SIX MAJOR PROPHETS
BY
EDWIN E. SLOSSON, M.S., Ph.D.
LITERARY EDITOR OF "THE INDEPENDENT"
ASSOCIATE IN THE COLUMBIA SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM
AUTHOR OF "MAJOR PROPHETS OF TO-DAY," ETC.
Whoever dies without recognizing the prophet of his time dies the death
of a pagan.
Mohammedan proverb.
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1917
TO MY SON PRESTON WILLIAM SLOSSON
WHOSE THOUGHTS AND PHRASES I HAVE MORE FREELY INCORPORATED THAN I AM
WILLING TO ACKNOWLEDGE ELSEWHERE THAN ON THIS PAGE, THIS VOLUME IS
GRATEFULLY DEDICATED
[Illustration: G. B. Shaw]
PREFACE
A few years ago it occurred to me that there were living on the same
planet and at the same time as myself some interesting people whom I
had never seen and did not know so much about as I should. Since they
or I might die at any moment, I determined not to delay longer. So I
prepared a list of twelve men who seemed to me most worth knowing, and
then I set out to see them; not with the hope of becoming personally
acquainted with them or even with the object of interviewing them,
but chiefly to satisfy myself that they really existed. One does
not go to Switzerland to find out how high the Alps are or how they
look. The traveler can get their altitude from Baedeker and their
appearance from photographs, but if he is to talk about them with any
sense of self-confidence he must have come within hailing distance of
the mountains themselves. It is sufficient to say that I got close
enough to the Alps I had chosen to be able to vouch for their actuality.
The men I selected for study were those who, whether they called
themselves philosophers or not, seemed to me to have a definite
philosophy of life, those who had a message for their own times of
sufficient importance and distinctiveness to merit public attention.
It is my purpose in these sketches to show the trend and importance
of these diverse theories, so that a reader who had not had the
opportunity to range over the complete works of a dozen authors
might find which of them was best adapted to serve him as "guide,
philosopher, and friend." In a word, my part is merely to act as
the host at a reception who introduces his guests and then leaves
them to follow up such acquaintanceships as seem profitable. My aim
is exposition rather than criticism. Although I have not thought it
necessary absolutely to suppress my own opinions, I trust this has
not prevented me from giving a fair and sufficiently sympathetic
presentation of each man's views in turn.
My list of the "Twelve Major Prophets of Today" consisted of the
following names: Maurice Maeterlinck, Henri Bergson, Henri Poincaré,
Elie Metchnikoff, Wilhelm Ostwald, Ernst Haeckel, George Bernard
Shaw, Herbert George Wells, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, F. C. S.
Schiller, John Dewey, and Rudolf Eucken. I had not taken nationality
into consideration, but I found that I had chosen four from England,
three from Germany, two from France, and one each from Belgium, Russia,
and the United States of America. Four of the twelve were professors
of philosophy; four were men of science, one of these a mathematician,
one a physician, one a zoologist, one a chemist; and four were men of
letters, authors of novels, dramas, or essays. The twelve sketches
appeared in _The Independent_ during the last few years, but they have
been considerably extended for book publication. The first six named
above were published in the volume "Major Prophets of To-day." The
other six are given in the following pages.
EDWIN E. SLOSSON
CONTENTS
Preface
I George Bernard Shaw
II H. G. Wells
III G. K. Chesterton
IV F. C. S. Schiller
V John Dewey
VI Rudolf Eucken
LIST OF PORTRAITS
George Bernard Shaw
H. G. Wells
G. K. Chesterton
F. C. S. Schiller
John Dewey
Rudolf Eucken
To write a book about a man who has written books about
himself is an impertinence which only an irresistible charm
of manner can carry off. The unpardonable way of doing it,
and the commonest, is to undertake to tell the public what a
writer has already told them himself, and tell it worse or
tell it wrong.
G. B. SHAW.
SIX MAJOR PROPHETS
CHAPTER I
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Dramatic Critic of Life
I am a journalist, proud of it, deliberately cutting out of
my works all that is not journalism, convinced that nothing
that is not journalism will live long as literature, or be
of any use whilst it does live. I deal with all periods, but
I never study any period but the present; and as a dramatist
I have no clue to any historical or other personage save
that part of him which is also myself.... The man who writes
about himself and his own time is the only man who writes
about all people and about all time.--G. B. S., in "The
Sanity of Art."
August 4, 1914, cuts time in two like a knife. The continuity of human
progress in science, arts, letters, commerce, philosophy, everything,
was broken off at that point--to be taken up again, who knows when?
Nothing in the world can remain quite the same as before. Everything
is seen in a new light. All our old ideas, even the most ancient
and most reverenced, will have to be taken out and looked over to see
how many of them remain intact and useful, just as after an earthquake
one overhauls the china closet. "The transvaluation of all values",
which Nietzsche looked for, has come to pass sooner than he expected,
although the results of this reëstimation are not likely to be what
he anticipated. It is not merely that the geographies will have to be
revised and the histories rewritten, but all books will be classified
as antebellum or postbellum literature. It will, however, not be
necessary to mark them A. B. or P. B., for they will by their style
of thought and language bear an indelible though invisible date with
reference to this line of demarcation.
We are already beginning to look back upon the antebellum days as a
closed period, and those who were conspicuous in it are being seen in
an historical perspective such as the lapse of a generation of ordinary
times is needed to produce. Some reputations are shrinking, others
are rising, as mountains seem from a departing train to rearrange
themselves according to their true height. The true prophets are
becoming distinguishable from the false.
Among those who have taken the test and stand higher than before is
George Bernard Shaw. Whether he will write better plays than before
remains to be seen. Perhaps he will write no more of any kind. But
those he has written will be regarded with more respect because we can
see their essential truth, whereas before we feared lest we might be
merely fascinated by their glitter. Warnings which the world took for
jokes because of their fantastic guise now turn out too terribly real,
and advice which the world ignored would better have been heeded.
Few writers have as little to take back on account of the war as Shaw,
although few have expressed such decided opinions in such extreme
language on so many topics. For instance, Kipling's "The Bear that
Walks Like a Man" makes queer reading now that England is fighting to
give Russia what then she was ready to fight to prevent her getting.
But the full significance of Shaw's fable farce of "Androcles and the
Lion" is now for the first time being realized. The philosophy of
this, his most frivolous and serious play, is summed up by Ferrovius,
a converted giant of the Ursus type, who finds it impossible to keep
to his Christian principle of nonresistance when brought into the
arena. The natural man rises in him and he slays six gladiators
single-handed. This delights the emperor, who thereupon offers him a
post in the Pretorian Guards which he had formerly refused. The fallen
and victorious Ferrovius accepts, saying:
In my youth I worshiped Mars, the god of war. I turned from
him to serve the Christian God; but to-day the Christian God
forsook me; and Mars overcame me and took back his own. The
Christian God is not yet. He will come when Mars and I are
dust; but meanwhile I must serve the gods that are, not the
God that will be. Until then I accept service in the Guard,
Caesar.
The great cataclysm does not seem to have changed Shaw's opinions one
iota, but all England is changed, and so he appears in a different
light. More of his countrymen agree with what he used to preach to them
than ever before, yet he was never so disliked as he is to-day--which
is saying a great deal. The British press has boycotted him. His
letters, once so sought after by the most dignified journals, now no
longer appear except in _The New Statesman_. His speeches, be they
never so witty and timely, are not reported or even announced.
Consequently those who wish to hear him have to resort to the
advertising expedients of the era before printing. A friend of mine
just back from London tells me that he saw chalked on the side-walk
a notice of a meeting to be addressed by Shaw in some out-of-the-way
hall. Going there, he found it packed with an enthusiastic crowd
gathered to hear Shaw discuss the questions of the day. The
anti-Shavian press said that he had to keep to his house, that he was
afraid to stir abroad for fear of a mob, that his career was over, that
he was exploded, repudiated, disgraced, boycotted, dead and done for.
At the very time when we were reading things like this, he was, as we
since have learned, addressing weekly meetings in one of the largest
halls in London. Reporters who were sent to see him hounded off the
platform witnessed an ovation instead. The audience at his invitation
asked him many questions, but not of a hostile character.
Shaw thrives on unpopularity or at least on public disapproval, which
is not quite the same thing. It is not only that Shaw would rather be
right than Prime Minister; he would rather be leader of the Opposition
than Prime Minister. He would be "in the right with two or three"; in
fact, if his followers increased much beyond the poet's minimum, he
would begin to feel uneasy and suspect that he was wrong.
When Shaw sees a lonely mistreated kitten or a lonely mistreated
theory, his tender heart yearns over it. For instance, when all
his set started sneering at "natural rights" as eighteenth-century
pedantry, he appeared as their champion, and, practically alone among
modern radicals and art lovers, he has dared to commend the Puritans.
The iconoclastic views which he expressed as dramatic and musical
critic in the nineties have been vindicated by events, and now when a
young reader opens for the first time "The Quintessence of Ibsenism",
"The Perfect Wagnerite", and the collection of "Dramatic Opinions and
Essays", he wonders only why Shaw should get so excited about such
conventional and undisputed things. It is no wonder Shaw is "the most
hated man in England." Nothing is more irritating than to say "I told
you so", and he can--and does--ay it oftener than anybody else, unless
it is Doctor Dillon.
Shaw's brain secretes automatically the particular antitoxin needed
to counteract whatever disease may be epidemic in the community at
the time. This injected with some vigor into the veins of thought
may not effect a cure, but always excites a feverish state in the
organism. It is his habit of seeing that there is another side to a
question and calling attention to it at inconvenient times that makes
him so irritating to the public. His opponents tried to intern him
in Coventry as a pro-German on account of his pamphlet, "Commonsense
about the War." But this is almost the only thing produced in England
during the first weeks of the war that reads well now. Compare it with
its numerous replies and see which seems absurd. Doubtless it was not
tactful, it might have been called treasonable, but it certainly was
sensible. Shaw kept his head level when others lost theirs. That was
because he had thought out things in advance and so did not have to
make up his mind in a hurry with the great probability of making it up
wrong. In that pamphlet he presented the case for the Allies in a way
much more convincing to the American mind than many that came to us in
the early days of the war, and his arguments have been strengthened
by the course of events, while others advanced at that time have been
weakened. Shaw was arguing before a neutral and international jury, and
so he did not rest his case on the specious and patriotic pleas that
passed muster at that time with the British public.
As for the charge of pro-Germanism, that may best be met by quoting
from a letter written by him to a friend in Vienna early in 1915. The
language is evidently not pure Shavian. It has been translated into
Austrian-German and thence retranslated into British journalese.
As regards myself, I am not what is called a pro-German. The
Germans would not respect me, were I at such a time as this,
when all thoughts of culture have vanished, not to stand by
my people. But also, I am not an anti-German. The war brings
us all on to the same plane of savagery. Every London coster
can stick his bayonet deeper into the stomach of Richard
Strauss than Richard Strauss would care to do to him.
Militarism has just now compelled me to pay a thousand
pounds war taxation in order that some "brave little
Servian" may be facilitated in cutting your throat or, that
a Russian mujik may cleave your skull in twain, although I
would gladly pay twice that sum to save your life, or to buy
some beautiful picture in Vienna for our National Gallery.
Shaw has always condemned militarism because of the type of mind
it engenders in officers and men. But he has never been opposed to
preparedness or to the use of force. In the London _Daily News_ of
January 1, 1914,--note the date,--he said:
I like courage (like most constitutionally timid civilians)
and the active use of strength for the salvation of the
world. It is good to have a giant's strength and it is not
at all tyrannous to use it like a giant provided you are
a decent sort of giant. What on earth is strength for but
to be used and will any reasonable man tell me that we are
using our strength now to any purpose?
Let us get the value of our money in strength and influence
instead of casting every new cannon in an ecstasy of terror
and then being afraid to aim it at anybody.
At that time, seven months before the storm burst, he not only
anticipated the war, but said that it might be averted,
By politely announcing that war between France and Germany
would be so inconvenient to England that the latter country
is prepared to pledge herself to defend either country if
attacked by the other.
If we are asked how we are to decide which nation is really
the aggressor we can reply that we shall take our choice, or
when the problem is unsolvable we shall toss up, but that we
will take a hand in the war anyhow.
International warfare is an unmitigated nuisance. Have as
much character-building civil war as you like, but there
must be no sowing of dragon's teeth like the Franco-Prussian
War. England can put a stop to such a crime single-handed
easily enough if she can keep her knees from knocking
together in her present militarist fashion.
Of course Shaw may have been wrong in supposing that an open
announcement of Great Britain's determination to enter the war would
have deterred Germany, but as we now know from the White Paper this
same opinion was held by the governments of both France and Russia.
On July 30 the President of France said to the British Ambassador at
Paris that
If His Majesty's Government announced that England would
come to the aid of France in the event of a conflict between
France and Germany as a result of the present differences
between Austria and Servia, there would be no war, for
Germany would at once modify her attitude.
And on July 25, M. Sazonof, the Russian Foreign Minister, said to the
British Ambassador at Petrograd that
He did not believe that Germany really wanted war, but her
attitude was decided by ours. If we took our stand firmly
with France and Russia, there would be no war. If we failed
her now, rivers of blood would flow, and we would in the end
be dragged into war.
Shaw now gives the same advice to the United States that he gave to
his own country before the war, that is, to increase its armament
and not be afraid to use it. In a recent letter to the American
_Intercollegiate Socialist_ he said:
I should strenuously recommend the United States to build
thirty-two new dreadnoughts instead of sixteen, and to spend
two billion dollars on its armament program instead of one.
This would cost only a fraction of the money you are wasting
every year in demoralizing luxury, a good deal of it having
been in the past scattered over the continental countries
which are now using what they saved out of it to slaughter
one another.
If the United States wishes to stop war as an institution,
that is, to undertake the policing of the world, it will
need a very big club for the purpose.
If I were an American statesman I should tell the country
flatly that it should maintain a Pacific navy capable of
resisting an attack from Japan and an Atlantic navy capable
of resisting an attack from England, with Zeppelins on the
same scale, a proportionate land equipment of siege guns,
and so forth. And until the nations see the suicidal folly
of staking everything in the last instance on the ordeal of
battle, no other advice will be honest advice.
In "Major Barbara" Cusins abandons the teaching of Greek to take up
the manufacture of munitions because he has the courage "to make war
on war." It is in this play that is expounded the theory on which
President Wilson based his policy. Lady Britomart tells Cusins: "You
must simply sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and
just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals." But Undershaft,
the munition-maker, replies: "No; none of that. You must keep the true
faith of an Armorer, or you don't come in here." And when Cusins asks:
"What on earth is the true faith of an Armorer?" he answers:
To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for
them, without respect of persons or principles; to
aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to burglar
and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to
all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths,
all follies, all causes and all crimes.... I will take an
order from a good man as cheerfully as from a bad one. If
you good people prefer preaching and shirking to buying my
weapons and fighting the rascals, don't blame me. I can make
cannons; I cannot make courage and conviction.
In this same conversation Shaw also gives a hint of his theology,
when Cusins says to Undershaft: "You have no power. You do not drive
this place; it drives you. And what drives this place?" Undershaft
answers, enigmatically, "A will of which I am a part." This doctrine
of an immanent God working through nature and man to higher things
was developed more definitely in an address which Mr. Shaw delivered
some years ago in the City Temple at the invitation of the Reverend R.
J. Campbell. Here he argued that God created human beings to be "his
helpers and servers, not his sycophants and apologists." Shaw continues:
If my actions are God's nobody can fairly hold me
responsible for them; my conscience is mere lunacy.... But
if I am a part of God, if my eyes are God's eyes, my hands
God's hands, and my conscience God's conscience then also I
share his responsibility for the world; and wo is me if the
world goes wrong!
This position enables him to explain evil on evolutionary principles as
"the Method of Trial and Error." When Blake asks of the tiger, "Did he
who made the lamb make thee?" Shaw conceives the Life-Force as replying:
Yes, it was the best I could devise at the time; but now
that I have evolved something better, part of the work
of that something better, Man, to wit, is to kill out my
earlier attempt. And in due time I hope to evolve Superman,
who will in his turn kill out and supersede Man, whose
abominable cruelties, stupidities and follies have utterly
disappointed me.
In the unactable third act of his "Man and Superman",[1] this theology
is put into the mouths of two most unpromising preachers, Don Juan and
the Devil. Here is found one of the most eloquent arraignments of war
in all literature. It is, remember, the Devil who is speaking:
I tell you that in the arts of life Man invests nothing;
but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and
produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of
plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt to-day
eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants
of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has
not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion
of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes
out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets
loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular
energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe
of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a
bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with
machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had
wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters
and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles; they are
toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat.
There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed
and sloth. His heart is in his weapons.... Man measures his
force by his destructiveness.... In the old chronicles you
read of earthquakes and pestilences, and are told that these
showed the power and majesty of God and the littleness of
Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles. In a battle
two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and
explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others
chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces
as they fly. And this, the chronicle concludes, shows the
greatness and majesty of empires, and the littleness of
the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about the
streets yelling with delight, and egg their Governments on
to spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter,
whilst the strongest ministers dare not spend an extra penny
in the pound against the poverty and pestilence in which
they themselves daily walk.... The plague, the famine, the
earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action;
the tiger and the crocodile were too easily satiated and not
cruel enough; something more constantly, more ruthlessly,
more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something
was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows
and the executioner; of the sword and gun; above all,
of justice, duty, patriotism, and all the other isms by
which even those clever enough to be humanely disposed are
persuaded to become the most destructive of all destroyers.
Three years before the war Shaw wrote a little satirical skit, "Press
Cuttings",[2] which was deemed so dangerous to both Britain and Germany
that the censors of both countries agreed in prohibiting its production
on the stage. Since the British censor seemed to fear that the
principal characters, "Balsquith" and "Mitchener", might be taken by
the public as referring to certain well-known statesmen, Shaw offered
to change the names to "Bones" and "Johnson." But even that concession
would not satisfy the censor's scruples, so the play was never publicly
put on the stage, though, since there was then no censorship of
literature, it was published as a book. Here is a bit of the dialogue:
_Balsquith_--The Germans have laid down four more
Dreadnoughts.
_Mitchener_--Then you must lay down twelve.
_Balsquith_--Oh, yes; it's easy to say that; but think of
what they'll cost.
_Mitchener_--Think of what it would cost to be invaded by
Germany and forced to pay an indemnity of five hundred
millions....
_Balsquith_--After all, why should the Germans invade us?
_Mitchener_--Why shouldn't they? What else have their army
to do? What else are they building a navy for?
_Balsquith_--Well, we never think of invading Germany.
_Mitchener_--Yes, we do. I have thought of nothing else
for the last ten years. Say what you will, Balsquith, the
Germans have never recognized, and until they get a stern
lesson, they never _will_ recognize, the plain fact that the
interests of the British Empire are paramount, and that the
command of the sea belongs by nature to England.
_Balsquith_--But if they wont recognize it, what can I do?
_Mitchener_--Shoot them down.
_Balsquith_--I cant shoot them down.
_Mitchener_--Yes, you can. You dont realize it; but if you
fire a rifle into a German he drops just as surely as a
rabbit does.
_Balsquith_--But dash it all, man, a rabbit hasn't got a
rifle and a German has. Suppose he shoots you down.
_Mitchener_--Excuse me, Balsquith; but that consideration is
what we call cowardice in the army. A soldier always assumes
that he is going to shoot, not to be shot.
_Balsquith_--Oh, come! I like to hear you military people
talking of cowardice. Why, you spend your lives in an
ecstasy of terror of imaginary invasions. I don't believe
you ever go to bed without looking under it for a burglar.
_Mitchener_--A very sensible precaution,
_Balsquith._ I always take it. And in consequence I've never
been burgled.
_Balsquith_--Neither have I. Anyhow dont you taunt me with
cowardice. I never look under my bed for a burglar. I'm not
always looking under the nation's bed for an invader. And
if it comes to fighting, Im quite willing to fight without
being three to one.
_Mitchener_--These are the romantic ravings of a Jingo
civilian, Balsquith. At least you'll not deny that the
absolute command of the sea is essential to our security.
_Balsquith_--The absolute command of the sea is essential to
the security of the principality of Monaco. But Monaco isn't
going to get it.
_Mitchener_--And consequently Monaco enjoys no security.
What a frightful thing! How do the inhabitants sleep with
the possibility of invasion, of bombardment, continually
present to their minds? Would you have our English slumbers
broken in this way? Are we also to live without security?
_Balsquith_--Yes. Theres no such thing as security in the
world; and there never can be as long as men are mortal.
England will be secure when England is dead, just as the
streets of London will be safe when there is no longer a man
in her streets to be run over, or a vehicle to run over him.
When you military chaps ask for security you are crying for
the moon.
_Mitchener_--Let me tell you, Balsquith, that in these days
of aeroplanes and Zeppelin airships, the question of the
moon is becoming one of the greatest importance. It will be
reached at no very distant date. Can you as an Englishman
tamely contemplate the possibility of having to live
under a German moon? The British flag must be planted there
at all hazards.
The play ends with the establishment of universal military training
and equal suffrage, thus doing away with a militarism that was both
timorous and tyrannical, snobbish and inefficient, and at the same
time making the nation truly democratic. It is characteristic of
Shaw that recently, when the papers were discussing what sort of a
monument should commemorate Edith Cavell, he interjected the unwelcome
suggestion that the country could honor her best by enfranchising her
sex.
There is ever something in Bernard Shaw that suggests the eighteenth
century, the age of Swift and Voltaire and Doctor Johnson. On the
credit side we must reckon lucidity, incisive wit, cleareyed logic,
unashamed common sense, love of discussion and openness to new ideas,
freedom from prejudice of race or class, humanitarian aspiration
--in a word the _Aufklärung_. On the debit side some items must
unhappily be listed also: doctrinaire intellectualism, inability to
see either the limits of one's own doctrines or the point in other
people's, inadequate appreciation of historic institutions and popular
sentiments, contempt for romance, intolerance for science, and
incapacity for poetry.
Shaw seems to have inherited the famous _saeva indignatio_ of his
great countryman, Swift. For all his simple diet he is not so eupeptic
as Chesterton. Chesterton is most closely akin to Dickens, as may be
seen from his sympathetic appreciations of Dickens's works. If I may
be permitted to express the relationship of the four in a mathematical
formula, I should put it:
Shaw: Chesterton = Swift: Dickens.
The mordant wit of the two Irishmen is a very different thing from
the genial humor of the two Englishmen. Chesterton as usual makes a
theological issue out of it. He says of Shaw:
He is not a humorist, but a great wit, almost as great
as Voltaire. Humor 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
consistency in things is a wit--and a Calvinist. The man who
sees 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 impatience with irrelevant
sentiment or obstructive symbol; the constant effort to keep
the soul at its highest pressure and speed. His instincts
upon all social customs and questions are Puritan. His
favorite author is 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 a Puritan prejudice.
When Shaw in the preface of his "Plays for Puritans" declared himself
"a Puritan in art" it was regarded as one of his jokes. So it was,
but, as the world has found out since, his jokes are not nonsense. The
main reason why the assumption and ascription of the term "Puritan"
to Shaw was thought absurd was because of the prevalent misconception
of what sort of people the Puritans were. The word in its common
acceptance implies orthodoxy, conventionality, prudishness, asceticism.
Now the real Puritan was a revolutionary of the most radical type. Of
all the socialists, anarchists, and extremists of various views with
whom I am acquainted, there is not one who lives in antagonism to his
conventional contemporaries on so many points as did the Puritan in
his day. Milton's pamphlets in favor of republicanism, free speech,
divorce, and new theology were as scandalous to the seventeenth century
as Shaw's "Revolutionist's Handbook" to the nineteenth. The Puritans
insisted that marriage was a purely civil contract to be made and
annulled by the State, and they even forbade ministers to perform
the ceremony, while Catholics, Roman and Anglican, hold the contrary
theory, that marriage is a religious rite, only performed by priests
and indissoluble. The Pilgrim Fathers who had a dozen children and two
or three wives apiece--consecutive, of course--are not to be classed
as ascetics; and if any one thinks them prudish, he has not read their
literature.
Of course Shaw's opinions are different from those of the Puritans,
indeed quite the opposite on some points. The Puritans, for
example, were not averse to blood, either in their food, their
politics, or their theology, while Shaw is almost Buddhistic in his
tender-heartedness. Androcles is his caricature of himself. But still
we may say that Shaw is puritanical in his type of mind, his attitude
toward the established institutions and moral codes of his time, and
even in his faults.
Consider for instance his intolerance. No, I do not mean dogmatism.
That he comes to emphatic conclusions is much to his credit and
differentiates him from the colloidal-minded mass of modern writers
who hold no convictions to have the courage of. But he does not,
for instance, content himself with the attitude: "For the life of
me I can't see what you find to admire in that absurd, romantic,
weak-minded, sentimental, butcherly Scott." He would be quite justified
in expressing his opinion thus-wise. He must add: "There's nothing
to him and if you say there is, you are deceiving me or--what is
wickeder--yourself. In either case you are an Idealist, which in my
unique vocabulary means liar." To which we might return an answer of
the Quaker sort: "Friend, thee has two eyes and the usual number of
brains and so a right to thine opinion. But it need not follow that
because thee sees not a merit in a writer that it does in nowise
exist." Every one of Shaw's early heroes and heroines, from the
Unsocial Socialist and the daughter of Mrs. Warren to Undershaft and
Larry Doyle, admires himself or herself immensely for saying to every
upholder of supposedly current morality: "Bah! Humbug! Hypocrite!" To
which again the gentle reply should come: "Friend, I be not an Humbug,
nor yet an Hypocrite, nor even a Bah. A man may differ from thee and
yet be sincere in his views, although this fact be dreamed not in thy
philosophy. I may be right or I may be wrong, but if thee call me an
Idealist yet again, lo, I will lift this brick and cast it at thee."
Wells and Shaw are quite commonly bracketed like Scylla and
Charybdis, Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, and the
Royal Bloodsweating Chesterbelloc of Holy Writ. These couplings are
often absurd but rarely arbitrary. Some likeness of thought or mood
or some contrast of viewpoint usually accounts for if not justifies
such literary _mésalliances_. Wells and Shaw are both socialists, but
this is not the tie, for, as the English aristocrat said: "We are all
socialists now." The real likeness is that each is an intellectual
anarchist, although a political Socialist. Shaw is an isolated, not
to say eccentric, figure even for a Socialist. Wells has gone further
yet in his self-isolation by leaving the Fabian movement. But the
unlikeness between the two men lies in the motive driving them to
their respective hermitages. Shaw may often change his point of view,
but at any given moment it is almost brutally clear and detailed, and
he insists upon the fullest conformity on the part of his would-be
followers. If they fall a step short of his iron boundary they are
mere Philistines and bourgeois, if they go a step beyond they are
inefficient and contemptible sentimental revolutionists. Shaw always
has "doots o' Jamie's orthodoxy." But Wells seeks a Socialism without
boundaries. Marxian Socialism, Fabian Socialism, State Socialism are
all too narrow and dogmatic for his taste as he has said time and time
again. Finding no true all-inclusive, universe-wide Socialism he erects
his own banner for the nations to rally to and as a result suffers the
universal fate of those who try to found Churches of Humanity and World
Languages, that is, merely succeeding in founding a new sect and a new
dialect.
Shaw has two defects which militate against his popularity; first, he
is too conventional, and, second, his conventions are peculiarly his
own. "There is," says his Undershaft, "only one true morality for every
man, but not every man has the same morality." Shaw is easily shocked,
but never by the same things that shock other people.
He himself ascribes his inability to see the same as others to his
sight being abnormally normal. The oculist who examined them said they
were the only pair of absolutely correct eyes he had ever come across.
Of course this illusion of possessing perfect mental vision is common
to everybody. All the opinions I hold at this moment are, I believe,
absolutely correct; otherwise I should change them instanter, though I
must admit, seeing how often I have erred in the past, that _a priori_
the chances are against my being altogether right now. But what
Shaw means by his normality of vision is not merely common confidence
in one's own orthodoxy, but has reference to his fanatical efforts to
tear away all the illusions of life and see things as they are. I do
not think that he often succeeds. Isis has many veils, and those who
have torn away the first and the second are all the more likely to be
deceived in mistaking the third for the naked truth.
There is no doubting Shaw's intent to undeceive the world or his
willingness to undeceive himself. "My way of joking is to tell the
truth," says his Father Keegan in "John Bull's Other Island." But
when he strains his eyes to see something clearly he sees only that
one thing. By following consistently one line of logic--instead of
several as he should--he gets tangled up in illogicalities. His mode of
reasoning is often the _reductio ad absurdum_ of his own theories, and
this is not a persuasive way of argumentation.
By temperament Shaw is a mystic, but his conscience compels him to
assume the method of cold intellectualism. He is an artist in the
disguise of a scientist, not an uncommon thing to see in this so-called
age of science.
Probably Shaw is not more inconsistent than any man of agile mind
who is capable of seeing in succession different sides of a thing, but
he is franker in expressing the point of view he holds at the time.
Consequently he has many admirers but few followers. They can't keep
up. The only possible Shavian is Shaw.
As somebody has remarked there are two ways of saying a thing; there
are writers who provoke thought and writers who provoke thinkers.
Shaw does both. This is intentional, and he defends it on the ground
that; "If you don't say a thing in an irritating way, you may just as
well not say it at all--since nobody will trouble themselves about
anything that does not trouble them." In short Shaw first got the ear
of the public by pulling it, and he does not know how to let go. Shaw's
argument is a wedge, but it is driven in blunt end first. A startling
statement, some monstrous paradox, is presented to the reader and
rouses his antagonism, then it is gradually qualified and whittled
down, or wittily diverted, so that it seems, in contrast to its first
form, quite innocuous and acceptable, and the reader is so relieved at
not having to swallow the dose first presented to him that he willingly
takes more than he otherwise would. Shaw has not the judicial mind and
does not want to have. "The way to get at the merits of a case," he
says "is not to listen to a fool who imagines himself impartial, but
to get it argued with reckless bias for and against." Put this on your
bookmark when you read Shaw.
George Bernard Shaw's collection of opinions is unique. Perhaps no
single view of his is quite original, but the combination certainly
is. He belongs to no type and has founded no school. This makes Shaw
an exasperating person for some people to read and causes them to
set him down as frivolous or inconsistent. They find, for instance,
from "The Revolutionist's Handbook" that Shaw believes in eugenics
and the importance of natural science. "Good!" people say, "now we
can classify him." They read "The Doctor's Dilemma" and find him a
rabid antivivisectionist and filled with a profound contempt for
modern medicine in general. Or they find out that he is a vegetarian,
a teetotaler, and a Puritan, and classify him as some nonconformist
minister of a pallid and overconscientious type. When they read what
he actually has to say about marriage in "Misalliance", about popular
religion and salvation by money and gunpowder in "Major Barbara",
they rush to the opposite conclusion that he is constitutionally an
unconstitutional rebel with a fondness for aimless violence such
as appears in "Fanny's First Play." Reading "The Conversion of Blanco
Bosnet" they discover that he is a devout Theist. Reading the preface
to "Androcles" they find him a higher critic. As a Fabian pamphleteer
he is in favor of abolishing all individual property of a productive
sort and has no use for _laissez faire_. But when it comes to children
(see "Misalliance") there cannot be too much _laissez faire_. He
appears as an ultramodernist, a universal cynic, a disillusioned
Ibsenite, and a disbeliever in the very existence of progress.
(Preface to "Man and Superman".) He offended half the radicals by his
"Impossibilities of Anarchism" and the other half by his "Illusions of
Socialism", and the conservatives by both.
But those who will take the trouble to compare these apparent
antinomies will find that the contradictions are not so great as they
seem from their paradoxical and partisan form, and that Shaw has
preserved his intellectual consistency to a remarkable degree.
When Shaw first burst into London, a young, red-haired Irishman, he
announced himself as an atheist, an anarchist, and a vegetarian, these
heresies being arranged in crescendo fashion, putting last what was
most calculated to shock the British public. Now when we look back
over his career we find that he has not been any more successful in
sticking to his youthful heresy than others are in sticking to their
youthful orthodoxy. Whether he has ever violated his vegetarian faith
by eating a beefsteak on the sly I do not know, but he has drifted far
from orthodox anarchism, for Socialism is, in theory at least, at the
opposite pole from anarchy. Once when Shaw was talking Socialism in
Hyde Park, he was much annoyed by the anarchists who circulated through
the crowd, selling copies of an early pamphlet of his on "The Illusions
of Socialism." As for his atheism he seems to have left that still
farther behind, for his present theological views, if expressed in less
provocative language, would pass muster in many a pulpit to-day. In
fact, they have as it is.
In a recent letter to me, Mr. Shaw refers to the cordial reception he
always received when Reverend Reginald Campbell invited him to occupy
the pulpit of City Temple,[3] and adds:
My greatest and surest successes as a public speaker have
been on religious subjects to religious audiences; but
this is the common experience of all speakers. People are
still more concerned about religion than anything else,
and any reasonably good preacher can easily leave the best
political spellbinder behind.
Shaw as a Socialist differs from others who bear that name. He is too
intense an individualist to be a good party man. He puts no faith in
Marx as the prophet of the millennium, and he has no Utopian vision of
his own. But what chiefly distinguishes him as a reformer is his power
of penetrating through shams to fundamental realities and his ability
to do original constructive thinking.[4] All of us can find fault with
the existing order of things, and most of us do. But to point out
just "what's wrong with the world" and to suggest a practical line of
improvement is not so easy. The Fabian Society has done more than set
off fireworks and stir up mud. The Minority Report on the reform of the
Poor Law is a fine piece of constructive statesmanship. This Minority
Report was largely the work of the Fabian Society, though how much Shaw
had to do with it personally I do not know. We now know, however, that
he was the author of Fabian Tract Number 2 of 1884 that startled
the conservative classes of England, including the orthodox Marxians.
Here are a few of the "Opinions Held by the Fabians" set forth in this
famous tract:
That since competition among producers admittedly secures to
the public the most satisfactory products, the state should
compete with all its might in every department of production.
That no branch of industry should be carried on at a profit
by the central administration.
That men no longer need special political privileges to
protect them against women, and that the sexes should
henceforth enjoy equal political rights.
That the established government has no more right to call
itself the State than the smoke of London has to call itself
the weather.
Shaw also wrote Fabian Tract Number 45 on "The Impossibilities of
Anarchism", in which he pointed out what was not so clear in 1888 as it
is to-day, that society was rapidly becoming communistic through the
efforts of those who were most opposed to communism as a theory:
Most people will tell you that communism is known in this
country only as a visionary project advocated by a handful
of amiable cranks. Then they will stroll across a common
bridge, along the common embankment, by the light of the
common street lamp shining alike on the just and the unjust,
up the common street and into the common Trafalgar Square
where on the smallest hint that communism is to be tolerated
for an instant in a civilized country, they will be handily
bludgeoned by a common policeman and hauled off to the
common gaol.
Shaw's latest contribution to Fabian literature, the appendix to
Pease's "History of the Fabian Society", seems to me one of the most
important, for in the final paragraphs he points out clearly a defect
in our democracy that is rarely recognized and altogether unremedied:
Another subject which has hardly yet been touched, and which
also must begin with deductive treatment, is what may be
called the democratization of democracy, and its extension
from mere negative and very uncertain check on tyranny to a
positive organizing force. No experienced Fabian believes
that society can be reconstructed (or rather constructed,
for the difficulty is that society is as yet only half
removed from chaos) by men of the type produced by popular
election under existing circumstances likely to be achieved
before the reconstruction. The fact that a hawker cannot
ply his trade without a license whilst a man may sit in
Parliament without any relevant qualifications is a typical
and significant anomaly which will certainly not be removed
by allowing everybody to be a hawker at will. Sooner or
later, unless democracy is to be discarded in a reaction
of disgust such as killed it in ancient Athens, democracy
will demand that only such men should be presented to its
choice as have proved themselves qualified for more
serious and disinterested work than "stoking up" election
meetings to momentary and foolish excitement. Without
qualified rulers a Socialist State is impossible; and it
must not be forgotten (though the reminder is as old as
Plato) that the qualified men may be very reluctant men
instead of very ambitious ones.
It is this doubt, more or less clearly felt, lest a genuinely
democratic society will fail to secure able and qualified leaders, that
lies at the bottom of the prevalent distrust of popular government and
causes many persons to cling to antiquated and irrational institutions
like aristocracy and even monarchy.
I sent Mr. Shaw a copy of an editorial entitled, "And There Shall Be No
More Kings", in _The Independent_ of March 22, 1915, and the following,
penned on the margin of the clipping in his careful handwriting, is his
comment on what he calls "a wise and timely article."
This war raises in an acute form the whole question of
republicanism versus German dynasticism. After the mischief
done by Franz Josef's second childhood as displayed in
his launching the forty-eight-hour ultimatum to Serbia
before the Kaiser could return from Stockholm, the world
has the right--indeed the duty--to demand that monarchies
shall at least be subject to superannuation as well as to
constitutional limitation.
All recent historical research has shown that the position
of a king, even in a jealously limited monarchy like the
British, makes him so strong that George III, who was
childish when he was not under restraint as an admitted
lunatic, was uncontrollable by the strongest body of
statesmen the eighteenth century produced. It is undoubtedly
inconvenient that the head of the state should be selected
at short intervals; but it does not follow that he (or she)
should be an unqualified person or hold office for life or
be a member of a dynasty.
I may add that if the policy of dismembering the Central
Empires by making separate national states of Bohemia,
Poland and Hungary, and making Serbia include Bosnia and
Herzegovina, is seriously put forward, it would involve
making them republics; for if they were kingdoms their
thrones would be occupied by cousins of the Hohenzollerns,
Hapsburgs and Romanoffs, strengthening the German hegemony
instead of restraining it.
Perhaps the reader will think that I am rather too presumptuous in
professing to know just what Shaw means and believes, when most people
are puzzled by him. So I should explain that I have the advantage of
a personal acquaintance with Shaw. I may say without boasting--or at
least without lying--that at one period of his life I was nearer to him
than any other human being. The distance between us was in fact the
diameter of one of those round tables in the A. B. C. restaurants, and
the period was confined to the time it took to consume a penny bun
and a cup of tea, both being paid for by him. I resorted to thorough
Fletchering for the purpose of prolonging the interview, and I wished
that either he or I had been a smoker. But although a vegetarian, he
eschews the weed, and smoking did not seem to be in accordance with
Fabian tactics.
The occasion was a recess in a Fabian Society conference. I did not
suppose that anything could shut off Socialists in the midst of debate.
The theme of discussion was the House of Lords, which the Fabians
unanimously agreed ought to be abolished, though no two of them agreed
on the substitute. But while they were iconoclasts as to one British
institution, they rendered homage to another by stopping to take tea in
the midst of a lovely scrap.
The Fabian Society was indirectly the fruit of one of the seeds which
Thomas Davidson scattered in many lands. You can track this peripatetic
philosopher through life, as you can Johnny Appleseed, by the societies
that sprung up along his pathway. In the Adirondacks he founded the
Glenmore School of Philosophy. In the Jewish quarter of New York City
another of his schools still thrives and is enthused with something of
his zeal for learning. The circle of earnest young men and women
whom he gathered about him in London were the founders of the Society
for Psychical Research, the Fellowship of the New Life, and the
Fabian Society. Yet Davidson himself was neither a spiritualist nor a
Socialist.[5]
At the Fabian Society one sees Shaw in his element. Every creature,
says Browning, like the moon,
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her.
The Fabian Society is Shaw's own true love, and to her he turns a
different face than to the outside world. As I watched him during
the afternoon--preceding and following the brief period of personal
contact of which I have been bragging--I was struck by the tact and
kindliness which he showed in the course of the discussion. There
was in his occasional remarks no trace of the caustic and dogmatic
tone which one gets from his writings. He has been not so much the
"shining light" or "presiding genius" of the society, as one of the
"wheel horses", and devoted himself diligently to the detailed and
inconspicuous work of the organization. He had for twenty-seven years
served on the Executive Committee of the society when in 1911 he
resigned to make way for the younger generation.
The question under discussion was, as I have said, that of the
reconstruction of the House of Lords. This was shortly before the war,
when such questions were regarded as important. Various plans were
proposed in order to secure the election of the fittest, when Shaw took
the floor in defense of genuine democracy. His argument ran like this,
as I remember it:
Our idea is that any 670 people is as good as any other for
governing, just as any twelve chosen by chance on the jury
have our lives and property in their hands.
Now if I and Mr. Sydney Webb here were sent to the House
of Commons it should be with unlimited opportunity to talk
but not to vote. To give us a vote would be to permit the
violation of the fundamental principle of democracy that
people should never be governed better than they want to
be. If you had a government of saints and philosophers the
people would be miserable. For instance, I would want to
stop all smoking and meat-eating and liquor drinking, but
like all superior persons now I have to convince other
people because I cannot compel them.
No elected body can possibly be representative, because
no man is elected as a normal man, but as an exceptional
one. The House of Lords is more representative than the
House of Commons, because a man in the House of Commons
is there because he has uncommon abilities, high or low.
Representatives ought to be, like jurymen, samples of the
commonalty picked at random and compelled to serve. Their
function is to explain where the shoe pinches. But the shoe
must be made by skilled legislators and statesmen, and these
should be eligible only when they have satisfied a very high
standard of qualification, and should sit without votes
though with unlimited powers of explanation and criticism.
These remarks, delivered in a musical and sympathetic voice with
frequent flashes of a broad row of white teeth, sounded very different
from the way they read in cold type. I do hope the phonograph will be
perfected before Shaw dies or his voice goes cracked, so posterity
can have a vocal version of his plays and prefaces. Otherwise his
personality stands little chance of being understood.
Shaw is tall and uses his eyeglasses for gesticulating as an orchestra
leader uses a baton. His hair was once a fiery red, but is now tempered
into gray. His eyes are light blue. Between his brows there are three
perpendicular wrinkles, but not of the cross and fretful type. His face
is long and pointed, but he looks not in the least Mephistophelian
as the caricaturists represent him. In short, Shaw is not so black
as he is painted by himself and others.
It is not necessary in this chapter, as it was in the case of some
of my "Twelve Major Prophets of To-day", for me to give biographical
details at any length, for these are easily accessible. Shaw has not
been reticent in talking about himself in various books and prefaces,
and he is fortunate in having in Professor Henderson of the University
of North Carolina a biographer of the Boswell kind--probably the best
kind there is. His big volume contains as much about Shaw's life and
words up to the time it was published, 1911, as any one needs to know.
Chesterton's book on Shaw is an impressionistic sketch rather than a
portrait, giving the author an opportunity of saying "what's wrong with
the world", including Shaw. Other lives of Shaw are mentioned in the
appendix of this chapter.
George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, July 25, 1856. His father
was an Irish gentleman, Protestant, improvident and respectable, a
wholesale dealer in corn, with a profound contempt for all retail
tradesmen. His mother was a musician, and it was to her that Mr. Shaw
owed his own moderate talent and remarkable knowledge of music. When
he went to London at the age of twenty, with artistic, musical
and literary ambitions, his mother practically supported the family
by teaching music there. As Shaw says in one of his autobiographical
fragments:
I did not throw myself into the struggle for life. I threw
my mother into it. I was not a staff to my father's old
age. I hung on to his coat tails. His reward was to live
just long enough to read a review of one of these silly
novels written in an obscure journal by a personal friend
of my own, prefiguring me to some extent as a considerable
author. I think, myself, that this is a handsome reward, far
better worth having than a nice pension from a dutiful son
struggling slavishly for his parents' bread in some sordid
trade.
His only schooling was at Dublin, where he says he learned little,
and this is confirmed by the school records which place him near the
bottom of his class. His opinion of the sort of education he got he has
expressed in several places, especially in the preface to "Misalliance."
My school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching
anything but Greek and Latin.... To this day, though I
can still decline a Latin noun and repeat some of the old
paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm
sticks to me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on
a tomb that I could translate throughout. Of Greek I can
decipher perhaps the greater part of the Greek alphabet.
In short I am, as to classical education, another
Shakespeare. I can read French as easily as English; and
under pressure of necessity, I can turn to account some
scraps of German and a little operatic Italian; but these
three were never taught at school. Instead, I was taught
lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty stories, a
blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as obscene
jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all
the blackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates
other cowards.
Why is it that British authors give us such horrible pictures of their
school days? They usually look back upon them as a most unpleasant and
unprofitable period of their lives, and when they attempt to eulogize
it they make it all the more shocking. Kipling in "Stalky and Company"
reveals an even more detestable state of affairs than Dickens does of
"Dotheboys Hall." Shaw takes the American view of it and condemns with
horror the "flagellomania" of the British schoolmaster. It is curious
to observe that in Great Britain the schoolmasters have weapons, and
the policemen have none. In America clubs have been given to the
police, and the canes taken away from the teachers. The New York
school-teachers are not allowed to deliver even a casual box on the ear
or a friendly shaking, yet they are making very decent citizens out of
most unpromising material, and the policemen's clubs are mostly used
on the immigrants who have been trained in the flagellant schools of
Europe.
It is doubtless a good thing that Shaw did not go through Oxford, but
he should have had a course in biology under Huxley such as Wells had.
This would have given him an acquaintance with the aims and methods of
modern science and freed him from such prejudice as he displayed, for
instance, in "The Doctor's Dilemma" and "The Philanderer."
Shaw's early efforts at authorship did not meet with encouragement.
If we may take his word for it, he earned six pounds in nine years
by his pen, and five of those came from writing a patent medicine
advertisement. He wrote five novels in five years, all at first
rejected by the book publishers. Four of them, "The Unsocial
Socialist", "The Irrational Knot", "Cashel Byron's Profession", and
"Love Among the Artists" have since been reprinted from the short-lived
Socialist periodicals in which they originally appeared. The first
novel he wrote, "Immaturity", has never been printed.
William Archer sent these novels to Robert Louis Stevenson, then trying
to recover his health at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. Stevenson's
letters refer to them as "blooming gaseous folly", "horrid fun", "a
fever dream of the most feverish",
"I say, Archer, my God, what women!" "If Mr. Shaw is below five and
twenty, let him go his path; if he is thirty, he had best be told that
he is a romantic and pursue romance with his eyes opened; perhaps he
knows it; God knows!--my brain is softened."
A plan to relieve struggling authors and secure the earlier recognition
of genius by means of an endowment fund and a system of substantial
prizes was once proposed by Upton Sinclair, author of "The Jungle",
who wrote to a number of authors, asking their opinion of the scheme.
Among those who responded were Wells, Bennett, De Morgan, Philpotts,
Galsworthy, London, and Shaw.[6] I quote part of what Shaw said about
it because of its biographical interest:
There is only one serious and effective way of helping young
men of the kind in view, and that is by providing everybody
with enough leisure in the intervals of well-paid and not
excessive work to enable them to write books in their spare
time and pay for the printing of them. Nothing else seems to
me to be really hopeful. I myself seem an example of a man
who achieved literary eminence without assistance; but as
a matter of fact certain remnants of family property made
all the difference. For fully nine years I had to sponge
shamelessly on my father and mother; but even at that
we only squeezed through because my mother's grandfather
had been a rich man. In fact, I was just the man for whom
Upton wants to establish his fund. Yet for the life of me I
cannot see how any committee in the world could have given
me a farthing. All I had to show was five big novels which
nobody would publish, and as the publishers' readers by
whose advice they were rejected included Lord Morley and
George Meredith, it cannot be said that I was in any worse
hands than those of any committee likely to be appointed. Of
course Sinclair may say to this that if Morley and Meredith,
instead of having to advise a publisher as to the prospects
of a business speculation, had only had to consider how to
help a struggling talent without reference to commercial
consideration, they might have come to my rescue.
Unfortunately, I have seen both their verdicts; and I can
assure Sinclair that I produced on both of them exactly
the impression that is inevitably produced in every such
case: that is, that I was a young man with more cleverness
than was good for me and that what I needed was snubbing
and not encouraging. No doubt there are talents which are
not aggressive and do not smell of brimstone; but these
are precisely the talents which are marketable, except, of
course, in the case of the highest poetry, which, however,
is out of the question anyhow as a means of livelihood.
William Morris, when he was at the height of his fame as a
poet, long after the publication of his popular poem, "The
Earthly Paradise", told me that his income from his poems
was about a hundred a year; and I happen to know that Robert
Browning threatened to leave the country because the
Income Tax Commissioners assessed him with a modest but
wholly imaginary income on the strength of his reputation.
Poetry is thus frankly a matter of endowment, but for the
rest I think a writer's chance of being helped by the fund
would be in inverse ratio to his qualifications as conceived
by Upton Sinclair.
Shaw's first essays in the field where he was to attain his greatest
success were as discouraging as his efforts at novel writing. His first
play, "Widower's Houses", dealing with tainted money, shocked but did
not attract the public. His "The Philanderer" was published before a
theater would accept it. His third play, "Mrs. Warren's Profession",
was prohibited by the censor. Of the seven that followed only one could
be called a decided success on its first presentation in London. But in
book form, with attractively written stage directions and argumentative
prefaces, they found a host of readers who wanted to see them in the
theater. "Candida" was not presented in London till 1904, nearly ten
years after it was written. It was with "Candida" that Arnold Daly
introduced Shaw to the theater-going public of America, and for the
last few years there have often been three Shaw plays running at the
same time in New York.
Shaw's plays were popular in America when they were tabooed or
pooh-poohed in England. His "Pygmalion" had its _première_ in the
Hofburg-theater in Vienna instead of London. I saw it, or rather heard
it, since it is a phonetic instead of a spectacular play, at the
Deutsches Theater of Irving Place, New York, in March, 1914, six months
before Mrs. Patrick Campbell gave it here in English. In spite of the
fact that the play depends upon variations in English dialects, it was
given better in the German than in the English.
Shaw is in fact an internationalist, much more honored in America,
Russia, Germany, France, Scandinavia, and Japan than in his own
country, that is, Ireland. It must be interesting to see "You Never Can
Tell" or "Man and Superman" on the Tokyo stage. The _Kobe Herald_ says:
"He appeals to the Japanese of progressive ideas because he prefers
potatoes, cabbages and beans to porter-house steak and lamb chops."
The reason why Shaw's prefaces read so well and his plays go better
on the stage than would be anticipated is because they are composed
by ear. Since reading aloud has gone out of fashion, there has arisen
a generation of young writers who do not realize that language is
intended to be spoken. Consequently one has to read them by eye
only, switching off for the time the internal auditory apparatus
so as to avoid their discords and dull rhythm. A little girl who was
trying to read to herself a story by one of our pyrotechnic authors
suddenly threw down the magazine with the cry: "I can't read this any
more! It dazzles my ears."
Shaw is a musician, and he writes musical prose. He uses shorthand in
composing, which is the next best thing to dictating to a phonograph.
Naturally he resents the established spelling of English which
preserves the form of words while allowing the words themselves to
decay, thus sacrificing speech to print. He has often argued for
phonetic spelling,[7] and has used as much of it in his works as his
publisher would permit. The point he makes in the following passage is
undeniably proving true:
All that the conventional spelling has done is to conceal
the one change that a phonetic spelling might have checked;
namely, the changes in pronunciation, including the waves
of debasement that produced the half-rural cockney of Sam
Weller and the modern metropolitan cockney of Drinkwater
in "Captain Brassbound's Conversion."... Refuse to teach
the Board School legions your pronunciation, and they will
force theirs on you by mere force of numbers. And serve you
right.
Shaw's treatment of the Salvation Army in "Major Barbara" showed that
he knew more about religion than some of his churchly critics. So,
too, his defense of the Salvation Army music in the London Standard
in 1905 proved that he knew more about music than those who sneered
at the Army bands. The Germans, who are now fond of analyzing the
English character, have discussed at length the question of why such an
unmusical people should have good music in the Salvation Army.[8]
The 125-page preface to "Androcles and the Lion" is devoted to a
rereading of the Gospels and a rewriting of the life of Christ. Shaw
interprets the New Testament like a higher critic but applies it
like an early Christian. He rejects the resurrection but accepts the
communism. He believes in the Life Force and Its Superman as others
do in God and His Messiah. Shaw's Superman obviously belongs to
another genus from Nietzsche's Uebermensch. He says in the preface to
"Misalliance":
The precise formula for the Superman, _ci-devant_ The Just
Made Perfect, has not yet been discovered. Until it is,
every birth is an experiment in a Great Research which
is being conducted by the Life Force to discover that
formula.
This eugenical and well meaning, but far from omnipotent creator,
bears a strong resemblance to Bergson's _Elan vital_, but Shaw was
writing about the Life Force long before Bergson wrote his "Creative
Evolution." If there was any borrowing about it, both borrowed from
Schopenhauer. But Shaw and Bergson, being kindly men and no pessimists,
have put a kind heart into Schopenhauer's ruthless Will.
If I were to sum up Shaw in two words it would be that his
distinguishing characteristics are courage and kind-heartedness. The
sight of suffering and injustice drives him mad, and then he runs
amuck, slashing right and left, without much regard to whom he hits
and no regard at all as to who hits him. He is, like Swift, a cruel
satirist through excess of sympathy. If Ibsen is right, that "the
strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone", then George
Bernard Shaw is not to be ignored.
HOW TO READ SHAW
It does not matter much which of Shaw's books you read first, for after
reading it, whichever it is, you will probably read all the others that
you can get your hands on. If I must be more specific in recommending
a book to begin on, I would suggest that "Major Barbara", "Man and
Superman", and "Androcles and the Lion" will give you an idea of
what Shaw is like; then, if you are interested, you can pick out others
from the following chronological list in which I have indicated by a
few words the theme, scene, or argument of the play and its preface.
All Shaw's works are published by Brentano's, New York, three plays in
one volume, or separately.
"Widowers' Houses", 1892 (tainted money).
"The Philanderer", 1893 (Ibsenites and esthetes).
"Mrs. Warren's Profession", 1893 (prostitution).
"Arms and the Man", 1894 (Serbian and Bulgarian war; anti-militarism).
"Candida", 1894 (triangle).
"You Never Can Tell", 1895 (farce comedy; the most popular of Shaw's
plays on the stage).
"The Man of Destiny", 1895 (one act, Napoleon in an unconventional
aspect).
"The Devil's Disciple", 1896 (American revolution).
"Caesar and Cleopatra", 1898 (Egypt Anglicized).
"Captain Brassbound's Conversion", 1899 (Morocco; Raisuli, Perdicaris,
_et al._)
"The Admirable Bashville or Constancy Unrewarded", 1902 (His novel:
"Cashel Byron's
Profession" put into blank verse "because it is easier to write than
prose").
"Man and Superman", 1903 (romance topsy-turvey; marriage by conquest
on the part of the woman; containing "The Revolutionist's
Handbook" and interlude on heaven and hell).
"John Bull's Other Island", 1904 (Irish and English temperament
contrasted, Home Rule question).
"Passion, Poison and Petrification", 1905 (burlesque extravaganza).
"Major Barbara", 1905 (Salvation Army and munition manufacture; problem
of poverty).
"How He Lied to her Husband", 1905 (parody on "Candida").
"The Doctor's Dilemma", 1906 (satire on medical professor and attack on
vivisection).
"Getting Married", 1908 (absurdities of marriage laws).
"The Showing-up of Blanco Bosnet", 1909 (Wild West; psychology of
conversion; prohibited by censor).
"Press Cuttings", 1909 (anti-militarism).
"Misalliance", 1909 ("a debate in one sitting"; preface on parents and
children).
"The Dark Lady of the Sonnets", 1910 (showing how Shakespeare got his
phrases).
"Fanny's First Play", 1911 (satire of dramatic critics and middle-class
morality).
"Androcles and the Lion", 1911 (early Christians; lion from Oz;
disquisition on the canon of the
New Testament and the possibility of living Christianity).
"Overruled", 1912 (philandering again).
"Pygmalion", 1913 (phonetics and class prejudice, with a postscript
proving that you never can tell how a Shaw play will come out).
"Great Catherine", 1913 (boisterous farce of Catherine II; contrast of
Russian and British temperament).
"The Music Cure", 1914 (Marconi scandal; used as curtain raiser for
Chesterton's "Magic", unpublished).
"Three Plays by Brieux", (Brentano's, 1911; contain "Damaged Goods"
and other plays in which the French playwright attacks social
evils as vigorously and outspokenly though not so wittily as Shaw.
They are translated by Mrs. Bernard Shaw, and Mr. Shaw provides
a preface).
Two farcical plays of the war, "The Inca of Perusalem" and "Augustus
does his Bit", produced by the London Stage Society and the former
also in New York, are ascribed to Shaw though unacknowledged by him.
Of Shaw's critical work we have in book form "The Perfect Wagnerite",
1895, and "The Quintessence of Ibsen", 1890, which championed two
unpopular causes; "The Sanity of Art", 1908, attacking Nordau's theory
of the degeneracy of artists; and two volumes of "Dramatic Opinions
and Essays", which, although reviews of current plays of the nineties,
retain a permanent value. Shaw's four early novels "Cashel Byron's
Profession", "An Unsocial Socialist", "Love Among the Artists", and
"The Irrational Knot" are of less interest than his plays.
His socialism has found expression in "The Common Sense of Municipal
Trading" and "Fabian Essays in Socialism", and numerous other tracts
and articles as well as most of his plays and prefaces.
Shaw's fugitive contributions to journalism are too numerous and
scattered to be cited here, but I will mention a few of them that are
of special interest: "The Case Against Chesterton" (_Metropolitan_,
1916); "The Case for Equality" (_Metropolitan_, 1913); "The German Case
Against Germany" (_New York Times_, April 16, 1916).
More has been written about Shaw's personality than about all the rest
of my "Twelve Major Prophets" put together. The chief and authorized
biography is "George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Work" by Professor
Archibald Henderson of the University of North Carolina. (Cincinnati:
Stewart and Kidd, 1911.) It contains a full bibliography up to its date
and some twenty portraits as well as much inaccessible and unpublished
material. Besides this we have:
"George Bernard Shaw: A Critical Study" by Joseph McCabe (London: Paul,
French, Trubner, 1914); "Bernard Shaw: A Critical Study" by Percival
P. Howe (Dodd, Mead, 1915); "George Bernard Shaw" by G. K. Chesterton
(John Lane, 1909); "Bernard Shaw as Artist-Philosopher", an exposition
of Shavianism, by Renée M. Deacon (John Lane, 1910); "George Bernard
Shaw: His Plays" by H. L. Mencken (Luce, 1909); "Bernard Shaw" by
Holbrook Jackson (Jacobs, 1907); and "The Innocence of Bernard Shaw" by
D. Scott (Doran, 1914).
Latest of all is "Bernard Shaw: The Man and the Mask" by Richard
Burton, a study of his plays in chronological order by the ex-president
of the Drama League of America (Henry Holt, November, 1916).
"Bernard Shaw: An Epitaph" by John Palmer (London: Richards, 1915),
"Harlequin or Patriot" (Century). Mr. Palmer comes to bury Shaw, not to
praise him, yet gives him more credit than many of his admirers.
Biographical data and criticism are also to be found in Archibald
Henderson's "European Dramatists" (Stewart and Kidd) and his
"Interpreters of Life and the Modern Spirit" (Kennerley); Ford Madox
Hueffer's "Memories and Impressions"; R. A. Scott-James's "Personality
in Literature" which also contains sketches of Wells and Chesterton
(London: Seeker, 1913); E. E. Hale's "Dramatists of To-day" (Holt,
1911); J. G. Huneker's "Iconoclasts" (Scribner, 1905); Cyril Maude's
"The Haymarket Theater"; Edward Pease's "History of the Fabian Society"
(London, 1916); Herman Bernstein's "With Master Minds" (Universal
Series Co., New York, 1913); and "Bernard Shaw et son oeuvre" by
Professor Cestre of the University of Bordeaux (Mercure de France,
1912).
Augustine F. Hamon, who has translated many of Shaw's plays into
French, has published the lectures he gave on them at the Sorbonne in
the volume "Le Molière du XXe siècle" (Paris: Figuière, 1913) which has
been translated "The Twentieth Century Molière" (Stokes, 1915), and
a separate chapter of it as "The Technique of Bernard Shaw's Plays"
(London: Daniel, 1912).
The following articles on Shaw are noteworthy for one reason or another:
"Shaw Contra Mundum" by C. B. Chilton in _The Independent_, March 8,
1906, with a sharp retort by Shaw; Personal reminiscences by Frank
Harris in _Pearson's_, 1916; Controversies of Shaw with Hilaire
Belloc and G. K. Chesterton in _The New Witness_, 1916; "Bernard
Shaw, Musician" by Florence Boylston Pelo in _The Bookman_, March,
1916; "Shaw in Portrait and Caricature" by H. Jackson in _The Idler_,
1908; "Shavian Religion" by the Rev. P. Gavan Duffy in _The Century_,
vol. 87, p. 908; "Mr. Bernard Shaw's Philosophy" by A. K. Rogers
in _Hibbert Journal_, 1910; "George Bernard Shaw" by D. A. Lord in
_Catholic World_, March and April, 1916; "Bernard Shaw et la guerre"
by Christabel Pankhurst in _La Revue_, 1915; "The Philosophy of Shaw"
by Archibald Henderson in _Atlantic_, vol. 103, p. 227; "Die
Quintessenz des Shawismus" by Helene Richter (Leipzig, 1913); "Bernard
Shaw" by Julius Bab (Berlin: Fischer).
The ingenious Allen Upward has written a futuristic satire on Shaw
in the form of a play: "Paradise Found or the Superman Found Out"
(Houghton Mifflin, 1915). In Act I The Sleeper Wakes, à la Wells, two
hundred years hence, finding himself in the Shaw Memorial Hall in the
custody of the Most Noble Order of Hereditary Fabians, chief of whom
are the Lady Wells and the Lord Keir-Hardie. The second act is set in
the Headquarters of the Anti-Shavian League, which the awakened and
disillusionized Shaw joins. The third act is in the Cabinet of H. V. M.
Maharajah Sri Singh Bahadar, for of course India outvoted England as
soon as universal suffrage was introduced into the British Empire.
[1] Published by Brentano's, 1904.
[2] Published by Brentano's, 1909.
[3] Mr. McCabe, in his life of Shaw, gives an interesting account of
one of these addresses, that on "Christian Economics" at the City
Temple in 1913. But Shaw is too much of a Christian still to suit
McCabe.
[4] See for instance Shaw's book on "The Common Sense of Municipal
Trading", based upon his experience as Vestryman and Borough Councillor.
[5] Pease, in his "History of the Fabian Society", gives an interesting
account of these diverse movements which in their inception were
closely allied. See also Knight's "Memorials of Thomas Davidson: the
Wandering Scholar" and James' delightful sketch, "The Knight-Errant
of the Intellectual Life", in his posthumous volume of "Memories and
Studies."
[6] Printed in The Independent, July 28, 1910.
[7] For Shaw's opinions on phonetics see "Pygmalion", "Captain
Brassbound's Conversion", and Henderson's biography, p. 326.
[8] Von unmusikalischen England und seiner musikalischen Heilsarmee.
Deutscher Wille, February, 1916.