Wells and Shaw are quite commonly bracketed like Scylla and Charybdis, Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, and the Royal Bloodsweating Chesterbelloc of Holy Writ. These couplings are often absurd but rarely arbitrary. Some likeness of thought or mood or some contrast of viewpoint usually accounts for if not justifies such literary mésalliances. Wells and Shaw are both socialists, but this is not the tie, for, as the English aristocrat said: "We are all socialists now." The real likeness is that each is an intellectual anarchist, although a political Socialist. Shaw is an isolated, not to say eccentric, figure even for a Socialist. Wells has gone further yet in his self-isolation by leaving the Fabian movement. But the unlikeness between the two men lies in the motive driving them to their respective hermitages. Shaw may often change his point of view, but at any given moment it is almost brutally clear and detailed, and he insists upon the fullest conformity on the part of his would-be followers. If they fall a step short of his iron boundary they are mere Philistines and bourgeois, if they go a step beyond they are inefficient and contemptible sentimental revolutionists. Shaw always has "doots o' Jamie's orthodoxy." But Wells seeks a Socialism without boundaries. Marxian Socialism, Fabian Socialism, State Socialism are all too narrow and dogmatic for his taste as he has said time and time again. Finding no true all-inclusive, universe-wide Socialism he erects his own banner for the nations to rally to and as a result suffers the universal fate of those who try to found Churches of Humanity and World Languages, that is, merely succeeding in founding a new sect and a new dialect.
Shaw has two defects which militate against his popularity; first, he is too conventional, and, second, his conventions are peculiarly his own. "There is," says his Undershaft, "only one true morality for every man, but not every man has the same morality." Shaw is easily shocked, but never by the same things that shock other people.
He himself ascribes his inability to see the same as others to his sight being abnormally normal. The oculist who examined them said they were the only pair of absolutely correct eyes he had ever come across.
Of course this illusion of possessing perfect mental vision is common to everybody. All the opinions I hold at this moment are, I believe, absolutely correct; otherwise I should change them instanter, though I must admit, seeing how often I have erred in the past, that a priori the chances are against my being altogether right now. But what Shaw means by his normality of vision is not merely common confidence in one's own orthodoxy, but has reference to his fanatical efforts to tear away all the illusions of life and see things as they are. I do not think that he often succeeds. Isis has many veils, and those who have torn away the first and the second are all the more likely to be deceived in mistaking the third for the naked truth.
There is no doubting Shaw's intent to undeceive the world or his willingness to undeceive himself. "My way of joking is to tell the truth," says his Father Keegan in "John Bull's Other Island." But when he strains his eyes to see something clearly he sees only that one thing. By following consistently one line of logic—instead of several as he should—he gets tangled up in illogicalities. His mode of reasoning is often the reductio ad absurdum of his own theories, and this is not a persuasive way of argumentation.
By temperament Shaw is a mystic, but his conscience compels him to assume the method of cold intellectualism. He is an artist in the disguise of a scientist, not an uncommon thing to see in this so-called age of science.
Probably Shaw is not more inconsistent than any man of agile mind who is capable of seeing in succession different sides of a thing, but he is franker in expressing the point of view he holds at the time. Consequently he has many admirers but few followers. They can't keep up. The only possible Shavian is Shaw.
As somebody has remarked there are two ways of saying a thing; there are writers who provoke thought and writers who provoke thinkers. Shaw does both. This is intentional, and he defends it on the ground that; "If you don't say a thing in an irritating way, you may just as well not say it at all—since nobody will trouble themselves about anything that does not trouble them." In short Shaw first got the ear of the public by pulling it, and he does not know how to let go. Shaw's argument is a wedge, but it is driven in blunt end first. A startling statement, some monstrous paradox, is presented to the reader and rouses his antagonism, then it is gradually qualified and whittled down, or wittily diverted, so that it seems, in contrast to its first form, quite innocuous and acceptable, and the reader is so relieved at not having to swallow the dose first presented to him that he willingly takes more than he otherwise would. Shaw has not the judicial mind and does not want to have. "The way to get at the merits of a case," he says "is not to listen to a fool who imagines himself impartial, but to get it argued with reckless bias for and against." Put this on your bookmark when you read Shaw.
George Bernard Shaw's collection of opinions is unique. Perhaps no single view of his is quite original, but the combination certainly is. He belongs to no type and has founded no school. This makes Shaw an exasperating person for some people to read and causes them to set him down as frivolous or inconsistent. They find, for instance, from "The Revolutionist's Handbook" that Shaw believes in eugenics and the importance of natural science. "Good!" people say, "now we can classify him." They read "The Doctor's Dilemma" and find him a rabid antivivisectionist and filled with a profound contempt for modern medicine in general. Or they find out that he is a vegetarian, a teetotaler, and a Puritan, and classify him as some nonconformist minister of a pallid and overconscientious type. When they read what he actually has to say about marriage in "Misalliance", about popular religion and salvation by money and gunpowder in "Major Barbara", they rush to the opposite conclusion that he is constitutionally an unconstitutional rebel with a fondness for aimless violence such as appears in "Fanny's First Play." Reading "The Conversion of Blanco Bosnet" they discover that he is a devout Theist. Reading the preface to "Androcles" they find him a higher critic. As a Fabian pamphleteer he is in favor of abolishing all individual property of a productive sort and has no use for laissez faire. But when it comes to children (see "Misalliance") there cannot be too much laissez faire. He appears as an ultramodernist, a universal cynic, a disillusioned Ibsenite, and a disbeliever in the very existence of progress. (Preface to "Man and Superman".) He offended half the radicals by his "Impossibilities of Anarchism" and the other half by his "Illusions of Socialism", and the conservatives by both.
But those who will take the trouble to compare these apparent antinomies will find that the contradictions are not so great as they seem from their paradoxical and partisan form, and that Shaw has preserved his intellectual consistency to a remarkable degree.