When I wrote a little volume on my friend Mr. Bernard Shaw, it is
needless to say that he reviewed it. I naturally felt tempted to answer
and to criticise the book from the same disinterested and impartial
standpoint from which Mr. Shaw had criticised the subject of it. I was
not withheld by any feeling that the joke was getting a little
obvious; for an obvious joke is only a successful joke; it is only the
unsuccessful clowns who comfort themselves with being subtle. The real
reason why I did not answer Mr. Shaw’s amusing attack was this: that one
simple phrase in it surrendered to me all that I have ever wanted, or
could want from him to all eternity. I told Mr. Shaw (in substance) that
he was a charming and clever fellow, but a common Calvinist. He admitted
that this was true, and there (so far as I am concerned) is an end of
the matter. He said that, of course, Calvin was quite right in holding
that “if once a man is born it is too late to damn or save him.” That is
the fundamental and subterranean secret; that is the last lie in hell.
The difference between Puritanism and Catholicism is not about whether
some priestly word or gesture is significant and sacred. It is about
whether any word or gesture is significant and sacred. To the Catholic
every other daily act is dramatic dedication to the service of good
or of evil. To the Calvinist no act can have that sort of solemnity,
because the person doing it has been dedicated from eternity, and is
merely filling up his time until the crack of doom. The difference
is something subtler than plum-puddings or private theatricals; the
difference is that to a Christian of my kind this short earthly life
is intensely thrilling and precious; to a Calvinist like Mr. Shaw it is
confessedly automatic and uninteresting. To me these threescore years
and ten are the battle. To the Fabian Calvinist (by his own confession)
they are only a long procession of the victors in laurels and the
vanquished in chains. To me earthly life is the drama; to him it is
the epilogue. Shavians think about the embryo; Spiritualists about the
ghost; Christians about the man. It is as well to have these things
clear.
Now all our sociology and eugenics and the rest of it are not so much
materialist as confusedly Calvinist, they are chiefly occupied in
educating the child before he exists. The whole movement is full of a
singular depression about what one can do with the populace, combined
with a strange disembodied gayety about what may be done with posterity.
These essential Calvinists have, indeed, abolished some of the more
liberal and universal parts of Calvinism, such as the belief in an
intellectual design or an everlasting happiness. But though Mr. Shaw and
his friends admit it is a superstition that a man is judged after death,
they stick to their central doctrine, that he is judged before he is
born.
In consequence of this atmosphere of Calvinism in the cultured world of
to-day, it is apparently necessary to begin all arguments on education
with some mention of obstetrics and the unknown world of the prenatal.
All I shall have to say, however, on heredity will be very brief,
because I shall confine myself to what is known about it, and that is
very nearly nothing. It is by no means self-evident, but it is a current
modern dogma, that nothing actually enters the body at birth except a
life derived and compounded from the parents. There is at least quite as
much to be said for the Christian theory that an element comes from
God, or the Buddhist theory that such an element comes from previous
existences. But this is not a religious work, and I must submit to those
very narrow intellectual limits which the absence of theology always
imposes. Leaving the soul on one side, let us suppose for the sake of
argument that the human character in the first case comes wholly from
parents; and then let us curtly state our knowledge rather than our
ignorance.
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