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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
_By_
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
NEW YORK
JOHN LANE COMPANY
MCMIX
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY
JOHN LANE COMPANY
THE PLIMPTON PRESS, NORWOOD, MASS.
* * * * *
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
HERETICS.
ORTHODOXY.
THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL: A Romance.
Illustrated by W. GRAHAM ROBERTSON.
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
THE BALL AND THE CROSS.
* * * * *
_Introduction to the First Edition_
Most people either say that they agree with Bernard Shaw or that they do
not understand him. I am the only person who understands him, and I do
not agree with him.
G. K. C.
_The Problem of a Preface_
A peculiar difficulty arrests the writer of this rough study at the very
start. Many people know Mr. Bernard Shaw chiefly as a man who would
write a very long preface even to a very short play. And there is truth
in the idea; he is indeed a very prefatory sort of person. He always
gives the explanation before the incident; but so, for the matter of
that, does the Gospel of St. John. For Bernard Shaw, as for the mystics,
Christian and heathen (and Shaw is best described as a heathen mystic),
the philosophy of facts is anterior to the facts themselves. In due time
we come to the fact, the incarnation; but in the beginning was the Word.
This produces upon many minds an impression of needless preparation and
a kind of bustling prolixity. But the truth is that the very rapidity of
such a man's mind makes him seem slow in getting to the point. It is
positively because he is quick-witted that he is long-winded. A quick
eye for ideas may actually make a writer slow in reaching his goal,
just as a quick eye for landscapes might make a motorist slow in
reaching Brighton. An original man has to pause at every allusion or
simile to re-explain historical parallels, to re-shape distorted words.
Any ordinary leader-writer (let us say) might write swiftly and smoothly
something like this: "The element of religion in the Puritan rebellion,
if hostile to art, yet saved the movement from some of the evils in
which the French Revolution involved morality." Now a man like Mr. Shaw,
who has his own views on everything, would be forced to make the
sentence long and broken instead of swift and smooth. He would say
something like: "The element of religion, as I explain religion, in the
Puritan rebellion (which you wholly misunderstand) if hostile to
art--that is what I mean by art--may have saved it from some evils
(remember my definition of evil) in which the French Revolution--of
which I have my own opinion--involved morality, which I will define for
you in a minute." That is the worst of being a really universal sceptic
and philosopher; it is such slow work. The very forest of the man's
thoughts chokes up his thoroughfare. A man must be orthodox upon most
things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
Now the same difficulty which affects the work of Bernard Shaw affects
also any book about him. There is an unavoidable artistic necessity to
put the preface before the play; that is, there is a necessity to say
something of what Bernard Shaw's experience means before one even says
what it was. We have to mention what he did when we have already
explained why he did it. Viewed superficially, his life consists of
fairly conventional incidents, and might easily fall under fairly
conventional phrases. It might be the life of any Dublin clerk or
Manchester Socialist or London author. If I touch on the man's life
before his work, it will seem trivial; yet taken with his work it is
most important. In short, one could scarcely know what Shaw's doings
meant unless one knew what he meant by them. This difficulty in mere
order and construction has puzzled me very much. I am going to overcome
it, clumsily perhaps, but in the way which affects me as most sincere.
Before I write even a slight suggestion of his relation to the stage, I
am going to write of three soils or atmospheres out of which that
relation grew. In other words, before I write of Shaw I will write of
the three great influences upon Shaw. They were all three there before
he was born, yet each one of them is himself and a very vivid portrait
of him from one point of view. I have called these three traditions:
"The Irishman," "The Puritan," and "The Progressive." I do not see how
this prefatory theorising is to be avoided; for if I simply said, for
instance, that Bernard Shaw was an Irishman, the impression produced on
the reader might be remote from my thought and, what is more important,
from Shaw's. People might think, for instance, that I meant that he was
"irresponsible." That would throw out the whole plan of these pages, for
if there is one thing that Shaw is not, it is irresponsible. The
responsibility in him rings like steel. Or, again, if I simply called
him a Puritan, it might mean something about nude statues or "prudes on
the prowl." Or if I called him a Progressive, it might be supposed to
mean that he votes for Progressives at the County Council election,
which I very much doubt. I have no other course but this: of briefly
explaining such matters as Shaw himself might explain them. Some
fastidious persons may object to my thus putting the moral in front of
the fable. Some may imagine in their innocence that they already
understand the word Puritan or the yet more mysterious word Irishman.
The only person, indeed, of whose approval I feel fairly certain is Mr.
Bernard Shaw himself, the man of many introductions.
_CONTENTS_
_Page_
INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION 5
THE PROBLEM OF A PREFACE 7
THE IRISHMAN 17
THE PURITAN 34
THE PROGRESSIVE 53
THE CRITIC 87
THE DRAMATIST 114
THE PHILOSOPHER 165
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
_The Irishman_
The English public has commonly professed, with a kind of pride, that it
cannot understand Mr. Bernard Shaw. There are many reasons for it which
ought to be adequately considered in such a book as this. But the first
and most obvious reason is the mere statement that George Bernard Shaw
was born in Dublin in 1856. At least one reason why Englishmen cannot
understand Mr. Shaw is that Englishmen have never taken the trouble to
understand Irishmen. They will sometimes be generous to Ireland; but
never just to Ireland. They will speak to Ireland; they will speak for
Ireland; but they will not hear Ireland speak. All the real amiability
which most Englishmen undoubtedly feel towards Irishmen is lavished upon
a class of Irishmen which unfortunately does not exist. The Irishman of
the English farce, with his brogue, his buoyancy, and his tender-hearted
irresponsibility, is a man who ought to have been thoroughly pampered
with praise and sympathy, if he had only existed to receive them.
Unfortunately, all the time that we were creating a comic Irishman in
fiction, we were creating a tragic Irishman in fact. Never perhaps has
there been a situation of such excruciating cross-purposes even in the
three-act farce. The more we saw in the Irishman a sort of warm and weak
fidelity, the more he regarded us with a sort of icy anger. The more the
oppressor looked down with an amiable pity, the more did the oppressed
look down with a somewhat unamiable contempt. But, indeed, it is
needless to say that such comic cross-purposes could be put into a play;
they have been put into a play. They have been put into what is perhaps
the most real of Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays, _John Bull's Other Island_.
It is somewhat absurd to imagine that any one who has not read a play by
Mr. Shaw will be reading a book about him. But if it comes to that it is
(as I clearly perceive) absurd to be writing a book about Mr. Bernard
Shaw at all. It is indefensibly foolish to attempt to explain a man
whose whole object through life has been to explain himself. But even in
nonsense there is a need for logic and consistency; therefore let us
proceed on the assumption that when I say that all Mr. Shaw's blood and
origin may be found in _John Bull's Other Island_, some reader may
answer that he does not know the play. Besides, it is more important to
put the reader right about England and Ireland even than to put him
right about Shaw. If he reminds me that this is a book about Shaw, I can
only assure him that I will reasonably, and at proper intervals,
remember the fact.
Mr. Shaw himself said once, "I am a typical Irishman; my family came
from Yorkshire." Scarcely anyone but a typical Irishman could have made
the remark. It is in fact a bull, a conscious bull. A bull is only a
paradox which people are too stupid to understand. It is the rapid
summary of something which is at once so true and so complex that the
speaker who has the swift intelligence to perceive it, has not the slow
patience to explain it. Mystical dogmas are much of this kind. Dogmas
are often spoken of as if they were signs of the slowness or endurance
of the human mind. As a matter of fact, they are marks of mental
promptitude and lucid impatience. A man will put his meaning mystically
because he cannot waste time in putting it rationally. Dogmas are not
dark and mysterious; rather a dogma is like a flash of lightning--an
instantaneous lucidity that opens across a whole landscape. Of the same
nature are Irish bulls; they are summaries which are too true to be
consistent. The Irish make Irish bulls for the same reason that they
accept Papal bulls. It is because it is better to speak wisdom
foolishly, like the Saints, rather than to speak folly wisely, like the
Dons.
This is the truth about mystical dogmas and the truth about Irish bulls;
it is also the truth about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw. Each of them
is an argument impatiently shortened into an epigram. Each of them
represents a truth hammered and hardened, with an almost disdainful
violence until it is compressed into a small space, until it is made
brief and almost incomprehensible. The case of that curt remark about
Ireland and Yorkshire is a very typical one. If Mr. Shaw had really
attempted to set out all the sensible stages of his joke, the sentence
would have run something like this: "That I am an Irishman is a fact of
psychology which I can trace in many of the things that come out of me,
my fastidiousness, my frigid fierceness and my distrust of mere
pleasure. But the thing must be tested by what comes from me; do not try
on me the dodge of asking where I came from, how many batches of three
hundred and sixty-five days my family was in Ireland. Do not play any
games on me about whether I am a Celt, a word that is dim to the
anthropologist and utterly unmeaning to anybody else. Do not start any
drivelling discussions about whether the word Shaw is German or
Scandinavian or Iberian or Basque. You know you are human; I know I am
Irish. I know I belong to a certain type and temper of society; and I
know that all sorts of people of all sorts of blood live in that society
and by that society; and are therefore Irish. You can take your books of
anthropology to hell or to Oxford." Thus gently, elaborately and at
length, Mr. Shaw would have explained his meaning, if he had thought it
worth his while. As he did not he merely flung the symbolic, but very
complete sentence, "I am a typical Irishman; my family came from
Yorkshire."
What then is the colour of this Irish society of which Bernard Shaw,
with all his individual oddity, is yet an essential type? One
generalisation, I think, may at least be made. Ireland has in it a
quality which caused it (in the most ascetic age of Christianity) to be
called the "Land of Saints"; and which still might give it a claim to be
called the Land of Virgins. An Irish Catholic priest once said to me,
"There is in our people a fear of the passions which is older even than
Christianity." Everyone who has read Shaw's play upon Ireland will
remember the thing in the horror of the Irish girl at being kissed in
the public streets. But anyone who knows Shaw's work will recognize it
in Shaw himself. There exists by accident an early and beardless
portrait of him which really suggests in the severity and purity of its
lines some of the early ascetic pictures of the beardless Christ.
However he may shout profanities or seek to shatter the shrines, there
is always something about him which suggests that in a sweeter and more
solid civilisation he would have been a great saint. He would have been
a saint of a sternly ascetic, perhaps of a sternly negative type. But he
has this strange note of the saint in him: that he is literally
unworldly. Worldliness has no human magic for him; he is not bewitched
by rank nor drawn on by conviviality at all. He could not understand
the intellectual surrender of the snob. He is perhaps a defective
character; but he is not a mixed one. All the virtues he has are heroic
virtues. Shaw is like the Venus of Milo; all that there is of him is
admirable.
But in any case this Irish innocence is peculiar and fundamental in him;
and strange as it may sound, I think that his innocence has a great deal
to do with his suggestions of sexual revolution. Such a man is
comparatively audacious in theory because he is comparatively clean in
thought. Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their
strength in forging chains for themselves; they alone know how strong
the chains need to be. But there are other souls who walk the woods like
Diana, with a sort of wild chastity. I confess I think that this Irish
purity a little disables a critic in dealing, as Mr. Shaw has dealt,
with the roots and reality of the marriage law. He forgets that those
fierce and elementary functions which drive the universe have an impetus
which goes beyond itself and cannot always easily be recovered. So the
healthiest men may often erect a law to watch them, just as the
healthiest sleepers may want an alarum clock to wake them up. However
this may be, Bernard Shaw certainly has all the virtues and all the
powers that go with this original quality in Ireland. One of them is a
sort of awful elegance; a dangerous and somewhat inhuman daintiness of
taste which sometimes seems to shrink from matter itself, as though it
were mud. Of the many sincere things Mr. Shaw has said he never said a
more sincere one than when he stated he was a vegetarian, not because
eating meat was bad morality, but because it was bad taste. It would be
fanciful to say that Mr. Shaw is a vegetarian because he comes of a race
of vegetarians, of peasants who are compelled to accept the simple life
in the shape of potatoes. But I am sure that his fierce fastidiousness
in such matters is one of the allotropic forms of the Irish purity; it
is to the virtue of Father Matthew what a coal is to a diamond. It has,
of course, the quality common to all special and unbalanced types of
virtue, that you never know where it will stop. I can feel what Mr. Shaw
probably means when he says that it is disgusting to feast off dead
bodies, or to cut lumps off what was once a living thing. But I can
never know at what moment he may not feel in the same way that it is
disgusting to mutilate a pear-tree, or to root out of the earth those
miserable mandrakes which cannot even groan. There is no natural limit
to this rush and riotous gallop of refinement.
But it is not this physical and fantastic purity which I should chiefly
count among the legacies of the old Irish morality. A much more
important gift is that which all the saints declared to be the reward of
chastity: a queer clearness of the intellect, like the hard clearness of
a crystal. This certainly Mr. Shaw possesses; in such degree that at
certain times the hardness seems rather clearer than the clearness. But
so it does in all the most typical Irish characters and Irish attitudes
of mind. This is probably why Irishmen succeed so much in such
professions as require a certain crystalline realism, especially about
results. Such professions are the soldier and the lawyer; these give
ample opportunity for crimes but not much for mere illusions. If you
have composed a bad opera you may persuade yourself that it is a good
one; if you have carved a bad statue you can think yourself better than
Michael Angelo. But if you have lost a battle you cannot believe you
have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have
got him off.
There must be some sense in every popular prejudice, even about
foreigners. And the English people certainly have somehow got an
impression and a tradition that the Irishman is genial, unreasonable,
and sentimental. This legend of the tender, irresponsible Paddy has two
roots; there are two elements in the Irish which made the mistake
possible. First, the very logic of the Irishman makes him regard war or
revolution as extra-logical, an _ultima ratio_ which is beyond reason.
When fighting a powerful enemy he no more worries whether all his
charges are exact or all his attitudes dignified than a soldier worries
whether a cannon-ball is shapely or a plan of campaign picturesque. He
is aggressive; he attacks. He seems merely to be rowdy in Ireland when
he is really carrying the war into Africa--or England. A Dublin
tradesman printed his name and trade in archaic Erse on his cart. He
knew that hardly anybody could read it; he did it to annoy. In his
position I think he was quite right. When one is oppressed it is a mark
of chivalry to hurt oneself in order to hurt the oppressor. But the
English (never having had a real revolution since the Middle Ages) find
it very hard to understand this steady passion for being a nuisance, and
mistake it for mere whimsical impulsiveness and folly. When an Irish
member holds up the whole business of the House of Commons by talking of
his bleeding country for five or six hours, the simple English members
suppose that he is a sentimentalist. The truth is that he is a scornful
realist who alone remains unaffected by the sentimentalism of the House
of Commons. The Irishman is neither poet enough nor snob enough to be
swept away by those smooth social and historical tides and tendencies
which carry Radicals and Labour members comfortably off their feet. He
goes on asking for a thing because he wants it; and he tries really to
hurt his enemies because they are his enemies. This is the first of the
queer confusions which make the hard Irishman look soft. He seems to us
wild and unreasonable because he is really much too reasonable to be
anything but fierce when he is fighting.
In all this it will not be difficult to see the Irishman in Bernard
Shaw. Though personally one of the kindest men in the world, he has
often written really in order to hurt; not because he hated any
particular men (he is hardly hot and animal enough for that), but
because he really hated certain ideas even unto slaying. He provokes; he
will not let people alone. One might even say that he bullies, only
that this would be unfair, because he always wishes the other man to hit
back. At least he always challenges, like a true Green Islander. An even
stronger instance of this national trait can be found in another eminent
Irishman, Oscar Wilde. His philosophy (which was vile) was a philosophy
of ease, of acceptance, and luxurious illusion; yet, being Irish, he
could not help putting it in pugnacious and propagandist epigrams. He
preached his softness with hard decision; he praised pleasure in the
words most calculated to give pain. This armed insolence, which was the
noblest thing about him, was also the Irish thing; he challenged all
comers. It is a good instance of how right popular tradition is even
when it is most wrong, that the English have perceived and preserved
this essential trait of Ireland in a proverbial phrase. It _is_ true
that the Irishman says, "Who will tread on the tail of my coat?"
But there is a second cause which creates the English fallacy that the
Irish are weak and emotional. This again springs from the very fact that
the Irish are lucid and logical. For being logical they strictly
separate poetry from prose; and as in prose they are strictly prosaic,
so in poetry they are purely poetical. In this, as in one or two other
things, they resemble the French, who make their gardens beautiful
because they are gardens, but their fields ugly because they are only
fields. An Irishman may like romance, but he will say, to use a frequent
Shavian phrase, that it is "only romance." A great part of the English
energy in fiction arises from the very fact that their fiction half
deceives them. If Rudyard Kipling, for instance, had written his short
stories in France, they would have been praised as cool, clever little
works of art, rather cruel, and very nervous and feminine; Kipling's
short stories would have been appreciated like Maupassant's short
stories. In England they were not appreciated but believed. They were
taken seriously by a startled nation as a true picture of the empire and
the universe. The English people made haste to abandon England in favour
of Mr. Kipling and his imaginary colonies; they made haste to abandon
Christianity in favour of Mr. Kipling's rather morbid version of
Judaism. Such a moral boom of a book would be almost impossible in
Ireland, because the Irish mind distinguishes between life and
literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw himself summed this up as he sums up so
many things in a compact sentence which he uttered in conversation with
the present writer, "An Irishman has two eyes." He meant that with one
eye an Irishman saw that a dream was inspiring, bewitching, or sublime,
and with the other eye that after all it was a dream. Both the humour
and the sentiment of an Englishman cause him to wink the other eye. Two
other small examples will illustrate the English mistake. Take, for
instance, that noble survival from a nobler age of politics--I mean
Irish oratory. The English imagine that Irish politicians are so
hot-headed and poetical that they have to pour out a torrent of burning
words. The truth is that the Irish are so clear-headed and critical that
they still regard rhetoric as a distinct art, as the ancients did. Thus
a man makes a speech as a man plays a violin, not necessarily without
feeling, but chiefly because he knows how to do it. Another instance of
the same thing is that quality which is always called the Irish charm.
The Irish are agreeable, not because they are particularly emotional,
but because they are very highly civilised. Blarney is a ritual; as much
of a ritual as kissing the Blarney Stone.
Lastly, there is one general truth about Ireland which may very well
have influenced Bernard Shaw from the first; and almost certainly
influenced him for good. Ireland is a country in which the political
conflicts are at least genuine; they are about something. They are about
patriotism, about religion, or about money: the three great realities.
In other words, they are concerned with what commonwealth a man lives in
or with what universe a man lives in or with how he is to manage to live
in either. But they are not concerned with which of two wealthy cousins
in the same governing class shall be allowed to bring in the same Parish
Councils Bill; there is no party system in Ireland. The party system in
England is an enormous and most efficient machine for preventing
political conflicts. The party system is arranged on the same principle
as a three-legged race: the principle that union is not always strength
and is never activity. Nobody asks for what he really wants. But in
Ireland the loyalist is just as ready to throw over the King as the
Fenian to throw over Mr. Gladstone; each will throw over anything except
the thing that he wants. Hence it happens that even the follies or the
frauds of Irish politics are more genuine as symptoms and more
honourable as symbols than the lumbering hypocrisies of the prosperous
Parliamentarian. The very lies of Dublin and Belfast are truer than the
truisms of Westminster. They have an object; they refer to a state of
things. There was more honesty, in the sense of actuality, about
Piggott's letters than about the _Times'_ leading articles on them. When
Parnell said calmly before the Royal Commission that he had made a
certain remark "in order to mislead the House" he proved himself to be
one of the few truthful men of his time. An ordinary British statesman
would never have made the confession, because he would have grown quite
accustomed to committing the crime. The party system itself implies a
habit of stating something other than the actual truth. A Leader of the
House means a Misleader of the House.
Bernard Shaw was born outside all this; and he carries that freedom upon
his face. Whether what he heard in boyhood was violent Nationalism or
virulent Unionism, it was at least something which wanted a certain
principle to be in force, not a certain clique to be in office. Of him
the great Gilbertian generalisation is untrue; he was not born either a
little Liberal or else a little Conservative. He did not, like most of
us, pass through the stage of being a good party man on his way to the
difficult business of being a good man. He came to stare at our general
elections as a Red Indian might stare at the Oxford and Cambridge
boat-race, blind to all its irrelevant sentimentalities and to some of
its legitimate sentiments. Bernard Shaw entered England as an alien, as
an invader, as a conqueror. In other words, he entered England as an
Irishman.
_The Puritan_
It has been said in the first section that Bernard Shaw draws from his
own nation two unquestionable qualities, a kind of intellectual
chastity, and the fighting spirit. He is so much of an idealist about
his ideals that he can be a ruthless realist in his methods. His soul
has (in short) the virginity and the violence of Ireland. But Bernard
Shaw is not merely an Irishman; he is not even a typical one. He is a
certain separated and peculiar kind of Irishman, which is not easy to
describe. Some Nationalist Irishmen have referred to him contemptuously
as a "West Briton." But this is really unfair; for whatever Mr. Shaw's
mental faults may be, the easy adoption of an unmeaning phrase like
"Briton" is certainly not one of them. It would be much nearer the truth
to put the thing in the bold and bald terms of the old Irish song, and
to call him "The anti-Irish Irishman." But it is only fair to say that
the description is far less of a monstrosity than the anti-English
Englishman would be; because the Irish are so much stronger in
self-criticism. Compared with the constant self-flattery of the
English, nearly every Irishman is an anti-Irish Irishman. But here again
popular phraseology hits the right word. This fairly educated and fairly
wealthy Protestant wedge which is driven into the country at Dublin and
elsewhere is a thing not easy superficially to summarise in any term. It
cannot be described merely as a minority; for a minority means the part
of a nation which is conquered. But this thing means something that
conquers, and is not entirely part of a nation. Nor can one even fall
back on the phrase of aristocracy. For an aristocracy implies at least
some chorus of snobbish enthusiasm; it implies that some at least are
willingly led by the leaders, if only towards vulgarity and vice. There
is only one word for the minority in Ireland, and that is the word that
public phraseology has found; I mean the word "Garrison." The Irish are
essentially right when they talk as if all Protestant Unionists lived
inside "The Castle." They have all the virtues and limitations of a
literal garrison in a fort. That is, they are valiant, consistent,
reliable in an obvious public sense; but their curse is that they can
only tread the flagstones of the court-yard or the cold rock of the
ramparts; they have never so much as set their foot upon their native
soil.
We have considered Bernard Shaw as an Irishman. The next step is to
consider him as an exile from Ireland living in Ireland; that, some
people would say, is a paradox after his own heart. But, indeed, such a
complication is not really difficult to expound. The great religion and
the great national tradition which have persisted for so many centuries
in Ireland have encouraged these clean and cutting elements; but they
have encouraged many other things which serve to balance them. The Irish
peasant has these qualities which are somewhat peculiar to Ireland, a
strange purity and a strange pugnacity. But the Irish peasant also has
qualities which are common to all peasants, and his nation has qualities
that are common to all healthy nations. I mean chiefly the things that
most of us absorb in childhood; especially the sense of the supernatural
and the sense of the natural; the love of the sky with its infinity of
vision, and the love of the soil with its strict hedges and solid shapes
of ownership. But here comes the paradox of Shaw; the greatest of all
his paradoxes and the one of which he is unconscious. These one or two
plain truths which quite stupid people learn at the beginning are
exactly the one or two truths which Bernard Shaw may not learn even at
the end. He is a daring pilgrim who has set out from the grave to find
the cradle. He started from points of view which no one else was clever
enough to discover, and he is at last discovering points of view which
no one else was ever stupid enough to ignore. This absence of the
red-hot truisms of boyhood; this sense that he is not rooted in the
ancient sagacities of infancy, has, I think, a great deal to do with his
position as a member of an alien minority in Ireland. He who has no real
country can have no real home. The average autochthonous Irishman is
close to patriotism because he is close to the earth; he is close to
domesticity because he is close to the earth; he is close to doctrinal
theology and elaborate ritual because he is close to the earth. In
short, he is close to the heavens because he is close to the earth. But
we must not expect any of these elemental and collective virtues in the
man of the garrison. He cannot be expected to exhibit the virtues of a
people, but only (as Ibsen would say) of an enemy of the people. Mr.
Shaw has no living traditions, no schoolboy tricks, no college customs,
to link him with other men. Nothing about him can be supposed to refer
to a family feud or to a family joke. He does not drink toasts; he does
not keep anniversaries; musical as he is I doubt if he would consent to
sing. All this has something in it of a tree with its roots in the air.
The best way to shorten winter is to prolong Christmas; and the only way
to enjoy the sun of April is to be an April Fool. When people asked
Bernard Shaw to attend the Stratford Tercentenary, he wrote back with
characteristic contempt: "I do not keep my own birthday, and I cannot
see why I should keep Shakespeare's." I think that if Mr. Shaw had
always kept his own birthday he would be better able to understand
Shakespeare's birthday--and Shakespeare's poetry.
In conjecturally referring this negative side of the man, his lack of
the smaller charities of our common childhood, to his birth in the
dominant Irish sect, I do not write without historic memory or reference
to other cases. That minority of Protestant exiles which mainly
represented Ireland to England during the eighteenth century did contain
some specimens of the Irish lounger and even of the Irish blackguard;
Sheridan and even Goldsmith suggest the type. Even in their
irresponsibility these figures had a touch of Irish tartness and
realism; but the type has been too much insisted on to the exclusion of
others equally national and interesting. To one of these it is worth
while to draw attention. At intervals during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries there has appeared a peculiar kind of Irishman. He
is so unlike the English image of Ireland that the English have actually
fallen back on the pretence that he was not Irish at all. The type is
commonly Protestant; and sometimes seems to be almost anti-national in
its acrid instinct for judging itself. Its nationalism only appears when
it flings itself with even bitterer pleasure into judging the foreigner
or the invader. The first and greatest of such figures was Swift.
Thackeray simply denied that Swift was an Irishman, because he was not a
stage Irishman. He was not (in the English novelist's opinion) winning
and agreeable enough to be Irish. The truth is that Swift was much too
harsh and disagreeable to be English. There is a great deal of Jonathan
Swift in Bernard Shaw. Shaw is like Swift, for instance, in combining
extravagant fancy with a curious sort of coldness. But he is most like
Swift in that very quality which Thackeray said was impossible in an
Irishman, benevolent bullying, a pity touched with contempt, and a habit
of knocking men down for their own good. Characters in novels are often
described as so amiable that they hate to be thanked. It is not an
amiable quality, and it is an extremely rare one; but Swift possessed
it. When Swift was buried the Dublin poor came in crowds and wept by the
grave of the broadest and most free-handed of their benefactors. Swift
deserved the public tribute; but he might have writhed and kicked in his
grave at the thought of receiving it. There is in G. B. S. something of
the same inhumane humanity. Irish history has offered a third instance
of this particular type of educated and Protestant Irishman, sincere,
unsympathetic, aggressive, alone. I mean Parnell; and with him also a
bewildered England tried the desperate dodge of saying that he was not
Irish at all. As if any thinkable sensible snobbish law-abiding
Englishman would ever have defied all the drawing-rooms by disdaining
the House of Commons! Despite the difference between taciturnity and a
torrent of fluency there is much in common also between Shaw and
Parnell; something in common even in the figures of the two men, in the
bony bearded faces with their almost Satanic self-possession. It will
not do to pretend that none of these three men belong to their own
nation; but it is true that they belonged to one special, though
recurring, type of that nation. And they all three have this peculiar
mark, that while Nationalists in their various ways they all give to the
more genial English one common impression; I mean the impression that
they do not so much love Ireland as hate England.
I will not dogmatise upon the difficult question as to whether there is
any religious significance in the fact that these three rather ruthless
Irishmen were Protestant Irishmen. I incline to think myself that the
Catholic Church has added charity and gentleness to the virtues of a
people which would otherwise have been too keen and contemptuous, too
aristocratic. But however this may be, there can surely be no question
that Bernard Shaw's Protestant education in a Catholic country has made
a great deal of difference to his mind. It has affected it in two ways,
the first negative and the second positive. It has affected him by
cutting him off (as we have said) from the fields and fountains of his
real home and history; by making him an Orangeman. And it has affected
him by the particular colour of the particular religion which he
received; by making him a Puritan.
In one of his numerous prefaces he says, "I have always been on the side
of the Puritans in the matter of Art"; and a closer study will, I think,
reveal that he is on the side of the Puritans in almost everything.
Puritanism was not a mere code of cruel regulations, though some of its
regulations were more cruel than any that have disgraced Europe. Nor was
Puritanism a mere nightmare, an evil shadow of eastern gloom and
fatalism, though this element did enter it, and was as it were the
symptom and punishment of its essential error. Something much nobler
(even if almost equally mistaken) was the original energy in the Puritan
creed. And it must be defined with a little more delicacy if we are
really to understand the attitude of G. B. S., who is the greatest of
the modern Puritans and perhaps the last.
I should roughly define the first spirit in Puritanism thus. It was a
refusal to contemplate God or goodness with anything lighter or milder
than the most fierce concentration of the intellect. A Puritan meant
originally a man whose mind had no holidays. To use his own favourite
phrase, he would let no living thing come between him and his God; an
attitude which involved eternal torture for him and a cruel contempt for
all the living things. It was better to worship in a barn than in a
cathedral for the specific and specified reason that the cathedral was
beautiful. Physical beauty was a false and sensual symbol coming in
between the intellect and the object of its intellectual worship. The
human brain ought to be at every instant a consuming fire which burns
through all conventional images until they were as transparent as glass.
This is the essential Puritan idea, that God can only be praised by
direct contemplation of Him. You must praise God only with your brain;
it is wicked to praise Him with your passions or your physical habits or
your gesture or instinct of beauty. Therefore it is wicked to worship by
singing or dancing or drinking sacramental wines or building beautiful
churches or saying prayers when you are half asleep. We must not worship
by dancing, drinking, building or singing; we can only worship by
thinking. Our heads can praise God, but never our hands and feet. That
is the true and original impulse of the Puritans. There is a great deal
to be said for it, and a great deal was said for it in Great Britain
steadily for two hundred years. It has gradually decayed in England and
Scotland, not because of the advance of modern thought (which means
nothing), but because of the slow revival of the mediæval energy and
character in the two peoples. The English were always hearty and humane,
and they have made up their minds to be hearty and humane in spite of
the Puritans. The result is that Dickens and W. W. Jacobs have picked up
the tradition of Chaucer and Robin Hood. The Scotch were always
romantic, and they have made up their minds to be romantic in spite of
the Puritans. The result is that Scott and Stevenson have picked up the
tradition of Bruce, Blind Harry and the vagabond Scottish kings. England
has become English again; Scotland has become Scottish again, in spite
of the splendid incubus, the noble nightmare of Calvin. There is only
one place in the British Islands where one may naturally expect to find
still surviving in its fulness the fierce detachment of the true
Puritan. That place is the Protestant part of Ireland. The Orange
Calvinists can be disturbed by no national resurrection, for they have
no nation. In them, if in any people, will be found the rectangular
consistency of the Calvinist. The Irish Protestant rioters are at least
immeasurably finer fellows than any of their brethren in England. They
have the two enormous superiorities: first, that the Irish Protestant
rioters really believe in Protestant theology; and second, that the
Irish Protestant rioters do really riot. Among these people, if
anywhere, should be found the cult of theological clarity combined with
barbarous external simplicity. Among these people Bernard Shaw was born.
There is at least one outstanding fact about the man we are studying;
Bernard Shaw is never frivolous. He never gives his opinions a holiday;
he is never irresponsible even for an instant. He has no nonsensical
second self which he can get into as one gets into a dressing-gown; that
ridiculous disguise which is yet more real than the real person. That
collapse and humorous confession of futility was much of the force in
Charles Lamb and in Stevenson. There is nothing of this in Shaw; his wit
is never a weakness; therefore it is never a sense of humour. For wit is
always connected with the idea that truth is close and clear. Humour,
on the other hand, is always connected with the idea that truth is
tricky and mystical and easily mistaken. What Charles Lamb said of the
Scotchman is far truer of this type of Puritan Irishman; he does not see
things suddenly in a new light; all his brilliancy is a blindingly rapid
calculation and deduction. Bernard Shaw never said an indefensible
thing; that is, he never said a thing that he was not prepared
brilliantly to defend. He never breaks out into that cry beyond reason
and conviction, that cry of Lamb when he cried, "We would indict our
dreams!" or of Stevenson, "Shall we never shed blood?" In short he is
not a humorist, but a great wit, almost as great as Voltaire. Humour is
akin to agnosticism, which is only the negative side of mysticism. But
pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness
of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the
consistency in things is a wit--and a Calvinist. The man who sees the
inconsistency in things is a humorist--and a Catholic. However this may
be, Bernard Shaw exhibits all that is purest in the Puritan; the desire
to see truth face to face even if it slay us, the high impatience with
irrelevant sentiment or obstructive symbol; the constant effort to keep
the soul at its highest pressure and speed. His instincts upon all
social customs and questions are Puritan. His favourite author is
Bunyan.
But along with what was inspiring and direct in Puritanism Bernard Shaw
has inherited also some of the things that were cumbersome and
traditional. If ever Shaw exhibits a prejudice it is always a Puritan
prejudice. For Puritanism has not been able to sustain through three
centuries that native ecstacy of the direct contemplation of truth;
indeed it was the whole mistake of Puritanism to imagine for a moment
that it could. One cannot be serious for three hundred years. In
institutions built so as to endure for ages you must have relaxation,
symbolic relativity and healthy routine. In eternal temples you must
have frivolity. You must "be at ease in Zion" unless you are only paying
it a flying visit.
By the middle of the nineteenth century this old austerity and actuality
in the Puritan vision had fallen away into two principal lower forms.
The first is a sort of idealistic garrulity upon which Bernard Shaw has
made fierce and on the whole fruitful war. Perpetual talk about
righteousness and unselfishness, about things that should elevate and
things which cannot but degrade, about social purity and true Christian
manhood, all poured out with fatal fluency and with very little
reference to the real facts of anybody's soul or salary--into this weak
and lukewarm torrent has melted down much of that mountainous ice which
sparkled in the seventeenth century, bleak indeed, but blazing. The
hardest thing of the seventeenth century bids fair to be the softest
thing of the twentieth.
Of all this sentimental and deliquescent Puritanism Bernard Shaw has
always been the antagonist; and the only respect in which it has soiled
him was that he believed for only too long that such sloppy idealism was
the whole idealism of Christendom and so used "idealist" itself as a
term of reproach. But there were other and negative effects of
Puritanism which he did not escape so completely. I cannot think that he
has wholly escaped that element in Puritanism which may fairly bear the
title of the taboo. For it is a singular fact that although extreme
Protestantism is dying in elaborate and over-refined civilisation, yet
it is the barbaric patches of it that live longest and die last. Of the
creed of John Knox the modern Protestant has abandoned the civilised
part and retained only the savage part. He has given up that great and
systematic philosophy of Calvinism which had much in common with modern
science and strongly resembles ordinary and recurrent determinism. But
he has retained the accidental veto upon cards or comic plays, which
Knox only valued as mere proof of his people's concentration on their
theology. All the awful but sublime affirmations of Puritan theology are
gone. Only savage negations remain; such as that by which in Scotland on
every seventh day the creed of fear lays his finger on all hearts and
makes an evil silence in the streets.
By the middle of the nineteenth century when Shaw was born this dim and
barbaric element in Puritanism, being all that remained of it, had added
another taboo to its philosophy of taboos; there had grown up a mystical
horror of those fermented drinks which are part of the food of civilised
mankind. Doubtless many persons take an extreme line on this matter
solely because of some calculation of social harm; many, but not all and
not even most. Many people think that paper money is a mistake and does
much harm. But they do not shudder or snigger when they see a
cheque-book. They do not whisper with unsavoury slyness that such and
such a man was "seen" going into a bank. I am quite convinced that the
English aristocracy is the curse of England, but I have not noticed
either in myself or others any disposition to ostracise a man simply for
accepting a peerage, as the modern Puritans would certainly ostracise
him (from any of their positions of trust) for accepting a drink. The
sentiment is certainly very largely a mystical one, like the sentiment
about the seventh day. Like the Sabbath, it is defended with
sociological reasons; but those reasons can be simply and sharply
tested. If a Puritan tells you that all humanity should rest once a
week, you have only to propose that they should rest on Wednesday. And
if a Puritan tells you that he does not object to beer but to the
tragedies of excess in beer, simply propose to him that in prisons and
workhouses (where the amount can be absolutely regulated) the inmates
should have three glasses of beer a day. The Puritan cannot call that
excess; but he will find something to call it. For it is not the excess
he objects to, but the beer. It is a transcendental taboo, and it is one
of the two or three positive and painful prejudices with which Bernard
Shaw began. A similar severity of outlook ran through all his earlier
attitude towards the drama; especially towards the lighter or looser
drama. His Puritan teachers could not prevent him from taking up
theatricals, but they made him take theatricals seriously. All his plays
were indeed "plays for Puritans." All his criticisms quiver with a
refined and almost tortured contempt for the indulgencies of ballet and
burlesque, for the tights and the _double entente_. He can endure
lawlessness but not levity. He is not repelled by the divorces and the
adulteries as he is by the "splits." And he has always been foremost
among the fierce modern critics who ask indignantly, "Why do you object
to a thing full of sincere philosophy like _The Wild Duck_ while you
tolerate a mere dirty joke like _The Spring Chicken_?" I do not think he
has ever understood what seems to me the very sensible answer of the man
in the street, "I laugh at the dirty joke of _The Spring Chicken_
because it is a joke. I criticise the philosophy of _The Wild Duck_
because it is a philosophy."
Shaw does not do justice to the democratic ease and sanity on this
subject; but indeed, whatever else he is, he is not democratic. As an
Irishman he is an aristocrat, as a Calvinist he is a soul apart; he
drew the breath of his nostrils from a land of fallen principalities and
proud gentility, and the breath of his spirit from a creed which made a
wall of crystal around the elect. The two forces between them produced
this potent and slender figure, swift, scornful, dainty and full of dry
magnanimity; and it only needed the last touch of oligarchic mastery to
be given by the overwhelming oligarchic atmosphere of our present age.
Such was the Puritan Irishman who stepped out into the world. Into what
kind of world did he step?
_The Progressive_