“Suppress that phase of human activity which consists in the pursuit of illusions, and you suppress the greatest force in the world. Do not suppose that the pursuit of illusions is a vain pursuit: on the contrary, an illusion can no more exist without reality than a shadow without an object. Unfortunately the majority of men are so constituted that reality repels, while illusions attract them.”
With acute psychologic insight, Shaw draws the distinction between two classes of illusions: those which flatter and those which are indispensable. By flattering illusions he understands those which encourage us to make efforts to attain things which we do not know how to appreciate in their simple reality; either they reconcile us to our lot, or else to actions we are obliged to take contrary to the dictates of conscience. These are, indeed, deplorable consequences in the eyes of the humanitarian meliorist who believes that to be reconciled to one's lot is the worst fate that can befall mankind, and who once said that the one real tragedy in life is the being used by personally-minded men for purposes which you yourself recognize to be base.
The métier of Bernard Shaw is the destruction, not of the indispensable illusions which support the social structure and ultimately make for the uplift of humanity, but of those treacherously flattering illusions which ensnare men in the toils of an existence for which they have not the requisite passion, courage, faith, endurance and self-restraint. “In my plays,” Shaw wrote in the Vienna Zeit, “you will not be teased and plagued with happiness, goodness and virtue, or with crime and romance, or, indeed, with any senseless thing of that sort. My plays have only one subject: life; and only one attribute: interest in life.”[220] It is a mistake of the German dramatic critic, Heinrich Stümcke, to aver that the quintessence of Shaw is nil admirari. It would be far nearer the truth to say that he wonders at everything in this demented, moon-struck world. The law of contrasts is the motif of his art. He is never so brilliant as in the portrayal of opposites.
With the transcendent egotism of the genius, he unhesitatingly claims to see more clearly than humanity at large, to have ever fought illusion, denied the ideal, and scorned to call things by other than their real names.[221] Thus we see him always in search of what Walter Pater was fond of calling la vraie vérité, challenging the old formulas with the new ideas, transvaluing moral values with Nietzschean fervour, and bidding humanity stand from behind its artificial barriers of custom, law, religion and morality, and dare to speak and live the truth. In his capacity of realistic critic of contemporary civilization, he is neither surprised nor confounded to encounter scepticism on all hands. Indeed, he is wise enough to expect it, since he has observed that, when reality at last presents itself to men nourished on dramatic illusions, they have lost the power to recognize it.
Bernard Shaw, as Alfred Kerr has put it, is a distinct ethical gain for our generation. His prime characteristic as a propagandist—and his deficiency as a dramatist—is found in his assertion that the quintessential function of comedy is the destruction of old-established morals. Hence it is that his plays are conceived in a militant spirit—in the Molièresque key of Les Précieuses Ridicules, or the Ibsenic key of An Enemy of the People. His drama may roughly be defined as the conflict of the Shavian Ausschauung with conventional dogma. Like Brieux, he has ingeniously employed the drama as a means of giving lectures. He frankly confesses that his object is to make people uncomfortable, to make them thoroughly ashamed of themselves. “Molière and I are much alike,” he once remarked to me; “we both attack pedantry.”[222] Shaw does not wish to drain the drama of all feeling; he merely wishes to make feeling subsidiary to logic. He regards the portrayal of emotion, not as an end in itself, but as an incentive to thought. “You cannot witness A Doll's House without feeling,” he once said, “and, as an inevitable consequence, thinking.” He wishes to set up, in the minds of his audience, a train of reflections and meditations which may alter their own lives, which may influence the whole world. For, as Emerson says, “To think is to act.” Shaw's object is to create a true drama of ideas, having for its normal material “problem, with its remorseless logic and iron framework of fact.” He would have intellect predominate over sentiment; will engineered by idea, and not unreasoning passion, the controlling factor. Bernard Shaw is frequently charged with being devoid of feeling. Shaw is less influenced by or concerned with mere personal feeling than anyone I have ever known; but his whole being is vibrant with passion for the welfare of society. If social pity is the underlying motive of the later Russian novelists, social indignation seems to be the guiding principle of Bernard Shaw. To him, social thought has become a genuine passion.
The quintessence of the Shavian drama is the Shavian philosophy. Shaw's theatre may be defined as an effort to depict naked instincts upon the stage; this is the meaning of his “scientific natural history.” He has sought to project instinctive temperaments, alive and potent, before our very eyes. The inspiring words of Zola at the funeral of Edmond de Goncourt might well have served as the motto for his principal figures: “Ah! to have intellectual courage! To tell the truth and the whole truth, even if it cost one peace and friends; never to consider any convention, to go to the end of one's thought, careless of consequence. Nothing is rarer, nothing is finer, nothing is grander.” Unhampered by such scrupulousness as that of Mark Twain, who declared that it was immodest to tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies, Shaw's leading characters are ever in quest of truth and freedom. They seek truth in unflinching recognition of facts, freedom in emancipation from slavery to the false idealism of romantic convention. They are libertines, in the original and not the perverted sense of the word, with judgment unbiased by traditional influence or contemporary prejudice. They are natural, not so much in the sense of being perfect replicas of contemporary men and women—for they are often little more than personified aspects of Shavianism—as in the sense of being in a state of nature in regard to whim, eccentricity, fancy, impulse, passion. There is a sort of complex and advanced juvenility about Shaw's characters; they are the enfants gâtés of modern drama. In them are concretely delineated the outlines of the Shavian philosophy: “Duty is the thing one should never do,” “Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it,” “Sentimentality is the error of supposing that quarter can be given or taken in moral conflicts.” The difference between moral and right, for these Shavians, is the difference between doing what you ought to do and what you want to do. Shakespeare's “To thine own self be true” is insufficient; the modern sociologist knows that it is imperative to realize, not only what you are, but where you are. After studying the possibilities, not the restrictions, of their environment, the Shavian characters go straight ahead and do what they choose. Shaw outranks Ibsen himself in the individualistic injunction “Live your own life.”
In his own admirable way, Shaw has given us a succinct exposition of his conception of the Shavian drama. Asked if he wrote plays to make fun of people, Shaw replied, more in sorrow than in anger:
“People talk all this nonsense about my plays because they have been to the theatre so much that they have lost their sense of the unreality and insincerity of the romantic drama. They take stage human nature for real human nature, whereas, of course, real human nature is the bitterest satire on stage human nature. The result is that when I try to put real human nature on the stage they think that I am laughing at them. They flatter themselves enormously, for I am not thinking of them at all. I am simply writing natural history very carefully and laboriously; and they are expecting something else. I can imagine a Japanese who had ordered a family portrait of himself, and expected it to be in the Japanese convention as to design, being exceedingly annoyed if the artist handed him a photograph, however artistic, because it was like him in a natural way. He would accuse the photographer of making fun of him and of having his tongue in his cheek.
“But there is a deeper reason for this attitude of mind. People imagine that 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. Now it is a part of my gift as a dramatist that I know that these conventions do not supply them with their motives. They make very plausible ex post facto excuses for their conduct; but the real motives are deep down in the will itself.
“And so an infinite comedy arises in everyday life from the contrast between the real motives and the alleged artificial motives; and when the dramatist refuses to be imposed upon, and forces his audience to laugh at the imposture, there is always a desperate effort to cover up the scandal and save the face of the conventional by the new convention that whoever refuses to play the conventional game is a cynic and a satirist, a farceur, a person whom no one takes seriously.”[223]