Our attitude towards Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells, Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc
was very different from our attitude towards Mr. Galsworthy. These
challenging, fighting, protesting men were concerned less with pity
for the victims of life than with anger against or opposition to the
oppressors of life. They did not wring their hands; they put up their
fists. The Early Twentieth Century Youth listened respectfully to Mr.
Galsworthy, but he went out to fight with Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells and
Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc. These four men did not move him in equal
measure. Mr. Wells stimulated him with the quick succession of his
ideas, but disconcerted him also with the rapidity with which he shed
one idea for another. While we were willing to challenge everything and
make it justify its existence, we were eager also to find firm ground
for our feet. We felt that Mr. Wells ought to make up his mind a little
more carefully before he took the public into his confidence. Mr.
Shaw's awful consistency, even when he took to religion, drew us to
him more than Mr. Wells's willingness to modify or enlarge his views.
Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton stimulated us in a different way from
that in which Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells stimulated us. Mr. Wells sent us
out into the world in search of new and more adequate formulæ; Mr.
Belloc and Mr. Chesterton checked us in headlong flights with words of
warning and remonstrance. They reminded us that man is of the earth,
earthy; that man does not live by Good Will alone; that society is
composed of a great variety of beings, generous and mean, exalted and
debased, hearty and miserable, noble and ignoble, self-sacrificing and
self-seeking, kind and cruel; and they reminded us also that unless
we took care to remember this vital fact of the variety of man, we
should lose our way in the deserts ahead of us. They told us that Mr.
Wells's "Good Will" was merely Godwin's "Universal Benevolence" all
over again, and that Godwin's doctrine had made the way easy for the
Utilitarians and the growth of a devitalizing political theory which
expressed itself in the brutal industrial system of the first half of
the nineteenth century. Mr. Wells sought to convict man of a sense
of stupidity and disorganization, but they sought to convict him of
a sense of sin. Mr. Wells reminded man of his power to aspire; they
reminded him of his lapse from grace. Mr. Wells said, "You can climb!"
They said, "You have fallen!" He said, "Think!" They said, "Repent!"
The world, in Mr. Wells's opinion, needed Love and Fine Thinking. In
the opinion of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton it needed the love of God
and faith in the Catholic Church. There probably was less difference
in essentials between Mr. Wells and the Chesterbelloc, as Mr. Shaw
nicknamed them, than appeared on the surface of things. The Catholic
Church in its organized state may move Mr. Wells to admiration, though,
in its religious aspect, it probably moves him only to derision. It is
a shabby sort of faith, with a tendency to tawdriness which makes it
ultimately unsuitable to the spiritual needs of a gentleman, although
adequate to the needs of servant-girls and actors. No one who has
visited a Catholic church or witnessed the ceremonials in Rome can
help, if he or she be possessed of any culture at all, feeling that the
whole business is second-rate: the effort of an overblown actor-manager
to interpret Shakespeare in pretentious terms. The fundamental sanity
of Mr. Chesterton has, no doubt, saved him from the folly of secession
to Rome, but his partiality for it and Mr. Belloc's rigid attainment
to it, made the young men of my time suspicious of the Chesterbelloc.
Mr. Belloc said, on a public occasion, that he would support the Church
in an act of repression if the Church came into serious conflict with
an antagonist; and he proved that he meant what he said by applauding
the execution of Ferrer, the anti-clerical, in Spain. It was natural,
perhaps, that my Orange blood should boil when I heard Mr. Belloc
palliating the offences of his obsolete church, but my more tolerant
friends were as dashed by his behaviour as I was, and what respect
we had for him was considerably diminished by the knowledge that he
would always come to heel when some priest snapped fingers at him.
Neither he nor Mr. Chesterton, although their criticism interested and
on occasions checked us, ever established dominion over us because of
their preoccupation with Catholicism. They might spell the word with a
capital C, but we knew very well that Mr. Belloc in his heart spelt it
with a small one, and we were not going to deliver ourselves into the
hands of men who were priest-ridden, however "jolly" they might be or
however well they might write.
We were not interested in their beer-swilling habits which we regarded
as queer nastinesses in otherwise reputable persons. Their efforts
to make a tenet of religion out of beer-swilling seemed to us to be
as ridiculous as would be an effort by a Chinaman to make a tenet of
religion out of opium-smoking.
Mr. Shaw was incontestably the supreme figure among these men of mind
who stimulated and influenced the young men and women of the Early
Twentieth Century. I doubt whether any one has ever captured or held
the fancy of young men as Mr. Shaw captured and held our fancy. Dr.
Johnson had an influence as powerful in his time as Mr. Shaw had in
ours; but Dr. Johnson's influence was mainly exercised over men of
older years than we were, of more established habits than we had; and
I doubt very much whether he affected their thoughts and outlook on
life so profoundly as Mr. Shaw affected us. He could not persuade the
faithful Boswell to accept his view of the American colonists, and his
pamphlet, "Taxation No Tyranny" displeased his friends as much as it
appeared to gratify George III and his supporters. Dr. Johnson was a
critic and a scholar with very little creative ability; he was too
conservative a man to be a man of genius; and he looked back too often
for the liking of young men who are always looking forward. His love
of tradition and settled order, while it was pleasing to men of an age
when comfort and security and familiar things began to attract the mind
more than effort and adventure and change, made him unattractive to
the stirring minds of young men. Shelley derived from Godwin, not from
Johnson.
There is a passage in Boswell's "Life of Dr. Johnson" in which Dr.
Johnson's peculiar views on the respect due to men of rank are set out
very clearly.
" ... a discussion took place, whether ... Lord Cardross did right
to refuse to go Secretary of the Embassy to Spain, when Sir James
Gray, a man of inferior rank, went Ambassador. Dr. Johnson said,
that perhaps in point of interest he did wrong; but in point of
dignity he did well.... Sir, had he gone Secretary, while his
inferior was Ambassador, he would have been a traitor to his rank
and family."
The question, to Dr. Johnson's mind, was not one of merit: Lord
Cardross was entitled to "go Ambassador," not because he was a more
skilful diplomatist than Sir James Gray, but because he was a lord
while Sir James was only a knight! This extraordinary doctrine, which
may be held accountable for much in British history, might appeal to
elderly men who love rules and regulations and like to have everything
neatly set out in books, but it certainly does not appeal to young men
who believe in conflicts won by superior qualities; for young men, as
Dr. Johnson himself said on one occasion, "have more virtue than old
men; they have more generous sentiments in every respect."
Mr. Shaw is incapable of uttering such a remark as Dr. Johnson uttered
in support of Lord Cardross's inept behaviour. He has, indeed, said
and written foolish things and he is capable of making what are called
"debating" points and cheap scores and of saying things for the sake
of saying them or of annoying the complacent and the smug; but he is
incapable of saying anything which supports a belief that one man shall
have precedence over another, not because of his merit, but because
of his birth. Dr. Johnson's statement was not a casual, fantastic,
perverse statement; it was a natural result of his general theory of
society. It is recorded of him that he declined to leave a room until
a Bishop had done so on the ground that the Bishop's office gave him
a title to precedence over a man of greater mentality! It was not
humility that caused Dr. Johnson to behave thus, for he was an arrogant
man, nor was it indifference to such matters, for he was a stickler for
respect to himself even when he did not deserve respect: it was his
belief in the providential arrangement of society in settled grades
that caused him to behave in this way. The man was entitled to quit the
room first, not because he was a good man or a great man, but because
he was a bishop! There is probably some convenience in this belief, a
simple method of preventing incivility, but it is a small convenience
which does not greatly matter to youth.
I can imagine Mr. Shaw refusing to go out of the room before the Bishop
has done so, in sheer humility or indifference, but I cannot imagine
him refusing to do so because of his regard for the man's office as
distinct from the man himself. And it is, I suppose, his irreverence
for office, more than anything else, which draws young men to him.
He is no respecter of persons or authorities: he criticizes them all,
high or low. His courage, his vitality, his arrogance, his humility,
his championship of persecuted persons, his impulse to help an
unpopular cause not, as stupid people imagine, because it is unpopular,
but because it seems to him to be a just cause, and his absolute
indifference to vested interests and the power of the majority--these
qualities of his draw young men to him as a magnet draws a needle. It
is significant, I think, that Dr. Johnson had a very strong dislike of
Dean Swift to whom, in many respects, Bernard Shaw bears a close mental
resemblance. It is very certain that had Bernard Shaw lived in the
eighteenth century, to which, in spirit, he really belongs, he would
have supported the Americans as fiercely as Johnson denounced them; and
I do not doubt that his would have been the most scathing and powerful
of the pamphlets written in reply to "Taxation No Tyranny."