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.