in creation and
1 60
The Dramatist
choice. Yet it never seems to have occurred
to him that the true key to national differentia-
tions is the key of the will and not of the
environment. It never crosses the modern
mind to fancy that perhaps a people is chiefly
influenced by how that people has chosen to
behave. If I have to choose between race
and weather I prefer race; I would rather be
imprisoned and compelled by ancestors who
were once alive than by mud and mists which
never were. But I do not propose to be
controlled by either; to me my national his-
tory is a chain of multitudinous choices. It is
neither blood nor rain that has made England,
but hope, the thing that all those dead men
have desired. France was not France because
she was made to be by the skulls of the Celts
or by the sun of Gaul. France was France
because she chose.
I have stepped on one side from the imme-
diate subject because this is as good an instance
as any we are likely to come across of a cer-
tain almost extraneous fault which does deface
the work of Bernard Shaw. It is a fault only
to be mentioned when we have made the
solidity of the merits quite clear. To say
that Shaw is merely making game of people is
demonstrably ridiculous; at least a fairly sys-
K i6i
George Bernard Shaw
tematic philosophy can be traced through all
his jokes, and one would not insist on such a
unity in all the songs of Mr. Dan Leno. I
have already pointed out that the genius of
Shaw is really too harsh and earnest rather
than too merry and irresponsible. I shall
have occasion to point out later that Shaw is,
in one very serious sense, the very opposite of
paradoxical. In any case if any real student
of Shaw says that Shaw is only making a fool
of him, we can only say that of that student it
is very superfluous for anyone to make a fool.
But though the dramatist's jests are always
serious and generally obvious, he is really
afi^ected from time to time by a certain spirit
of which that climate theory is a case — a spirit
that can only be called one of senseless in-
genuity. I suppose it is a sort of nemesis of
wit; the skidding of a wheel in the height of
its speed. Perhaps it is connected with the
nomadic nature of his mind. That lack of
roots, this remoteness from ancient instincts
and traditions is responsible for a -^ertain bleak
and heartless extravagance of statement on
certain subjects which makes the author really
unconvincing as well as exaggerative; satires
that are saugrenu, jokes that are rather silly
than wild, statements which even considered
162
The Dramatist
as lies have no symbolic relation to truth.
They are exaggerations of something that does
not exist. For instance, if a man called
Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse
for drunkenness and gluttony that would be
false, but it would have a fact hidden in it
somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says
that Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept
up by poulterers and wine merchants from
strictly business motives, then he says some-
thing which is not so much false as startlingly
and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say
that the two sexes were invented by jewellers
who wanted to sell wedding rings. Or again,
take the case of nationality and the unit of
patriotism. If a man said that all boundaries
betw^een clans, kingdoms, or empires were
nonsensical or non-existent, that would be a
fallacy, but a consistent and philosophical
fallacy. But when Mr. Bernard Shaw says
that England matters so little that the British
Empire might very well give up these islands
to Germany, he has not only got hold of the
sow by the wrong ear but the wrong sow by
the wrong ear; a mythical sow, a sow that is
not there at all. If Britain is unreal, the
British Empire must be a thousand times
more unreal. It is as if one said, "I do not
163
George Bernard Shaw
believe that Michael Scott ever had any exist-
ence; but I am convinced, in spite of the
absurd legend, that he had a shadow."
As has been said already, there must be
some truth in every popular impression.
And the impression that Shaw, the most
savagely serious man of his time, is a mere
music-hall artist must have reference to
such rare outbreaks as these. As a rule his
speeches are full, not only of substance, but of
substances, materials like pork, mahogany,
lead, and leather. There is no man whose
arguments cover a more Napoleonic map of
detail. It is true that he jokes; but wherever
he is he has topical jokes, one might almost
say family jokes. If he talks to tailors he can
allude to the last absurdity about buttons. If
he talks to the soldiers he can see the exquisite
and exact humour of the last gun-carriage.
But when all his powerful practicality Is
allowed, there does run through him this
erratic levity, an explosion of ineptitude. It
is a queer quality in literature. It is a sort of
cold extravagance; and it has made him all his
enemies.
164
The Philosopher
I SHOULD suppose that Ccesar and Cleo-
patra marks about the turning tide of
Bernard Shaw's fortune and fame. Up
to this time he had known glory, but
never success. He had been wondered at as
something brilliant and barren, like a meteor;
but no one would accept him as a sun, for the
test of a sun is that it can make something grow.
Practically speaking the two qualities of a
modern drama are, that it should play and that
it should pay. It had been proved over and
over again in weighty dramatic criticisms, in
careful readers' reports, that the plays of Shaw
could never play or pay; that the public did
not want wit and the wars of intellect. And
just about the time that this had been finally
proved, the plays of Bernard Shaw promised to
play like Charley s Aunt and to pay like Colman's
Mustard. It is a fact in which we can all re-
joice not only because it redeems the reputation
of Bernard Shaw, but because it redeems the
character of the English people. All that is
bravest in human nature, open challenge and
unexpected wit and angry conviction, are not
165
George Bernard Shaw
so very unpopular as the publishers and mana-
gers in their motor-cars have been in the habit of
telling us. But exactly because v^e have come to
a turning point in the man's career I propose to
interrupt the mere catalogue of his plays and
to treat his latest series rather as the proclama-
tions of an acknowledged prophet. For the
last plays, especially Man and Superman, are
such that his whole position must be re-stated
before attacking them seriously.
For two reasons I have called this concluding
series of plays not again by the name of "The
Dramatist," but by the general name of **The
Philosopher." The first reason is that given
above, that we have come to the time of his
triumph and may therefore treat him as having
gained complete possession of a pulpit of his
own. But there is a second reason: that it
was just about this time that he began to
create not only a pulpit of his own, but a
church and creed of his own. It is a very
vast and universal religion; and it is not his
fault that he is the only member of it. The
plainer way of putting it is this: that here,
in the hour of his earthly victory, there dies
in him the old mere denier, the mere dyna-
miter of criticism. In the warmth of popu-
larity he begins to wish to put his faith
1 66
The Philosopher
positively; to offer some solid key to all
creation. Perhaps the irony in the situation
is this: that all the crowds are acclaiming; him
as the blasting and hypercritical buffoon, while
he himself is seriously rallying his synthetic
power, and with a grave face telling himself
that it is time he had a faith to preach. His
final success as a sort of charlatan coincides
with his first grand failures as a theologian.
For this reason I have deliberately called
a halt in his dramatic career, in order to con-
sider these two essential points: What did
the mass of Englishmen, who had now learnt
to admire him, imagine his point of view to
be ^ and second, What did he imagine it to be ?
or, if the phrase be premature, WTiat did he
imagine it was going to be ^ In his latest
work, especially in Man and Superman, Shaw
has become a complete and colossal mystic.
That mysticism does grow quite rationally out
of his older arguments; but veiy^ few people
ever troubled to trace the connection. In
order to do so it is necessar}' to say what was,
at the time of his first success, the pubHc im-
pression of Shaw's philosophy.
Now it is an irritating and pathetic thing
that the three most popular phrases about
Shaw are false. Modern criticism, like all
167
George Bernard Shaw
weak things, Is overloaded with words. In a
healthy condition of language a man finds it
very difficult to say the right thing, but at last
says it. In this empire of journalese a man
finds it so very easy to say the wrong thing
that he never thinks of saying anything else.
False or meaningless phrases lie so ready to
his hand that It Is easier to use them than not
to use them. These wrong terms picked up
through Idleness are retained through habit,
and so the man has begun to think wrong
almost before he has begun to think at all.
Such lumbering logomachy is always injurious
and oppressive to men of spirit, imagination
or Intellectual honour, and It has dealt very
recklessly and wrongly with Bernard Shaw.
He has contrived to get about three news-
paper phrases tied to his tail; and those news-
paper phrases are all and separately wrong.
The three superstitions about him. It will be
conceded, are generally these: first that he
desires "problem plays," second that he is
"paradoxical," and third that in his dramas as
elsewhere he Is specially "a Socialist." And
the Interesting thing is that when we come to
his philosophy, all these three phrases are quite
peculiarly Inapplicable.
i68
The Philosopher
To take the plays first, there is a general
disposition to describe that type of intimate
or defiant drama which he approves as "the
problem play." Now the serious modern play
is, as a rule, the very reverse of a problem
play; for there can be no problem unless both
points of view are equally and urgently pre-
sented. Hamlet really is a problem play
because at the end of it one is really in doubt
as to whether upon the author's showing
Hamlet is something more than a man or
something less. Henry IV and Henry V are
really problem plays; in this sense, that the
reader or spectator is really doubtful whether
the high but harsh efficiency, valour, and
ambition of Henry V are an improvement
on his old blackguard camaraderie; and
w^hether he was not a better man when he was
a thief. This hearty and healthy doubt is
very common in Shakespeare; I mean a doubt
that exists in the writer as well as in the
reader. But Bernard Shaw is far too much of
a Puritan to tolerate such doubts about points
which he counts essential. There is no sort of
doubt that the young lady in Arms and the Man
is improved by losing her ideals. There is no
sort of doubt that Captain Brassbound is im-
proved by giving up the object of his life.
169
George Bernard Shaiv
But a better case can be found in something
that both dramatists have been concerned with;
Shaw wrote Ccesar and Cleopatra; Shakespeare
wrote Antony and Cleopatra and also 'Julius
Ccesar. And exactly what annoys Bernard
Shaw about Shakespeare's version i.s this:
that Shakespeare has an open mind or, in
other w^ords, that Shakespeare has really writ-
ten a problem play. Shakespeare sees quite as
clearly as Shaw that Brutus is unpractical and
ineffectual; but he also sees, what is quite as
plain and practical a fact, that these ineffectual
men do capture the hearts and influence the
policies of mankind. Shaw would have noth-
ing said in favour of Brutus; because Brutus
is on the wrong side in politics. Of the
actual problem of public and private morality,
as it was presented to Brutus, he takes actually
no notice at all. He can write the most ener-
getic and outspoken of propaganda plays; but
he cannot rise to a problem play. He cannot
really divide his mind and let the two parts
speak independently to each other. He has
never, so to speak, actually spHt his head in
two; though I daresay there are many other
people who are willing to do it for him.
Sometimes, especially in his later plays, he
allows his clear conviction to spoil even his
170
The Philosopher
admirable dialogue, making one side entirely
weak, as in an Evangelical tract. I do not
know whether in Major Barbara the young
Greek professor was supposed to be a fool.
As popular tradition (which I trust more
than anything else) declared that he is drawn
from a real Professor of my acquaintance,
who is anything but a fool, I should imagine
not. But in that case I am all the more
mystified by the incredibly weak fight which
he makes in the play in answer to the
elephantine sophistries of Undershaft. It is
really a disgraceful case, and almost the only
case in Shaw of there being no fair fight
between the two sides. For instance, the
Professor mentions pity. Mr. Undershaft
says with melodramatic scorn, "Pity! the
scavenger of the Universe!" Now if any
gentleman had said this to me, I should have
replied, "If I permit you to escape from the
point by means of metaphors, will you tell
me whether you disapprove of scavengers ?"
Instead of this obvious retort, the miserable
Greek professor only says, "Well then, love,"
to which Undershaft replies with unnecessary
violence that he won't have the Greek pro-
fessor's love, to which the obvious answer of
course would be, " How the deuce can you
171
George Bernard Shaw
prevent my loving you if I choose to do so?"
Instead of this, as far as I remember, that
abject Hellenist says nothing at all. I only
mention this unfair dialogue, because it marks,
I think, the recent hardening, for good or
evil, of Shaw out of a dramatist into a mere
philosopher, and v^hoever hardens into a phi-
losopher may be hardening into a fanatic.
And just as there is nothing really prob-
lematic in Shaw's mind, so there is nothing
really paradoxical. The meaning of the word
paradoxical may indeed be made the subject
of argument. In Greek, of course, it sim-
ply means something which is against the
received opinion; in that sense a missionary
remonstrating with South Sea cannibals is
paradoxical. But in the much more im-
portant world, where words are used and
altered in the using, paradox does not mean
merely this: it means at least something of
which the antinomy or apparent inconsistency
is sufficiently plain in the words used, and
most commonly of all it means an idea ex-
pressed in a form which is verbally contradic-
tory. Thus, for instance, the great saying,
"He that shall lose his life, the same shall
save it," is an example of what modern people
mean by a paradox. If any learned person
172
The Philosopher
should read this book (which seems im-
measurably improbable) he can content him-
self with putting it this way, that the moderns
mistakenly say paradox when they should say
oxymoron. Ultimately, in any case, it may
be agreed that we commonly mean by a
paradox some kind of collision between what
is seemingly and what is really true.
Now if by paradox we mean truth inherent
in a contradiction, as in the saying of Christ
that I have quoted, it is a very curious fact
that Bernard Shaw is almost entirely without
paradox. Moreover, he cannot even under-
stand a paradox. And more than this, paradox
is about the only thing in the world that he
does not understand. All his splendid vistas
and startling suggestions arise from carrymg
some one clear principle further than it has
yet been carried. His madness is all con-
sistency, not inconsistency. As the point can
hardly be made clear without examples, let us
take one example, the subject of education.
Shaw has been all his life preaching to grown-
up people the profound truth that liberty and
responsibility go together; that the reason
why freedom is so often easily withheld, is
simply that it is a terrible nuisance. This is
true, though not the whole truth, of citizens;
V3
George Bernard Shaw
and so when Shaw comes to children he can
only apply to them the same principle that he
has already applied to citizens. He begins to
play with the Herbert Spencer idea of teaching
children by experience; perhaps the most
fatuously silly idea that was ever gravely put
down in print. On that there is no need to
dwell; one has only to ask how the experi-
mental method is to be appHed to a precipice;
and the theory no longer exists. But Shaw
effected a further development, if possible
more fantastic. He said that one should never
tell a child anything without letting him hear
the opposite opinion. That is to say, when
you tell Tommy not to hit his sick sister on
the temple, you must make sure of the
presence of some Nietzscheite professor, who
will explain to him that such a course might
possibly serve to eliminate the unfit. When
you are in the act of telling Susan not to
drink out of the bottle labelled "poison,"
you must telegraph for a Christian Scientist,
who will be ready to maintain that without
her own consent it cannot do her any harm.
What would happen to a child brought up on
Shaw's principle I cannot conceive; I should
think he would commit suicide in his bath.
But that is not here the question. The point
174
The Philosopher
\
is that this proposition seems quite sufficiently
wild and startling to ensure that its author, if
he escapes Hanwell, would reach the front rank
of journalists, demagogues, or public enter-
tainers. It is a perfect paradox, if a paradox
only means something that makes one jump.
But it is not a paradox at all in the sense of /
a contradiction. It is not a contradiction, but ^
an enormous and outrageous consistency, the
one principle of free thought carried to a
point to which no other sane man would con-
sent to carry it. Exactly what Shaw does not
understand is the paradox; the unavoidable
paradox of childhood. Although this child
is much better than I, yet I must teach it.
Although this being has much purer passions
than I, yet I must control it. Although
Tommy is quite right to rush towards a
precipice, yet he must be stood in the corner
for doing it. This contradiction is the only
possible condition of having to do with chil-
dren at all; anyone w^ho talks about a child
without feeling this paradox might just as
well be talking about a merman. He has
never even seen the animal. But this paradox
Shaw in his intellectual simplicity cannot see;
he cannot see it because it is a paradox. His
only intellectual excitement is to carry one
175
George Bernard Shaw
idea further and further across the world. It
never occurs to him that it might meet another
idea, and Hke the three winds in Martin
Chuzzlewify they might make a night of it.
His only paradox is to pull out one thread or
cord of truth longer and longer into waste
and fantastic places. He does not allow for
/ that deeper sort of paradox by which two
I opposite cords of truth become entangled in
an inextricable knot. Still less can he be
\ made to realise that it is often this knot which
'ties safely together the whole bundle of human
life.
This blindness to paradox everywhere per-
plexes his outlook. He cannot understand
marriage because he will not understand the
paradox of marriage; that the woman is all
the more the house for not being the head of
it. He cannot understand patriotism, because
he will not understand the paradox of patriot-
ism; that one is all the more human for not
merely loving humanity. He does not under-
stand Christianity because he will not under-
stand the paradox of Christianity; that we can
f only really understand all myths when we
I know that one of them is true. I do not
under-rate him for this anti-paradoxical temper;
I concede that much of his finest and keenest
176
The Philosopher
work in the way of intellectual purification
would have been difficult or impossible without
it. But I say that here lies the Hmitation of that
lucid and compelling mind; he cannot quite
understand life, because he will not accept its
contradictions.
Nor is it by any means descriptive of Shaw
to call him a Socialist; in so far as that word
can be extended to cover an ethical attitude.
He is the least social of all Socialists; and I
pity the Socialist state that tries to manage
him. This anarchism of his is not a question
of thinking for himself; every decent man
thinks for himself; it would be highly im-
modest to think for anybody else. Nor is it
any instinctive licence or egoism; as I have
said before, he is a man of peculiarly acute
public conscience. The unmanageable part of
him, the fact that he cannot be conceived as
part of a crowd or as really and invisibly help-
ing a movement, has reference to another
thing in him, or rather to another thing not
in him.
The great defect of that fine intelligence is
a failure to grasp and enjoy the things com-
monly called convention and tradition; which
are foods upon which all human creatures
must feed frequently if they are to live.
L 177
George Bernard Shaw
Very few modern people of course have any
idea of what they are. "Convention" is
very nearly the same word as "democracy."
It has again and again in history been used
as an alternative word to Parliament. So far
from suggesting anything stale or sober, the
word convention rather conveys a hubbub;
it is the coming together of men; every mob
is a convention. In its secondary sense it
means the common soul of such a crowd, its
instinctive anger at the traitor or its instinc-
tive salutation of the flag. Conventions may
be cruel, they may be unsuitable, they may
even be grossly superstitious or obscene; but
there is one thing that they never are. Con-
ventions are never dead. They are always
full of accumulated emotions, the piled-up
and passionate experiences of many genera-
tions asserting what they could not explain.
To be inside any true convention, as the
Chinese respect for parents or the European
respect for children, is to be surrounded by
something which whatever else it is is not
leaden, lifeless or automatic, something which
is taut and tingling with vitality at a hundred
points, which is sensitive almost to madness
and which is so much alive that it can kill.
Now Bernard Shaw has always made this one
178
The Philosopher
immense mistake (arising out of that bad
progressive education of his), the mistake
of treating convention as a dead thing; treat-
ing it as if it were a mere physical environ-
ment like the pavement or the rain. Where-
as it is a result of will; a rain of blessings
and a pavement of good intentions. Let it
be remembered that I am not discussing in
what degree one should allow for tradition;
I am saying that men like Shaw do not allow
for it at all. If Shaw had found in early life
that he was contradicted by Bradshaw^s Rail-
way Guide or even by the Encyclopcedia Brit-
annic a, he would have felt at least that he
might be wrong. But if he had found him-
self contradicted by his father and mother, he
would have thought it all the more probable
that he was right. If the Issue of the last
evening paper contradicted him he might be
troubled to investigate or explain. That the
human tradition of two thousand years con-
tradicted him did not trouble him for an
instant. That Marx was not with him was
important. That Man was not with him was
an Irrelevant prehistoric joke. People have
talked far too much about the paradoxes of
Bernard Shaw. Perhaps his only pure para-
dox is this almost unconscious one; that he
179
George Bernard Shaw
has tended to think that because something
has satisfied generations of men it must be
untrue.
Shaw is wrong about nearly all the things
one learns early in life and while one is still
simple. Most human beings start with certain
facts of psychology to which the rest of life
must be somewhat related. For instance,
every man falls in love; and no man falls into
free love. When he falls into that he calls it
lust, and is always ashamed of it even when he
boasts of it. That there is some connection
between a love and a vow nearly every human
being knows before he is eighteen. That
there is a solid and instinctive connection
between the idea of sexual ecstasy and the
idea of some sort of almost suicidal con-
stancy, this I say is simply the first fact in
one's own psychology; boys and girls know
it almost before they know their own language.
How far it can be trusted, how it can best be
dealt with, all that is another matter. But
lovers lust after constancy more than after
happiness; if you are in any sense pre-
pared to give them what they ask, then what
they ask, beyond all question, is an oath of
final fidelity. Lovers may be lunatics; lovers
may be children; lovers may be unfit for
i8o
The Philosopher
citizenship and outside human argument;
you can take up that position If you will.
But lovers do not only desire love; they
desire marriage. The root of legal monogamy
does not He (as Shaw and his friends are for
ever drearily asserting) in the fact that the
man Is a mere tyrant and the woman a mere
slave. It lies in the fact that // their love
for each other Is the noblest and freest love
conceivable, It can only find Its heroic ex-
pression In both becoming slaves. I only
mention this matter here as a matter which
most of us do not need to be taught; for
It was the first lesson of life. In after years
we may make up what code or compromise
about sex we like; but we all know that con-
stancy, jealousy, and the personal pledge are
natural and Inevitable In sex; we do not feel
any surprise when we see them either In a
murder or In a valentine. We may or may not
see wisdom in early marriages; but we know
quite well that wherever the thing is genuine
at all, early loves will mean early marriages.
But Shaw had not learnt about this tragedy
of the sexes, what the rustic ballads of any
country on earth would have taught him.
He had not learnt, what universal common
sense has put Into all the folk-lore of the
i8i
George Bernard Shaw
earth, that love cannot be thought of clearly
for an instant except as monogamous. The
old English ballads never sing the praises of
"lovers." They always sing the praises of
"true lovers/' and that is the final philosophy
of the question.
The same is true of Mr. Shaw's refusal to
understand the love of the land either in the
form of patriotism or of private ownership.
It is the attitude of an Irishman cut off from
the soil of Ireland, retaining the audacity and
even cynicism of the national type, but no
longer fed from the roots with its pathos or
its experience.
This broader and more brotherly rendering
of convention must be applied particularly to
the conventions of the drama; since that is
necessarily the most democratic of all the arts.
And it will be found generally that most of
the theatrical conventions rest on a real artistic
basis. The Greek Unities, for instance, were
not proper objects of the meticulous and
trivial imitation of Seneca or Gabriel Harvey.
But still less were they the right objects for
the equally trivial and far more vulgar im-
patience of men like Macaulay. That a tale
should, if possible, be told of one place or one
day or a manageable number of characters is an
182
The Philosopher
ideal plainly rooted in an aesthetic instinct.
But if this be so with the classical drama, it is
yet more certainly so with romantic drama,
against the somewhat decayed dignity of which
Bernard Shaw was largely in rebellion. There
was one point in particular upon which the
Ibsenites claimed to have reformed the
romantic convention which is worthy of special
allusion.
Shaw and all the other Ibsenites were fond
of insisting that a defect in the romantic
drama was its tendency to end with wedding-
bells. Against this they set the modern
drama of middle-age, the drama which de-
scribed marriage itself instead of its poetic
preliminaries. Now if Bernard Shaw had
been more patient with popular tradition,
more prone to think that there might be
some sense in its survival, he might have
seen this particular problem much more
clearly. The old playwrights have left us
plenty of plays of marriage and middle-age.
Othello is as much about what follows the
wedding-bells as The DolFs House. Macbeth
is about a middle-aged couple as much as
Little Eyolf. But if we ask ourselves what
is the real difference, we shall, I think, find
that it can fairly be stated thus. The old
183
George Bernard Shaw
tragedies of marriage, though not love stories,
are like love stories in this, that they work
up to some act or stroke which is irrevocable
as marriage is irrevocable; to the fact of death
or of adultery.
Now the reason why our fathers did not
make marriage, in the middle-aged and static
sense, the subject of their plays was a very
simple one; it was that a play is a very bad
place for discussing that topic. You cannot
easily make a good drama out of the success
or failure of a marriage, just as you could not
make a good drama out of the growth of an
oak tree or the decay of an empire. As
Polonius very reasonably observed, it is too
long. A happy love-affair will make a drama
simply because it is dramatic; it depends on
an ultimate yes or no. But a happy marriage
is not dramatic; perhaps it would be less
happy if it were. The essence of a rom.antic
heroine is that she asks herself an intense
question; but the essence of a sensible wife
is that she is much too sensible to ask herself
any questions at all. All the things that make
monogamy a success are in their nature un-
dramatic things, the silent growth of an
instinctive confidence, the common wounds
and victories, the accumulation of customs,
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The Philosopher
the rich maturing of old jokes. Sane mar-
riage is an untheatrical thing; it is therefore
not surprising that most modern dramatists
have devoted themselves to insane marriage.
To summarise; before touching the philo-
sophy which Shaw has ultimately adopted, we
must quit the notion that we know it already
and that it is hit off in such journalistic terms
as these three. Shaw does not wish to multiply
problem plays or even problems. He has such
scepticism as is the misfortune of his age; but
he has this dignified and courageous quality,
that he does not come to ask questions but to
answer them. He is not a paradox-monger;
he is a wild logician, far too simple even to be
called a sophist. He understands everything
in life except its paradoxes, especially that ulti-
mate paradox that the very things that we can-
not comprehend are the things that we have to
take for granted. Lastly, he is not especially
social or collectivist. On the contrary, he rather
dislikes men in the mass, though he can appre-
ciate them individually. He has no respect
for collective humanity in its two great forms;
either in that momentary form which we call
a mob, or in that enduring form which we call
a convention.
.85
George Bernard Shaw
The general cosmic theory which can so far
be traced through the earlier essays and plays
of Bernard Shaw may be expressed in the
image of Schopenhauer standing on his head.
I cheerfully concede that Schopenhauer looks
much nicer in that posture than in his original
one, but I can hardly suppose that he feels
more comfortable. The substance of the change
is this. Roughly speaking, Schopenhauer main-
tained that life is unreasonable. The intellect,
if it could be impartial, would tell us to cease;
but a blind partiality, an instinct quite dis-
tinct from thought, drives us on to take
desperate chances in an essentially bankrupt
lottery. Shaw seems to accept this dingy
estimate of the rational outlook, but adds a
somewhat arresting comment. Schopenhauer
had said, "Life is unreasonable; so much the
worse for all living things." Shaw said, '*Life
is u^iireasonable; so much the worse for reason."
Life is the higher ^all, life we must follow. It
may be that there is some undetected fallacy in
reason itself. Perhaps the whole man cannot
get inside his own head any more than he can
jump down his own throat. But there is about
the need to live, to suffer, an^to create that
imperative quality which can truly be called
supernatural, of whose voice it can indeed be
i86
The Philosopher
said that it speaks with authority, and not as
the scribes.
This is the first and finest item of the original
Bernard Shaw creed: that if reason says that
life is irrational, life must be content to reply
that reason is lifeless; lifers the primary
thing, and if reason impedes it, then reason
must be trodden down into the mire amid the
most abject superstitions. In the ordinary
sense it would be specially absurd to suggest
that Shaw desires man to be a mere animal.
For that is always associated with lust or in-
continence; and Shaw's ideals are strict,
hygienic, and even, one might say, old-maidish.
But there is a mystical sense in which one
may say literally that Shaw desires man to
be an animal. That is, he desires him to
cling first__and_last to life, to the spirit of
animation, to the thing which is common to
him* and the biTds and plants. Man should
have ^the~Hlmd faith of a beast: he should be
as mystically immutable as a cow, and as deaf
to sophistries as a fish. Shaw does not wish
him to be a philosopher or an artist; he does
not even wish him to be a man, so much as
he wishes him to be, in this holy sense, an
animal. He must follow the flag of life as
187
George Bernard Shaw
fiercely from conviction as all other creatures
follow it from instinct.
But this Shavian v^orship of life is by no
means lively. It has nothing in common either
v^ith the braver or the baser forms of w^hat v^e
commonly call optimism. It has none of the
omnivorous exultation of Walt Whitman or
the fiery pantheism of Shelley. Bernard Shaw^
v^ishes to show^ himself not so much as an
optimist, but rather as a sort of faithful and
contented pessimist. This contradiction is the
key to nearly all his early and more obvious
contradictions and to many v^hich remain to the
end. Whitman and many modern idealists
have talked of taking even duty as a pleasure;
it seems to me that Shaw takes even pleasure
as a duty. In a queer way he seems to see
existence as an illusion and yet as an obligation.
To every man and woman, bird, beast, and
flower, life is a love-call to be eagerly followed.
To Bernard Shaw it is merely a military
bugle to be obeyed. In short, he fails to feel
that the command of Nature (if one must use
the anthropomorphic fable of Nature instead of
the philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as
well as obeyed. He paints life at its darkest
and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap
in the dark. That is heroic; and to my
The Philosopher
instinct at least Schopenhauer looks like a
pigmy beside his pupil. But it is the hero-
ism of a morbid and almost asphyxiated age.
It is awful to think that this world which so
many poets have praised has even for a time
been depicted as a man-trap into which we
may just have the manhood to jump. Think
of all those ages through which men have
talked of having the courage to die. And
then remember that we have actually fallen
to talking about having the courage to
live.
It is exactly this oddity or dilemma which
may be said to culminate in the crowning work
of his later and more constructive period, the
work in which he certainly attempted, whether
with success or not, to state his ultimate and
cosmic vision; I mean the play called Man
and Superman. In approaching this play we
must keep well in mind the distinction recently
drawn: that Shaw follows the banner of life,
but austerely, not joyously. For him nature
has authority, but hardly charm. But before
we approach it it is necessary to deal with three
things that lead up to it. First it is necessary
to speak of what remained of his old critical
and realistic method; and then it is necessary
to speak of the tw^o important influences which
189
George Bernard Shaw
led up to his last and most important change of
outlook.
First, since all our spiritual epochs overlap,
and a man is often doing the old work while
he is thinking of the new, we may deal first
with what may be fairly called his last two
plays of pure worldly criticism. These are
Major Barbara and John BulFs Other Island.
Major Barbara indeed contains a strong
religious element; but, when all is said, the
whole point of the play is that the religious
element is defeated. Moreover, the actual
expressions of religion in the play are some-
what unsatisfactory as expressions of religion —
or even of reason. I must frankly say that
Bernard Shaw always seems to me to use the
word God not only without any idea of what
it means, but without one moment's thought
about what it could possibly mean. He said
to some atheist, "Never believe in a God that
you cannot improve on." The atheist (being
a sound theologian) naturally replied that one
should not believe in a God whom one could
improve on; as that would show that he was
not God. In the same style in Major Bar-
bara the heroine ends by suggesting that she
will serve God without personal hope, so that
she may owe nothing to God and He owe
190
The Philosopher
everything to her. It does not seem to strike
her that if God owes everything to her He is
not God. These things afFect me merely as
tedious perversions of a phrase. It is as if you
said, ''I will never have a father unless I have
begotten him."
But the real sting and substance of Major
Barbara is much more practical and to the
point. It expresses not the new spirituality
but the old materialism of Bernard Shaw.
Almost every one of Shaw's plays is an ex-
panded epigram. But the epigram is not
expanded (as with most people) into a hundred
commonplaces. Rather the epigram is ex-
panded into a hundred other epigrams; the
work is at least as brilliant in detail as it is in
design. But it is generally possible to discover
the original and pivotal epigram which is the
centre and purpose of the play. It is generally
possible, even amid that blinding jewellery of
a million jokes, to discover the grave, solemn
and sacred joke for which the play itself was
written.
The ultimate epigram of Major Barbara
can be put thus. People say that poverty is ^
no crime; Shaws says that poverty is a crime; '
that it is a crime to endure it, a crime to be
content with it, that it is the mother of all
191
George Bernard Shaw
crimes of brutality, corruption, and fear. If
a man says to Shaw that he is born of poor
'but honest parents, Shaw tells him that the
very word *'but" shows that his parents were
probably "dtshohest. In short, he maintains
I here what he had maintained elsewhere: that
; what the people at this moment require Is not
I more patriotism or more art or more religion
or more morality or more sociology, but simply
more money. The evil is not ignorance or
decadence or sin or pessimism; the evil is
poverty. The point of this particular drama
is that even the noblest enthusiasm of the girl
who becomes a Salvation Army officer f^ils
under the brute money power of her father
who is a modern capitalist. When I have said
this it will be clear why this play, fine and full
of bitter sincerity as it is, must in a manner
be cleared out of the way before we come to
talk of Shaw's final and serious faith. For
his serious faith is iji_the sanctity of human
willj^nthe^ divine capacity for creation and
choice rising higher than environment and
doom; and so far as that goes. Major Bar-
bara is not only apart from his faith but
against his faith. Major Barbara is an ac-
count of environment victorious over heroic
will. There are a thousand answers to the
192
The Philosopher
ethic in Major Barbara which I should be
inclined to offer. I might point out that the
rich do not so much buy honesty as curtains to
cover dishonesty: that they do not so much buy
health as cushions to comfort disease. And I
might suggest that the doctrine that poverty
degrades the poor is much more likely to be
used as an argument for keeping them power-
less than as an argument for making them
rich. But there is no need to find such
answers ^to. the materialistic pessimism of
Major Barbara. The best answer to it
is in Shaw's own best and crq\vning philo-
sophy, with which we shall shortly be con-
cerned.
^ohn BulFs Other Island represents a realism
somewhat more tinged with the later trans-
cendentalism of its author. In one sense, of
course, it is a satire on the conventional
Englishman, who is never so silly or senti-
mental as when he sees silliness and sentiment
in the Irishman. Broadbent, whose mind is
all fog and his morals all gush, is firmly per-
suaded that he is bringing reason and order
among the Irish, whereas in truth they are all
smiling at his illusions with the critical de-
tachment of so many devils. There have been
many plays depicting the absurd Paddy in a
M 193
George Bernard Shaw
ring of Anglo-Saxons; the first purpose of
this play is to depict the absurd Anglo-Saxon
in a rino; of ironical Paddies. But it has a
second and more subtle purpose, which is
very finely contrived. It is suggested that
when all is said and done there is in this pre-
posterous Englishman a certain creative power
which comes from his simplicity and optimism,
from his profound resolution rather to live
life than to criticise it. I know no finer dia-
logue of philosophical cross-purposes than that
in which Broadbent boasts of his common-
sense, and his subtler Irish friend mystifies
him by telling him that he, Broadbent, has
no common-sense, but only inspiration. The
Irishman admits in Broadbent a certain un-
conscious spiritual force even in his very
stupidity. Lord Rosebery coined the very
clever phrase *'a practical mystic." Shaw is
here maintaining that all practical men are
, practical mystics. And he is really main-
taining also that the most practical of all the
practical mystics is the one who is a fool.
There is something unexpected and fascinat-
ing about this reversal of the usual argument
touching enterprise and the business man;
this theory that success is created not by in-
telligence, but by a certain half-witted and yet
194
The Philosopher
magical instinct. For Bernard Shaw, appar-
ently, the forests of factories and the moun-
tains of money are not the creations of human
wisdom or even of human cunning; they are
rather manifestations of the sacred maxim
which declares that God has chosen the foolish
things of the earth to confound the wise. It
is simplicity and even innocence that has made
Manchester. As a philosophical fancy this is
interesting or even suggestive; but it must be
confessed that as a criticism of the relations
of England to Ireland it is open to a strong
historical objection. The one weak point in
John Bull's Other Island is that it turns on
the fact that Broadbent succeeds in Ireland.
But as a matter of fact Broadbent has not
succeeded in Ireland. If getting what one
wants is the test and fruit of this mysterious
strength, then the Irish peasants are certainly
much stronger than the English merchants;
for in spite of all the efforts of the merchants,
the land has remained a land of peasants. No
glorification of the English practicality as if it
were a universal thing can ever get over the
fact that we have failed in dealing with the
one white people in our power who were
markedly unlike ourselves. And the kindness
of Broadbent has failed just as much as his
195
George Bernard Shaw
common-sense; because he was dealing with a
people whose desire and ideal were different
from his own. He did not share the Irish
passion for small possession in land or for the
more pathetic virtues of Christianity. In fact
the kindness of Broadbent has failed for the
same reason that the gigantic kindness of
Shaw has failed. The roots are different; it
is like tying the tops of two trees together.
Briefly, the philosophy of John BulFs Other
Island is quite effective and satisfactory
except for this incurable fault: the fact that
John Bull's other island is not John Bull's.
This clearing off of his last critical plays
we may classify as the first of the three facts
which lead up to Man and Superman. The
second of the three facts may be found, I
think, in Shaw's discovery of Nietzsche. This
eloquent sophist has an influence upon Shaw
and his school which it would require a separate
book adequately to study. By descent Nietzsche
was a Pole, and probably a Polish noble; and
to say that he was a Polish noble is to say that
he was a frail, fastidious, and entirely useless
anarchist. He had a wonderful poetic wit;
and is one of the best rhetoricians of the
modern world. He had a remarkable power
of saying things that master the reason for a
196
The Philosopher
moment by their gigantic unreasonableness;
as, for Instance, "Your life Is Intolerable with-
out Immortality; but why should not your
life be Intolerable?" His whole work Is shot
through with the pangs and fevers of his
physical life, which was one of extreme bad
health; and In early middle age his brilliant
brain broke down Into Impotence and dark-
ness. All that was true In his teaching was
this: that If a man looks fine on a horse It Is
so far Irrelevant to tell him that he would be
more economical on a donkey or more humane
on a tricycle. In other words, the mere achieve-
ment of dignity, beauty, or triumph Is strictly
to be called a good thing. I do not know if
Nietzsche ever used the Illustration; but It
seems to me that all that is creditable or sound in
Nietzsche could be stated In the derivation of
one word, the word "valour." Valour means
valeur; It means a value; courage Is itself a
solid good; It Is an ultimate virtue; valour
is In itself valid. In so far as he maintained
this Nietzsche was only taking part in that
great Protestant game of see-saw which has
been the amusement of northern Europe since
the sixteenth century. Nietzsche Imagined he
was rebelling against ancient morality; as a
matter of fact he was only rebelling against
197
George Bernard Shaw
recent morality, against the half-baked impu-
dence of the utilitarians and the materialists.
He thought he was rebelling against Chris-
tianity; curiously enough he was rebelling
solely against the special enemies of Chris-
tianity, against Herbert Spencer and Mr.
Edward Clodd. Historic Christianity has
always believed in the valour of St. Michael
riding in front of the Church Militant; and in
an ultimate and absolute pleasure, not indirect
or utilitarian, the intoxication of the spirit, the
wine of the blood of God.
There are indeed doctrines of Nietzsche that
are not Christian, but then, by an entertaining
coincidence, they are also not true. His
hatred of pity is not Christian, but that was
not his doctrine but his disease. Invalids are
often hard on invalids. And there is another
doctrine of his that is not Christianity, and
also (by the same laughable accident) not
common-sense; and it is a most pathetic cir-
cumstance that this was the one doctrine
which caught the eye of Shaw and captured
him. He was not influenced at all by the
morbid attack on mercy. It would require
more than ten thousand mad Polish pro-
fessors to make Bernard Shaw anything but
a generous and compassionate man. But it is
198
The Philosopher
certainly a nuisance that the one Nietzsche
doctrine which attracted him was not the one
Nietzsche doctrine that Is human and rectify-
ing. Nietzsche might really have done some
good if he had taught Bernard Shaw to draw
the sword, to drink wine, or even to dance.
But he only succeeded in putting into his
head a new superstition, which bids fair to
be the chief superstition of the dark ages
which are possibly in front of us — I mean
the superstition of what is called the Super-
man.
In one of his least convincing phrases,
Nietzsche had said that just as the ape ulti-
mately produced the man, so should we ulti-
mately produce something higher than the
man. The Immediate answer, of course, is
sufficiently obvious: the ape did not worry
about the man, so why should we worry about
the Superman ? If the Superman will come
by natural selection, may we leave It to natural
selection ? If the Superman will come by
human selection, what sort of Superman are
wx to select .^ If he is simply to be more
just, more brave, or more merciful, then
Zarathustra sinks into a Sunday-school
teacher; the only way we can work for It is
to be more just, more brave, and more merci-
199
George Bernard Shaw
ful; sensible advice, but hardly startling. If
he is to be anything else than this, why should
we desire him, or what else are we to desire ?
These questions have been many times asked
of the Nietzscheites, and none of the Nietz-
scheites have even attempted to answer them.
The keen intellect of Bernard Shaw would,
I think, certainly have seen through this fal-
lacy and verbiage had it not been that another
important event about this time came to the
help of Nietzsche and established the Super-
man on his pedestal. It is the third of the
things which I have called stepping-stones to
Man and Superman^ and it is very im-
portant. It is nothing less than the break-
down of one of the three intellectual supports
upon which Bernard Shaw had reposed through
all his confident career. At the beginning of
this book I have described the three ultimate
supports of Shaw as the Irishman, the Puritan,
and the Progressive. They are the three legs
of the tripod upon which the prophet sat to
give the oracle; and one of them broke. Just
about this time suddenly, by a mere shaft of
illumination, Bernard Shaw ceased to believe
in progress altogether.
It is generally implied that it was reading
Plato that did it. That philosopher was very
200
TJie Philosopher
well qualified to convey the first shock of the
ancient civilisation to Shaw, who had always
thought instinctively of civilisation as modern.
This is not due merely to the daring splendour
of the speculations and the vivid picture of
Athenian life, it is due also to something
analogous in the personalities of that par-
ticular ancient Greek and this particular
modern Irishman. Bernard Shaw has much
affinity to Plato — in his instinctive elevation of
temper, his courageous pursuit of ideas as far
as they will go, his civic idealism; and also, it
must be confessed, in his dislike of poets and
a touch of delicate inhumanity. But whatever
influence produced the change, the change had
all the dramatic^suddenness and completeness^'j^
which belongs to the conversions of great
men. It had been perpetually implied through
all the earlier works not only that mankind is
constantly improving, but that almost every-
thing must be considered in the light of this
fact. More than once he seemed to argue, in
comparing the dramatists of the sixteenth
with those of the nineteenth century, that
the latter had a definite advantage merely
because they were of the nineteenth century
and not of the sixteenth. When accused of
impertinence towards the greatest of the
201
George Bernard Shaw
Elizabethans, Bernard Shaw had said,
** Shakespeare is a much taller man than I,
but I stand on his shoulders" — an epigram
which sums up this doctrine with character-
istic neatness. But Shaw fell off Shakespeare's
shoulders with a crash. This chronological
theory that Shaw stood on Shakespeare's
shoulders logically involved the supposition
that Shakespeare stood on Plato's shoulders.
And Bernard Shaw found Plato from his point
of view so much more advanced than Shake-
speare that he decided in desperation that all
three were equal.
Such failure as has partially attended the
idea of human equality is very largely due to
the fact that no party in the modern state has
heartily believed in it. Tories and Radicals
have both assumed that one set of men were in
essentials superior to mankind. The only
difference was that the Tory superiority was
a superiority of place; while the Radical
superiority is a superiority of time. The
great objection to Shaw being on Shakespeare's
shoulders is a consideration for the sensations
and personal dignity of Shakespeare. It is a
democratic objection to anyone being on any-
one else's shoulders. Eternal human nature
refuses to submit to a man who rules merely
202
The Philosopher
by right of birth. To rule by right of century
is to rule by right of birth. Shaw found his
nearest kinsman in remote Athens, his remotest
enemies in the closest historical proximity;
and.Jhe began to see the enormous average and
the vast level of mankindx. If progress swung
constantly between such extremes it could not
be progress at all. The paradox was sharp
but undeniable; if life had such continual ups
and downs, it was upon the whole flat. With
characteristic sincerity and love of sensation he
had no sooner seen this than he hastened to
declare it. In the teeth of all his previous
pronouncements he emphasised and re-em-
phasised in print that man had not progressed
at all; that ninety-nine hundredths of a man
in a cave were the same as ninety-nine
hundredths of a man in a suburban villa.
It is characteristic of him to say that he
rushed into print with a frank confession of
the failure of his old theory. But it is also
characteristic of him that he rushed into print
also with a new alternative theory, quite as
definite, quite as confident, and, if one may
put it so, quite as infallible as the old one.
Progress had never happened hitherto, because
it had been sought solely through education.
Education was rubbish. "Fancy," said he,
203
George Bernard Shaw
"trying to produce a greyhound or a race-
horse by education!'* The man of the future
must not be taught; he must be bred. This
notion of producing superior human beings by
the methods of the stud-farm had often been
urged though its difficulties had never been
cleared up. I mean its practical difficulties;
its moral difficulties, or rather impossibilities,
for any animal fit to be called a man need
scarcely be discussed. But even as a scheme
it had never been made clear. The first and
most obvious objection to it of course is this:
that if you are to breed men as pigs, you
require some overseer who is as much more
subtle than a man as a man is more subtle
than a pig. Such an individual is not easy to
find.
< It was, however, in the heat of these three
things, the decline of his merely destructive
realism, the discovery of Nietzsche, and the
abandonment of the idea of a progressive
education of mankind, that he attempted what
is not necessarily his best, but certainly his
most important work. The two things are
by no means necessarily the same. The most
important work of Milton is Paradise Lost;
his best work is Lycidas, There are other
places in which Shaw's argument is more
204
The Philosopher
fascinating or his wit more startling than in
Man and Superman; there are other plays
that he has made more brilliant. But I am
sure that there is no other play that he wished
to make more brilliant. I will not say that he
is in this case more serious than elsewhere;
for the word serious is a double-meaning and
double-dealing word, a traitor in the diction-
ary. It sometimes means solemn, and it some-
times means sincere. A ver}^ short experience
of private and public Kfe will be enough to
prove that the most solemn people are generally
the most insincere. A somewhat more delicate
and detailed consideration will show also that
the most sincere men are generally not solemn;
and of these is Bernard Shaw. But if we use
the word serious in the old and Latin sense
of the word "grave," which means weighty or
valid, full of substance, then we may say
without any hesitation that this is the most
serious play of the most serious man alive.
The outline of the play is, I suppose, by this
time sufficiently well known. It has two main
philosophic motives. The first is that what he
calls the life-force (the old infidels called it
Nature, which seem's a neater word, and nobody
knows the meaning of either of them) desires
above all things to make suitable marriages,
205
George Bernard Shaw
to produce a purer and prouder race, or even-
tually to produce a Superman. The second is
that in this effecting of racial marriages the
woman is a more conscious agent than the
man. In short, that woman disposes a long
time before man proposes. In this play, there-
fore, woman is made the pursuer and man the
pursued. It cannot be denied, I think, that
in this matter Shaw is handicapped by his
habitual hardness of touch, by his lack of
sympathy with the romance of which he writes,
and to a certain extent even by his own
integrity and right conscience. Whether the
man hunts the woman or the woman the man,
at least it should be a splendid pagan hunt;
but Shaw is not a sporting man. Nor is he
a pagan, but a Puritan. He cannot recover
the impartiality of paganism which allowed
Diana to propose to Endymion without think-
ing any the worse of her. The result is that
while he makes Anne, the woman who marries
his hero, a really powerful and convincing
woman, he can only do it by making her a
highly objectionable woman. She is a liar and
a bully, not from sudden fear or excruciating
dilemma; she is a liar and a bully in grain;
she has no truth or magnanimity in her. The
more we know that she is real, the more we
206
The Philosopher
know that she is vile. In short, Bernard
Shaw is still haunted with his old impotence
of the unromantic WTiter; he cannot imagine
the main motives of human life from the
inside. We are convinced successfully that
Anne wishes to marry Tanner, but in the very
process we lose all power of conceiving why
Tanner should ever consent to marry Anne.
A writer with a more romantic strain in him
might have imagined a woman choosing her
lover without shamelessness and magnetising
him without fraud. Even if the first move-
ment were feminine, it need hardly be a
movement like this. In truth, of course, the
two sexes have their two methods of attraction,
and in some of the happiest cases they are
almost simultaneous. But even on the most
cynical showing they need not be mixed up.
It is one thing to say that the mousetrap
is not there by accident. It is another to say
(in the face of ocular experience) that the
mousetrap runs after the mouse.
But whenever Shaw shows the Puritan
hardness or even the Puritan cheapness, he
shows something also of the Puritan nobility,
of the idea that sacrifice is really a frivolity
in the face of a great purpose. The reason-
ableness of Calvin and his followers will by
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George Bernard Shaw
the mercy of heaven be at last washed away;
but their unreasonableness will remain an
eternal splendour. Long after we have let
drop the fancy that Protestantism was rational
it will be its glory that it was fanatical. So
it is with Shaw. ^To make Anne a real
woman, even a dangerous woman, he would
need to be something stranger and softer than
Bernard Shaw. . But though I always argue
with him whenever he argues, I confess that
he always conquers me in the one or two
moments when he is emotional.
There is one really noble moment when
Anne offers for all her cynical husband-hunting
the only defence that is really great enough to
cover it. "It will not be all happiness for me.
Perhaps death." And the man rises also at
that real crisis, saying, "Oh, that clutch holds
and hurts. What have you grasped in me ^ Is
there a father's heart as well as a mother's?''
That seems to me actually great; I do not like
either of the characters an atom more than
formerly; but I can see shining and shaking
through them at that instant the splendour of
the God that made them and of the image of God
who wrote their story.
A logician is like a liar in many respects,
208
The Philosopher
but chiefly in the fact that he should have
a good memory. That cutting and inquisi-
tive style which Bernard Shaw has always
adopted carries with it an inevitable criticism.
And it cannot be denied that this new theory
of the supreme importance of sound sexual
union, wrought by any means, is hard logic-
ally to reconcile with Shaw's old diatribes
against sentimentalism and operatic romance.
If Nature wishes primarily to entrap us into
sexual union, then all the means of sexual
attraction, even the most maudlin or theat-
rical, are justified at one stroke. The guitar
of the troubadour is as practical as the plough-
share of the husbandman. The waltz in the
ballroom is as serious as the debate in the
parish council. The justification of Anne, as
the potential mother of Superman, is really
the justification of all the humbugs and sen-
timentalists whom Shaw had been denouncing
as a dramatic critic and as a dramatist since
the beginning of his career. It was to no
purpose that the earlier Bernard Shaw said
that romance was all moonshine. The moon-
shine that ripens love is now as practical as
the sunshine that ripens corn. It was vain
to say that sexual chivalry was all rot; it
might be as rotten as manure — and also as
N 209
George Bernard Shaw
fertile. It is vain to call first love a fiction;
it may be as fictitious as the ink of the cuttle
or the doubling of the hare; as fictitious, as
efficient, and as indispensable. It is vain to
call it a self-deception; Schopenhauer said
that all existence was a self-deception; and
Shaw's only further comment seems to be
that it is right to be deceived. To Man
and Superman, as to all his plays, the
author attaches a most fascinating preface at
the beginning. But I really think that he
ought also to attach a hearty apology at the
end; an apology to all the minor dramatists
or preposterous actors whom he had cursed
for romanticism in his youth. Whenever he
objected to an actress for ogling she might
reasonably reply, "But this is how I support
my friend Anne in her sublime evolutionary
effort." Whenever he laughed at an old-
fashioned actor for ranting, the actor might
answer, "My exaggeration is not more absurd
than the tail of a peacock or the swagger of
a cock; it is the way I preach the great fruit-
ful He of the Hfe-force that I am a very fine
fellow." We have remarked the end of Shaw's
campaign in favour of progress. This ought
really to have been the end of his campaign
against romance. All the tricks of love that
210
The Philosopher
he called artificial become natural; because they
become Nature. All the lies of love become
truths; indeed they become the Truth.
The minor things of the play contain some
thunderbolts of good thinking. Throughout
this brief study I have deliberately not dwelt
upon mere wit, because in anything of Shaw's
that may be taken for granted. It is enough
to say that this play which is full of his most
serious quality is as full as any of his minor sort
of success. In a more solid sense two important
facts stand out: the first is the character of
the young American; the other is the character
of Straker, the chauffeur. In these Shaw has
realised and made vivid two most important
facts. First, that America is not intellectually
a go-ahead country, but both for good and
evil an old-fashioned one. It is full of stale
culture and ancestral simplicity, just as Shaw's
young millionaire quotes Macaulay and piously
worships his wife. Second, he has pointed
out in the character of Straker that there
has arisen in our midst a new class that
has education without breeding. Straker is
the man who has ousted the hansom-cabman,
having neither his coarseness nor his kindli-
ness. Great sociological credit is due to the
man who has first clearly observed that Straker
211
George Bernard Shaw
has appeared. How anybody can profess for a
moment to be glad that he has appeared, I do
not attempt to conjecture.
Appended to the play is an entertain-
ing though somewhat mysterious document
called "The Revolutionist's Handbook." It
contains many very sound remarks; this, for
example, which I cannot too much applaud: "If
you hit your child, be sure that you hit him
in anger." If that principle had been pro-
perly understood, we should have had less of
Shaw's sociological friends and their meddHng
with the habits and instincts of the poor.
But among the fragments of advice also occurs
the following suggestive and even alluring
remark: "Every man over forty is a scoun-
drel." On the first personal opportunity I
asked the author of this remarkable axiom
what it meant. I gathered that what it really
meant was something like this: that every
man over forty had been all the essential use
that he was likely to be, and was therefore in
a manner a parasite. It is gratifying to reflect
that Bernard Shaw has sufficiently answered
his own epigram by continuing to pour out
treasures both of truth and folly long after
this allotted time. But if the epigram might
be interpreted in a rather looser style as
212
The Philosopher
meaning that past a certain point a man's
work takes on its final character and does not
greatly change the nature of its merits, it
may certainly be said that with Man and
Superman, Shaw reaches that stage. The
two plays that have followed it, though of
very great interest in themselves, do not
require any revaluation of, or indeed any
addition to, our summary of his genius and
success. They are both in a sense casts
back to his primary^ energies; the first in a
controversial and the second in a technical
sense. Neither need prevent our saying that
^the moment when John Tanner and Anne
agree that it is doom for him and death for
her and life only for the thing unborn, is the
peak of his utterance as a prophet. -
The two important plays that he has since
given us are The Doctor s Dilemma and Getting
Married. The first is as regards its most
amusing and effective elements a throw-back
to his old game of guying the men of science.
It was a very good game, and he was an
admirable player. The actual story of the
Doctor s Dile?nma itself seems to me less
poignant and important than the things with
which Shaw had lately been dealing. First of
all, as has been said, Shaw has neither the
213
George Bernard Shaw
kind of justice nor the kind of weakness that
goes to make a true problem. We cannot feel
the Doctor's Dilemma, because we cannot
really fancy Bernard Shaw being in a dilemma.
His mind is both fond of abruptness and fond
of finality; he always makes up his mind
when he knows the facts and sometimes before.
Moreover, this particular problem (though
Shaw is certainly, as we shall see, nearer to
pure doubt about it than about anything else)
does not strike the critic as being such an
exasperating problem after all. An artist of
vast power and promise, who is also a scamp
of vast profligacy and treachery, has a chance
of life if specially treated for a special disease.
The modern doctors (and even the modern
dramatist) are in doubt whether he should be
specially favoured because he is aesthetically
important or specially disregarded because he
is ethically anti-social. They see-saw between
the two despicable modern doctrines, one that
geniuses should be worshipped like idols and
the other that criminals should be merely
wiped out like germs. That both clever men
and bad men ought to be treated like men
does not seem to occur to them. As a matter
of fact, in these affairs of life and death one
never does think of such distinctions. Nobody
214
The Philosopher
does shout out at sea, " Bad citizen over-
board!" I should recommend the doctor in
his dilemma to do exactly what I am sure any
decent doctor would do without any dilemma
at all: to treat the man simply as a man, and
give him no more and no less favour than
he would to anybody else. In short, I am
sure a practical physician would drop all these
visionarv, unworkable modern dreams about
type and criminology and go back to the plain
business-like facts of the French Revolution
and the Rights of Man.
The other play. Getting Married^ is a point
in Shaw's career, but only as a play, not, as
usual, as a heresy. It is nothing but a con-
versation about marriage; and one cannot
agree or disagree with the view of marriage,
because all views are given which are held by
anybody, and some (I should think) which are
held by nobody. But its technical quality is
of some importance in the life of its author.
It is worth consideration as a play, because it
is not a play at all. It marks the culmination
and completeness of that victory of Bernard
Shaw over the British public, or rather over
their official representatives, of which I have
spoken. Shaw had fought a long fight with
business men, those incredible people, who
215
George Bernard Shaw
assured him that it was useless to have wit
without murders, and that a good joke, which
is the most popular thing everywhere else, was
quite unsalable in the theatrical world. In
spite of this he had conquered by his wit and
his good dialogue; and by the time of which
we now speak he was victorious and secure.
All his plays were being produced as a matter
of course in England and as a matter of the
fiercest fashion and enthusiasm in America
and Germany. No one who knows the nature
of the man will doubt that under such cir-
cumstances his first act would be to produce
his wit naked and unashamed. He had been
told that he could not support a slight play by
mere dialogue. He therefore promptly pro-
duced mere dialogue without the slightest
play for it to support. Getting Married is no
more a play than Cicero's dialogue De A mi did,
and not half so much a play as Wilson's
Nodes Amhrosiance. But though it is not a
play, it was played, and played successfully.
Everyone who went into the theatre felt that
he was only eavesdropping at an accidental
conversation. But the conversation was so
sparkling and sensible that he went on eaves-
dropping. This, I think, as it is the final
play of Shaw, is also, and fitly, his final
216
The Philosopher
triumph. He is a good dramatist and some-
times even a great dramatist. But the occa-
sions when we get ghmpses of him as really a
great man are on these occasions when he is
utterly undramatic.
From first to last Bernard Shaw has been
nothing but a conversationalist. It is not a
slur to say so; Socrates was one, and even
Christ Himself. He differs from that divine
and that human prototype in the fact that, like
most modern people, he does to some extent
talk in order to find out what he thinks;
whereas they knew it beforehand. But he has
the virtues that go with the talkative man;
one of which is humility. You will hardly
ever find a really proud man talkative; he is
afraid of talking too much. Bernard Shaw
offered himself to the world with only one
great qualification, that he could talk honestly
and well. He did not speak; he talked to a
crowd. He did not write; he talked to
a typewriter. He did not really construct a
play; he talked through ten mouths or masks
instead of through one. His literary power
and progress began in casual conversations —
and it seems to me supremely right that it
should end in one great and casual conversa-
tion. His last play is nothing but garrulous
217
George Bernard Shaiv
talking, that great thing called gossip. And I
am happy to say that the play has been as
efficient and successful as talk and gossip
have always been among the children of men.
Of his life in these later years I have made
no pretence of telling even the little that there
is to tell. Those who regard him as a mere
self-advertising egotist may be surprised to
hear that there is perhaps no man of whose
private life less could be positively said by an
outsider. Even those who know him can
make little but a conjecture of what has lain
behind this splendid stretch of intellectual
self-expression; I only make my conjecture
like the rest. I think that the first great
turning-point in Shaw's life (after the early
things of which I have spoken, the taint of
drink in the teetotal home, or the first fight
with poverty) was the deadly illness which fell
upon him, at the end of his first flashing career
as a Saturday Reviewer. I know it would
goad Shaw to madness to suggest that sickness
could have softened him. That is why I
suggest it. But I say for his comfort that
I think it hardened him also; if that can be
called hardening which is only the strength-
ening of our souls to meet some dreadful
reality. At least it is certain that the larger
218
The Philosopher
spiritual ambitions, the desire to find a faith
and found a church, come after that time.
I also mention it because there is hardly any-
thing else to mention; his life is singularly
free from landmarks, while his literature is so
oddly full of surprises. His marriage to
Miss Payne-Townsend, which occurred not
long after his illness, was one of those quite
successful things which are utterly silent.
The placidity of his married life may be suffi-
ciently indicated by saying that (as far as I
can make out) the most important events in it
were rows about the Executive of the Fabian
Society. If such ripples do not express a still
and lake-like life, I do not know what would.
Honestly, the only thing in his later career
that can be called an event is the stand made
by Shaw at the Fabians against the sudden
assault of Mr. H. G. Wells, which, after scenes
of splendid exasperations, ended in Wells' re-
signation. There was another slight ruffling of
the calm when Bernard Shaw said some quite
sensible things about Sir Henry Irving. But
on the whole we confront the composure of
one who has come into his own.
The method of his life has remained mostly
unchanged. And there is a great deal of
method in his life; I can hear some people
219
George Bernard Shaw
murmuring something about method in his
madness. He is not only neat and business-
like; but, unHke some literary men I know,
does not conceal the fact. Having all the
talents proper to an author, he delights to
prove that he has also all the talents proper to
a publisher; or even to a publisher's clerk.
Though many looking at his light brown
clothes would call him a Bohemian, he really
hates and despises Bohemianism; in the sense
that he hates and despises disorder and unclean-
ness and irresponsibility. All that part of him
is peculiarly normal and efficient. He gives
good advice; he always answers letters, and
answers them in a decisive and very legible
hand. He has said himself that the only
educational art that he thinks important is
that of being able to jump off tram-cars at the
proper moment. Though a rigid vegetarian,
he is quite regular and rational in his meals;
and though he detests sport, he takes quite
sufficient exercise. While he has always made
a mock of science in theory, he is by nature
prone to meddle with it in practice. He is
fond of photographing, and even more fond of
being photographed. He maintained (in one
of his moments of mad modernity) that photo-
graphy was a finer thing than portrait-painting,
220
The Philosopher
more exquisite and more imaginative; he
urged the characteristic argument that none
of his own photographs were like each other
or Hke him. But he would certainly wash
the chemicals off his hands the instant after an
experiment; just as he would wash the blood
off his hands the instant after a Socialist
massacre. He cannot endure stains or accre-
tions; he is of that temperament which feels
tradition itself to be a coat of dust; whose
temptation it is to feel nothing but a sort
of foul accumulation or living disease even in
the creeper upon the cottage or the moss upon
the grave. So thoroughly are his tastes those
of the civilised modern man that if it had not
been for the fire in him of justice and anger
he might have been the most trim and modern
among the millions whom he shocks: and his
bicycle and brown hat have been no menace in
Brixton. But God sent among those subur-
bans one who was a prophet as well as a sani-
tary inspector. He had every qualification for
living in a villa — except the necessary indiffer-
ence to his brethren living in pigstyes. But
for the small fact that he hates with a sickening
hatred the hypocrisy and class cruelty, he
would really accept and admire the bathroom
and the bicycle and asbestos-stove, having no
221
George Bernard Shaw
memory of rivers or of roaring fires. In these
things, like Mr. Straker, he is the New Man.
But for his great soul he might have accepted
modern civilisation; it vs^as a wonderful escape.
This man whom men so foolishly call crazy
and anarchic has really a dangerous affinity to
the fourth-rate perfections of our provincial
and Protestant civilisation. He might even
have been respectable if he had had less self-
respect.
His fulfilled fame and this tone of repose
and reason in his life, together with the large
circle of his private kindness and the regard of
his fellow-artists, should permit us to end the
record in a tone of almost patriarchal quiet.
If I wished to complete such a picture I could
add many touches: that he has consented to
wear evening dress; that he has supported
the Times Book Club; and that his beard has
turned grey; the last to his regret, as he
wanted it to remain red till they had completed
colour-photography. He can mix with the
most conservative statesmen; his tone grows
continuously more gentle in the matter of
religion. It would be easy to end with the
lion lying down with the lamb, the wild Irish-
man tamed or taming everybody, Shaw recon-
222
The Philosopher
died to the British pubHc as the British public
is certainly largely reconciled to Shaw.
But as I put these last papers together,
having finished this rude study, I hear a piece
of news. His latest play, The Showing Up of
Blanco Posnet, has been forbidden by the
Censor. As far as I can discover, it has been
forbidden because one of the characters pro-
fesses a belief in God and states his conviction
that God has got him. This is wholesome;
this is Hke one crack of thunder in a clear
sky. Not so easily does the prince of this
world forgive. Shaw's rehgious training and
instinct is not mine, but in all honest religion
there is something that is hateful to the
prosperous compromise of our time. You
are free in our time to say that God does not
exist; you are free to say that He exists and
is evil; you are free to say (like poor old
Renan) that He would like to exist if He could.
You may talk of God as a metaphor or a
mystification; you may water Him down with
gallons of long words, or boil Him to the rags
of metaphysics; and it is not merely that
nobody punishes, but nobody protests. But
if you speak of God as a fact, as a thing like
a tiger, as a reason for changing one's con-
duct, then the modern world will stop you
223
George Bernard Shaw
somehow if it can. We are long past talking
about whether an unbeliever should be
punished for being irreverent. It is now
thought irreverent to be a believer. I end
where I began: it is the old Puritan in Shaw
that jars the modern world like an electric
shock. That vision with which I meant to
end, that vision of culture and common-sense,
of red brick and brown flannel, of the modern
clerk broadened enough to embrace Shaw and
Shaw softened enough to embrace the clerk,
all that vision of a new London begins to fade
and alter. The red brick begins to burn red-
hot; and the smoke from all the chimneys has
a strange smell. I find myself back in the
fumes in which I started. . . . Perhaps I have
been misled by small modernities. Perhaps
what I have called fastidiousness is a divine
fear. Perhaps what I have called coldness is
a predestinate and ancient endurance. The
vision of the Fabian villas grows fainter and
fainter, until I see only a void place across
which runs Bunyan's Pilgrim with his fingers
in his ears.
Bernard Shaw has occupied much of his life
in trying to elude his followers. The fox has
enthusiastic followers, and Shaw seems to
regard his in much the same way. This man
The Philosopher
whom men accuse of bidding for applause
seems to me to shrink even from assent. If
you agree with Shaw he is very Hkely to
contradict you; I have contradicted Shaw
throughout, that is why I come at last almost
to agree with him. His critics have accused
him of vulgar self-advertisement; in his
relation to his followers he seems to me
rather marked with a sort of mad modesty.
He seems to wish to fly from agreement, to
have as few followers as possible. All this
reaches back, I think, to the three roots from
which this meditation grew. It is partly the
mere impatience and irony of the Irishman.
It is partly the thought of the Calvinist that
the host of God should be thinned rather than
thronged; that Gideon must reject soldiers
rather than recruit them. And it is partly,
alas, the unhappy Progressive trying to be in
front of his own religion, trying to. destroy his
own idol and even to desecrate his own tomb.
But from whatever causes, this furious escape
from popularity has involved Shaw in some
perversities and refinements which are almost
mere insincerities, and which make it neces-
sary to disentangle the good he has done from
the evil in this dazzling course. I will at-
tempt some summary by stating the three
O 225
George Bernard SJiaw
things in which his influence seems to me
thoroughly good and the three in which it
seems bad. But for the pleasure of ending
on the finer note I will speak first of those
that seem bad.
The primary respect in which Shaw has
been a bad influence is that he has encouraged
fastidiousness. He has made men dainty
about their moral meals. This is indeed the
root of his whole objection to romance.
Many people have objected to romance for
being too airy and exquisite. Shaw objects
to romance for being too rank and coarse.
Many have despised romance because it is
unreal; Shaw really hates it because it is a
great deal too real. Shaw disHkes romance as
he dislikes beef and beer, raw brandy or raw
beefsteaks. Romance is too masculine for
his taste. You will find throughout his
criticisms, amid all their truth, their wild
justice or pungent impartiality, a curious
undercurrent of prejudice upon one point:
the preference for the refined rather than the
rude or ugly. Thus he will dislike a joke
because it is coarse without asking if it is
really immoral. He objects to a man sitting
down on his hat, whereas the austere moralist
should only object to his sitting down on
226
The Philosopher
someone else's hat. This sensibility is barren
because it is universal. It is useless to object
to man being made ridiculous. Man is born
ridiculous, as can easily be seen :f you look at
him soon after he is born. It is grotesque to
drink beer, but it is equally grotesque to
drink soda-water; the grotesqueness lies in
the act of filling yourself like a bottle through
a hole. It is undignified to walk with a
drunken stagger; but it is fairly undignified
to walk at all, for all walking is a sort of
balancing, and there is always in the human
being something of a quadruped on its hind
legs. I do not say he would be more digni-
fied if he went on all fours; I do not know
that he ever is dignified except when he is dead.
We shall not be refined till we are refined into
dust. Of course it is only because he is not
wholly an animal that man sees he is a rum
animal; and if man on his hind legs is in an
artificial attitude, it is only because, like a dog,
he is begging or saying thank you.
Everything important is in that sense absurd
from the grave baby to the grinning skull;
everything practical is a practical joke. But
throughout Shaw's comedies, curiously enough,
there is a certain kicking against this great
doom of laughter. For instance, it is the first
22/
George Bernard Shaw
duty of a man who is in love to make a fool
of himself; but Shaw's heroes always seem to
flinch from this, and attempt, in airy, philosophic
revenge, to make a fool of the woman first.
The attempts of Valentine and Charteris to
divide their perceptions from their desires, and
tell the woman she is worthless even while
trying to win her, are sometimes almost tor-
turing to watch; it is like seeing a man trying
to play a different tune with each hand. I fancy
this agony is not only in the spectator, but in
the dramatist as well. It is Bernard Shaw
struggling with his reluctance to do anything
so ridiculous as make a proposal. For there
are two types of great humorist: those who
love to see a man absurd and those who hate
to see him absurd. Of the first kind are Rabe-
lais and Dickens; of the second kind are
Swift and Bernard Shaw.
So far as Shaw has spread or helped a certain
modern reluctance or manvaise honte in these
grand and grotesque functions of man I think
he has definitely done harm. He has much
influence among the young men; but it is not
an influence in the direction of keeping them
young. One cannot imagine him inspiring
any of his followers to write a war-song or
a drinking-song or a love-song, the three
228
The Philosopher
forms of human utterance which come next in
nobility to a prayer. It may seem odd to
say that the net effect of a man so apparently
impudent will be to make men shy. But it is
certainly the truth. Shyness is always the
sign of a divided soul; a man is shy because
he somehow thinks his position at once de-
spicable and important. If he were without
humility he would not care; and if he were
without pride he would not care. Now the
main purpose of Shaw's theoretic teaching is
to declare that we ought to fulfil these great
functions of life, that we ought to eat and
drink and love. But the main tendency of
his habitual criticism is to suggest that all the
sentiments, professions, and postures of these
things are not only comic but even con-
temptibly comic, follies and almost frauds.
The result would seem to be that a race of
young men may arise who do all these things,
but do them awkwardly. That which was of
old a free and hilarious function becomes an
important and embarrassing necessity. Let us
endure all the pagan pleasures with a Christian
patience. Let us eat, drink, and be serious.
The second of the two points on which I
think Shaw has done definite harm is this:
that he has (not always or even as a rule in-
229
George Bernard Shaw
tentionally) increased that anarchy of thought
which is ahvays the destruction of thought.
Much of his early writing has encouraged
among the modern youth that most pestilent
of all popular tricks and fallacies; what is
called the argument of progress. I mean this
kind of thing. Previous ages were often, alas,
aristocratic in politics or clericalist in religion;
but they were always democratic in philosophy;
they appealed to man, not to particular men.
And if most men were against an idea, that
was so far against it. But nowadays that
most men are against a thing is thought to
be in its favour; it is vaguely supposed to
show that some day most men will be for it.
If a man says that cows are reptiles, or that
Bacon wrote Shakespeare, he can always quote
the contempt of his contemporaries as in some
mysterious way proving the complete con-
version of posterity. The objections to this
theory scarcely need any elaborate indication.
The final objection to it is that it amounts to
this: say anything, however idiotic, and you
are in advance of your age. This kind of
stuff must be stopped. The sort of democrat
who appeals to the babe unborn must be
classed with the sort of aristocrat who appeals
to his deceased great-grandfather. Both
230
The Philosopher
should be sharply reminded that they are
appealing to individuals whom they well know
to be at a disadvantage in the matter of prompt
and witty reply. Now although Bernard
Shaw has survived this simple confusion, he
has in his time greatly contributed to It. If
there Is, for instance, one thing that is really
rare in Shaw It Is hesitation. He makes up
his mind quicker than a calculating boy or a
county magistrate. Yet on this subject of
the next change In ethics he has felt hesi-
tation, and being a strictly honest man has
expressed it.
"I know no harder practical question than
how much selfishness one ought to stand from
a gifted person for the sake of his gifts or on
the chance of his being right In the long run.
The Superman will certainly come like a thief
in the night, and be shot at accordingly; but
we cannot leave our property wholly un-
defended on that account. On the other hand,
we cannot ask the Superman simply to add a
higher set of virtues to current respectable
morals; for he is undoubtedly going to empty
a good deal of respectable morality out like so
much dirty water, and replace it by new and
strange customs, shedding old obligations and
accepting new and heavier ones. Every step
231
George Bernard Shaw
of his progress must horrify conventional
people; and if it were possible for even the
most superior man to march ahead all the
time, every pioneer of the march towards the
Superman would be crucified."
When the most emphatic man alive, a man
unmatched in violent precision of statement,
speaks with such avowed vagueness and doubt
as this, it is no wonder if all his more weak-
minded followers are in a mere whirlpool of
uncritical and unmeaning innovation. If the
superior person will be apparently criminal,
the most probable result is simply that the
criminal person will think himself superior.
A very slight knowledge of human nature
is required in the matter. If the Superman
may possibly be a thief, you may bet your
boots that the next thief will be a Superman.
But indeed the Supermen (of whom I have
met many) have generally been more weak in
the head than in the moral conduct; they
have simply offered the first fancy which occu-
pied their minds as the new morality. I fear
that Shaw had a way of encouraging these
follies. It is obvious from the passage I have
quoted that he has no way of restraining
them.
The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally
232
The Philosopher
live in the future, because it is featureless; it
is a soft job; you can make it what you like.
The next age is blank, and I can paint it freely
with my favourite colour. It requires real
courage to face the past, because the past is
full of facts which cannot be got over; of
men certainly wiser than we and of things
done which we could not do. I know I
cannot write a poem as good as Lycidas. But
it is always easy to say that the particular sort
of poetry I can write will be the poetry of the
future.
This I call the second evil influence of
Shaw: that he has encouraged many to throw
themselves for justification upon the shapeless
and the unknown. In this, though courageous
himself, he has encouraged cowards, and though
sincere himself, has helped a mean escape.
The third evil in his influence can, I think, be
much more shortly dealt with. He has to a
very slight extent, but still perceptibly, en-
couraged a kind of charlatanism of utterance
among those who possess his Irish impudence
without his Irish virtue. For instance, his
amusing trick of self-praise is perfectly hearty
and humorous in him; nay, it is even
humble; for to confess vanity is itself humble.
All that is the matter with the proud is that
George Bernard Shaw
they will not admit that they are vain. There-
fore when Shaw says that he alone is able to
write such and such admirable work, or that
he has just utterly wiped out some celebrated
opponent, I for one never feel anything offen-
sive in the tone, but, indeed, only the un-
mistakable intonation of a friend's voice.
But I have noticed among younger, harder,
and much shallower men a certain disposition
to ape this insolent ease and certitude, and
that without any fundamental frankness or
mirth. So far the influence is bad. Egoism
can be learnt as a lesson like any other ''ism.'*
It is not so easy to learn an Irish accent or a
good temper. In its lower forms the thing
becomes a most unmilitary trick of announcing
the victory before one has gained it.
When one has said those three things, one
has said, I think, all that can be said by way
of blaming Bernard Shaw. It is significant that
he was never blamed for any of these things
by the Censor. Such censures as the attitude
of that official involves may be dismissed with
a very light sort of disdain. To represent
Shaw as profane or provocatively indecent is
not a matter for discussion at all; it is a dis-
gusting criminal libel upon a particularly re-
spectable gentleman of the middle classes, of
234
The Philosopher
refined tastes and somewhat Puritanical views.
But while the negative defence of Shaw is
easy, the just praise of him is almost as com-
plex as it is necessary-; and I shall devote the
last few pages of this book to a triad corre-
sponding to the last one — to the three im-
portant elements in which the work of Shaw
has been good as well as great.
In the first place, and quite apart from all
particular theories, the world owes thanks to
Bernard Shaw for having combined being
intelligent with being intelligible. He has
popularised philosophy, or rather he has re-
popularised it, for philosophy is always popu-
lar, except in peculiarly corrupt and oligarchic
ages like our own. We have passed the age
of the demagogue, the man who has little to
say and says it loud. We have come to the
age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has
nothing to say, but says it softly and impres-
sively in an indistinct whisper. After all,
short words must mean something, even if
they mean filth or lies; but long words may
sometimes mean Hterally nothing, especially
if they are used (as they mostly are in
modern books and magazine articles) to
balance and modify each other. A plain
figure 4, scrawled in chalk anywhere, must
235
George Bernard Shaw
always mean something; it must always
mean 2 + 2. But the most enormous and
mysterious algebraic equation, full of letters,
brackets, and fractions, may all cancel out at
last and be equal to nothing. When a dema-
gogue says to a mob, "There is the Bank of
England, why shouldn't you have some of
that money?" he says something which is at
least as honest and intelligible as the figure 4.
When a writer in the Times remarks, "We
must raise the economic efficiency of the
masses without diverting anything from those
classes which represent the national pros-
perity and refinement," then his equation
cancels out; in a literal and logical sense his
remark amounts to nothing.
There are two kinds of charlatans or people
called quacks to-day. The power of the first
is that he advertises — and cures. The power
of the second is that though he Is not learned
enough to cure he is much too learned to
advertise. The former give away their dignity
with a pound of tea; the latter are paid a
pound of tea merely for being dignified. I think
them the worse quacks of the two. Shaw is
certainly of the other sort. Dickens, another
man who was great enough to be a demagogue
(and greater than Shaw because more heartily
236
The Philosopher
a demagogue), puts for ever the true difference
between the demagogue and the mystagogue in
Dr. Mangold: '* Except that we're cheap-jacks
and they're dear-jacks, I don't see any dif-
ference between us." Bernard Shaw is a great
cheap-jack, with plenty of patter and I dare
say plenty of nonsense, but with this also
(which is not wholly unimportant), with
goods to sell. People accuse such a man
of self-advertisement. But at least the cheap-
jack does advertise his wares, whereas the don
or dear-jack advertises nothing except himself.
His very silence, nay his very sterility, are
supposed to be marks of the richness of his
erudition. He is too learned to teach, and
sometimes too wise even to talk. St. Thomas
Aquinas said: "In auctore auctoritas." But
there is more than one man at Oxford or
Cambridge who is considered an authority
because he has never been an author.
Against all this mystification both of silence
and verbosity Shaw has been a splendid and
smashing protest. He has stood up for the
fact that philosophy is not the concern of those
who pass through Divinity and Greats, but of
those who pass through birth and death.
Nearly all the most awful and abstruse state-
ments can be put in words of one syllable,
^37
George Bernard Shaw
from "A child is born" to "A soul is
damned. "^If the ordinary man may not dis-
cuss existence, why should he be asked to
conduct it ? About concrete matters indeed
one naturally appeals to an oligarchy or select
class. For information about Lapland I go to
an aristocracy of Laplanders; for the ways of
rabbits to an aristocracy of naturalists or, pref-
erably, an aristocracy of poachers. But only
mankind itself can bear witness to the abstract
first principles of mankind, and in matters of
theory I would always consult the mob. Only
the mass of men, for instance, have authority
to say whether life is good. Whether life is
good is an especially mystical and delicate
question, and, like all such questions, is asked
in words of one syllable. It is also answered
in words of one syllable, and Bernard Shaw
(as also mankind) answers "yes."
<- This plain, pugnacious style of Shaw has
greatly clarified all controversies. He has
slain the polysyllable, that huge and slimy
centipede which has sprawled over all the
valleys of England Hke the "loathly worm"
who was slain by the ancient knight. He does
not think that difficult questions will be made
simpler by using difficult words about them.
He has achieved the admirable work, never to
238
The Philosopher
be mentioned without gratitude, of discussing
Evolution without mentioning it. The good
work is of course more evident in the case of
philosophy than any other region; because
the case of philosophy was a crying one. It
was really preposterous that the things most
carefully reserved for the study of two or
three men should actually be the things com-
mon to all mien. It was absurd that certain
men should be experts on the special subject of
everything. But he stood for much the same
spirit and style in other matters; in economics,
for example. There never has been a better
popular economist; one more lucid, enter-
taining, consistent, and essentially exact. The
very comicality of his examples makes them
and their argument stick in the mind; as in
the case I remember in which he said that the
big shops had now to please everybody, and
were not entirely dependent on the lady who
sails in "to order four governesses and live
grand pianos." He is always preaching collec-
tivism; yet he does not very often name it.
He does not talk about collectivism, but
about cash; of which the populace feel a much
more definite need. He talks about cheese,
boots, perambulators, and how people are really
to live. 'For him economics really means
239
George Bernard Shaw
housekeeping, as it does in Greek. His
difference from the othodox economists, like
most of his differences, is very different from
the attacks made by the main body of Socialists.
The old Manchester economists are generally
attacked for being too gross and material.
Shaw really attacks them for not being gross
or material enough. He thinks that they
hide themselves behind long w^ords, remote
hypotheses or unreal generalisations. When
the orthodox economist begins with his correct
and primary formula, " Suppose there is a
Man on an Island " Shaw is apt to inter-
rupt him sharply, saying, "There is a Man in
the Street."
The second phase of the man's really fruitful
efficacy is in a sense the converse of this. He
has improved philosophic discussions by
making them more popular. But he has also
improved popular amusements by making them
more philosophic. And by more philosophic
I do not mean duller, but funnier; that is
more varied. All real fun is in cosmic con-
trasts, which involve a view of the cosmos.
But I know that this second strength in Shaw
is really difficult to state and must be
approached by explanations and even by
eliminations. Let me say at once that I think
240
The Philosopher
nothing of Shaw or anybody else merely for
playing the daring sceptic. I do not think he
has done any good or even achieved any effect
simply by asking startling questions. It is
possible that there have been ages so sluggish
or automatic that anything that woke them up
at all was a good thing. It is sufficient to be
certain that ours is not such an age. We do
not need waking up; rather we_^suffer from
insomnia, with all its results of fear and ex-
aggeration and frightful waking dreams. The
modern mind is not a donkey which wants
kicking to make it go on. The modern mind
is more like a motor-car on a lonely road
which two amateur motorists have been just
clever enough to take to pieces, but are not
quite clever enough to put together again.
Under these^ircumstances kicking the car has
never been found by the best experts to be
effective. No one, therefore, does any good
to our age merely by asking questions — unless
he can answer the questions. Asking questions
is already the fashionable and aristocratic sport
which has brought most of us into the
bankruptcy court. The note of our age is a
note of interrogation. And the final point is
so plain; no sceptical philosopher can ask any
questions that may not equally be asked by a
P 241
George Bernard Shaiv
tired child on a hot afternoon. *'Am I a
boy ? — Why am I a boy ? — Why aren't I a
chair ? — What is a chair ?" A child will some-
times ask questions of this sort for two hours.
And the philosophers of Protestant Europe
have asked them for two hundred years.
If that were all that I meant by Shaw
making men more philosophic, I should put it
not among his good influences but his bad.
He did do that to some extent; and so far he
is bad. But there is a much bigger and better
sense in which he has been a philosopher. He
has brought back into English drama all the
streams of fact or tendency which are commonly
called undramatic. They were there in
Shakespeare's time; but they have scarcely
been there since until Shaw. I mean that
Shakespeare, being interested in everything,
put everything into a play. If he had lately
been thinking about the irony and even con-
tradiction confronting us in self-preservation
and suicide, he put it all into Hamlet. If he
was annoyed by some passing boom in theatrical
babies he put that into Hamlet too. He would
put anything into Hamlet which he really
thought was true, from his favourite nursery
ballads to his personal (and perhaps unfashion-
able) conviction of the Catholic purgatory.
242
The Philosopher
There is no fact that strikes one, I think, about
Shakespeare, except the fact of how dramatic
he could be, so much as the fact of how
undramatic he could be.
In this great sense Shaw has brought philo-
sophy back into drama — philosophy in the
sense of a certain freedom of the mind. This
is not a freedom to think what one likes
(which is absurd, for one can only think what
one thinks); it is a freedom to think about
what one likes, which is quite a different thing
and the spring of all thought. Shakespeare
(in a weak moment, I think) said that all the
world is a stage. But Shakespeare acted on
the much finer principle that a stage is all the
world. So there are in all Bernard Shaw's
plays patches of what people would call essen-
tially undramatic stuflF, which the dramatist
puts in because he is honest and would rather
prove his case than succeed with his play.
Shaw has brought back into English drama
that Shakespearian universality which, if you
like, you can call Shakespearian irrelevance.
Perhaps a better definition than either is a
habit of thinking the URth- worth telling
even when you meet it by accident. JLn-Shaw's
plays^one meets an incredible number of truths
by accident.
243
George Bernard Shaw
To be up to date is a paltry ambition except
in an almanac, and Shaw has sometimes talked
this almanac philosophy. Nevertheless there
is a real sense in which the phrase may be
wisely used, and that is in cases where some
stereotyped version of what is happening hides
what is really happening from our eyes. Thus,
for instance, newspapers are never up to date.
The men who write leading articles are always
behind the times, because they are in a hurry.
They are forced to fall back on their old-
fashioned view of things; they have no time
to fashion a new one. Everything that is
done in a hurry is certain to be antiquated;
that is why modern industrial civilisation bears
so curious a resemblance to barbarism. Thus
when newspapers say that the Times is a
solemn old Tory paper, they are out of date;
their talk is behind the talk in Fleet Street.
Thus when newspapers say that Christian
dogmas are crumbling, they are out of date;
their talk is behind the talk in public-houses.
Now in this sense Shaw has kept in a really
stirring sense up to date. He has introduced
into the theatre the things that no one else
had introduced into a theatre — the things in
the street outside. The theatre is a sort
of thing which proudly sends a hansom-cab
244
The Philosopher
across the stage as Realism, while everybody
outside is whistling for motor-cabs.
Consider in this respect how many and fine
have been Shaw's intrusions into the theatre
with the things that were really going on. Daily
papers and daily matinees were still gravely
explaining how much modern war depended
on gunpowder. Arms and the Man explained
how much modern war depends on chocolate.
Every play and paper described the Vicar who
was a mild. Conservative. Candida caught hold
of the modern Vicar who is an advanced
Socialist. Numberless magazine articles and
society comedies describe the emancipated
woman as new and wild. Only Tou Never Can
Tell was young enough to see that the emanci-
pated woman is already old and respectable.
Every comic paper has caricatured the un-
educated upstart. Only the author of Man
and Superman knew enough about the modern
world to caricature the educated upstart — the
man Straker who can quote Beaumarchais,
though he cannot pronounce him. This is
the second real and great work of Shaw — the
letting in of the world on to the stage, as
the rivers were let in upon the Augean Stable.
He has let a little of the Haymarket into the J
Haymarket Theatre. He has permitted some
245
George Bernard Shaw
whispers of the Strand to enter the Strand
Theatre. [A variety of solutions in philosophy
is as silly as it is in arithmetic, but one may
be justly proud of a variety of materials for
a solution. After Shaw, one may say, there is
nothing that cannot be introduced into a play
if one can make it decent, amusing, and rele-
vant J The state of a man's health, the religion
of his childhood, his ear for music, or his
ignorance of cookery can all be made vivid if
they have anything to do with the subject. A
soldier may mention the commissariat as well
as the cavalry; and, better still, a priest may
mention theology as well as religion. That
is being a philosopher; that is bringing the
universe on the stage.
OLastly, he has obliterated the mere cynic.
He has been so much more cynical than any-
one else for the public good that no one has
dared since to be really cynical for anything
smaller. The Chinese crackers of the frivolous
cynics fail to excite us after the dynamite of
the serious and aspiring cynic. Bernard Shaw
and I (who are growing grey together) can
remember an epoch which many of his
followers do not know: an epoch of real
pessimism. The years from 1885 ^o ^^9^
were like the hours of afternoon in a rich
246
The Philosopher
house with large rooms; the hours before
tea-time. They beHeved in nothing except
good manners; and the essence of good
manners is to conceal a yawn. A yawn may
be defined as a silent yell. The power which
the young pessimist of that time showed in
this direction would have astonished anyone
but him. He yawned so wide as to swallow
the world. He swallowed the world like an
unpleasant pill before retiring to an eternal
rest. Now the last and best glory of Shaw
is that in the circles where this creature was
found, he is not. He has not been killed (I
don't know exactly why), but he has actually
turned into a Shaw idealist. This is no ex-
aggeration, I meet men who, when I knew
them in 1898, were just a little too lazy to
destroy the universe. They are now con-
scious of not being quite worthy to abolish
some prison regulations. This destruction
and conversion seem to me the mark of
something actually great. It is always great
to destroy a type without destroying a man.
The followers of Shaw are optimists; some
of them are so simple as even to use the
word. They are sometimes rather pallid op-
timists, frequently very worried optimists,
occasionally, to tell the truth, rather cross
247
George Bernard Shaw
optimists: but they not pessimists; they
can exult though they cannot laugh. He has
at least withered up among them the mere
pose of impossibility. Like every great
teacher, he has cursed the barren fig-tree.
For nothing except that impossibility is really
impossible.
I know it is all very strange. From the
height of eight hundred years ago, or of eight
hundred years hence, our age must look in-
credibly odd. We call the twelfth century
ascetic. We call our own time hedonist and
full of praise and pleasure. But in the ascetic
age the love of life was evident and enormous,
so that it had to be restrained. In an hedonist
age pleasure has always sunk low, so that it
has to be encouraged. How high the sea of
human happiness rose in the Middle Ages,
we now only know by the colossal walls that
they built to keep it in bounds^jHow low
human happiness sank in the twentieth cen-
tury our children will only know by these
extraordinary modern books, which tell people
that it is a duty to be cheerful and that life is
not so bad after all. Humanity never pro-
duces optimists till it has ceased to produce
248
The Philosopher
happy men. It is strange to be obliged to
impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men
to a banquet with spears. But this shall be
written of our time: that when the spirit who
denies besieged the last citadel, blaspheming
life itself, there were some, there was one
especially, whose voice was heard and whose
spear was never broken.
THE END
249
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"This story cf glass has swept me off my feet. Instead of a world
of technicalities I met entertainment, and yet that entertainment
never abandoned the natural level of dignity belonging to the sub-
j ect. " — Ferdinand S.hwill, Professor of Modern History^ University
of Chicago.
"A more unique or more delightful travel book has not been
written." — Toronto Mat I and Empire.
Stained Glass Tours in England.
Illustrated. Cloth Zvo. $2.50 net. Postage 20 cents.
"Just the information that many travellers in England need. All
in an orderly and sprightly manner." — Professor William Lyon
Phelps^ Yale University .
"Well conceived and original." — AthencBum.
*^*'Tn these days of universal travel and of the almost universal
writing of travel books, it is unusual to find an author whose point
of view is unique and whose subject-matter is unhackneyed. Mr.
Sherrill has met both of these difiScult requirements." — The DiaL
J. M. DIVER
Captain Desmond, V. C.
Ornamental cloth. i2mo. $1.50,
"A story of the Punjab frontier. The theme is that of Kipling's
' Story of the Gadsbys' — a brilliant and convincing study of an
undying problem." — London Post.
The Great Amulet \2mo. $1.50.
A love-story dealing with army life in India.
Candles in the Wind \2mo. $1.50.
HUGH DE SELINCOURT
The Strongest Plume \2mo. $1.50.
•'Deals with a problem quite worthy of serious consideration,
frankly but restrainedly. Excellent studies of character."
— London Daily News.
A Boy's Marriage 12^^?. $1.50.
The High Adventure iimo. $1.50.
"Admirably well told with distinctive literary skill."
— Philadelphia Press.
The Way Things Happen i2mo. $1.50.
"Fantastic and agreeable — an effort somewhat in the manner of
Mr. W. J. Locke." — Glasgow Evening News.
A. NEIL LYONS
Arthur's Hotel i2mo. $1.50.
"Sketches of low life in London. The book will delight visitors
to the slums." — New York Sun.
Sixpenny Pieces i2mo. $1.50.
The Story of a "Sixpenny Doctor" in the East end of
London. The volume is instinct with a realism that
differs altogether from the so-called realism of the
accepted "gutter" novels, for it ^is the realism of life
as it is, and not as imagined.
THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
WILLIAM J. LOCKE
**LlFE IS A GLORIOUS THING." — W, J. Lockt
"If you wish to be lifted out of the petty cares of to-day, read one
of Locke's novels. You may select any from the following titles and
be certain of meeting some new and delightful friends. His char-
acters are worth knowing." — Baltimore Sun.
The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne The Demagogue and Lady Phayre
At the Gate of Samaria The Beloved Vagabond
A Study in Shadows The White Dove
Where Love Is The Usurper
Derelicts Septimus Idols
I2mo, Cloth. %l.^o each.
Eleven volumes bound in green cloth. Uniform edition in box.
$16.50 per set. Half morocco $45.00 net. Express prepaid.
The Beloved Vagabond
"'The Beloved Vagabond' is a gently-written, fascinating tale.
Make his acquaintance some dreary, rain-soaked evening and find
the vagabond nerve-thrilling in your own hea^t."
— Chicago Record- Herald.
Septimus
"Septimus is the joy of the year." — American Magazine,
The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
"A literary event of the first importance." — Boston Herald,
" One of those rare and much-to-be-desired stories which keep one
divided between an interested impatience to get on, and an irresis-
tible temptation to linger for full enjoyment by the way."— Zi/Jr.
Where Love Is
**A capital story told with skill.** — New York Evening Sun,
** One of those unusual novels of which the end ia as good a^ the
beginning." — New York Globe.
WILLIAM J. LOCKE
The Usurper
" Contains the hall-mark of genius itself. The plot is masterly in
conception, the descriptions are all vivid flashes from a brilliant
pen. It is impossible to read and not marvel at the skilled work-
manship and the constant dramatic intensity of the incident, situ-
ations and climax," — The Boston Herald,
Derelicts
** Mr. Locke tells his story in a very true, a very moving, and a
very noble book. If any one can read the last chapter with dry
eyes we shall be surprised. * Derelicts * is an impressive, an im-
portant book. Yvonne is a creation that any artist might be proud
oV—The Daily Chronicle,
Idols
"One of the very few distinguished novels of this present book
season." — The Daily Mail.
" A brilliantly written and eminently readable book."
— The London Daily Telegraph,
A Study in Shadows
♦'Mr. Locke has achieved a distinct success in this novel. He has
struck many emotional chords, and struck them all with a firm,
sure hand. In the relations between Katherine and Raine he had
a delicate problem to handle, and he has handled it delicately."
— The Daily Chronicle.
The White Dove
" It is an interesting story. The characters are strongly conceived
and vividly presented, and the dramatic moments are powerfully
realized." — The Morning Post,
The Demagogue and Lady Phayre
"Think of Locke's clever books. Then think of a book as differ-
ent from any cf these as one can well imagine — that will be Mr.
Locke's new book." — New York World,
At the Gate of Samaria
♦' William J. Locke's novels are nothing if not unusuaL They are
marked by a quaint originality. The habitual novel reader inevi*
tably is grateful for a refreshing sense of escaping the common*
plao« parth of conclusion. " — Chicago Record- Herald, ^
14 DAY USE
RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED
LOAN DEPT.
This book Is due on the last date stamped below,
or on the date to which renewed. Renewals only:
Tel. No. 642-3405
Renewals may be made 4 days prior to date due.
Renewed books are subject to immediate recall.
g[;rp jfi AUG 13 73-1 PM
JUL 1 7 1977
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