been spent somewhere mid-way between the lives of the man-of-action
and the man-of-letters. He has been primarily and essentially a critic
of the current ideas about existing facts, the ideas which are
pre-supposed in the typical and habitual activities of our modern
world. He has been, almost invariably, a destructive critic--a critic
of that rare kind which is able to win attention because he himself is
so active in this Vandal work of his, because he can make his critical
attack in so many different ways, because there seem to be a greater
vital force and spirit in his pulling down of gods than ever existed
in the gods themselves. Socrates, one would suppose, was not more
insistent and unexpected in his gadfly attacks upon the Athenian
sophists than is Mr. Shaw in his raids upon the Pharisees of
sophisticated London. His biography, when it is written, will be a
very fascinating and a very large book, and Mr. Shaw himself thinks
that it will be identical with the history of his time. There is
already in existence a book which claims to be an authorised "Critical
Biography;" and, needless to say, it was written by an American--Dr.
Archibald Henderson--who stepped in with superb confidence and
compelled Mr. Shaw to criticise, overhaul, and contribute to his
daring enterprise. "You can force my hand to some extent," said Mr.
Shaw, "for any story that you start will pursue me to all eternity."
This valiant American describes with gusto the active, talking,
debating, propagating, protesting life that Mr. Shaw has lived. It has
not been a "domestic" life; not even a specially "literary" life. We
feel it has been a life in which there has been little privacy or
intimacy, that it has seldom been wholly shut off from the
market-place and the theatre; that if he is a man entirely destitute
of "company manners," this is because he has lived always "in
company." He was, of course, born in Ireland, not very far from
Dublin. His parents were Protestants belonging to that middle class
which is hampered by social pretensions and insufficient worldly
means. He was taught at Protestant schools, where he was expected to
believe that "Roman Catholics are socially inferior persons, who will
go to hell when they die, and leave Heaven in the exclusive possession
of ladies and gentlemen." At the age of fifteen he went into a land
office and helped to collect rents, without realising, it is to be
presumed, that he was contributing to an iniquitous system. He studied
pictures in the Irish National Gallery, became interested in music
through his mother and her friends, and made his first appearance in
print when moved to protest against the evangelistic services of
Sankey and Moody. At the age of twenty he turned his back upon
Ireland, and started a literary career in London. In the first nine
years of "consistent literary drudgery" he succeeded in earning six
pounds.
To put it frankly, Mr. Shaw was not born to succeed as "a mere man of
letters," and assuredly not as a writer of romances. His own statement
that he "exhausted romanticism before he was ten years old" is
historically inaccurate. He started a literary career early, but at
twenty-nine he was still a romantic young man who had written reams of
romantic literature, and had signally failed. He was right to abandon
romance; it had never inspired him, and it was entirely natural and
human that he should ever after disown and abuse this treacherous
mistress. It is characteristic that what really did inspire him and
set him moving upon the course ever after to be his own was an event
unconnected with those personal, intimate issues of experience which
usually feed the flame of imaginative art. It was a debating speech by
Henry George which aroused the reforming ardour thenceforward
essential and characteristic in Mr. Shaw, a speech which sent him to
Karl Marx, and made him a "man with some business in the world."
Henry George sent him to Karl Marx, and Karl Marx sent him to that
group of clever people among whom were Graham Wallas, Hubert Bland,
Sidney Olivier, and--of main importance--Sidney Webb.
"Quite the cleverest thing I ever did in my life," Mr. Shaw is
reported to have said to his American interviewer, "was to force my
friendship on Webb, to extort his, and keep it." Mr. Sidney Webb was
then, as now, the constructive encyclopædist, the man who, wherever he
went, "knew more than anybody present." "The truth of the matter is
that Webb and I are very useful to each other. We are in perfect
contrast, each supplying the deficiency in the other.... As I am an
incorrigible mountebank, and Webb is one of the simplest of geniuses,
I have always been in the centre of the stage, whilst Webb has been
prompting me, invisible, from the side." It was this singular union
more than anything else which gave direction and motive force to the
propaganda carried on by the Fabian Society for a quarter of a
century, whilst to Mr. Shaw personally it gave the consistency of
thought and definiteness of aim which underlie all his later work. We
cannot, of course, neglect the intellectual influence of Ibsen and
Nietzsche, Wagner and Samuel Butler, the individualists and
aristocrats who corrected the mob-sentiment of old-fashioned
socialism; but these and similar influences matured in him through his
Fabianism.
Bernard Shaw, of the Fabian Society, ceased to be a private citizen. He
became a man of "affairs," destined, thenceforward, to live in the
publicity of debating-halls, among those ideas which reformers and
politicians have actually socialised, removing them from the privacy of
human experience and turning them into public property--like parks, open
spaces, and wash-houses. I do not mean that he treated this public
property as other, and more conventionally-minded, men habitually treat
it. Mr. Shaw walks down the Strand as if it were his private
bridle-path. He walks across an Insurance Bill or a National Theatre
scheme or a policy for giving self-government to Englishmen as a man who
might be treading the weeds in his own garden. But the intellectual
stage-properties were all prepared for him and presented ready-made in
those times when he went night after night to lecture in the city and
suburbs of London. He had, indeed, the social cosmopolitanism which made
him dissociate himself from small literary coteries and gain a practical
knowledge of publicly-minded men. But one cannot fail to see that his
long experience of lecturing, debating, setting up arguments, and
parrying verbal attacks--which made him the best debater in England, and
turned him, as Dr. Henderson has suggested, from a doctrinaire into a
"practical opportunist"--served not only to endow him with his
consistency as a thinker and his excellence in expounding ideas, but
also confirmed him in his defects as a humanist. His continual
intercourse with the innumerable fixed ideas of societies and
committees, his debater's habit of attacking whatever fixed idea he
encounters, have had the effect of organising his own mind along the
lines of such fixed ideas, theses, positions and oppositions as could be
defended or countered by his boundless resource in argument, wit, and
raillery; and it followed that his interpretation of life was likely to
resolve itself into the debater's generalisations, the partialities and
half-truths which ignore what is individual, personal, intimate, and
finest--for the finest things in life are those which cannot be
generalised, which are individual and unique, which admit of being
stated but not argued. It follows also that his strength is in attack
and in destructive criticism. The only important positive ideas for
which he stands are the Supermannish idea of the duty of every man to be
himself to the utmost, and a generous democratic idea of freedom, in
accordance with which every self-respecting man and woman should be
given the opportunity to work out his or her own destiny fully,
unhampered by the tyrannies of caste, prestige, sentimental traditions,
false codes, and effete moral obligations.
But these ideas are of very considerable magnitude. They are capable
of almost infinite extension and application to life. And it should be
observed that, though Mr. Shaw thinks mainly about obvious "public
questions"--politics, the professions, the institution of marriage,
patriotism, public oratory, public health, etc., he has nothing in
common with the unimaginative public man who merely criticises
proposals and policies. He is always interested in the state of mind
which produces proposals and policies. When he pleads for the
abolition of the Dramatic Censorship before a Royal Commission, he
gives us not only the most effective practical exposure of the
Censorship that has ever been written, but also a far-reaching
philosophical analysis of liberty as freedom to express and propagate
ideas. "My reputation has been gained by my persistent struggle to
force the public to reconsider its morals," he says in the _Rejected
Statement_, the presentation of which to the Royal Commission affords
one of those delightful true stories that only a Shaw can make so
damaging. "I write plays with the deliberate object of converting the
nation to my opinion in these matters." That he has to a large extent
already converted the intellectuals--whether by his plays or by other
means--is beyond question. Many of the most powerful writers of the
last ten years have concentrated their efforts on exposing the tyranny
of the established idea and the established moral code. Such diverse
writers as Mr. Wells, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Granville Barker, Mr.
Cunninghame-Graham, Mr. Belloc, and Mr. Chesterton have written books
the motives of which have been satire, divine anger, _sæva
indignatio_, directed against the established moral codes or
intellectual habits of the time. Mr. Shaw, who originally followed the
obscure Samuel Butler, showed the way for the others. His method was,
and is, to combine argument with the more telling weapon of ridicule.
In his Preface to _Blanco Posnet_ he exposes and ridicules the
Dramatic Censorship, just as in _Getting Married_ he exposes and
ridicules the popular conception of happy domestic life, and in like
manner in _The Doctor's Dilemma_ the superstition that the faculty of
medicine is infallible.
The picture of concerted professional fraud given us in _The Doctor's
Dilemma_ is not too exaggerated for the purposes of a debating
argument; but in his long essay on the subject he gives a far more
reasonable statement of the case. He does not treat the doctor as a
murderer, or a pickpocket, or a human vulture, or even a cold-blooded
cynic; he explains what is likely to happen to the ordinary,
moderately decent, normal man, without any special moral or
intellectual equipment, who becomes a doctor. "As to the honour and
conscience of doctors, they have as much as any other class of men, no
more and no less. And what other men," he adds characteristically,
"dare pretend to be impartial where they have a strong pecuniary
interest on one side?" He analyses the psychology of the practitioner
and the specialist. He shows how much guesswork there must be where
even the most distinguished differ; in what manner we are all handed
over, bound, to the tender mercies of the men who are often poor,
overworked, unscientific, and, if they are specialists, prejudiced by
exclusive study of one disease. What he says about the surgeon and the
specialist is nearer to the truth than what he says about the general
practitioner. Long experience of all sorts of illnesses is more
valuable for the curing of simple diseases than much so-called
"scientific knowledge;" and, as it happens, the life of the general
practitioner who comes into sympathetic contact with so many men and
women of different types is one which does promote certain healthy
cynicisms and human decencies singularly lacking in the specialist on
the one side and the routine-driven hospital nurse on the other. But
there we have the individual equation. Mr. Shaw is good at
considering general cases; he is never, in his writing, much concerned
about individuals.
The essay which preceded _Getting Married_ is stronger in its attack
than in its reconstructive proposals; and the essay is better than the
play, because Mr. Shaw can present arguments more effectively than
persons, and arguments are more suited to essays than to plays. It is
interesting to find him confessing that "young women come to me and
ask me whether they ought to consent to marry the man they have
decided to live with." Mr. Shaw, of course, urges them "on no account
to compromise themselves without the security of an authentic
wedding-ring." He should not have been surprised. He, if anyone,
should have known that if you attack an existing morality, the public
will inevitably think you are advocating the corresponding
"immorality" as popularly understood; and one suspects that Mr. Shaw
has, from this natural misunderstanding, more to answer for than he
himself dreams of. When he calls himself "an immoralist," he means
that he is the true moralist; that he is going to substitute for a
decayed, outworn, conventional, and stupid morality, a morality based
upon a rational human principle--a morality that will make society
better and more tolerable. In this particular essay he asks us to get
rid of the idea that the family, _as at present constituted_, is the
highest form of human co-partnership. "The people who talk and write
as if the highest attainable state is that of a family stewing in love
continuously from the cradle to the grave can hardly have given five
minutes' serious consideration to so outrageous a proposition."
Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a
cage is natural to a cockatoo. Its grave danger to the nation
lies in its narrow views, its unnaturally sustained and
spitefully jealous concupiscences, its petty tyrannies, its
false social pretences, its endless grudges and squabbles, its
sacrifice of the boy's future by setting him to earn money to
help the family when he should be in training for his adult life
(remember the boy Dickens and the blacking factory), and of the
girl's chances by making her a slave to sick or selfish parents,
its unnatural packing into little brick boxes of little parcels
of humanity of ill-assorted ages, with the old scolding or
beating the young for behaving like young people, and the young
hating and thwarting the old for behaving like old people, and
all the other ills, mentionable and unmentionable, that arise
from excessive segregation. It sets these evils up as benefits
and blessings representing the highest attainable degree of
honour and virtue, whilst any criticism of or revolt against
them is savagely persecuted as the extremity of vice.
But when Mr. Shaw begins to reconstruct, and thinks that the whole
matter can be solved by such simple--and so far as they go,
excellent--economic expedients as making women economically
independent, and legitimising children, he ceases to be persuasive.
There comes a point when brilliant cleverness and sheer logic _from
necessity_ miss the truth. It is precisely the cut-and-dried Fabian
side of Mr. Shaw which blinds him to facts of a certain sort--the
fact, for instance, that for certain human needs no ingenious, or
_invented_, rational remedy is possible; that in certain departments
of life where the great instincts are concerned the accumulated
conscious and subconscious experience of thousands of years of mankind
have produced a kind of instinctive knowledge which logic cannot
tamper with; which is bound up with human nature and is near to a
thousand subtle truths never yet brought within the scope of
scientific knowledge; which it is dangerous to attack by a brutal
frontal assault, as if the issue were a single and simple debating
issue; which is defied only under just such penalties as Mr. Shaw
himself alludes to.
It is already evident why Mr. Shaw is far better as lecturer, debater,
pamphleteer, and writer of critical essays than as writer of either
romances or plays. He is primarily a social reformer, like Henry
George and Karl Marx, though he brings more wit, cleverness, driving
power, and intellectual agility to bear upon his subjects. He is
interested in public morality and "affairs," in generalities rather
than individuals, in ideas about life rather than in life at first
hand. He sees through the intellect rather than through the
perceptions. He is concerned to prove and to teach rather than to
_show_. He has made very few _characters_ in his plays, for the simple
reason that he handicaps his persons by treating them as _ideas_
rather than as _persons_. This is to say, that as an artist he is
never disinterested; he is more concerned with the case which his
puppets are set up to prove than with a situation for its own sake. In
_Cæsar and Cleopatra_ he did for once allow a subject to exist for
its own sake. He had no axe to grind, primarily, on behalf of society
and its morals. It is not perhaps the cleverest of his plays, but it
is the play which is most a play; and if it is not a great play, that
is because Mr. Shaw is not a great dramatist--he has not allowed
himself to be a great imaginative artist--he turned his back upon
imaginative art at the age of twenty-nine.
In the cleverest of his plays there is, indeed, always one real
person, and that person is none other than himself. In _Man and
Superman_, in _Arms and the Man_, and in _John Bull's Other Island_,
the hero is in each case nothing more nor less than a new
impersonation of Bernard Shaw. (In _John Bull's Other Island_ I take
Larry Doyle as the hero.) The hero is a man who on every possible
occasion either gets up and argues with extraordinary fluency and good
sense as if he were a very brilliant young man in a debate, or else is
forced into the sort of action which that brilliant debater would have
advocated. Broadbent, in _John Bull's Other Island_, is not a person
at all; he is a brilliantly conceived caricature of English stupidity;
he is a general idea, not an individual. Even Keegan, who has been
extolled as a romantic and unusual figure among the Shavian _dramatis
personæ_, is a chorus rather than a character, and essentially Shavian
in that his ideals are vegetarian, and that his language is couched in
such terms as--
How will you drag our acres from the ferret's grip of Matthew
Haffigan? How will you persuade Cornelius Doyle to forego the
pride of being a small landowner? How will Barney Doran's
millrace agree with your motor-boats?... Perhaps I had better
vote for an efficient devil that knows his own mind and his own
business than for a foolish patriot who has no mind and no
business.
That is not the way in which priests, madmen, or idealists talk in
Ireland. It is the way they talk at the Fabian Society.
The present writer is fully aware of the great work which Mr. Shaw has
done. He yields to no one in his admiration for the strength of
character and the spirited eagerness which have made him so effective
in his onslaught upon pernicious illusions, in making people look
beyond the formula and refuse to be blinded by social taboos. But it
is just because his influence is so great and in many respects
beneficial that we ought to be on our guard against a man who may not
always mesmerise us to our advantage. And it is in the matter of the
drama and the fine arts in general that Mr. Shaw is proving a
dangerous Messiah. He has done much to cleanse the Augean stables of
the English theatre. He has discredited though he has not destroyed
the artificial "drawing-room play;" he has poured ridicule upon the
so-called "well-made play" which Scribe, Sardou, and their school
could concoct for the delight of Frenchmen; he has exposed the
insignificance of the accidents and catastrophes, and the coming down
of the curtain "on a hero slain or married." He has compelled sensible
people to look to the theatre for something more than sentiment,
romance, ingenuity; for something relevant to the larger issues of
life. That he has done; and it is doubtful if any English-speaking and
English-writing man now alive, excepting Mr. Shaw, could have done it
with any thoroughness.
But having freed us from these old tyrannies of the stage, he has not
rested there. He has imposed new tyrannies of his own which are
sanctioned either by his own extraordinary influence or by that swing
of the Time-Spirit of which he is the visible pendulum. He is very
persuasive, and puts his case so well that he is able to blind us to
false issues. He states his case in the Preface which he wrote to
_Three Plays by Brieux_. Brieux is for him the greatest French
dramatist since Molière; and more important because whilst Molière was
content to indict human nature, Brieux devotes his energy to an
indictment of society. "His fisticuffs are not aimed heavenward: they
fall on human noses for the good of human souls."
When he sees human nature in conflict with a political abuse he
does not blame human nature, knowing that such blame is the
favourite trick of those who wish to perpetuate the abuse
without being able to defend it. He does not even blame the
abuse: he exposes it, and then leaves human nature to tackle it
with its eyes open....
You do not go away from a Brieux play with the feeling that the
affair is finished or the problem solved for you by the
dramatist.... You come away with a very disquieting sense that
you are involved in the affair, and must find the way out of it
for yourself and everybody else if civilisation is to be
tolerable to your sense of honour.
All this is unmistakable. Mr. Shaw regards the theatre primarily and
essentially as a substitute for the pulpit, as a convenient
lecture-hall for the propaganda of Shavian socialism. He takes it for
granted that there is to be a social "problem;" that "fisticuffs" are
to be aimed at somebody's nose as they were in those delightful games
of play in which he indulged as a young and earnest Fabian; that the
audience is to come away tuned up to social endeavour just as people
come away from Revival meetings tuned up to the tasks of spiritual
salvation.
This is well enough. Upon two conditions, I agree that there would be
no objection to Mr. Shaw or any other dramatist using the theatre as a
means of reforming men; these conditions being, firstly, that he is
able to do it--which I doubt; and secondly, that he should not insist
that this use of the theatre is the only proper and legitimate use.