There is a photograph of Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells, taken
by an American photographer, Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn, in which the
two men are shown sitting side by side. It is the most illuminating
interpretation of their characters that I have ever seen. Mr. Shaw,
with something of the look of a prophet, sits beside Mr. Wells who has
a smile of disbelief on his face; Mr. Shaw shows a countenance full of
faith, while Mr. Wells shows one full of inquiry. Mr. Shaw accepts the
pose quite naturally, but Mr. Wells is deprecating. I felt when I saw
that photograph in Mr. Wells's study that while Mr. Shaw accepted the
status of a great man as his right, Mr. Wells felt uncomfortable about
the pose, not because he doubts his right to be regarded as a great
man, but because he is reluctant to live on pedestals. "I'm human just
as much as you are," he seems to be saying to the photographer, and
the smile of deprecation on his face means, if it means anything, that
while Mr. Shaw accepts the great man's altitude without a qualm, Mr.
Wells feels that the whole thing is humbug. "Shaw is taken in by this
Great Man business," the Wells of the photograph says as plainly as if
the picture were to take life and utter words, "but don't you imagine
I'm deluded by it!..."
These two men, one Irish, one English, George Bernard Shaw and Herbert
George Wells, between them have done more to influence the minds
of the young men of my generation than any other two men of their
time. Their attitude towards life may, perhaps, be summarized in an
account of the way in which they interpret the doctrine of Evolution.
Mr. Shaw believes that the Life Force, which ordinary men call God,
is an Imperfect Thing seeking to make Itself Perfect. How, when you
contemplate the miseries and inequalities and cruelties of existence,
can you believe in an All-Powerful God? he says. You must believe
that these horrible things happen because God cannot prevent them
from happening. The blind-alley argument that the Almighty inflicts
pain upon us for our good is insupportable when one considers that an
earthly father would not subject his child to convulsions or cause a
cancer to consume its life or endow it with a cruel disposition if such
things were within his powers of disposal. If, one reasonably argues,
an earthly father is incapable of such acts, how less likely is God
to be capable of them if He be All-Powerful and All-Good? Since these
inexplicable cruelties and horrors occur and recur, surely, argues
Mr. Shaw, it is only common sense to assume that they do so in spite
of God's good will towards man. Starting from this premise, he goes on
to argue that God seeks to obtain that control over material things
which He has not yet succeeded in obtaining. He imagines God engaged in
a magnificent research, the discovery of a harmonious universe, much
in the way in which one imagines a biologist in his laboratory seeking
for a preventative of disease. The Life Force uses such instruments
for its purpose as are to be found lying at hand. When these prove
abortive or useless or insufficient, the Life Force invents a new
instrument which it uses until that instrument, too, is found to be
useless or inadequate and is scrapped in favour of a new instrument.
Like all creators, God must express Himself through His creatures, and
the whole of Time has been spent so far in finding a suitable means
of expression. In the beginning, God used mammoth beasts, but finding
them unsuitable for His purpose, He scrapped them and invented other
creatures until at last He achieved His best instrument, Man. God's
latest and finest creature differs from all His other creatures in
this respect that he is conscious of God's purpose and can help it
forward or hold it back. God concealed His intention from all the
instruments that preceded the advent of Man, but, in the development
of His Being, He found that greater advantage would accrue to Him if
He made His instrument aware of its purpose. So we get the reason of
Man. God, before the creation of Man, had depended upon Himself. After
the creation of Man, he depended partly upon Himself, partly upon
His creature. _Man, in short, was the first of God's instruments to
have the power to help God to realize Himself._ To Mr. Shaw, it is an
obscuring of God's purpose for Man continually to pray, "God help me!"
when it is part of his purpose and duty to affirm, "I will help God!" I
have already quoted his dictum that we should so live that when we die,
God is in our debt.
It is obvious, from this belief, that Mr. Shaw does not believe in the
inevitable march of mankind from bad to good and from good to better.
We may be marching towards Utopia or the New Jerusalem, or we may be
marching back to Chaos. Man, having the choice between helping God and
thwarting Him, may so vex the Deity that He will become impatient with
him and throw this instrument away as he has thrown away other useless
instruments, and seek for a better one. God scrapped the mammoth beasts
because they were not adequate for the execution of His design; He
_may_ scrap Man for the same reason or because Man, while adequate,
wilfully refuses to help. This theory is expressed continually in
Mr. Shaw's plays and prefaces, for example, in a speech by Cæsar in
"Cæsar and Cleopatra," where the Emperor gives expression to a violent
antipathy to war. War, in Mr. Shaw's mind, is a plain perversion of
God's purpose, and he would probably declare that Man, in the Great War
whose end may yet be a bloody battle between the Allies, almost reached
the end of God's patience. In five years, the British alone had eight
hundred thousand of her most valuable men _killed_. France lost double
that number _killed_. Germany lost more even than France _killed_.
All the potentialities for good, all the fervour and chivalry and
idealism and courage that was in those men, their ability to help God
to achieve perfection, has vanished utterly from the world; and there
is nothing left of it. Most of them died without progeny, and so there
is not even the hope that their spirit has passed on to their children
and that, at the worst, God's purpose has only been suspended for a
generation. They have gone, irretrievably gone. Another such war and
Western civilization must perish, if, indeed, it has not already begun
to decay. In other words, God, sickened by Man's perversity and wilful
obstruction, will have scrapped him....
That is the Shavian doctrine of the Life Force, put plainly and simply.
Mr. Wells differs very sharply from Mr. Shaw in his doctrine. Mr. Shaw
believes that the progress from bad to good is not inevitable: Mr.
Wells believes that it is, and he produces the records of history to
support his belief. Mankind, at this moment, he will admit, is in a
very bloody mess, but that mess is not so frightful as, say, the mess
after the Thirty Years' War. We, who contemplate the organized Murder
of Youth which began in August, 1914, may fairly feel that mankind
has sunk very low in barbarism, but when we survey the whole range
of humanity so far as it has been recorded, the depths of 1914, deep
though they are, appear to be slightly less dreadful than the depths
of other days. There is a greater revolt from organized Murder to-day
than there was after the Thirty Years' War. There are fewer people
to-day who prate about the glories of war than there were then. (Oddly
enough, or perhaps naturally enough, most of the people who still
think of war as a jolly adventure live in America.) We are a little
nearer to a realization of the commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" than
we were before 1914. We are learning that there are no qualifications
or exceptions to that commandment. It does not say, "Thou shalt not
kill--except in defence of small nationalities!" It does not say,
"Thou shalt not kill--except for the purpose of self-determination!"
It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill--except for the establishment of
a Republic in Ireland!" It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill--except
for the purpose of preserving the Empire!" Tersely and without
modification, it states that "Thou Shalt Not Kill" in any circumstances
whatever.
Here is a dilemma from which the Christian cannot easily escape, and
the difficulty of doing so, apart from all ordinary considerations of
decency, is bringing man sharply face to face with the fundamentals of
human existence. In spite of much occasion for pessimism to-day, there
is occasion for greater optimism than man ever before has had. There
is a social consciousness at work in our minds and hearts that will
yet deliver us from the wicked man. How few are the years since the
days when men in one part of England made war on men in another part!
How unthinkable it is that men in Lancaster should make war to-day in
Yorkshire! True, it is less than a century since men in the Northern
States of America made war on men in the Southern States. True, it is
less than ten years since men in Ulster prepared themselves to make war
on men in the rest of Ireland. True, at this moment, Russian fights
Russian, and Sinn Feiner slays Orangeman, and Orangeman slays Sinn
Feiner. True, that white man burns black man, that Christian persecutes
Jew, true all this and worse, yet it remains true that when the records
of time are made up and just balances are drawn in the accounts of
Mankind, there is seen to be a greater perception of common purpose
to-day than there was a century ago.
His scientific and historic sense keeps Mr. Wells secure in his belief
that Man, although he may hinder the development of God's purpose,
cannot thwart it. Mr. Shaw would perhaps agree with Mr. Wells in his
belief that God's Will must ultimately find adequate expression, but
he would insist that that expression may be through another instrument
than man. Mr. Wells, however, would not yield to him on this point; he
would insist that God's Will must ultimately find adequate expression
through man. Man may, indeed be obliterated by plague and pestilence or
cosmic disaster, but, failing those, man must achieve God's purpose.