Progress, from Shaw's point of view, means increased command over self; this lamentable desideratum is the cause of his scepticism. But let us observe the open-minded, clear-eyed consistency of Shaw. While heartily subscribing to the metaphysics of Schopenhauer, he yet as heartily refuses to accept his pessimistic philosophy. At one with Darwin and Huxley in their scientific, realistic, yet anarchistic challenge of the validity of Biblical theology, Shaw, by his deliberate rejection of their materialistic views, occupies the opposite pole of conviction. It is useless to pretend to a “generation which has ceased to believe in heaven and has not yet learned that the degradation by poverty of four out of every five of its number is artificial,” that the “pessimism of Koheleth, Shakespeare, Dryden and Swift can be refuted if the world progresses solely by the destruction of the unfit, and yet can only maintain its civilization by manufacturing the unfit in swarms of which that appalling proportion of four to one represents but the comparatively fit survivors.” To Shaw, progress means, not an effect of the survival of the fittest brought about by the destruction of the unfit, but the growth of the spirit of man. He has refused to accept the Darwinian theory of evolution, since it “only accounted for progress at all on the hypothesis of a continuous increase in the severity of the conditions of existence—that is, on an assumption of just the reverse of what was actually taking place”—a fact which escaped Huxley. He finds in the world no signs of progress in the humanitarian and ethical sense; only a few more discoveries in physics. And even the much-trumpeted “increased command over nature,” harnessing continents, circling the globe, and so on, as an argument for progress vanishes before the inevitable query as to whether a negro of to-day using a telephone is superior to George Washington. Shaw rails at the “theistic credulity” of Voltaire as he rails at the “tribal soothsayings” of Huxley. As he recently wrote me: “I have not escaped from a literal belief in the Book of Genesis only to fall back into the gross blindness of seeing nothing in the world but the result of natural selection operating on a chapter of accidents, which is popular Darwinism.”
In that most whimsical and witty essay, entitled, The Conflict Between Science and Common Sense, Shaw declares that he has “found out” the man of science: “In future my attitude towards him will be one of more or less polite incredulity. Impostor for impostor, I prefer the mystic to the scientist—the man who at least has the decency to call his nonsense a mystery, to him who pretends that it is ascertained, weighed, measured, analyzed fact.” In a sense, Shaw's part in the humanitarian campaign against vivisection, modern science generally, vaccination, education, flogging, “cannibalism,” and so on, are all part of his attitude as a “mystic.” He has no faith in the scientist with his specious invitation: “My friend, by a diabolically cruel process I have procured a revoltingly filthy substance. Allow me to inject this under your skin, and you can never get hydrophobia, or enteric fever, or diphtheria, etc. I have even a very choice preparation, of unmentionable nastiness, which will enable you, if not to live for ever (though I think that quite possible), at least to renew in your old age the excesses of your youth.” While the average man, with incomprehensible credulity, jumps at the bait, Shaw refuses to be so easily duped. While science has taught him that dirt is “only matter in the wrong place,” his own common sense has taught him that “disease is only matter in the wrong condition, and that to inject matter in the wrong condition into matter in the right condition (healthy flesh, to wit) is to put matter in the wrong place with a vengeance.” In the public prints, in his novels and plays, notably, Cashel Byron's Profession and The Philanderer, Shaw has fulminated as vigorously against vivisection as against vaccination. From the first he perceived that the vivisector was “just the same phenomenon in science as the dynamiter in politics, and that to all humane men both methods of research and reform, effective or not, were eternally barred, precisely as highway robbery is barred as a method of supporting one's family.” His persistent vegetarianism is not based upon a scientific inquiry into the amount of hydrocarbons, uric acid, or what not deleterious stuff there may be in meat, but in his perfectly natural and humane distaste for the shedding of blood. “I have not the slightest doubt myself,” he once said, “that a diet of nice tender babies, carefully selected, cleanly killed and tenderly cooked, would make us far healthier and handsomer than the haphazard dinners of to-day, whether carnivorous or vegetarian.... There is no objection whatever to a baby from a nitrogenous point of view. Eaten with sugar, or with beer, it would leave nothing to be desired in the way of carbon. My sole objection to such a diet is that it happens to be repugnant to me. I prefer bread and butter.” Shaw's “three centuries” of life have taught him, mainly, to regard “men's principles as excuses for doing what they want to do.” And in the moral sphere, he contends that “the world remains as dependent as ever on pure dogmatic, instinctive recoil from suffering on the one hand, and pure dogmatic, instinctive love of inflicting it on the other. Common to both these temperaments, and to the compound temperament in which they struggle for mastery, is the timid perception that society can only exist through a compact to live and let live.... All sorts of virtuously indignant persons, clamouring for all sorts of vulgar retaliations, from the kicking of a cad to the humiliation of a minister by an election defeat, are indulging the destructive instincts under cover of solicitude for the common weal, as unmistakably as the scientist who, with a thousand humane departments of research open to him, deliberately prefers cruel experiments, and pleads that the man who ascertains how long it takes to bake a dog to death confers as great a boon on humanity as the man who discovers the Röntgen rays and their application to surgery. The cruel (loving to read the description of his experiments), the selfish (hoping for cures), the sportsman (anxious to be kept in countenance), and the cowardly (seeking an excuse for tolerating an evil they dare not attack) will accept his excuse: the humane will not. The final conflict is not between the excuses in their logical disguise of scientific arguments, but between the cruel will and the humane will.”
A leading cause for Shaw's “divine discontent” with progress, with moral systems, with institutions, with “regimentation,” with flogging in the navy, vaccination, science, cannibalism, and a thousand other things, is his loss of faith in education. He has lost his illusions on the subject. Education and culture, he maintains, are for the most part “nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.” He sees Masters of Art as “patentees of highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the majority but half valid, representations of life.” This is the natural attitude for one who said only the other day that “great communities are built by men who sign with a mark: they are wrecked by men who write Latin verses.” The ruthless repression which we practise on our fellow creatures whilst they are still too small to defend themselves, he insists, ends in their “reaching their full bodily growth in a hopelessly lamed and intimidated condition, unable to conceive of any forces in the world except physically coercive and socially conventional ones.” “Modern” education, he declares, “differs from Dr. Johnson's education only in substituting Jenner and Pasteur for Plato and Euripides as academic idols, and replacing the recognition of a purpose in the world, and the investigation of that purpose, by a conception of the universe as the accidental result of a senseless raging of mechanical forces, and by a boundless credulity, not outdone in dirt, cruelty, and stupidity, by any known savage tribe, as to the possibility of circumventing these forces by nostrums and conjurations.” The hope of the world lies in the development of individuality and self-reliance. Real live learning would soon flourish on the boundless basis of human curiosity and ambition.[238]
A Plaster Bust of Shaw.
Made in forty minutes.
Prince Paul Toubetzkoy.
Courtesy of the Sculptor
Bernard Shaw is not a materialist or natural selectionist, but in direct line of descent, astounding as the contrast may appear, from Schopenhauer, Lamarck and Samuel Butler. Shaw does not subscribe to the belief that goodness implies that “man is vicious by nature, and that supreme goodness is supreme martyrdom.” A fundamental tenet of his philosophic faith is the conviction that “progress can do nothing but make the most of us all as we are.” This conviction has more or less consciously animated him all through his career. Within his secret soul, Shaw has always cherished a radiant and gorgeous hope for humanity, always unconsciously trod the rainbow bridge from the real to the ideal. In his heart, he has whispered Ibsen's thought, “The expression of our own individuality is our first duty.” A dream of human perfectibility has lured him on: the dearest foe of this arrant realist has ever been—an ideal. As a youth he revelled in the Shelley of Prometheus Unbound; young manhood found him working upon the hypothesis of the Economic Man. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw sang of the new man, the sovereign individual—in Nietzsche's phrase, “the possessor of a long infrangible will, who has, in his possession, his standard of valuation.” He had found out the impossibilities of anarchism before he came to Wagner; his clearer vision and enlarged horizon enabled him to realize that “the individual Siegfried has come often enough, only to find himself confronted with the alternative of government or destruction at the hands of his fellows who are not Siegfrieds.” At last he began to realize that “it is necessary to breed a race of men in whom the life-giving impulses predominate before the New Protestantism becomes politically practicable.” The matured form of his ideal is the ethical man, convinced of the bankruptcy of education and progress, inspired with the faith of the world-will, and resolved, not to adopt a new philosophy, but to develop and perfect the human species. “To rise above ourselves to ourselves”—that is the creed of the new faith, of the humanitarian artificial selectionist concerned even more for the future of the race than for the freedom of his own instincts. Every phase in Shaw's career, it cannot be too strongly insisted upon, is the legitimate and logical outcome of his Socialism. His philosophy is the consistent integration of his empirical criticisms of society and its present organization, founded on authority and based upon Capitalism. And to the Socialist, nothing is necessary for the realization of Utopia but that man should will it. “Man will never be that which he can and should be,” wrote Wagner, “until by a conscious following of that inner natural necessity, which is the only true necessity, he makes his life a mirror of nature, and frees himself from his thraldom to outer artificial counterfeits. Then will he first become a living man, who now is a mere wheel in the mechanism of this or that Religion, Nationality or State.” The fact faced by the Shavian philosophy is that Man does not effectively will perfection. The quintessence of Shavianism is that “he never will until he becomes Superman.”[239]
The cardinal point in the New Theology as enunciated by Bernard Shaw is the identification of God with the Life Force. “There are two mutually contradictory ideas which cut across each other in regard to the relative powers of God and Man,” Mr. Shaw once said to me in the course of a long discussion of his religious views. “According to the popular conception, God always creates beings inferior to Himself: the creator must be greater than the creature. I find myself utterly unable to accept this horrible old idea, involving as it does the belief that all the cruelty in the world is the work of an omnipotent God, who, if He liked, could have left cruelty out of creation. If God could have created anything better, do you suppose He would have been content to create such miserable failures as you and me?
“As a matter of fact,” he continued, “we know that in all art, literature, politics, sociology—in every phase of genuine life and vitality—man's highest aspiration is to create something higher than himself. So God, the Life Force, has been struggling for countless ages to become conscious of Himself—to express Himself in forms higher and ever higher up in the scale of evolution. God does not take pride in making a grub-worm because it is lower than Himself. On the contrary, the grub is a mere symbol of His desire for self-expression.”