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]