ENTER--G.B.S.
Most of the distinguished personalities of the Eighteen Nineties
challenged somebody or something. George Bernard Shaw challenged
everybody and everything. He began the period as one entering the
lists, and he has tilted more or less successfully ever since.
No other man of the time broke so many lances as he, and looking
backwards one is filled with amazement at his prodigality of ideas
and wit, his persistent audacity and unfailing cheerfulness. Yet
these very qualities limited his effectiveness, for it took even “the
intellectuals,” whose high priest he became, twenty years to realise
that he was in earnest and a genius. G.B.S. was Challenge incarnate--a
rampant note of interrogation, eternally asking us uncomfortable
questions about our most cherished habits. Why, for instance, we
ate meat? Why we vivisected animals? Why we owned property? Why we
tolerated such a brainless drama--such unimaginative art--such low
wages--such long hours of labour--such inconvenient houses--such
adulteration--such dirty cities--such illogical morals--such dead
religions--in short, such a chaotic civilisation? And he did not wait
for us to answer his innumerable questions; he answered them himself,
or provoking a defence by a process of irritation, he smashed our
replies with the nicest of dialectical art; tempting us in the pauses
of our bewilderment with a new vision of life.
In the year 1890 Bernard Shaw was hardly a name to those who were
outside of convinced Socialist and revolutionary circles, although his
articles on music, over the pseudonym _Corno di Bassetto_, in
_The Star_ (1888–1890), afterwards continued in _The World_
from 1890–1894, made him the subject of discussion in musical circles.
Socialists knew him as a tireless and effective propagandist of the
collectivism upheld by the Fabian Society, of which organisation he
was one of the most able members, and as the editor of the famous
_Fabian Essays in Socialism_ (1889), which contained two essays by
himself, one of which had been delivered before the Economic Section
at the Bath Meeting of the British Association, in the preceding year.
He was also known in the inner circles of Socialism as a persistent
enemy of the Marxian theory of value, which he attacked on every
possible occasion. He was introduced to a wider public as a result of
the first production of Ibsen’s plays in London. _Rosmersholm_,
_Ghosts_ and _Hedda Gabler_ had been performed by the Stage
Society, and the astonishment of the dramatic critics had expressed
hopeless bewilderment and surprise in a venomous Press attack. The year
before Shaw had lectured upon Henrik Ibsen before the Fabian Society at
the St James’ Restaurant, and this lecture, rewritten in the form of a
reply to the critics, was produced as a book in 1891, under the title
of _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_. And in 1892 he followed up
this defence of the modern drama with a play of his own, _Widowers’
Houses_, which was produced by Mr J. T. Grein at the Royalty Theatre
and published in book form during the same year.
Between 1879 and 1883 Bernard Shaw began his literary career by writing
five novels. The results were not encouraging from the publishing
side, four only, after many vicissitudes, achieving print, and one
only, _Cashel Byron’s Profession_, receiving anything approaching
recognition from Press or public. So, checked but undismayed, he
turned, like more than one unsuccessful novelist, to the sister art of
drama. The rest of the decade was devoted to laying the foundation of
that reputation which has placed him in the forefront of the modern
dramatic movement. Between 1892 and 1896 he wrote, besides _Widowers’
Houses_:--_The Philanderer: A Topical Comedy_; _Mrs Warren’s
Profession: A Play_; _Arms and the Man: A Comedy_; _Candida:
A Mystery_; _The Man of Destiny: A Trifle_; and _You Never
Can Tell: A Comedy_. These were afterwards collected and published
in 1898 in two volumes called _Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant_,
prefaced by one of those essays which are his favourite medium for the
interpretation of himself and his ideas to a shy-witted public. Three
other plays, _The Devil’s Disciple_, _Cæsar and Cleopatra_,
and _Captain Brassbound’s Conversion_, followed, and were
published, in the volume called _Three Plays for Puritans_, in
1901. Public performances of most of the plays were given, but it was
not until the dawn of the new century and the historic Vedrenne-Barker
repertoire season at the Court Theatre (1904–1907) that the general
playgoing public was convinced of even the entertainment value of these
remarkable dramas. But lack of public appreciation sat lightly on the
shoulders of Bernard Shaw. Seemingly possessed of exhaustless energy,
and quite indifferent to neglect, he went on with his work, putting
his ideas and arguments into such essays as the _Impossibilities of
Anarchism_ (1893); _The Perfect Wagnerite_ (1898); _Fabianism
and the Empire_ (1900); and into the long series of dramatic
criticisms contributed to _The Saturday Review_ between 1895 and
1898. Whenever occasion offered he carried his warfare into current
polemics by means of letters to the Press, and one of these, attacking
Max Nordau’s _Degeneration_, published in the American Anarchist
paper _Liberty_ (27th July 1895), probably forms a record of its
kind, for it fills practically the whole of that issue of the paper,
and has since been published in a volume entitled _The Sanity of
Art_. He also associated himself with the more typical literary
movement of the period by contributing an essay “On Going to Church” to
_The Savoy_.
In all this work Bernard Shaw assumed the rôle of critic. The newly
awakened social conscience found in him a willing and effective
instrument, and despite his unabashed and often self-announced
cleverness, the intellectual vice of the time, mere “brilliance,”
critical or otherwise, was rarely for him an end in itself, as was
the wit of Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm. His cleverness subserved
a creative end, an end which looked forward towards a new and
resplendent civilisation. It was the sharp edge of the sword of
purpose. He did not scruple to enlist the forces of art in his service,
and his plays, therefore, are invariably didactic, though relieved
from dullness by abundant wit, much humour and vivid flashes of
characterisation. Such plays, for instance, as _Widowers’ Houses_
and _Mrs Warren’s Profession_ are pure sociology in the form
of drama, or rather melodrama, for Shaw is the melodramatist of the
intellect. He seeks to do for the head what Charles Reade sought to
do for the heart, and there is no fundamental difference between the
inspiration at the back of _Widowers’ Houses_ and _It’s Never
Too Late to Mend_: both are dramatised tracts.
Art for art’s sake had come to its logical conclusion in decadence, and
Bernard Shaw joined issue with the ascendant spirit of the times, whose
more recent devotees have adopted the expressive phrase: art for life’s
sake. It is probable that the decadents meant much the same thing, but
they saw life as intensive and individual, whereas the later view is
universal in scope. It roams extensively over humanity, realising the
collective soul. The decadent art idea stood for individuals, and saw
humanity only as a panoramic background. The ascendant view promotes
the background to a front place; it sees life communally and sees it
whole, and refuses to allow individual encroachments. Bernard Shaw
upheld this vision of life, and strove to square it with his own inborn
and emphatic individuality. He considered it legitimate to use art to
establish and extend his ideas. “Fine art,” he said, “is the subtlest,
the most seductive, the most effective means of moral propagandism in
the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive
even this exception in favour of the art of the stage, because it works
by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving
to crowds of unobservant, unreflecting people to whom real life means
nothing.” In the epistolary essay to _Liberty_ he emphasised and
detailed his sense of the moral value of art, revealing his divergence
from the Ruskin-Morris view of art as joyful work, as well as from the
views of Gautier and Baudelaire:
“The claim of art to our respect must stand or fall with the validity
of its pretension to cultivate and refine our senses and faculties
until seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting become highly
conscious and critical acts with us, protesting vehemently against
ugliness, noise, discordant speech, frowsy clothing and foul air,
and taking keen interest and pleasure in beauty, in music, and in
the open air, besides making us insist, as necessary for comfort and
decency, on clean, wholesome, handsome fabrics to wear, and utensils of
fine material and elegant workmanship to handle. Further, art should
refine our sense of character and conduct, of justice and sympathy,
greatly heightening our self-knowledge, self-control, precision of
action, and considerateness, and making us intolerant of baseness,
cruelty, injustice and intellectual superficiality or vulgarity. The
worthy artist or craftsman is he who responds to this cultivation
of the physical or moral senses by feeding them with pictures,
musical compositions, pleasant houses and gardens, good clothes and
fine implements, poems, fictions, essays and dramas, which call the
heightened senses and ennobled faculties into pleasurable activity.
The greatest artist is he who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by
supplying works of a higher beauty and a higher interest than have yet
been perceived, succeeds, after a brief struggle with its strangeness,
in adding this fresh extension of sense to the heritage of the race.
This is why we value art: this is why we feel that the iconoclast and
the Puritan are attacking something made holier, by solid usefulness,
than their own theories of purity; this is why art has won the
privileges of religion; so that London shopkeepers who would fiercely
resent a compulsory church rate, who do not know ‘Yankee Doodle’ from
‘God save the Queen,’ and who are more interested in the photograph of
the latest celebrity than in the Velasquez portraits in the National
Gallery, tamely allow the London County Council to spend their money
on bands, on municipal art inspectors, and on plaster casts from the
antique.”
Bernard Shaw strove to add to the heritage of the race a keener sense
of reality. He called it “the sense of fact.” And it was in pursuit
of this idea that he defended the art of the French Impressionists
and Richard Wagner and Henrik Ibsen. Much of his humour is based
on the portrayal of the incongruity between those who see things
clearly and those who don’t; between the faculty of seeing life and
experiencing life with frank individual conviction, and the habit of
seeing and living by the proxies of convention and tradition. His wit
is designedly explosive, but only apparently impudent and irreverent,
for it seeks to startle a moribund society out of its stultifying
habits, duties and ideals. In _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_ he
upholds realism against idealism, with the plays of Ibsen as text. But
his sense of reality does not take reason for its basis. The basis
of the new realism is the will. Reason takes the subsidiary place of
defender of the will, and will and faith are treated as one. Reason
does not indicate direction to the will, it proves that wilfulness is
right--after the act. Shaw says, in effect, do what you want to do and
then prove you are right. It will thus be seen that anything in the
nature of an ideal, a formal duty or a fixed habit must necessarily
conflict with the realist attitude. “The realist ... loses patience
with ideals altogether, and sees in them only something to blind us,
something to numb us, something whereby instead of resisting death, we
can disarm it by committing suicide.” He associates his attack upon
ideals with the idea of stripping the mask from the face of reality
which is life.
Rationalism found a convinced and subtle enemy in this new master of
dialectics, for those whose minds could survive the laughter provoked
by the humorous presentation of the Shavian doctrine realised quickly
enough, and, if they were rationalists, tragically enough, that the
moral and religious system rationalism had expended so much energy
in attacking was really rationalism triumphant. Shaw announced that
civilisation was rational but wrong. Yet in the Eighteen Nineties he
had no place for mysticism in his view of life. The rationalists came
to grief by reasoning about something, and Shaw did not think it
possible to improve matters by becoming a mystic and “reasoning about
nothing.” Since then he has modified his view, but now as then his
sole aim has been the conquest of reality. This is brought out nowhere
so clearly as in the “Interlude” in _Man and Superman_, and in
one passage, that in which Don Juan explains his ideas of heaven and
hell, we have the quintessence of Shavianism. “Do you suppose heaven
is like earth?” Don Juan asks Ana; “where people persuade themselves
that what is done can be undone by repentance; that what is spoken can
be unspoken by withdrawing it; that what is true can be annihilated
by a general agreement to give it the lie? No: heaven is the home of
the masters of reality: that is why I am going thither.” Ana answers
that she has had quite enough reality on earth and that she is going
to heaven for happiness. Don Juan advises her to remain in hell for
“hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is
the only refuge from heaven, which is ... the home of the masters of
reality, and from earth which is the home of the slaves of reality.”
And again he says he would enjoy the contemplation of that which
interests him above all things--“namely, Life: the force that ever
strives to attain greater power of contemplating itself.” The end of
this contemplation is to be the creation of a brain capable of wielding
an imagination fine enough to help Life in its struggle upward.
With such a conception of life and its purpose Bernard Shaw entered the
lists, advocating many causes which might tend towards the realisation
of his idea. He managed to combine a firm anti-romantic attitude
with convinced humanitarian preferences. Thus he became vegetarian,
anti-vaccinationist, anti-vivisectionist and Socialist. His arguments
and advocacy were able, and therefore useful to all of these causes,
but it was as a Socialist that his genius for propaganda displayed
itself to best advantage. Long before the outer public had heard
of him, innumerable people whose minds were ripening under social
and industrial discontent came under the spell of his eloquence in
revolutionary club rooms, in Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park and other
open-air forums of the people, and at the meetings of the Fabian
Society. It was at the Fabian Society that he was heard to best
advantage, for there he was matched in debate with some of the keenest
intelligences and quickest minds in London.
To Socialism, however, he contributed no original thought. He was
in the main content to advocate and buttress with eloquence and
dialectic the collectivist opportunism of his friend, Sidney Webb.
The constitutional methods of Webb and the Fabian Society have indeed
seemed at times difficult to square with Bernard Shaw’s written views
of what ought to be the true attitude of a revolutionist. Particularly
is this obvious in such later plays as _Man and Superman_ and
_Major Barbara_, where there are expressions which it is not easy
to construe otherwise than as advocacy of direct action and revolt.
Even in his Fabian utterances he has not always taken the orthodox
Fabian line, which is always uncompromisingly middle-class, as, for
instance, in his insistence on the complete acceptance of the idea of
economic equality as the only basis of the Socialist state, and it is
conceivable that, if the revolutionary philosophy of Shaw’s plays were
pushed to its logical conclusion, their author would find himself in
the ranks of those Socialists who believe less in parliamentary and
legal processes of reform than in active revolt.
Bernard Shaw’s original contribution to the intellectual awakening
of the Eighteen Nineties was not so much an idea as a new attitude
of approaching all ideas and all facts. The approach by criticism
is by no means a novel method in itself, but it is always a novelty
in the stable mental atmosphere of English and, indeed, Teutonic
culture. Anything in the nature of criticism and its correlatives,
satire and caricature, are treated by most people in this country
as mere irreverence. Shaw has always been considered irreverent,
though probably few more earnest and essentially religious men ever
existed. But the cumulative effect of his wit has moved a mountain
range of indifference, and although the majority of those who go to
his plays go to laugh and remain to laugh (often beyond reason), many
remain to laugh and pray. These plays have had a more immediate and
more intelligent success in Germany, but they have attracted little
attention in France. This is not quite so hard to explain as it might
appear at first sight. In England we could not see the seriousness
of Shaw because his critical attack being local hit us before his
humour could win home. In Germany a similar mental _milieu_
greeted him more readily because his irreverence, apparently the
outcome of criticism of British institutions and morals, but really
a criticism of modern civilised morality, did not hit Germany so
hard, and consequently his wit was free to carry on its subtle trade
in philosophy. But in France Shavianism was no new thing. Criticism
had been freer in that country for over a century than in any other
country in the world. Wit was no rarity; diabolonian humour no uncommon
weapon, and idea-play no novelty. France in fact was the birthplace of
modernity, and the modernity of Shaw was outmoded there before we began
to notice its existence here. Whilst England and Germany were murmuring
delightedly “brilliant”--“daring”--“clever”--at each successive Shavian
sally, the land of Voltaire and Rousseau, Baudelaire and Zola, Anatole
France and Brieux, could only say: “_Vieux jeu!_”--Queen Anne’s
dead!
Shaw’s success in England has not been in any way national. It is
at best a class acceptance and generally bourgeois. The mass of the
people know him only as a name frequently appearing in the papers,
and often enough in connection with some statement or idea which to
them seemed incomprehensible or freakish. The reason is not far to
seek, for Bernard Shaw is an apostle to the Middle Class, as, indeed,
he is a product of that class. He displays all its characteristics in
his personality and his art, what are called his eccentricities of
thought and expression being often little more than advertisements of
his own respectability. Puritanical, economical, methodical, deeply
conscious of responsibility and a sound man of affairs, he sums up in
his own personality all the virtues of the class satirised by Ibsen in
_The Pillars of Society_. An examination of his most “advanced”
ideas urges the point; for even his dialectic is bourgeois from its
nicest subtleties to its most outrageous explosions. When he shocks
the middle classes, which he does very often, he shocks them with the
sort of squibs they would let off to shock themselves for fun; and when
he argues with them he uses precisely the kind of argument they use
in defence of the things they already know and like. As a Socialist
he invariably appeals to the bourgeois instinct of self-interest;
and much of his philosophy is a modern variation of the bourgeois
ideals of self-help and self-reliance--namely, self-assertion. He
tells the bourgeoisie that they are, politically, the neglected and
abused class, and advises them to retaliate upon their oppressors by
adopting a Socialism broad-based in the Utopian dream of a nationalised
respectability. And when his interested, but by no means convinced,
hearers stumble over the horrible thought that they may have to abandon
the financial basis of their estate, Bernard Shaw produces a defence of
money which turns consternation into delight and Socialist philosophy
into self-interest.
All of which does not alter the freshness of his gospel nor the
veritability of his unique contribution to modern thought. As a critic
he has made it possible for all who desire to do so to look at life
in their own way, and in doing so to surround their egoism with a
margin of sweet tolerance; he has philosophised common-sense, and
made anti-climax a popular literary, conversational and oratorical
trick; and he has gone far towards reintroducing intelligence to the
British theatre and proving that in some circumstances an intelligent
drama is a sound commercial proposition. Above all he has demonstrated
the dramatic possibilities of discussion, and by so doing linked up
the literary drama with Platonic dialogue, and, at the same time, he
has left the theatre free to develop at the right moment its natural
emotional and imaginative tradition.
If circumstances have forced Bernard Shaw to give to the middle classes
what was meant for humanity, it is consoling to think that his teaching
is big enough and good enough for the latter. In the essence of things
there is nothing in his teaching or his ideas fundamentally opposed to
broad human needs. Rightly understood, Shaw’s gospel is universal, and
none the less so because it is eclectic and has been assimilated and
selected by one of the most able and distinguished minds our nation has
produced from the thought of the most powerful and original of modern
intelligences. Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Henrik Ibsen and Samuel Butler have all contributed material to augment
that gospel of reality which Shaw has preached with so much original
eloquence and wit. The Eighteen Nineties were largely indifferent to
the high and bewildering purpose of this teaching, although it is
not easy to imagine an atmosphere better suited for its development
either on the part of its creator or of his possible followers. It was
reserved for the new century to recognise Shaw’s great gifts by wide
discussion and much protest, and it is certain that protest will die
down when the ripe sanity and easy common-sense of his purpose is seen
through the satiric _diablerie_ of the mask he chooses to wear.
No other modern writer in this country save Samuel Butler, and none
in Europe save Tolstoy and Ibsen, have looked at life so frankly as
Bernard Shaw. Zola, generally considered an arch-realist, but really a
romantic, was so obsessed by the shibboleth of scientific accumulation
of evidence that his vision is as blurred as that of Herbert Spencer;
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both looked at life through the distorting
glass of theory; Ruskin and Carlyle saw only parts of life. But Tolstoy
and Ibsen, Butler and Shaw possessed the faculty of looking at life
with photographic vision. Realists of this type are the outcome of
that impulsion towards frankness which produced the Impressionists.
Manet and Degas are their prototypes in the graphic arts; and just as
these artists demanded and accepted with all its consequences the full
reality and accent of light, so the artist-philosophers, working in the
same spirit, allowed light absolute freedom in the realms of observing
intellect and informing imagination.
To look at life until you see it clearly is Bernard Shaw’s avowed aim.
His concern being with humanity and the fine arts, he has made it his
business to see these manifestations of life clearly and deduce his
philosophy from them without fear of what has been said or believed or
experienced. And although he now sets a higher value on contemplation,
in the Nineties he knew that contemplation was not enough in itself.
Writing of life, in 1896, he said: “Only by intercourse with men and
women can we learn anything about it. This involves an active life,
not a contemplative one; for unless you do something in the world, you
can have no real business to transact with men; and unless you love
and are loved, you can have no intimate relations with them. And you
must transact business, wirepull politics, discuss religion, give and
receive hate, love and friendship, with all sorts of people before
you can acquire the sense of humanity. If you are to acquire the
sense sufficiently to be a philosopher, you must do all these things
unconditionally.” Facing life in suchwise himself he has hammered out
his own religion of art, activity and contemplation, and this religion
finds a voice in all his work, and is summed up in many passages, but
in none so intimately and so personally as in a passage in _The
Savoy_ essay, “On Going to Church”: “Any place where men dwell,
village or city, is a reflection of the consciousness of every single
man. In my consciousness there is a market, a garden, a dwelling, a
workshop, a lovers’ walk--above all, a cathedral. My appeal to the
master-builder is: Mirror this cathedral for me in enduring stone; make
it with hands; let it direct its sure and clear appeal to my senses,
so that when my spirit is vaguely groping after an elusive mood my
eye shall be caught by the skyward tower, showing me where, within
the cathedral, I may find my way to the cathedral within me.” Reading
these words one might have paused, wondering whether Shaw would always
believe mysticism to be argument about nothing, and whether his work
might not bridge the rationalist gap between the old mysticism and the
new.