Balsquith—The Germans have laid down four more Dreadnoughts.
Mitchener—Then you must lay down twelve.
Balsquith—Oh, yes; it's easy to say that; but think of what they'll cost.
Mitchener—Think of what it would cost to be invaded by Germany and forced to pay an indemnity of five hundred millions....
Balsquith—After all, why should the Germans invade us?
Mitchener—Why shouldn't they? What else have their army to do? What else are they building a navy for?
Balsquith—Well, we never think of invading Germany.
Mitchener—Yes, we do. I have thought of nothing else for the last ten years. Say what you will, Balsquith, the Germans have never recognized, and until they get a stern lesson, they never will recognize, the plain fact that the interests of the British Empire are paramount, and that the command of the sea belongs by nature to England.
Balsquith—But if they wont recognize it, what can I do?
Mitchener—Shoot them down.
Balsquith—I cant shoot them down.
Mitchener—Yes, you can. You dont realize it; but if you fire a rifle into a German he drops just as surely as a rabbit does.
Balsquith—But dash it all, man, a rabbit hasn't got a rifle and a German has. Suppose he shoots you down.
Mitchener—Excuse me, Balsquith; but that consideration is what we call cowardice in the army. A soldier always assumes that he is going to shoot, not to be shot.
Balsquith—Oh, come! I like to hear you military people talking of cowardice. Why, you spend your lives in an ecstasy of terror of imaginary invasions. I don't believe you ever go to bed without looking under it for a burglar.
Mitchener—A very sensible precaution,
Balsquith. I always take it. And in consequence I've never been burgled.
Balsquith—Neither have I. Anyhow dont you taunt me with cowardice. I never look under my bed for a burglar. I'm not always looking under the nation's bed for an invader. And if it comes to fighting, Im quite willing to fight without being three to one.
Mitchener—These are the romantic ravings of a Jingo civilian, Balsquith. At least you'll not deny that the absolute command of the sea is essential to our security.
Balsquith—The absolute command of the sea is essential to the security of the principality of Monaco. But Monaco isn't going to get it.
Mitchener—And consequently Monaco enjoys no security. What a frightful thing! How do the inhabitants sleep with the possibility of invasion, of bombardment, continually present to their minds? Would you have our English slumbers broken in this way? Are we also to live without security?
Balsquith—Yes. Theres no such thing as security in the world; and there never can be as long as men are mortal. England will be secure when England is dead, just as the streets of London will be safe when there is no longer a man in her streets to be run over, or a vehicle to run over him. When you military chaps ask for security you are crying for the moon.
Mitchener—Let me tell you, Balsquith, that in these days of aeroplanes and Zeppelin airships, the question of the moon is becoming one of the greatest importance. It will be reached at no very distant date. Can you as an Englishman tamely contemplate the possibility of having to live under a German moon? The British flag must be planted there at all hazards.
The play ends with the establishment of universal military training and equal suffrage, thus doing away with a militarism that was both timorous and tyrannical, snobbish and inefficient, and at the same time making the nation truly democratic. It is characteristic of Shaw that recently, when the papers were discussing what sort of a monument should commemorate Edith Cavell, he interjected the unwelcome suggestion that the country could honor her best by enfranchising her sex.
There is ever something in Bernard Shaw that suggests the eighteenth century, the age of Swift and Voltaire and Doctor Johnson. On the credit side we must reckon lucidity, incisive wit, cleareyed logic, unashamed common sense, love of discussion and openness to new ideas, freedom from prejudice of race or class, humanitarian aspiration —in a word the Aufklärung. On the debit side some items must unhappily be listed also: doctrinaire intellectualism, inability to see either the limits of one's own doctrines or the point in other people's, inadequate appreciation of historic institutions and popular sentiments, contempt for romance, intolerance for science, and incapacity for poetry.
Shaw seems to have inherited the famous saeva indignatio of his great countryman, Swift. For all his simple diet he is not so eupeptic as Chesterton. Chesterton is most closely akin to Dickens, as may be seen from his sympathetic appreciations of Dickens's works. If I may be permitted to express the relationship of the four in a mathematical formula, I should put it:
Shaw: Chesterton = Swift: Dickens.
The mordant wit of the two Irishmen is a very different thing from the genial humor of the two Englishmen. Chesterton as usual makes a theological issue out of it. He says of Shaw:
He is not a humorist, but a great wit, almost as great as Voltaire. Humor is akin to agnosticism, which is only the negative side of mysticism. But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees consistency in things is a wit—and a Calvinist. The man who sees inconsistency in things is a humorist—and a Catholic. However this may be, Bernard Shaw exhibits all that is purest in the Puritan; the desire to see truth face to face even if it slay us, the high impatience with irrelevant sentiment or obstructive symbol; the constant effort to keep the soul at its highest pressure and speed. His instincts upon all social customs and questions are Puritan. His favorite author is Bunyan. But along with what was inspiring and direct in Puritanism, Bernard Shaw has inherited also some of the things that were cumbersome and traditional. If ever Shaw exhibits a prejudice it is a Puritan prejudice.
When Shaw in the preface of his "Plays for Puritans" declared himself "a Puritan in art" it was regarded as one of his jokes. So it was, but, as the world has found out since, his jokes are not nonsense. The main reason why the assumption and ascription of the term "Puritan" to Shaw was thought absurd was because of the prevalent misconception of what sort of people the Puritans were. The word in its common acceptance implies orthodoxy, conventionality, prudishness, asceticism. Now the real Puritan was a revolutionary of the most radical type. Of all the socialists, anarchists, and extremists of various views with whom I am acquainted, there is not one who lives in antagonism to his conventional contemporaries on so many points as did the Puritan in his day. Milton's pamphlets in favor of republicanism, free speech, divorce, and new theology were as scandalous to the seventeenth century as Shaw's "Revolutionist's Handbook" to the nineteenth. The Puritans insisted that marriage was a purely civil contract to be made and annulled by the State, and they even forbade ministers to perform the ceremony, while Catholics, Roman and Anglican, hold the contrary theory, that marriage is a religious rite, only performed by priests and indissoluble. The Pilgrim Fathers who had a dozen children and two or three wives apiece—consecutive, of course—are not to be classed as ascetics; and if any one thinks them prudish, he has not read their literature.
Of course Shaw's opinions are different from those of the Puritans, indeed quite the opposite on some points. The Puritans, for example, were not averse to blood, either in their food, their politics, or their theology, while Shaw is almost Buddhistic in his tender-heartedness. Androcles is his caricature of himself. But still we may say that Shaw is puritanical in his type of mind, his attitude toward the established institutions and moral codes of his time, and even in his faults.
Consider for instance his intolerance. No, I do not mean dogmatism. That he comes to emphatic conclusions is much to his credit and differentiates him from the colloidal-minded mass of modern writers who hold no convictions to have the courage of. But he does not, for instance, content himself with the attitude: "For the life of me I can't see what you find to admire in that absurd, romantic, weak-minded, sentimental, butcherly Scott." He would be quite justified in expressing his opinion thus-wise. He must add: "There's nothing to him and if you say there is, you are deceiving me or—what is wickeder—yourself. In either case you are an Idealist, which in my unique vocabulary means liar." To which we might return an answer of the Quaker sort: "Friend, thee has two eyes and the usual number of brains and so a right to thine opinion. But it need not follow that because thee sees not a merit in a writer that it does in nowise exist." Every one of Shaw's early heroes and heroines, from the Unsocial Socialist and the daughter of Mrs. Warren to Undershaft and Larry Doyle, admires himself or herself immensely for saying to every upholder of supposedly current morality: "Bah! Humbug! Hypocrite!" To which again the gentle reply should come: "Friend, I be not an Humbug, nor yet an Hypocrite, nor even a Bah. A man may differ from thee and yet be sincere in his views, although this fact be dreamed not in thy philosophy. I may be right or I may be wrong, but if thee call me an Idealist yet again, lo, I will lift this brick and cast it at thee."