It is worthy of record that Bernard Shaw does not _claim_ to be a great
novelist, or a great dramatist, or a great critic. As Mr. Chesterton
says, Shaw is very dogmatic, but very humble. Indeed, Mr. Shaw once
wrote me that he does not _claim_ to be great: either he is or he
is not great, and that is an end of the matter! But it is highly
significant that Shaw does specifically claim to be a philosopher.
Shaw's philosophical ideas have generally been regarded by English
and American critics either as of undoubted European derivation, or
else as fantastic paradoxes totally unrelated to the existing body
of thought. “I urge them to remember,” Shaw remonstrates, “that
this body of thought is the slowest of growths and the rarest of
blossomings, and that if there is such a thing on the philosophic
plane as a matter of course, it is that no individual can make more
than a minute contribution to it.” Whilst it is undoubtedly true that
Shaw's philosophy has been partially shared in by many forerunners,
nevertheless, he has made his own “minute contribution” to the existing
body of thought. Bernard Shaw is an independent thinker and natural
moralist, with a clearly co-ordinated system of philosophy. Let us
critically endeavour, then, in the language of political economy, to
award Shaw his merited “rent of ability.”
Shaw's fundamental postulate is that morality is not a stagnant
quality, the same yesterday, to-day and for ever, but transitory and
evolutional. Morality flows: “What people call vice is eternal; what
they call virtue is mere fashion.” A celebrated French critic once
declared: “_La morale est purement géographique._” Shaw goes far
beyond this in the assertion that morality is a creature of occasion,
conditioned by circumstance. And why is it that morality comes to be
regarded as not in itself a fixed quantity, a solid substratum of
human consciousness, but a concomitant fluxion of civilization? It
is because, historically considered, progress connotes repudiation
of custom: social advance takes effect through the replacement of
old institutions by new ones. “Since every institution involves the
duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an
established duty at every turn.” History shows us a world strewn with
the wrecks of institutions whose laws, upheld for a time as fixed,
were eventually broken by the triumphant assertion of the crescent
will of man. This phenomenon is not to be confused with that in which
an institution is burst simply by the natural growth of the social
organism. The phenomenon of which we are speaking involves a deliberate
assertion of self-constituted authority on the part of the individual
in defiance of established and generally accepted customs.[227]
“The ideal is dead; long live the ideal!” is the epitome of all human
progress. It is the note of nineteenth century literature. For the
first time in history the devil began to get his due. Men ceased to be
always on the side of the angels; a new day was dawning, the day of
the saintly anarch, the _advocatus diaboli_. Shaw has given us a brief
history of the movement:
“Formerly, when there was a question of canonizing a pious
person, the devil was allowed an advocate to support his
claims to the pious person's soul. But nobody ever dreamt of
openly defending him as a much misunderstood and fundamentally
right-minded regenerator of the race until the nineteenth
century, when William Blake boldly went over to the other
side and started a devil's party. Fortunately for himself, he
was a poet, and so passed as a paradoxical madman instead of
a blasphemer. For a long time the party made little direct
progress, the nation being occupied with the passing of its
religion through the purifying fire of a criticism which did
at last smelt some of the grosser African elements out of
it, but which also exalted duty, morality, law and altruism
above faith; reared ethical societies; and left my poor old
friend the devil (for I, too, was a Diabolonian born) worse
off than ever. Mr. Swinburne explained Blake, and even went
so far as to exclaim: 'Come down and redeem us from virtue';
but the pious influences of Putney reclaimed him, and he is
now a respectable, Shakespeare-fearing man. Mark Twain emitted
some Diabolonian sparks, only to see them extinguished by
the overwhelming American atmosphere of chivalry, duty and
gentility. A miserable spurious Satanism, founded on the
essentially pious dogma that the Prince of Darkness is no
gentleman, sprang up in Paris, to the heavy discredit of the
true cult of the Son of the Morning. All seemed lost, when
suddenly the cause found its dramatist in Ibsen, the first
leader who really dragged duty, unselfishness, idealism,
self-sacrifice, and the rest of the anti-diabolic scheme to the
bar at which it had indicted so many excellent Diabolonians.
The outrageous assumption that a good man may do anything he
thinks right (which in the case of a _naturally_ good man
means, by definition, anything he likes), without regard to the
interests of bad men or of the community at large, was put on
its defence, and the party became influential at last.
“After the dramatist came the philosopher. In England, G. B.
S.; in Germany, Nietzsche.”[228]
The whole anarchistic spirit of our time is summed up in the words
of a character in one of Ibsen's plays: “The old beauty is no longer
beautiful; the new truth is no longer true.”
Every age has its dominant accepted ideas and forms; but, as Georg
Brandes has said: “besides these, it owns another whole class of quite
different ideas, which have not yet taken shape, but are in the air,
and are apprehended by the greatest men of the age as the results
which must now be arrived at.” The ideas of the evolutionary trend
of human ideals, of the triumphant hypocrisy of current morality,
of the necessity for challenging and repudiating the code of the
human herd were in the air: they were slowly being arrived at. We
hear Chamfort's contemptuous assertion: “_Il y a à parier que toute
idée publique--toute convention reçue--est une sottise; car elle a
convenue au plus grand nombre._” We see William Blake performing the
ceremony of the _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_; the Pirate King in W. S.
Gilbert's _Pirates of Penzance_ repudiates _bourgeois_ respectability
in his reply to Frederic's urgent request to accompany him back to
civilization: “No, Frederic, it cannot be. I don't think much of our
profession, but, contrasted with respectability, it is comparatively
honest. No, Frederic; I shall live and die a pirate king.” In _The
Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg_, Mark Twain posits a new reading of
the Lord's Prayer: “Lead us (not) into temptation”; he arraigns the
morality of custom in _Was It Heaven or Hell?_ Nietzsche works his
way, through the “outer fortifications, the garb and masquerade; the
occasional incrustation, petrification, dogmatization” of the ideal, to
a position beyond good and evil, from which he transvalues all moral
values.[229]
With Ibsen, the disciple as well as the master of his age, the
newer ideas gained currency through the medium of the drama. The
individualist Stockmann, in _An Enemy of the People_, preaches the
salutary sermon of the “saving remnant” in his passionate declamation:
“The majority is never right! That's one of the social lies a free,
thinking man is bound to rebel against. Who make up the majority in any
given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think all must agree
that the fools are in a terribly overwhelming majority all the world
over.... What sort of truths do the majority rally round? Truths that
are decrepit with age. When a truth is as old as that, then it's in a
fair way to become a lie.” Ibsen is one with Saint Augustine in the
belief that it matters not so much what we are as what we are becoming.
“Neither our moral conceptions nor our artistic forms,” he once said,
“have an eternity before them. How much in duty are we really bound to
hold on to? Who can afford me a guarantee that up yonder on Jupiter
two and two do not make five?” And at a dinner at the Grand Hotel,
Stockholm, he concretized this tenet of modern faith in the words: “It
has been asserted on various occasions that I am a pessimist. So I am
to this extent--that I do not believe human ideals to be eternal. But I
am also an optimist, for I believe firmly in the power of those ideals
to propagate and develop.” In like manner Zola declared that there was
always a contest between men of unconquerable temperaments and the
herd: “I am on the side of the temperaments, and I attack the herd.”
How fiercely Schopenhauer and Shelley, Lassalle and Karl Marx, Ruskin
and Carlyle, Morris and Wagner railed at all the orthodoxies, the
respectabilities and the ideals! Heine tilted against the Philistine,
“the strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of
the children of light,” with an _élan_ equalled only by the detestation
of Carlyle for the snobbery which he denominated “respectability in its
thousand gigs.” The literature of the age resounded with the “rattle of
twentieth century tumbrils.”
Nietzsche has declared that the good taste, the “honesty,” of a
psychologist consists nowadays, if in anything, in his opposing the
shamefully permoralized language by which as by a phlegm all modern
judging on men and things is covered. His aim must be to “re-discover”
the incarnate innocence in moralistic mendaciousness, to stagger the
complacency of the illuded, ever “holding aloft the banner of the
ideal,” to divorce the imagined life from the real. Mr. W. S. Gilbert
was the first modern English dramatist to satirize the morality of
custom; but his philosophy was a mere farcical masquerade and sham. “He
would put forward a paradox,” Shaw has justly observed, “which at first
promised to be one of those humane truths which so many modern men of
fine spiritual insight, from William Blake onward, have worded so as to
flash out their contradictions of some weighty rule of our systematized
morality, and would then let it slip through his fingers, leaving
nothing but a mechanical topsy-turvitude.”[230]
Bernard Shaw has identified the function of comedy with the destruction
of old-established morals. In play after play, from _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_ and _Arms and the Man_ to _The Devil's Disciple_ and _Man
and Superman_, he has mordantly and fiercely attacked that “inmost
feminism which delights in calling itself idealism,” that Philistine
respectability which vaunts itself on its “morality of custom,” and the
genuine British narrowness, with its humdrum conservatism, its slavery
to routine, its stupid distrust of new ideas and fear of bold thinking.
Like Ibsen, he is always an outpost thinker, having no tolerance for
conservatism--the attitude of “the little narrow-chested, short-winded
crew that lie in our wake.” He has lived in passionate defiance of the
precept:
“Be not the first by whom the new is tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”
The step from the premiss that morality is a variable function of
civilization to the conclusion that salvation lies alone in revolt was
inevitable. Historically considered, the stages in the growth of man's
spirit may be classified under three heads: Faith, Reason, Will. First
came the age of Faith: man accepted the precepts of the Bible as the
revelation of God's voice. Faith in the Bible became the criterion of
righteous intention, and for a time the authority of the Church reigned
supreme. After a while came the age of free-thought, of Reason; the
free-thinker begins to “find reasons for not doing what he does not
want to do; and these reasons seem to him to be far more binding on the
conscience than the precepts of a book of which the divine inspiration
cannot be rationally proved.” Faith was dethroned by Reason, and
rationalist “free-thinking” soon came to mean “syllogism worship with
rites of human sacrifice.”
The great error of the Rationalists is latent in Voltaire's reply to
the plea of the poetaster that he must live: “_Je n'en vois pas la
nécessité._” “The evasion was worthy of the Father of Lies himself,”
Shaw has it; “for Voltaire was face to face with the very necessity
he was denying--must have known, consciously or not, that it was the
universal postulate--would have understood, if he had lived to-day,
that since all human institutions are constructed to fulfil man's will,
and that his will is to live even when his reason teaches him to die,
logical necessity, which was the sort Voltaire meant (the other sort
being visible enough) can never be a motor in human action, and is, in
short, not necessity at all.” In the course of time came Schopenhauer
to re-establish the old theological doctrine that reason is no motive
power; that the true motive power in the world--otherwise life--is
will, and that the setting up of reason above will is a damnable error.
Shaw has warned us that acceptance of the metaphysics of
Schopenhauerism by no means involves endorsement of its philosophy.
To Shaw, the cardinal Rationalist error into which Schopenhauer fell
consisted in making happiness the test of the value of life. Shaw is
the most vigorous possible combatant of the pessimist conclusion that
life is not worth living, and that “the will which urges us to live
in spite of this is necessarily a malign torturer, the desirable
end of all things being the Nirvana of the stilling of the will, and
the consequent setting of life's sun 'into the blind cave of eternal
night.'” The keynote of the Shavian philosophy is _the pursuit of life
for its own sake. Life is realized only as activity that satisfies the
will: that is, as self-assertion. Every extension or intensification
of activity is an increase in life._ Quantity and quality of activity
measure the value of existence. Shaw has refused to acknowledge the
validity of the will of the official theologians, because their
God stands outside man and in authority above him. He accepted
Schopenhauer's view of the will as a “purely secular force of nature,
attaining various degrees of organization, here as a jelly-fish, there
as a cabbage, more complexly as an ape or a tiger, and attaining its
highest form, so far, in the human being.” This was Shaw's key to the
works of two great artists, Wagner and Ibsen, notably, _The Ring_ and
_Emperor and Galilean_.
It is the idlest nonsense to say of Shaw, in Oscar Wilde's phrase,
that he has the courage of other people's convictions. Shaw's most
conspicuous trait is his courage in challenging and defying other
people's convictions. Instead of clinging to the pessimism of
Schopenhauer, he has been bold enough to “drop the Nirvana nonsense,
the pessimism, the rationalism, the theology, and all the other
subterfuges to which we cling because we are afraid to look life
straight in the face and see in it, not the fulfilment of a moral law
or the deductions of reason, but the satisfaction of a passion in us
of which we can give no account.” Claiming for himself the faculty
of unilluded vision, he conceives it his mission to tear away the
veils with which we persist in hiding realities and to call things
by their true names, instead of the false names with which we are
content to dupe ourselves. Mr. Walkley once said: “Mr. Shaw takes
up the empty bladders of life, the current commonplaces, the cant
phrases, the windbags of rodomontade, the hollow conventions and the
sham sentiments; quietly inserts his pin, and the thing collapses with
a pop.” But Shaw regards this as a cheap job which any man might do
and which Mr. Walkley himself excels in. “It is not the bubbles and
bladders that require some tackling,” Mr. Shaw once observed to me; “it
is the solid brass that has to be assayed and proved to be base metal.”
In many places, in varying ways, Shaw has given pungent expression to
the opinion so well advanced in Meredith's words: “Our world is all
but a sensational world at present, in maternal travail of a soberer,
a braver, a bright-eyed.” The clarity of Shaw's vision has saved him
from the cheap crudeness of pessimism: unlike Ibsen, plenty of “sound
potatoes” have come under his observation. His position is clearly
expressed in his own words:
“Now to me, as a realist playwright, the applause of the
conscious, hardy pessimist is more exasperating than the abuse
of the unconscious, fearful one. I am not a pessimist at all.
It does not concern me that, according to certain ethical
systems, all human beings fall into classes labelled liar,
coward, thief, and so on. I am myself, according to these
systems, a liar, a coward, a thief, and a sensualist; and it is
my deliberate, cheerful and entirely self-respecting intention
to continue to the end of my life deceiving people, avoiding
danger, making my bargains with publishers and managers on
principles of supply and demand instead of abstract justice,
and indulging all my appetites, whenever circumstances commend
such actions to my judgment. If any creed or system deduces
from this that I am a rascal incapable on occasion of telling
the truth, facing a risk, forgoing a commercial advantage, or
resisting an intemperate impulse of any sort, then so much the
worse for the creed or system, since I have done all these
things, and will probably do them again. The saying, 'All have
sinned' is, in the sense in which it was written, certainly
true of all the people I have ever known. But the sinfulness
of my friends is not unmixed with saintliness: some of their
actions are sinful, others saintly. And here, again, if the
ethical system to which the classifications of saint and sinner
belong, involves the conclusion that a line of cleavage drawn
between my friends' sinful actions and their saintly ones will
coincide exactly with one drawn between their mistakes and
their successes (I include the highest and the widest sense of
the two terms), then so much the worse for the system; for the
facts contradict it. Persons obsessed by systems may retort:
'No; so much the worse for your friends'--implying that I must
move in a circle of rare blackguards; but I am quite prepared
not only to publish a list of friends of mine whose names would
put such a retort to open shame, but to take any human being,
alive or dead, of whose actions a genuinely miscellaneous
unselected dozen can be brought to light, to show that none
of the ethical systems habitually applied by dramatic critics
(not to mention other people) can verify their inferences.
As a realist dramatist, therefore, it is my business to get
outside these systems.... The fact is, though I am willing and
anxious to see the human race improved, if possible, still I
find that, with reasonably sound specimens, the more intimately
I know people the better I like them; and when a man concludes
from this that I am a cynic, and that he who prefers stage
monsters--walking catalogues of the systematized virtues--to
his own species, is a person of wholesome philanthropic tastes,
why, how can I feel toward him except as an Englishwoman feels
toward the Arab, who, faithful to _his_ system, denounces her
indecency in appearing in public with her mouth uncovered.”[231]
The destruction of the principle of alien authority carries with it the
necessity for the creation of the individual standard. The dethronement
of rationalism, be it observed, involves no repudiation of logic and
intellect as guides to everyday life. “Ability to reason accurately is
as desirable as ever, since it is only by accurate reasoning that we
can calculate our actions so as to do what we intend to do--that is, to
fulfil our will.” Instead of accepting the nude, anarchistic formula
of Maurice Barrés, for example, “_Fais ce que tu veux_,” Shaw may be
understood to enjoin: “Form your moral conscience and act as it directs
you.”[232]
A development in our moral views must first appear insane and
blasphemous, Shaw has time and again warned us, to people who are
satisfied, or more than satisfied, with the current morality. Henri
Beyle was for long, and still is, much misunderstood for the simple
reason that the characters he created evolve their own standard,
pursue their cherished ideals with unfaltering determination, and
brook no interference, make no compromise, until they have won and
established their self-respect. All the while insisting on the prudence
necessary to discover the way for the will, Shaw has unhesitatingly
taken the supreme step, realizing always that “Every step in morals
is made by challenging the validity of the existing conception of
perfect propriety of conduct.... Heterodoxy in art is at worst rated
as eccentricity or folly: heterodoxy in morals is at once rated as
scoundrelism, and, what is worse, propagandist scoundrelism, which
must, we are told, if successful, undermine society and bring us back
to barbarism after a period of decadence like that which brought
Imperial Rome to its downfall.”
The time comes, however, when the voice of instinctive temperament
makes itself heard and heeded. In the past the younger generation
waited, but with a divine impatience, until “they were old enough to
find their aspirations toward the fullest attainable activity and
satisfaction working out in practice very much as they have worked out
in the life of the race; so that the revolutionist at twenty-five, who
saw nothing for it but a clean sweep of all our institutions, found
himself, at forty, accepting and even clinging to them on condition
of a few reforms to bring them up to date.” To-day the younger
generation is loud in its demands, imperious in its insistence. They
are outspoken in their scepticism concerning the infallibility of their
parents, they insist that their “spiritual pastors and masters” speak
humanly, and not dogmatically, of morality, and are determined to try
all pontifical wisdom by the touchstone of experience. They formulate
their heresy as a faith, and Shaw is the arch-heretic of them all.
Ibsen would abolish the State and inaugurate a bloodless revolution:
a revolution of the spirit of man; Hauptmann poetizes the Nietzschean
ideal in _Die Versunkene Glocke_; Sudermann challenges the equity of
parental authority in _Heimat_. With all the appearance of profound
wisdom and abstract justice, Maeterlinck teaches that the preservation
of virtue and adherence to conventional moral standards may be the
quintessence of selfishness and egotism. Tolstoy preaches an impossible
ideal of celibacy, and Shaw would abolish marriage because it is the
“most licentious of human institutions.” Modern literature from Ibsen
and Nietzsche to Bourget and Shaw is a “long litany in praise of the
man who wills.” Men to-day contemn the “slavery to duty and discipline
which has left so many soured old people with nothing but envious
regrets for a virtuous youth.” Moral heroism is the toast of the
epoch--“the heroism of the man who believes in himself and dares do the
thing he wills.” It finds complete expression in Henley's best known
poem, with its clamant finale:
“I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”
The philosophy whose pæan is glorification of the man whose standards
are within himself, whose actions are controlled by his will, carries
with it certain inevitable and shocking consequences. It is the
clearest proof of Shaw's consistency that he has never swerved one jot
from the course marked out by himself. He accepts the disagreeable
consequences along with the rest, neither blinking nor shirking them.
Georg Brandes epitomized his doctrine in the words: “To obey one's
senses is to have character. He who allows himself to be guided by his
own passions has individuality.” Shaw has avowed that he regards this
as excellent doctrine, both in Brandes' form and in the older form: “He
that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that is filthy, let him
be filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still;
and he that is holy, let him be holy still.” Shaw is fundamentally an
optimist; he identifies all life with the will itself. This will, this
Life Force, he refuses to regard as naturally malign and devilish.
His life-work may be said to consist in an attack upon the conception
that passions are necessarily base and unclean; his art works are
glorifications of the man of conviction who can find a motive, and not
an excuse, for his passions; whose conduct flows from his own ideas of
right and wrong; and who obeys the law of his own nature in defiance
of appearance, of criticism, and of authority. This abrogation of
authority, this repudiation of systematized morality is the step which
the strongest spirits in all history have taken; it is the inevitable
step for the naturally good man, who can breathe only in an atmosphere
of truth and freedom. Emancipation comes only when man fulfils his duty
to himself; but one's duty to oneself, as Shaw has reminded us, is no
duty at all, since a debt is cancelled when the debtor and creditor are
the same person. “Its payment is simply a fulfilment of the individual
will, upon which all duty is a restriction.”
The obverse of the medal is not so clear: What will happen in the case
of a person of ungovernable temper, of unbridled passions? The whole
philosophy of his position, with all its appalling consequences, Shaw
has expounded in that most remarkable of all his philosophical essays,
entitled, _A Degenerate's View of Nordau_.
“If 'the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and
desperately wicked,' then truly, the man who allows himself
to be guided by his passions must needs be a scoundrel, and
his teacher might well be slain by his parents. But how if the
youth, thrown helpless on his passions, found that honesty,
that self-respect, that hatred of cruelty and injustice, that
the desire for soundness and health and efficiency, were master
passions--nay, that their excess is so dangerous to youth that
it is part of the wisdom of age to say to the young: 'Be not
righteous overmuch: why shouldst thou destroy thyself?'...
The people who profess to renounce and abjure their own
passions, and ostentatiously regulate their conduct by the most
convenient interpretation of what the Bible means, or, worse
still, by their ability to find reasons for it (as if there
were not excellent reasons to be found for every conceivable
course of conduct, from dynamite and vivisection to martyrdom),
seldom need a warning against being righteous overmuch, their
attention, indeed, often needing a rather pressing jog in the
opposite direction. The truth is that passion is the steam in
the engine of all religious and moral systems. In so far as it
is malevolent, the religions are malevolent too, and insist on
human sacrifices, on hell, wrath and vengeance. You cannot read
Browning's 'Caliban upon Setebos, or Natural Theology on the
Island' without admitting that all our religions have been made
as Caliban made his, and that the difference between Caliban
and Prospero is that Prospero is mastered by holier passions.
And as Caliban imagined his theology, so did Mill reason out
his essay on 'Liberty' and Spencer his 'Data of Ethics.' In
them we find the authors still trying to formulate abstract
principles of conduct--still missing the fact that truth and
justice are not abstract principles external to man, but human
passions, which have, in their time, conflicted with higher
passions as well as with lower ones.”
It is one of Shaw's disconcerting theories--after Blake--that “the
road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”; the law of the stern
asceticism of satiety is that “you never know what is enough unless you
know what is more than enough.” In amplifying this idea Shaw once said:
“When Blake told men that through excess they would learn moderation,
he knew that the way for the present lay through the Venusberg, and
that the race would assuredly not perish there as some individuals
have, and as the Puritan fears we all shall unless we find a way round.
Also, he no doubt foresaw the time when our children would be born on
the other side of it, and so be spared that fiery purgation.”
It is not _mal à propos_ that the arms of the Shaw family should have
borne the motto, in Latin: “Know thyself.” Shaw insists upon the
salutary virtue of experience, its reforming and educative effect. “If
a young woman, in a mood of strong reaction against the preaching of
duty and self-sacrifice and the rest of it,” Shaw once wrote, “were
to tell Mr. Herbert Spencer that she was determined not to murder her
own instincts and throw away her life in obedience to a mouthful of
empty phrases, I suspect he would recommend the 'Data of Ethics' to
her as a trustworthy and conclusive guide to conduct. Under similar
circumstances I should unhesitatingly say to the young woman: 'By all
means do as you propose. Try how wicked you can be; it is precisely
the same experiment as trying how good you can be. At worst, you will
only find out the sort of person you really are. At best, you will
find that your passions, if you really and honestly let them all loose
impartially, will discipline you with a severity your conventional
friends, abandoning themselves to the mechanical routine of fashion,
could not stand for a day.' As a matter of fact, I have seen over and
over again this comedy of the 'emancipated' young enthusiast flinging
duty and religion, convention and parental authority, to the winds,
only to find herself becoming, for the first time in her life, plunged
into duties, responsibilities and sacrifices from which she is often
glad to retreat, after a few years' wearing down of her enthusiasm,
into the comparatively loose life of an ordinary respectable woman
of fashion.” It is not a case of after satiety, moderation; after
Venus, Saint Elizabeth; after Bohemianism, the convent. This is not
what happens, except to ordinary loose livers. What happens, according
to Shaw, is, that when we cast off all moral restraint we find Saint
Elizabeth and the convent drawing us more passionately to them than
Venus and the Bohemians. The true trend of the movement, it scarcely
need be remarked, has been mistaken by many of its supporters as
well as by its opponents. “The ingrained habit of thinking of the
propensities of which we are ashamed as 'our passions,'” Shaw has
shrewdly remarked, “and our shame of them and of our propensities
to noble conduct as a negative and inhibitory department called our
conscience, leads us to conclude that to accept the guidance of our
passions is to plunge recklessly into the insupportable tedium of
what is called a life of pleasure. Reactionists against the almost
equally insupportable slavery of what is called a life of duty are,
nevertheless, willing to venture on these terms. The 'revolted
daughter,' exasperated at being systematically lied to by her parents
on every subject of vital importance to an eager and intensely curious
young student of life, allies herself with really vicious people and
with humorists who like to shock the pious with gay paradoxes, in
claiming an impossible license in personal conduct. No great harm is
done beyond the inevitable and temporary excesses produced by all
reactions; for the would-be wicked ones find, when they come to the
point, that the indispensable qualification for a wicked life is not
freedom, but wickedness.”[233]
In the present state of the world's civilization, the universal
application of the Shavian philosophy is neither possible nor
desirable. Like Nietzsche, Shaw has evolved a philosophy for the
_naturally good man_, for the strong man who realizes that freedom
connotes, not license, but responsibility. His error inheres in the
statement that no great harm would be done by people claiming an
impossible license in personal conduct beyond the inevitable and
temporary excesses produced by all reactions. Far from being temporary
and negligible, the consequences that would result, were every person
permitted to give a personal unrestricted interpretation of his own
instincts, would be lasting and irremediable. The average sensual man,
“the mean sensual man,” as Granville Barker translates it--for
whom passion means merely sexual lust, would take every advantage of
the loopholes for self-indulgence offered by the Shavian programme.
Were every man a Martin Luther, a William Blake, a Bernard Shaw; were
every woman a Mary Wollstonecraft, a Candida Burgess, the world might,
indeed, be clear of cant, of hypocrisy, of moralistic mendaciousness,
of idealistic sophistication!
[Illustration: =_George Bernard Shaw_.=]
_From a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn made in 1906._
Mr. Shaw once went so far as to assure me that the universal
application of the Shavian philosophy does actually take place. As a
matter of fact, the vast majority of people do not do what they please,
but, aside from scruples of conscience, find it vastly more convenient
and satisfactory to conform to prevailing standards of right and wrong.
Indeed, the limits to the application of the Shavian philosophy are
given by Shaw himself when he tells us that “the men in the street have
no use for principles, because they can neither understand nor apply
them; and that what they can understand and apply are arbitrary rules
of conduct, often frightfully destructive and inhuman, but at least
definite rules enabling the common stupid man to know where he stands,
and what he may do and not do without getting into trouble.” That is,
most people can and actually do fulfil their desires only within the
limits prescribed by the prevailing code of morality. Most men are
neither philosophers nor moralists. Under present circumstances, as
Shaw himself admits, the number of people who can think out a line of
conduct for themselves is very small, and the number who can afford the
time for it still smaller.
“Nobody can afford the time to do it on all points. The
professional thinker may on occasion make his own morality
and philosophy as the cobbler may make his own boots; but the
ordinary man of business must buy at the shop, so to speak, and
put up with what he finds on sale there, whether it exactly
suits him or not, because he can neither make a morality
for himself nor do without one. This typewriter with which
I am writing is the best I can get; but it is by no means a
perfect instrument; and I have not the smallest doubt that
in fifty years' time the authors of that day will wonder how
men could have put up with so clumsy a contrivance. When a
better one is invented, I shall buy it: until then I must make
the best of it, just as my Protestant and Roman Catholic and
Agnostic friends make the best of their creeds and systems.
This would be better recognized if people took consciously and
deliberately to the use of the creeds as they do to the use
of typewriters. Just as the traffic of a great city would be
impossible without a code of rules of the road which not one
wagoner in a thousand could draw up for himself, much less
promulgate, and without, in London at least, an unquestioning
consent to treat the policeman's raised hand as if it were an
impassable bar stretched half across the road, so the average
man is still unable to get through the world without being
told what to do at every turn, and basing such calculations as
he is capable of on the assumptions that everyone else will
calculate on the same assumptions. Even your man of genius
accepts a thousand rules for every one he challenges; and you
may lodge in the same house with an Anarchist for ten years
without noticing anything exceptional about him. Martin Luther,
the priest, horrified the greater half of Christendom by
marrying a nun, yet was a submissive conformist in countless
ways, living orderly as a husband and father, wearing what his
bootmaker and tailor made for him, and dwelling in what the
builder built for him, although he would have died rather than
take his Church from the Pope. And when he got a Church made by
himself to his liking, generations of men calling themselves
Lutherans took that Church from him just as unquestionably as
he took the fashion of his clothes from his tailor. As the
race evolves, many a convention which recommends itself by its
obvious utility to everyone passes into an automatic habit,
like breathing; and meanwhile the improvement in our nerves and
judgment enlarges the list of emergencies which individuals
may be trusted to deal with on the spur of the moment without
reference to regulations, but there will for many centuries
to come be a huge demand for a ready-made code of conduct for
general use, which will be used more or less as a matter of
overwhelming convenience by all members of communities.”[234]
The final effect of the philosophy of Ibsen, of Nietzsche, of Shaw is
to substitute _conscience_ for _conformity_.[235] With the dramatists
of the Restoration, as Meredith has reminded us, morality was a duenna
to be circumvented; with Shaw, morality is a mere convenience, like
etiquette at a dinner-table or drill on a parade-ground. “For too long
a time man regarded his natural bents with an 'evil eye,'” writes
Nietzsche, “so that in the end they became related to 'bad conscience.'
A reverse experiment is _in itself_ possible--but who is strong enough
for it?” Readiness to override tradition, to act unconventionally, to
violate the current code of morality requires moral courage of the
very highest order. The sense of moral responsibility is infinitely
deepened. “Before conversion the individual anticipates nothing worse
in the way of examination at the judgment bar of his conscience,”
wrote Shaw before he had ever heard of Nietzsche, “than such questions
as: Have you kept the commandments? Have you obeyed the law? Have
you attended church regularly; paid your rates and taxes to Cæsar;
and contributed, in reason, to charitable institutions? It may be
hard to do all these things; but it is still harder not to do them,
as our ninety-nine moral cowards in the hundred know. And even a
scoundrel can do them all and yet live a worse life than the smuggler
or prostitute, who must answer 'No' all the way through the catechism.
Substitute for such a technical examination one in which the whole
point to be settled is, Guilty or Not Guilty?--one in which there is
no more and no less respect for chastity than for incontinence, for
subordination than for rebellion, for legality than for illegality,
for piety than for blasphemy, in short, for the standard virtues
than for the standard vices, and immediately, instead of lowering
the moral standard by relaxing the tests of worth, you raise it by
increasing their stringency to a point at which no mere pharisaism
or moral cowardice can pass them.” One of John Tanner's epigrams was
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” All the
stock excuses of the average man vanish before the inexorable fact of
this responsibility: “'The woman tempted me'; 'The serpent tempted
me'; 'I was not myself at the time'; 'I meant well'; 'My passion got
the better of my reason'; 'It was my duty to do it'; 'The Bible says
that we should do it'; 'Everybody does it,' and so on. Nothing is left
but the frank avowal: 'I did it because I am built that way.' Every
man hates to say that. He wants to believe that his generous actions
are characteristic of him, and that his meannesses are aberrations or
concessions to the force of circumstances.” Most men are lacking in the
“vigilant open-mindedness,” the splendid moral courage of an Ibsen; few
men are willing to face the fearful responsibility entailed by revolt
against the will of the majority. Only a master impulse, a ruling
passion will drive them to it. Shavianism means liberty with a string
to it; while knocking off the fetters of alien authority, it forges
upon one the iron band of liberty with responsibility.[236] Shavianism
is the philosophy for the reformer who is driven by the “passion of a
great faith”; in the words of Nietzsche, it is “the privilege of the
fewest.” The keynote of Shaw's philosophy he has sounded in the perfect
epigram, “The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.” But, as Mr.
Chesterton rightly reminds us, the saying can be simply answered by
being turned around. “That there is no golden rule is itself a golden
rule, or, rather, it is much worse than a golden rule. It is an iron
rule, a fetter on the first movement of a man.”
The battle-cry of Shaw's life is the Nietzschean command: “Forward,
march! our old morality, _too_, is a _piece of comedy_.” Originality
in regard to moral notions he regards as the true diagnostic of the
first order in literature, the distinction that “sets Shakespeare's
_Hamlet_ above his other plays, and that sets Ibsen's work as a whole
above Shakespeare's work as a whole.” Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth and Turner
(these four apart and above all the English classics), Goethe, Shelley,
Schopenhauer, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, he has
told us, are among the writers whose peculiar sense of the world he
recognizes as more or less akin to his own. While granting to Dickens
and Shakespeare the “specific genius of the fictionist and the common
sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree,” he yet
insists that in spite of their combination of sound moral judgment with
light-hearted good-humour, they are concerned with the diversities of
the world instead of with its unities. His highest meed of praise goes
to the artist-philosopher who identifies himself with the purpose of
the world. He classes himself with writers of the “first order,” so
called, because he has recognized and proclaimed in all his works that
the rules of code-morality and the “need for them produced by the moral
and intellectual incompetence of the ordinary human animal, are no more
invariably beneficial and respectable than the sunlight which ripens
the wheat in Sussex and leaves the desert deadly in Sahara, making the
cheeks of the ploughman's child rosy in the morning and striking the
ploughman brainsick or dead in the afternoon; no more inspired (and no
less) than the religion of the Andaman Islanders: as much in need of
frequent throwing away and replacement as the community's boots.”
The prime reason for the accusation that in his plays Shaw ignores
all human feeling is not as simple as it seems. It is not enough to
say it is because he is judicially impartial or even that he ignores
stage logic. Humanity may possibly move by clockwork in Shaw's plays,
as Mr. Arthur Symons once said; but even if it did, there must be
some key which sets the machine in motion. That key is not intellect,
but will; against which systems, creeds, conventions, every sort of
formalism is ineffective and impotent. “Take care to get what you like
or you will be forced to like what you get”; that is the creed of all
his characters; or, in the words of Ann Whitefield: “The only really
simple thing to do is to go straight for what you want, and grab it.”
It is his view that “people imagine that their actions and feelings are
dictated by moral systems, by religious systems, by codes of honour
and conventions of conduct which lie outside the real human will.”
As a dramatist, he recognizes that these conventions do not supply
them with their motives, but merely serve as very plausible _ex post
facto_ excuses for their conduct. He has sought to reveal to us real
people with real motives which are deep down in the will itself. It was
Sainte Beuve's aim, as he himself phrased it, to set forth “the natural
history of the intellect.” One might say of Shaw, the dramatist, that
his aim is to set forth the natural history of the human will. “Far
from ignoring idiosyncrasy, will, passion, impulse, whim, as factors
in human action, I have placed them so nakedly on the stage that the
elderly citizen, accustomed to see them clothed with the veil of
manufactured logic about duty, and to disguise even his own impulses
from himself in this way, finds the picture as unnatural as Carlyle's
suggested painting of Parliament sitting without its clothes.”
It is this unmasking of all the ideals, this shattering of all the
illusions, this demolition of the romantic cast of life which makes
Shaw appear as a cynic, representing human creatures as frauds,
impostors, poseurs, cads, bounders, hypocrites and humbugs. It is
difficult to convince some people, especially women, that Shaw
is not a cynic and pessimist. Like Schopenhauer, Shaw is a pure
metaphysiologist. It is the inevitable result of his disbelief in the
validity of custom-made morality that he should appear as a cynic,
and the characters of his plays as frauds and shams. But he has
deliberately averred: “It is not my object in the least to represent
people as hypocrites and humbugs. It is conceit, not hypocrisy, that
makes a man think he is guided by reasoned principles when he is
really obeying his instincts.” And in explaining his view of the
world-comedy, he has shown that, as a dramatist, he pretends to be, not
the historian, but the naturalist of his age.
“It is this premature search for a meaning that produces the
comedy. We are not within a million years, as yet, of being
concerned with the meaning of the world. Why do we recognize
that philosophy is not a baby's business, although its facial
expression so strongly suggests the professional philosopher?
Because we know that all its mental energy is absorbed by the
struggle to attain ordinary physical consciousness. It is
learning to interpret the sensations of its eyes and ears and
nose and tongue and finger-tips. It is ridiculously delighted
by a silly toy, absurdly terrified by a harmless bogey, because
it cannot as yet see things as they really are. Well, we are
all still as much babies in the world of thought as we were
in our second year in the world of sense. Men are not real
to us; they are heroes and villains, respectable persons and
criminals. Their qualities are virtues and vices; the natural
laws that govern them are gods and devils; their destinies are
rewards and expiations; their conditions are innocence and
guilt--there is no end to the amazing transubstantiations and
childish imaginings which delight and terrify us because we
have not yet grown up enough to be capable of genuine natural
history. And then people come to you with their heads full of
these figments, which they call, if you please, 'the world,'
and ask you what is the meaning of them. The answer is, that
they have not even an existence, much less a meaning. The blank
incredulity of men to that reply, and their absurd attempts to
act on their illusions, are as funny as the antics of a baby:
that is what you call the world-comedy. But when they try to
force others to act on them, when they ostracize, punish,
murder, make war, impose by force their grotesque religious
and hideous criminal codes, then the comedy becomes a tragedy.
And only the dramatist sees through it; all the rest, the
Army, the Navy, the Church, and the Bar are busy bolstering
up the imposture. The dramatic faculty is nothing more nor
less than a little more than common forwardness in natural
history, a little more than common freedom from illusion, or,
to put it as the average dupe sees it, and as Ruskin flatly
expressed it concerning Shakespeare, a little less than common
conscience.... If the playgoer could see the dramatist's mind,
all the dramatists would be hanged, just as all the men and
women of forty would be massacred by all the youths and maidens
of twenty, if these young ones only knew.”[237]
The world-comedy, in Shaw's eyes, consists in the imaginative
self-delusion, the moralistic sophistication of man; the world-tragedy
in the bankruptcy of what we delight in calling progress with a P.
Progress, from Shaw's point of view, means increased command over self;
this lamentable desideratum is the cause of his scepticism. But let us
observe the open-minded, clear-eyed consistency of Shaw. While heartily
subscribing to the metaphysics of Schopenhauer, he yet as heartily
refuses to accept his pessimistic philosophy. At one with Darwin and
Huxley in their scientific, realistic, yet anarchistic challenge of the
validity of Biblical theology, Shaw, by his deliberate rejection of
their materialistic views, occupies the opposite pole of conviction.
It is useless to pretend to a “generation which has ceased to believe
in heaven and has not yet learned that the degradation by poverty
of four out of every five of its number is artificial,” that the
“pessimism of Koheleth, Shakespeare, Dryden and Swift can be refuted
if the world progresses solely by the destruction of the unfit, and
yet can only maintain its civilization by manufacturing the unfit in
swarms of which that appalling proportion of four to one represents
but the comparatively fit survivors.” To Shaw, progress means, not an
effect of the survival of the fittest brought about by the destruction
of the unfit, but the growth of the spirit of man. He has refused to
accept the Darwinian theory of evolution, since it “only accounted
for progress at all on the hypothesis of a continuous increase in the
severity of the conditions of existence--that is, on an assumption
of just the reverse of what was actually taking place”--a fact which
escaped Huxley. He finds in the world no signs of progress in the
humanitarian and ethical sense; only a few more discoveries in physics.
And even the much-trumpeted “increased command over nature,” harnessing
continents, circling the globe, and so on, as an argument for progress
vanishes before the inevitable query as to whether a negro of to-day
using a telephone is superior to George Washington. Shaw rails at
the “theistic credulity” of Voltaire as he rails at the “tribal
soothsayings” of Huxley. As he recently wrote me: “I have not escaped
from a literal belief in the Book of Genesis only to fall back into
the gross blindness of seeing nothing in the world but the result of
natural selection operating on a chapter of accidents, which is popular
Darwinism.”
In that most whimsical and witty essay, entitled, _The Conflict
Between Science and Common Sense_, Shaw declares that he has “found
out” the man of science: “In future my attitude towards him will
be one of more or less polite incredulity. Impostor for impostor,
I prefer the mystic to the scientist--the man who at least has the
decency to call his nonsense a mystery, to him who pretends that
it is ascertained, weighed, measured, analyzed fact.” In a sense,
Shaw's part in the humanitarian campaign against vivisection, modern
science generally, vaccination, education, flogging, “cannibalism,”
and so on, are all part of his attitude as a “mystic.” He has no
faith in the scientist with his specious invitation: “My friend, by
a diabolically cruel process I have procured a revoltingly filthy
substance. Allow me to inject this under your skin, and you can never
get hydrophobia, or enteric fever, or diphtheria, etc. I have even a
very choice preparation, of unmentionable nastiness, which will enable
you, if not to live for ever (though I think that quite possible),
at least to renew in your old age the excesses of your youth.” While
the average man, with incomprehensible credulity, jumps at the bait,
Shaw refuses to be so easily duped. While science has taught him that
dirt is “only matter in the wrong place,” his own common sense has
taught him that “disease is only matter in the wrong condition, and
that to inject matter in the wrong condition into matter in the right
condition (healthy flesh, to wit) is to put matter in the wrong place
with a vengeance.” In the public prints, in his novels and plays,
notably, _Cashel Byron's Profession_ and _The Philanderer_, Shaw has
fulminated as vigorously against vivisection as against vaccination.
From the first he perceived that the vivisector was “just the same
phenomenon in science as the dynamiter in politics, and that to all
humane men both methods of research and reform, effective or not,
were eternally barred, precisely as highway robbery is barred as a
method of supporting one's family.” His persistent vegetarianism is
not based upon a scientific inquiry into the amount of hydrocarbons,
uric acid, or what not deleterious stuff there may be in meat, but in
his perfectly natural and humane distaste for the shedding of blood.
“I have not the slightest doubt myself,” he once said, “that a diet of
nice tender babies, carefully selected, cleanly killed and tenderly
cooked, would make us far healthier and handsomer than the haphazard
dinners of to-day, whether carnivorous or vegetarian.... There is no
objection whatever to a baby from a nitrogenous point of view. Eaten
with sugar, or with beer, it would leave nothing to be desired in the
way of carbon. My sole objection to such a diet is that it happens
to be repugnant to me. I prefer bread and butter.” Shaw's “three
centuries” of life have taught him, mainly, to regard “men's principles
as excuses for doing what they want to do.” And in the moral sphere, he
contends that “the world remains as dependent as ever on pure dogmatic,
instinctive recoil from suffering on the one hand, and pure dogmatic,
instinctive love of inflicting it on the other. Common to both these
temperaments, and to the compound temperament in which they struggle
for mastery, is the timid perception that society can only exist
through a compact to live and let live.... All sorts of virtuously
indignant persons, clamouring for all sorts of vulgar retaliations,
from the kicking of a cad to the humiliation of a minister by an
election defeat, are indulging the destructive instincts under cover
of solicitude for the common weal, as unmistakably as the scientist
who, with a thousand humane departments of research open to him,
deliberately prefers cruel experiments, and pleads that the man who
ascertains how long it takes to bake a dog to death confers as great a
boon on humanity as the man who discovers the Röntgen rays and their
application to surgery. The cruel (loving to read the description
of his experiments), the selfish (hoping for cures), the sportsman
(anxious to be kept in countenance), and the cowardly (seeking an
excuse for tolerating an evil they dare not attack) will accept his
excuse: the humane will not. The final conflict is not between the
excuses in their logical disguise of scientific arguments, but between
the cruel will and the humane will.”
A leading cause for Shaw's “divine discontent” with progress, with
moral systems, with institutions, with “regimentation,” with flogging
in the navy, vaccination, science, cannibalism, and a thousand other
things, is his loss of faith in education. He has lost his illusions
on the subject. Education and culture, he maintains, are for the most
part “nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of
literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary
real.” He sees Masters of Art as “patentees of highly questionable
methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and
for the majority but half valid, representations of life.” This is
the natural attitude for one who said only the other day that “great
communities are built by men who sign with a mark: they are wrecked
by men who write Latin verses.” The ruthless repression which we
practise on our fellow creatures whilst they are still too small to
defend themselves, he insists, ends in their “reaching their full
bodily growth in a hopelessly lamed and intimidated condition, unable
to conceive of any forces in the world except physically coercive
and socially conventional ones.” “Modern” education, he declares,
“differs from Dr. Johnson's education only in substituting Jenner and
Pasteur for Plato and Euripides as academic idols, and replacing the
recognition of a purpose in the world, and the investigation of that
purpose, by a conception of the universe as the accidental result of
a senseless raging of mechanical forces, and by a boundless credulity,
not outdone in dirt, cruelty, and stupidity, by any known savage
tribe, as to the possibility of circumventing these forces by nostrums
and conjurations.” The hope of the world lies in the development of
individuality and self-reliance. Real live learning would soon flourish
on the boundless basis of human curiosity and ambition.[238]
[Illustration: =A Plaster Bust of Shaw.=]
Made in forty minutes.
_Prince Paul Toubetzkoy._
_Courtesy of the Sculptor_
Bernard Shaw is not a materialist or natural selectionist, but in
direct line of descent, astounding as the contrast may appear, from
Schopenhauer, Lamarck and Samuel Butler. Shaw does not subscribe to
the belief that goodness implies that “man is vicious by nature, and
that supreme goodness is supreme martyrdom.” A fundamental tenet of
his philosophic faith is the conviction that “progress can do nothing
but make the most of us all as we are.” This conviction has more or
less consciously animated him all through his career. Within his
secret soul, Shaw has always cherished a radiant and gorgeous hope for
humanity, always unconsciously trod the rainbow bridge from the real
to the ideal. In his heart, he has whispered Ibsen's thought, “The
expression of our own individuality is our first duty.” A dream of
human perfectibility has lured him on: the dearest foe of this arrant
realist has ever been--an ideal. As a youth he revelled in the Shelley
of _Prometheus Unbound_; young manhood found him working upon the
hypothesis of the Economic Man. In _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_, Shaw
sang of the new man, the sovereign individual--in Nietzsche's phrase,
“the possessor of a long infrangible will, who has, in his possession,
his _standard of valuation_.” He had found out the impossibilities of
anarchism before he came to Wagner; his clearer vision and enlarged
horizon enabled him to realize that “the individual Siegfried has come
often enough, only to find himself confronted with the alternative
of government or destruction at the hands of his fellows who are not
Siegfrieds.” At last he began to realize that “it is necessary to breed
a race of men in whom the life-giving impulses predominate before
the New Protestantism becomes politically practicable.” The matured
form of his ideal is the ethical man, convinced of the bankruptcy of
education and progress, inspired with the faith of the world-will, and
resolved, not to adopt a new philosophy, but to develop and perfect
the human species. “To rise above ourselves to ourselves”--that is the
creed of the new faith, of the humanitarian artificial selectionist
concerned even more for the future of the race than for the freedom
of his own instincts. Every phase in Shaw's career, it cannot be too
strongly insisted upon, is the legitimate and logical outcome of
his Socialism. His philosophy is the consistent integration of his
empirical criticisms of society and its present organization, founded
on authority and based upon Capitalism. And to the Socialist, nothing
is necessary for the realization of Utopia but that man should will
it. “Man will never be that which he can and should be,” wrote Wagner,
“until by a conscious following of that inner natural necessity, which
is the only true necessity, he makes his life a mirror of nature, and
frees himself from his thraldom to outer artificial counterfeits. Then
will he first become a living man, who now is a mere wheel in the
mechanism of this or that Religion, Nationality or State.” The fact
faced by the Shavian philosophy is that Man does not effectively will
perfection. The quintessence of Shavianism is that “he never will until
he becomes Superman.”[239]
The cardinal point in the New Theology as enunciated by Bernard Shaw
is the identification of God with the Life Force. “There are two
mutually contradictory ideas which cut across each other in regard to
the relative powers of God and Man,” Mr. Shaw once said to me in the
course of a long discussion of his religious views. “According to the
popular conception, God always creates beings inferior to Himself: the
creator must be greater than the creature. I find myself utterly unable
to accept this horrible old idea, involving as it does the belief that
all the cruelty in the world is the work of an omnipotent God, who, if
He liked, could have left cruelty out of creation. If God could have
created anything better, do you suppose He would have been content to
create such miserable failures as you and me?
“As a matter of fact,” he continued, “we know that in all art,
literature, politics, sociology--in every phase of genuine life and
vitality--man's highest aspiration is to create something higher than
himself. So God, the Life Force, has been struggling for countless ages
to become conscious of Himself--to express Himself in forms higher and
ever higher up in the scale of evolution. God does not take pride in
making a grub-worm because it is lower than Himself. On the contrary,
the grub is a mere symbol of His desire for self-expression.”
To Bernard Shaw, the universe is God in the act of making Himself.
At the back of the universe, according to his mystical conception,
there is a great purpose, a great will. This force behind the universe
is bodiless and impotent, without executive power of its own; after
innumerable tentatives--experiments and mistakes--the force has
succeeded in changing inert matter into the amœba, the amœba into some
more complex organism; this again into something still more complex,
and finally has evolved a man, with hands and a brain to accomplish the
work of the Will. Man is not the ultimate aim of the Life Force, but
only a stage in the scale of evolution. The Life Force will go still
further and produce something more complicated than Man, that is, the
Superman, then the Angel, the Archangel, and last of all an omnipotent
and omniscient God.[240]
Shaw has startled and shocked many people during his lifetime by
asserting vehemently that he was an atheist.[241] And so indeed he is,
if orthodoxy connotes belief in the early-Victorian God of cruelty and
barbarity--the Almighty Fiend of Shelley's characterization. The idea
of God as a cruel Designer, vindictive in punishment of the unbeliever,
then held full sway.
“Neither science on the one hand, nor the moral remonstrances of
Shelley and his school on the other, were able to shake the current
belief in that old theology that came back to the old tribal idol,
Jehovah.” Then came Darwin with his theory of natural selection,
involving the corollary that all the operations of the species can be
accounted for without consciousness, intelligence or design. After
rapturously embracing Darwinism for six weeks, Samuel Butler turned
upon Darwin and rent him--he had discovered that Darwin had actually
banished mind from the universe.[242] Butler saw clearly that natural
selection had no moral significance, that it did away not only with the
necessity for purpose and design in the universe, but actually with the
necessity for consciousness.
Philosophically and scientifically, Shaw derives directly from
Schopenhauer, Lamarck and Butler. He recognizes purpose and will in
the world because he is himself conscious of purpose and will. Woman
brings children into the world, not for herself or for her husband,
but to fulfil the end in view of which the Life Force has created her.
Man produces great works just as woman brings men into the world, with
travail and pain; man is continually engaged in doing things which
do not benefit him. He works just as hard when there is no chance of
profit as when there is. Shaw, then, is a confirmed Neo-Lamarckian in
the view that “where there's a will there's a way.” Just as Lamarck,
with his theory of functional adaptation, virtually maintained that
living organisms changed because they wanted to, so Shaw believes that
there is a purpose in the universe; identifies his own purpose with it,
and makes the achievement of that purpose an act, not of self-sacrifice
for himself, but of self-realization. In Shaw's view, Schopenhauer's
treatise on the World as Will is the complement to Lamarck's natural
history; for Will is the driving force of Lamarckian evolution.[243]
Bernard Shaw's religion is the expression of his faith in Life and
in the Will. He regards man as divine because, actually, he is the
last effort of the Will to realize itself as God. And yet he does not
believe in the doctrine of personal immortality. “I have a strong
feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for--scrapped at
last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than
myself,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me. “This, I believe, is the clue to
my views on immortality. The idea of personal salvation is intensely
repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big
brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering
about as a celestial Rough Rider! Or imagine me in heaven, giving forth
all sorts of epigrams and paradoxes, startling Saint Peter with my
iconoclasm, being paragraphed in the _Eternal Herald_ and cartooned
in the _Æon Review_! No, I think the trouble has come about through
imagining that there are only two attributes--eternal life and utter
extinction at death. I believe neither of these theories to be correct.
Life continually tends to organize itself into higher and better forms.
There is no such thing as personal immortality; and death, as Weismann
says, is only a means of economizing life. The vital spark, the Life
principle within us, goes on in spite of personal annihilation.
“As I told Mrs. Besant the other night,” he added, “I am looking for a
race of men who are not afraid to die.”
A popular error into which many able critics fall is involved in the
oft-repeated assertion that Shaw derives his philosophy directly from
Ibsen, Strindberg, Stirner and Nietzsche. It is quite true that _The
Quintessence of Ibsenism_ might have been written by an ardent disciple
of Nietzsche; and yet the first time Shaw ever heard Nietzsche's name
was from a German mathematician, a Miss Borchardt, who had read Shaw's
brochure on Ibsen, and who told him she knew where he had got it all.
On being asked where, she replied “From Nietzsche's _Jenseits von Gut
und Böse_.” Shaw at once understood and appreciated the title, and
thereafter took an interest in Nietzsche; but he could not read much of
the few English translations that were attempted except Thomas Common's
book of selections; the German originals he never even attempted to
read. “If all this talk about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche continues,”
Shaw laughingly said to me one day, “I really will have to read their
works, to discover just what we have in common. This habit of referring
every idea of mine to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche comes about partly
because, to people without philosophy, all philosophies seem the same,
and partly because I have often referred to them to remind my readers
that what they called my eccentricities and paradoxes are part of
the common European stock.” As for Stirner, I have never heard Mr.
Shaw mention Stirner. I recall no mention of Stirner in all of Shaw's
works, and I have no reason to believe that Shaw is indebted to him
in the slightest degree. It is quite true that, like Stirner, Shaw
is an intellectual anarch; but he has no real sympathy for Stirner's
“Eigentum,” for the reason that though Shaw is an individualist, he
is likewise a constitutional collectivist. He sees no real conflict
between Individualism and Socialism, and has actually given the
striking definition: “Socialism is merely Individualism rationalized,
organized, clothed and in its right mind.” Shaw has been accused of
indebtedness to Strindberg also; the truth is, that he has all along
been perfectly familiar with the idea of hatred of woman-idolization
through the writings and conversation of Mr. Ernest Belfort Bax, whose
essays attacking _bourgeois_ morality were published before Strindberg,
or Nietzsche, for that matter, had been heard of in England. But
although Shaw has read very little of the marvellously prolific
Strindberg, he admires him greatly, and once told me that he thought
Strindberg would prove to be “the noblest Roman of us all.” Nietzsche's
view of Christianity as a slave-morality was advanced in England by
Mr. Stuart-Glennie, a Scotch historical philosopher, still living and
much neglected, in what appealed to Shaw as a far more sensible way,
Stuart-Glennie regarding it as the means by which the white races (the
Supermen) enslaved the dark races and mean whites, while Nietzsche
regarded it as an imposition by the slaves themselves.[244] Shaw,
Stuart-Glennie and Bax are all Socialists; if “the physiologist of the
mind” would seek to trace in Shaw's work early influences upon his
philosophy, he must look for them in the works of Stuart-Glennie and
Bax, rather than in the works of Nietzsche and Strindberg. And as for
Shaw's strange complex of Socialism and individualism, I personally
find it to be a mean between the extravagant individualism of Max
Stirner, the intellectual anarchy of Elisée Reclus, and the practical
collectivism of Jaurès and Vandervelde.
The English critics, however, continue to refer Shaw's philosophy to
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, “knowing nothing about them,” as Shaw says,
“except that their opinions, like mine, are not those of the _Times_ or
the _Spectator_.” Indeed, Shaw is an unwilling impostor as a pundit in
the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. What, for example, could
be more foreign to the Shavian philosophy than Nietzsche's repudiation
of Socialism, his admiration of the Romans, or his notions about art?
Shaw's Superman is mere man to Nietzsche; whilst Nietzsche's Superman
is God to Shaw. “Nietzsche's erudition I believe to be all nonsense,”
Shaw recently remarked to me. “I think he was academic in the sense
of having a great deal of second-hand book-learning about him, and
don't care for him except when he is perfectly original--that is,
when he is dealing with matters which a peasant might have dealt with
if he had brains enough, and had had the run of a library. You feel
how clever and imaginative he is, and how much he has derived from
writers of genius and from his own humanity about men and nations; but
there is a want of actual contact knowledge about him; he is always
the speculative university professor or the solitary philosopher and
poet, never quite the worker and man of affairs or the executive artist
in solid materials. It annoys me to see English writers absolutely
ignoring the work of British thinkers, and swallowing foreign
celebrities--whether philosophers or opera-singers--without a grain
of salt. It shows an utter want of intellectual self-respect; and the
result of it is that Nietzsche's views, instead of being added solely
to the existing body of philosophy, are treated as if they were a sort
of music-hall performance.”
Bernard Shaw is endowed with that persistent strain of British
practicality which makes him employ philosophy as an instrumentality
for the achievement of the purposes of life. In a word, Shaw is
fundamentally an ethicist: philosophy to him means a guide for life.
His metaphysic is basically moralistic, consisting of a series of
postulates in respect to conduct.
In the manuscript of an unfinished work which Mr. Shaw once loaned to
me, I discovered a notable passage which throws a flood of light upon
Shaw's philosophy as an index to his entire life and career. Perhaps it
may distil the quintessence of the Shavian philosophy:
“The man who is looking after himself is useless for revolutionary
purposes. The man who believes he is only a fly on the wheel of Natural
Selection, of Evolution, or Progress, or Puritanism, or 'some power
not ourselves, that makes for righteousness' is not only useless,
but obstructive. But the man who believes that there is a purpose in
the universe, and identifies his own purpose with it, and makes the
achievement of that purpose an act, not of self-sacrifice for himself,
but of self-realization: that is the effective man and the happy man,
whether he calls the purpose the will of God, or Socialism, or the
religion of humanity. He is the man who will combine with you in a
fellowship, which he may call the fellowship of the Holy Ghost or you
may call Democracy, or the Parliament of Man, or the Federation of the
World, but which is a real working, and if need be fighting, fellowship
for all that. He is the man who knows that nothing intelligent will be
done until somebody does it, and who will place the doing of it above
all his other interests.
“In short, we must make a religion of Socialism. We must fall back
on our will to Socialism, and resort to our reason only to find out
the ways and means. And this we can do only if we conceive the will
as a creative energy, as Lamarck did; and totally renounce and abjure
Darwinism, Marxism, and all fatalistic, penny-in-the-slot theories of
evolution whatever.”
FOOTNOTES:
[227] Shaw's philosophy has many points of contact with the Pragmatism
of Schiller and James. Shaw sees in truth and justice, not abstract
principles external to man, but _human passions_, which have, in their
time, conflicted with higher passions as well as with lower ones. With
James he is at one in the belief that “Truth has its palæontology, and
its 'prescription' and may grow stiff with years of veteran service
and petrified in men's regard by sheer antiquity”; and with Schiller's
“humanistic” doctrine that “to an unascertainable extent our truths are
man-made products too.” To Shaw, as to James, “'the right' is only the
expedient in the way of our behaving.”
[228] _Giving the Devil His Due_: a review, by Bernard Shaw, of Vols.
I. and II. of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Supplement to the
_Saturday Review_, May 13th, 1899.
[229] “'Is here,' someone will ask, 'an ideal being erected, or an
ideal being broken down?' But have ye ever really asked yourselves
sufficiently as to how dearly the erection of _all_ ideals on earth
were paid for? How much reality had to be slandered and misconceived
for this purpose; how much falsehood sanctioned; how much conscience
confused; how much 'God' sacrificed each time? In order that a
sanctuary may be erected, _a sanctuary must be broken down_: this
is the law--name me an instance in which it is violated!” Friedrich
Nietzsche, _Genealogy of Morals_, translated by William A. Hausemann,
p. 122 (Macmillan).
[230] To take a single example, consult _My Dream_, from _The Bab
Ballads and Songs of a Savoyard_, the first two stanzas of which read:
The other night, from cares exempt, I slept--and what d'you think I
dreamt? I dreamt that somehow I had come To dwell in Topsy-Turvydom.
Where vice is virtue--virtue, vice; Where nice is nasty--nasty, nice;
Where right is wrong and wrong is right; Where white is black and black
is white.
[231] _A Dramatic Realist to His Critics_, in the _New Review_
(London), July, 1894.
[232] This morality is no new thing under the sun; Maurice Maeterlinck
has declared that our morality of to-day has nothing to add to this
injunction, found in the _Arabian Nights_: “Learn to know thyself! And
do thou not act till then. And do thou then only act in accordance with
all thy desires, but having great care always that thou do not injure
thy neighbour.”
[233] Compare also the notable passage, embodying a similar view, in
Max Stirner's _The Ego and His Own_ (Benjamin R. Tucker, N. Y., 1907),
p. 212, beginning: “'What am I?' each of you asks himself. An abyss of
lawless and unregulated impulses, desires, wishes, passions, a chaos
without light or guiding star!...”
[234] _A Degenerate's View of Nordau_, in _Liberty_, July 27th, 1895.
[235] Mr. Shaw has recently pointed out that Professor A. K. Rogers, in
his _Mr. Bernard Shaw's Philosophy_ (_Hibbert Journal_, July, 1910),
has failed to note the “trumpery (!) distinction between instinct and
conscience” which Shaw had drawn in _Man and Superman_.
[236] It is worthy of note that Nietzsche has defined freedom as the
will to be responsible for oneself. Compare also _The Ego and His Own_,
pp. 237-238 (Benjamin R. Tucker, N. Y.), the passage beginning: “To be
_a_ man is not to realize the ideal of Man, but to realize _oneself_,
the individual....”
[237] _Who I Am, and What I Think_, Part II., in _The Candid Friend_,
May 18th, 1901.
[238] Compare _Does Modern Education Ennoble?_ by G. Bernard Shaw; in
_Great Thoughts_, October 7th, 1905.
[239] The substance of Shaw's philosophy--as, indeed, he once told
me--is embodied in Act III. of _Man and Superman_.
[240] For the sake of making himself easily understood, Shaw frequently
expresses his neo-theological conceptions in the familiar phraseology
of orthodox religion. Shaw's practice of personifying God, when in
reality he mentally identifies “God” with a mystical and impersonal
“Force,” is a practice which many people quite justly condemn.
[241] _Cf._ Shaw's open letter to G. W. Foote, in _The Freethinker_,
November 1st, 1908.
[242] In this connection it is interesting to read Shaw's review of
Samuel Butler's _Luck or Cunning?_ published under the heading “Darwin
Denounced,” in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, May 31st, 1887. At this time,
Shaw committed himself neither to Lamarck nor to Butler, but was
content to define the issues of the controversy. Certainly his interest
was aroused, and years later his support was won, by Butler's protest
against natural selection as--to use Butler's own words--“a purely
automatic conception of the universe as of something that will work if
a penny be dropped into the box.”
[243] Compare _The Philosophy of Bernard Shaw_, by Archibald Henderson,
in the _Atlantic Monthly_, February, 1909.
[244] Compare _A Genealogy of Morals_, translated by William A.
Hausemann; Alexander Tille's introduction, pp. xvi. and xviii. For
Shaw's general confession of indebtedness to others, compare the
preface to _Major Barbara_--_First Aid to Critics_.
THE MAN
“Like all men, I play many parts, and none of them is more or
less real than the other.... I am a soul of infinite worth. I
am, in short, not only what I can make out of myself, which
varies greatly from hour to hour, and emergency to emergency,
but what you can see in me.”--Bernard Shaw's review of G. K.
Chesterton's _Bernard Shaw_.
“Many people seem to imagine that I am an extraordinary sort of
person. The fact of the matter is that ninety-nine per cent. of
me is just like everybody else.”--Remark of Bernard Shaw to the
author.
“This is the true joy in life: the being used for a purpose
recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly
worn out before you are thrown on the scrap-heap; the being a
force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of
ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not
devote itself to making you happy.”--_Man and Superman. Epistle
Dedicatory to A. B. Walkley._