saying of Christ that I have quoted, it is a very curious fact that
Bernard Shaw is almost entirely without paradox. Moreover, he cannot
even understand a paradox. And more than this, paradox is about the only
thing in the world that he does not understand. All his splendid vistas
and startling suggestions arise from carrying some one clear principle
further than it has yet been carried. His madness is all consistency,
not inconsistency. As the point can hardly be made clear without
examples, let us take one example, the subject of education. Shaw has
been all his life preaching to grown-up people the profound truth that
liberty and responsibility go together; that the reason why freedom is
so often easily withheld, is simply that it is a terrible nuisance. This
is true, though not the whole truth, of citizens; and so when Shaw
comes to children he can only apply to them the same principle that he
has already applied to citizens. He begins to play with the Herbert
Spencer idea of teaching children by experience; perhaps the most
fatuously silly idea that was ever gravely put down in print. On that
there is no need to dwell; one has only to ask how the experimental
method is to be applied to a precipice; and the theory no longer exists.
But Shaw effected a further development, if possible more fantastic. He
said that one should never tell a child anything without letting him
hear the opposite opinion. That is to say, when you tell Tommy not to
hit his sick sister on the temple, you must make sure of the presence of
some Nietzscheite professor, who will explain to him that such a course
might possibly serve to eliminate the unfit. When you are in the act of
telling Susan not to drink out of the bottle labelled "poison," you must
telegraph for a Christian Scientist, who will be ready to maintain that
without her own consent it cannot do her any harm. What would happen to
a child brought up on Shaw's principle I cannot conceive; I should think
he would commit suicide in his bath. But that is not here the question.
The point is that this proposition seems quite sufficiently wild and
startling to ensure that its author, if he escapes Hanwell, would reach
the front rank of journalists, demagogues, or public entertainers. It is
a perfect paradox, if a paradox only means something that makes one
jump. But it is not a paradox at all in the sense of a contradiction. It
is not a contradiction, but an enormous and outrageous consistency, the
one principle of free thought carried to a point to which no other sane
man would consent to carry it. Exactly what Shaw does not understand is
the paradox; the unavoidable paradox of childhood. Although this child
is much better than I, yet I must teach it. Although this being has much
purer passions than I, yet I must control it. Although Tommy is quite
right to rush towards a precipice, yet he must be stood in the corner
for doing it. This contradiction is the only possible condition of
having to do with children at all; anyone who talks about a child
without feeling this paradox might just as well be talking about a
merman. He has never even seen the animal. But this paradox Shaw in his
intellectual simplicity cannot see; he cannot see it because it is a
paradox. His only intellectual excitement is to carry one idea further
and further across the world. It never occurs to him that it might meet
another idea, and like the three winds in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, they
might make a night of it. His only paradox is to pull out one thread or
cord of truth longer and longer into waste and fantastic places. He does
not allow for that deeper sort of paradox by which two opposite cords of
truth become entangled in an inextricable knot. Still less can he be
made to realise that it is often this knot which ties safely together
the whole bundle of human life.
This blindness to paradox everywhere perplexes his outlook. He cannot
understand marriage because he will not understand the paradox of
marriage; that the woman is all the more the house for not being the
head of it. He cannot understand patriotism, because he will not
understand the paradox of patriotism; that one is all the more human for
not merely loving humanity. He does not understand Christianity because
he will not understand the paradox of Christianity; that we can only
really understand all myths when we know that one of them is true. I do
not under-rate him for this anti-paradoxical temper; I concede that much
of his finest and keenest work in the way of intellectual purification
would have been difficult or impossible without it. But I say that here
lies the limitation of that lucid and compelling mind; he cannot quite
understand life, because he will not accept its contradictions.
Nor is it by any means descriptive of Shaw to call him a Socialist; in
so far as that word can be extended to cover an ethical attitude. He is
the least social of all Socialists; and I pity the Socialist state that
tries to manage him. This anarchism of his is not a question of thinking
for himself; every decent man thinks for himself; it would be highly
immodest to think for anybody else. Nor is it any instinctive licence or
egoism; as I have said before, he is a man of peculiarly acute public
conscience. The unmanageable part of him, the fact that he cannot be
conceived as part of a crowd or as really and invisibly helping a
movement, has reference to another thing in him, or rather to another
thing not in him.
The great defect of that fine intelligence is a failure to grasp and
enjoy the things commonly called convention and tradition; which are
foods upon which all human creatures must feed frequently if they are to
live. Very few modern people of course have any idea of what they are.
"Convention" is very nearly the same word as "democracy." It has again
and again in history been used as an alternative word to Parliament. So
far from suggesting anything stale or sober, the word convention rather
conveys a hubbub; it is the coming together of men; every mob is a
convention. In its secondary sense it means the common soul of such a
crowd, its instinctive anger at the traitor or its instinctive
salutation of the flag. Conventions may be cruel, they may be
unsuitable, they may even be grossly superstitious or obscene; but there
is one thing that they never are. Conventions are never dead. They are
always full of accumulated emotions, the piled-up and passionate
experiences of many generations asserting what they could not explain.
To be inside any true convention, as the Chinese respect for parents or
the European respect for children, is to be surrounded by something
which whatever else it is is not leaden, lifeless or automatic,
something which is taut and tingling with vitality at a hundred points,
which is sensitive almost to madness and which is so much alive that it
can kill. Now Bernard Shaw has always made this one immense mistake
(arising out of that bad progressive education of his), the mistake of
treating convention as a dead thing; treating it as if it were a mere
physical environment like the pavement or the rain. Whereas it is a
result of will; a rain of blessings and a pavement of good intentions.
Let it be remembered that I am not discussing in what degree one should
allow for tradition; I am saying that men like Shaw do not allow for it
at all. If Shaw had found in early life that he was contradicted by
_Bradshaw's Railway Guide_ or even by the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, he
would have felt at least that he might be wrong. But if he had found
himself contradicted by his father and mother, he would have thought it
all the more probable that he was right. If the issue of the last
evening paper contradicted him he might be troubled to investigate or
explain. That the human tradition of two thousand years contradicted him
did not trouble him for an instant. That Marx was not with him was
important. That Man was not with him was an irrelevant prehistoric joke.
People have talked far too much about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw.
Perhaps his only pure paradox is this almost unconscious one; that he
has tended to think that because something has satisfied generations of
men it must be untrue.
Shaw is wrong about nearly all the things one learns early in life and
while one is still simple. Most human beings start with certain facts of
psychology to which the rest of life must be somewhat related. For
instance, every man falls in love; and no man falls into free love. When
he falls into that he calls it lust, and is always ashamed of it even
when he boasts of it. That there is some connection between a love and a
vow nearly every human being knows before he is eighteen. That there is
a solid and instinctive connection between the idea of sexual ecstasy
and the idea of some sort of almost suicidal constancy, this I say is
simply the first fact in one's own psychology; boys and girls know it
almost before they know their own language. How far it can be trusted,
how it can best be dealt with, all that is another matter. But lovers
lust after constancy more than after happiness; if you are in any sense
prepared to give them what they ask, then what they ask, beyond all
question, is an oath of final fidelity. Lovers may be lunatics; lovers
may be children; lovers may be unfit for citizenship and outside human
argument; you can take up that position if you will. But lovers do not
only desire love; they desire marriage. The root of legal monogamy does
not lie (as Shaw and his friends are for ever drearily asserting) in the
fact that the man is a mere tyrant and the woman a mere slave. It lies
in the fact that _if_ their love for each other is the noblest and
freest love conceivable, it can only find its heroic expression in both
becoming slaves. I only mention this matter here as a matter which most
of us do not need to be taught; for it was the first lesson of life. In
after years we may make up what code or compromise about sex we like;
but we all know that constancy, jealousy, and the personal pledge are
natural and inevitable in sex; we do not feel any surprise when we see
them either in a murder or in a valentine. We may or may not see wisdom
in early marriages; but we know quite well that wherever the thing is
genuine at all, early loves will mean early marriages. But Shaw had not
learnt about this tragedy of the sexes, what the rustic ballads of any
country on earth would have taught him. He had not learnt, what
universal common sense has put into all the folk-lore of the earth,
that love cannot be thought of clearly for an instant except as
monogamous. The old English ballads never sing the praises of "lovers."
They always sing the praises of "true lovers," and that is the final
philosophy of the question.
The same is true of Mr. Shaw's refusal to understand the love of the
land either in the form of patriotism or of private ownership. It is the
attitude of an Irishman cut off from the soil of Ireland, retaining the
audacity and even cynicism of the national type, but no longer fed from
the roots with its pathos or its experience.
This broader and more brotherly rendering of convention must be applied
particularly to the conventions of the drama; since that is necessarily
the most democratic of all the arts. And it will be found generally that
most of the theatrical conventions rest on a real artistic basis. The
Greek Unities, for instance, were not proper objects of the meticulous
and trivial imitation of Seneca or Gabriel Harvey. But still less were
they the right objects for the equally trivial and far more vulgar
impatience of men like Macaulay. That a tale should, if possible, be
told of one place or one day or a manageable number of characters is an
ideal plainly rooted in an æsthetic instinct. But if this be so with the
classical drama, it is yet more certainly so with romantic drama,
against the somewhat decayed dignity of which Bernard Shaw was largely
in rebellion. There was one point in particular upon which the Ibsenites
claimed to have reformed the romantic convention which is worthy of
special allusion.
Shaw and all the other Ibsenites were fond of insisting that a defect in
the romantic drama was its tendency to end with wedding-bells. Against
this they set the modern drama of middle-age, the drama which described
marriage itself instead of its poetic preliminaries. Now if Bernard Shaw
had been more patient with popular tradition, more prone to think that
there might be some sense in its survival, he might have seen this
particular problem much more clearly. The old playwrights have left us
plenty of plays of marriage and middle-age. _Othello_ is as much about
what follows the wedding-bells as _The Doll's House_. _Macbeth_ is about
a middle-aged couple as much as _Little Eyolf_. But if we ask ourselves
what is the real difference, we shall, I think, find that it can fairly
be stated thus. The old tragedies of marriage, though not love stories,
are like love stories in this, that they work up to some act or stroke
which is irrevocable as marriage is irrevocable; to the fact of death or
of adultery.
Now the reason why our fathers did not make marriage, in the middle-aged
and static sense, the subject of their plays was a very simple one; it
was that a play is a very bad place for discussing that topic. You
cannot easily make a good drama out of the success or failure of a
marriage, just as you could not make a good drama out of the growth of
an oak tree or the decay of an empire. As Polonius very reasonably
observed, it is too long. A happy love-affair will make a drama simply
because it is dramatic; it depends on an ultimate yes or no. But a happy
marriage is not dramatic; perhaps it would be less happy if it were. The
essence of a romantic heroine is that she asks herself an intense
question; but the essence of a sensible wife is that she is much too
sensible to ask herself any questions at all. All the things that make
monogamy a success are in their nature undramatic things, the silent
growth of an instinctive confidence, the common wounds and victories,
the accumulation of customs, the rich maturing of old jokes. Sane
marriage is an untheatrical thing; it is therefore not surprising that
most modern dramatists have devoted themselves to insane marriage.
To summarise; before touching the philosophy which Shaw has ultimately
adopted, we must quit the notion that we know it already and that it is
hit off in such journalistic terms as these three. Shaw does not wish to
multiply problem plays or even problems. He has such scepticism as is
the misfortune of his age; but he has this dignified and courageous
quality, that he does not come to ask questions but to answer them. He
is not a paradox-monger; he is a wild logician, far too simple even to
be called a sophist. He understands everything in life except its
paradoxes, especially that ultimate paradox that the very things that we
cannot comprehend are the things that we have to take for granted.
Lastly, he is not especially social or collectivist. On the contrary, he
rather dislikes men in the mass, though he can appreciate them
individually. He has no respect for collective humanity in its two great
forms; either in that momentary form which we call a mob, or in that
enduring form which we call a convention.
The general cosmic theory which can so far be traced through the earlier
essays and plays of Bernard Shaw may be expressed in the image of
Schopenhauer standing on his head. I cheerfully concede that
Schopenhauer looks much nicer in that posture than in his original one,
but I can hardly suppose that he feels more comfortable. The substance
of the change is this. Roughly speaking, Schopenhauer maintained that
life is unreasonable. The intellect, if it could be impartial, would
tell us to cease; but a blind partiality, an instinct quite distinct
from thought, drives us on to take desperate chances in an essentially
bankrupt lottery. Shaw seems to accept this dingy estimate of the
rational outlook, but adds a somewhat arresting comment. Schopenhauer
had said, "Life is unreasonable; so much the worse for all living
things." Shaw said, "Life is unreasonable; so much the worse for
reason." Life is the higher call, life we must follow. It may be that
there is some undetected fallacy in reason itself. Perhaps the whole man
cannot get inside his own head any more than he can jump down his own
throat. But there is about the need to live, to suffer, and to create
that imperative quality which can truly be called supernatural, of whose
voice it can indeed be said that it speaks with authority, and not as
the scribes.
This is the first and finest item of the original Bernard Shaw creed:
that if reason says that life is irrational, life must be content to
reply that reason is lifeless; life is the primary thing, and if reason
impedes it, then reason must be trodden down into the mire amid the most
abject superstitions. In the ordinary sense it would be specially absurd
to suggest that Shaw desires man to be a mere animal. For that is always
associated with lust or incontinence; and Shaw's ideals are strict,
hygienic, and even, one might say, old-maidish. But there is a mystical
sense in which one may say literally that Shaw desires man to be an
animal. That is, he desires him to cling first and last to life, to the
spirit of animation, to the thing which is common to him and the birds
and plants. Man should have the blind faith of a beast: he should be as
mystically immutable as a cow, and as deaf to sophistries as a fish.
Shaw does not wish him to be a philosopher or an artist; he does not
even wish him to be a man, so much as he wishes him to be, in this holy
sense, an animal. He must follow the flag of life as fiercely from
conviction as all other creatures follow it from instinct.
But this Shavian worship of life is by no means lively. It has nothing
in common either with the braver or the baser forms of what we commonly
call optimism. It has none of the omnivorous exultation of Walt Whitman
or the fiery pantheism of Shelley. Bernard Shaw wishes to show himself
not so much as an optimist, but rather as a sort of faithful and
contented pessimist. This contradiction is the key to nearly all his
early and more obvious contradictions and to many which remain to the
end. Whitman and many modern idealists have talked of taking even duty
as a pleasure; it seems to me that Shaw takes even pleasure as a duty.
In a queer way he seems to see existence as an illusion and yet as an
obligation. To every man and woman, bird, beast, and flower, life is a
love-call to be eagerly followed. To Bernard Shaw it is merely a
military bugle to be obeyed. In short, he fails to feel that the command
of Nature (if one must use the anthropomorphic fable of Nature instead
of the philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as well as obeyed. He paints
life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap in
the dark. That is heroic; and to my instinct at least Schopenhauer
looks like a pigmy beside his pupil. But it is the heroism of a morbid
and almost asphyxiated age. It is awful to think that this world which
so many poets have praised has even for a time been depicted as a
man-trap into which we may just have the manhood to jump. Think of all
those ages through which men have talked of having the courage to die.
And then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having
the courage to live.
It is exactly this oddity or dilemma which may be said to culminate in
the crowning work of his later and more constructive period, the work in
which he certainly attempted, whether with success or not, to state his
ultimate and cosmic vision; I mean the play called _Man and Superman_.
In approaching this play we must keep well in mind the distinction
recently drawn: that Shaw follows the banner of life, but austerely, not
joyously. For him nature has authority, but hardly charm. But before we
approach it it is necessary to deal with three things that lead up to
it. First it is necessary to speak of what remained of his old critical
and realistic method; and then it is necessary to speak of the two
important influences which led up to his last and most important change
of outlook.
First, since all our spiritual epochs overlap, and a man is often doing
the old work while he is thinking of the new, we may deal first with
what may be fairly called his last two plays of pure worldly criticism.
These are _Major Barbara_ and _John Bull's Other Island_. _Major
Barbara_ indeed contains a strong religious element; but, when all is
said, the whole point of the play is that the religious element is
defeated. Moreover, the actual expressions of religion in the play are
somewhat unsatisfactory as expressions of religion--or even of reason. I
must frankly say that Bernard Shaw always seems to me to use the word
God not only without any idea of what it means, but without one moment's
thought about what it could possibly mean. He said to some atheist,
"Never believe in a God that you cannot improve on." The atheist (being
a sound theologian) naturally replied that one should not believe in a
God whom one could improve on; as that would show that he was not God.
In the same style in _Major Barbara_ the heroine ends by suggesting that
she will serve God without personal hope, so that she may owe nothing to
God and He owe everything to her. It does not seem to strike her that
if God owes everything to her He is not God. These things affect me
merely as tedious perversions of a phrase. It is as if you said, "I will
never have a father unless I have begotten him."
But the real sting and substance of _Major Barbara_ is much more
practical and to the point. It expresses not the new spirituality but
the old materialism of Bernard Shaw. Almost every one of Shaw's plays is
an expanded epigram. But the epigram is not expanded (as with most
people) into a hundred commonplaces. Rather the epigram is expanded into
a hundred other epigrams; the work is at least as brilliant in detail as
it is in design. But it is generally possible to discover the original
and pivotal epigram which is the centre and purpose of the play. It is
generally possible, even amid that blinding jewellery of a million
jokes, to discover the grave, solemn and sacred joke for which the play
itself was written.
The ultimate epigram of _Major Barbara_ can be put thus. People say that
poverty is no crime; Shaw says that poverty is a crime; that it is a
crime to endure it, a crime to be content with it, that it is the mother
of all crimes of brutality, corruption, and fear. If a man says to Shaw
that he is born of poor but honest parents, Shaw tells him that the very
word "but" shows that his parents were probably dishonest. In short, he
maintains here what he had maintained elsewhere: that what the people at
this moment require is not more patriotism or more art or more religion
or more morality or more sociology, but simply more money. The evil is
not ignorance or decadence or sin or pessimism; the evil is poverty. The
point of this particular drama is that even the noblest enthusiasm of
the girl who becomes a Salvation Army officer fails under the brute
money power of her father who is a modern capitalist. When I have said
this it will be clear why this play, fine and full of bitter sincerity
as it is, must in a manner be cleared out of the way before we come to
talk of Shaw's final and serious faith. For his serious faith is in the
sanctity of human will, in the divine capacity for creation and choice
rising higher than environment and doom; and so far as that goes, _Major
Barbara_ is not only apart from his faith but against his faith. _Major
Barbara_ is an account of environment victorious over heroic will. There
are a thousand answers to the ethic in _Major Barbara_ which I should
be inclined to offer. I might point out that the rich do not so much buy
honesty as curtains to cover dishonesty: that they do not so much buy
health as cushions to comfort disease. And I might suggest that the
doctrine that poverty degrades the poor is much more likely to be used
as an argument for keeping them powerless than as an argument for making
them rich. But there is no need to find such answers to the
materialistic pessimism of _Major Barbara_. The best answer to it is in
Shaw's own best and crowning philosophy, with which we shall shortly be
concerned.