explanations before the events. I can now give a fact or two with a
partial certainty at least that the reader will give to the affairs of
Bernard Shaw something of the same kind of significance which they have
for Bernard Shaw himself. Thus, if I had simply said that Shaw was born
in Dublin the average reader might exclaim, "Ah yes--a wild Irishman,
gay, emotional and untrustworthy." The wrong note would be struck at the
start. I have attempted to give some idea of what being born in Ireland
meant to the man who was really born there. Now therefore for the first
time I may be permitted to confess that Bernard Shaw was, like other
men, born. He was born in Dublin on the 26th of July, 1856.
Just as his birth can only be appreciated through some vision of
Ireland, so his family can only be appreciated by some realisation of
the Puritan. He was the youngest son of one George Carr Shaw, who had
been a civil servant and was afterwards a somewhat unsuccessful
business man. If I had merely said that his family was Protestant (which
in Ireland means Puritan) it might have been passed over as a quite
colourless detail. But if the reader will keep in mind what has been
said about the degeneration of Calvinism into a few clumsy vetoes, he
will see in its full and frightful significance such a sentence as this
which comes from Shaw himself: "My father was in theory a vehement
teetotaler, but in practice often a furtive drinker." The two things of
course rest upon exactly the same philosophy; the philosophy of the
taboo. There is a mystical substance, and it can give monstrous
pleasures or call down monstrous punishments. The dipsomaniac and the
abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same
mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink. But if I
had mentioned that fragment of family information without any ethical
preface, people would have begun at once to talk nonsense about artistic
heredity and Celtic weakness, and would have gained the general
impression that Bernard Shaw was an Irish wastrel and the child of Irish
wastrels. Whereas it is the whole point of the matter that Bernard Shaw
comes of a Puritan middle-class family of the most solid
respectability; and the only admission of error arises from the fact
that one member of that Puritan family took a particularly Puritan view
of strong drink. That is, he regarded it generally as a poison and
sometimes as a medicine, if only a mental medicine. But a poison and a
medicine are very closely akin, as the nearest chemist knows; and they
are chiefly akin in this; that no one will drink either of them for fun.
Moreover, medicine and a poison are also alike in this; that no one will
by preference drink either of them in public. And this medical or
poisonous view of alcohol is not confined to the one Puritan to whose
failure I have referred, it is spread all over the whole of our dying
Puritan civilisation. For instance, social reformers have fired a
hundred shots against the public-house; but never one against its really
shameful feature. The sign of decay is not in the public-house, but in
the private bar; or rather the row of five or six private bars, into
each of which a respectable dipsomaniac can go in solitude, and by
indulging his own half-witted sin violate his own half-witted morality.
Nearly all these places are equipped with an atrocious apparatus of
ground-glass windows which can be so closed that they practically
conceal the face of the buyer from the seller. Words cannot express the
abysses of human infamy and hateful shame expressed by that elaborate
piece of furniture. Whenever I go into a public-house, which happens
fairly often, I always carefully open all these apertures and then leave
the place, in every way refreshed.
In other ways also it is necessary to insist not only on the fact of an
extreme Protestantism, but on that of the Protestantism of a garrison; a
world where that religious force both grew and festered all the more for
being at once isolated and protected. All the influences surrounding
Bernard Shaw in boyhood were not only Puritan, but such that no
non-Puritan force could possibly pierce or counteract. He belonged to
that Irish group which, according to Catholicism, has hardened its
heart, which, according to Protestantism has hardened its head, but
which, as I fancy, has chiefly hardened its hide, lost its sensibility
to the contact of the things around it. In reading about his youth, one
forgets that it was passed in the island which is still one flame before
the altar of St. Peter and St. Patrick. The whole thing might be
happening in Wimbledon. He went to the Wesleyan Connexional School. He
went to hear Moody and Sankey. "I was," he writes, "wholly unmoved by
their eloquence; and felt bound to inform the public that I was, on the
whole, an atheist. My letter was solemnly printed in _Public Opinion_,
to the extreme horror of my numerous aunts and uncles." That is the
philosophical atmosphere; those are the religious postulates. It could
never cross the mind of a man of the Garrison that before becoming an
atheist he might stroll into one of the churches of his own country, and
learn something of the philosophy that had satisfied Dante and Bossuet,
Pascal and Descartes.
In the same way I have to appeal to my theoretic preface at this third
point of the drama of Shaw's career. On leaving school he stepped into a
secure business position which he held steadily for four years and which
he flung away almost in one day. He rushed even recklessly to London;
where he was quite unsuccessful and practically starved for six years.
If I had mentioned this act on the first page of this book it would have
seemed to have either the simplicity of a mere fanatic or else to cover
some ugly escapade of youth or some quite criminal looseness of
temperament. But Bernard Shaw did not act thus because he was careless,
but because he was ferociously careful, careful especially of the one
thing needful. What was he thinking about when he threw away his last
halfpence and went to a strange place; what was he thinking about when
he endured hunger and small-pox in London almost without hope? He was
thinking of what he has ever since thought of, the slow but sure surge
of the social revolution; you must read into all those bald sentences
and empty years what I shall attempt to sketch in the third section. You
must read the revolutionary movement of the later nineteenth century,
darkened indeed by materialism and made mutable by fear and free
thought, but full of awful vistas of an escape from the curse of Adam.
Bernard Shaw happened to be born in an epoch, or rather at the end of an
epoch, which was in its way unique in the ages of history. The
nineteenth century was not unique in the success or rapidity of its
reforms or in their ultimate cessation; but it was unique in the
peculiar character of the failure which followed the success. The French
Revolution was an enormous act of human realisation; it has altered the
terms of every law and the shape of every town in Europe; but it was by
no means the only example of a strong and swift period of reform. What
was really peculiar about the Republican energy was this, that it left
behind it, not an ordinary reaction but a kind of dreary, drawn out and
utterly unmeaning hope. The strong and evident idea of reform sank lower
and lower until it became the timid and feeble idea of progress. Towards
the end of the nineteenth century there appeared its two incredible
figures; they were the pure Conservative and the pure Progressive; two
figures which would have been overwhelmed with laughter by any other
intellectual commonwealth of history. There was hardly a human
generation which could not have seen the folly of merely going forward
or merely standing still; of mere progressing or mere conserving. In the
coarsest Greek Comedy we might have a joke about a man who wanted to
keep what he had, whether it was yellow gold or yellow fever. In the
dullest mediæval morality we might have a joke about a progressive
gentleman who, having passed heaven and come to purgatory, decided to go
further and fare worse. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were an age
of quite impetuous progress; men made in one rush, roads, trades,
synthetic philosophies, parliaments, university settlements, a law that
could cover the world and such spires as had never struck the sky. But
they would not have said that they wanted progress, but that they wanted
the road, the parliaments, and the spires. In the same way the time from
Richelieu to the Revolution was upon the whole a time of conservation,
often of harsh and hideous conservation; it preserved tortures, legal
quibbles, and despotism. But if you had asked the rulers they would not
have said that they wanted conservation; but that they wanted the
torture and the despotism. The old reformers and the old despots alike
desired definite _things_, powers, licenses, payments, vetoes, and
permissions. Only the modern progressive and the modern conservative
have been content with two words.
Other periods of active improvement have died by stiffening at last into
some routine. Thus the Gothic gaiety of the thirteenth century
stiffening into the mere Gothic ugliness of the fifteenth. Thus the
mighty wave of the Renaissance, whose crest was lifted to heaven, was
touched by a wintry witchery of classicism and frozen for ever before it
fell. Alone of all such movements the democratic movement of the last
two centuries has not frozen, but loosened and liquefied. Instead of
becoming more pedantic in its old age, it has grown more bewildered. By
the analogy of healthy history we ought to have gone on worshipping the
republic and calling each other citizen with increasing seriousness
until some other part of the truth broke into our republican temple. But
in fact we have turned the freedom of democracy into a mere scepticism,
destructive of everything, including democracy itself. It is none the
less destructive because it is, so to speak, an optimistic
scepticism--or, as I have said, a dreary hope. It was none the better
because the destroyers were always talking about the new vistas and
enlightenments which their new negations opened to us. The republican
temple, like any other strong building, rested on certain definite
limits and supports. But the modern man inside it went on indefinitely
knocking holes in his own house and saying that they were windows. The
result is not hard to calculate: the moral world was pretty well all
windows and no house by the time that Bernard Shaw arrived on the scene.
Then there entered into full swing that great game of which he soon
became the greatest master. A progressive or advanced person was now to
mean not a man who wanted democracy, but a man who wanted something
newer than democracy. A reformer was to be, not a man who wanted a
parliament or a republic, but a man who wanted anything that he hadn't
got. The emancipated man must cast a weird and suspicious eye round him
at all the institutions of the world, wondering which of them was
destined to die in the next few centuries. Each one of them was
whispering to himself, "What can I alter?"
This quite vague and varied discontent probably did lead to the
revelation of many incidental wrongs and to much humane hard work in
certain holes and corners. It also gave birth to a great deal of quite
futile and frantic speculation, which seemed destined to take away
babies from women, or to give votes to tom-cats. But it had an evil in
it much deeper and more psychologically poisonous than any superficial
absurdities. There was in this thirst to be "progressive" a subtle sort
of double-mindedness and falsity. A man was so eager to be in advance of
his age that he pretended to be in advance of himself. Institutions that
his wholesome nature and habit fully accepted he had to sneer at as
old-fashioned, out of a servile and snobbish fear of the future. Out of
the primal forests, through all the real progress of history, man had
picked his way obeying his human instinct, or (in the excellent phrase)
following his nose. But now he was trying, by violent athletic
exertions, to get in front of his nose.
Into this riot of all imaginary innovations Shaw brought the sharp edge
of the Irishman and the concentration of the Puritan, and thoroughly
thrashed all competitors in the difficult art of being at once modern
and intelligent. In twenty twopenny controversies he took the
revolutionary side, I fear in most cases because it was called
revolutionary. But the other revolutionists were abruptly startled by
the presentation of quite rational and ingenious arguments on their own
side. The dreary thing about most new causes is that they are praised in
such very old terms. Every new religion bores us with the same stale
rhetoric about closer fellowship and the higher life. No one ever
approximately equalled Bernard Shaw in the power of finding really fresh
and personal arguments for these recent schemes and creeds. No one ever
came within a mile of him in the knack of actually producing a new
argument for a new philosophy. I give two instances to cover the kind of
thing I mean. Bernard Shaw (being honestly eager to put himself on the
modern side in everything) put himself on the side of what is called
the feminist movement; the proposal to give the two sexes not merely
equal social privileges, but identical. To this it is often answered
that women cannot be soldiers; and to this again the sensible feminists
answer that women run their own kind of physical risk, while the silly
feminists answer that war is an outworn barbaric thing which women would
abolish. But Bernard Shaw took the line of saying that women had been
soldiers, in all occasions of natural and unofficial war, as in the
French Revolution. That has the great fighting value of being an
unexpected argument; it takes the other pugilist's breath away for one
important instant. To take the other case, Mr. Shaw has found himself,
led by the same mad imp of modernity, on the side of the people who want
to have phonetic spelling. The people who want phonetic spelling
generally depress the world with tireless and tasteless explanations of
how much easier it would be for children or foreign bagmen if "height"
were spelt "hite." Now children would curse spelling whatever it was,
and we are not going to permit foreign bagmen to improve Shakespeare.
Bernard Shaw charged along quite a different line; he urged that
Shakespeare himself believed in phonetic spelling, since he spelt his
own name in six different ways. According to Shaw, phonetic spelling is
merely a return to the freedom and flexibility of Elizabethan
literature. That, again, is exactly the kind of blow the old speller
does not expect. As a matter of fact there is an answer to both the
ingenuities I have quoted. When women have fought in revolutions they
have generally shown that it was not natural to them, by their
hysterical cruelty and insolence; it was the men who fought in the
Revolution; it was the women who tortured the prisoners and mutilated
the dead. And because Shakespeare could sing better than he could spell,
it does not follow that his spelling and ours ought to be abruptly
altered by a race that has lost all instinct for singing. But I do not
wish to discuss these points; I only quote them as examples of the
startling ability which really brought Shaw to the front; the ability to
brighten even our modern movements with original and suggestive
thoughts.
But while Bernard Shaw pleasantly surprised innumerable cranks and
revolutionists by finding quite rational arguments for them, he
surprised them unpleasantly also by discovering something else. He
discovered a turn of argument or trick of thought which has ever since
been the plague of their lives, and given him in all assemblies of their
kind, in the Fabian Society or in the whole Socialist movement, a
fantastic but most formidable domination. This method may be
approximately defined as that of revolutionising the revolutionists by
turning their rationalism against their remaining sentimentalism. But
definition leaves the matter dark unless we give one or two examples.
Thus Bernard Shaw threw himself as thoroughly as any New Woman into the
cause of the emancipation of women. But while the New Woman praised
woman as a prophetess, the new man took the opportunity to curse her and
kick her as a comrade. For the others sex equality meant the
emancipation of women, which allowed them to be equal to men. For Shaw
it mainly meant the emancipation of men, which allowed them to be rude
to women. Indeed, almost every one of Bernard Shaw's earlier plays might
be called an argument between a man and a woman, in which the woman is
thumped and thrashed and outwitted until she admits that she is the
equal of her conqueror. This is the first case of the Shavian trick of
turning on the romantic rationalists with their own rationalism. He
said in substance, "If we are democrats, let us have votes for women;
but if we are democrats, why on earth should we have respect for women?"
I take one other example out of many. Bernard Shaw was thrown early into
what may be called the cosmopolitan club of revolution. The Socialists
of the S.D.F. call it "L'Internationale," but the club covers more than
Socialists. It covers many who consider themselves the champions of
oppressed nationalities--Poland, Finland, and even Ireland; and thus a
strong nationalist tendency exists in the revolutionary movement.
Against this nationalist tendency Shaw set himself with sudden violence.
If the flag of England was a piece of piratical humbug, was not the flag
of Poland a piece of piratical humbug too? If we hated the jingoism of
the existing armies and frontiers, why should we bring into existence
new jingo armies and new jingo frontiers? All the other revolutionists
fell in instinctively with Home Rule for Ireland. Shaw urged, in effect,
that Home Rule was as bad as Home Influences and Home Cooking, and all
the other degrading domesticities that began with the word "Home." His
ultimate support of the South African war was largely created by his
irritation against the other revolutionists for favouring a nationalist
resistance. The ordinary Imperialists objected to Pro-Boers because they
were anti-patriots. Bernard Shaw objected to Pro-Boers because they were
pro-patriots.
But among these surprise attacks of G. B. S., these turnings of
scepticism against the sceptics, there was one which has figured largely
in his life; the most amusing and perhaps the most salutary of all these
reactions. The "progressive" world being in revolt against religion had
naturally felt itself allied to science; and against the authority of
priests it would perpetually hurl the authority of scientific men. Shaw
gazed for a few moments at this new authority, the veiled god of Huxley
and Tyndall, and then with the greatest placidity and precision kicked
it in the stomach. He declared to the astounded progressives around him
that physical science was a mystical fake like sacerdotalism; that
scientists, like priests, spoke with authority because they could not
speak with proof or reason; that the very wonders of science were mostly
lies, like the wonders of religion. "When astronomers tell me," he says
somewhere, "that a star is so far off that its light takes a thousand
years to reach us, the magnitude of the lie seems to me inartistic." The
paralysing impudence of such remarks left everyone quite breathless; and
even to this day this particular part of Shaw's satiric war has been far
less followed up than it deserves. For there was present in it an
element very marked in Shaw's controversies; I mean that his apparent
exaggerations are generally much better backed up by knowledge than
would appear from their nature. He can lure his enemy on with fantasies
and then overwhelm him with facts. Thus the man of science, when he read
some wild passage in which Shaw compared Huxley to a tribal soothsayer
grubbing in the entrails of animals, supposed the writer to be a mere
fantastic whom science could crush with one finger. He would therefore
engage in a controversy with Shaw about (let us say) vivisection, and
discover to his horror that Shaw really knew a great deal about the
subject, and could pelt him with expert witnesses and hospital reports.
Among the many singular contradictions in a singular character, there is
none more interesting than this combination of exactitude and industry
in the detail of opinions with audacity and a certain wildness in their
outline.
This great game of catching revolutionists napping, of catching the
unconventional people in conventional poses, of outmarching and
outmanoeuvring progressives till they felt like conservatives, of
undermining the mines of Nihilists till they felt like the House of
Lords, this great game of dishing the anarchists continued for some time
to be his most effective business. It would be untrue to say that he was
a cynic; he was never a cynic, for that implies a certain corrupt
fatigue about human affairs, whereas he was vibrating with virtue and
energy. Nor would it be fair to call him even a sceptic, for that
implies a dogma of hopelessness and definite belief in unbelief. But it
would be strictly just to describe him at this time, at any rate, as a
merely destructive person. He was one whose main business was, in his
own view, the pricking of illusions, the stripping away of disguises,
and even the destruction of ideals. He was a sort of anti-confectioner
whose whole business it was to take the gilt off the gingerbread.
Now I have no particular objection to people who take the gilt off the
gingerbread; if only for this excellent reason, that I am much fonder of
gingerbread than I am of gilt. But there are some objections to this
task when it becomes a crusade or an obsession. One of them is this:
that people who have really scraped the gilt off gingerbread generally
waste the rest of their lives in attempting to scrape the gilt off
gigantic lumps of gold. Such has too often been the case of Shaw. He
can, if he likes, scrape the romance off the armaments of Europe or the
party system of Great Britain. But he cannot scrape the romance off love
or military valour, because it is all romance, and three thousand miles
thick. It cannot, I think, be denied that much of Bernard Shaw's
splendid mental energy has been wasted in this weary business of gnawing
at the necessary pillars of all possible society. But it would be
grossly unfair to indicate that even in his first and most destructive
stage he uttered nothing except these accidental, if arresting,
negations. He threw his whole genius heavily into the scale in favour of
two positive projects or causes of the period. When we have stated these
we have really stated the full intellectual equipment with which he
started his literary life.