swaggering figure, is that of the face with which so many caricaturists
have fantastically delighted themselves, the Mephistophelean face with
the fierce tufted eyebrows and forked red beard. Yet those caricaturists
in their natural delight in coming upon so striking a face, have
somewhat misrepresented it, making it merely Satanic; whereas its actual
expression has quite as much benevolence as mockery. By this time his
costume has become a part of his personality; one has come to think of
the reddish brown Jaeger suit as if it were a sort of reddish brown fur,
and were, like the hair and eyebrows, a part of the animal; yet there
are those who claim to remember a Bernard Shaw of yet more awful aspect
before Jaeger came to his assistance; a Bernard Shaw in a dilapidated
frock-coat and some sort of straw hat. I can hardly believe it; the man
is so much of a piece, and must always have dressed appropriately. In
any case his brown woollen clothes, at once artistic and hygienic,
completed the appeal for which he stood; which might be defined as an
eccentric healthy-mindedness. But something of the vagueness and
equivocation of his first fame is probably due to the different
functions which he performed in the contemporary world of art.
He began by writing novels. They are not much read, and indeed not
imperatively worth reading, with the one exception of the crude and
magnificent _Cashel Byron's Profession_. Mr. William Archer, in the
course of his kindly efforts on behalf of his young Irish friend, sent
this book to Samoa, for the opinion of the most elvish and yet
efficient of modern critics. Stevenson summed up much of Shaw even from
that fragment when he spoke of a romantic griffin roaring with laughter
at the nature of his own quest. He also added the not wholly unjustified
postscript: "I say, Archer,--my God, what women!"
The fiction was largely dropped; but when he began work he felt his way
by the avenues of three arts. He was an art critic, a dramatic critic,
and a musical critic; and in all three, it need hardly be said, he
fought for the newest style and the most revolutionary school. He wrote
on all these as he would have written on anything; but it was, I fancy,
about the music that he cared most.
It may often be remarked that mathematicians love and understand music
more than they love or understand poetry. Bernard Shaw is in much the
same condition; indeed, in attempting to do justice to Shakespeare's
poetry, he always calls it "word music." It is not difficult to explain
this special attachment of the mere logician to music. The logician,
like every other man on earth, must have sentiment and romance in his
existence; in every man's life, indeed, which can be called a life at
all, sentiment is the most solid thing. But if the extreme logician
turns for his emotions to poetry, he is exasperated and bewildered by
discovering that the words of his own trade are used in an entirely
different meaning. He conceives that he understands the word "visible,"
and then finds Milton applying it to darkness, in which nothing is
visible. He supposes that he understands the word "hide," and then finds
Shelley talking of a poet hidden in the light. He has reason to believe
that he understands the common word "hung"; and then William
Shakespeare, Esquire, of Stratford-on-Avon, gravely assures him that the
tops of the tall sea waves were hung with deafening clamours on the
slippery clouds. That is why the common arithmetician prefers music to
poetry. Words are his scientific instruments. It irritates him that they
should be anyone else's musical instruments. He is willing to see men
juggling, but not men juggling with his own private tools and
possessions--his terms. It is then that he turns with an utter relief to
music. Here are all the same fascination and inspiration, all the same
purity and plunging force as in poetry; but not requiring any verbal
confession that light conceals things or that darkness can be seen in
the dark. Music is mere beauty; it is beauty in the abstract, beauty in
solution. It is a shapeless and liquid element of beauty, in which a man
may really float, not indeed affirming the truth, but not denying it.
Bernard Shaw, as I have already said, is infinitely far above all such
mere mathematicians and pedantic reasoners; still his feeling is partly
the same. He adores music because it cannot deal with romantic terms
either in their right or their wrong sense. Music can be romantic
without reminding him of Shakespeare and Walter Scott, with whom he has
had personal quarrels. Music can be Catholic without reminding him
verbally of the Catholic Church, which he has never seen, and is sure he
does not like. Bernard Shaw can agree with Wagner, the musician, because
he speaks without words; if it had been Wagner the man he would
certainly have had words with him. Therefore I would suggest that Shaw's
love of music (which is so fundamental that it must be mentioned early,
if not first, in his story) may itself be considered in the first case
as the imaginative safety-valve of the rationalistic Irishman.
This much may be said conjecturally over the present signature; but more
must not be said. Bernard Shaw understands music so much better than I
do that it is just possible that he is, in that tongue and atmosphere,
all that he is not elsewhere. While he is writing with a pen I know his
limitations as much as I admire his genius; and I know it is true to say
that he does not appreciate romance. But while he is playing on the
piano he may be cocking a feather, drawing a sword or draining a flagon
for all I know. While he is speaking I am sure that there are some
things he does not understand. But while he is listening (at the Queen's
Hall) he may understand everything, including God and me. Upon this part
of him I am a reverent agnostic; it is well to have some such dark
continent in the character of a man of whom one writes. It preserves two
very important things--modesty in the biographer and mystery in the
biography.
For the purpose of our present generalisation it is only necessary to
say that Shaw, as a musical critic, summed himself up as "The Perfect
Wagnerite"; he threw himself into subtle and yet trenchant eulogy of
that revolutionary voice in music. It was the same with the other arts.
As he was a Perfect Wagnerite in music, so he was a Perfect Whistlerite
in painting; so above all he was a Perfect Ibsenite in drama. And with
this we enter that part of his career with which this book is more
specially concerned. When Mr. William Archer got him established as
dramatic critic of the _Saturday Review_, he became for the first time
"a star of the stage"; a shooting star and sometimes a destroying comet.
On the day of that appointment opened one of the very few exhilarating
and honest battles that broke the silence of the slow and cynical
collapse of the nineteenth century. Bernard Shaw the demagogue had got
his cart and his trumpet; and was resolved to make them like the car of
destiny and the trumpet of judgment. He had not the servility of the
ordinary rebel, who is content to go on rebelling against kings and
priests, because such rebellion is as old and as established as any
priests or kings. He cast about him for something to attack which was
not merely powerful or placid, but was unattacked. After a little quite
sincere reflection, he found it. He would not be content to be a common
atheist; he wished to blaspheme something in which even atheists
believed. He was not satisfied with being revolutionary; there were so
many revolutionists. He wanted to pick out some prominent institution
which had been irrationally and instinctively accepted by the most
violent and profane; something of which Mr. Foote would speak as
respectfully on the front page of the _Freethinker_ as Mr. St. Loe
Strachey on the front page of the _Spectator_. He found the thing; he
found the great unassailed English institution--Shakespeare.
But Shaw's attack on Shakespeare, though exaggerated for the fun of the
thing, was not by any means the mere folly or firework paradox that has
been supposed. He meant what he said; what was called his levity was
merely the laughter of a man who enjoyed saying what he meant--an
occupation which is indeed one of the greatest larks in life. Moreover,
it can honestly be said that Shaw did good by shaking the mere idolatry
of Him of Avon. That idolatry was bad for England; it buttressed our
perilous self-complacency by making us think that we alone had, not
merely a great poet, but the one poet above criticism. It was bad for
literature; it made a minute model out of work that was really a hasty
and faulty masterpiece. And it was bad for religion and morals that
there should be so huge a terrestrial idol, that we should put such
utter and unreasoning trust in any child of man. It is true that it was
largely through Shaw's own defects that he beheld the defects of
Shakespeare. But it needed someone equally prosaic to resist what was
perilous in the charm of such poetry; it may not be altogether a mistake
to send a deaf man to destroy the rock of the sirens.
This attitude of Shaw illustrates of course all three of the divisions
or aspects to which the reader's attention has been drawn. It was partly
the attitude of the Irishman objecting to the Englishman turning his
mere artistic taste into a religion; especially when it was a taste
merely taught him by his aunts and uncles. In Shaw's opinion (one might
say) the English do not really enjoy Shakespeare or even admire
Shakespeare; one can only say, in the strong colloquialism, that they
swear by Shakespeare. He is a mere god; a thing to be invoked. And
Shaw's whole business was to set up the things which were to be sworn by
as things to be sworn at. It was partly again the revolutionist in
pursuit of pure novelty, hating primarily the oppression of the past,
almost hating history itself. For Bernard Shaw the prophets were to be
stoned after, and not before, men had built their sepulchres. There was
a Yankee smartness in the man which was irritated at the idea of being
dominated by a person dead for three hundred years; like Mark Twain, he
wanted a fresher corpse.
These two motives there were, but they were small compared with the
other. It was the third part of him, the Puritan, that was really at war
with Shakespeare. He denounced that playwright almost exactly as any
contemporary Puritan coming out of a conventicle in a steeple-crowned
hat and stiff bands might have denounced the playwright coming out of
the stage door of the old Globe Theatre. This is not a mere fancy; it is
philosophically true. A legend has run round the newspapers that Bernard
Shaw offered himself as a better writer than Shakespeare. This is false
and quite unjust; Bernard Shaw never said anything of the kind. The
writer whom he did say was better than Shakespeare was not himself, but
Bunyan. And he justified it by attributing to Bunyan a virile acceptance
of life as a high and harsh adventure, while in Shakespeare he saw
nothing but profligate pessimism, the _vanitas vanitatum_ of a
disappointed voluptuary. According to this view Shakespeare was always
saying, "Out, out, brief candle," because his was only a ballroom
candle; while Bunyan was seeking to light such a candle as by God's
grace should never be put out.
It is odd that Bernard Shaw's chief error or insensibility should have
been the instrument of his noblest affirmation. The denunciation of
Shakespeare was a mere misunderstanding. But the denunciation of
Shakespeare's pessimism was the most splendidly understanding of all his
utterances. This is the greatest thing in Shaw, a serious optimism--even
a tragic optimism. Life is a thing too glorious to be enjoyed. To be is
an exacting and exhausting business; the trumpet though inspiring is
terrible. Nothing that he ever wrote is so noble as his simple reference
to the sturdy man who stepped up to the Keeper of the Book of Life and
said, "Put down my name, Sir." It is true that Shaw called this heroic
philosophy by wrong names and buttressed it with false metaphysics; that
was the weakness of the age. The temporary decline of theology had
involved the neglect of philosophy and all fine thinking; and Bernard
Shaw had to find shaky justifications in Schopenhauer for the sons of
God shouting for joy. He called it the Will to Live--a phrase invented
by Prussian professors who would like to exist, but can't. Afterwards he
asked people to worship the Life-Force; as if one could worship a
hyphen. But though he covered it with crude new names (which are now
fortunately crumbling everywhere like bad mortar) he was on the side of
the good old cause; the oldest and the best of all causes, the cause of
creation against destruction, the cause of yes against no, the cause of
the seed against the stony earth and the star against the abyss.
His misunderstanding of Shakespeare arose largely from the fact that he
is a Puritan, while Shakespeare was spiritually a Catholic. The former
is always screwing himself up to see truth; the latter is often content
that truth is there. The Puritan is only strong enough to stiffen; the
Catholic is strong enough to relax. Shaw, I think, has entirely
misunderstood the pessimistic passages of Shakespeare. They are flying
moods which a man with a fixed faith can afford to entertain. That all
is vanity, that life is dust and love is ashes, these are frivolities,
these are jokes that a Catholic can afford to utter. He knows well
enough that there is a life that is not dust and a love that is not
ashes. But just as he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the
matter of enjoyment, so he may let himself go more than the Puritan in
the matter of melancholy. The sad exuberances of Hamlet are merely like
the glad exuberances of Falstaff. This is not conjecture; it is the text
of Shakespeare. In the very act of uttering his pessimism, Hamlet admits
that it is a mood and not the truth. Heaven _is_ a heavenly thing, only
to him it seems a foul congregation of vapours. Man _is_ the paragon of
animals, only to him he seems a quintessence of dust. Hamlet is quite
the reverse of a sceptic. He is a man whose strong intellect believes
much more than his weak temperament can make vivid to him. But this
power of knowing a thing without feeling it, this power of believing a
thing without experiencing it, this is an old Catholic complexity, and
the Puritan has never understood it. Shakespeare confesses his moods
(mostly by the mouths of villains and failures), but he never sets up
his moods against his mind. His cry of _vanitas vanitatum_ is itself
only a harmless vanity. Readers may not agree with my calling him
Catholic with a big C; but they will hardly complain of my calling him
catholic with a small one. And that is here the principal point.
Shakespeare was not in any sense a pessimist; he was, if anything, an
optimist so universal as to be able to enjoy even pessimism. And this is
exactly where he differs from the Puritan. The true Puritan is not
squeamish: the true Puritan is free to say "Damn it!" But the Catholic
Elizabethan was free (on passing provocation) to say "Damn it all!"
It need hardly be explained that Bernard Shaw added to his negative case
of a dramatist to be depreciated a corresponding affirmative case of a
dramatist to be exalted and advanced. He was not content with so remote
a comparison as that between Shakespeare and Bunyan. In his vivacious
weekly articles in the _Saturday Review_, the real comparison upon which
everything turned was the comparison between Shakespeare and Ibsen. He
early threw himself with all possible eagerness into the public disputes
about the great Scandinavian; and though there was no doubt whatever
about which side he supported, there was much that was individual in the
line he took. It is not our business here to explore that extinct
volcano. You may say that anti-Ibsenism is dead, or you may say that
Ibsen is dead; in any case, that controversy is dead, and death, as the
Roman poet says, can alone confess of what small atoms we are made. The
opponents of Ibsen largely exhibited the permanent qualities of the
populace; that is, their instincts were right and their reasons wrong.
They made the complete controversial mistake of calling Ibsen a
pessimist; whereas, indeed, his chief weakness is a rather childish
confidence in mere nature and freedom, and a blindness (either of
experience or of culture) in the matter of original sin. In this sense
Ibsen is not so much a pessimist as a highly crude kind of optimist.
Nevertheless the man in the street was right in his fundamental
instinct, as he always is. Ibsen, in his pale northern style, is an
optimist; but for all that he is a depressing person. The optimism of
Ibsen is less comforting than the pessimism of Dante; just as a
Norwegian sunrise, however splendid, is colder than a southern night.
But on the side of those who fought for Ibsen there was also a
disagreement, and perhaps also a mistake. The vague army of "the
advanced" (an army which advances in all directions) were united in
feeling that they ought to be the friends of Ibsen because he also was
advancing somewhere somehow. But they were also seriously impressed by
Flaubert, by Oscar Wilde and all the rest who told them that a work of
art was in another universe from ethics and social good. Therefore many,
I think most, of the Ibsenites praised the Ibsen plays merely as _choses
vues_, æsthetic affirmations of what can be without any reference to
what ought to be. Mr. William Archer himself inclined to this view,
though his strong sagacity kept him in a haze of healthy doubt on the
subject. Mr. Walkley certainly took this view. But this view Mr. George
Bernard Shaw abruptly and violently refused to take.
With the full Puritan combination of passion and precision he informed
everybody that Ibsen was not artistic, but moral; that his dramas were
didactic, that all great art was didactic, that Ibsen was strongly on
the side of some of his characters and strongly against others, that
there was preaching and public spirit in the work of good dramatists;
and that if this were not so, dramatists and all other artists would be
mere panders of intellectual debauchery, to be locked up as the Puritans
locked up the stage players. No one can understand Bernard Shaw who does
not give full value to this early revolt of his on behalf of ethics
against the ruling school of _l'art pour l'art_. It is interesting
because it is connected with other ambitions in the man, especially
with that which has made him somewhat vainer of being a Parish
Councillor than of being one of the most popular dramatists in Europe.
But its chief interest is again to be referred to our stratification of
the psychology; it is the lover of true things rebelling for once
against merely new things; it is the Puritan suddenly refusing to be the
mere Progressive.
But this attitude obviously laid on the ethical lover of Ibsen a not
inconsiderable obligation. If the new drama had an ethical purpose, what
was it? and if Ibsen was a moral teacher, what the deuce was he
teaching? Answers to this question, answers of manifold brilliancy and
promise, were scattered through all the dramatic criticisms of those
years on the _Saturday Review_. But even Bernard Shaw grew tired after a
time of discussing Ibsen only in connection with the current pantomime
or the latest musical comedy. It was felt that so much sincerity and
fertility of explanation justified a concentrated attack; and in 1891
appeared the brilliant book called _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_, which
some have declared to be merely the quintessence of Shaw. However this
may be, it was in fact and profession the quintessence of Shaw's theory
of the morality or propaganda of Ibsen.
The book itself is much longer than the book that I am writing; and as
is only right in so spirited an apologist, every paragraph is
provocative. I could write an essay on every sentence which I accept and
three essays on every sentence which I deny. Bernard Shaw himself is a
master of compression; he can put a conception more compactly than any
other man alive. It is therefore rather difficult to compress his
compression; one feels as if one were trying to extract a beef essence
from Bovril. But the shortest form in which I can state the idea of _The
Quintessence of Ibsenism_ is that it is the idea of distrusting ideals,
which are universal, in comparison with facts, which are miscellaneous.
The man whom he attacks throughout he calls "The Idealist"; that is the
man who permits himself to be mainly moved by a moral generalisation.
"Actions," he says, "are to be judged by their effect on happiness, and
not by their conformity to any ideal." As we have already seen, there is
a certain inconsistency here; for while Shaw had always chucked all
ideals overboard the one he had chucked first was the ideal of
happiness. Passing this however for the present, we may mark the above
as the most satisfying summary. If I tell a lie I am not to blame myself
for having violated the ideal of truth, but only for having perhaps got
myself into a mess and made things worse than they were before. If I
have broken my word I need not feel (as my fathers did) that I have
broken something inside of me, as one who breaks a blood vessel. It all
depends on whether I have broken up something outside me; as one who
breaks up an evening party. If I shoot my father the only question is
whether I have made him happy. I must not admit the idealistic
conception that the mere shooting of my father might possibly make me
unhappy. We are to judge of every individual case as it arises,
apparently without any social summary or moral ready-reckoner at all.
"The Golden Rule is that there is no Golden Rule." We must not say that
it is right to keep promises, but that it may be right to keep this
promise. Essentially it is anarchy; nor is it very easy to see how a
state could be very comfortable which was Socialist in all its public
morality and Anarchist in all its private. But if it is anarchy, it is
anarchy without any of the abandon and exuberance of anarchy. It is a
worried and conscientious anarchy; an anarchy of painful delicacy and
even caution. For it refuses to trust in traditional experiments or
plainly trodden tracks; every case must be considered anew from the
beginning, and yet considered with the most wide-eyed care for human
welfare; every man must act as if he were the first man made. Briefly,
we must always be worrying about what is best for our children, and we
must not take one hint or rule of thumb from our fathers. Some think
that this anarchism would make a man tread down mighty cities in his
madness. I think it would make a man walk down the street as if he were
walking on egg-shells. I do not think this experiment in opportunism
would end in frantic license; I think it would end in frozen timidity.
If a man was forbidden to solve moral problems by moral science or the
help of mankind, his course would be quite easy--he would not solve the
problems. The world instead of being a knot so tangled as to need
unravelling, would simply become a piece of clockwork too complicated to
be touched. I cannot think that this untutored worry was what Ibsen
meant; I have my doubts as to whether it was what Shaw meant; but I do
not think that it can be substantially doubted that it was what he said.
In any case it can be asserted that the general aim of the work was to
exalt the immediate conclusions of practice against the general
conclusions of theory. Shaw objected to the solution of every problem in
a play being by its nature a general solution, applicable to all other
such problems. He disliked the entrance of a universal justice at the
end of the last act; treading down all the personal ultimatums and all
the varied certainties of men. He disliked the god from the
machine--because he was from a machine. But even without the machine he
tended to dislike the god; because a god is more general than a man. His
enemies have accused Shaw of being anti-domestic, a shaker of the
roof-tree. But in this sense Shaw may be called almost madly domestic.
He wishes each private problem to be settled in private, without
reference to sociological ethics. And the only objection to this kind of
gigantic casuistry is that the theatre is really too small to discuss
it. It would not be fair to play David and Goliath on a stage too small
to admit Goliath. And it is not fair to discuss private morality on a
stage too small to admit the enormous presence of public morality; that
character which has not appeared in a play since the Middle Ages; whose
name is Everyman and whose honour we have all in our keeping.
_The Dramatist_