Some Impressions of My Elders

by St. John G. Ervine

III

There is a photograph of Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells, taken by an American photographer, Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn, in which the two men are shown sitting side by side. It is the most illuminating interpretation of their characters that I have ever seen. Mr. Shaw, with something of the look of a prophet, sits beside Mr. Wells who has a smile of disbelief on his face; Mr. Shaw shows a countenance full of faith, while Mr. Wells shows one full of inquiry. Mr. Shaw accepts the pose quite naturally, but Mr. Wells is deprecating. I felt when I saw that photograph in Mr. Wells's study that while Mr. Shaw accepted the status of a great man as his right, Mr. Wells felt uncomfortable about the pose, not because he doubts his right to be regarded as a great man, but because he is reluctant to live on pedestals. "I'm human just as much as you are," he seems to be saying to the photographer, and the smile of deprecation on his face means, if it means anything, that while Mr. Shaw accepts the great man's altitude without a qualm, Mr. Wells feels that the whole thing is humbug. "Shaw is taken in by this Great Man business," the Wells of the photograph says as plainly as if the picture were to take life and utter words, "but don't you imagine I'm deluded by it!..."

These two men, one Irish, one English, George Bernard Shaw and Herbert George Wells, between them have done more to influence the minds of the young men of my generation than any other two men of their time. Their attitude towards life may, perhaps, be summarized in an account of the way in which they interpret the doctrine of Evolution. Mr. Shaw believes that the Life Force, which ordinary men call God, is an Imperfect Thing seeking to make Itself Perfect. How, when you contemplate the miseries and inequalities and cruelties of existence, can you believe in an All-Powerful God? he says. You must believe that these horrible things happen because God cannot prevent them from happening. The blind-alley argument that the Almighty inflicts pain upon us for our good is insupportable when one considers that an earthly father would not subject his child to convulsions or cause a cancer to consume its life or endow it with a cruel disposition if such things were within his powers of disposal. If, one reasonably argues, an earthly father is incapable of such acts, how less likely is God to be capable of them if He be All-Powerful and All-Good? Since these inexplicable cruelties and horrors occur and recur, surely, argues Mr. Shaw, it is only common sense to assume that they do so in spite of God's good will towards man. Starting from this premise, he goes on to argue that God seeks to obtain that control over material things which He has not yet succeeded in obtaining. He imagines God engaged in a magnificent research, the discovery of a harmonious universe, much in the way in which one imagines a biologist in his laboratory seeking for a preventative of disease. The Life Force uses such instruments for its purpose as are to be found lying at hand. When these prove abortive or useless or insufficient, the Life Force invents a new instrument which it uses until that instrument, too, is found to be useless or inadequate and is scrapped in favour of a new instrument. Like all creators, God must express Himself through His creatures, and the whole of Time has been spent so far in finding a suitable means of expression. In the beginning, God used mammoth beasts, but finding them unsuitable for His purpose, He scrapped them and invented other creatures until at last He achieved His best instrument, Man. God's latest and finest creature differs from all His other creatures in this respect that he is conscious of God's purpose and can help it forward or hold it back. God concealed His intention from all the instruments that preceded the advent of Man, but, in the development of His Being, He found that greater advantage would accrue to Him if He made His instrument aware of its purpose. So we get the reason of Man. God, before the creation of Man, had depended upon Himself. After the creation of Man, he depended partly upon Himself, partly upon His creature. Man, in short, was the first of God's instruments to have the power to help God to realize Himself. To Mr. Shaw, it is an obscuring of God's purpose for Man continually to pray, "God help me!" when it is part of his purpose and duty to affirm, "I will help God!" I have already quoted his dictum that we should so live that when we die, God is in our debt.

It is obvious, from this belief, that Mr. Shaw does not believe in the inevitable march of mankind from bad to good and from good to better. We may be marching towards Utopia or the New Jerusalem, or we may be marching back to Chaos. Man, having the choice between helping God and thwarting Him, may so vex the Deity that He will become impatient with him and throw this instrument away as he has thrown away other useless instruments, and seek for a better one. God scrapped the mammoth beasts because they were not adequate for the execution of His design; He may scrap Man for the same reason or because Man, while adequate, wilfully refuses to help. This theory is expressed continually in Mr. Shaw's plays and prefaces, for example, in a speech by Cæsar in "Cæsar and Cleopatra," where the Emperor gives expression to a violent antipathy to war. War, in Mr. Shaw's mind, is a plain perversion of God's purpose, and he would probably declare that Man, in the Great War whose end may yet be a bloody battle between the Allies, almost reached the end of God's patience. In five years, the British alone had eight hundred thousand of her most valuable men killed. France lost double that number killed. Germany lost more even than France killed. All the potentialities for good, all the fervour and chivalry and idealism and courage that was in those men, their ability to help God to achieve perfection, has vanished utterly from the world; and there is nothing left of it. Most of them died without progeny, and so there is not even the hope that their spirit has passed on to their children and that, at the worst, God's purpose has only been suspended for a generation. They have gone, irretrievably gone. Another such war and Western civilization must perish, if, indeed, it has not already begun to decay. In other words, God, sickened by Man's perversity and wilful obstruction, will have scrapped him....

That is the Shavian doctrine of the Life Force, put plainly and simply.

Mr. Wells differs very sharply from Mr. Shaw in his doctrine. Mr. Shaw believes that the progress from bad to good is not inevitable: Mr. Wells believes that it is, and he produces the records of history to support his belief. Mankind, at this moment, he will admit, is in a very bloody mess, but that mess is not so frightful as, say, the mess after the Thirty Years' War. We, who contemplate the organized Murder of Youth which began in August, 1914, may fairly feel that mankind has sunk very low in barbarism, but when we survey the whole range of humanity so far as it has been recorded, the depths of 1914, deep though they are, appear to be slightly less dreadful than the depths of other days. There is a greater revolt from organized Murder to-day than there was after the Thirty Years' War. There are fewer people to-day who prate about the glories of war than there were then. (Oddly enough, or perhaps naturally enough, most of the people who still think of war as a jolly adventure live in America.) We are a little nearer to a realization of the commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" than we were before 1914. We are learning that there are no qualifications or exceptions to that commandment. It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill—except in defence of small nationalities!" It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill—except for the purpose of self-determination!" It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill—except for the establishment of a Republic in Ireland!" It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill—except for the purpose of preserving the Empire!" Tersely and without modification, it states that "Thou Shalt Not Kill" in any circumstances whatever.

Here is a dilemma from which the Christian cannot easily escape, and the difficulty of doing so, apart from all ordinary considerations of decency, is bringing man sharply face to face with the fundamentals of human existence. In spite of much occasion for pessimism to-day, there is occasion for greater optimism than man ever before has had. There is a social consciousness at work in our minds and hearts that will yet deliver us from the wicked man. How few are the years since the days when men in one part of England made war on men in another part! How unthinkable it is that men in Lancaster should make war to-day in Yorkshire! True, it is less than a century since men in the Northern States of America made war on men in the Southern States. True, it is less than ten years since men in Ulster prepared themselves to make war on men in the rest of Ireland. True, at this moment, Russian fights Russian, and Sinn Feiner slays Orangeman, and Orangeman slays Sinn Feiner. True, that white man burns black man, that Christian persecutes Jew, true all this and worse, yet it remains true that when the records of time are made up and just balances are drawn in the accounts of Mankind, there is seen to be a greater perception of common purpose to-day than there was a century ago.

His scientific and historic sense keeps Mr. Wells secure in his belief that Man, although he may hinder the development of God's purpose, cannot thwart it. Mr. Shaw would perhaps agree with Mr. Wells in his belief that God's Will must ultimately find adequate expression, but he would insist that that expression may be through another instrument than man. Mr. Wells, however, would not yield to him on this point; he would insist that God's Will must ultimately find adequate expression through man. Man may, indeed be obliterated by plague and pestilence or cosmic disaster, but, failing those, man must achieve God's purpose.