What else is talent but a name for experience, practice,
appropriation, incorporation, from the times of our forefathers?
--FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.
A century is a mere clock-tick in eternity, but measured by human
events it is a hundred long years. Napoleon Bonaparte, born in 1768,
became an officer of artillery and gravedigger for an epoch. Born in
1868, he might have become a journeyman genius of the boulevards, a
Franco-Yankee trust magnate, or the democratic boss of Kansas City. And
so, contrariwise, George Bernard Shaw, born in 1756 instead of 1856,
might have become a gold-stick-in-waiting at the Court of St. James or
Archbishop of Canterbury. The accident that made him what he is was one
of time. He saw the light after, instead of before Charles Darwin.
Darwin is dead now, and the public that reads the newspapers remembers
him only as the person who first publicly noted the fact that men
look a great deal like monkeys. But his soul goes marching on. Thomas
Huxley and Herbert Spencer, like a new Ham and a new Shem, spent their
lives seeing to that. From him, through Huxley, we have appendicitis,
the seedless orange, and our affable indifference to hell. Through
Spencer, in like manner, we have Nietzsche, Sudermann, Hauptmann,
Ibsen, our annual carnivals of catechetical revision, the stampede for
church union, and the aforesaid George Bernard Shaw. Each and all of
these men and things, it is true, might have appeared if Darwin were
yet unborn. Ibsen might have written “A Doll’s House,” and a rash synod
or two might have turned impertinent search-lights upon the doctrine
of infant damnation. It is possible, certainly, but it is supremely,
colossally, and overwhelmingly improbable.
Why? Simply because before Darwin gave the world “The Origin
of Species” the fight against orthodoxy, custom, and authority
was perennially and necessarily a losing one. On the side of
the defense were ignorance, antiquity, piety, organization, and
respectability--twelve-inch, wire-wound, rapid-fire guns, all of them.
In the hands of the scattered, half-hearted, unorganized attacking
parties there were but two weapons--the blowpipe of impious doubt and
the bludgeon of sacrilege. Neither, unsupported, was very effective.
Voltaire, who tried both, scared the defenders a bit and for a while
there was a great pother and scurrying about, but when the smoke
cleared away the walls were just as strong as before and the drawbridge
was still up. One had to believe or be damned. There was no compromise
and no middle ground.
And so, when Darwin bobbed up, armed with a new-fangled dynamite gun
that hurled shells charged with a new shrapnel--facts--the defenders
laughed at the novel weapon and looked forward to slaying its bearer.
Spencer, because he ventured to question Genesis, lost his best friend.
Huxley, for an incautious utterance, was barred from the University
of Oxford. And then of a sudden, there was a deafening roar and a
blinding flash--and down went the walls. Ramparts of authority that
had resisted doubts fell like hedge-rows before facts, and there began
an intellectual reign of terror that swept like a whirlwind through
Europe, America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. For six thousand years it
had been necessary, in defending a doctrine, to show only that it was
respectable or sacred. Since 1859, it has been needful to prove its
truth.
It will take the perspective of centuries to reveal to us the exact
metes and bounds of Darwin’s influence. He himself probably gave little
thought to it. His own business in life was the investigation of
biological phenomena and he was too busy at that to take an interest in
politics or ethics. But his new method of assailing tradition appealed
to men laboring in far distant vineyards, and soon there was in
progress a grand assault-at-arms that left orthodoxy and custom dying
on the field. Huxley led the physicians and Spencer the metaphysicians.
Every time the former overturned an old theory of matter, the latter
pricked an old maxim of ethics. And so the search for the ultimate
verities, which had been a pariah hiding in cellars, like anarchism or
polygamy, became the spirit of the times. Whenever custom or tradition
reared one of its hydra-heads, there was a champion ready to strike it
down.
The practical result of this was that seekers after the truth, growing
bold with success, began attacking virtues as well as vices. And herein
you will find the fundamental difference between the philosophers
before Darwin and those after him. The _Spectator_, in the ’teens
of the eighteenth century, inveighed against marital infidelity--an
amusement counted among the scarlet sins since the days of Moses.
Ibsen, a century and a half later, asked if there might not be evil,
too, in unreasoning fidelity. If you pursue this little inquiry to its
close, you will observe that George Bernard Shaw, in nearly all of
his plays and novels, follows Ibsen rather than Addison. Sometimes he
lends his ear to one of the two classes of pioneers he mentions in “The
Quintessence of Ibsen,” and sometimes to the other, but it is always to
the pioneers. Either he is exhibiting a virtue as a vice in disguise,
or exhibiting a vice as a virtue in vice’s clothing. In this fact lies
the excuse for considering him a world-figure. He stands in a sense
as an embodiment of the _welt-geist_, which is a word invented by the
Germans to designate world-spirit or tendency of the times.