“It was easy for Ruskin to lay down the rule of dying rather than doing unjustly; but death is a plain thing, justice a very obscure thing. How is an ordinary man to draw the line between right and wrong otherwise than by accepting public opinion on the subject; and what more conclusive expression of sincere public opinion can there be than market demand? Even when we repudiate that and fall back on our own judgment, the matter gathers doubt rather than clearness. The popular notion of morality and piety is to simply beg all the more important questions in life for other people; but when these questions come home to ourselves, we suddenly discover that the devil's advocate has a stronger case than we thought: we remember that the way of righteousness or death was the way of the Inquisition; that hell is paved, not with bad intentions but with good ones.”—An Essay on Modern Glove Fighting appended to Cashel Byron's Profession.
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.”