In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities, when
genial old Ibsen filled the world with wholesome joy, and the kindly
tales of the forgotten Emile Zola kept our firesides merry and pure, it
used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood. It may be
doubted whether it is always or even generally a disadvantage. The man
who is misunderstood has always this advantage over his enemies, that
they do not know his weak point or his plan of campaign. They go out
against a bird with nets and against a fish with arrows. There are
several modern examples of this situation. Mr. Chamberlain, for
instance, is a very good one. He constantly eludes or vanquishes his
opponents because his real powers and deficiencies are quite different
to those with which he is credited, both by friends and foes. His
friends depict him as a strenuous man of action; his opponents depict
him as a coarse man of business; when, as a fact, he is neither one nor
the other, but an admirable romantic orator and romantic actor. He has
one power which is the soul of melodrama—the power of pretending, even
when backed by a huge majority, that he has his back to the wall. For
all mobs are so far chivalrous that their heroes must make some show of
misfortune—that sort of hypocrisy is the homage that strength pays to
weakness. He talks foolishly and yet very finely about his own city
that has never deserted him. He wears a flaming and fantastic flower,
like a decadent minor poet. As for his bluffness and toughness and
appeals to common sense, all that is, of course, simply the first trick
of rhetoric. He fronts his audiences with the venerable affectation of
Mark Antony—
“I am no orator, as Brutus is;
But as you know me all, a plain blunt man.”
It is the whole difference between the aim of the orator and the aim of
any other artist, such as the poet or the sculptor. The aim of the
sculptor is to convince us that he is a sculptor; the aim of the
orator, is to convince us that he is not an orator. Once let Mr.
Chamberlain be mistaken for a practical man, and his game is won. He
has only to compose a theme on empire, and people will say that these
plain men say great things on great occasions. He has only to drift in
the large loose notions common to all artists of the second rank, and
people will say that business men have the biggest ideals after all.
All his schemes have ended in smoke; he has touched nothing that he did
not confuse. About his figure there is a Celtic pathos; like the Gaels
in Matthew Arnold’s quotation, “he went forth to battle, but he always
fell.” He is a mountain of proposals, a mountain of failures; but still
a mountain. And a mountain is always romantic.
There is another man in the modern world who might be called the
antithesis of Mr. Chamberlain in every point, who is also a standing
monument of the advantage of being misunderstood. Mr. Bernard Shaw is
always represented by those who disagree with him, and, I fear, also
(if such exist) by those who agree with him, as a capering humorist, a
dazzling acrobat, a quick-change artist. It is said that he cannot be
taken seriously, that he will defend anything or attack anything, that
he will do anything to startle and amuse. All this is not only untrue,
but it is, glaringly, the opposite of the truth; it is as wild as to
say that Dickens had not the boisterous masculinity of Jane Austen.
The whole force and triumph of Mr. Bernard Shaw lie in the fact that he
is a thoroughly consistent man. So far from his power consisting in
jumping through hoops or standing on his head, his power consists in
holding his own fortress night and day. He puts the Shaw test rapidly
and rigorously to everything that happens in heaven or earth. His
standard never varies. The thing which weak-minded revolutionists and
weak-minded Conservatives really hate (and fear) in him, is exactly
this, that his scales, such as they are, are held even, and that his
law, such as it is, is justly enforced. You may attack his principles,
as I do; but I do not know of any instance in which you can attack
their application. If he dislikes lawlessness, he dislikes the
lawlessness of Socialists as much as that of Individualists. If he
dislikes the fever of patriotism, he dislikes it in Boers and Irishmen
as well as in Englishmen. If he dislikes the vows and bonds of
marriage, he dislikes still more the fiercer bonds and wilder vows that
are made by lawless love. If he laughs at the authority of priests, he
laughs louder at the pomposity of men of science. If he condemns the
irresponsibility of faith, he condemns with a sane consistency the
equal irresponsibility of art. He has pleased all the bohemians by
saying that women are equal to men; but he has infuriated them by
suggesting that men are equal to women. He is almost mechanically just;
he has something of the terrible quality of a machine. The man who is
really wild and whirling, the man who is really fantastic and
incalculable, is not Mr. Shaw, but the average Cabinet Minister. It is
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach who jumps through hoops. It is Sir Henry
Fowler who stands on his head. The solid and respectable statesman of
that type does really leap from position to position; he is really
ready to defend anything or nothing; he is really not to be taken
seriously. I know perfectly well what Mr. Bernard Shaw will be saying
thirty years hence; he will be saying what he has always said. If
thirty years hence I meet Mr. Shaw, a reverent being with a silver
beard sweeping the earth, and say to him, “One can never, of course,
make a verbal attack upon a lady,” the patriarch will lift his aged
hand and fell me to the earth. We know, I say, what Mr. Shaw will be,
saying thirty years hence. But is there any one so darkly read in stars
and oracles that he will dare to predict what Mr. Asquith will be
saying thirty years hence?
The truth is, that it is quite an error to suppose that absence of
definite convictions gives the mind freedom and agility. A man who
believes something is ready and witty, because he has all his weapons
about him. He can apply his test in an instant. The man engaged in
conflict with a man like Mr. Bernard Shaw may fancy he has ten faces;
similarly a man engaged against a brilliant duellist may fancy that the
sword of his foe has turned to ten swords in his hand. But this is not
really because the man is playing with ten swords, it is because he is
aiming very straight with one. Moreover, a man with a definite belief
always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he
has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a
zoetrope. Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and
sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity,
because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of
the world.
People accuse Mr. Shaw and many much sillier persons of “proving that
black is white.” But they never ask whether the current
colour-language is always correct. Ordinary sensible phraseology
sometimes calls black white, it certainly calls yellow white and green
white and reddish-brown white. We call wine “white wine” which is as
yellow as a Blue-coat boy’s legs. We call grapes “white grapes” which
are manifestly pale green. We give to the European, whose complexion is
a sort of pink drab, the horrible title of a “white man”—a picture
more blood-curdling than any spectre in Poe.
Now, it is undoubtedly true that if a man asked a waiter in a
restaurant for a bottle of yellow wine and some greenish-yellow grapes,
the waiter would think him mad. It is undoubtedly true that if a
Government official, reporting on the Europeans in Burmah, said, “There
are only two thousand pinkish men here” he would be accused of cracking
jokes, and kicked out of his post. But it is equally obvious that both
men would have come to grief through telling the strict truth. That too
truthful man in the restaurant; that too truthful man in Burmah, is Mr.
Bernard Shaw. He appears eccentric and grotesque because he will not
accept the general belief that white is yellow. He has based all his
brilliancy and solidity upon the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact
that truth is stranger than fiction. Truth, of course, must of
necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit
ourselves.
So much then a reasonable appreciation will find in Mr. Shaw to be
bracing and excellent. He claims to see things as they are; and some
things, at any rate, he does see as they are, which the whole of our
civilization does not see at all. But in Mr. Shaw’s realism there is
something lacking, and that thing which is lacking is serious.
Mr. Shaw’s old and recognized philosophy was that powerfully presented
in “The Quintessence of Ibsenism.” It was, in brief, that conservative
ideals were bad, not because they were conservative, but because they
were ideals. Every ideal prevented men from judging justly the
particular case; every moral generalization oppressed the individual;
the golden rule was there was no golden rule. And the objection to this
is simply that it pretends to free men, but really restrains them from
doing the only thing that men want to do. What is the good of telling a
community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws?
The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people. And what
is the good of telling a man (or a philosopher) that he has every
liberty except the liberty to make generalizations. Making
generalizations is what makes him a man. In short, when Mr. Shaw
forbids men to have strict moral ideals, he is acting like one who
should forbid them to have children. The saying that “the golden rule
is that there is no golden rule,” can, indeed, be simply answered by
being turned round. That there is no golden rule is itself a golden
rule, or rather it is much worse than a golden rule. It is an iron
rule; a fetter on the first movement of a man.
But the sensation connected with Mr. Shaw in recent years has been his
sudden development of the religion of the Superman. He who had to all
appearance mocked at the faiths in the forgotten past discovered a new
god in the unimaginable future. He who had laid all the blame on
ideals set up the most impossible of all ideals, the ideal of a new
creature. But the truth, nevertheless, is that any one who knows Mr.
Shaw’s mind adequately, and admires it properly, must have guessed all
this long ago.
For the truth is that Mr. Shaw has never seen things as they really
are. If he had he would have fallen on his knees before them. He has
always had a secret ideal that has withered all the things of this
world. He has all the time been silently comparing humanity with
something that was not human, with a monster from Mars, with the Wise
Man of the Stoics, with the Economic Man of the Fabians, with Julius
Caesar, with Siegfried, with the Superman. Now, to have this inner and
merciless standard may be a very good thing, or a very bad one, it may
be excellent or unfortunate, but it is not seeing things as they are.
It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with a
hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two.
It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of Argus
with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if
he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a
demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the
latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots. And this
is what Mr. Shaw has always in some degree done. When we really see
men as they are, we do not criticise, but worship; and very rightly.
For a monster with mysterious eyes and miraculous thumbs, with strange
dreams in his skull, and a queer tenderness for this place or that
baby, is truly a wonderful and unnerving matter. It is only the quite
arbitrary and priggish habit of comparison with something else which
makes it possible to be at our ease in front of him. A sentiment of
superiority keeps us cool and practical; the mere facts would make our
knees knock under as with religious fear. It is the fact that every
instant of conscious life is an unimaginable prodigy. It is the fact
that every face in the street has the incredible unexpectedness of a
fairy-tale. The thing which prevents a man from realizing this is not
any clear-sightedness or experience, it is simply a habit of pedantic
and fastidious comparisons between one thing and another. Mr. Shaw, on
the practical side perhaps the most humane man alive, is in this sense
inhumane. He has even been infected to some extent with the primary
intellectual weakness of his new master, Nietzsche, the strange notion
that the greater and stronger a man was the more he would despise other
things. The greater and stronger a man is the more he would be
inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle. That Mr. Shaw keeps
a lifted head and a contemptuous face before the colossal panorama of
empires and civilizations, this does not in itself convince one that he
sees things as they are. I should be most effectively convinced that he
did if I found him staring with religious astonishment at his own feet.
“What are those two beautiful and industrious beings,” I can imagine
him murmuring to himself, “whom I see everywhere, serving me I know not
why? What fairy godmother bade them come trotting out of elfland when I
was born? What god of the borderland, what barbaric god of legs, must
I propitiate with fire and wine, lest they run away with me?”
The truth is, that all genuine appreciation rests on a certain mystery
of humility and almost of darkness. The man who said, “Blessed is he
that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed,” put the
eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth “Blessed is he
that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised.” The man
who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see, and
greener grass, and a more startling sun. Blessed is he that expecteth
nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains; blessed is
the meek, for he shall inherit the earth. Until we realize that things
might not be we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the
background of darkness we cannot admire the light as a single and
created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is
lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine. Until we picture nonentity we
underrate the victory of God, and can realize none of the trophies of
His ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we
know nothing until we know nothing.
Now this is, I say deliberately, the only defect in the greatness of
Mr. Shaw, the only answer to his claim to be a great man, that he is
not easily pleased. He is an almost solitary exception to the general
and essential maxim, that little things please great minds. And from
this absence of that most uproarious of all things, humility, comes
incidentally the peculiar insistence on the Superman. After belabouring
a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr.
Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very
doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be
progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be
combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected
to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being
easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations
and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is
incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new
kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a
nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on
discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food
and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a
new baby. Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuable
and lovable in our eyes is man—the old beer-drinking, creed-making,
fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man. And the things that have
been founded on this creature immortally remain; the things that have
been founded on the fancy of the Superman have died with the dying
civilizations which alone have given them birth. When Christ at a
symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its
corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a
shuffler, a snob a coward—in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has
built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it.
All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent
and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon
strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was
founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no
chain is stronger than its weakest link.