with the later transcendentalism of its author. In one sense, of course,
it is a satire on the conventional Englishman, who is never so silly or
sentimental as when he sees silliness and sentiment in the Irishman.
Broadbent, whose mind is all fog and his morals all gush, is firmly
persuaded that he is bringing reason and order among the Irish, whereas
in truth they are all smiling at his illusions with the critical
detachment of so many devils. There have been many plays depicting the
absurd Paddy in a ring of Anglo-Saxons; the first purpose of this play
is to depict the absurd Anglo-Saxon in a ring of ironical Paddies. But
it has a second and more subtle purpose, which is very finely contrived.
It is suggested that when all is said and done there is in this
preposterous Englishman a certain creative power which comes from his
simplicity and optimism, from his profound resolution rather to live
life than to criticise it. I know no finer dialogue of philosophical
cross-purposes than that in which Broadbent boasts of his commonsense,
and his subtler Irish friend mystifies him by telling him that he,
Broadbent, has no common-sense, but only inspiration. The Irishman
admits in Broadbent a certain unconscious spiritual force even in his
very stupidity. Lord Rosebery coined the very clever phrase "a practical
mystic." Shaw is here maintaining that all practical men are practical
mystics. And he is really maintaining also that the most practical of
all the practical mystics is the one who is a fool.
There is something unexpected and fascinating about this reversal of the
usual argument touching enterprise and the business man; this theory
that success is created not by intelligence, but by a certain
half-witted and yet magical instinct. For Bernard Shaw, apparently, the
forests of factories and the mountains of money are not the creations of
human wisdom or even of human cunning; they are rather manifestations of
the sacred maxim which declares that God has chosen the foolish things
of the earth to confound the wise. It is simplicity and even innocence
that has made Manchester. As a philosophical fancy this is interesting
or even suggestive; but it must be confessed that as a criticism of the
relations of England to Ireland it is open to a strong historical
objection. The one weak point in _John Bull's Other Island_ is that it
turns on the fact that Broadbent succeeds in Ireland. But as a matter of
fact Broadbent has not succeeded in Ireland. If getting what one wants
is the test and fruit of this mysterious strength, then the Irish
peasants are certainly much stronger than the English merchants; for in
spite of all the efforts of the merchants, the land has remained a land
of peasants. No glorification of the English practicality as if it were
a universal thing can ever get over the fact that we have failed in
dealing with the one white people in our power who were markedly unlike
ourselves. And the kindness of Broadbent has failed just as much as his
common-sense; because he was dealing with a people whose desire and
ideal were different from his own. He did not share the Irish passion
for small possession in land or for the more pathetic virtues of
Christianity. In fact the kindness of Broadbent has failed for the same
reason that the gigantic kindness of Shaw has failed. The roots are
different; it is like tying the tops of two trees together. Briefly, the
philosophy of _John Bull's Other Island_ is quite effective and
satisfactory except for this incurable fault: the fact that John Bull's
other island is not John Bull's.
This clearing off of his last critical plays we may classify as the
first of the three facts which lead up to _Man and Superman_. The second
of the three facts may be found, I think, in Shaw's discovery of
Nietzsche. This eloquent sophist has an influence upon Shaw and his
school which it would require a separate book adequately to study. By
descent Nietzsche was a Pole, and probably a Polish noble; and to say
that he was a Polish noble is to say that he was a frail, fastidious,
and entirely useless anarchist. He had a wonderful poetic wit; and is
one of the best rhetoricians of the modern world. He had a remarkable
power of saying things that master the reason for a moment by their
gigantic unreasonableness; as, for instance, "Your life is intolerable
without immortality; but why should not your life be intolerable?" His
whole work is shot through with the pangs and fevers of his physical
life, which was one of extreme bad health; and in early middle age his
brilliant brain broke down into impotence and darkness. All that was
true in his teaching was this: that if a man looks fine on a horse it is
so far irrelevant to tell him that he would be more economical on a
donkey or more humane on a tricycle. In other words, the mere
achievement of dignity, beauty, or triumph is strictly to be called a
good thing. I do not know if Nietzsche ever used the illustration; but
it seems to me that all that is creditable or sound in Nietzsche could
be stated in the derivation of one word, the word "valour." Valour means
_valeur_; it means a value; courage is itself a solid good; it is an
ultimate virtue; valour is in itself _valid_. In so far as he maintained
this Nietzsche was only taking part in that great Protestant game of
see-saw which has been the amusement of northern Europe since the
sixteenth century. Nietzsche imagined he was rebelling against ancient
morality; as a matter of fact he was only rebelling against recent
morality, against the half-baked impudence of the utilitarians and the
materialists. He thought he was rebelling against Christianity;
curiously enough he was rebelling solely against the special enemies of
Christianity, against Herbert Spencer and Mr. Edward Clodd. Historic
Christianity has always believed in the valour of St. Michael riding in
front of the Church Militant; and in an ultimate and absolute pleasure,
not indirect or utilitarian, the intoxication of the spirit, the wine of
the blood of God.
There are indeed doctrines of Nietzsche that are not Christian, but
then, by an entertaining coincidence, they are also not true. His hatred
of pity is not Christian, but that was not his doctrine but his disease.
Invalids are often hard on invalids. And there is another doctrine of
his that is not Christianity, and also (by the same laughable accident)
not common-sense; and it is a most pathetic circumstance that this was
the one doctrine which caught the eye of Shaw and captured him. He was
not influenced at all by the morbid attack on mercy. It would require
more than ten thousand mad Polish professors to make Bernard Shaw
anything but a generous and compassionate man. But it is certainly a
nuisance that the one Nietzsche doctrine which attracted him was not the
one Nietzsche doctrine that is human and rectifying. Nietzsche might
really have done some good if he had taught Bernard Shaw to draw the
sword, to drink wine, or even to dance. But he only succeeded in putting
into his head a new superstition, which bids fair to be the chief
superstition of the dark ages which are possibly in front of us--I mean
the superstition of what is called the Superman.
In one of his least convincing phrases, Nietzsche had said that just as
the ape ultimately produced the man, so should we ultimately produce
something higher than the man. The immediate answer, of course, is
sufficiently obvious: the ape did not worry about the man, so why should
we worry about the Superman? If the Superman will come by natural
selection, may we leave it to natural selection? If the Superman will
come by human selection, what sort of Superman are we to select? If he
is simply to be more just, more brave, or more merciful, then
Zarathustra sinks into a Sunday-school teacher; the only way we can work
for it is to be more just, more brave, and more merciful; sensible
advice, but hardly startling. If he is to be anything else than this,
why should we desire him, or what else are we to desire? These questions
have been many times asked of the Nietzscheites, and none of the
Nietzscheites have even attempted to answer them.
The keen intellect of Bernard Shaw would, I think, certainly have seen
through this fallacy and verbiage had it not been that another important
event about this time came to the help of Nietzsche and established the
Superman on his pedestal. It is the third of the things which I have
called stepping-stones to _Man and Superman_, and it is very important.
It is nothing less than the breakdown of one of the three intellectual
supports upon which Bernard Shaw had reposed through all his confident
career. At the beginning of this book I have described the three
ultimate supports of Shaw as the Irishman, the Puritan, and the
Progressive. They are the three legs of the tripod upon which the
prophet sat to give the oracle; and one of them broke. Just about this
time suddenly, by a mere shaft of illumination, Bernard Shaw ceased to
believe in progress altogether.
It is generally implied that it was reading Plato that did it. That
philosopher was very well qualified to convey the first shock of the
ancient civilisation to Shaw, who had always thought instinctively of
civilisation as modern. This is not due merely to the daring splendour
of the speculations and the vivid picture of Athenian life, it is due
also to something analogous in the personalities of that particular
ancient Greek and this particular modern Irishman. Bernard Shaw has much
affinity to Plato--in his instinctive elevation of temper, his
courageous pursuit of ideas as far as they will go, his civic idealism;
and also, it must be confessed, in his dislike of poets and a touch of
delicate inhumanity. But whatever influence produced the change, the
change had all the dramatic suddenness and completeness which belongs to
the conversions of great men. It had been perpetually implied through
all the earlier works not only that mankind is constantly improving, but
that almost everything must be considered in the light of this fact.
More than once he seemed to argue, in comparing the dramatists of the
sixteenth with those of the nineteenth century, that the latter had a
definite advantage merely because they were of the nineteenth century
and not of the sixteenth. When accused of impertinence towards the
greatest of the Elizabethans, Bernard Shaw had said, "Shakespeare is a
much taller man than I, but I stand on his shoulders"--an epigram which
sums up this doctrine with characteristic neatness. But Shaw fell off
Shakespeare's shoulders with a crash. This chronological theory that
Shaw stood on Shakespeare's shoulders logically involved the supposition
that Shakespeare stood on Plato's shoulders. And Bernard Shaw found
Plato from his point of view so much more advanced than Shakespeare that
he decided in desperation that all three were equal.
Such failure as has partially attended the idea of human equality is
very largely due to the fact that no party in the modern state has
heartily believed in it. Tories and Radicals have both assumed that one
set of men were in essentials superior to mankind. The only difference
was that the Tory superiority was a superiority of place; while the
Radical superiority is a superiority of time. The great objection to
Shaw being on Shakespeare's shoulders is a consideration for the
sensations and personal dignity of Shakespeare. It is a democratic
objection to anyone being on anyone else's shoulders. Eternal human
nature refuses to submit to a man who rules merely by right of birth.
To rule by right of century is to rule by right of birth. Shaw found his
nearest kinsman in remote Athens, his remotest enemies in the closest
historical proximity; and he began to see the enormous average and the
vast level of mankind. If progress swung constantly between such
extremes it could not be progress at all. The paradox was sharp but
undeniable; if life had such continual ups and downs, it was upon the
whole flat. With characteristic sincerity and love of sensation he had
no sooner seen this than he hastened to declare it. In the teeth of all
his previous pronouncements he emphasised and re-emphasised in print
that man had not progressed at all; that ninety-nine hundredths of a man
in a cave were the same as ninety-nine hundredths of a man in a suburban
villa.
It is characteristic of him to say that he rushed into print with a
frank confession of the failure of his old theory. But it is also
characteristic of him that he rushed into print also with a new
alternative theory, quite as definite, quite as confident, and, if one
may put it so, quite as infallible as the old one. Progress had never
happened hitherto, because it had been sought solely through education.
Education was rubbish. "Fancy," said he, "trying to produce a greyhound
or a racehorse by education!" The man of the future must not be taught;
he must be bred. This notion of producing superior human beings by the
methods of the stud-farm had often been urged, though its difficulties
had never been cleared up. I mean its practical difficulties; its moral
difficulties, or rather impossibilities, for any animal fit to be called
a man need scarcely be discussed. But even as a scheme it had never been
made clear. The first and most obvious objection to it of course is
this: that if you are to breed men as pigs, you require some overseer
who is as much more subtle than a man as a man is more subtle than a
pig. Such an individual is not easy to find.
It was, however, in the heat of these three things, the decline of his
merely destructive realism, the discovery of Nietzsche, and the
abandonment of the idea of a progressive education of mankind, that he
attempted what is not necessarily his best, but certainly his most
important work. The two things are by no means necessarily the same. The
most important work of Milton is _Paradise Lost_; his best work is
_Lycidas_. There are other places in which Shaw's argument is more
fascinating or his wit more startling than in _Man and Superman_; there
are other plays that he has made more brilliant. But I am sure that
there is no other play that he wished to make more brilliant. I will not
say that he is in this case more serious than elsewhere; for the word
serious is a double-meaning and double-dealing word, a traitor in the
dictionary. It sometimes means solemn, and it sometimes means sincere. A
very short experience of private and public life will be enough to prove
that the most solemn people are generally the most insincere. A somewhat
more delicate and detailed consideration will show also that the most
sincere men are generally not solemn; and of these is Bernard Shaw. But
if we use the word serious in the old and Latin sense of the word
"grave," which means weighty or valid, full of substance, then we may
say without any hesitation that this is the most serious play of the
most serious man alive.
The outline of the play is, I suppose, by this time sufficiently well
known. It has two main philosophic motives. The first is that what he
calls the life-force (the old infidels called it Nature, which seems a
neater word, and nobody knows the meaning of either of them) desires
above all things to make suitable marriages, to produce a purer and
prouder race, or eventually to produce a Superman. The second is that in
this effecting of racial marriages the woman is a more conscious agent
than the man. In short, that woman disposes a long time before man
proposes. In this play, therefore, woman is made the pursuer and man the
pursued. It cannot be denied, I think, that in this matter Shaw is
handicapped by his habitual hardness of touch, by his lack of sympathy
with the romance of which he writes, and to a certain extent even by his
own integrity and right conscience. Whether the man hunts the woman or
the woman the man, at least it should be a splendid pagan hunt; but Shaw
is not a sporting man. Nor is he a pagan, but a Puritan. He cannot
recover the impartiality of paganism which allowed Diana to propose to
Endymion without thinking any the worse of her. The result is that while
he makes Anne, the woman who marries his hero, a really powerful and
convincing woman, he can only do it by making her a highly objectionable
woman. She is a liar and a bully, not from sudden fear or excruciating
dilemma; she is a liar and a bully in grain; she has no truth or
magnanimity in her. The more we know that she is real, the more we know
that she is vile. In short, Bernard Shaw is still haunted with his old
impotence of the unromantic writer; he cannot imagine the main motives
of human life from the inside. We are convinced successfully that Anne
wishes to marry Tanner, but in the very process we lose all power of
conceiving why Tanner should ever consent to marry Anne. A writer with a
more romantic strain in him might have imagined a woman choosing her
lover without shamelessness and magnetising him without fraud. Even if
the first movement were feminine, it need hardly be a movement like
this. In truth, of course, the two sexes have their two methods of
attraction, and in some of the happiest cases they are almost
simultaneous. But even on the most cynical showing they need not be
mixed up. It is one thing to say that the mousetrap is not there by
accident. It is another to say (in the face of ocular experience) that
the mousetrap runs after the mouse.
But whenever Shaw shows the Puritan hardness or even the Puritan
cheapness, he shows something also of the Puritan nobility, of the idea
that sacrifice is really a frivolity in the face of a great purpose. The
reasonableness of Calvin and his followers will by the mercy of heaven
be at last washed away; but their unreasonableness will remain an
eternal splendour. Long after we have let drop the fancy that
Protestantism was rational it will be its glory that it was fanatical.
So it is with Shaw. To make Anne a real woman, even a dangerous woman,
he would need to be something stranger and softer than Bernard Shaw. But
though I always argue with him whenever he argues, I confess that he
always conquers me in the one or two moments when he is emotional.
There is one really noble moment when Anne offers for all her cynical
husband-hunting the only defence that is really great enough to cover
it. "It will not be all happiness for me. Perhaps death." And the man
rises also at that real crisis, saying, "Oh, that clutch holds and
hurts. What have you grasped in me? Is there a father's heart as well as
a mother's?" That seems to me actually great; I do not like either of
the characters an atom more than formerly; but I can see shining and
shaking through them at that instant the splendour of the God that made
them and of the image of God who wrote their story.
A logician is like a liar in many respects, but chiefly in the fact
that he should have a good memory. That cutting and inquisitive style
which Bernard Shaw has always adopted carries with it an inevitable
criticism. And it cannot be denied that this new theory of the supreme
importance of sound sexual union, wrought by any means, is hard
logically to reconcile with Shaw's old diatribes against sentimentalism
and operatic romance. If Nature wishes primarily to entrap us into
sexual union, then all the means of sexual attraction, even the most
maudlin or theatrical, are justified at one stroke. The guitar of the
troubadour is as practical as the ploughshare of the husbandman. The
waltz in the ballroom is as serious as the debate in the parish council.
The justification of Anne, as the potential mother of Superman, is
really the justification of all the humbugs and sentimentalists whom
Shaw had been denouncing as a dramatic critic and as a dramatist since
the beginning of his career. It was to no purpose that the earlier
Bernard Shaw said that romance was all moonshine. The moonshine that
ripens love is now as practical as the sunshine that ripens corn. It was
vain to say that sexual chivalry was all rot; it might be as rotten as
manure--and also as fertile. It is vain to call first love a fiction;
it may be as fictitious as the ink of the cuttle or the doubling of the
hare; as fictitious, as efficient, and as indispensable. It is vain to
call it a self-deception; Schopenhauer said that all existence was a
self-deception; and Shaw's only further comment seems to be that it is
right to be deceived. To _Man and Superman_, as to all his plays, the
author attaches a most fascinating preface at the beginning. But I
really think that he ought also to attach a hearty apology at the end;
an apology to all the minor dramatists or preposterous actors whom he
had cursed for romanticism in his youth. Whenever he objected to an
actress for ogling she might reasonably reply, "But this is how I
support my friend Anne in her sublime evolutionary effort." Whenever he
laughed at an old-fashioned actor for ranting, the actor might answer,
"My exaggeration is not more absurd than the tail of a peacock or the
swagger of a cock; it is the way I preach the great fruitful lie of the
life-force that I am a very fine fellow." We have remarked the end of
Shaw's campaign in favour of progress. This ought really to have been
the end of his campaign against romance. All the tricks of love that he
called artificial become natural; because they become Nature. All the
lies of love become truths; indeed they become the Truth.
The minor things of the play contain some thunderbolts of good thinking.
Throughout this brief study I have deliberately not dwelt upon mere wit,
because in anything of Shaw's that may be taken for granted. It is
enough to say that this play which is full of his most serious quality
is as full as any of his minor sort of success. In a more solid sense
two important facts stand out: the first is the character of the young
American; the other is the character of Straker, the chauffeur. In these
Shaw has realised and made vivid two most important facts. First, that
America is not intellectually a go-ahead country, but both for good and
evil an old-fashioned one. It is full of stale culture and ancestral
simplicity, just as Shaw's young millionaire quotes Macaulay and piously
worships his wife. Second, he has pointed out in the character of
Straker that there has arisen in our midst a new class that has
education without breeding. Straker is the man who has ousted the
hansom-cabman, having neither his coarseness nor his kindliness. Great
sociological credit is due to the man who has first clearly observed
that Straker has appeared. How anybody can profess for a moment to be
glad that he has appeared, I do not attempt to conjecture.
Appended to the play is an entertaining though somewhat mysterious
document called "The Revolutionist's Handbook." It contains many very
sound remarks; this, for example, which I cannot too much applaud: "If
you hit your child, be sure that you hit him in anger." If that
principle had been properly understood, we should have had less of
Shaw's sociological friends and their meddling with the habits and
instincts of the poor. But among the fragments of advice also occurs the
following suggestive and even alluring remark: "Every man over forty is
a scoundrel." On the first personal opportunity I asked the author of
this remarkable axiom what it meant. I gathered that what it really
meant was something like this: that every man over forty had been all
the essential use that he was likely to be, and was therefore in a
manner a parasite. It is gratifying to reflect that Bernard Shaw has
sufficiently answered his own epigram by continuing to pour out
treasures both of truth and folly long after this allotted time. But if
the epigram might be interpreted in a rather looser style as meaning
that past a certain point a man's work takes on its final character and
does not greatly change the nature of its merits, it may certainly be
said that with _Man and Superman_, Shaw reaches that stage. The two
plays that have followed it, though of very great interest in
themselves, do not require any revaluation of, or indeed any addition
to, our summary of his genius and success. They are both in a sense
casts back to his primary energies; the first in a controversial and the
second in a technical sense. Neither need prevent our saying that the
moment when John Tanner and Anne agree that it is doom for him and death
for her and life only for the thing unborn, is the peak of his utterance
as a prophet.