George Bernard Shaw, his life and works

by Archibald Henderson

CHAPTER XV

It is worthy of record that Bernard Shaw does not claim to be a great novelist, or a great dramatist, or a great critic. As Mr. Chesterton says, Shaw is very dogmatic, but very humble. Indeed, Mr. Shaw once wrote me that he does not claim to be great: either he is or he is not great, and that is an end of the matter! But it is highly significant that Shaw does specifically claim to be a philosopher. Shaw's philosophical ideas have generally been regarded by English and American critics either as of undoubted European derivation, or else as fantastic paradoxes totally unrelated to the existing body of thought. “I urge them to remember,” Shaw remonstrates, “that this body of thought is the slowest of growths and the rarest of blossomings, and that if there is such a thing on the philosophic plane as a matter of course, it is that no individual can make more than a minute contribution to it.” Whilst it is undoubtedly true that Shaw's philosophy has been partially shared in by many forerunners, nevertheless, he has made his own “minute contribution” to the existing body of thought. Bernard Shaw is an independent thinker and natural moralist, with a clearly co-ordinated system of philosophy. Let us critically endeavour, then, in the language of political economy, to award Shaw his merited “rent of ability.”

Shaw's fundamental postulate is that morality is not a stagnant quality, the same yesterday, to-day and for ever, but transitory and evolutional. Morality flows: “What people call vice is eternal; what they call virtue is mere fashion.” A celebrated French critic once declared: “La morale est purement géographique.” Shaw goes far beyond this in the assertion that morality is a creature of occasion, conditioned by circumstance. And why is it that morality comes to be regarded as not in itself a fixed quantity, a solid substratum of human consciousness, but a concomitant fluxion of civilization? It is because, historically considered, progress connotes repudiation of custom: social advance takes effect through the replacement of old institutions by new ones. “Since every institution involves the duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every turn.” History shows us a world strewn with the wrecks of institutions whose laws, upheld for a time as fixed, were eventually broken by the triumphant assertion of the crescent will of man. This phenomenon is not to be confused with that in which an institution is burst simply by the natural growth of the social organism. The phenomenon of which we are speaking involves a deliberate assertion of self-constituted authority on the part of the individual in defiance of established and generally accepted customs.[227]

“The ideal is dead; long live the ideal!” is the epitome of all human progress. It is the note of nineteenth century literature. For the first time in history the devil began to get his due. Men ceased to be always on the side of the angels; a new day was dawning, the day of the saintly anarch, the advocatus diaboli. Shaw has given us a brief history of the movement:

“Formerly, when there was a question of canonizing a pious person, the devil was allowed an advocate to support his claims to the pious person's soul. But nobody ever dreamt of openly defending him as a much misunderstood and fundamentally right-minded regenerator of the race until the nineteenth century, when William Blake boldly went over to the other side and started a devil's party. Fortunately for himself, he was a poet, and so passed as a paradoxical madman instead of a blasphemer. For a long time the party made little direct progress, the nation being occupied with the passing of its religion through the purifying fire of a criticism which did at last smelt some of the grosser African elements out of it, but which also exalted duty, morality, law and altruism above faith; reared ethical societies; and left my poor old friend the devil (for I, too, was a Diabolonian born) worse off than ever. Mr. Swinburne explained Blake, and even went so far as to exclaim: 'Come down and redeem us from virtue'; but the pious influences of Putney reclaimed him, and he is now a respectable, Shakespeare-fearing man. Mark Twain emitted some Diabolonian sparks, only to see them extinguished by the overwhelming American atmosphere of chivalry, duty and gentility. A miserable spurious Satanism, founded on the essentially pious dogma that the Prince of Darkness is no gentleman, sprang up in Paris, to the heavy discredit of the true cult of the Son of the Morning. All seemed lost, when suddenly the cause found its dramatist in Ibsen, the first leader who really dragged duty, unselfishness, idealism, self-sacrifice, and the rest of the anti-diabolic scheme to the bar at which it had indicted so many excellent Diabolonians. The outrageous assumption that a good man may do anything he thinks right (which in the case of a naturally good man means, by definition, anything he likes), without regard to the interests of bad men or of the community at large, was put on its defence, and the party became influential at last.

“After the dramatist came the philosopher. In England, G. B. S.; in Germany, Nietzsche.”[228]

The whole anarchistic spirit of our time is summed up in the words of a character in one of Ibsen's plays: “The old beauty is no longer beautiful; the new truth is no longer true.”

Every age has its dominant accepted ideas and forms; but, as Georg Brandes has said: “besides these, it owns another whole class of quite different ideas, which have not yet taken shape, but are in the air, and are apprehended by the greatest men of the age as the results which must now be arrived at.” The ideas of the evolutionary trend of human ideals, of the triumphant hypocrisy of current morality, of the necessity for challenging and repudiating the code of the human herd were in the air: they were slowly being arrived at. We hear Chamfort's contemptuous assertion: “Il y a à parier que toute idée publique—toute convention reçue—est une sottise; car elle a convenue au plus grand nombre.” We see William Blake performing the ceremony of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell; the Pirate King in W. S. Gilbert's Pirates of Penzance repudiates bourgeois respectability in his reply to Frederic's urgent request to accompany him back to civilization: “No, Frederic, it cannot be. I don't think much of our profession, but, contrasted with respectability, it is comparatively honest. No, Frederic; I shall live and die a pirate king.” In The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, Mark Twain posits a new reading of the Lord's Prayer: “Lead us (not) into temptation”; he arraigns the morality of custom in Was It Heaven or Hell? Nietzsche works his way, through the “outer fortifications, the garb and masquerade; the occasional incrustation, petrification, dogmatization” of the ideal, to a position beyond good and evil, from which he transvalues all moral values.[229]

With Ibsen, the disciple as well as the master of his age, the newer ideas gained currency through the medium of the drama. The individualist Stockmann, in An Enemy of the People, preaches the salutary sermon of the “saving remnant” in his passionate declamation: “The majority is never right! That's one of the social lies a free, thinking man is bound to rebel against. Who make up the majority in any given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think all must agree that the fools are in a terribly overwhelming majority all the world over.... What sort of truths do the majority rally round? Truths that are decrepit with age. When a truth is as old as that, then it's in a fair way to become a lie.” Ibsen is one with Saint Augustine in the belief that it matters not so much what we are as what we are becoming. “Neither our moral conceptions nor our artistic forms,” he once said, “have an eternity before them. How much in duty are we really bound to hold on to? Who can afford me a guarantee that up yonder on Jupiter two and two do not make five?” And at a dinner at the Grand Hotel, Stockholm, he concretized this tenet of modern faith in the words: “It has been asserted on various occasions that I am a pessimist. So I am to this extent—that I do not believe human ideals to be eternal. But I am also an optimist, for I believe firmly in the power of those ideals to propagate and develop.” In like manner Zola declared that there was always a contest between men of unconquerable temperaments and the herd: “I am on the side of the temperaments, and I attack the herd.” How fiercely Schopenhauer and Shelley, Lassalle and Karl Marx, Ruskin and Carlyle, Morris and Wagner railed at all the orthodoxies, the respectabilities and the ideals! Heine tilted against the Philistine, “the strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of light,” with an élan equalled only by the detestation of Carlyle for the snobbery which he denominated “respectability in its thousand gigs.” The literature of the age resounded with the “rattle of twentieth century tumbrils.”

Nietzsche has declared that the good taste, the “honesty,” of a psychologist consists nowadays, if in anything, in his opposing the shamefully permoralized language by which as by a phlegm all modern judging on men and things is covered. His aim must be to “re-discover” the incarnate innocence in moralistic mendaciousness, to stagger the complacency of the illuded, ever “holding aloft the banner of the ideal,” to divorce the imagined life from the real. Mr. W. S. Gilbert was the first modern English dramatist to satirize the morality of custom; but his philosophy was a mere farcical masquerade and sham. “He would put forward a paradox,” Shaw has justly observed, “which at first promised to be one of those humane truths which so many modern men of fine spiritual insight, from William Blake onward, have worded so as to flash out their contradictions of some weighty rule of our systematized morality, and would then let it slip through his fingers, leaving nothing but a mechanical topsy-turvitude.”[230]

Bernard Shaw has identified the function of comedy with the destruction of old-established morals. In play after play, from Mrs. Warren's Profession and Arms and the Man to The Devil's Disciple and Man and Superman, he has mordantly and fiercely attacked that “inmost feminism which delights in calling itself idealism,” that Philistine respectability which vaunts itself on its “morality of custom,” and the genuine British narrowness, with its humdrum conservatism, its slavery to routine, its stupid distrust of new ideas and fear of bold thinking. Like Ibsen, he is always an outpost thinker, having no tolerance for conservatism—the attitude of “the little narrow-chested, short-winded crew that lie in our wake.” He has lived in passionate defiance of the precept:

“Be not the first by whom the new is tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”

The step from the premiss that morality is a variable function of civilization to the conclusion that salvation lies alone in revolt was inevitable. Historically considered, the stages in the growth of man's spirit may be classified under three heads: Faith, Reason, Will. First came the age of Faith: man accepted the precepts of the Bible as the revelation of God's voice. Faith in the Bible became the criterion of righteous intention, and for a time the authority of the Church reigned supreme. After a while came the age of free-thought, of Reason; the free-thinker begins to “find reasons for not doing what he does not want to do; and these reasons seem to him to be far more binding on the conscience than the precepts of a book of which the divine inspiration cannot be rationally proved.” Faith was dethroned by Reason, and rationalist “free-thinking” soon came to mean “syllogism worship with rites of human sacrifice.”

The great error of the Rationalists is latent in Voltaire's reply to the plea of the poetaster that he must live: “Je n'en vois pas la nécessité.” “The evasion was worthy of the Father of Lies himself,” Shaw has it; “for Voltaire was face to face with the very necessity he was denying—must have known, consciously or not, that it was the universal postulate—would have understood, if he had lived to-day, that since all human institutions are constructed to fulfil man's will, and that his will is to live even when his reason teaches him to die, logical necessity, which was the sort Voltaire meant (the other sort being visible enough) can never be a motor in human action, and is, in short, not necessity at all.” In the course of time came Schopenhauer to re-establish the old theological doctrine that reason is no motive power; that the true motive power in the world—otherwise life—is will, and that the setting up of reason above will is a damnable error.

Shaw has warned us that acceptance of the metaphysics of Schopenhauerism by no means involves endorsement of its philosophy. To Shaw, the cardinal Rationalist error into which Schopenhauer fell consisted in making happiness the test of the value of life. Shaw is the most vigorous possible combatant of the pessimist conclusion that life is not worth living, and that “the will which urges us to live in spite of this is necessarily a malign torturer, the desirable end of all things being the Nirvana of the stilling of the will, and the consequent setting of life's sun 'into the blind cave of eternal night.'” The keynote of the Shavian philosophy is the pursuit of life for its own sake. Life is realized only as activity that satisfies the will: that is, as self-assertion. Every extension or intensification of activity is an increase in life. Quantity and quality of activity measure the value of existence. Shaw has refused to acknowledge the validity of the will of the official theologians, because their God stands outside man and in authority above him. He accepted Schopenhauer's view of the will as a “purely secular force of nature, attaining various degrees of organization, here as a jelly-fish, there as a cabbage, more complexly as an ape or a tiger, and attaining its highest form, so far, in the human being.” This was Shaw's key to the works of two great artists, Wagner and Ibsen, notably, The Ring and Emperor and Galilean.

It is the idlest nonsense to say of Shaw, in Oscar Wilde's phrase, that he has the courage of other people's convictions. Shaw's most conspicuous trait is his courage in challenging and defying other people's convictions. Instead of clinging to the pessimism of Schopenhauer, he has been bold enough to “drop the Nirvana nonsense, the pessimism, the rationalism, the theology, and all the other subterfuges to which we cling because we are afraid to look life straight in the face and see in it, not the fulfilment of a moral law or the deductions of reason, but the satisfaction of a passion in us of which we can give no account.” Claiming for himself the faculty of unilluded vision, he conceives it his mission to tear away the veils with which we persist in hiding realities and to call things by their true names, instead of the false names with which we are content to dupe ourselves. Mr. Walkley once said: “Mr. Shaw takes up the empty bladders of life, the current commonplaces, the cant phrases, the windbags of rodomontade, the hollow conventions and the sham sentiments; quietly inserts his pin, and the thing collapses with a pop.” But Shaw regards this as a cheap job which any man might do and which Mr. Walkley himself excels in. “It is not the bubbles and bladders that require some tackling,” Mr. Shaw once observed to me; “it is the solid brass that has to be assayed and proved to be base metal.”

In many places, in varying ways, Shaw has given pungent expression to the opinion so well advanced in Meredith's words: “Our world is all but a sensational world at present, in maternal travail of a soberer, a braver, a bright-eyed.” The clarity of Shaw's vision has saved him from the cheap crudeness of pessimism: unlike Ibsen, plenty of “sound potatoes” have come under his observation. His position is clearly expressed in his own words:

“Now to me, as a realist playwright, the applause of the conscious, hardy pessimist is more exasperating than the abuse of the unconscious, fearful one. I am not a pessimist at all. It does not concern me that, according to certain ethical systems, all human beings fall into classes labelled liar, coward, thief, and so on. I am myself, according to these systems, a liar, a coward, a thief, and a sensualist; and it is my deliberate, cheerful and entirely self-respecting intention to continue to the end of my life deceiving people, avoiding danger, making my bargains with publishers and managers on principles of supply and demand instead of abstract justice, and indulging all my appetites, whenever circumstances commend such actions to my judgment. If any creed or system deduces from this that I am a rascal incapable on occasion of telling the truth, facing a risk, forgoing a commercial advantage, or resisting an intemperate impulse of any sort, then so much the worse for the creed or system, since I have done all these things, and will probably do them again. The saying, 'All have sinned' is, in the sense in which it was written, certainly true of all the people I have ever known. But the sinfulness of my friends is not unmixed with saintliness: some of their actions are sinful, others saintly. And here, again, if the ethical system to which the classifications of saint and sinner belong, involves the conclusion that a line of cleavage drawn between my friends' sinful actions and their saintly ones will coincide exactly with one drawn between their mistakes and their successes (I include the highest and the widest sense of the two terms), then so much the worse for the system; for the facts contradict it. Persons obsessed by systems may retort: 'No; so much the worse for your friends'—implying that I must move in a circle of rare blackguards; but I am quite prepared not only to publish a list of friends of mine whose names would put such a retort to open shame, but to take any human being, alive or dead, of whose actions a genuinely miscellaneous unselected dozen can be brought to light, to show that none of the ethical systems habitually applied by dramatic critics (not to mention other people) can verify their inferences. As a realist dramatist, therefore, it is my business to get outside these systems.... The fact is, though I am willing and anxious to see the human race improved, if possible, still I find that, with reasonably sound specimens, the more intimately I know people the better I like them; and when a man concludes from this that I am a cynic, and that he who prefers stage monsters—walking catalogues of the systematized virtues—to his own species, is a person of wholesome philanthropic tastes, why, how can I feel toward him except as an Englishwoman feels toward the Arab, who, faithful to his system, denounces her indecency in appearing in public with her mouth uncovered.”[231]

The destruction of the principle of alien authority carries with it the necessity for the creation of the individual standard. The dethronement of rationalism, be it observed, involves no repudiation of logic and intellect as guides to everyday life. “Ability to reason accurately is as desirable as ever, since it is only by accurate reasoning that we can calculate our actions so as to do what we intend to do—that is, to fulfil our will.” Instead of accepting the nude, anarchistic formula of Maurice Barrés, for example, “Fais ce que tu veux,” Shaw may be understood to enjoin: “Form your moral conscience and act as it directs you.”[232]

A development in our moral views must first appear insane and blasphemous, Shaw has time and again warned us, to people who are satisfied, or more than satisfied, with the current morality. Henri Beyle was for long, and still is, much misunderstood for the simple reason that the characters he created evolve their own standard, pursue their cherished ideals with unfaltering determination, and brook no interference, make no compromise, until they have won and established their self-respect. All the while insisting on the prudence necessary to discover the way for the will, Shaw has unhesitatingly taken the supreme step, realizing always that “Every step in morals is made by challenging the validity of the existing conception of perfect propriety of conduct.... Heterodoxy in art is at worst rated as eccentricity or folly: heterodoxy in morals is at once rated as scoundrelism, and, what is worse, propagandist scoundrelism, which must, we are told, if successful, undermine society and bring us back to barbarism after a period of decadence like that which brought Imperial Rome to its downfall.”

The time comes, however, when the voice of instinctive temperament makes itself heard and heeded. In the past the younger generation waited, but with a divine impatience, until “they were old enough to find their aspirations toward the fullest attainable activity and satisfaction working out in practice very much as they have worked out in the life of the race; so that the revolutionist at twenty-five, who saw nothing for it but a clean sweep of all our institutions, found himself, at forty, accepting and even clinging to them on condition of a few reforms to bring them up to date.” To-day the younger generation is loud in its demands, imperious in its insistence. They are outspoken in their scepticism concerning the infallibility of their parents, they insist that their “spiritual pastors and masters” speak humanly, and not dogmatically, of morality, and are determined to try all pontifical wisdom by the touchstone of experience. They formulate their heresy as a faith, and Shaw is the arch-heretic of them all. Ibsen would abolish the State and inaugurate a bloodless revolution: a revolution of the spirit of man; Hauptmann poetizes the Nietzschean ideal in Die Versunkene Glocke; Sudermann challenges the equity of parental authority in Heimat. With all the appearance of profound wisdom and abstract justice, Maeterlinck teaches that the preservation of virtue and adherence to conventional moral standards may be the quintessence of selfishness and egotism. Tolstoy preaches an impossible ideal of celibacy, and Shaw would abolish marriage because it is the “most licentious of human institutions.” Modern literature from Ibsen and Nietzsche to Bourget and Shaw is a “long litany in praise of the man who wills.” Men to-day contemn the “slavery to duty and discipline which has left so many soured old people with nothing but envious regrets for a virtuous youth.” Moral heroism is the toast of the epoch—“the heroism of the man who believes in himself and dares do the thing he wills.” It finds complete expression in Henley's best known poem, with its clamant finale:

“I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”

The philosophy whose pæan is glorification of the man whose standards are within himself, whose actions are controlled by his will, carries with it certain inevitable and shocking consequences. It is the clearest proof of Shaw's consistency that he has never swerved one jot from the course marked out by himself. He accepts the disagreeable consequences along with the rest, neither blinking nor shirking them. Georg Brandes epitomized his doctrine in the words: “To obey one's senses is to have character. He who allows himself to be guided by his own passions has individuality.” Shaw has avowed that he regards this as excellent doctrine, both in Brandes' form and in the older form: “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still; and he that is holy, let him be holy still.” Shaw is fundamentally an optimist; he identifies all life with the will itself. This will, this Life Force, he refuses to regard as naturally malign and devilish. His life-work may be said to consist in an attack upon the conception that passions are necessarily base and unclean; his art works are glorifications of the man of conviction who can find a motive, and not an excuse, for his passions; whose conduct flows from his own ideas of right and wrong; and who obeys the law of his own nature in defiance of appearance, of criticism, and of authority. This abrogation of authority, this repudiation of systematized morality is the step which the strongest spirits in all history have taken; it is the inevitable step for the naturally good man, who can breathe only in an atmosphere of truth and freedom. Emancipation comes only when man fulfils his duty to himself; but one's duty to oneself, as Shaw has reminded us, is no duty at all, since a debt is cancelled when the debtor and creditor are the same person. “Its payment is simply a fulfilment of the individual will, upon which all duty is a restriction.”

The obverse of the medal is not so clear: What will happen in the case of a person of ungovernable temper, of unbridled passions? The whole philosophy of his position, with all its appalling consequences, Shaw has expounded in that most remarkable of all his philosophical essays, entitled, A Degenerate's View of Nordau.

“If 'the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,' then truly, the man who allows himself to be guided by his passions must needs be a scoundrel, and his teacher might well be slain by his parents. But how if the youth, thrown helpless on his passions, found that honesty, that self-respect, that hatred of cruelty and injustice, that the desire for soundness and health and efficiency, were master passions—nay, that their excess is so dangerous to youth that it is part of the wisdom of age to say to the young: 'Be not righteous overmuch: why shouldst thou destroy thyself?'... The people who profess to renounce and abjure their own passions, and ostentatiously regulate their conduct by the most convenient interpretation of what the Bible means, or, worse still, by their ability to find reasons for it (as if there were not excellent reasons to be found for every conceivable course of conduct, from dynamite and vivisection to martyrdom), seldom need a warning against being righteous overmuch, their attention, indeed, often needing a rather pressing jog in the opposite direction. The truth is that passion is the steam in the engine of all religious and moral systems. In so far as it is malevolent, the religions are malevolent too, and insist on human sacrifices, on hell, wrath and vengeance. You cannot read Browning's 'Caliban upon Setebos, or Natural Theology on the Island' without admitting that all our religions have been made as Caliban made his, and that the difference between Caliban and Prospero is that Prospero is mastered by holier passions. And as Caliban imagined his theology, so did Mill reason out his essay on 'Liberty' and Spencer his 'Data of Ethics.' In them we find the authors still trying to formulate abstract principles of conduct—still missing the fact that truth and justice are not abstract principles external to man, but human passions, which have, in their time, conflicted with higher passions as well as with lower ones.”

It is one of Shaw's disconcerting theories—after Blake—that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”; the law of the stern asceticism of satiety is that “you never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” In amplifying this idea Shaw once said: “When Blake told men that through excess they would learn moderation, he knew that the way for the present lay through the Venusberg, and that the race would assuredly not perish there as some individuals have, and as the Puritan fears we all shall unless we find a way round. Also, he no doubt foresaw the time when our children would be born on the other side of it, and so be spared that fiery purgation.”

It is not mal à propos that the arms of the Shaw family should have borne the motto, in Latin: “Know thyself.” Shaw insists upon the salutary virtue of experience, its reforming and educative effect. “If a young woman, in a mood of strong reaction against the preaching of duty and self-sacrifice and the rest of it,” Shaw once wrote, “were to tell Mr. Herbert Spencer that she was determined not to murder her own instincts and throw away her life in obedience to a mouthful of empty phrases, I suspect he would recommend the 'Data of Ethics' to her as a trustworthy and conclusive guide to conduct. Under similar circumstances I should unhesitatingly say to the young woman: 'By all means do as you propose. Try how wicked you can be; it is precisely the same experiment as trying how good you can be. At worst, you will only find out the sort of person you really are. At best, you will find that your passions, if you really and honestly let them all loose impartially, will discipline you with a severity your conventional friends, abandoning themselves to the mechanical routine of fashion, could not stand for a day.' As a matter of fact, I have seen over and over again this comedy of the 'emancipated' young enthusiast flinging duty and religion, convention and parental authority, to the winds, only to find herself becoming, for the first time in her life, plunged into duties, responsibilities and sacrifices from which she is often glad to retreat, after a few years' wearing down of her enthusiasm, into the comparatively loose life of an ordinary respectable woman of fashion.” It is not a case of after satiety, moderation; after Venus, Saint Elizabeth; after Bohemianism, the convent. This is not what happens, except to ordinary loose livers. What happens, according to Shaw, is, that when we cast off all moral restraint we find Saint Elizabeth and the convent drawing us more passionately to them than Venus and the Bohemians. The true trend of the movement, it scarcely need be remarked, has been mistaken by many of its supporters as well as by its opponents. “The ingrained habit of thinking of the propensities of which we are ashamed as 'our passions,'” Shaw has shrewdly remarked, “and our shame of them and of our propensities to noble conduct as a negative and inhibitory department called our conscience, leads us to conclude that to accept the guidance of our passions is to plunge recklessly into the insupportable tedium of what is called a life of pleasure. Reactionists against the almost equally insupportable slavery of what is called a life of duty are, nevertheless, willing to venture on these terms. The 'revolted daughter,' exasperated at being systematically lied to by her parents on every subject of vital importance to an eager and intensely curious young student of life, allies herself with really vicious people and with humorists who like to shock the pious with gay paradoxes, in claiming an impossible license in personal conduct. No great harm is done beyond the inevitable and temporary excesses produced by all reactions; for the would-be wicked ones find, when they come to the point, that the indispensable qualification for a wicked life is not freedom, but wickedness.”[233]

In the present state of the world's civilization, the universal application of the Shavian philosophy is neither possible nor desirable. Like Nietzsche, Shaw has evolved a philosophy for the naturally good man, for the strong man who realizes that freedom connotes, not license, but responsibility. His error inheres in the statement that no great harm would be done by people claiming an impossible license in personal conduct beyond the inevitable and temporary excesses produced by all reactions. Far from being temporary and negligible, the consequences that would result, were every person permitted to give a personal unrestricted interpretation of his own instincts, would be lasting and irremediable. The average sensual man, “the mean sensual man,” as Granville Barker translates it—for whom passion means merely sexual lust, would take every advantage of the loopholes for self-indulgence offered by the Shavian programme. Were every man a Martin Luther, a William Blake, a Bernard Shaw; were every woman a Mary Wollstonecraft, a Candida Burgess, the world might, indeed, be clear of cant, of hypocrisy, of moralistic mendaciousness, of idealistic sophistication!

George Bernard Shaw.

From a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn made in 1906.

Mr. Shaw once went so far as to assure me that the universal application of the Shavian philosophy does actually take place. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of people do not do what they please, but, aside from scruples of conscience, find it vastly more convenient and satisfactory to conform to prevailing standards of right and wrong. Indeed, the limits to the application of the Shavian philosophy are given by Shaw himself when he tells us that “the men in the street have no use for principles, because they can neither understand nor apply them; and that what they can understand and apply are arbitrary rules of conduct, often frightfully destructive and inhuman, but at least definite rules enabling the common stupid man to know where he stands, and what he may do and not do without getting into trouble.” That is, most people can and actually do fulfil their desires only within the limits prescribed by the prevailing code of morality. Most men are neither philosophers nor moralists. Under present circumstances, as Shaw himself admits, the number of people who can think out a line of conduct for themselves is very small, and the number who can afford the time for it still smaller.

“Nobody can afford the time to do it on all points. The professional thinker may on occasion make his own morality and philosophy as the cobbler may make his own boots; but the ordinary man of business must buy at the shop, so to speak, and put up with what he finds on sale there, whether it exactly suits him or not, because he can neither make a morality for himself nor do without one. This typewriter with which I am writing is the best I can get; but it is by no means a perfect instrument; and I have not the smallest doubt that in fifty years' time the authors of that day will wonder how men could have put up with so clumsy a contrivance. When a better one is invented, I shall buy it: until then I must make the best of it, just as my Protestant and Roman Catholic and Agnostic friends make the best of their creeds and systems. This would be better recognized if people took consciously and deliberately to the use of the creeds as they do to the use of typewriters. Just as the traffic of a great city would be impossible without a code of rules of the road which not one wagoner in a thousand could draw up for himself, much less promulgate, and without, in London at least, an unquestioning consent to treat the policeman's raised hand as if it were an impassable bar stretched half across the road, so the average man is still unable to get through the world without being told what to do at every turn, and basing such calculations as he is capable of on the assumptions that everyone else will calculate on the same assumptions. Even your man of genius accepts a thousand rules for every one he challenges; and you may lodge in the same house with an Anarchist for ten years without noticing anything exceptional about him. Martin Luther, the priest, horrified the greater half of Christendom by marrying a nun, yet was a submissive conformist in countless ways, living orderly as a husband and father, wearing what his bootmaker and tailor made for him, and dwelling in what the builder built for him, although he would have died rather than take his Church from the Pope. And when he got a Church made by himself to his liking, generations of men calling themselves Lutherans took that Church from him just as unquestionably as he took the fashion of his clothes from his tailor. As the race evolves, many a convention which recommends itself by its obvious utility to everyone passes into an automatic habit, like breathing; and meanwhile the improvement in our nerves and judgment enlarges the list of emergencies which individuals may be trusted to deal with on the spur of the moment without reference to regulations, but there will for many centuries to come be a huge demand for a ready-made code of conduct for general use, which will be used more or less as a matter of overwhelming convenience by all members of communities.”[234]

The final effect of the philosophy of Ibsen, of Nietzsche, of Shaw is to substitute conscience for conformity.[235] With the dramatists of the Restoration, as Meredith has reminded us, morality was a duenna to be circumvented; with Shaw, morality is a mere convenience, like etiquette at a dinner-table or drill on a parade-ground. “For too long a time man regarded his natural bents with an 'evil eye,'” writes Nietzsche, “so that in the end they became related to 'bad conscience.' A reverse experiment is in itself possible—but who is strong enough for it?” Readiness to override tradition, to act unconventionally, to violate the current code of morality requires moral courage of the very highest order. The sense of moral responsibility is infinitely deepened. “Before conversion the individual anticipates nothing worse in the way of examination at the judgment bar of his conscience,” wrote Shaw before he had ever heard of Nietzsche, “than such questions as: Have you kept the commandments? Have you obeyed the law? Have you attended church regularly; paid your rates and taxes to Cæsar; and contributed, in reason, to charitable institutions? It may be hard to do all these things; but it is still harder not to do them, as our ninety-nine moral cowards in the hundred know. And even a scoundrel can do them all and yet live a worse life than the smuggler or prostitute, who must answer 'No' all the way through the catechism. Substitute for such a technical examination one in which the whole point to be settled is, Guilty or Not Guilty?—one in which there is no more and no less respect for chastity than for incontinence, for subordination than for rebellion, for legality than for illegality, for piety than for blasphemy, in short, for the standard virtues than for the standard vices, and immediately, instead of lowering the moral standard by relaxing the tests of worth, you raise it by increasing their stringency to a point at which no mere pharisaism or moral cowardice can pass them.” One of John Tanner's epigrams was “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” All the stock excuses of the average man vanish before the inexorable fact of this responsibility: “'The woman tempted me'; 'The serpent tempted me'; 'I was not myself at the time'; 'I meant well'; 'My passion got the better of my reason'; 'It was my duty to do it'; 'The Bible says that we should do it'; 'Everybody does it,' and so on. Nothing is left but the frank avowal: 'I did it because I am built that way.' Every man hates to say that. He wants to believe that his generous actions are characteristic of him, and that his meannesses are aberrations or concessions to the force of circumstances.” Most men are lacking in the “vigilant open-mindedness,” the splendid moral courage of an Ibsen; few men are willing to face the fearful responsibility entailed by revolt against the will of the majority. Only a master impulse, a ruling passion will drive them to it. Shavianism means liberty with a string to it; while knocking off the fetters of alien authority, it forges upon one the iron band of liberty with responsibility.[236] Shavianism is the philosophy for the reformer who is driven by the “passion of a great faith”; in the words of Nietzsche, it is “the privilege of the fewest.” The keynote of Shaw's philosophy he has sounded in the perfect epigram, “The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.” But, as Mr. Chesterton rightly reminds us, the saying can be simply answered by being turned around. “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.”

The battle-cry of Shaw's life is the Nietzschean command: “Forward, march! our old morality, too, is a piece of comedy.” Originality in regard to moral notions he regards as the true diagnostic of the first order in literature, the distinction that “sets Shakespeare's Hamlet above his other plays, and that sets Ibsen's work as a whole above Shakespeare's work as a whole.” Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth and Turner (these four apart and above all the English classics), Goethe, Shelley, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, he has told us, are among the writers whose peculiar sense of the world he recognizes as more or less akin to his own. While granting to Dickens and Shakespeare the “specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree,” he yet insists that in spite of their combination of sound moral judgment with light-hearted good-humour, they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities. His highest meed of praise goes to the artist-philosopher who identifies himself with the purpose of the world. He classes himself with writers of the “first order,” so called, because he has recognized and proclaimed in all his works that the rules of code-morality and the “need for them produced by the moral and intellectual incompetence of the ordinary human animal, are no more invariably beneficial and respectable than the sunlight which ripens the wheat in Sussex and leaves the desert deadly in Sahara, making the cheeks of the ploughman's child rosy in the morning and striking the ploughman brainsick or dead in the afternoon; no more inspired (and no less) than the religion of the Andaman Islanders: as much in need of frequent throwing away and replacement as the community's boots.”

The prime reason for the accusation that in his plays Shaw ignores all human feeling is not as simple as it seems. It is not enough to say it is because he is judicially impartial or even that he ignores stage logic. Humanity may possibly move by clockwork in Shaw's plays, as Mr. Arthur Symons once said; but even if it did, there must be some key which sets the machine in motion. That key is not intellect, but will; against which systems, creeds, conventions, every sort of formalism is ineffective and impotent. “Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get”; that is the creed of all his characters; or, in the words of Ann Whitefield: “The only really simple thing to do is to go straight for what you want, and grab it.” It is his view that “people imagine that their actions and feelings are dictated by moral systems, by religious systems, by codes of honour and conventions of conduct which lie outside the real human will.” As a dramatist, he recognizes that these conventions do not supply them with their motives, but merely serve as very plausible ex post facto excuses for their conduct. He has sought to reveal to us real people with real motives which are deep down in the will itself. It was Sainte Beuve's aim, as he himself phrased it, to set forth “the natural history of the intellect.” One might say of Shaw, the dramatist, that his aim is to set forth the natural history of the human will. “Far from ignoring idiosyncrasy, will, passion, impulse, whim, as factors in human action, I have placed them so nakedly on the stage that the elderly citizen, accustomed to see them clothed with the veil of manufactured logic about duty, and to disguise even his own impulses from himself in this way, finds the picture as unnatural as Carlyle's suggested painting of Parliament sitting without its clothes.”

It is this unmasking of all the ideals, this shattering of all the illusions, this demolition of the romantic cast of life which makes Shaw appear as a cynic, representing human creatures as frauds, impostors, poseurs, cads, bounders, hypocrites and humbugs. It is difficult to convince some people, especially women, that Shaw is not a cynic and pessimist. Like Schopenhauer, Shaw is a pure metaphysiologist. It is the inevitable result of his disbelief in the validity of custom-made morality that he should appear as a cynic, and the characters of his plays as frauds and shams. But he has deliberately averred: “It is not my object in the least to represent people as hypocrites and humbugs. It is conceit, not hypocrisy, that makes a man think he is guided by reasoned principles when he is really obeying his instincts.” And in explaining his view of the world-comedy, he has shown that, as a dramatist, he pretends to be, not the historian, but the naturalist of his age.

“It is this premature search for a meaning that produces the comedy. We are not within a million years, as yet, of being concerned with the meaning of the world. Why do we recognize that philosophy is not a baby's business, although its facial expression so strongly suggests the professional philosopher? Because we know that all its mental energy is absorbed by the struggle to attain ordinary physical consciousness. It is learning to interpret the sensations of its eyes and ears and nose and tongue and finger-tips. It is ridiculously delighted by a silly toy, absurdly terrified by a harmless bogey, because it cannot as yet see things as they really are. Well, we are all still as much babies in the world of thought as we were in our second year in the world of sense. Men are not real to us; they are heroes and villains, respectable persons and criminals. Their qualities are virtues and vices; the natural laws that govern them are gods and devils; their destinies are rewards and expiations; their conditions are innocence and guilt—there is no end to the amazing transubstantiations and childish imaginings which delight and terrify us because we have not yet grown up enough to be capable of genuine natural history. And then people come to you with their heads full of these figments, which they call, if you please, 'the world,' and ask you what is the meaning of them. The answer is, that they have not even an existence, much less a meaning. The blank incredulity of men to that reply, and their absurd attempts to act on their illusions, are as funny as the antics of a baby: that is what you call the world-comedy. But when they try to force others to act on them, when they ostracize, punish, murder, make war, impose by force their grotesque religious and hideous criminal codes, then the comedy becomes a tragedy. And only the dramatist sees through it; all the rest, the Army, the Navy, the Church, and the Bar are busy bolstering up the imposture. The dramatic faculty is nothing more nor less than a little more than common forwardness in natural history, a little more than common freedom from illusion, or, to put it as the average dupe sees it, and as Ruskin flatly expressed it concerning Shakespeare, a little less than common conscience.... If the playgoer could see the dramatist's mind, all the dramatists would be hanged, just as all the men and women of forty would be massacred by all the youths and maidens of twenty, if these young ones only knew.”[237]

The world-comedy, in Shaw's eyes, consists in the imaginative self-delusion, the moralistic sophistication of man; the world-tragedy in the bankruptcy of what we delight in calling progress with a P.

Progress, from Shaw's point of view, means increased command over self; this lamentable desideratum is the cause of his scepticism. But let us observe the open-minded, clear-eyed consistency of Shaw. While heartily subscribing to the metaphysics of Schopenhauer, he yet as heartily refuses to accept his pessimistic philosophy. At one with Darwin and Huxley in their scientific, realistic, yet anarchistic challenge of the validity of Biblical theology, Shaw, by his deliberate rejection of their materialistic views, occupies the opposite pole of conviction. It is useless to pretend to a “generation which has ceased to believe in heaven and has not yet learned that the degradation by poverty of four out of every five of its number is artificial,” that the “pessimism of Koheleth, Shakespeare, Dryden and Swift can be refuted if the world progresses solely by the destruction of the unfit, and yet can only maintain its civilization by manufacturing the unfit in swarms of which that appalling proportion of four to one represents but the comparatively fit survivors.” To Shaw, progress means, not an effect of the survival of the fittest brought about by the destruction of the unfit, but the growth of the spirit of man. He has refused to accept the Darwinian theory of evolution, since it “only accounted for progress at all on the hypothesis of a continuous increase in the severity of the conditions of existence—that is, on an assumption of just the reverse of what was actually taking place”—a fact which escaped Huxley. He finds in the world no signs of progress in the humanitarian and ethical sense; only a few more discoveries in physics. And even the much-trumpeted “increased command over nature,” harnessing continents, circling the globe, and so on, as an argument for progress vanishes before the inevitable query as to whether a negro of to-day using a telephone is superior to George Washington. Shaw rails at the “theistic credulity” of Voltaire as he rails at the “tribal soothsayings” of Huxley. As he recently wrote me: “I have not escaped from a literal belief in the Book of Genesis only to fall back into the gross blindness of seeing nothing in the world but the result of natural selection operating on a chapter of accidents, which is popular Darwinism.”

In that most whimsical and witty essay, entitled, The Conflict Between Science and Common Sense, Shaw declares that he has “found out” the man of science: “In future my attitude towards him will be one of more or less polite incredulity. Impostor for impostor, I prefer the mystic to the scientist—the man who at least has the decency to call his nonsense a mystery, to him who pretends that it is ascertained, weighed, measured, analyzed fact.” In a sense, Shaw's part in the humanitarian campaign against vivisection, modern science generally, vaccination, education, flogging, “cannibalism,” and so on, are all part of his attitude as a “mystic.” He has no faith in the scientist with his specious invitation: “My friend, by a diabolically cruel process I have procured a revoltingly filthy substance. Allow me to inject this under your skin, and you can never get hydrophobia, or enteric fever, or diphtheria, etc. I have even a very choice preparation, of unmentionable nastiness, which will enable you, if not to live for ever (though I think that quite possible), at least to renew in your old age the excesses of your youth.” While the average man, with incomprehensible credulity, jumps at the bait, Shaw refuses to be so easily duped. While science has taught him that dirt is “only matter in the wrong place,” his own common sense has taught him that “disease is only matter in the wrong condition, and that to inject matter in the wrong condition into matter in the right condition (healthy flesh, to wit) is to put matter in the wrong place with a vengeance.” In the public prints, in his novels and plays, notably, Cashel Byron's Profession and The Philanderer, Shaw has fulminated as vigorously against vivisection as against vaccination. From the first he perceived that the vivisector was “just the same phenomenon in science as the dynamiter in politics, and that to all humane men both methods of research and reform, effective or not, were eternally barred, precisely as highway robbery is barred as a method of supporting one's family.” His persistent vegetarianism is not based upon a scientific inquiry into the amount of hydrocarbons, uric acid, or what not deleterious stuff there may be in meat, but in his perfectly natural and humane distaste for the shedding of blood. “I have not the slightest doubt myself,” he once said, “that a diet of nice tender babies, carefully selected, cleanly killed and tenderly cooked, would make us far healthier and handsomer than the haphazard dinners of to-day, whether carnivorous or vegetarian.... There is no objection whatever to a baby from a nitrogenous point of view. Eaten with sugar, or with beer, it would leave nothing to be desired in the way of carbon. My sole objection to such a diet is that it happens to be repugnant to me. I prefer bread and butter.” Shaw's “three centuries” of life have taught him, mainly, to regard “men's principles as excuses for doing what they want to do.” And in the moral sphere, he contends that “the world remains as dependent as ever on pure dogmatic, instinctive recoil from suffering on the one hand, and pure dogmatic, instinctive love of inflicting it on the other. Common to both these temperaments, and to the compound temperament in which they struggle for mastery, is the timid perception that society can only exist through a compact to live and let live.... All sorts of virtuously indignant persons, clamouring for all sorts of vulgar retaliations, from the kicking of a cad to the humiliation of a minister by an election defeat, are indulging the destructive instincts under cover of solicitude for the common weal, as unmistakably as the scientist who, with a thousand humane departments of research open to him, deliberately prefers cruel experiments, and pleads that the man who ascertains how long it takes to bake a dog to death confers as great a boon on humanity as the man who discovers the Röntgen rays and their application to surgery. The cruel (loving to read the description of his experiments), the selfish (hoping for cures), the sportsman (anxious to be kept in countenance), and the cowardly (seeking an excuse for tolerating an evil they dare not attack) will accept his excuse: the humane will not. The final conflict is not between the excuses in their logical disguise of scientific arguments, but between the cruel will and the humane will.”

A leading cause for Shaw's “divine discontent” with progress, with moral systems, with institutions, with “regimentation,” with flogging in the navy, vaccination, science, cannibalism, and a thousand other things, is his loss of faith in education. He has lost his illusions on the subject. Education and culture, he maintains, are for the most part “nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.” He sees Masters of Art as “patentees of highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the majority but half valid, representations of life.” This is the natural attitude for one who said only the other day that “great communities are built by men who sign with a mark: they are wrecked by men who write Latin verses.” The ruthless repression which we practise on our fellow creatures whilst they are still too small to defend themselves, he insists, ends in their “reaching their full bodily growth in a hopelessly lamed and intimidated condition, unable to conceive of any forces in the world except physically coercive and socially conventional ones.” “Modern” education, he declares, “differs from Dr. Johnson's education only in substituting Jenner and Pasteur for Plato and Euripides as academic idols, and replacing the recognition of a purpose in the world, and the investigation of that purpose, by a conception of the universe as the accidental result of a senseless raging of mechanical forces, and by a boundless credulity, not outdone in dirt, cruelty, and stupidity, by any known savage tribe, as to the possibility of circumventing these forces by nostrums and conjurations.” The hope of the world lies in the development of individuality and self-reliance. Real live learning would soon flourish on the boundless basis of human curiosity and ambition.[238]

A Plaster Bust of Shaw.

Made in forty minutes.

Prince Paul Toubetzkoy.
Courtesy of the Sculptor

Bernard Shaw is not a materialist or natural selectionist, but in direct line of descent, astounding as the contrast may appear, from Schopenhauer, Lamarck and Samuel Butler. Shaw does not subscribe to the belief that goodness implies that “man is vicious by nature, and that supreme goodness is supreme martyrdom.” A fundamental tenet of his philosophic faith is the conviction that “progress can do nothing but make the most of us all as we are.” This conviction has more or less consciously animated him all through his career. Within his secret soul, Shaw has always cherished a radiant and gorgeous hope for humanity, always unconsciously trod the rainbow bridge from the real to the ideal. In his heart, he has whispered Ibsen's thought, “The expression of our own individuality is our first duty.” A dream of human perfectibility has lured him on: the dearest foe of this arrant realist has ever been—an ideal. As a youth he revelled in the Shelley of Prometheus Unbound; young manhood found him working upon the hypothesis of the Economic Man. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw sang of the new man, the sovereign individual—in Nietzsche's phrase, “the possessor of a long infrangible will, who has, in his possession, his standard of valuation.” He had found out the impossibilities of anarchism before he came to Wagner; his clearer vision and enlarged horizon enabled him to realize that “the individual Siegfried has come often enough, only to find himself confronted with the alternative of government or destruction at the hands of his fellows who are not Siegfrieds.” At last he began to realize that “it is necessary to breed a race of men in whom the life-giving impulses predominate before the New Protestantism becomes politically practicable.” The matured form of his ideal is the ethical man, convinced of the bankruptcy of education and progress, inspired with the faith of the world-will, and resolved, not to adopt a new philosophy, but to develop and perfect the human species. “To rise above ourselves to ourselves”—that is the creed of the new faith, of the humanitarian artificial selectionist concerned even more for the future of the race than for the freedom of his own instincts. Every phase in Shaw's career, it cannot be too strongly insisted upon, is the legitimate and logical outcome of his Socialism. His philosophy is the consistent integration of his empirical criticisms of society and its present organization, founded on authority and based upon Capitalism. And to the Socialist, nothing is necessary for the realization of Utopia but that man should will it. “Man will never be that which he can and should be,” wrote Wagner, “until by a conscious following of that inner natural necessity, which is the only true necessity, he makes his life a mirror of nature, and frees himself from his thraldom to outer artificial counterfeits. Then will he first become a living man, who now is a mere wheel in the mechanism of this or that Religion, Nationality or State.” The fact faced by the Shavian philosophy is that Man does not effectively will perfection. The quintessence of Shavianism is that “he never will until he becomes Superman.”[239]

The cardinal point in the New Theology as enunciated by Bernard Shaw is the identification of God with the Life Force. “There are two mutually contradictory ideas which cut across each other in regard to the relative powers of God and Man,” Mr. Shaw once said to me in the course of a long discussion of his religious views. “According to the popular conception, God always creates beings inferior to Himself: the creator must be greater than the creature. I find myself utterly unable to accept this horrible old idea, involving as it does the belief that all the cruelty in the world is the work of an omnipotent God, who, if He liked, could have left cruelty out of creation. If God could have created anything better, do you suppose He would have been content to create such miserable failures as you and me?

“As a matter of fact,” he continued, “we know that in all art, literature, politics, sociology—in every phase of genuine life and vitality—man's highest aspiration is to create something higher than himself. So God, the Life Force, has been struggling for countless ages to become conscious of Himself—to express Himself in forms higher and ever higher up in the scale of evolution. God does not take pride in making a grub-worm because it is lower than Himself. On the contrary, the grub is a mere symbol of His desire for self-expression.”

To Bernard Shaw, the universe is God in the act of making Himself. At the back of the universe, according to his mystical conception, there is a great purpose, a great will. This force behind the universe is bodiless and impotent, without executive power of its own; after innumerable tentatives—experiments and mistakes—the force has succeeded in changing inert matter into the amœba, the amœba into some more complex organism; this again into something still more complex, and finally has evolved a man, with hands and a brain to accomplish the work of the Will. Man is not the ultimate aim of the Life Force, but only a stage in the scale of evolution. The Life Force will go still further and produce something more complicated than Man, that is, the Superman, then the Angel, the Archangel, and last of all an omnipotent and omniscient God.[240]

Shaw has startled and shocked many people during his lifetime by asserting vehemently that he was an atheist.[241] And so indeed he is, if orthodoxy connotes belief in the early-Victorian God of cruelty and barbarity—the Almighty Fiend of Shelley's characterization. The idea of God as a cruel Designer, vindictive in punishment of the unbeliever, then held full sway.

“Neither science on the one hand, nor the moral remonstrances of Shelley and his school on the other, were able to shake the current belief in that old theology that came back to the old tribal idol, Jehovah.” Then came Darwin with his theory of natural selection, involving the corollary that all the operations of the species can be accounted for without consciousness, intelligence or design. After rapturously embracing Darwinism for six weeks, Samuel Butler turned upon Darwin and rent him—he had discovered that Darwin had actually banished mind from the universe.[242] Butler saw clearly that natural selection had no moral significance, that it did away not only with the necessity for purpose and design in the universe, but actually with the necessity for consciousness.

Philosophically and scientifically, Shaw derives directly from Schopenhauer, Lamarck and Butler. He recognizes purpose and will in the world because he is himself conscious of purpose and will. Woman brings children into the world, not for herself or for her husband, but to fulfil the end in view of which the Life Force has created her. Man produces great works just as woman brings men into the world, with travail and pain; man is continually engaged in doing things which do not benefit him. He works just as hard when there is no chance of profit as when there is. Shaw, then, is a confirmed Neo-Lamarckian in the view that “where there's a will there's a way.” Just as Lamarck, with his theory of functional adaptation, virtually maintained that living organisms changed because they wanted to, so Shaw believes that there is a purpose in the universe; identifies his own purpose with it, and makes the achievement of that purpose an act, not of self-sacrifice for himself, but of self-realization. In Shaw's view, Schopenhauer's treatise on the World as Will is the complement to Lamarck's natural history; for Will is the driving force of Lamarckian evolution.[243]

Bernard Shaw's religion is the expression of his faith in Life and in the Will. He regards man as divine because, actually, he is the last effort of the Will to realize itself as God. And yet he does not believe in the doctrine of personal immortality. “I have a strong feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for—scrapped at last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than myself,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me. “This, I believe, is the clue to my views on immortality. The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider! Or imagine me in heaven, giving forth all sorts of epigrams and paradoxes, startling Saint Peter with my iconoclasm, being paragraphed in the Eternal Herald and cartooned in the Æon Review! No, I think the trouble has come about through imagining that there are only two attributes—eternal life and utter extinction at death. I believe neither of these theories to be correct. Life continually tends to organize itself into higher and better forms. There is no such thing as personal immortality; and death, as Weismann says, is only a means of economizing life. The vital spark, the Life principle within us, goes on in spite of personal annihilation.

“As I told Mrs. Besant the other night,” he added, “I am looking for a race of men who are not afraid to die.”

A popular error into which many able critics fall is involved in the oft-repeated assertion that Shaw derives his philosophy directly from Ibsen, Strindberg, Stirner and Nietzsche. It is quite true that The Quintessence of Ibsenism might have been written by an ardent disciple of Nietzsche; and yet the first time Shaw ever heard Nietzsche's name was from a German mathematician, a Miss Borchardt, who had read Shaw's brochure on Ibsen, and who told him she knew where he had got it all. On being asked where, she replied “From Nietzsche's Jenseits von Gut und Böse.” Shaw at once understood and appreciated the title, and thereafter took an interest in Nietzsche; but he could not read much of the few English translations that were attempted except Thomas Common's book of selections; the German originals he never even attempted to read. “If all this talk about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche continues,” Shaw laughingly said to me one day, “I really will have to read their works, to discover just what we have in common. This habit of referring every idea of mine to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche comes about partly because, to people without philosophy, all philosophies seem the same, and partly because I have often referred to them to remind my readers that what they called my eccentricities and paradoxes are part of the common European stock.” As for Stirner, I have never heard Mr. Shaw mention Stirner. I recall no mention of Stirner in all of Shaw's works, and I have no reason to believe that Shaw is indebted to him in the slightest degree. It is quite true that, like Stirner, Shaw is an intellectual anarch; but he has no real sympathy for Stirner's “Eigentum,” for the reason that though Shaw is an individualist, he is likewise a constitutional collectivist. He sees no real conflict between Individualism and Socialism, and has actually given the striking definition: “Socialism is merely Individualism rationalized, organized, clothed and in its right mind.” Shaw has been accused of indebtedness to Strindberg also; the truth is, that he has all along been perfectly familiar with the idea of hatred of woman-idolization through the writings and conversation of Mr. Ernest Belfort Bax, whose essays attacking bourgeois morality were published before Strindberg, or Nietzsche, for that matter, had been heard of in England. But although Shaw has read very little of the marvellously prolific Strindberg, he admires him greatly, and once told me that he thought Strindberg would prove to be “the noblest Roman of us all.” Nietzsche's view of Christianity as a slave-morality was advanced in England by Mr. Stuart-Glennie, a Scotch historical philosopher, still living and much neglected, in what appealed to Shaw as a far more sensible way, Stuart-Glennie regarding it as the means by which the white races (the Supermen) enslaved the dark races and mean whites, while Nietzsche regarded it as an imposition by the slaves themselves.[244] Shaw, Stuart-Glennie and Bax are all Socialists; if “the physiologist of the mind” would seek to trace in Shaw's work early influences upon his philosophy, he must look for them in the works of Stuart-Glennie and Bax, rather than in the works of Nietzsche and Strindberg. And as for Shaw's strange complex of Socialism and individualism, I personally find it to be a mean between the extravagant individualism of Max Stirner, the intellectual anarchy of Elisée Reclus, and the practical collectivism of Jaurès and Vandervelde.

The English critics, however, continue to refer Shaw's philosophy to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, “knowing nothing about them,” as Shaw says, “except that their opinions, like mine, are not those of the Times or the Spectator.” Indeed, Shaw is an unwilling impostor as a pundit in the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. What, for example, could be more foreign to the Shavian philosophy than Nietzsche's repudiation of Socialism, his admiration of the Romans, or his notions about art? Shaw's Superman is mere man to Nietzsche; whilst Nietzsche's Superman is God to Shaw. “Nietzsche's erudition I believe to be all nonsense,” Shaw recently remarked to me. “I think he was academic in the sense of having a great deal of second-hand book-learning about him, and don't care for him except when he is perfectly original—that is, when he is dealing with matters which a peasant might have dealt with if he had brains enough, and had had the run of a library. You feel how clever and imaginative he is, and how much he has derived from writers of genius and from his own humanity about men and nations; but there is a want of actual contact knowledge about him; he is always the speculative university professor or the solitary philosopher and poet, never quite the worker and man of affairs or the executive artist in solid materials. It annoys me to see English writers absolutely ignoring the work of British thinkers, and swallowing foreign celebrities—whether philosophers or opera-singers—without a grain of salt. It shows an utter want of intellectual self-respect; and the result of it is that Nietzsche's views, instead of being added solely to the existing body of philosophy, are treated as if they were a sort of music-hall performance.”

Bernard Shaw is endowed with that persistent strain of British practicality which makes him employ philosophy as an instrumentality for the achievement of the purposes of life. In a word, Shaw is fundamentally an ethicist: philosophy to him means a guide for life. His metaphysic is basically moralistic, consisting of a series of postulates in respect to conduct.

In the manuscript of an unfinished work which Mr. Shaw once loaned to me, I discovered a notable passage which throws a flood of light upon Shaw's philosophy as an index to his entire life and career. Perhaps it may distil the quintessence of the Shavian philosophy:

“The man who is looking after himself is useless for revolutionary purposes. The man who believes he is only a fly on the wheel of Natural Selection, of Evolution, or Progress, or Puritanism, or 'some power not ourselves, that makes for righteousness' is not only useless, but obstructive. But the man who believes that there is a purpose in the universe, and identifies his own purpose with it, and makes the achievement of that purpose an act, not of self-sacrifice for himself, but of self-realization: that is the effective man and the happy man, whether he calls the purpose the will of God, or Socialism, or the religion of humanity. He is the man who will combine with you in a fellowship, which he may call the fellowship of the Holy Ghost or you may call Democracy, or the Parliament of Man, or the Federation of the World, but which is a real working, and if need be fighting, fellowship for all that. He is the man who knows that nothing intelligent will be done until somebody does it, and who will place the doing of it above all his other interests.

“In short, we must make a religion of Socialism. We must fall back on our will to Socialism, and resort to our reason only to find out the ways and means. And this we can do only if we conceive the will as a creative energy, as Lamarck did; and totally renounce and abjure Darwinism, Marxism, and all fatalistic, penny-in-the-slot theories of evolution whatever.”

FOOTNOTES:

[227] Shaw's philosophy has many points of contact with the Pragmatism of Schiller and James. Shaw sees in truth and justice, not abstract principles external to man, but human passions, which have, in their time, conflicted with higher passions as well as with lower ones. With James he is at one in the belief that “Truth has its palæontology, and its 'prescription' and may grow stiff with years of veteran service and petrified in men's regard by sheer antiquity”; and with Schiller's “humanistic” doctrine that “to an unascertainable extent our truths are man-made products too.” To Shaw, as to James, “'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.”

[228] Giving the Devil His Due: a review, by Bernard Shaw, of Vols. I. and II. of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Supplement to the Saturday Review, May 13th, 1899.

[229] “'Is here,' someone will ask, 'an ideal being erected, or an ideal being broken down?' But have ye ever really asked yourselves sufficiently as to how dearly the erection of all ideals on earth were paid for? How much reality had to be slandered and misconceived for this purpose; how much falsehood sanctioned; how much conscience confused; how much 'God' sacrificed each time? In order that a sanctuary may be erected, a sanctuary must be broken down: this is the law—name me an instance in which it is violated!” Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, translated by William A. Hausemann, p. 122 (Macmillan).

[230] To take a single example, consult My Dream, from The Bab Ballads and Songs of a Savoyard, the first two stanzas of which read:

The other night, from cares exempt,
I slept—and what d'you think I dreamt?
I dreamt that somehow I had come
To dwell in Topsy-Turvydom.
Where vice is virtue—virtue, vice;
Where nice is nasty—nasty, nice;
Where right is wrong and wrong is right;
Where white is black and black is white.

[231] A Dramatic Realist to His Critics, in the New Review (London), July, 1894.

[232] This morality is no new thing under the sun; Maurice Maeterlinck has declared that our morality of to-day has nothing to add to this injunction, found in the Arabian Nights: “Learn to know thyself! And do thou not act till then. And do thou then only act in accordance with all thy desires, but having great care always that thou do not injure thy neighbour.”

[233] Compare also the notable passage, embodying a similar view, in Max Stirner's The Ego and His Own (Benjamin R. Tucker, N. Y., 1907), p. 212, beginning: “'What am I?' each of you asks himself. An abyss of lawless and unregulated impulses, desires, wishes, passions, a chaos without light or guiding star!...”

[234] A Degenerate's View of Nordau, in Liberty, July 27th, 1895.

[235] Mr. Shaw has recently pointed out that Professor A. K. Rogers, in his Mr. Bernard Shaw's Philosophy (Hibbert Journal, July, 1910), has failed to note the “trumpery (!) distinction between instinct and conscience” which Shaw had drawn in Man and Superman.

[236] It is worthy of note that Nietzsche has defined freedom as the will to be responsible for oneself. Compare also The Ego and His Own, pp. 237-238 (Benjamin R. Tucker, N. Y.), the passage beginning: “To be a man is not to realize the ideal of Man, but to realize oneself, the individual....”

[237] Who I Am, and What I Think, Part II., in The Candid Friend, May 18th, 1901.

[238] Compare Does Modern Education Ennoble? by G. Bernard Shaw; in Great Thoughts, October 7th, 1905.

[239] The substance of Shaw's philosophy—as, indeed, he once told me—is embodied in Act III. of Man and Superman.

[240] For the sake of making himself easily understood, Shaw frequently expresses his neo-theological conceptions in the familiar phraseology of orthodox religion. Shaw's practice of personifying God, when in reality he mentally identifies “God” with a mystical and impersonal “Force,” is a practice which many people quite justly condemn.

[241] Cf. Shaw's open letter to G. W. Foote, in The Freethinker, November 1st, 1908.

[242] In this connection it is interesting to read Shaw's review of Samuel Butler's Luck or Cunning? published under the heading “Darwin Denounced,” in the Pall Mall Gazette, May 31st, 1887. At this time, Shaw committed himself neither to Lamarck nor to Butler, but was content to define the issues of the controversy. Certainly his interest was aroused, and years later his support was won, by Butler's protest against natural selection as—to use Butler's own words—“a purely automatic conception of the universe as of something that will work if a penny be dropped into the box.”

[243] Compare The Philosophy of Bernard Shaw, by Archibald Henderson, in the Atlantic Monthly, February, 1909.

[244] Compare A Genealogy of Morals, translated by William A. Hausemann; Alexander Tille's introduction, pp. xvi. and xviii. For Shaw's general confession of indebtedness to others, compare the preface to Major Barbara—First Aid to Critics.

THE MAN

“Like all men, I play many parts, and none of them is more or less real than the other.... I am a soul of infinite worth. I am, in short, not only what I can make out of myself, which varies greatly from hour to hour, and emergency to emergency, but what you can see in me.”—Bernard Shaw's review of G. K. Chesterton's Bernard Shaw.

“Many people seem to imagine that I am an extraordinary sort of person. The fact of the matter is that ninety-nine per cent. of me is just like everybody else.”—Remark of Bernard Shaw to the author.

“This is the true joy in life: the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap-heap; the being a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”—Man and Superman. Epistle Dedicatory to A. B. Walkley.