Julius Cæsar in the preface than there is in the play. But in the
preface I think the portrait is less imaginative and more fanciful. He
attempts to connect his somewhat chilly type of superman with the heroes
of the old fairy tales. But Shaw should not talk about the fairy tales;
for he does not feel them from the inside. As I have said, on all this
side of historic and domestic traditions Bernard Shaw is weak and
deficient. He does not approach them as fairy tales, as if he were four,
but as "folk-lore" as if he were forty. And he makes a big mistake about
them which he would never have made if he had kept his birthday and hung
up his stocking, and generally kept alive inside him the firelight of a
home. The point is so peculiarly characteristic of Bernard Shaw, and is
indeed so much of a summary of his most interesting assertion and his
most interesting error, that it deserves a word by itself, though it is
a word which must be remembered in connection with nearly all the other
plays.
His primary and defiant proposition is the Calvinistic proposition: that
the elect do not earn virtue, but possess it. The goodness of a man does
not consist in trying to be good, but in being good. Julius Cæsar
prevails over other people by possessing more _virtus_ than they; not by
having striven or suffered or bought his virtue; not because he has
struggled heroically, but because he is a hero. So far Bernard Shaw is
only what I have called him at the beginning; he is simply a
seventeenth-century Calvinist. Cæsar is not saved by works, or even by
faith; he is saved because he is one of the elect. Unfortunately for
himself, however, Bernard Shaw went back further than the seventeenth
century; and professing his opinion to be yet more antiquated, invoked
the original legends of mankind. He argued that when the fairy tales
gave Jack the Giant Killer a coat of darkness or a magic sword it
removed all credit from Jack in the "common moral" sense; he won as
Cæsar won only because he was superior. I will confess, in passing, to
the conviction that Bernard Shaw in the course of his whole simple and
strenuous life was never quite so near to hell as at the moment when he
wrote down those words. But in this question of fairy tales my immediate
point is, not how near he was to hell, but how very far off he was from
fairyland. That notion about the hero with a magic sword being the
superman with a magic superiority is the caprice of a pedant; no child,
boy, or man ever felt it in the story of Jack the Giant Killer.
Obviously the moral is all the other way. Jack's fairy sword and
invisible coat are clumsy expedients for enabling him to fight at all
with something which is by nature stronger. They are a rough, savage
substitute for psychological descriptions of special valour or unwearied
patience. But no one in his five wits can doubt that the idea of "Jack
the Giant Killer" is exactly the opposite to Shaw's idea. If it were not
a tale of effort and triumph hardly earned it would not be called "Jack
the Giant Killer." If it were a tale of the victory of natural
advantages it would be called "Giant the Jack Killer." If the teller of
fairy tales had merely wanted to urge that some beings are born stronger
than others he would not have fallen back on elaborate tricks of weapon
and costume for conquering an ogre. He would simply have let the ogre
conquer. I will not speak of my own emotions in connection with this
incredibly caddish doctrine that the strength of the strong is
admirable, but not the valour of the weak. It is enough to say that I
have to summon up the physical presence of Shaw, his frank gestures,
kind eyes, and exquisite Irish voice, to cure me of a mere sensation of
contempt. But I do not dwell upon the point for any such purpose; but
merely to show how we must be always casting back to those concrete
foundations with which we began. Bernard Shaw, as I have said, was never
national enough to be domestic; he was never a part of his past; hence
when he tries to interpret tradition he comes a terrible cropper, as in
this case. Bernard Shaw (I strongly suspect) began to disbelieve in
Santa Claus at a discreditably early age. And by this time Santa Claus
has avenged himself by taking away the key of all the prehistoric
scriptures; so that a noble and honourable artist flounders about like
any German professor. Here is a whole fairy literature which is almost
exclusively devoted to the unexpected victory of the weak over the
strong; and Bernard Shaw manages to make it mean the inevitable victory
of the strong over the weak--which, among other things, would not make a
story at all. It all comes of that mistake about not keeping his
birthday. A man should be always tied to his mother's apron strings; he
should always have a hold on his childhood, and be ready at intervals to
start anew from a childish standpoint. Theologically the thing is best
expressed by saying, "You must be born again." Secularly it is best
expressed by saying, "You must keep your birthday." Even if you will not
be born again, at least remind yourself occasionally that you were born
once.
Some of the incidental wit in the Cæsarian drama is excellent although
it is upon the whole less spontaneous and perfect than in the previous
plays. One of its jests may be mentioned in passing, not merely to draw
attention to its failure (though Shaw is brilliant enough to afford many
failures) but because it is the best opportunity for mentioning one of
the writer's minor notions to which he obstinately adheres. He
describes the Ancient Briton in Cæsar's train as being exactly like a
modern respectable Englishman. As a joke for a Christmas pantomime this
would be all very well; but one expects the jokes of Bernard Shaw to
have some intellectual root, however fantastic the flower. And obviously
all historic common sense is against the idea that that dim Druid
people, whoever they were, who dwelt in our land before it was lit up by
Rome or loaded with varied invasions, were a precise facsimile of the
commercial society of Birmingham or Brighton. But it is a part of the
Puritan in Bernard Shaw, a part of the taut and high-strung quality of
his mind, that he will never admit of any of his jokes that it was only
a joke. When he has been most witty he will passionately deny his own
wit; he will say something which Voltaire might envy and then declare
that he has got it all out of a Blue book. And in connection with this
eccentric type of self-denial, we may notice this mere detail about the
Ancient Briton. Someone faintly hinted that a blue Briton when first
found by Cæsar might not be quite like Mr. Broadbent; at the touch Shaw
poured forth a torrent of theory, explaining that climate was the only
thing that affected nationality; and that whatever races came into the
English or Irish climate would become like the English or Irish. Now the
modern theory of race is certainly a piece of stupid materialism; it is
an attempt to explain the things we are sure of, France, Scotland, Rome,
Japan, by means of the things we are not sure of at all, prehistoric
conjectures, Celts, Mongols, and Iberians. Of course there is a reality
in race; but there is no reality in the theories of race offered by some
ethnological professors. Blood, perhaps, is thicker than water; but
brains are sometimes thicker than anything. But if there is one thing
yet more thick and obscure and senseless than this theory of the
omnipotence of race it is, I think, that to which Shaw has fled for
refuge from it; this doctrine of the omnipotence of climate. Climate
again is something; but if climate were everything, Anglo-Indians would
grow more and more to look like Hindoos, which is far from being the
case. Something in the evil spirit of our time forces people always to
pretend to have found some material and mechanical explanation. Bernard
Shaw has filled all his last days with affirmations about the divinity
of the non-mechanical part of man, the sacred quality in creation and
choice. Yet it never seems to have occurred to him that the true key to
national differentiations is the key of the will and not of the
environment. It never crosses the modern mind to fancy that perhaps a
people is chiefly influenced by how that people has chosen to behave. If
I have to choose between race and weather I prefer race; I would rather
be imprisoned and compelled by ancestors who were once alive than by mud
and mists which never were. But I do not propose to be controlled by
either; to me my national history is a chain of multitudinous choices.
It is neither blood nor rain that has made England, but hope, the thing
that all those dead men have desired. France was not France because she
was made to be by the skulls of the Celts or by the sun of Gaul. France
was France because she chose.
I have stepped on one side from the immediate subject because this is as
good an instance as any we are likely to come across of a certain almost
extraneous fault which does deface the work of Bernard Shaw. It is a
fault only to be mentioned when we have made the solidity of the merits
quite clear. To say that Shaw is merely making game of people is
demonstrably ridiculous; at least a fairly systematic philosophy can be
traced through all his jokes, and one would not insist on such a unity
in all the songs of Mr. Dan Leno. I have already pointed out that the
genius of Shaw is really too harsh and earnest rather than too merry and
irresponsible. I shall have occasion to point out later that Shaw is, in
one very serious sense, the very opposite of paradoxical. In any case if
any real student of Shaw says that Shaw is only making a fool of him, we
can only say that of that student it is very superfluous for anyone to
make a fool. But though the dramatist's jests are always serious and
generally obvious, he is really affected from time to time by a certain
spirit of which that climate theory is a case--a spirit that can only be
called one of senseless ingenuity. I suppose it is a sort of nemesis of
wit; the skidding of a wheel in the height of its speed. Perhaps it is
connected with the nomadic nature of his mind. That lack of roots, this
remoteness from ancient instincts and traditions is responsible for a
certain bleak and heartless extravagance of statement on certain
subjects which makes the author really unconvincing as well as
exaggerative; satires that are _saugrenu_, jokes that are rather silly
than wild, statements which even considered as lies have no symbolic
relation to truth. They are exaggerations of something that does not
exist. For instance, if a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical
excuse for drunkenness and gluttony that would be false, but it would
have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that
Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by poulterers and wine
merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which
is not so much false as startlingly and arrestingly foolish. He might as
well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to
sell wedding rings. Or again, take the case of nationality and the unit
of patriotism. If a man said that all boundaries between clans,
kingdoms, or empires were nonsensical or non-existent, that would be a
fallacy, but a consistent and philosophical fallacy. But when Mr.
Bernard Shaw says that England matters so little that the British Empire
might very well give up these islands to Germany, he has not only got
hold of the sow by the wrong ear but the wrong sow by the wrong ear; a
mythical sow, a sow that is not there at all. If Britain is unreal, the
British Empire must be a thousand times more unreal. It is as if one
said, "I do not believe that Michael Scott ever had any existence; but
I am convinced, in spite of the absurd legend, that he had a shadow."
As has been said already, there must be some truth in every popular
impression. And the impression that Shaw, the most savagely serious man
of his time, is a mere music-hall artist must have reference to such
rare outbreaks as these. As a rule his speeches are full, not only of
substance, but of substances, materials like pork, mahogany, lead, and
leather. There is no man whose arguments cover a more Napoleonic map of
detail. It is true that he jokes; but wherever he is he has topical
jokes, one might almost say family jokes. If he talks to tailors he can
allude to the last absurdity about buttons. If he talks to the soldiers
he can see the exquisite and exact humour of the last gun-carriage. But
when all his powerful practicality is allowed, there does run through
him this erratic levity, an explosion of ineptitude. It is a queer
quality in literature. It is a sort of cold extravagance; and it has
made him all his enemies.
_The Philosopher_
I should suppose that _Cæsar and Cleopatra_ marks about the turning tide
of Bernard Shaw's fortune and fame. Up to this time he had known glory,
but never success. He had been wondered at as something brilliant and
barren, like a meteor; but no one would accept him as a sun, for the
test of a sun is that it can make something grow. Practically speaking
the two qualities of a modern drama are, that it should play and that it
should pay. It had been proved over and over again in weighty dramatic
criticisms, in careful readers' reports, that the plays of Shaw could
never play or pay; that the public did not want wit and the wars of
intellect. And just about the time that this had been finally proved,
the plays of Bernard Shaw promised to play like _Charley's Aunt_ and to
pay like Colman's Mustard. It is a fact in which we can all rejoice, not
only because it redeems the reputation of Bernard Shaw, but because it
redeems the character of the English people. All that is bravest in
human nature, open challenge and unexpected wit and angry conviction,
are not so very unpopular as the publishers and managers in their
motor-cars have been in the habit of telling us. But exactly because we
have come to a turning point in the man's career I propose to interrupt
the mere catalogue of his plays and to treat his latest series rather as
the proclamations of an acknowledged prophet. For the last plays,
especially _Man and Superman_, are such that his whole position must be
re-stated before attacking them seriously.
For two reasons I have called this concluding series of plays not again
by the name of "The Dramatist," but by the general name of "The
Philosopher." The first reason is that given above, that we have come to
the time of his triumph and may therefore treat him as having gained
complete possession of a pulpit of his own. But there is a second
reason: that it was just about this time that he began to create not
only a pulpit of his own, but a church and creed of his own. It is a
very vast and universal religion; and it is not his fault that he is the
only member of it. The plainer way of putting it is this: that here, in
the hour of his earthly victory, there dies in him the old mere denier,
the mere dynamiter of criticism. In the warmth of popularity he begins
to wish to put his faith positively; to offer some solid key to all
creation. Perhaps the irony in the situation is this: that all the
crowds are acclaiming him as the blasting and hypercritical buffoon,
while he himself is seriously rallying his synthetic power, and with a
grave face telling himself that it is time he had a faith to preach. His
final success as a sort of charlatan coincides with his first grand
failures as a theologian.
For this reason I have deliberately called a halt in his dramatic
career, in order to consider these two essential points: What did the
mass of Englishmen, who had now learnt to admire him, imagine his point
of view to be? and second, What did he imagine it to be? or, if the
phrase be premature, What did he imagine it was going to be? In his
latest work, especially in _Man and Superman_, Shaw has become a
complete and colossal mystic. That mysticism does grow quite rationally
out of his older arguments; but very few people ever troubled to trace
the connection. In order to do so it is necessary to say what was, at
the time of his first success, the public impression of Shaw's
philosophy.
Now it is an irritating and pathetic thing that the three most popular
phrases about Shaw are false. Modern criticism, like all weak things,
is overloaded with words. In a healthy condition of language a man finds
it very difficult to say the right thing, but at last says it. In this
empire of journalese a man finds it so very easy to say the wrong thing
that he never thinks of saying anything else. False or meaningless
phrases lie so ready to his hand that it is easier to use them than not
to use them. These wrong terms picked up through idleness are retained
through habit, and so the man has begun to think wrong almost before he
has begun to think at all. Such lumbering logomachy is always injurious
and oppressive to men of spirit, imagination or intellectual honour, and
it has dealt very recklessly and wrongly with Bernard Shaw. He has
contrived to get about three newspaper phrases tied to his tail; and
those newspaper phrases are all and separately wrong. The three
superstitions about him, it will be conceded, are generally these: first
that he desires "problem plays," second that he is "paradoxical," and
third that in his dramas as elsewhere he is specially "a Socialist." And
the interesting thing is that when we come to his philosophy, all these
three phrases are quite peculiarly inapplicable.
To take the plays first, there is a general disposition to describe that
type of intimate or defiant drama which he approves as "the problem
play." Now the serious modern play is, as a rule, the very reverse of a
problem play; for there can be no problem unless both points of view are
equally and urgently presented. _Hamlet_ really is a problem play
because at the end of it one is really in doubt as to whether upon the
author's showing Hamlet is something more than a man or something less.
_Henry IV_ and _Henry V_ are really problem plays; in this sense, that
the reader or spectator is really doubtful whether the high but harsh
efficiency, valour, and ambition of Henry V are an improvement on his
old blackguard camaraderie; and whether he was not a better man when he
was a thief. This hearty and healthy doubt is very common in
Shakespeare; I mean a doubt that exists in the writer as well as in the
reader. But Bernard Shaw is far too much of a Puritan to tolerate such
doubts about points which he counts essential. There is no sort of doubt
that the young lady in _Arms and the Man_ is improved by losing her
ideals. There is no sort of doubt that Captain Brassbound is improved by
giving up the object of his life. But a better case can be found in
something that both dramatists have been concerned with; Shaw wrote
_Cæsar and Cleopatra_; Shakespeare wrote _Antony and Cleopatra_ and also
_Julius Cæsar_. And exactly what annoys Bernard Shaw about Shakespeare's
version is this: that Shakespeare has an open mind or, in other words,
that Shakespeare has really written a problem play. Shakespeare sees
quite as clearly as Shaw that Brutus is unpractical and ineffectual; but
he also sees, what is quite as plain and practical a fact, that these
ineffectual men do capture the hearts and influence the policies of
mankind. Shaw would have nothing said in favour of Brutus; because
Brutus is on the wrong side in politics. Of the actual problem of public
and private morality, as it was presented to Brutus, he takes actually
no notice at all. He can write the most energetic and outspoken of
propaganda plays; but he cannot rise to a problem play. He cannot really
divide his mind and let the two parts speak independently to each other.
He has never, so to speak, actually split his head in two; though I
daresay there are many other people who are willing to do it for him.
Sometimes, especially in his later plays, he allows his clear conviction
to spoil even his admirable dialogue, making one side entirely weak, as
in an Evangelical tract. I do not know whether in _Major Barbara_ the
young Greek professor was supposed to be a fool. As popular tradition
(which I trust more than anything else) declared that he is drawn from a
real Professor of my acquaintance, who is anything but a fool, I should
imagine not. But in that case I am all the more mystified by the
incredibly weak fight which he makes in the play in answer to the
elephantine sophistries of Undershaft. It is really a disgraceful case,
and almost the only case in Shaw of there being no fair fight between
the two sides. For instance, the Professor mentions pity. Mr. Undershaft
says with melodramatic scorn, "Pity! the scavenger of the Universe!" Now
if any gentleman had said this to me, I should have replied, "If I
permit you to escape from the point by means of metaphors, will you tell
me whether you disapprove of scavengers?" Instead of this obvious
retort, the miserable Greek professor only says, "Well then, love," to
which Undershaft replies with unnecessary violence that he won't have
the Greek professor's love, to which the obvious answer of course would
be, "How the deuce can you prevent my loving you if I choose to do so?"
Instead of this, as far as I remember, that abject Hellenist says
nothing at all. I only mention this unfair dialogue, because it marks, I
think, the recent hardening, for good or evil, of Shaw out of a
dramatist into a mere philosopher, and whoever hardens into a
philosopher may be hardening into a fanatic.
And just as there is nothing really problematic in Shaw's mind, so there
is nothing really paradoxical. The meaning of the word paradoxical may
indeed be made the subject of argument. In Greek, of course, it simply
means something which is against the received opinion; in that sense a
missionary remonstrating with South Sea cannibals is paradoxical. But in
the much more important world, where words are used and altered in the
using, paradox does not mean merely this: it means at least something of
which the antinomy or apparent inconsistency is sufficiently plain in
the words used, and most commonly of all it means an idea expressed in a
form which is verbally contradictory. Thus, for instance, the great
saying, "He that shall lose his life, the same shall save it," is an
example of what modern people mean by a paradox. If any learned person
should read this book (which seems immeasurably improbable) he can
content himself with putting it this way, that the moderns mistakenly
say paradox when they should say oxymoron. Ultimately, in any case, it
may be agreed that we commonly mean by a paradox some kind of collision
between what is seemingly and what is really true.