It is odd, or no, it's not, but it's note-worthy, that Shaw has had few
disciples. Here is a witty, vivacious man, successful and keen: why
isn't he the head of a school of other keen, witty writers? He has
provided an attractive form--the play with an essay as preface. He has
provided stock characters, such as the handsome-hero male-moth, who
protests so indignantly at the fatal attraction of candles. He has
developed above all that useful formula which has served many a
dramatist--the comic confrontation of reason and instinct in man. Yet
this whole apparatus lies idle, except for the use that Shaw makes of
it. It is as though Henry Ford had perfected an automobile, and then no
one had taken a drive in it, ever, but Henry.
The explanation that Shaw's is too good a machine, or that it takes a
genius to run it, is not sufficiently plausible. The truth probably is
that his shiny car has some bad defect.
It has this defect certainly: in all his long arguments, Shaw has one
underlying assumption--that men could be perfectly reasonable and wise
if they would. They have only to let themselves; and if they won't,
it's downright perversity. This belief is at the center of his being,
and he can't get away from it. He doesn't hold it lightly: he's really
in earnest about it. Naturally, when he looks around at the world with
that belief in his heart, and sees men and women making blunders which
he thinks they don't need to, he becomes too exasperated for silence,
and pours out his plays. Sometimes he is philosophic enough to treat his
fellows amusedly; sometimes he is serious and exacerbated, in which case
he is tiresome. But at heart he is always provoked and astonished at men
for the way they fend off the millennium, when it's right at their side.
He may have inherited this attitude from those economists, who
flourished, or attempted to flourish, in the generation before
him--those who built with such confidence on rationalism in human
affairs. Man was a reasonable being, they said and believed; and all
would be well with him, therefore, when he once saw the light. To
discover the light might be difficult, but they would do all that for
us, and then it would surely be no trouble to man to accept it. They
proceeded to discover the light in finance, trade, and matters of
government; and Shaw, coming after them, extended the field into
marriage, and explained to us the rational thing to do in social
relations. These numerous doses of what was confidently recommended as
reason were faithfully swallowed by all of us; and yet we're not
changed. The dose was as pure as these doctors were able to make it.
But--reason needs admixtures of other things to be a good dose. Men have
learned that without these confirmings it's not to be trusted.
The turn that psychology has taken during the last twenty years has
naturally been unlucky for Shaw as a leader, or influence. He appears
now as the culminating figure of an old school of thinkers, instead of
the founder of a new. And that old school is dead. It was so fascinated
by reason or what it believed to be such (for we should not assume that
its conceptions, even of reason, were right), that it never properly
studied or faced human nature.
Civilization is a process, not a trick to be learned overnight. It is a
way of behavior which we super-animals adopt bit by bit. The surprising
and hopeful thing is that we adopt it at all. Civilization is the slow
modification of our old feral qualities, the slow growth of others,
which we test, then discard or retain. An occasional invention seems to
hasten things, but chiefly externally; for the internal change in men's
natures is slower than glaciers, and it is upon the sum of men's natures
that civilization depends. While this testing and churning and gradual
molding goes on, some fellow is always holding up a hasty lamp he calls
reason, and beckoning the glacier one side, like a will-o'-the-wisp.
Shaw's lamp of reason is one that has an extra fine glitter; it makes
everything look perfectly simple; it shows us short-cuts. He recommends
it as a substitute for understanding, which he does not manufacture.
Understanding is slow, and is always pointing to the longest way round.
Shaw has studied the ways of mankind, but without enough sympathy. It is
unlucky, both for him and for us, this is so. Sympathy would have made
him humorous and wise, and then what a friend he'd have been to us.
Instead, being brilliant and witty, he has left us unnourished.
[Illustration: Which shall the Future belong to--man or the insects?]