the case of these two important convictions he exercised a solid power
of choice. When he first went to London he mixed with every kind of
revolutionary society, and met every kind of person except the ordinary
person. He knew everybody, so to speak, except everybody. He was more
than once a momentary apparition among the respectable atheists. He knew
Bradlaugh and spoke on the platforms of that Hall of Science in which
very simple and sincere masses of men used to hail with shouts of joy
the assurance that they were not immortal. He retains to this day
something of the noise and narrowness of that room; as, for instance,
when he says that it is contemptible to have a craving for eternal life.
This prejudice remains in direct opposition to all his present opinions,
which are all to the effect that it is glorious to desire power,
consciousness, and vitality even for one's self. But this old secularist
tag, that it is selfish to save one's soul, remains with him long after
he has practically glorified selfishness. It is a relic of those chaotic
early days. And just as he mingled with the atheists he mingled with the
anarchists, who were in the eighties a much more formidable body than
now, disputing with the Socialists on almost equal terms the claim to
be the true heirs of the Revolution. Shaw still talks entertainingly
about this group. As far as I can make out, it was almost entirely
female. When a book came out called _A Girl among the Anarchists_,
G. B. S. was provoked to a sort of explosive reminiscence. "A girl among
the anarchists!" he exclaimed to his present biographer; "if they had
said 'A man among the anarchists' it would have been more of an
adventure." He is ready to tell other tales of this eccentric
environment, most of which does not convey an impression of a very
bracing atmosphere. That revolutionary society must have contained many
high public ideals, but also a fair number of low private desires. And
when people blame Bernard Shaw for his pitiless and prosaic coldness,
his cutting refusal to reverence or admire, I think they should remember
this riff-raff of lawless sentimentalism against which his commonsense
had to strive, all the grandiloquent "comrades" and all the gushing
"affinities," all the sweetstuff sensuality and senseless sulking
against law. If Bernard Shaw became a little too fond of throwing cold
water upon prophecies or ideals, remember that he must have passed much
of his youth among cosmopolitan idealists who wanted a little cold water
in every sense of the word.
Upon two of these modern crusades he concentrated, and, as I have said,
he chose them well. The first was broadly what was called the
Humanitarian cause. It did not mean the cause of humanity, but rather,
if anything, the cause of everything else. At its noblest it meant a
sort of mystical identification of our life with the whole life of
nature. So a man might wince when a snail was crushed as if his toe were
trodden on; so a man might shrink when a moth shrivelled as if his own
hair had caught fire. Man might be a network of exquisite nerves running
over the whole universe, a subtle spider's web of pity. This was a fine
conception; though perhaps a somewhat severe enforcement of the
theological conception of the special divinity of man. For the
humanitarians certainly asked of humanity what can be asked of no other
creature; no man ever required a dog to understand a cat or expected the
cow to cry for the sorrows of the nightingale.
Hence this sense has been strongest in saints of a very mystical sort;
such as St. Francis who spoke of Sister Sparrow and Brother Wolf. Shaw
adopted this crusade of cosmic pity but adopted it very much in his own
style, severe, explanatory, and even unsympathetic. He had no
affectionate impulse to say "Brother Wolf"; at the best he would have
said "Citizen Wolf," like a sound republican. In fact, he was full of
healthy human compassion for the sufferings of animals; but in
phraseology he loved to put the matter unemotionally and even harshly. I
was once at a debating club at which Bernard Shaw said that he was not a
humanitarian at all, but only an economist, that he merely hated to see
life wasted by carelessness or cruelty. I felt inclined to get up and
address to him the following lucid question: "If when you spare a
herring you are only being oikonomikal, for what oikos are you being
nomikal?" But in an average debating club I thought this question might
not be quite clear; so I abandoned the idea. But certainly it is not
plain for whom Bernard Shaw is economising if he rescues a rhinoceros
from an early grave. But the truth is that Shaw only took this economic
pose from his hatred of appearing sentimental. If Bernard Shaw killed a
dragon and rescued a princess of romance, he would try to say "I have
saved a princess" with exactly the same intonation as "I have saved a
shilling." He tries to turn his own heroism into a sort of superhuman
thrift. He would thoroughly sympathise with that passage in his
favourite dramatic author in which the Button Moulder tells Peer Gynt
that there is a sort of cosmic housekeeping; that God Himself is very
economical, "and that is why He is so well to do."
This combination of the widest kindness and consideration with a
consistent ungraciousness of tone runs through all Shaw's ethical
utterance, and is nowhere more evident than in his attitude towards
animals. He would waste himself to a white-haired shadow to save a shark
in an aquarium from inconvenience or to add any little comforts to the
life of a carrion-crow. He would defy any laws or lose any friends to
show mercy to the humblest beast or the most hidden bird. Yet I cannot
recall in the whole of his works or in the whole of his conversation a
single word of any tenderness or intimacy with any bird or beast. It was
under the influence of this high and almost superhuman sense of duty
that he became a vegetarian; and I seem to remember that when he was
lying sick and near to death at the end of his _Saturday Review_ career
he wrote a fine fantastic article, declaring that his hearse ought to be
drawn by all the animals that he had not eaten. Whenever that evil day
comes there will be no need to fall back on the ranks of the brute
creation; there will be no lack of men and women who owe him so much as
to be glad to take the place of the animals; and the present writer for
one will be glad to express his gratitude as an elephant. There is no
doubt about the essential manhood and decency of Bernard Shaw's
instincts in such matters. And quite apart from the vegetarian
controversy, I do not doubt that the beasts also owe him much. But when
we come to positive things (and passions are the only truly positive
things) that obstinate doubt remains which remains after all eulogies of
Shaw. That fixed fancy sticks to the mind; that Bernard Shaw is a
vegetarian more because he dislikes dead beasts than because he likes
live ones.
It was the same with the other great cause to which Shaw more
politically though not more publicly committed himself. The actual
English people, without representation in Press or Parliament, but
faintly expressed in public-houses and music-halls, would connect Shaw
(so far as they have heard of him) with two ideas; they would say first
that he was a vegetarian, and second that he was a Socialist. Like most
of the impressions of the ignorant, these impressions would be on the
whole very just. My only purpose here is to urge that Shaw's Socialism
exemplifies the same trait of temperament as his vegetarianism. This
book is not concerned with Bernard Shaw as a politician or a
sociologist, but as a critic and creator of drama. I will therefore end
in this chapter all that I have to say about Bernard Shaw as a
politician or a political philosopher. I propose here to dismiss this
aspect of Shaw: only let it be remembered, once and for all, that I am
here dismissing the most important aspect of Shaw. It is as if one
dismissed the sculpture of Michael Angelo and went on to his sonnets.
Perhaps the highest and purest thing in him is simply that he cares more
for politics than for anything else; more than for art or for
philosophy. Socialism is the noblest thing for Bernard Shaw; and it is
the noblest thing in him. He really desires less to win fame than to
bear fruit. He is an absolute follower of that early sage who wished
only to make two blades of grass grow instead of one. He is a loyal
subject of Henri Quatre, who said that he only wanted every Frenchman to
have a chicken in his pot on Sunday; except, of course, that he would
call the repast cannibalism. But _cæteris paribus_ he thinks more of
that chicken than of the eagle of the universal empire; and he is always
ready to support the grass against the laurel.
Yet by the nature of this book the account of the most important Shaw,
who is the Socialist, must be also the most brief. Socialism (which I am
not here concerned either to attack or defend) is, as everyone knows,
the proposal that all property should be nationally owned that it may be
more decently distributed. It is a proposal resting upon two principles,
unimpeachable as far as they go: first, that frightful human calamities
call for immediate human aid; second, that such aid must almost always
be collectively organised. If a ship is being wrecked, we organise a
lifeboat; if a house is on fire, we organise a blanket; if half a nation
is starving, we must organise work and food. That is the primary and
powerful argument of the Socialist, and everything that he adds to it
weakens it. The only possible line of protest is to suggest that it is
rather shocking that we have to treat a normal nation as something
exceptional, like a house on fire or a shipwreck. But of such things it
may be necessary to speak later. The point here is that Shaw behaved
towards Socialism just as he behaved towards vegetarianism; he offered
every reason except the emotional reason, which was the real one. When
taxed in a _Daily News_ discussion with being a Socialist for the
obvious reason that poverty was cruel, he said this was quite wrong; it
was only because poverty was wasteful. He practically professed that
modern society annoyed him, not so much like an unrighteous kingdom, but
rather like an untidy room. Everyone who knew him knew, of course, that
he was full of a proper brotherly bitterness about the oppression of the
poor. But here again he would not admit that he was anything but an
Economist.
In thus setting his face like flint against sentimental methods of
argument he undoubtedly did one great service to the causes for which he
stood. Every vulgar anti-humanitarian, every snob who wants monkeys
vivisected or beggars flogged has always fallen back upon stereotyped
phrases like "maudlin" and "sentimental," which indicated the
humanitarian as a man in a weak condition of tears. The mere personality
of Shaw has shattered those foolish phrases for ever. Shaw the
humanitarian was like Voltaire the humanitarian, a man whose satire was
like steel, the hardest and coolest of fighters, upon whose piercing
point the wretched defenders of a masculine brutality wriggled like
worms.
In this quarrel one cannot wish Shaw even an inch less contemptuous, for
the people who call compassion "sentimentalism" deserve nothing but
contempt. In this one does not even regret his coldness; it is an
honourable contrast to the blundering emotionalism of the jingoes and
flagellomaniacs. The truth is that the ordinary anti-humanitarian only
manages to harden his heart by having already softened his head. It is
the reverse of sentimental to insist that a nigger is being burned
alive; for sentimentalism must be the clinging to pleasant thoughts. And
no one, not even a Higher Evolutionist, can think a nigger burned alive
a pleasant thought. The sentimental thing is to warm your hands at the
fire while denying the existence of the nigger, and that is the ruling
habit in England, as it has been the chief business of Bernard Shaw to
show. And in this the brutalitarians hate him not because he is soft,
but because he is hard, because he is not to be softened by conventional
excuses; because he looks hard at a thing--and hits harder. Some foolish
fellow of the Henley-Whibley reaction wrote that if we were to be
conquerors we must be less tender and more ruthless. Shaw answered with
really avenging irony, "What a light this principle throws on the defeat
of the tender Dervish, the compassionate Zulu, and the morbidly humane
Boxer at the hands of the hardy savages of England, France, and
Germany." In that sentence an idiot is obliterated and the whole story
of Europe told; but it is immensely stiffened by its ironic form. In the
same way Shaw washed away for ever the idea that Socialists were weak
dreamers, who said that things might be only because they wished them to
be. G. B. S. in argument with an individualist showed himself, as a
rule, much the better economist and much the worse rhetorician. In this
atmosphere arose a celebrated Fabian Society, of which he is still the
leading spirit--a society which answered all charges of impracticable
idealism by pushing both its theoretic statements and its practical
negotiations to the verge of cynicism. Bernard Shaw was the literary
expert who wrote most of its pamphlets. In one of them, among such
sections as _Fabian Temperance Reform_, _Fabian Education_ and so on,
there was an entry gravely headed "Fabian Natural Science," which stated
that in the Socialist cause light was needed more than heat.
Thus the Irish detachment and the Puritan austerity did much good to the
country and to the causes for which they were embattled. But there was
one thing they did not do; they did nothing for Shaw himself in the
matter of his primary mistakes and his real limitation. His great defect
was and is the lack of democratic sentiment. And there was nothing
democratic either in his humanitarianism or his Socialism. These new and
refined faiths tended rather to make the Irishman yet more aristocratic,
the Puritan yet more exclusive. To be a Socialist was to look down on
all the peasant owners of the earth, especially on the peasant owners of
his own island. To be a Vegetarian was to be a man with a strange and
mysterious morality, a man who thought the good lord who roasted oxen
for his vassals only less bad than the bad lord who roasted the vassals.
None of these advanced views could the common people hear gladly; nor
indeed was Shaw specially anxious to please the common people. It was
his glory that he pitied animals like men; it was his defect that he
pitied men only too much like animals. Foulon said of the democracy,
"Let them eat grass." Shaw said, "Let them eat greens." He had more
benevolence, but almost as much disdain. "I have never had any feelings
about the English working classes," he said elsewhere, "except a desire
to abolish them and replace them by sensible people." This is the
unsympathetic side of the thing; but it had another and much nobler
side, which must at least be seriously recognised before we pass on to
much lighter things.
Bernard Shaw is not a democrat; but he is a splendid republican. The
nuance of difference between those terms precisely depicts him. And
there is after all a good deal of dim democracy in England, in the sense
that there is much of a blind sense of brotherhood, and nowhere more
than among old-fashioned and even reactionary people. But a republican
is a rare bird, and a noble one. Shaw is a republican in the literal and
Latin sense; he cares more for the Public Thing than for any private
thing. The interest of the State is with him a sincere thirst of the
soul, as it was in the little pagan cities. Now this public passion,
this clean appetite for order and equity, had fallen to a lower ebb, had
more nearly disappeared altogether, during Shaw's earlier epoch than at
any other time. Individualism of the worst type was on the top of the
wave; I mean artistic individualism, which is so much crueller, so much
blinder and so much more irrational even than commercial individualism.
The decay of society was praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is
praised by worms. The æsthete was all receptiveness, like the flea. His
only affair in this world was to feed on its facts and colours, like a
parasite upon blood. The ego was the all; and the praise of it was
enunciated in madder and madder rhythms by poets whose Helicon was
absinthe and whose Pegasus was the nightmare. This diseased pride was
not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all
political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a
question of one man one vote, but of one man one universe.
I have in my time had my fling at the Fabian Society, at the pedantry of
schemes, the arrogance of experts; nor do I regret it now. But when I
remember that other world against which it reared its bourgeois banner
of cleanliness and common sense, I will not end this chapter without
doing it decent honour. Give me the drain pipes of the Fabians rather
than the panpipes of the later poets; the drain pipes have a nicer
smell. Give me even that business-like benevolence that herded men like
beasts rather than that exquisite art which isolated them like devils;
give me even the suppression of "Zæo" rather than the triumph of
"Salome." And if I feel such a confession to be due to those Fabians who
could hardly have been anything but experts in any society, such as Mr.
Sidney Webb or Mr. Edward Pease, it is due yet more strongly to the
greatest of the Fabians. Here was a man who could have enjoyed art among
the artists, who could have been the wittiest of all the _flâneurs_; who
could have made epigrams like diamonds and drunk music like wine. He has
instead laboured in a mill of statistics and crammed his mind with all
the most dreary and the most filthy details, so that he can argue on the
spur of the moment about sewing-machines or sewage, about typhus fever
or twopenny tubes. The usual mean theory of motives will not cover the
case; it is not ambition, for he could have been twenty times more
prominent as a plausible and popular humorist. It is the real and
ancient emotion of the _salus populi_, almost extinct in our
oligarchical chaos; nor will I for one, as I pass on to many matters of
argument or quarrel, neglect to salute a passion so implacable and so
pure.
_The Critic_
It appears a point of some mystery to the present writer that Bernard
Shaw should have been so long unrecognised and almost in beggary. I
should have thought his talent was of the ringing and arresting sort;
such as even editors and publishers would have sense enough to seize.
Yet it is quite certain that he almost starved in London for many years,
writing occasional columns for an advertisement or words for a picture.
And it is equally certain (it is proved by twenty anecdotes, but no one
who knows Shaw needs any anecdotes to prove it) that in those days of
desperation he again and again threw up chances and flung back good
bargains which did not suit his unique and erratic sense of honour. The
fame of having first offered Shaw to the public upon a platform worthy
of him belongs, like many other public services, to Mr. William Archer.
I say it seems odd that such a writer should not be appreciated in a
flash; but upon this point there is evidently a real difference of
opinion, and it constitutes for me the strangest difficulty of the
subject. I hear many people complain that Bernard Shaw deliberately
mystifies them. I cannot imagine what they mean; it seems to me that he
deliberately insults them. His language, especially on moral questions,
is generally as straight and solid as that of a bargee and far less
ornate and symbolic than that of a hansom-cabman. The prosperous English
Philistine complains that Mr. Shaw is making a fool of him. Whereas Mr.
Shaw is not in the least making a fool of him; Mr. Shaw is, with
laborious lucidity, calling him a fool. G. B. S. calls a landlord a
thief; and the landlord, instead of denying or resenting it, says, "Ah,
that fellow hides his meaning so cleverly that one can never make out
what he means, it is all so fine spun and fantastical." G. B. S. calls a
statesman a liar to his face, and the statesman cries in a kind of
ecstasy, "Ah, what quaint, intricate and half-tangled trains of thought!
Ah, what elusive and many-coloured mysteries of half-meaning!" I think
it is always quite plain what Mr. Shaw means, even when he is joking,
and it generally means that the people he is talking to ought to howl
aloud for their sins. But the average representative of them undoubtedly
treats the Shavian meaning as tricky and complex, when it is really
direct and offensive. He always accuses Shaw of pulling his leg, at the
exact moment when Shaw is pulling his nose.
This prompt and pungent style he learnt in the open, upon political tubs
and platforms; and he is very legitimately proud of it. He boasts of
being a demagogue; "The cart and the trumpet for me," he says, with
admirable good sense. Everyone will remember the effective appearance of
Cyrano de Bergerac in the first act of the fine play of that name; when
instead of leaping in by any hackneyed door or window, he suddenly
springs upon a chair above the crowd that has so far kept him invisible;
"les bras croisés, le feutre en bataille, la moustache hérissée, le nez
terrible." I will not go so far as to say that when Bernard Shaw sprang
upon a chair or tub in Trafalgar Square he had the hat in battle, or
even that he had the nose terrible. But just as we see Cyrano best when
he thus leaps above the crowd, I think we may take this moment of Shaw
stepping on his little platform to see him clearly as he then was, and
even as he has largely not ceased to be. I, at least, have only known
him in his middle age; yet I think I can see him, younger yet only a
little more alert, with hair more red but with face yet paler, as he
first stood up upon some cart or barrow in the tossing glare of the gas.
The first fact that one realises about Shaw (independent of all one has
read and often contradicting it) is his voice. Primarily it is the voice
of an Irishman, and then something of the voice of a musician. It
possibly explains much of his career; a man may be permitted to say so
many impudent things with so pleasant an intonation. But the voice is
not only Irish and agreeable, it is also frank and as it were inviting
conference. This goes with a style and gesture which can only be
described as at once very casual and very emphatic. He assumes that
bodily supremacy which goes with oratory, but he assumes it with almost
ostentatious carelessness; he throws back the head, but loosely and
laughingly. He is at once swaggering and yet shrugging his shoulders, as
if to drop from them the mantle of the orator which he has confidently
assumed. Lastly, no man ever used voice or gesture better for the
purpose of expressing certainty; no man can say "I tell Mr. Jones he is
totally wrong" with more air of unforced and even casual conviction.
This particular play of feature or pitch of voice, at once didactic and
yet not uncomrade-like, must be counted a very important fact,
especially in connection with the period when that voice was first
heard. It must be remembered that Shaw emerged as a wit in a sort of
secondary age of wits; one of those stale interludes of prematurely old
young men, which separate the serious epochs of history. Oscar Wilde was
its god; but he was somewhat more mystical, not to say monstrous, than
the average of its dried and decorous impudence. The _two survivals_ of
that time, as far as I know, are Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. Graham
Robertson; two most charming people; but the air they had to live in was
the devil. One of its notes was an artificial reticence of speech, which
waited till it could plant the perfect epigram. Its typical products
were far too conceited to lay down the law. Now when people heard that
Bernard Shaw was witty, as he most certainly was, when they heard his
_mots_ repeated like those of Whistler or Wilde, when they heard things
like "the Seven deadly Virtues" or "Who _was_ Hall Caine?" they expected
another of these silent sarcastic dandies who went about with one
epigram, patient and poisonous, like a bee with his one sting. And when
they saw and heard the new humorist they found no fixed sneer, no frock
coat, no green carnation, no silent Savoy Restaurant good manners, no
fear of looking a fool, no particular notion of looking a gentleman.
They found a talkative Irishman with a kind voice and a brown coat; open
gestures and an evident desire to make people really agree with him. He
had his own kind of affectations no doubt, and his own kind of tricks of
debate; but he broke, and, thank God, forever the spell of the little
man with the single eye glass who had frozen both faith and fun at so
many tea-tables. Shaw's humane voice and hearty manner were so obviously
more the things of a great man than the hard, gem-like brilliancy of
Wilde or the careful ill-temper of Whistler. He brought in a breezier
sort of insolence; the single eye-glass fled before the single eye.