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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of George Bernard Shaw, by Gilbert K. Chesterton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: George Bernard Shaw
+
+Author: Gilbert K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: October 13, 2006 [EBook #19535]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sigal Alon, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
+
+
+_By_
+
+GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+MCMIX
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY
+JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+
+THE PLIMPTON PRESS, NORWOOD, MASS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+
+HERETICS.
+
+ORTHODOXY.
+
+THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL: A Romance.
+Illustrated by W. GRAHAM ROBERTSON.
+
+ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
+
+THE BALL AND THE CROSS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Introduction to the First Edition_
+
+
+Most people either say that they agree with Bernard Shaw or that they do
+not understand him. I am the only person who understands him, and I do
+not agree with him.
+
+                                                          G. K. C.
+
+
+
+
+_The Problem of a Preface_
+
+
+A peculiar difficulty arrests the writer of this rough study at the very
+start. Many people know Mr. Bernard Shaw chiefly as a man who would
+write a very long preface even to a very short play. And there is truth
+in the idea; he is indeed a very prefatory sort of person. He always
+gives the explanation before the incident; but so, for the matter of
+that, does the Gospel of St. John. For Bernard Shaw, as for the mystics,
+Christian and heathen (and Shaw is best described as a heathen mystic),
+the philosophy of facts is anterior to the facts themselves. In due time
+we come to the fact, the incarnation; but in the beginning was the Word.
+
+This produces upon many minds an impression of needless preparation and
+a kind of bustling prolixity. But the truth is that the very rapidity of
+such a man's mind makes him seem slow in getting to the point. It is
+positively because he is quick-witted that he is long-winded. A quick
+eye for ideas may actually make a writer slow in reaching his goal,
+just as a quick eye for landscapes might make a motorist slow in
+reaching Brighton. An original man has to pause at every allusion or
+simile to re-explain historical parallels, to re-shape distorted words.
+Any ordinary leader-writer (let us say) might write swiftly and smoothly
+something like this: "The element of religion in the Puritan rebellion,
+if hostile to art, yet saved the movement from some of the evils in
+which the French Revolution involved morality." Now a man like Mr. Shaw,
+who has his own views on everything, would be forced to make the
+sentence long and broken instead of swift and smooth. He would say
+something like: "The element of religion, as I explain religion, in the
+Puritan rebellion (which you wholly misunderstand) if hostile to
+art--that is what I mean by art--may have saved it from some evils
+(remember my definition of evil) in which the French Revolution--of
+which I have my own opinion--involved morality, which I will define for
+you in a minute." That is the worst of being a really universal sceptic
+and philosopher; it is such slow work. The very forest of the man's
+thoughts chokes up his thoroughfare. A man must be orthodox upon most
+things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
+
+Now the same difficulty which affects the work of Bernard Shaw affects
+also any book about him. There is an unavoidable artistic necessity to
+put the preface before the play; that is, there is a necessity to say
+something of what Bernard Shaw's experience means before one even says
+what it was. We have to mention what he did when we have already
+explained why he did it. Viewed superficially, his life consists of
+fairly conventional incidents, and might easily fall under fairly
+conventional phrases. It might be the life of any Dublin clerk or
+Manchester Socialist or London author. If I touch on the man's life
+before his work, it will seem trivial; yet taken with his work it is
+most important. In short, one could scarcely know what Shaw's doings
+meant unless one knew what he meant by them. This difficulty in mere
+order and construction has puzzled me very much. I am going to overcome
+it, clumsily perhaps, but in the way which affects me as most sincere.
+Before I write even a slight suggestion of his relation to the stage, I
+am going to write of three soils or atmospheres out of which that
+relation grew. In other words, before I write of Shaw I will write of
+the three great influences upon Shaw. They were all three there before
+he was born, yet each one of them is himself and a very vivid portrait
+of him from one point of view. I have called these three traditions:
+"The Irishman," "The Puritan," and "The Progressive." I do not see how
+this prefatory theorising is to be avoided; for if I simply said, for
+instance, that Bernard Shaw was an Irishman, the impression produced on
+the reader might be remote from my thought and, what is more important,
+from Shaw's. People might think, for instance, that I meant that he was
+"irresponsible." That would throw out the whole plan of these pages, for
+if there is one thing that Shaw is not, it is irresponsible. The
+responsibility in him rings like steel. Or, again, if I simply called
+him a Puritan, it might mean something about nude statues or "prudes on
+the prowl." Or if I called him a Progressive, it might be supposed to
+mean that he votes for Progressives at the County Council election,
+which I very much doubt. I have no other course but this: of briefly
+explaining such matters as Shaw himself might explain them. Some
+fastidious persons may object to my thus putting the moral in front of
+the fable. Some may imagine in their innocence that they already
+understand the word Puritan or the yet more mysterious word Irishman.
+The only person, indeed, of whose approval I feel fairly certain is Mr.
+Bernard Shaw himself, the man of many introductions.
+
+
+
+
+_CONTENTS_
+
+                                    _Page_
+INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION        5
+
+THE PROBLEM OF A PREFACE                 7
+
+THE IRISHMAN                            17
+
+THE PURITAN                             34
+
+THE PROGRESSIVE                         53
+
+THE CRITIC                              87
+
+THE DRAMATIST                          114
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER                        165
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
+
+
+
+
+_The Irishman_
+
+
+The English public has commonly professed, with a kind of pride, that it
+cannot understand Mr. Bernard Shaw. There are many reasons for it which
+ought to be adequately considered in such a book as this. But the first
+and most obvious reason is the mere statement that George Bernard Shaw
+was born in Dublin in 1856. At least one reason why Englishmen cannot
+understand Mr. Shaw is that Englishmen have never taken the trouble to
+understand Irishmen. They will sometimes be generous to Ireland; but
+never just to Ireland. They will speak to Ireland; they will speak for
+Ireland; but they will not hear Ireland speak. All the real amiability
+which most Englishmen undoubtedly feel towards Irishmen is lavished upon
+a class of Irishmen which unfortunately does not exist. The Irishman of
+the English farce, with his brogue, his buoyancy, and his tender-hearted
+irresponsibility, is a man who ought to have been thoroughly pampered
+with praise and sympathy, if he had only existed to receive them.
+Unfortunately, all the time that we were creating a comic Irishman in
+fiction, we were creating a tragic Irishman in fact. Never perhaps has
+there been a situation of such excruciating cross-purposes even in the
+three-act farce. The more we saw in the Irishman a sort of warm and weak
+fidelity, the more he regarded us with a sort of icy anger. The more the
+oppressor looked down with an amiable pity, the more did the oppressed
+look down with a somewhat unamiable contempt. But, indeed, it is
+needless to say that such comic cross-purposes could be put into a play;
+they have been put into a play. They have been put into what is perhaps
+the most real of Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays, _John Bull's Other Island_.
+
+It is somewhat absurd to imagine that any one who has not read a play by
+Mr. Shaw will be reading a book about him. But if it comes to that it is
+(as I clearly perceive) absurd to be writing a book about Mr. Bernard
+Shaw at all. It is indefensibly foolish to attempt to explain a man
+whose whole object through life has been to explain himself. But even in
+nonsense there is a need for logic and consistency; therefore let us
+proceed on the assumption that when I say that all Mr. Shaw's blood and
+origin may be found in _John Bull's Other Island_, some reader may
+answer that he does not know the play. Besides, it is more important to
+put the reader right about England and Ireland even than to put him
+right about Shaw. If he reminds me that this is a book about Shaw, I can
+only assure him that I will reasonably, and at proper intervals,
+remember the fact.
+
+Mr. Shaw himself said once, "I am a typical Irishman; my family came
+from Yorkshire." Scarcely anyone but a typical Irishman could have made
+the remark. It is in fact a bull, a conscious bull. A bull is only a
+paradox which people are too stupid to understand. It is the rapid
+summary of something which is at once so true and so complex that the
+speaker who has the swift intelligence to perceive it, has not the slow
+patience to explain it. Mystical dogmas are much of this kind. Dogmas
+are often spoken of as if they were signs of the slowness or endurance
+of the human mind. As a matter of fact, they are marks of mental
+promptitude and lucid impatience. A man will put his meaning mystically
+because he cannot waste time in putting it rationally. Dogmas are not
+dark and mysterious; rather a dogma is like a flash of lightning--an
+instantaneous lucidity that opens across a whole landscape. Of the same
+nature are Irish bulls; they are summaries which are too true to be
+consistent. The Irish make Irish bulls for the same reason that they
+accept Papal bulls. It is because it is better to speak wisdom
+foolishly, like the Saints, rather than to speak folly wisely, like the
+Dons.
+
+This is the truth about mystical dogmas and the truth about Irish bulls;
+it is also the truth about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw. Each of them
+is an argument impatiently shortened into an epigram. Each of them
+represents a truth hammered and hardened, with an almost disdainful
+violence until it is compressed into a small space, until it is made
+brief and almost incomprehensible. The case of that curt remark about
+Ireland and Yorkshire is a very typical one. If Mr. Shaw had really
+attempted to set out all the sensible stages of his joke, the sentence
+would have run something like this: "That I am an Irishman is a fact of
+psychology which I can trace in many of the things that come out of me,
+my fastidiousness, my frigid fierceness and my distrust of mere
+pleasure. But the thing must be tested by what comes from me; do not try
+on me the dodge of asking where I came from, how many batches of three
+hundred and sixty-five days my family was in Ireland. Do not play any
+games on me about whether I am a Celt, a word that is dim to the
+anthropologist and utterly unmeaning to anybody else. Do not start any
+drivelling discussions about whether the word Shaw is German or
+Scandinavian or Iberian or Basque. You know you are human; I know I am
+Irish. I know I belong to a certain type and temper of society; and I
+know that all sorts of people of all sorts of blood live in that society
+and by that society; and are therefore Irish. You can take your books of
+anthropology to hell or to Oxford." Thus gently, elaborately and at
+length, Mr. Shaw would have explained his meaning, if he had thought it
+worth his while. As he did not he merely flung the symbolic, but very
+complete sentence, "I am a typical Irishman; my family came from
+Yorkshire."
+
+What then is the colour of this Irish society of which Bernard Shaw,
+with all his individual oddity, is yet an essential type? One
+generalisation, I think, may at least be made. Ireland has in it a
+quality which caused it (in the most ascetic age of Christianity) to be
+called the "Land of Saints"; and which still might give it a claim to be
+called the Land of Virgins. An Irish Catholic priest once said to me,
+"There is in our people a fear of the passions which is older even than
+Christianity." Everyone who has read Shaw's play upon Ireland will
+remember the thing in the horror of the Irish girl at being kissed in
+the public streets. But anyone who knows Shaw's work will recognize it
+in Shaw himself. There exists by accident an early and beardless
+portrait of him which really suggests in the severity and purity of its
+lines some of the early ascetic pictures of the beardless Christ.
+However he may shout profanities or seek to shatter the shrines, there
+is always something about him which suggests that in a sweeter and more
+solid civilisation he would have been a great saint. He would have been
+a saint of a sternly ascetic, perhaps of a sternly negative type. But he
+has this strange note of the saint in him: that he is literally
+unworldly. Worldliness has no human magic for him; he is not bewitched
+by rank nor drawn on by conviviality at all. He could not understand
+the intellectual surrender of the snob. He is perhaps a defective
+character; but he is not a mixed one. All the virtues he has are heroic
+virtues. Shaw is like the Venus of Milo; all that there is of him is
+admirable.
+
+But in any case this Irish innocence is peculiar and fundamental in him;
+and strange as it may sound, I think that his innocence has a great deal
+to do with his suggestions of sexual revolution. Such a man is
+comparatively audacious in theory because he is comparatively clean in
+thought. Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their
+strength in forging chains for themselves; they alone know how strong
+the chains need to be. But there are other souls who walk the woods like
+Diana, with a sort of wild chastity. I confess I think that this Irish
+purity a little disables a critic in dealing, as Mr. Shaw has dealt,
+with the roots and reality of the marriage law. He forgets that those
+fierce and elementary functions which drive the universe have an impetus
+which goes beyond itself and cannot always easily be recovered. So the
+healthiest men may often erect a law to watch them, just as the
+healthiest sleepers may want an alarum clock to wake them up. However
+this may be, Bernard Shaw certainly has all the virtues and all the
+powers that go with this original quality in Ireland. One of them is a
+sort of awful elegance; a dangerous and somewhat inhuman daintiness of
+taste which sometimes seems to shrink from matter itself, as though it
+were mud. Of the many sincere things Mr. Shaw has said he never said a
+more sincere one than when he stated he was a vegetarian, not because
+eating meat was bad morality, but because it was bad taste. It would be
+fanciful to say that Mr. Shaw is a vegetarian because he comes of a race
+of vegetarians, of peasants who are compelled to accept the simple life
+in the shape of potatoes. But I am sure that his fierce fastidiousness
+in such matters is one of the allotropic forms of the Irish purity; it
+is to the virtue of Father Matthew what a coal is to a diamond. It has,
+of course, the quality common to all special and unbalanced types of
+virtue, that you never know where it will stop. I can feel what Mr. Shaw
+probably means when he says that it is disgusting to feast off dead
+bodies, or to cut lumps off what was once a living thing. But I can
+never know at what moment he may not feel in the same way that it is
+disgusting to mutilate a pear-tree, or to root out of the earth those
+miserable mandrakes which cannot even groan. There is no natural limit
+to this rush and riotous gallop of refinement.
+
+But it is not this physical and fantastic purity which I should chiefly
+count among the legacies of the old Irish morality. A much more
+important gift is that which all the saints declared to be the reward of
+chastity: a queer clearness of the intellect, like the hard clearness of
+a crystal. This certainly Mr. Shaw possesses; in such degree that at
+certain times the hardness seems rather clearer than the clearness. But
+so it does in all the most typical Irish characters and Irish attitudes
+of mind. This is probably why Irishmen succeed so much in such
+professions as require a certain crystalline realism, especially about
+results. Such professions are the soldier and the lawyer; these give
+ample opportunity for crimes but not much for mere illusions. If you
+have composed a bad opera you may persuade yourself that it is a good
+one; if you have carved a bad statue you can think yourself better than
+Michael Angelo. But if you have lost a battle you cannot believe you
+have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have
+got him off.
+
+There must be some sense in every popular prejudice, even about
+foreigners. And the English people certainly have somehow got an
+impression and a tradition that the Irishman is genial, unreasonable,
+and sentimental. This legend of the tender, irresponsible Paddy has two
+roots; there are two elements in the Irish which made the mistake
+possible. First, the very logic of the Irishman makes him regard war or
+revolution as extra-logical, an _ultima ratio_ which is beyond reason.
+When fighting a powerful enemy he no more worries whether all his
+charges are exact or all his attitudes dignified than a soldier worries
+whether a cannon-ball is shapely or a plan of campaign picturesque. He
+is aggressive; he attacks. He seems merely to be rowdy in Ireland when
+he is really carrying the war into Africa--or England. A Dublin
+tradesman printed his name and trade in archaic Erse on his cart. He
+knew that hardly anybody could read it; he did it to annoy. In his
+position I think he was quite right. When one is oppressed it is a mark
+of chivalry to hurt oneself in order to hurt the oppressor. But the
+English (never having had a real revolution since the Middle Ages) find
+it very hard to understand this steady passion for being a nuisance, and
+mistake it for mere whimsical impulsiveness and folly. When an Irish
+member holds up the whole business of the House of Commons by talking of
+his bleeding country for five or six hours, the simple English members
+suppose that he is a sentimentalist. The truth is that he is a scornful
+realist who alone remains unaffected by the sentimentalism of the House
+of Commons. The Irishman is neither poet enough nor snob enough to be
+swept away by those smooth social and historical tides and tendencies
+which carry Radicals and Labour members comfortably off their feet. He
+goes on asking for a thing because he wants it; and he tries really to
+hurt his enemies because they are his enemies. This is the first of the
+queer confusions which make the hard Irishman look soft. He seems to us
+wild and unreasonable because he is really much too reasonable to be
+anything but fierce when he is fighting.
+
+In all this it will not be difficult to see the Irishman in Bernard
+Shaw. Though personally one of the kindest men in the world, he has
+often written really in order to hurt; not because he hated any
+particular men (he is hardly hot and animal enough for that), but
+because he really hated certain ideas even unto slaying. He provokes; he
+will not let people alone. One might even say that he bullies, only
+that this would be unfair, because he always wishes the other man to hit
+back. At least he always challenges, like a true Green Islander. An even
+stronger instance of this national trait can be found in another eminent
+Irishman, Oscar Wilde. His philosophy (which was vile) was a philosophy
+of ease, of acceptance, and luxurious illusion; yet, being Irish, he
+could not help putting it in pugnacious and propagandist epigrams. He
+preached his softness with hard decision; he praised pleasure in the
+words most calculated to give pain. This armed insolence, which was the
+noblest thing about him, was also the Irish thing; he challenged all
+comers. It is a good instance of how right popular tradition is even
+when it is most wrong, that the English have perceived and preserved
+this essential trait of Ireland in a proverbial phrase. It _is_ true
+that the Irishman says, "Who will tread on the tail of my coat?"
+
+But there is a second cause which creates the English fallacy that the
+Irish are weak and emotional. This again springs from the very fact that
+the Irish are lucid and logical. For being logical they strictly
+separate poetry from prose; and as in prose they are strictly prosaic,
+so in poetry they are purely poetical. In this, as in one or two other
+things, they resemble the French, who make their gardens beautiful
+because they are gardens, but their fields ugly because they are only
+fields. An Irishman may like romance, but he will say, to use a frequent
+Shavian phrase, that it is "only romance." A great part of the English
+energy in fiction arises from the very fact that their fiction half
+deceives them. If Rudyard Kipling, for instance, had written his short
+stories in France, they would have been praised as cool, clever little
+works of art, rather cruel, and very nervous and feminine; Kipling's
+short stories would have been appreciated like Maupassant's short
+stories. In England they were not appreciated but believed. They were
+taken seriously by a startled nation as a true picture of the empire and
+the universe. The English people made haste to abandon England in favour
+of Mr. Kipling and his imaginary colonies; they made haste to abandon
+Christianity in favour of Mr. Kipling's rather morbid version of
+Judaism. Such a moral boom of a book would be almost impossible in
+Ireland, because the Irish mind distinguishes between life and
+literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw himself summed this up as he sums up so
+many things in a compact sentence which he uttered in conversation with
+the present writer, "An Irishman has two eyes." He meant that with one
+eye an Irishman saw that a dream was inspiring, bewitching, or sublime,
+and with the other eye that after all it was a dream. Both the humour
+and the sentiment of an Englishman cause him to wink the other eye. Two
+other small examples will illustrate the English mistake. Take, for
+instance, that noble survival from a nobler age of politics--I mean
+Irish oratory. The English imagine that Irish politicians are so
+hot-headed and poetical that they have to pour out a torrent of burning
+words. The truth is that the Irish are so clear-headed and critical that
+they still regard rhetoric as a distinct art, as the ancients did. Thus
+a man makes a speech as a man plays a violin, not necessarily without
+feeling, but chiefly because he knows how to do it. Another instance of
+the same thing is that quality which is always called the Irish charm.
+The Irish are agreeable, not because they are particularly emotional,
+but because they are very highly civilised. Blarney is a ritual; as much
+of a ritual as kissing the Blarney Stone.
+
+Lastly, there is one general truth about Ireland which may very well
+have influenced Bernard Shaw from the first; and almost certainly
+influenced him for good. Ireland is a country in which the political
+conflicts are at least genuine; they are about something. They are about
+patriotism, about religion, or about money: the three great realities.
+In other words, they are concerned with what commonwealth a man lives in
+or with what universe a man lives in or with how he is to manage to live
+in either. But they are not concerned with which of two wealthy cousins
+in the same governing class shall be allowed to bring in the same Parish
+Councils Bill; there is no party system in Ireland. The party system in
+England is an enormous and most efficient machine for preventing
+political conflicts. The party system is arranged on the same principle
+as a three-legged race: the principle that union is not always strength
+and is never activity. Nobody asks for what he really wants. But in
+Ireland the loyalist is just as ready to throw over the King as the
+Fenian to throw over Mr. Gladstone; each will throw over anything except
+the thing that he wants. Hence it happens that even the follies or the
+frauds of Irish politics are more genuine as symptoms and more
+honourable as symbols than the lumbering hypocrisies of the prosperous
+Parliamentarian. The very lies of Dublin and Belfast are truer than the
+truisms of Westminster. They have an object; they refer to a state of
+things. There was more honesty, in the sense of actuality, about
+Piggott's letters than about the _Times'_ leading articles on them. When
+Parnell said calmly before the Royal Commission that he had made a
+certain remark "in order to mislead the House" he proved himself to be
+one of the few truthful men of his time. An ordinary British statesman
+would never have made the confession, because he would have grown quite
+accustomed to committing the crime. The party system itself implies a
+habit of stating something other than the actual truth. A Leader of the
+House means a Misleader of the House.
+
+Bernard Shaw was born outside all this; and he carries that freedom upon
+his face. Whether what he heard in boyhood was violent Nationalism or
+virulent Unionism, it was at least something which wanted a certain
+principle to be in force, not a certain clique to be in office. Of him
+the great Gilbertian generalisation is untrue; he was not born either a
+little Liberal or else a little Conservative. He did not, like most of
+us, pass through the stage of being a good party man on his way to the
+difficult business of being a good man. He came to stare at our general
+elections as a Red Indian might stare at the Oxford and Cambridge
+boat-race, blind to all its irrelevant sentimentalities and to some of
+its legitimate sentiments. Bernard Shaw entered England as an alien, as
+an invader, as a conqueror. In other words, he entered England as an
+Irishman.
+
+
+
+
+_The Puritan_
+
+
+It has been said in the first section that Bernard Shaw draws from his
+own nation two unquestionable qualities, a kind of intellectual
+chastity, and the fighting spirit. He is so much of an idealist about
+his ideals that he can be a ruthless realist in his methods. His soul
+has (in short) the virginity and the violence of Ireland. But Bernard
+Shaw is not merely an Irishman; he is not even a typical one. He is a
+certain separated and peculiar kind of Irishman, which is not easy to
+describe. Some Nationalist Irishmen have referred to him contemptuously
+as a "West Briton." But this is really unfair; for whatever Mr. Shaw's
+mental faults may be, the easy adoption of an unmeaning phrase like
+"Briton" is certainly not one of them. It would be much nearer the truth
+to put the thing in the bold and bald terms of the old Irish song, and
+to call him "The anti-Irish Irishman." But it is only fair to say that
+the description is far less of a monstrosity than the anti-English
+Englishman would be; because the Irish are so much stronger in
+self-criticism. Compared with the constant self-flattery of the
+English, nearly every Irishman is an anti-Irish Irishman. But here again
+popular phraseology hits the right word. This fairly educated and fairly
+wealthy Protestant wedge which is driven into the country at Dublin and
+elsewhere is a thing not easy superficially to summarise in any term. It
+cannot be described merely as a minority; for a minority means the part
+of a nation which is conquered. But this thing means something that
+conquers, and is not entirely part of a nation. Nor can one even fall
+back on the phrase of aristocracy. For an aristocracy implies at least
+some chorus of snobbish enthusiasm; it implies that some at least are
+willingly led by the leaders, if only towards vulgarity and vice. There
+is only one word for the minority in Ireland, and that is the word that
+public phraseology has found; I mean the word "Garrison." The Irish are
+essentially right when they talk as if all Protestant Unionists lived
+inside "The Castle." They have all the virtues and limitations of a
+literal garrison in a fort. That is, they are valiant, consistent,
+reliable in an obvious public sense; but their curse is that they can
+only tread the flagstones of the court-yard or the cold rock of the
+ramparts; they have never so much as set their foot upon their native
+soil.
+
+We have considered Bernard Shaw as an Irishman. The next step is to
+consider him as an exile from Ireland living in Ireland; that, some
+people would say, is a paradox after his own heart. But, indeed, such a
+complication is not really difficult to expound. The great religion and
+the great national tradition which have persisted for so many centuries
+in Ireland have encouraged these clean and cutting elements; but they
+have encouraged many other things which serve to balance them. The Irish
+peasant has these qualities which are somewhat peculiar to Ireland, a
+strange purity and a strange pugnacity. But the Irish peasant also has
+qualities which are common to all peasants, and his nation has qualities
+that are common to all healthy nations. I mean chiefly the things that
+most of us absorb in childhood; especially the sense of the supernatural
+and the sense of the natural; the love of the sky with its infinity of
+vision, and the love of the soil with its strict hedges and solid shapes
+of ownership. But here comes the paradox of Shaw; the greatest of all
+his paradoxes and the one of which he is unconscious. These one or two
+plain truths which quite stupid people learn at the beginning are
+exactly the one or two truths which Bernard Shaw may not learn even at
+the end. He is a daring pilgrim who has set out from the grave to find
+the cradle. He started from points of view which no one else was clever
+enough to discover, and he is at last discovering points of view which
+no one else was ever stupid enough to ignore. This absence of the
+red-hot truisms of boyhood; this sense that he is not rooted in the
+ancient sagacities of infancy, has, I think, a great deal to do with his
+position as a member of an alien minority in Ireland. He who has no real
+country can have no real home. The average autochthonous Irishman is
+close to patriotism because he is close to the earth; he is close to
+domesticity because he is close to the earth; he is close to doctrinal
+theology and elaborate ritual because he is close to the earth. In
+short, he is close to the heavens because he is close to the earth. But
+we must not expect any of these elemental and collective virtues in the
+man of the garrison. He cannot be expected to exhibit the virtues of a
+people, but only (as Ibsen would say) of an enemy of the people. Mr.
+Shaw has no living traditions, no schoolboy tricks, no college customs,
+to link him with other men. Nothing about him can be supposed to refer
+to a family feud or to a family joke. He does not drink toasts; he does
+not keep anniversaries; musical as he is I doubt if he would consent to
+sing. All this has something in it of a tree with its roots in the air.
+The best way to shorten winter is to prolong Christmas; and the only way
+to enjoy the sun of April is to be an April Fool. When people asked
+Bernard Shaw to attend the Stratford Tercentenary, he wrote back with
+characteristic contempt: "I do not keep my own birthday, and I cannot
+see why I should keep Shakespeare's." I think that if Mr. Shaw had
+always kept his own birthday he would be better able to understand
+Shakespeare's birthday--and Shakespeare's poetry.
+
+In conjecturally referring this negative side of the man, his lack of
+the smaller charities of our common childhood, to his birth in the
+dominant Irish sect, I do not write without historic memory or reference
+to other cases. That minority of Protestant exiles which mainly
+represented Ireland to England during the eighteenth century did contain
+some specimens of the Irish lounger and even of the Irish blackguard;
+Sheridan and even Goldsmith suggest the type. Even in their
+irresponsibility these figures had a touch of Irish tartness and
+realism; but the type has been too much insisted on to the exclusion of
+others equally national and interesting. To one of these it is worth
+while to draw attention. At intervals during the eighteenth and
+nineteenth centuries there has appeared a peculiar kind of Irishman. He
+is so unlike the English image of Ireland that the English have actually
+fallen back on the pretence that he was not Irish at all. The type is
+commonly Protestant; and sometimes seems to be almost anti-national in
+its acrid instinct for judging itself. Its nationalism only appears when
+it flings itself with even bitterer pleasure into judging the foreigner
+or the invader. The first and greatest of such figures was Swift.
+Thackeray simply denied that Swift was an Irishman, because he was not a
+stage Irishman. He was not (in the English novelist's opinion) winning
+and agreeable enough to be Irish. The truth is that Swift was much too
+harsh and disagreeable to be English. There is a great deal of Jonathan
+Swift in Bernard Shaw. Shaw is like Swift, for instance, in combining
+extravagant fancy with a curious sort of coldness. But he is most like
+Swift in that very quality which Thackeray said was impossible in an
+Irishman, benevolent bullying, a pity touched with contempt, and a habit
+of knocking men down for their own good. Characters in novels are often
+described as so amiable that they hate to be thanked. It is not an
+amiable quality, and it is an extremely rare one; but Swift possessed
+it. When Swift was buried the Dublin poor came in crowds and wept by the
+grave of the broadest and most free-handed of their benefactors. Swift
+deserved the public tribute; but he might have writhed and kicked in his
+grave at the thought of receiving it. There is in G. B. S. something of
+the same inhumane humanity. Irish history has offered a third instance
+of this particular type of educated and Protestant Irishman, sincere,
+unsympathetic, aggressive, alone. I mean Parnell; and with him also a
+bewildered England tried the desperate dodge of saying that he was not
+Irish at all. As if any thinkable sensible snobbish law-abiding
+Englishman would ever have defied all the drawing-rooms by disdaining
+the House of Commons! Despite the difference between taciturnity and a
+torrent of fluency there is much in common also between Shaw and
+Parnell; something in common even in the figures of the two men, in the
+bony bearded faces with their almost Satanic self-possession. It will
+not do to pretend that none of these three men belong to their own
+nation; but it is true that they belonged to one special, though
+recurring, type of that nation. And they all three have this peculiar
+mark, that while Nationalists in their various ways they all give to the
+more genial English one common impression; I mean the impression that
+they do not so much love Ireland as hate England.
+
+I will not dogmatise upon the difficult question as to whether there is
+any religious significance in the fact that these three rather ruthless
+Irishmen were Protestant Irishmen. I incline to think myself that the
+Catholic Church has added charity and gentleness to the virtues of a
+people which would otherwise have been too keen and contemptuous, too
+aristocratic. But however this may be, there can surely be no question
+that Bernard Shaw's Protestant education in a Catholic country has made
+a great deal of difference to his mind. It has affected it in two ways,
+the first negative and the second positive. It has affected him by
+cutting him off (as we have said) from the fields and fountains of his
+real home and history; by making him an Orangeman. And it has affected
+him by the particular colour of the particular religion which he
+received; by making him a Puritan.
+
+In one of his numerous prefaces he says, "I have always been on the side
+of the Puritans in the matter of Art"; and a closer study will, I think,
+reveal that he is on the side of the Puritans in almost everything.
+Puritanism was not a mere code of cruel regulations, though some of its
+regulations were more cruel than any that have disgraced Europe. Nor was
+Puritanism a mere nightmare, an evil shadow of eastern gloom and
+fatalism, though this element did enter it, and was as it were the
+symptom and punishment of its essential error. Something much nobler
+(even if almost equally mistaken) was the original energy in the Puritan
+creed. And it must be defined with a little more delicacy if we are
+really to understand the attitude of G. B. S., who is the greatest of
+the modern Puritans and perhaps the last.
+
+I should roughly define the first spirit in Puritanism thus. It was a
+refusal to contemplate God or goodness with anything lighter or milder
+than the most fierce concentration of the intellect. A Puritan meant
+originally a man whose mind had no holidays. To use his own favourite
+phrase, he would let no living thing come between him and his God; an
+attitude which involved eternal torture for him and a cruel contempt for
+all the living things. It was better to worship in a barn than in a
+cathedral for the specific and specified reason that the cathedral was
+beautiful. Physical beauty was a false and sensual symbol coming in
+between the intellect and the object of its intellectual worship. The
+human brain ought to be at every instant a consuming fire which burns
+through all conventional images until they were as transparent as glass.
+
+This is the essential Puritan idea, that God can only be praised by
+direct contemplation of Him. You must praise God only with your brain;
+it is wicked to praise Him with your passions or your physical habits or
+your gesture or instinct of beauty. Therefore it is wicked to worship by
+singing or dancing or drinking sacramental wines or building beautiful
+churches or saying prayers when you are half asleep. We must not worship
+by dancing, drinking, building or singing; we can only worship by
+thinking. Our heads can praise God, but never our hands and feet. That
+is the true and original impulse of the Puritans. There is a great deal
+to be said for it, and a great deal was said for it in Great Britain
+steadily for two hundred years. It has gradually decayed in England and
+Scotland, not because of the advance of modern thought (which means
+nothing), but because of the slow revival of the mediæval energy and
+character in the two peoples. The English were always hearty and humane,
+and they have made up their minds to be hearty and humane in spite of
+the Puritans. The result is that Dickens and W. W. Jacobs have picked up
+the tradition of Chaucer and Robin Hood. The Scotch were always
+romantic, and they have made up their minds to be romantic in spite of
+the Puritans. The result is that Scott and Stevenson have picked up the
+tradition of Bruce, Blind Harry and the vagabond Scottish kings. England
+has become English again; Scotland has become Scottish again, in spite
+of the splendid incubus, the noble nightmare of Calvin. There is only
+one place in the British Islands where one may naturally expect to find
+still surviving in its fulness the fierce detachment of the true
+Puritan. That place is the Protestant part of Ireland. The Orange
+Calvinists can be disturbed by no national resurrection, for they have
+no nation. In them, if in any people, will be found the rectangular
+consistency of the Calvinist. The Irish Protestant rioters are at least
+immeasurably finer fellows than any of their brethren in England. They
+have the two enormous superiorities: first, that the Irish Protestant
+rioters really believe in Protestant theology; and second, that the
+Irish Protestant rioters do really riot. Among these people, if
+anywhere, should be found the cult of theological clarity combined with
+barbarous external simplicity. Among these people Bernard Shaw was born.
+
+There is at least one outstanding fact about the man we are studying;
+Bernard Shaw is never frivolous. He never gives his opinions a holiday;
+he is never irresponsible even for an instant. He has no nonsensical
+second self which he can get into as one gets into a dressing-gown; that
+ridiculous disguise which is yet more real than the real person. That
+collapse and humorous confession of futility was much of the force in
+Charles Lamb and in Stevenson. There is nothing of this in Shaw; his wit
+is never a weakness; therefore it is never a sense of humour. For wit is
+always connected with the idea that truth is close and clear. Humour,
+on the other hand, is always connected with the idea that truth is
+tricky and mystical and easily mistaken. What Charles Lamb said of the
+Scotchman is far truer of this type of Puritan Irishman; he does not see
+things suddenly in a new light; all his brilliancy is a blindingly rapid
+calculation and deduction. Bernard Shaw never said an indefensible
+thing; that is, he never said a thing that he was not prepared
+brilliantly to defend. He never breaks out into that cry beyond reason
+and conviction, that cry of Lamb when he cried, "We would indict our
+dreams!" or of Stevenson, "Shall we never shed blood?" In short he is
+not a humorist, but a great wit, almost as great as Voltaire. Humour 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 the
+consistency in things is a wit--and a Calvinist. The man who sees the
+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 favourite 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 always a Puritan
+prejudice. For Puritanism has not been able to sustain through three
+centuries that native ecstacy of the direct contemplation of truth;
+indeed it was the whole mistake of Puritanism to imagine for a moment
+that it could. One cannot be serious for three hundred years. In
+institutions built so as to endure for ages you must have relaxation,
+symbolic relativity and healthy routine. In eternal temples you must
+have frivolity. You must "be at ease in Zion" unless you are only paying
+it a flying visit.
+
+By the middle of the nineteenth century this old austerity and actuality
+in the Puritan vision had fallen away into two principal lower forms.
+The first is a sort of idealistic garrulity upon which Bernard Shaw has
+made fierce and on the whole fruitful war. Perpetual talk about
+righteousness and unselfishness, about things that should elevate and
+things which cannot but degrade, about social purity and true Christian
+manhood, all poured out with fatal fluency and with very little
+reference to the real facts of anybody's soul or salary--into this weak
+and lukewarm torrent has melted down much of that mountainous ice which
+sparkled in the seventeenth century, bleak indeed, but blazing. The
+hardest thing of the seventeenth century bids fair to be the softest
+thing of the twentieth.
+
+Of all this sentimental and deliquescent Puritanism Bernard Shaw has
+always been the antagonist; and the only respect in which it has soiled
+him was that he believed for only too long that such sloppy idealism was
+the whole idealism of Christendom and so used "idealist" itself as a
+term of reproach. But there were other and negative effects of
+Puritanism which he did not escape so completely. I cannot think that he
+has wholly escaped that element in Puritanism which may fairly bear the
+title of the taboo. For it is a singular fact that although extreme
+Protestantism is dying in elaborate and over-refined civilisation, yet
+it is the barbaric patches of it that live longest and die last. Of the
+creed of John Knox the modern Protestant has abandoned the civilised
+part and retained only the savage part. He has given up that great and
+systematic philosophy of Calvinism which had much in common with modern
+science and strongly resembles ordinary and recurrent determinism. But
+he has retained the accidental veto upon cards or comic plays, which
+Knox only valued as mere proof of his people's concentration on their
+theology. All the awful but sublime affirmations of Puritan theology are
+gone. Only savage negations remain; such as that by which in Scotland on
+every seventh day the creed of fear lays his finger on all hearts and
+makes an evil silence in the streets.
+
+By the middle of the nineteenth century when Shaw was born this dim and
+barbaric element in Puritanism, being all that remained of it, had added
+another taboo to its philosophy of taboos; there had grown up a mystical
+horror of those fermented drinks which are part of the food of civilised
+mankind. Doubtless many persons take an extreme line on this matter
+solely because of some calculation of social harm; many, but not all and
+not even most. Many people think that paper money is a mistake and does
+much harm. But they do not shudder or snigger when they see a
+cheque-book. They do not whisper with unsavoury slyness that such and
+such a man was "seen" going into a bank. I am quite convinced that the
+English aristocracy is the curse of England, but I have not noticed
+either in myself or others any disposition to ostracise a man simply for
+accepting a peerage, as the modern Puritans would certainly ostracise
+him (from any of their positions of trust) for accepting a drink. The
+sentiment is certainly very largely a mystical one, like the sentiment
+about the seventh day. Like the Sabbath, it is defended with
+sociological reasons; but those reasons can be simply and sharply
+tested. If a Puritan tells you that all humanity should rest once a
+week, you have only to propose that they should rest on Wednesday. And
+if a Puritan tells you that he does not object to beer but to the
+tragedies of excess in beer, simply propose to him that in prisons and
+workhouses (where the amount can be absolutely regulated) the inmates
+should have three glasses of beer a day. The Puritan cannot call that
+excess; but he will find something to call it. For it is not the excess
+he objects to, but the beer. It is a transcendental taboo, and it is one
+of the two or three positive and painful prejudices with which Bernard
+Shaw began. A similar severity of outlook ran through all his earlier
+attitude towards the drama; especially towards the lighter or looser
+drama. His Puritan teachers could not prevent him from taking up
+theatricals, but they made him take theatricals seriously. All his plays
+were indeed "plays for Puritans." All his criticisms quiver with a
+refined and almost tortured contempt for the indulgencies of ballet and
+burlesque, for the tights and the _double entente_. He can endure
+lawlessness but not levity. He is not repelled by the divorces and the
+adulteries as he is by the "splits." And he has always been foremost
+among the fierce modern critics who ask indignantly, "Why do you object
+to a thing full of sincere philosophy like _The Wild Duck_ while you
+tolerate a mere dirty joke like _The Spring Chicken_?" I do not think he
+has ever understood what seems to me the very sensible answer of the man
+in the street, "I laugh at the dirty joke of _The Spring Chicken_
+because it is a joke. I criticise the philosophy of _The Wild Duck_
+because it is a philosophy."
+
+Shaw does not do justice to the democratic ease and sanity on this
+subject; but indeed, whatever else he is, he is not democratic. As an
+Irishman he is an aristocrat, as a Calvinist he is a soul apart; he
+drew the breath of his nostrils from a land of fallen principalities and
+proud gentility, and the breath of his spirit from a creed which made a
+wall of crystal around the elect. The two forces between them produced
+this potent and slender figure, swift, scornful, dainty and full of dry
+magnanimity; and it only needed the last touch of oligarchic mastery to
+be given by the overwhelming oligarchic atmosphere of our present age.
+Such was the Puritan Irishman who stepped out into the world. Into what
+kind of world did he step?
+
+
+
+
+_The Progressive_
+
+
+It is now partly possible to justify the Shavian method of putting the
+explanations before the events. I can now give a fact or two with a
+partial certainty at least that the reader will give to the affairs of
+Bernard Shaw something of the same kind of significance which they have
+for Bernard Shaw himself. Thus, if I had simply said that Shaw was born
+in Dublin the average reader might exclaim, "Ah yes--a wild Irishman,
+gay, emotional and untrustworthy." The wrong note would be struck at the
+start. I have attempted to give some idea of what being born in Ireland
+meant to the man who was really born there. Now therefore for the first
+time I may be permitted to confess that Bernard Shaw was, like other
+men, born. He was born in Dublin on the 26th of July, 1856.
+
+Just as his birth can only be appreciated through some vision of
+Ireland, so his family can only be appreciated by some realisation of
+the Puritan. He was the youngest son of one George Carr Shaw, who had
+been a civil servant and was afterwards a somewhat unsuccessful
+business man. If I had merely said that his family was Protestant (which
+in Ireland means Puritan) it might have been passed over as a quite
+colourless detail. But if the reader will keep in mind what has been
+said about the degeneration of Calvinism into a few clumsy vetoes, he
+will see in its full and frightful significance such a sentence as this
+which comes from Shaw himself: "My father was in theory a vehement
+teetotaler, but in practice often a furtive drinker." The two things of
+course rest upon exactly the same philosophy; the philosophy of the
+taboo. There is a mystical substance, and it can give monstrous
+pleasures or call down monstrous punishments. The dipsomaniac and the
+abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same
+mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink. But if I
+had mentioned that fragment of family information without any ethical
+preface, people would have begun at once to talk nonsense about artistic
+heredity and Celtic weakness, and would have gained the general
+impression that Bernard Shaw was an Irish wastrel and the child of Irish
+wastrels. Whereas it is the whole point of the matter that Bernard Shaw
+comes of a Puritan middle-class family of the most solid
+respectability; and the only admission of error arises from the fact
+that one member of that Puritan family took a particularly Puritan view
+of strong drink. That is, he regarded it generally as a poison and
+sometimes as a medicine, if only a mental medicine. But a poison and a
+medicine are very closely akin, as the nearest chemist knows; and they
+are chiefly akin in this; that no one will drink either of them for fun.
+Moreover, medicine and a poison are also alike in this; that no one will
+by preference drink either of them in public. And this medical or
+poisonous view of alcohol is not confined to the one Puritan to whose
+failure I have referred, it is spread all over the whole of our dying
+Puritan civilisation. For instance, social reformers have fired a
+hundred shots against the public-house; but never one against its really
+shameful feature. The sign of decay is not in the public-house, but in
+the private bar; or rather the row of five or six private bars, into
+each of which a respectable dipsomaniac can go in solitude, and by
+indulging his own half-witted sin violate his own half-witted morality.
+Nearly all these places are equipped with an atrocious apparatus of
+ground-glass windows which can be so closed that they practically
+conceal the face of the buyer from the seller. Words cannot express the
+abysses of human infamy and hateful shame expressed by that elaborate
+piece of furniture. Whenever I go into a public-house, which happens
+fairly often, I always carefully open all these apertures and then leave
+the place, in every way refreshed.
+
+In other ways also it is necessary to insist not only on the fact of an
+extreme Protestantism, but on that of the Protestantism of a garrison; a
+world where that religious force both grew and festered all the more for
+being at once isolated and protected. All the influences surrounding
+Bernard Shaw in boyhood were not only Puritan, but such that no
+non-Puritan force could possibly pierce or counteract. He belonged to
+that Irish group which, according to Catholicism, has hardened its
+heart, which, according to Protestantism has hardened its head, but
+which, as I fancy, has chiefly hardened its hide, lost its sensibility
+to the contact of the things around it. In reading about his youth, one
+forgets that it was passed in the island which is still one flame before
+the altar of St. Peter and St. Patrick. The whole thing might be
+happening in Wimbledon. He went to the Wesleyan Connexional School. He
+went to hear Moody and Sankey. "I was," he writes, "wholly unmoved by
+their eloquence; and felt bound to inform the public that I was, on the
+whole, an atheist. My letter was solemnly printed in _Public Opinion_,
+to the extreme horror of my numerous aunts and uncles." That is the
+philosophical atmosphere; those are the religious postulates. It could
+never cross the mind of a man of the Garrison that before becoming an
+atheist he might stroll into one of the churches of his own country, and
+learn something of the philosophy that had satisfied Dante and Bossuet,
+Pascal and Descartes.
+
+In the same way I have to appeal to my theoretic preface at this third
+point of the drama of Shaw's career. On leaving school he stepped into a
+secure business position which he held steadily for four years and which
+he flung away almost in one day. He rushed even recklessly to London;
+where he was quite unsuccessful and practically starved for six years.
+If I had mentioned this act on the first page of this book it would have
+seemed to have either the simplicity of a mere fanatic or else to cover
+some ugly escapade of youth or some quite criminal looseness of
+temperament. But Bernard Shaw did not act thus because he was careless,
+but because he was ferociously careful, careful especially of the one
+thing needful. What was he thinking about when he threw away his last
+halfpence and went to a strange place; what was he thinking about when
+he endured hunger and small-pox in London almost without hope? He was
+thinking of what he has ever since thought of, the slow but sure surge
+of the social revolution; you must read into all those bald sentences
+and empty years what I shall attempt to sketch in the third section. You
+must read the revolutionary movement of the later nineteenth century,
+darkened indeed by materialism and made mutable by fear and free
+thought, but full of awful vistas of an escape from the curse of Adam.
+
+Bernard Shaw happened to be born in an epoch, or rather at the end of an
+epoch, which was in its way unique in the ages of history. The
+nineteenth century was not unique in the success or rapidity of its
+reforms or in their ultimate cessation; but it was unique in the
+peculiar character of the failure which followed the success. The French
+Revolution was an enormous act of human realisation; it has altered the
+terms of every law and the shape of every town in Europe; but it was by
+no means the only example of a strong and swift period of reform. What
+was really peculiar about the Republican energy was this, that it left
+behind it, not an ordinary reaction but a kind of dreary, drawn out and
+utterly unmeaning hope. The strong and evident idea of reform sank lower
+and lower until it became the timid and feeble idea of progress. Towards
+the end of the nineteenth century there appeared its two incredible
+figures; they were the pure Conservative and the pure Progressive; two
+figures which would have been overwhelmed with laughter by any other
+intellectual commonwealth of history. There was hardly a human
+generation which could not have seen the folly of merely going forward
+or merely standing still; of mere progressing or mere conserving. In the
+coarsest Greek Comedy we might have a joke about a man who wanted to
+keep what he had, whether it was yellow gold or yellow fever. In the
+dullest mediæval morality we might have a joke about a progressive
+gentleman who, having passed heaven and come to purgatory, decided to go
+further and fare worse. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were an age
+of quite impetuous progress; men made in one rush, roads, trades,
+synthetic philosophies, parliaments, university settlements, a law that
+could cover the world and such spires as had never struck the sky. But
+they would not have said that they wanted progress, but that they wanted
+the road, the parliaments, and the spires. In the same way the time from
+Richelieu to the Revolution was upon the whole a time of conservation,
+often of harsh and hideous conservation; it preserved tortures, legal
+quibbles, and despotism. But if you had asked the rulers they would not
+have said that they wanted conservation; but that they wanted the
+torture and the despotism. The old reformers and the old despots alike
+desired definite _things_, powers, licenses, payments, vetoes, and
+permissions. Only the modern progressive and the modern conservative
+have been content with two words.
+
+Other periods of active improvement have died by stiffening at last into
+some routine. Thus the Gothic gaiety of the thirteenth century
+stiffening into the mere Gothic ugliness of the fifteenth. Thus the
+mighty wave of the Renaissance, whose crest was lifted to heaven, was
+touched by a wintry witchery of classicism and frozen for ever before it
+fell. Alone of all such movements the democratic movement of the last
+two centuries has not frozen, but loosened and liquefied. Instead of
+becoming more pedantic in its old age, it has grown more bewildered. By
+the analogy of healthy history we ought to have gone on worshipping the
+republic and calling each other citizen with increasing seriousness
+until some other part of the truth broke into our republican temple. But
+in fact we have turned the freedom of democracy into a mere scepticism,
+destructive of everything, including democracy itself. It is none the
+less destructive because it is, so to speak, an optimistic
+scepticism--or, as I have said, a dreary hope. It was none the better
+because the destroyers were always talking about the new vistas and
+enlightenments which their new negations opened to us. The republican
+temple, like any other strong building, rested on certain definite
+limits and supports. But the modern man inside it went on indefinitely
+knocking holes in his own house and saying that they were windows. The
+result is not hard to calculate: the moral world was pretty well all
+windows and no house by the time that Bernard Shaw arrived on the scene.
+
+Then there entered into full swing that great game of which he soon
+became the greatest master. A progressive or advanced person was now to
+mean not a man who wanted democracy, but a man who wanted something
+newer than democracy. A reformer was to be, not a man who wanted a
+parliament or a republic, but a man who wanted anything that he hadn't
+got. The emancipated man must cast a weird and suspicious eye round him
+at all the institutions of the world, wondering which of them was
+destined to die in the next few centuries. Each one of them was
+whispering to himself, "What can I alter?"
+
+This quite vague and varied discontent probably did lead to the
+revelation of many incidental wrongs and to much humane hard work in
+certain holes and corners. It also gave birth to a great deal of quite
+futile and frantic speculation, which seemed destined to take away
+babies from women, or to give votes to tom-cats. But it had an evil in
+it much deeper and more psychologically poisonous than any superficial
+absurdities. There was in this thirst to be "progressive" a subtle sort
+of double-mindedness and falsity. A man was so eager to be in advance of
+his age that he pretended to be in advance of himself. Institutions that
+his wholesome nature and habit fully accepted he had to sneer at as
+old-fashioned, out of a servile and snobbish fear of the future. Out of
+the primal forests, through all the real progress of history, man had
+picked his way obeying his human instinct, or (in the excellent phrase)
+following his nose. But now he was trying, by violent athletic
+exertions, to get in front of his nose.
+
+Into this riot of all imaginary innovations Shaw brought the sharp edge
+of the Irishman and the concentration of the Puritan, and thoroughly
+thrashed all competitors in the difficult art of being at once modern
+and intelligent. In twenty twopenny controversies he took the
+revolutionary side, I fear in most cases because it was called
+revolutionary. But the other revolutionists were abruptly startled by
+the presentation of quite rational and ingenious arguments on their own
+side. The dreary thing about most new causes is that they are praised in
+such very old terms. Every new religion bores us with the same stale
+rhetoric about closer fellowship and the higher life. No one ever
+approximately equalled Bernard Shaw in the power of finding really fresh
+and personal arguments for these recent schemes and creeds. No one ever
+came within a mile of him in the knack of actually producing a new
+argument for a new philosophy. I give two instances to cover the kind of
+thing I mean. Bernard Shaw (being honestly eager to put himself on the
+modern side in everything) put himself on the side of what is called
+the feminist movement; the proposal to give the two sexes not merely
+equal social privileges, but identical. To this it is often answered
+that women cannot be soldiers; and to this again the sensible feminists
+answer that women run their own kind of physical risk, while the silly
+feminists answer that war is an outworn barbaric thing which women would
+abolish. But Bernard Shaw took the line of saying that women had been
+soldiers, in all occasions of natural and unofficial war, as in the
+French Revolution. That has the great fighting value of being an
+unexpected argument; it takes the other pugilist's breath away for one
+important instant. To take the other case, Mr. Shaw has found himself,
+led by the same mad imp of modernity, on the side of the people who want
+to have phonetic spelling. The people who want phonetic spelling
+generally depress the world with tireless and tasteless explanations of
+how much easier it would be for children or foreign bagmen if "height"
+were spelt "hite." Now children would curse spelling whatever it was,
+and we are not going to permit foreign bagmen to improve Shakespeare.
+Bernard Shaw charged along quite a different line; he urged that
+Shakespeare himself believed in phonetic spelling, since he spelt his
+own name in six different ways. According to Shaw, phonetic spelling is
+merely a return to the freedom and flexibility of Elizabethan
+literature. That, again, is exactly the kind of blow the old speller
+does not expect. As a matter of fact there is an answer to both the
+ingenuities I have quoted. When women have fought in revolutions they
+have generally shown that it was not natural to them, by their
+hysterical cruelty and insolence; it was the men who fought in the
+Revolution; it was the women who tortured the prisoners and mutilated
+the dead. And because Shakespeare could sing better than he could spell,
+it does not follow that his spelling and ours ought to be abruptly
+altered by a race that has lost all instinct for singing. But I do not
+wish to discuss these points; I only quote them as examples of the
+startling ability which really brought Shaw to the front; the ability to
+brighten even our modern movements with original and suggestive
+thoughts.
+
+But while Bernard Shaw pleasantly surprised innumerable cranks and
+revolutionists by finding quite rational arguments for them, he
+surprised them unpleasantly also by discovering something else. He
+discovered a turn of argument or trick of thought which has ever since
+been the plague of their lives, and given him in all assemblies of their
+kind, in the Fabian Society or in the whole Socialist movement, a
+fantastic but most formidable domination. This method may be
+approximately defined as that of revolutionising the revolutionists by
+turning their rationalism against their remaining sentimentalism. But
+definition leaves the matter dark unless we give one or two examples.
+Thus Bernard Shaw threw himself as thoroughly as any New Woman into the
+cause of the emancipation of women. But while the New Woman praised
+woman as a prophetess, the new man took the opportunity to curse her and
+kick her as a comrade. For the others sex equality meant the
+emancipation of women, which allowed them to be equal to men. For Shaw
+it mainly meant the emancipation of men, which allowed them to be rude
+to women. Indeed, almost every one of Bernard Shaw's earlier plays might
+be called an argument between a man and a woman, in which the woman is
+thumped and thrashed and outwitted until she admits that she is the
+equal of her conqueror. This is the first case of the Shavian trick of
+turning on the romantic rationalists with their own rationalism. He
+said in substance, "If we are democrats, let us have votes for women;
+but if we are democrats, why on earth should we have respect for women?"
+I take one other example out of many. Bernard Shaw was thrown early into
+what may be called the cosmopolitan club of revolution. The Socialists
+of the S.D.F. call it "L'Internationale," but the club covers more than
+Socialists. It covers many who consider themselves the champions of
+oppressed nationalities--Poland, Finland, and even Ireland; and thus a
+strong nationalist tendency exists in the revolutionary movement.
+Against this nationalist tendency Shaw set himself with sudden violence.
+If the flag of England was a piece of piratical humbug, was not the flag
+of Poland a piece of piratical humbug too? If we hated the jingoism of
+the existing armies and frontiers, why should we bring into existence
+new jingo armies and new jingo frontiers? All the other revolutionists
+fell in instinctively with Home Rule for Ireland. Shaw urged, in effect,
+that Home Rule was as bad as Home Influences and Home Cooking, and all
+the other degrading domesticities that began with the word "Home." His
+ultimate support of the South African war was largely created by his
+irritation against the other revolutionists for favouring a nationalist
+resistance. The ordinary Imperialists objected to Pro-Boers because they
+were anti-patriots. Bernard Shaw objected to Pro-Boers because they were
+pro-patriots.
+
+But among these surprise attacks of G. B. S., these turnings of
+scepticism against the sceptics, there was one which has figured largely
+in his life; the most amusing and perhaps the most salutary of all these
+reactions. The "progressive" world being in revolt against religion had
+naturally felt itself allied to science; and against the authority of
+priests it would perpetually hurl the authority of scientific men. Shaw
+gazed for a few moments at this new authority, the veiled god of Huxley
+and Tyndall, and then with the greatest placidity and precision kicked
+it in the stomach. He declared to the astounded progressives around him
+that physical science was a mystical fake like sacerdotalism; that
+scientists, like priests, spoke with authority because they could not
+speak with proof or reason; that the very wonders of science were mostly
+lies, like the wonders of religion. "When astronomers tell me," he says
+somewhere, "that a star is so far off that its light takes a thousand
+years to reach us, the magnitude of the lie seems to me inartistic." The
+paralysing impudence of such remarks left everyone quite breathless; and
+even to this day this particular part of Shaw's satiric war has been far
+less followed up than it deserves. For there was present in it an
+element very marked in Shaw's controversies; I mean that his apparent
+exaggerations are generally much better backed up by knowledge than
+would appear from their nature. He can lure his enemy on with fantasies
+and then overwhelm him with facts. Thus the man of science, when he read
+some wild passage in which Shaw compared Huxley to a tribal soothsayer
+grubbing in the entrails of animals, supposed the writer to be a mere
+fantastic whom science could crush with one finger. He would therefore
+engage in a controversy with Shaw about (let us say) vivisection, and
+discover to his horror that Shaw really knew a great deal about the
+subject, and could pelt him with expert witnesses and hospital reports.
+Among the many singular contradictions in a singular character, there is
+none more interesting than this combination of exactitude and industry
+in the detail of opinions with audacity and a certain wildness in their
+outline.
+
+This great game of catching revolutionists napping, of catching the
+unconventional people in conventional poses, of outmarching and
+outmanoeuvring progressives till they felt like conservatives, of
+undermining the mines of Nihilists till they felt like the House of
+Lords, this great game of dishing the anarchists continued for some time
+to be his most effective business. It would be untrue to say that he was
+a cynic; he was never a cynic, for that implies a certain corrupt
+fatigue about human affairs, whereas he was vibrating with virtue and
+energy. Nor would it be fair to call him even a sceptic, for that
+implies a dogma of hopelessness and definite belief in unbelief. But it
+would be strictly just to describe him at this time, at any rate, as a
+merely destructive person. He was one whose main business was, in his
+own view, the pricking of illusions, the stripping away of disguises,
+and even the destruction of ideals. He was a sort of anti-confectioner
+whose whole business it was to take the gilt off the gingerbread.
+
+Now I have no particular objection to people who take the gilt off the
+gingerbread; if only for this excellent reason, that I am much fonder of
+gingerbread than I am of gilt. But there are some objections to this
+task when it becomes a crusade or an obsession. One of them is this:
+that people who have really scraped the gilt off gingerbread generally
+waste the rest of their lives in attempting to scrape the gilt off
+gigantic lumps of gold. Such has too often been the case of Shaw. He
+can, if he likes, scrape the romance off the armaments of Europe or the
+party system of Great Britain. But he cannot scrape the romance off love
+or military valour, because it is all romance, and three thousand miles
+thick. It cannot, I think, be denied that much of Bernard Shaw's
+splendid mental energy has been wasted in this weary business of gnawing
+at the necessary pillars of all possible society. But it would be
+grossly unfair to indicate that even in his first and most destructive
+stage he uttered nothing except these accidental, if arresting,
+negations. He threw his whole genius heavily into the scale in favour of
+two positive projects or causes of the period. When we have stated these
+we have really stated the full intellectual equipment with which he
+started his literary life.
+
+I have said that Shaw was on the insurgent side in everything; but in
+the case of these two important convictions he exercised a solid power
+of choice. When he first went to London he mixed with every kind of
+revolutionary society, and met every kind of person except the ordinary
+person. He knew everybody, so to speak, except everybody. He was more
+than once a momentary apparition among the respectable atheists. He knew
+Bradlaugh and spoke on the platforms of that Hall of Science in which
+very simple and sincere masses of men used to hail with shouts of joy
+the assurance that they were not immortal. He retains to this day
+something of the noise and narrowness of that room; as, for instance,
+when he says that it is contemptible to have a craving for eternal life.
+This prejudice remains in direct opposition to all his present opinions,
+which are all to the effect that it is glorious to desire power,
+consciousness, and vitality even for one's self. But this old secularist
+tag, that it is selfish to save one's soul, remains with him long after
+he has practically glorified selfishness. It is a relic of those chaotic
+early days. And just as he mingled with the atheists he mingled with the
+anarchists, who were in the eighties a much more formidable body than
+now, disputing with the Socialists on almost equal terms the claim to
+be the true heirs of the Revolution. Shaw still talks entertainingly
+about this group. As far as I can make out, it was almost entirely
+female. When a book came out called _A Girl among the Anarchists_,
+G. B. S. was provoked to a sort of explosive reminiscence. "A girl among
+the anarchists!" he exclaimed to his present biographer; "if they had
+said 'A man among the anarchists' it would have been more of an
+adventure." He is ready to tell other tales of this eccentric
+environment, most of which does not convey an impression of a very
+bracing atmosphere. That revolutionary society must have contained many
+high public ideals, but also a fair number of low private desires. And
+when people blame Bernard Shaw for his pitiless and prosaic coldness,
+his cutting refusal to reverence or admire, I think they should remember
+this riff-raff of lawless sentimentalism against which his commonsense
+had to strive, all the grandiloquent "comrades" and all the gushing
+"affinities," all the sweetstuff sensuality and senseless sulking
+against law. If Bernard Shaw became a little too fond of throwing cold
+water upon prophecies or ideals, remember that he must have passed much
+of his youth among cosmopolitan idealists who wanted a little cold water
+in every sense of the word.
+
+Upon two of these modern crusades he concentrated, and, as I have said,
+he chose them well. The first was broadly what was called the
+Humanitarian cause. It did not mean the cause of humanity, but rather,
+if anything, the cause of everything else. At its noblest it meant a
+sort of mystical identification of our life with the whole life of
+nature. So a man might wince when a snail was crushed as if his toe were
+trodden on; so a man might shrink when a moth shrivelled as if his own
+hair had caught fire. Man might be a network of exquisite nerves running
+over the whole universe, a subtle spider's web of pity. This was a fine
+conception; though perhaps a somewhat severe enforcement of the
+theological conception of the special divinity of man. For the
+humanitarians certainly asked of humanity what can be asked of no other
+creature; no man ever required a dog to understand a cat or expected the
+cow to cry for the sorrows of the nightingale.
+
+Hence this sense has been strongest in saints of a very mystical sort;
+such as St. Francis who spoke of Sister Sparrow and Brother Wolf. Shaw
+adopted this crusade of cosmic pity but adopted it very much in his own
+style, severe, explanatory, and even unsympathetic. He had no
+affectionate impulse to say "Brother Wolf"; at the best he would have
+said "Citizen Wolf," like a sound republican. In fact, he was full of
+healthy human compassion for the sufferings of animals; but in
+phraseology he loved to put the matter unemotionally and even harshly. I
+was once at a debating club at which Bernard Shaw said that he was not a
+humanitarian at all, but only an economist, that he merely hated to see
+life wasted by carelessness or cruelty. I felt inclined to get up and
+address to him the following lucid question: "If when you spare a
+herring you are only being oikonomikal, for what oikos are you being
+nomikal?" But in an average debating club I thought this question might
+not be quite clear; so I abandoned the idea. But certainly it is not
+plain for whom Bernard Shaw is economising if he rescues a rhinoceros
+from an early grave. But the truth is that Shaw only took this economic
+pose from his hatred of appearing sentimental. If Bernard Shaw killed a
+dragon and rescued a princess of romance, he would try to say "I have
+saved a princess" with exactly the same intonation as "I have saved a
+shilling." He tries to turn his own heroism into a sort of superhuman
+thrift. He would thoroughly sympathise with that passage in his
+favourite dramatic author in which the Button Moulder tells Peer Gynt
+that there is a sort of cosmic housekeeping; that God Himself is very
+economical, "and that is why He is so well to do."
+
+This combination of the widest kindness and consideration with a
+consistent ungraciousness of tone runs through all Shaw's ethical
+utterance, and is nowhere more evident than in his attitude towards
+animals. He would waste himself to a white-haired shadow to save a shark
+in an aquarium from inconvenience or to add any little comforts to the
+life of a carrion-crow. He would defy any laws or lose any friends to
+show mercy to the humblest beast or the most hidden bird. Yet I cannot
+recall in the whole of his works or in the whole of his conversation a
+single word of any tenderness or intimacy with any bird or beast. It was
+under the influence of this high and almost superhuman sense of duty
+that he became a vegetarian; and I seem to remember that when he was
+lying sick and near to death at the end of his _Saturday Review_ career
+he wrote a fine fantastic article, declaring that his hearse ought to be
+drawn by all the animals that he had not eaten. Whenever that evil day
+comes there will be no need to fall back on the ranks of the brute
+creation; there will be no lack of men and women who owe him so much as
+to be glad to take the place of the animals; and the present writer for
+one will be glad to express his gratitude as an elephant. There is no
+doubt about the essential manhood and decency of Bernard Shaw's
+instincts in such matters. And quite apart from the vegetarian
+controversy, I do not doubt that the beasts also owe him much. But when
+we come to positive things (and passions are the only truly positive
+things) that obstinate doubt remains which remains after all eulogies of
+Shaw. That fixed fancy sticks to the mind; that Bernard Shaw is a
+vegetarian more because he dislikes dead beasts than because he likes
+live ones.
+
+It was the same with the other great cause to which Shaw more
+politically though not more publicly committed himself. The actual
+English people, without representation in Press or Parliament, but
+faintly expressed in public-houses and music-halls, would connect Shaw
+(so far as they have heard of him) with two ideas; they would say first
+that he was a vegetarian, and second that he was a Socialist. Like most
+of the impressions of the ignorant, these impressions would be on the
+whole very just. My only purpose here is to urge that Shaw's Socialism
+exemplifies the same trait of temperament as his vegetarianism. This
+book is not concerned with Bernard Shaw as a politician or a
+sociologist, but as a critic and creator of drama. I will therefore end
+in this chapter all that I have to say about Bernard Shaw as a
+politician or a political philosopher. I propose here to dismiss this
+aspect of Shaw: only let it be remembered, once and for all, that I am
+here dismissing the most important aspect of Shaw. It is as if one
+dismissed the sculpture of Michael Angelo and went on to his sonnets.
+Perhaps the highest and purest thing in him is simply that he cares more
+for politics than for anything else; more than for art or for
+philosophy. Socialism is the noblest thing for Bernard Shaw; and it is
+the noblest thing in him. He really desires less to win fame than to
+bear fruit. He is an absolute follower of that early sage who wished
+only to make two blades of grass grow instead of one. He is a loyal
+subject of Henri Quatre, who said that he only wanted every Frenchman to
+have a chicken in his pot on Sunday; except, of course, that he would
+call the repast cannibalism. But _cæteris paribus_ he thinks more of
+that chicken than of the eagle of the universal empire; and he is always
+ready to support the grass against the laurel.
+
+Yet by the nature of this book the account of the most important Shaw,
+who is the Socialist, must be also the most brief. Socialism (which I am
+not here concerned either to attack or defend) is, as everyone knows,
+the proposal that all property should be nationally owned that it may be
+more decently distributed. It is a proposal resting upon two principles,
+unimpeachable as far as they go: first, that frightful human calamities
+call for immediate human aid; second, that such aid must almost always
+be collectively organised. If a ship is being wrecked, we organise a
+lifeboat; if a house is on fire, we organise a blanket; if half a nation
+is starving, we must organise work and food. That is the primary and
+powerful argument of the Socialist, and everything that he adds to it
+weakens it. The only possible line of protest is to suggest that it is
+rather shocking that we have to treat a normal nation as something
+exceptional, like a house on fire or a shipwreck. But of such things it
+may be necessary to speak later. The point here is that Shaw behaved
+towards Socialism just as he behaved towards vegetarianism; he offered
+every reason except the emotional reason, which was the real one. When
+taxed in a _Daily News_ discussion with being a Socialist for the
+obvious reason that poverty was cruel, he said this was quite wrong; it
+was only because poverty was wasteful. He practically professed that
+modern society annoyed him, not so much like an unrighteous kingdom, but
+rather like an untidy room. Everyone who knew him knew, of course, that
+he was full of a proper brotherly bitterness about the oppression of the
+poor. But here again he would not admit that he was anything but an
+Economist.
+
+In thus setting his face like flint against sentimental methods of
+argument he undoubtedly did one great service to the causes for which he
+stood. Every vulgar anti-humanitarian, every snob who wants monkeys
+vivisected or beggars flogged has always fallen back upon stereotyped
+phrases like "maudlin" and "sentimental," which indicated the
+humanitarian as a man in a weak condition of tears. The mere personality
+of Shaw has shattered those foolish phrases for ever. Shaw the
+humanitarian was like Voltaire the humanitarian, a man whose satire was
+like steel, the hardest and coolest of fighters, upon whose piercing
+point the wretched defenders of a masculine brutality wriggled like
+worms.
+
+In this quarrel one cannot wish Shaw even an inch less contemptuous, for
+the people who call compassion "sentimentalism" deserve nothing but
+contempt. In this one does not even regret his coldness; it is an
+honourable contrast to the blundering emotionalism of the jingoes and
+flagellomaniacs. The truth is that the ordinary anti-humanitarian only
+manages to harden his heart by having already softened his head. It is
+the reverse of sentimental to insist that a nigger is being burned
+alive; for sentimentalism must be the clinging to pleasant thoughts. And
+no one, not even a Higher Evolutionist, can think a nigger burned alive
+a pleasant thought. The sentimental thing is to warm your hands at the
+fire while denying the existence of the nigger, and that is the ruling
+habit in England, as it has been the chief business of Bernard Shaw to
+show. And in this the brutalitarians hate him not because he is soft,
+but because he is hard, because he is not to be softened by conventional
+excuses; because he looks hard at a thing--and hits harder. Some foolish
+fellow of the Henley-Whibley reaction wrote that if we were to be
+conquerors we must be less tender and more ruthless. Shaw answered with
+really avenging irony, "What a light this principle throws on the defeat
+of the tender Dervish, the compassionate Zulu, and the morbidly humane
+Boxer at the hands of the hardy savages of England, France, and
+Germany." In that sentence an idiot is obliterated and the whole story
+of Europe told; but it is immensely stiffened by its ironic form. In the
+same way Shaw washed away for ever the idea that Socialists were weak
+dreamers, who said that things might be only because they wished them to
+be. G. B. S. in argument with an individualist showed himself, as a
+rule, much the better economist and much the worse rhetorician. In this
+atmosphere arose a celebrated Fabian Society, of which he is still the
+leading spirit--a society which answered all charges of impracticable
+idealism by pushing both its theoretic statements and its practical
+negotiations to the verge of cynicism. Bernard Shaw was the literary
+expert who wrote most of its pamphlets. In one of them, among such
+sections as _Fabian Temperance Reform_, _Fabian Education_ and so on,
+there was an entry gravely headed "Fabian Natural Science," which stated
+that in the Socialist cause light was needed more than heat.
+
+Thus the Irish detachment and the Puritan austerity did much good to the
+country and to the causes for which they were embattled. But there was
+one thing they did not do; they did nothing for Shaw himself in the
+matter of his primary mistakes and his real limitation. His great defect
+was and is the lack of democratic sentiment. And there was nothing
+democratic either in his humanitarianism or his Socialism. These new and
+refined faiths tended rather to make the Irishman yet more aristocratic,
+the Puritan yet more exclusive. To be a Socialist was to look down on
+all the peasant owners of the earth, especially on the peasant owners of
+his own island. To be a Vegetarian was to be a man with a strange and
+mysterious morality, a man who thought the good lord who roasted oxen
+for his vassals only less bad than the bad lord who roasted the vassals.
+None of these advanced views could the common people hear gladly; nor
+indeed was Shaw specially anxious to please the common people. It was
+his glory that he pitied animals like men; it was his defect that he
+pitied men only too much like animals. Foulon said of the democracy,
+"Let them eat grass." Shaw said, "Let them eat greens." He had more
+benevolence, but almost as much disdain. "I have never had any feelings
+about the English working classes," he said elsewhere, "except a desire
+to abolish them and replace them by sensible people." This is the
+unsympathetic side of the thing; but it had another and much nobler
+side, which must at least be seriously recognised before we pass on to
+much lighter things.
+
+Bernard Shaw is not a democrat; but he is a splendid republican. The
+nuance of difference between those terms precisely depicts him. And
+there is after all a good deal of dim democracy in England, in the sense
+that there is much of a blind sense of brotherhood, and nowhere more
+than among old-fashioned and even reactionary people. But a republican
+is a rare bird, and a noble one. Shaw is a republican in the literal and
+Latin sense; he cares more for the Public Thing than for any private
+thing. The interest of the State is with him a sincere thirst of the
+soul, as it was in the little pagan cities. Now this public passion,
+this clean appetite for order and equity, had fallen to a lower ebb, had
+more nearly disappeared altogether, during Shaw's earlier epoch than at
+any other time. Individualism of the worst type was on the top of the
+wave; I mean artistic individualism, which is so much crueller, so much
+blinder and so much more irrational even than commercial individualism.
+The decay of society was praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is
+praised by worms. The æsthete was all receptiveness, like the flea. His
+only affair in this world was to feed on its facts and colours, like a
+parasite upon blood. The ego was the all; and the praise of it was
+enunciated in madder and madder rhythms by poets whose Helicon was
+absinthe and whose Pegasus was the nightmare. This diseased pride was
+not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all
+political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a
+question of one man one vote, but of one man one universe.
+
+I have in my time had my fling at the Fabian Society, at the pedantry of
+schemes, the arrogance of experts; nor do I regret it now. But when I
+remember that other world against which it reared its bourgeois banner
+of cleanliness and common sense, I will not end this chapter without
+doing it decent honour. Give me the drain pipes of the Fabians rather
+than the panpipes of the later poets; the drain pipes have a nicer
+smell. Give me even that business-like benevolence that herded men like
+beasts rather than that exquisite art which isolated them like devils;
+give me even the suppression of "Zæo" rather than the triumph of
+"Salome." And if I feel such a confession to be due to those Fabians who
+could hardly have been anything but experts in any society, such as Mr.
+Sidney Webb or Mr. Edward Pease, it is due yet more strongly to the
+greatest of the Fabians. Here was a man who could have enjoyed art among
+the artists, who could have been the wittiest of all the _flâneurs_; who
+could have made epigrams like diamonds and drunk music like wine. He has
+instead laboured in a mill of statistics and crammed his mind with all
+the most dreary and the most filthy details, so that he can argue on the
+spur of the moment about sewing-machines or sewage, about typhus fever
+or twopenny tubes. The usual mean theory of motives will not cover the
+case; it is not ambition, for he could have been twenty times more
+prominent as a plausible and popular humorist. It is the real and
+ancient emotion of the _salus populi_, almost extinct in our
+oligarchical chaos; nor will I for one, as I pass on to many matters of
+argument or quarrel, neglect to salute a passion so implacable and so
+pure.
+
+
+
+
+_The Critic_
+
+
+It appears a point of some mystery to the present writer that Bernard
+Shaw should have been so long unrecognised and almost in beggary. I
+should have thought his talent was of the ringing and arresting sort;
+such as even editors and publishers would have sense enough to seize.
+Yet it is quite certain that he almost starved in London for many years,
+writing occasional columns for an advertisement or words for a picture.
+And it is equally certain (it is proved by twenty anecdotes, but no one
+who knows Shaw needs any anecdotes to prove it) that in those days of
+desperation he again and again threw up chances and flung back good
+bargains which did not suit his unique and erratic sense of honour. The
+fame of having first offered Shaw to the public upon a platform worthy
+of him belongs, like many other public services, to Mr. William Archer.
+
+I say it seems odd that such a writer should not be appreciated in a
+flash; but upon this point there is evidently a real difference of
+opinion, and it constitutes for me the strangest difficulty of the
+subject. I hear many people complain that Bernard Shaw deliberately
+mystifies them. I cannot imagine what they mean; it seems to me that he
+deliberately insults them. His language, especially on moral questions,
+is generally as straight and solid as that of a bargee and far less
+ornate and symbolic than that of a hansom-cabman. The prosperous English
+Philistine complains that Mr. Shaw is making a fool of him. Whereas Mr.
+Shaw is not in the least making a fool of him; Mr. Shaw is, with
+laborious lucidity, calling him a fool. G. B. S. calls a landlord a
+thief; and the landlord, instead of denying or resenting it, says, "Ah,
+that fellow hides his meaning so cleverly that one can never make out
+what he means, it is all so fine spun and fantastical." G. B. S. calls a
+statesman a liar to his face, and the statesman cries in a kind of
+ecstasy, "Ah, what quaint, intricate and half-tangled trains of thought!
+Ah, what elusive and many-coloured mysteries of half-meaning!" I think
+it is always quite plain what Mr. Shaw means, even when he is joking,
+and it generally means that the people he is talking to ought to howl
+aloud for their sins. But the average representative of them undoubtedly
+treats the Shavian meaning as tricky and complex, when it is really
+direct and offensive. He always accuses Shaw of pulling his leg, at the
+exact moment when Shaw is pulling his nose.
+
+This prompt and pungent style he learnt in the open, upon political tubs
+and platforms; and he is very legitimately proud of it. He boasts of
+being a demagogue; "The cart and the trumpet for me," he says, with
+admirable good sense. Everyone will remember the effective appearance of
+Cyrano de Bergerac in the first act of the fine play of that name; when
+instead of leaping in by any hackneyed door or window, he suddenly
+springs upon a chair above the crowd that has so far kept him invisible;
+"les bras croisés, le feutre en bataille, la moustache hérissée, le nez
+terrible." I will not go so far as to say that when Bernard Shaw sprang
+upon a chair or tub in Trafalgar Square he had the hat in battle, or
+even that he had the nose terrible. But just as we see Cyrano best when
+he thus leaps above the crowd, I think we may take this moment of Shaw
+stepping on his little platform to see him clearly as he then was, and
+even as he has largely not ceased to be. I, at least, have only known
+him in his middle age; yet I think I can see him, younger yet only a
+little more alert, with hair more red but with face yet paler, as he
+first stood up upon some cart or barrow in the tossing glare of the gas.
+
+The first fact that one realises about Shaw (independent of all one has
+read and often contradicting it) is his voice. Primarily it is the voice
+of an Irishman, and then something of the voice of a musician. It
+possibly explains much of his career; a man may be permitted to say so
+many impudent things with so pleasant an intonation. But the voice is
+not only Irish and agreeable, it is also frank and as it were inviting
+conference. This goes with a style and gesture which can only be
+described as at once very casual and very emphatic. He assumes that
+bodily supremacy which goes with oratory, but he assumes it with almost
+ostentatious carelessness; he throws back the head, but loosely and
+laughingly. He is at once swaggering and yet shrugging his shoulders, as
+if to drop from them the mantle of the orator which he has confidently
+assumed. Lastly, no man ever used voice or gesture better for the
+purpose of expressing certainty; no man can say "I tell Mr. Jones he is
+totally wrong" with more air of unforced and even casual conviction.
+
+This particular play of feature or pitch of voice, at once didactic and
+yet not uncomrade-like, must be counted a very important fact,
+especially in connection with the period when that voice was first
+heard. It must be remembered that Shaw emerged as a wit in a sort of
+secondary age of wits; one of those stale interludes of prematurely old
+young men, which separate the serious epochs of history. Oscar Wilde was
+its god; but he was somewhat more mystical, not to say monstrous, than
+the average of its dried and decorous impudence. The _two survivals_ of
+that time, as far as I know, are Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. Graham
+Robertson; two most charming people; but the air they had to live in was
+the devil. One of its notes was an artificial reticence of speech, which
+waited till it could plant the perfect epigram. Its typical products
+were far too conceited to lay down the law. Now when people heard that
+Bernard Shaw was witty, as he most certainly was, when they heard his
+_mots_ repeated like those of Whistler or Wilde, when they heard things
+like "the Seven deadly Virtues" or "Who _was_ Hall Caine?" they expected
+another of these silent sarcastic dandies who went about with one
+epigram, patient and poisonous, like a bee with his one sting. And when
+they saw and heard the new humorist they found no fixed sneer, no frock
+coat, no green carnation, no silent Savoy Restaurant good manners, no
+fear of looking a fool, no particular notion of looking a gentleman.
+They found a talkative Irishman with a kind voice and a brown coat; open
+gestures and an evident desire to make people really agree with him. He
+had his own kind of affectations no doubt, and his own kind of tricks of
+debate; but he broke, and, thank God, forever the spell of the little
+man with the single eye glass who had frozen both faith and fun at so
+many tea-tables. Shaw's humane voice and hearty manner were so obviously
+more the things of a great man than the hard, gem-like brilliancy of
+Wilde or the careful ill-temper of Whistler. He brought in a breezier
+sort of insolence; the single eye-glass fled before the single eye.
+
+Added to the effect of the amiable dogmatic voice and lean, loose
+swaggering figure, is that of the face with which so many caricaturists
+have fantastically delighted themselves, the Mephistophelean face with
+the fierce tufted eyebrows and forked red beard. Yet those caricaturists
+in their natural delight in coming upon so striking a face, have
+somewhat misrepresented it, making it merely Satanic; whereas its actual
+expression has quite as much benevolence as mockery. By this time his
+costume has become a part of his personality; one has come to think of
+the reddish brown Jaeger suit as if it were a sort of reddish brown fur,
+and were, like the hair and eyebrows, a part of the animal; yet there
+are those who claim to remember a Bernard Shaw of yet more awful aspect
+before Jaeger came to his assistance; a Bernard Shaw in a dilapidated
+frock-coat and some sort of straw hat. I can hardly believe it; the man
+is so much of a piece, and must always have dressed appropriately. In
+any case his brown woollen clothes, at once artistic and hygienic,
+completed the appeal for which he stood; which might be defined as an
+eccentric healthy-mindedness. But something of the vagueness and
+equivocation of his first fame is probably due to the different
+functions which he performed in the contemporary world of art.
+
+He began by writing novels. They are not much read, and indeed not
+imperatively worth reading, with the one exception of the crude and
+magnificent _Cashel Byron's Profession_. Mr. William Archer, in the
+course of his kindly efforts on behalf of his young Irish friend, sent
+this book to Samoa, for the opinion of the most elvish and yet
+efficient of modern critics. Stevenson summed up much of Shaw even from
+that fragment when he spoke of a romantic griffin roaring with laughter
+at the nature of his own quest. He also added the not wholly unjustified
+postscript: "I say, Archer,--my God, what women!"
+
+The fiction was largely dropped; but when he began work he felt his way
+by the avenues of three arts. He was an art critic, a dramatic critic,
+and a musical critic; and in all three, it need hardly be said, he
+fought for the newest style and the most revolutionary school. He wrote
+on all these as he would have written on anything; but it was, I fancy,
+about the music that he cared most.
+
+It may often be remarked that mathematicians love and understand music
+more than they love or understand poetry. Bernard Shaw is in much the
+same condition; indeed, in attempting to do justice to Shakespeare's
+poetry, he always calls it "word music." It is not difficult to explain
+this special attachment of the mere logician to music. The logician,
+like every other man on earth, must have sentiment and romance in his
+existence; in every man's life, indeed, which can be called a life at
+all, sentiment is the most solid thing. But if the extreme logician
+turns for his emotions to poetry, he is exasperated and bewildered by
+discovering that the words of his own trade are used in an entirely
+different meaning. He conceives that he understands the word "visible,"
+and then finds Milton applying it to darkness, in which nothing is
+visible. He supposes that he understands the word "hide," and then finds
+Shelley talking of a poet hidden in the light. He has reason to believe
+that he understands the common word "hung"; and then William
+Shakespeare, Esquire, of Stratford-on-Avon, gravely assures him that the
+tops of the tall sea waves were hung with deafening clamours on the
+slippery clouds. That is why the common arithmetician prefers music to
+poetry. Words are his scientific instruments. It irritates him that they
+should be anyone else's musical instruments. He is willing to see men
+juggling, but not men juggling with his own private tools and
+possessions--his terms. It is then that he turns with an utter relief to
+music. Here are all the same fascination and inspiration, all the same
+purity and plunging force as in poetry; but not requiring any verbal
+confession that light conceals things or that darkness can be seen in
+the dark. Music is mere beauty; it is beauty in the abstract, beauty in
+solution. It is a shapeless and liquid element of beauty, in which a man
+may really float, not indeed affirming the truth, but not denying it.
+Bernard Shaw, as I have already said, is infinitely far above all such
+mere mathematicians and pedantic reasoners; still his feeling is partly
+the same. He adores music because it cannot deal with romantic terms
+either in their right or their wrong sense. Music can be romantic
+without reminding him of Shakespeare and Walter Scott, with whom he has
+had personal quarrels. Music can be Catholic without reminding him
+verbally of the Catholic Church, which he has never seen, and is sure he
+does not like. Bernard Shaw can agree with Wagner, the musician, because
+he speaks without words; if it had been Wagner the man he would
+certainly have had words with him. Therefore I would suggest that Shaw's
+love of music (which is so fundamental that it must be mentioned early,
+if not first, in his story) may itself be considered in the first case
+as the imaginative safety-valve of the rationalistic Irishman.
+
+This much may be said conjecturally over the present signature; but more
+must not be said. Bernard Shaw understands music so much better than I
+do that it is just possible that he is, in that tongue and atmosphere,
+all that he is not elsewhere. While he is writing with a pen I know his
+limitations as much as I admire his genius; and I know it is true to say
+that he does not appreciate romance. But while he is playing on the
+piano he may be cocking a feather, drawing a sword or draining a flagon
+for all I know. While he is speaking I am sure that there are some
+things he does not understand. But while he is listening (at the Queen's
+Hall) he may understand everything, including God and me. Upon this part
+of him I am a reverent agnostic; it is well to have some such dark
+continent in the character of a man of whom one writes. It preserves two
+very important things--modesty in the biographer and mystery in the
+biography.
+
+For the purpose of our present generalisation it is only necessary to
+say that Shaw, as a musical critic, summed himself up as "The Perfect
+Wagnerite"; he threw himself into subtle and yet trenchant eulogy of
+that revolutionary voice in music. It was the same with the other arts.
+As he was a Perfect Wagnerite in music, so he was a Perfect Whistlerite
+in painting; so above all he was a Perfect Ibsenite in drama. And with
+this we enter that part of his career with which this book is more
+specially concerned. When Mr. William Archer got him established as
+dramatic critic of the _Saturday Review_, he became for the first time
+"a star of the stage"; a shooting star and sometimes a destroying comet.
+
+On the day of that appointment opened one of the very few exhilarating
+and honest battles that broke the silence of the slow and cynical
+collapse of the nineteenth century. Bernard Shaw the demagogue had got
+his cart and his trumpet; and was resolved to make them like the car of
+destiny and the trumpet of judgment. He had not the servility of the
+ordinary rebel, who is content to go on rebelling against kings and
+priests, because such rebellion is as old and as established as any
+priests or kings. He cast about him for something to attack which was
+not merely powerful or placid, but was unattacked. After a little quite
+sincere reflection, he found it. He would not be content to be a common
+atheist; he wished to blaspheme something in which even atheists
+believed. He was not satisfied with being revolutionary; there were so
+many revolutionists. He wanted to pick out some prominent institution
+which had been irrationally and instinctively accepted by the most
+violent and profane; something of which Mr. Foote would speak as
+respectfully on the front page of the _Freethinker_ as Mr. St. Loe
+Strachey on the front page of the _Spectator_. He found the thing; he
+found the great unassailed English institution--Shakespeare.
+
+But Shaw's attack on Shakespeare, though exaggerated for the fun of the
+thing, was not by any means the mere folly or firework paradox that has
+been supposed. He meant what he said; what was called his levity was
+merely the laughter of a man who enjoyed saying what he meant--an
+occupation which is indeed one of the greatest larks in life. Moreover,
+it can honestly be said that Shaw did good by shaking the mere idolatry
+of Him of Avon. That idolatry was bad for England; it buttressed our
+perilous self-complacency by making us think that we alone had, not
+merely a great poet, but the one poet above criticism. It was bad for
+literature; it made a minute model out of work that was really a hasty
+and faulty masterpiece. And it was bad for religion and morals that
+there should be so huge a terrestrial idol, that we should put such
+utter and unreasoning trust in any child of man. It is true that it was
+largely through Shaw's own defects that he beheld the defects of
+Shakespeare. But it needed someone equally prosaic to resist what was
+perilous in the charm of such poetry; it may not be altogether a mistake
+to send a deaf man to destroy the rock of the sirens.
+
+This attitude of Shaw illustrates of course all three of the divisions
+or aspects to which the reader's attention has been drawn. It was partly
+the attitude of the Irishman objecting to the Englishman turning his
+mere artistic taste into a religion; especially when it was a taste
+merely taught him by his aunts and uncles. In Shaw's opinion (one might
+say) the English do not really enjoy Shakespeare or even admire
+Shakespeare; one can only say, in the strong colloquialism, that they
+swear by Shakespeare. He is a mere god; a thing to be invoked. And
+Shaw's whole business was to set up the things which were to be sworn by
+as things to be sworn at. It was partly again the revolutionist in
+pursuit of pure novelty, hating primarily the oppression of the past,
+almost hating history itself. For Bernard Shaw the prophets were to be
+stoned after, and not before, men had built their sepulchres. There was
+a Yankee smartness in the man which was irritated at the idea of being
+dominated by a person dead for three hundred years; like Mark Twain, he
+wanted a fresher corpse.
+
+These two motives there were, but they were small compared with the
+other. It was the third part of him, the Puritan, that was really at war
+with Shakespeare. He denounced that playwright almost exactly as any
+contemporary Puritan coming out of a conventicle in a steeple-crowned
+hat and stiff bands might have denounced the playwright coming out of
+the stage door of the old Globe Theatre. This is not a mere fancy; it is
+philosophically true. A legend has run round the newspapers that Bernard
+Shaw offered himself as a better writer than Shakespeare. This is false
+and quite unjust; Bernard Shaw never said anything of the kind. The
+writer whom he did say was better than Shakespeare was not himself, but
+Bunyan. And he justified it by attributing to Bunyan a virile acceptance
+of life as a high and harsh adventure, while in Shakespeare he saw
+nothing but profligate pessimism, the _vanitas vanitatum_ of a
+disappointed voluptuary. According to this view Shakespeare was always
+saying, "Out, out, brief candle," because his was only a ballroom
+candle; while Bunyan was seeking to light such a candle as by God's
+grace should never be put out.
+
+It is odd that Bernard Shaw's chief error or insensibility should have
+been the instrument of his noblest affirmation. The denunciation of
+Shakespeare was a mere misunderstanding. But the denunciation of
+Shakespeare's pessimism was the most splendidly understanding of all his
+utterances. This is the greatest thing in Shaw, a serious optimism--even
+a tragic optimism. Life is a thing too glorious to be enjoyed. To be is
+an exacting and exhausting business; the trumpet though inspiring is
+terrible. Nothing that he ever wrote is so noble as his simple reference
+to the sturdy man who stepped up to the Keeper of the Book of Life and
+said, "Put down my name, Sir." It is true that Shaw called this heroic
+philosophy by wrong names and buttressed it with false metaphysics; that
+was the weakness of the age. The temporary decline of theology had
+involved the neglect of philosophy and all fine thinking; and Bernard
+Shaw had to find shaky justifications in Schopenhauer for the sons of
+God shouting for joy. He called it the Will to Live--a phrase invented
+by Prussian professors who would like to exist, but can't. Afterwards he
+asked people to worship the Life-Force; as if one could worship a
+hyphen. But though he covered it with crude new names (which are now
+fortunately crumbling everywhere like bad mortar) he was on the side of
+the good old cause; the oldest and the best of all causes, the cause of
+creation against destruction, the cause of yes against no, the cause of
+the seed against the stony earth and the star against the abyss.
+
+His misunderstanding of Shakespeare arose largely from the fact that he
+is a Puritan, while Shakespeare was spiritually a Catholic. The former
+is always screwing himself up to see truth; the latter is often content
+that truth is there. The Puritan is only strong enough to stiffen; the
+Catholic is strong enough to relax. Shaw, I think, has entirely
+misunderstood the pessimistic passages of Shakespeare. They are flying
+moods which a man with a fixed faith can afford to entertain. That all
+is vanity, that life is dust and love is ashes, these are frivolities,
+these are jokes that a Catholic can afford to utter. He knows well
+enough that there is a life that is not dust and a love that is not
+ashes. But just as he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the
+matter of enjoyment, so he may let himself go more than the Puritan in
+the matter of melancholy. The sad exuberances of Hamlet are merely like
+the glad exuberances of Falstaff. This is not conjecture; it is the text
+of Shakespeare. In the very act of uttering his pessimism, Hamlet admits
+that it is a mood and not the truth. Heaven _is_ a heavenly thing, only
+to him it seems a foul congregation of vapours. Man _is_ the paragon of
+animals, only to him he seems a quintessence of dust. Hamlet is quite
+the reverse of a sceptic. He is a man whose strong intellect believes
+much more than his weak temperament can make vivid to him. But this
+power of knowing a thing without feeling it, this power of believing a
+thing without experiencing it, this is an old Catholic complexity, and
+the Puritan has never understood it. Shakespeare confesses his moods
+(mostly by the mouths of villains and failures), but he never sets up
+his moods against his mind. His cry of _vanitas vanitatum_ is itself
+only a harmless vanity. Readers may not agree with my calling him
+Catholic with a big C; but they will hardly complain of my calling him
+catholic with a small one. And that is here the principal point.
+Shakespeare was not in any sense a pessimist; he was, if anything, an
+optimist so universal as to be able to enjoy even pessimism. And this is
+exactly where he differs from the Puritan. The true Puritan is not
+squeamish: the true Puritan is free to say "Damn it!" But the Catholic
+Elizabethan was free (on passing provocation) to say "Damn it all!"
+
+It need hardly be explained that Bernard Shaw added to his negative case
+of a dramatist to be depreciated a corresponding affirmative case of a
+dramatist to be exalted and advanced. He was not content with so remote
+a comparison as that between Shakespeare and Bunyan. In his vivacious
+weekly articles in the _Saturday Review_, the real comparison upon which
+everything turned was the comparison between Shakespeare and Ibsen. He
+early threw himself with all possible eagerness into the public disputes
+about the great Scandinavian; and though there was no doubt whatever
+about which side he supported, there was much that was individual in the
+line he took. It is not our business here to explore that extinct
+volcano. You may say that anti-Ibsenism is dead, or you may say that
+Ibsen is dead; in any case, that controversy is dead, and death, as the
+Roman poet says, can alone confess of what small atoms we are made. The
+opponents of Ibsen largely exhibited the permanent qualities of the
+populace; that is, their instincts were right and their reasons wrong.
+They made the complete controversial mistake of calling Ibsen a
+pessimist; whereas, indeed, his chief weakness is a rather childish
+confidence in mere nature and freedom, and a blindness (either of
+experience or of culture) in the matter of original sin. In this sense
+Ibsen is not so much a pessimist as a highly crude kind of optimist.
+Nevertheless the man in the street was right in his fundamental
+instinct, as he always is. Ibsen, in his pale northern style, is an
+optimist; but for all that he is a depressing person. The optimism of
+Ibsen is less comforting than the pessimism of Dante; just as a
+Norwegian sunrise, however splendid, is colder than a southern night.
+
+But on the side of those who fought for Ibsen there was also a
+disagreement, and perhaps also a mistake. The vague army of "the
+advanced" (an army which advances in all directions) were united in
+feeling that they ought to be the friends of Ibsen because he also was
+advancing somewhere somehow. But they were also seriously impressed by
+Flaubert, by Oscar Wilde and all the rest who told them that a work of
+art was in another universe from ethics and social good. Therefore many,
+I think most, of the Ibsenites praised the Ibsen plays merely as _choses
+vues_, æsthetic affirmations of what can be without any reference to
+what ought to be. Mr. William Archer himself inclined to this view,
+though his strong sagacity kept him in a haze of healthy doubt on the
+subject. Mr. Walkley certainly took this view. But this view Mr. George
+Bernard Shaw abruptly and violently refused to take.
+
+With the full Puritan combination of passion and precision he informed
+everybody that Ibsen was not artistic, but moral; that his dramas were
+didactic, that all great art was didactic, that Ibsen was strongly on
+the side of some of his characters and strongly against others, that
+there was preaching and public spirit in the work of good dramatists;
+and that if this were not so, dramatists and all other artists would be
+mere panders of intellectual debauchery, to be locked up as the Puritans
+locked up the stage players. No one can understand Bernard Shaw who does
+not give full value to this early revolt of his on behalf of ethics
+against the ruling school of _l'art pour l'art_. It is interesting
+because it is connected with other ambitions in the man, especially
+with that which has made him somewhat vainer of being a Parish
+Councillor than of being one of the most popular dramatists in Europe.
+But its chief interest is again to be referred to our stratification of
+the psychology; it is the lover of true things rebelling for once
+against merely new things; it is the Puritan suddenly refusing to be the
+mere Progressive.
+
+But this attitude obviously laid on the ethical lover of Ibsen a not
+inconsiderable obligation. If the new drama had an ethical purpose, what
+was it? and if Ibsen was a moral teacher, what the deuce was he
+teaching? Answers to this question, answers of manifold brilliancy and
+promise, were scattered through all the dramatic criticisms of those
+years on the _Saturday Review_. But even Bernard Shaw grew tired after a
+time of discussing Ibsen only in connection with the current pantomime
+or the latest musical comedy. It was felt that so much sincerity and
+fertility of explanation justified a concentrated attack; and in 1891
+appeared the brilliant book called _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_, which
+some have declared to be merely the quintessence of Shaw. However this
+may be, it was in fact and profession the quintessence of Shaw's theory
+of the morality or propaganda of Ibsen.
+
+The book itself is much longer than the book that I am writing; and as
+is only right in so spirited an apologist, every paragraph is
+provocative. I could write an essay on every sentence which I accept and
+three essays on every sentence which I deny. Bernard Shaw himself is a
+master of compression; he can put a conception more compactly than any
+other man alive. It is therefore rather difficult to compress his
+compression; one feels as if one were trying to extract a beef essence
+from Bovril. But the shortest form in which I can state the idea of _The
+Quintessence of Ibsenism_ is that it is the idea of distrusting ideals,
+which are universal, in comparison with facts, which are miscellaneous.
+The man whom he attacks throughout he calls "The Idealist"; that is the
+man who permits himself to be mainly moved by a moral generalisation.
+"Actions," he says, "are to be judged by their effect on happiness, and
+not by their conformity to any ideal." As we have already seen, there is
+a certain inconsistency here; for while Shaw had always chucked all
+ideals overboard the one he had chucked first was the ideal of
+happiness. Passing this however for the present, we may mark the above
+as the most satisfying summary. If I tell a lie I am not to blame myself
+for having violated the ideal of truth, but only for having perhaps got
+myself into a mess and made things worse than they were before. If I
+have broken my word I need not feel (as my fathers did) that I have
+broken something inside of me, as one who breaks a blood vessel. It all
+depends on whether I have broken up something outside me; as one who
+breaks up an evening party. If I shoot my father the only question is
+whether I have made him happy. I must not admit the idealistic
+conception that the mere shooting of my father might possibly make me
+unhappy. We are to judge of every individual case as it arises,
+apparently without any social summary or moral ready-reckoner at all.
+"The Golden Rule is that there is no Golden Rule." We must not say that
+it is right to keep promises, but that it may be right to keep this
+promise. Essentially it is anarchy; nor is it very easy to see how a
+state could be very comfortable which was Socialist in all its public
+morality and Anarchist in all its private. But if it is anarchy, it is
+anarchy without any of the abandon and exuberance of anarchy. It is a
+worried and conscientious anarchy; an anarchy of painful delicacy and
+even caution. For it refuses to trust in traditional experiments or
+plainly trodden tracks; every case must be considered anew from the
+beginning, and yet considered with the most wide-eyed care for human
+welfare; every man must act as if he were the first man made. Briefly,
+we must always be worrying about what is best for our children, and we
+must not take one hint or rule of thumb from our fathers. Some think
+that this anarchism would make a man tread down mighty cities in his
+madness. I think it would make a man walk down the street as if he were
+walking on egg-shells. I do not think this experiment in opportunism
+would end in frantic license; I think it would end in frozen timidity.
+If a man was forbidden to solve moral problems by moral science or the
+help of mankind, his course would be quite easy--he would not solve the
+problems. The world instead of being a knot so tangled as to need
+unravelling, would simply become a piece of clockwork too complicated to
+be touched. I cannot think that this untutored worry was what Ibsen
+meant; I have my doubts as to whether it was what Shaw meant; but I do
+not think that it can be substantially doubted that it was what he said.
+
+In any case it can be asserted that the general aim of the work was to
+exalt the immediate conclusions of practice against the general
+conclusions of theory. Shaw objected to the solution of every problem in
+a play being by its nature a general solution, applicable to all other
+such problems. He disliked the entrance of a universal justice at the
+end of the last act; treading down all the personal ultimatums and all
+the varied certainties of men. He disliked the god from the
+machine--because he was from a machine. But even without the machine he
+tended to dislike the god; because a god is more general than a man. His
+enemies have accused Shaw of being anti-domestic, a shaker of the
+roof-tree. But in this sense Shaw may be called almost madly domestic.
+He wishes each private problem to be settled in private, without
+reference to sociological ethics. And the only objection to this kind of
+gigantic casuistry is that the theatre is really too small to discuss
+it. It would not be fair to play David and Goliath on a stage too small
+to admit Goliath. And it is not fair to discuss private morality on a
+stage too small to admit the enormous presence of public morality; that
+character which has not appeared in a play since the Middle Ages; whose
+name is Everyman and whose honour we have all in our keeping.
+
+
+
+
+_The Dramatist_
+
+
+No one who was alive at the time and interested in such matters will
+ever forget the first acting of _Arms and the Man_. It was applauded by
+that indescribable element in all of us which rejoices to see the
+genuine thing prevail against the plausible; that element which rejoices
+that even its enemies are alive. Apart from the problems raised in the
+play, the very form of it was an attractive and forcible innovation.
+Classic plays which were wholly heroic, comic plays which were wholly
+and even heartlessly ironical, were common enough. Commonest of all in
+this particular time was the play that began playfully, with plenty of
+comic business, and was gradually sobered by sentiment until it ended on
+a note of romance or even of pathos. A commonplace little officer, the
+butt of the mess, becomes by the last act as high and hopeless a lover
+as Dante. Or a vulgar and violent pork-butcher remembers his own youth
+before the curtain goes down. The first thing that Bernard Shaw did when
+he stepped before the footlights was to reverse this process. He
+resolved to build a play not on pathos, but on bathos. The officer
+should be heroic first and then everyone should laugh at him; the
+curtain should go up on a man remembering his youth, and he should only
+reveal himself as a violent pork-butcher when someone interrupted him
+with an order for pork. This merely technical originality is indicated
+in the very title of the play. The _Arma Virumque_ of Virgil is a
+mounting and ascending phrase, the man is more than his weapons. The
+Latin line suggests a superb procession which should bring on to the
+stage the brazen and resounding armour, the shield and shattering axe,
+but end with the hero himself, taller and more terrible because unarmed.
+The technical effect of Shaw's scheme is like the same scene, in which a
+crowd should carry even more gigantic shapes of shield and helmet, but
+when the horns and howls were at their highest, should end with the
+figure of Little Tich. The name itself is meant to be a bathos;
+arms--and the man.
+
+It is well to begin with the superficial; and this is the superficial
+effectiveness of Shaw; the brilliancy of bathos. But of course the
+vitality and value of his plays does not lie merely in this; any more
+than the value of Swinburne lies in alliteration or the value of Hood in
+puns. This is not his message; but it is his method; it is his style.
+The first taste we had of it was in this play of _Arms and the Man_; but
+even at the very first it was evident that there was much more in the
+play than that. Among other things there was one thing not unimportant;
+there was savage sincerity. Indeed, only a ferociously sincere person
+can produce such effective flippancies on a matter like war; just as
+only a strong man could juggle with cannon balls. It is all very well to
+use the word "fool" as synonymous with "jester"; but daily experience
+shows that it is generally the solemn and silent man who is the fool. It
+is all very well to accuse Mr. Shaw of standing on his head; but if you
+stand on your head you must have a hard and solid head to stand on. In
+_Arms and the Man_ the bathos of form was strictly the incarnation of a
+strong satire in the idea. The play opens in an atmosphere of military
+melodrama; the dashing officer of cavalry going off to death in an
+attitude, the lovely heroine left in tearful rapture; the brass band,
+the noise of guns and the red fire. Into all this enters Bluntschli, the
+little sturdy crop-haired Swiss professional soldier, a man without a
+country but with a trade. He tells the army-adoring heroine frankly that
+she is a humbug; and she, after a moment's reflection, appears to agree
+with him. The play is like nearly all Shaw's plays, the dialogue of a
+conversion. By the end of it the young lady has lost all her military
+illusions and admires this mercenary soldier not because he faces guns,
+but because he faces facts.
+
+This was a fitting entrance for Shaw to his didactic drama; because the
+commonplace courage which he respects in Bluntschli was the one virtue
+which he was destined to praise throughout. We can best see how the play
+symbolises and summarises Bernard Shaw if we compare it with some other
+attack by modern humanitarians upon war. Shaw has many of the actual
+opinions of Tolstoy. Like Tolstoy he tells men, with coarse innocence,
+that romantic war is only butchery and that romantic love is only lust.
+But Tolstoy objects to these things because they are real; he really
+wishes to abolish them. Shaw only objects to them in so far as they are
+ideal; that is in so far as they are idealised. Shaw objects not so much
+to war as to the attractiveness of war. He does not so much dislike love
+as the love of love. Before the temple of Mars, Tolstoy stands and
+thunders, "There shall be no wars"; Bernard Shaw merely murmurs, "Wars
+if you must; but for God's sake, not war songs." Before the temple of
+Venus, Tolstoy cries terribly, "Come out of it!"; Shaw is quite content
+to say, "Do not be taken in by it." Tolstoy seems really to propose that
+high passion and patriotic valour should be destroyed. Shaw is more
+moderate; and only asks that they should be desecrated. Upon this note,
+both about sex and conflict, he was destined to dwell through much of
+his work with the most wonderful variations of witty adventure and
+intellectual surprise. It may be doubted perhaps whether this realism in
+love and war is quite so sensible as it looks. _Securus judicat orbis
+terrarum_; the world is wiser than the moderns. The world has kept
+sentimentalities simply because they are the most practical things in
+the world. They alone make men do things. The world does not encourage a
+quite rational lover, simply because a perfectly rational lover would
+never get married. The world does not encourage a perfectly rational
+army, because a perfectly rational army would run away.
+
+The brain of Bernard Shaw was like a wedge in the literal sense. Its
+sharpest end was always in front; and it split our society from end to
+end the moment it had entrance at all. As I have said he was long
+unheard of; but he had not the tragedy of many authors, who were heard
+of long before they were heard. When you had read any Shaw you read all
+Shaw. When you had seen one of his plays you waited for more. And when
+he brought them out in volume form, you did what is repugnant to any
+literary man--you bought a book.
+
+The dramatic volume with which Shaw dazzled the public was called,
+_Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_. I think the most striking and typical
+thing about it was that he did not know very clearly which plays were
+unpleasant and which were pleasant. "Pleasant" is a word which is almost
+unmeaning to Bernard Shaw. Except, as I suppose, in music (where I
+cannot follow him), relish and receptivity are things that simply do not
+appear. He has the best of tongues and the worst of palates. With the
+possible exception of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ (which was at least
+unpleasant in the sense of being forbidden) I can see no particular
+reason why any of the seven plays should be held specially to please or
+displease. First in fame and contemporary importance came the reprint
+of _Arms and the Man_, of which I have already spoken. Over all the rest
+towered unquestionably the two figures of Mrs. Warren and of Candida.
+They were neither of them pleasant, except as all good art is pleasant.
+They were neither of them really unpleasant except as all truth is
+unpleasant. But they did represent the author's normal preference and
+his principal fear; and those two sculptured giantesses largely upheld
+his fame.
+
+I fancy that the author rather dislikes _Candida_ because it is so
+generally liked. I give my own feeling for what it is worth (a foolish
+phrase), but I think that there were only two moments when this powerful
+writer was truly, in the ancient and popular sense, inspired; that is,
+breathing from a bigger self and telling more truth than he knew. One is
+that scene in a later play where after the secrets and revenges of Egypt
+have rioted and rotted all round him, the colossal sanity of Cæsar is
+suddenly acclaimed with swords. The other is that great last scene in
+_Candida_ where the wife, stung into final speech, declared her purpose
+of remaining with the strong man because he is the weak man. The wife is
+asked to decide between two men, one a strenuous self-confident popular
+preacher, her husband, the other a wild and weak young poet, logically
+futile and physically timid, her lover; and she chooses the former
+because he has more weakness and more need of her. Even among the plain
+and ringing paradoxes of the Shaw play this is one of the best reversals
+or turnovers ever effected. A paradoxical writer like Bernard Shaw is
+perpetually and tiresomely told that he stands on his head. But all
+romance and all religion consist in making the whole universe stand on
+its head. That reversal is the whole idea of virtue; that the last shall
+be first and the first last. Considered as a pure piece of Shaw
+therefore, the thing is of the best. But it is also something much
+better than Shaw. The writer touches certain realities commonly outside
+his scope; especially the reality of the normal wife's attitude to the
+normal husband, an attitude which is not romantic but which is yet quite
+quixotic; which is insanely unselfish and yet quite cynically
+clear-sighted. It involves human sacrifice without in the least
+involving idolatry.
+
+The truth is that in this place Bernard Shaw comes within an inch of
+expressing something that is not properly expressed anywhere else; the
+idea of marriage. Marriage is not a mere chain upon love as the
+anarchists say; nor is it a mere crown upon love as the sentimentalists
+say. Marriage is a fact, an actual human relation like that of
+motherhood which has certain human habits and loyalties, except in a few
+monstrous cases where it is turned to torture by special insanity and
+sin. A marriage is neither an ecstasy nor a slavery; it is a
+commonwealth; it is a separate working and fighting thing like a nation.
+Kings and diplomatists talk of "forming alliances" when they make
+weddings; but indeed every wedding is primarily an alliance. The family
+is a fact even when it is not an agreeable fact, and a man is part of
+his wife even when he wishes he wasn't. The twain are one flesh--yes,
+even when they are not one spirit. Man is duplex. Man is a quadruped.
+
+Of this ancient and essential relation there are certain emotional
+results, which are subtle, like all the growths of nature. And one of
+them is the attitude of the wife to the husband, whom she regards at
+once as the strongest and most helpless of human figures. She regards
+him in some strange fashion at once as a warrior who must make his way
+and as an infant who is sure to lose his way. The man has emotions which
+exactly correspond; sometimes looking down at his wife and sometimes up
+at her; for marriage is like a splendid game of see-saw. Whatever else
+it is, it is not comradeship. This living, ancestral bond (not of love
+or fear, but strictly of marriage) has been twice expressed splendidly
+in literature. The man's incurable sense of the mother in his lawful
+wife was uttered by Browning in one of his two or three truly shattering
+lines of genius, when he makes the execrable Guido fall back finally
+upon the fact of marriage and the wife whom he has trodden like mire:
+
+
+                "Christ! Maria! God,
+     Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"
+
+
+And the woman's witness to the same fact has been best expressed by
+Bernard Shaw in this great scene where she remains with the great
+stalwart successful public man because he is really too little to run
+alone.
+
+There are one or two errors in the play; and they are all due to the
+primary error of despising the mental attitude of romance, which is the
+only key to real human conduct. For instance, the love making of the
+young poet is all wrong. He is supposed to be a romantic and amorous
+boy; and therefore the dramatist tries to make him talk turgidly, about
+seeking for "an archangel with purple wings" who shall be worthy of his
+lady. But a lad in love would never talk in this mock heroic style;
+there is no period at which the young male is more sensitive and serious
+and afraid of looking a fool. This is a blunder; but there is another
+much bigger and blacker. It is completely and disastrously false to the
+whole nature of falling in love to make the young Eugene complain of the
+cruelty which makes Candida defile her fair hands with domestic duties.
+No boy in love with a beautiful woman would ever feel disgusted when she
+peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. He would like her to be domestic. He
+would simply feel that the potatoes had become poetical and the lamps
+gained an extra light. This may be irrational; but we are not talking of
+rationality, but of the psychology of first love. It may be very unfair
+to women that the toil and triviality of potato peeling should be seen
+through a glamour of romance; but the glamour is quite as certain a fact
+as the potatoes. It may be a bad thing in sociology that men should
+deify domesticity in girls as something dainty and magical; but all men
+do. Personally I do not think it a bad thing at all; but that is another
+argument. The argument here is that Bernard Shaw, in aiming at mere
+realism, makes a big mistake in reality. Misled by his great heresy of
+looking at emotions from the outside, he makes Eugene a cold-blooded
+prig at the very moment when he is trying, for his own dramatic
+purposes, to make him a hot-blooded lover. He makes the young lover an
+idealistic theoriser about the very things about which he really would
+have been a sort of mystical materialist. Here the romantic Irishman is
+much more right than the very rational one; and there is far more truth
+to life as it is in Lover's couplet--
+
+
+     "And envied the chicken
+     That Peggy was pickin'."
+
+
+than in Eugene's solemn, æsthetic protest against the potato-skins and
+the lamp-oil. For dramatic purposes, G. B. S., even if he despises
+romance, ought to comprehend it. But then, if once he comprehended
+romance, he would not despise it.
+
+The series contained, besides its more substantial work, tragic and
+comic, a comparative frivolity called _The Man of Destiny_. It is a
+little comedy about Napoleon, and is chiefly interesting as a
+foreshadowing of his after sketches of heroes and strong men; it is a
+kind of parody of _Cæsar and Cleopatra_ before it was written. In this
+connection the mere title of this Napoleonic play is of interest. All
+Shaw's generation and school of thought remembered Napoleon only by his
+late and corrupt title of "The Man of Destiny," a title only given to
+him when he was already fat and tired and destined to exile. They forgot
+that through all the really thrilling and creative part of his career he
+was not the man of destiny, but the man who defied destiny. Shaw's
+sketch is extraordinarily clever; but it is tinged with this unmilitary
+notion of an inevitable conquest; and this we must remember when we come
+to those larger canvases on which he painted his more serious heroes. As
+for the play, it is packed with good things, of which the last is
+perhaps the best. The long duologue between Bonaparte and the Irish lady
+ends with the General declaring that he will only be beaten when he
+meets an English army under an Irish general. It has always been one of
+Shaw's paradoxes that the English mind has the force to fulfil orders,
+while the Irish mind has the intelligence to give them, and it is among
+those of his paradoxes which contain a certain truth.
+
+A far more important play is _The Philanderer_, an ironic comedy which
+is full of fine strokes and real satire; it is more especially the
+vehicle of some of Shaw's best satire upon physical science. Nothing
+could be cleverer than the picture of the young, strenuous doctor, in
+the utter innocence of his professional ambition, who has discovered a
+new disease, and is delighted when he finds people suffering from it and
+cast down to despair when he finds that it does not exist. The point is
+worth a pause, because it is a good, short way of stating Shaw's
+attitude, right or wrong, upon the whole of formal morality. What he
+dislikes in young Doctor Paramore is that he has interposed a secondary
+and false conscience between himself and the facts. When his disease is
+disproved, instead of seeing the escape of a human being who thought he
+was going to die of it, Paramore sees the downfall of a kind of flag or
+cause. This is the whole contention of _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_,
+put better than the book puts it; it is a really sharp exposition of the
+dangers of "idealism," the sacrifice of people to principles, and Shaw
+is even wiser in his suggestion that this excessive idealism exists
+nowhere so strongly as in the world of physical science. He shows that
+the scientist tends to be more concerned about the sickness than about
+the sick man; but it was certainly in his mind to suggest here also that
+the idealist is more concerned about the sin than about the sinner.
+
+This business of Dr. Paramore's disease while it is the most farcical
+thing in the play is also the most philosophic and important. The rest
+of the figures, including the Philanderer himself, are in the full sense
+of those blasting and obliterating words "funny without being vulgar,"
+that is, funny without being of any importance to the masses of men. It
+is a play about a dashing and advanced "Ibsen Club," and the squabble
+between the young Ibsenites and the old people who are not yet up to
+Ibsen. It would be hard to find a stronger example of Shaw's only
+essential error, modernity--which means the seeking for truth in terms
+of time. Only a few years have passed and already almost half the wit of
+that wonderful play is wasted, because it all turns on the newness of a
+fashion that is no longer new. Doubtless many people still think the
+Ibsen drama a great thing, like the French classical drama. But going to
+"The Philanderer" is like going among periwigs and rapiers and hearing
+that the young men are now all for Racine. What makes such work sound
+unreal is not the praise of Ibsen, but the praise of the novelty of
+Ibsen. Any advantage that Bernard Shaw had over Colonel Craven I have
+over Bernard Shaw; we who happen to be born last have the meaningless
+and paltry triumph in that meaningless and paltry war. We are the
+superiors by that silliest and most snobbish of all superiorities, the
+mere aristocracy of time. All works must become thus old and insipid
+which have ever tried to be "modern," which have consented to smell of
+time rather than of eternity. Only those who have stooped to be in
+advance of their time will ever find themselves behind it.
+
+But it is irritating to think what diamonds, what dazzling silver of
+Shavian wit has been sunk in such an out-of-date warship. In _The
+Philanderer_ there are five hundred excellent and about five magnificent
+things. The rattle of repartees between the doctor and the soldier about
+the humanity of their two trades is admirable. Or again, when the
+colonel tells Chartaris that "in his young days" he would have no more
+behaved like Chartaris than he would have cheated at cards. After a
+pause Chartaris says, "You're getting old, Craven, and you make a
+virtue of it as usual." And there is an altitude of aerial tragedy in
+the words of Grace, who has refused the man she loves, to Julia, who is
+marrying the man she doesn't, "This is what they call a happy
+ending--these men."
+
+There is an acrid taste in _The Philanderer_; and certainly he might be
+considered a super-sensitive person who should find anything acrid in
+_You Never Can Tell_. This play is the nearest approach to frank and
+objectless exuberance in the whole of Shaw's work. _Punch_, with wisdom
+as well as wit, said that it might well be called not "You Never Can
+Tell" but "You Never Can be Shaw." And yet if anyone will read this
+blazing farce and then after it any of the romantic farces, such as
+_Pickwick_ or even _The Wrong Box_, I do not think he will be disposed
+to erase or even to modify what I said at the beginning about the
+ingrained grimness and even inhumanity of Shaw's art. To take but one
+test: love, in an "extravaganza," may be light love or love in idleness,
+but it should be hearty and happy love if it is to add to the general
+hilarity. Such are the ludicrous but lucky love affairs of the sportsman
+Winkle and the Maestro Jimson. In Gloria's collapse before her bullying
+lover there is something at once cold and unclean; it calls up all the
+modern supermen with their cruel and fishy eyes. Such farces should
+begin in a friendly air, in a tavern. There is something very symbolic
+of Shaw in the fact that his farce begins in a dentist's.
+
+The only one out of this brilliant batch of plays in which I think that
+the method adopted really fails, is the one called _Widower's Houses_.
+The best touch of Shaw is simply in the title. The simple substitution
+of widowers for widows contains almost the whole bitter and yet
+boisterous protest of Shaw; all his preference for undignified fact over
+dignified phrase; all his dislike of those subtle trends of sex or
+mystery which swing the logician off the straight line. We can imagine
+him crying, "Why in the name of death and conscience should it be tragic
+to be a widow but comic to be a widower?" But the rationalistic method
+is here applied quite wrong as regards the production of a drama. The
+most dramatic point in the affair is when the open and indecent
+rack-renter turns on the decent young man of means and proves to him
+that he is equally guilty, that he also can only grind his corn by
+grinding the faces of the poor. But even here the point is undramatic
+because it is indirect; it is indirect because it is merely
+sociological. It may be the truth that a young man living on an
+unexamined income which ultimately covers a great deal of house-property
+is as dangerous as any despot or thief. But it is a truth that you can
+no more put into a play than into a triolet. You can make a play out of
+one man robbing another man, but not out of one man robbing a million
+men; still less out of his robbing them unconsciously.
+
+Of the plays collected in this book I have kept _Mrs. Warren's
+Profession_ to the last, because, fine as it is, it is even finer and
+more important because of its fate, which was to rouse a long and
+serious storm and to be vetoed by the Censor of Plays. I say that this
+drama is most important because of the quarrel that came out of it. If I
+were speaking of some mere artist this might be an insult. But there are
+high and heroic things in Bernard Shaw; and one of the highest and most
+heroic is this, that he certainly cares much more for a quarrel than for
+a play. And this quarrel about the censorship is one on which he feels
+so strongly that in a book embodying any sort of sympathy it would be
+much better to leave out Mrs. Warren than to leave out Mr. Redford. The
+veto was the pivot of so very personal a movement by the dramatist, of
+so very positive an assertion of his own attitude towards things, that
+it is only just and necessary to state what were the two essential
+parties to the dispute; the play and the official who prevented the
+play.
+
+The play of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ is concerned with a coarse mother
+and a cold daughter; the mother drives the ordinary and dirty trade of
+harlotry; the daughter does not know until the end the atrocious origin
+of all her own comfort and refinement. The daughter, when the discovery
+is made, freezes up into an iceberg of contempt; which is indeed a very
+womanly thing to do. The mother explodes into pulverising cynicism and
+practicality; which is also very womanly. The dialogue is drastic and
+sweeping; the daughter says the trade is loathsome; the mother answers
+that she loathes it herself; that every healthy person does loathe the
+trade by which she lives. And beyond question the general effect of the
+play is that the trade is loathsome; supposing anyone to be so
+insensible as to require to be told of the fact. Undoubtedly the upshot
+is that a brothel is a miserable business, and a brothel-keeper a
+miserable woman. The whole dramatic art of Shaw is in the literal sense
+of the word, tragi-comic; I mean that the comic part comes after the
+tragedy. But just as _You Never Can Tell_ represents the nearest
+approach of Shaw to the purely comic, so _Mrs. Warren's Profession_
+represents his only complete, or nearly complete, tragedy. There is no
+twopenny modernism in it, as in _The Philanderer_. Mrs. Warren is as old
+as the Old Testament; "for she hath cast down many wounded, yea, many
+strong men have been slain by her; her house is in the gates of hell,
+going down into the chamber of death." Here is no subtle ethics, as in
+_Widowers' Houses_; for even those moderns who think it noble that a
+woman should throw away her honour, surely cannot think it especially
+noble that she should sell it. Here is no lighting up by laughter,
+astonishment, and happy coincidence, as in _You Never Can Tell_. The
+play is a pure tragedy about a permanent and quite plain human problem;
+the problem is as plain and permanent, the tragedy is as proud and pure,
+as in _OEdipus_ or _Macbeth_. This play was presented in the ordinary
+way for public performance and was suddenly stopped by the Censor of
+Plays.
+
+The Censor of Plays is a small and accidental eighteenth-century
+official. Like nearly all the powers which Englishmen now respect as
+ancient and rooted, he is very recent. Novels and newspapers still talk
+of the English aristocracy that came over with William the Conqueror.
+Little of our effective oligarchy is as old as the Reformation; and none
+of it came over with William the Conqueror. Some of the older English
+landlords came over with William of Orange; the rest have come by
+ordinary alien immigration. In the same way we always talk of the
+Victorian woman (with her smelling salts and sentiment) as the
+old-fashioned woman. But she really was a quite new-fashioned woman; she
+considered herself, and was, an advance in delicacy and civilisation
+upon the coarse and candid Elizabethan woman to whom we are now
+returning. We are never oppressed by old things; it is recent things
+that can really oppress. And in accordance with this principle modern
+England has accepted, as if it were a part of perennial morality, a
+tenth-rate job of Walpole's worst days called the Censorship of the
+Drama. Just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century parvenus to
+date from Hastings, just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century
+ladies to date from Eve, so they have supposed the eighteenth-century
+Censorship to date from Sinai. The origin of the thing was in truth
+purely political. Its first and principal achievement was to prevent
+Fielding from writing plays; not at all because the plays were coarse,
+but because they criticised the Government. Fielding was a free writer;
+but they did not resent his sexual freedom; the Censor would not have
+objected if he had torn away the most intimate curtains of decency or
+rent the last rag from private life. What the Censor disliked was his
+rending the curtain from public life. There is still much of that spirit
+in our country; there are no affairs which men seek so much to cover up
+as public affairs. But the thing was done somewhat more boldly and
+baldly in Walpole's day; and the Censorship of plays has its origin, not
+merely in tyranny, but in a quite trifling and temporary and partisan
+piece of tyranny; a thing in its nature far more ephemeral, far less
+essential, than Ship Money. Perhaps its brightest moment was when the
+office of censor was held by that filthy writer, Colman the younger; and
+when he gravely refused to license a work by the author of _Our
+Village_. Few funnier notions can ever have actually been facts than
+this notion that the restraint and chastity of George Colman saved the
+English public from the eroticism and obscenity of Miss Mitford.
+
+Such was the play; and such was the power that stopped the play. A
+private man wrote it; another private man forbade it; nor was there any
+difference between Mr. Shaw's authority and Mr. Redford's, except that
+Mr. Shaw did defend his action on public grounds and Mr. Redford did
+not. The dramatist had simply been suppressed by a despot; and what was
+worse (because it was modern) by a silent and evasive despot; a despot
+in hiding. People talk about the pride of tyrants; but we at the present
+day suffer from the modesty of tyrants; from the shyness and the
+shrinking secrecy of the strong. Shaw's preface to _Mrs. Warren's
+Profession_ was far more fit to be called a public document than the
+slovenly refusal of the individual official; it had more exactness, more
+universal application, more authority. Shaw on Redford was far more
+national and responsible than Redford on Shaw.
+
+The dramatist found in the quarrel one of the important occasions of his
+life, because the crisis called out something in him which is in many
+ways his highest quality--righteous indignation. As a mere matter of the
+art of controversy of course he carried the war into the enemy's camp
+at once. He did not linger over loose excuses for licence; he declared
+at once that the Censor was licentious, while he, Bernard Shaw, was
+clean. He did not discuss whether a Censorship ought to make the drama
+moral. He declared that it made the drama immoral. With a fine strategic
+audacity he attacked the Censor quite as much for what he permitted as
+for what he prevented. He charged him with encouraging all plays that
+attracted men to vice and only stopping those which discouraged them
+from it. Nor was this attitude by any means an idle paradox. Many plays
+appear (as Shaw pointed out) in which the prostitute and the procuress
+are practically obvious, and in which they are represented as revelling
+in beautiful surroundings and basking in brilliant popularity. The crime
+of Shaw was not that he introduced the Gaiety Girl; that had been done,
+with little enough decorum, in a hundred musical comedies. The crime of
+Shaw was that he introduced the Gaiety Girl, but did not represent her
+life as all gaiety. The pleasures of vice were already flaunted before
+the playgoers. It was the perils of vice that were carefully concealed
+from them. The gay adventures, the gorgeous dresses, the champagne and
+oysters, the diamonds and motor-cars, dramatists were allowed to drag
+all these dazzling temptations before any silly housemaid in the gallery
+who was grumbling at her wages. But they were not allowed to warn her of
+the vulgarity and the nausea, the dreary deceptions and the blasting
+diseases of that life. _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ was not up to a
+sufficient standard of immorality; it was not spicy enough to pass the
+Censor. The acceptable and the accepted plays were those which made the
+fall of a woman fashionable and fascinating; for all the world as if the
+Censor's profession were the same as Mrs. Warren's profession.
+
+Such was the angle of Shaw's energetic attack; and it is not to be
+denied that there was exaggeration in it, and what is so much worse,
+omission. The argument might easily be carried too far; it might end
+with a scene of screaming torture in the Inquisition as a corrective to
+the too amiable view of a clergyman in _The Private Secretary_. But the
+controversy is definitely worth recording, if only as an excellent
+example of the author's aggressive attitude and his love of turning the
+tables in debate. Moreover, though this point of view involves a
+potential overstatement, it also involves an important truth. One of
+the best points urged in the course of it was this, that though vice is
+punished in conventional drama, the punishment is not really impressive,
+because it is not inevitable or even probable. It does not arise out of
+the evil act. Years afterwards Bernard Shaw urged this argument again in
+connection with his friend Mr. Granville Barker's play of _Waste_, in
+which the woman dies from an illegal operation. Bernard Shaw said, truly
+enough, that if she had died from poison or a pistol shot it would have
+left everyone unmoved, for pistols do not in their nature follow female
+unchastity. Illegal operations very often do. The punishment was one
+which might follow the crime, not only in that case, but in many cases.
+Here, I think, the whole argument might be sufficiently cleared up by
+saying that the objection to such things on the stage is a purely
+artistic objection. There is nothing wrong in talking about an illegal
+operation; there are plenty of occasions when it would be very wrong not
+to talk about it. But it may easily be just a shade too ugly for the
+shape of any work of art. There is nothing wrong about being sick; but
+if Bernard Shaw wrote a play in which all the characters expressed
+their dislike of animal food by vomiting on the stage, I think we should
+be justified in saying that the thing was outside, not the laws of
+morality, but the framework of civilised literature. The instinctive
+movement of repulsion which everyone has when hearing of the operation
+in _Waste_ is not an ethical repulsion at all. But it is an æsthetic
+repulsion, and a right one.
+
+But I have only dwelt on this particular fighting phase because it
+leaves us facing the ultimate characteristics which I mentioned first.
+Bernard Shaw cares nothing for art; in comparison with morals, literally
+nothing. Bernard Shaw is a Puritan and his work is Puritan work. He has
+all the essentials of the old, virile and extinct Protestant type. In
+his work he is as ugly as a Puritan. He is as indecent as a Puritan. He
+is as full of gross words and sensual facts as a sermon of the
+seventeenth century. Up to this point of his life indeed hardly anyone
+would have dreamed of calling him a Puritan; he was called sometimes an
+anarchist, sometimes a buffoon, sometimes (by the more discerning stupid
+people) a prig. His attitude towards current problems was felt to be
+arresting and even indecent; I do not think that anyone thought of
+connecting it with the old Calvinistic morality. But Shaw, who knew
+better than the Shavians, was at this moment on the very eve of
+confessing his moral origin. The next book of plays he produced
+(including The _Devil's Disciple_, _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_,
+and _Cæsar and Cleopatra_), actually bore the title of _Plays for
+Puritans_.
+
+The play called _The Devil's Disciple_ has great merits, but the merits
+are incidental. Some of its jokes are serious and important, but its
+general plan can only be called a joke. Almost alone among Bernard
+Shaw's plays (except of course such things as _How he Lied to her
+Husband_ and _The Admirable Bashville_) this drama does not turn on any
+very plain pivot of ethical or philosophical conviction. The artistic
+idea seems to be the notion of a melodrama in which all the conventional
+melodramatic situations shall suddenly take unconventional turns. Just
+where the melodramatic clergyman would show courage he appears to show
+cowardice; just where the melodramatic sinner would confess his love he
+confesses his indifference. This is a little too like the Shaw of the
+newspaper critics rather than the Shaw of reality. There are indeed
+present in the play two of the writer's principal moral conceptions.
+The first is the idea of a great heroic action coming in a sense from
+nowhere; that is, not coming from any commonplace motive; being born in
+the soul in naked beauty, coming with its own authority and testifying
+only to itself. Shaw's agent does not act towards something, but from
+something. The hero dies, not because he desires heroism, but because he
+has it. So in this particular play the Devil's Disciple finds that his
+own nature will not permit him to put the rope around another man's
+neck; he has no reasons of desire, affection, or even equity; his death
+is a sort of divine whim. And in connection with this the dramatist
+introduces another favourite moral; the objection to perpetual playing
+upon the motive of sex. He deliberately lures the onlooker into the net
+of Cupid in order to tell him with salutary decision that Cupid is not
+there at all. Millions of melodramatic dramatists have made a man face
+death for the woman he loves; Shaw makes him face death for the woman he
+does not love--merely in order to put woman in her place. He objects to
+that idolatry of sexualism which makes it the fountain of all forcible
+enthusiasms; he dislikes the amorous drama which makes the female the
+only key to the male. He is Feminist in politics, but Anti-feminist in
+emotion. His key to most problems is, "Ne cherchez pas la femme."
+
+As has been observed, the incidental felicities of the play are frequent
+and memorable, especially those connected with the character of General
+Burgoyne, the real full-blooded, free-thinking eighteenth century
+gentleman, who was much too much of an aristocrat not to be a liberal.
+One of the best thrusts in all the Shavian fencing matches is that which
+occurs when Richard Dudgeon, condemned to be hanged, asks rhetorically
+why he cannot be shot like a soldier. "Now there you speak like a
+civilian," replies General Burgoyne. "Have you formed any conception of
+the condition of marksmanship in the British Army?" Excellent, too, is
+the passage in which his subordinate speaks of crushing the enemy in
+America, and Burgoyne asks him who will crush their enemies in England,
+snobbery and jobbery and incurable carelessness and sloth. And in one
+sentence towards the end, Shaw reaches a wider and more genial
+comprehension of mankind than he shows anywhere else; "it takes all
+sorts to make a world, saints as well as soldiers." If Shaw had
+remembered that sentence on other occasions he would have avoided his
+mistake about Cæsar and Brutus. It is not only true that it takes all
+sorts to make a world; but the world cannot succeed without its
+failures. Perhaps the most doubtful point of all in the play is why it
+is a play for Puritans; except the hideous picture of a Calvinistic home
+is meant to destroy Puritanism. And indeed in this connection it is
+constantly necessary to fall back upon the facts of which I have spoken
+at the beginning of this brief study; it is necessary especially to
+remember that Shaw could in all probability speak of Puritanism from the
+inside. In that domestic circle which took him to hear Moody and Sankey,
+in that domestic circle which was teetotal even when it was intoxicated,
+in that atmosphere and society Shaw might even have met the monstrous
+mother in _The Devil's Disciple_, the horrible old woman who declares
+that she has hardened her heart to hate her children, because the heart
+of man is desperately wicked, the old ghoul who has made one of her
+children an imbecile and the other an outcast. Such types do occur in
+small societies drunk with the dismal wine of Puritan determinism. It is
+possible that there were among Irish Calvinists people who denied that
+charity was a Christian virtue. It is possible that among Puritans there
+were people who thought a heart was a kind of heart disease. But it is
+enough to make one tear one's hair to think that a man of genius
+received his first impressions in so small a corner of Europe that he
+could for a long time suppose that this Puritanism was current among
+Christian men. The question, however, need not detain us, for the batch
+of plays contained two others about which it is easier to speak.
+
+The third play in order in the series called _Plays for Puritans_ is a
+very charming one; _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_. This also turns,
+as does so much of the Cæsar drama, on the idea of vanity of
+revenge--the idea that it is too slight and silly a thing for a man to
+allow to occupy and corrupt his consciousness. It is not, of course, the
+morality that is new here, but the touch of cold laughter in the core of
+the morality. Many saints and sages have denounced vengeance. But they
+treated vengeance as something too great for man. "Vengeance is Mine,
+saith the Lord; I will repay." Shaw treats vengeance as something too
+small for man--a monkey trick he ought to have outlived, a childish
+storm of tears which he ought to be able to control. In the story in
+question Captain Brassbound has nourished through his whole erratic
+existence, racketting about all the unsavoury parts of Africa--a mission
+of private punishment which appears to him as a mission of holy justice.
+His mother has died in consequence of a judge's decision, and Brassbound
+roams and schemes until the judge falls into his hands. Then a pleasant
+society lady, Lady Cicely Waynefleet tells him in an easy conversational
+undertone--a rivulet of speech which ripples while she is mending his
+coat--that he is making a fool of himself, that his wrong is irrelevant,
+that his vengeance is objectless, that he would be much better if he
+flung his morbid fancy away for ever; in short, she tells him he is
+ruining himself for the sake of ruining a total stranger. Here again we
+have the note of the economist, the hatred of mere loss. Shaw (one might
+almost say) dislikes murder, not so much because it wastes the life of
+the corpse as because it wastes the time of the murderer. If he were
+endeavouring to persuade one of his moon-lighting fellow-countrymen not
+to shoot his landlord, I can imagine him explaining with benevolent
+emphasis that it was not so much a question of losing a life as of
+throwing away a bullet. But indeed the Irish comparison alone suggests a
+doubt which wriggles in the recesses of my mind about the complete
+reliability of the philosophy of Lady Cicely Waynefleet, the complete
+finality of the moral of _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_. Of course,
+it was very natural in an aristocrat like Lady Cicely Waynefleet to wish
+to let sleeping dogs lie, especially those whom Mr. Blatchford calls
+under-dogs. Of course it was natural for her to wish everything to be
+smooth and sweet-tempered. But I have the obstinate question in the
+corner of my brain, whether if a few Captain Brassbounds did revenge
+themselves on judges, the quality of our judges might not materially
+improve.
+
+When this doubt is once off one's conscience one can lose oneself in the
+bottomless beatitude of Lady Cicely Waynefleet, one of the most living
+and laughing things that her maker has made. I do not know any stronger
+way of stating the beauty of the character than by saying that it was
+written specially for Ellen Terry, and that it is, with Beatrice, one of
+the very few characters in which the dramatist can claim some part of
+her triumph.
+
+We may now pass to the more important of the plays. For some time
+Bernard Shaw would seem to have been brooding upon the soul of Julius
+Cæsar. There must always be a strong human curiosity about the soul of
+Julius Cæsar; and, among other things, about whether he had a soul. The
+conjunction of Shaw and Cæsar has about it something smooth and
+inevitable; for this decisive reason, that Cæsar is really the only
+great man of history to whom the Shaw theories apply. Cæsar _was_ a Shaw
+hero. Cæsar was merciful without being in the least pitiful; his mercy
+was colder than justice. Cæsar was a conqueror without being in any
+hearty sense a soldier; his courage was lonelier than fear. Cæsar was a
+demagogue without being a democrat. In the same way Bernard Shaw is a
+demagogue without being a democrat. If he had tried to prove his
+principle from any of the other heroes or sages of mankind he would have
+found it much more difficult. Napoleon achieved more miraculous
+conquest; but during his most conquering epoch he was a burning boy
+suicidally in love with a woman far beyond his age. Joan of Arc achieved
+far more instant and incredible worldly success; but Joan of Arc
+achieved worldly success because she believed in another world. Nelson
+was a figure fully as fascinating and dramatically decisive; but Nelson
+was "romantic"; Nelson was a devoted patriot and a devoted lover.
+Alexander was passionate; Cromwell could shed tears; Bismarck had some
+suburban religion; Frederick was a poet; Charlemagne was fond of
+children. But Julius Cæsar attracted Shaw not less by his positive than
+by his negative enormousness. Nobody can say with certainty that Cæsar
+cared for anything. It is unjust to call Cæsar an egoist; for there is
+no proof that he cared even for Cæsar. He may not have been either an
+atheist or a pessimist. But he may have been; that is exactly the rub.
+He may have been an ordinary decently good man slightly deficient in
+spiritual expansiveness. On the other hand, he may have been the
+incarnation of paganism in the sense that Christ was the incarnation of
+Christianity. As Christ expressed how great a man can be humble and
+humane, Cæsar may have expressed how great a man can be frigid and
+flippant. According to most legends Antichrist was to come soon after
+Christ. One has only to suppose that Antichrist came shortly before
+Christ; and Antichrist might very well be Cæsar.
+
+It is, I think, no injustice to Bernard Shaw to say that he does not
+attempt to make his Cæsar superior except in this naked and negative
+sense. There is no suggestion, as there is in the Jehovah of the Old
+Testament, that the very cruelty of the higher being conceals some
+tremendous and even tortured love. Cæsar is superior to other men not
+because he loves more, but because he hates less. Cæsar is magnanimous
+not because he is warm-hearted enough to pardon, but because he is not
+warm-hearted enough to avenge. There is no suggestion anywhere in the
+play that he is hiding any great genial purpose or powerful tenderness
+towards men. In order to put this point beyond a doubt the dramatist has
+introduced a soliloquy of Cæsar alone with the Sphinx. There if anywhere
+he would have broken out into ultimate brotherhood or burning pity for
+the people. But in that scene between the Sphinx and Cæsar, Cæsar is as
+cold and as lonely and as dead as the Sphinx.
+
+But whether the Shavian Cæsar is a sound ideal or no, there can be
+little doubt that he is a very fine reality. Shaw has done nothing
+greater as a piece of artistic creation. If the man is a little like a
+statue, it is a statue by a great sculptor; a statue of the best
+period. If his nobility is a little negative in its character, it is the
+negative darkness of the great dome of night; not as in some "new
+moralities" the mere mystery of the coal-hole. Indeed, this somewhat
+austere method of work is very suitable to Shaw when he is serious.
+There is nothing Gothic about his real genius; he could not build a
+mediæval cathedral in which laughter and terror are twisted together in
+stone, molten by mystical passion. He can build, by way of amusement, a
+Chinese pagoda; but when he is in earnest, only a Roman temple. He has a
+keen eye for truth; but he is one of those people who like, as the
+saying goes, to put down the truth in black and white. He is always
+girding and jeering at romantics and idealists because they will not put
+down the truth in black and white. But black and white are not the only
+two colours in the world. The modern man of science who writes down a
+fact in black and white is not more but less accurate than the mediæval
+monk who wrote it down in gold and scarlet, sea-green and turquoise.
+Nevertheless, it is a good thing that the more austere method should
+exist separately, and that some men should be specially good at it.
+Bernard Shaw is specially good at it; he is pre-eminently a black and
+white artist.
+
+And as a study in black and white nothing could be better than this
+sketch of Julius Cæsar. He is not so much represented as "bestriding the
+earth like a Colossus" (which is indeed a rather comic attitude for a
+hero to stand in), but rather walking the earth with a sort of stern
+levity, lightly touching the planet and yet spurning it away like a
+stone. He walks like a winged man who has chosen to fold his wings.
+There is something creepy even about his kindness; it makes the men in
+front of him feel as if they were made of glass. The nature of the
+Cæsarian mercy is massively suggested. Cæsar dislikes a massacre, not
+because it is a great sin, but because it is a small sin. It is felt
+that he classes it with a flirtation or a fit of the sulks; a senseless
+temporary subjugation of man's permanent purpose by his passing and
+trivial feelings. He will plunge into slaughter for a great purpose,
+just as he plunges into the sea. But to be stung into such action he
+deems as undignified as to be tipped off the pier. In a singularly fine
+passage Cleopatra, having hired assassins to stab an enemy, appeals to
+her wrongs as justifying her revenge, and says, "If you can find one
+man in all Africa who says that I did wrong, I will be crucified by my
+own slaves." "If you can find one man in all the world," replies Cæsar,
+"who can see that you did wrong, he will either conquer the world as I
+have done or be crucified by it." That is the high water mark of this
+heathen sublimity; and we do not feel it inappropriate, or unlike Shaw,
+when a few minutes afterwards the hero is saluted with a blaze of
+swords.
+
+As usually happens in the author's works, there is even more about
+Julius Cæsar in the preface than there is in the play. But in the
+preface I think the portrait is less imaginative and more fanciful. He
+attempts to connect his somewhat chilly type of superman with the heroes
+of the old fairy tales. But Shaw should not talk about the fairy tales;
+for he does not feel them from the inside. As I have said, on all this
+side of historic and domestic traditions Bernard Shaw is weak and
+deficient. He does not approach them as fairy tales, as if he were four,
+but as "folk-lore" as if he were forty. And he makes a big mistake about
+them which he would never have made if he had kept his birthday and hung
+up his stocking, and generally kept alive inside him the firelight of a
+home. The point is so peculiarly characteristic of Bernard Shaw, and is
+indeed so much of a summary of his most interesting assertion and his
+most interesting error, that it deserves a word by itself, though it is
+a word which must be remembered in connection with nearly all the other
+plays.
+
+His primary and defiant proposition is the Calvinistic proposition: that
+the elect do not earn virtue, but possess it. The goodness of a man does
+not consist in trying to be good, but in being good. Julius Cæsar
+prevails over other people by possessing more _virtus_ than they; not by
+having striven or suffered or bought his virtue; not because he has
+struggled heroically, but because he is a hero. So far Bernard Shaw is
+only what I have called him at the beginning; he is simply a
+seventeenth-century Calvinist. Cæsar is not saved by works, or even by
+faith; he is saved because he is one of the elect. Unfortunately for
+himself, however, Bernard Shaw went back further than the seventeenth
+century; and professing his opinion to be yet more antiquated, invoked
+the original legends of mankind. He argued that when the fairy tales
+gave Jack the Giant Killer a coat of darkness or a magic sword it
+removed all credit from Jack in the "common moral" sense; he won as
+Cæsar won only because he was superior. I will confess, in passing, to
+the conviction that Bernard Shaw in the course of his whole simple and
+strenuous life was never quite so near to hell as at the moment when he
+wrote down those words. But in this question of fairy tales my immediate
+point is, not how near he was to hell, but how very far off he was from
+fairyland. That notion about the hero with a magic sword being the
+superman with a magic superiority is the caprice of a pedant; no child,
+boy, or man ever felt it in the story of Jack the Giant Killer.
+Obviously the moral is all the other way. Jack's fairy sword and
+invisible coat are clumsy expedients for enabling him to fight at all
+with something which is by nature stronger. They are a rough, savage
+substitute for psychological descriptions of special valour or unwearied
+patience. But no one in his five wits can doubt that the idea of "Jack
+the Giant Killer" is exactly the opposite to Shaw's idea. If it were not
+a tale of effort and triumph hardly earned it would not be called "Jack
+the Giant Killer." If it were a tale of the victory of natural
+advantages it would be called "Giant the Jack Killer." If the teller of
+fairy tales had merely wanted to urge that some beings are born stronger
+than others he would not have fallen back on elaborate tricks of weapon
+and costume for conquering an ogre. He would simply have let the ogre
+conquer. I will not speak of my own emotions in connection with this
+incredibly caddish doctrine that the strength of the strong is
+admirable, but not the valour of the weak. It is enough to say that I
+have to summon up the physical presence of Shaw, his frank gestures,
+kind eyes, and exquisite Irish voice, to cure me of a mere sensation of
+contempt. But I do not dwell upon the point for any such purpose; but
+merely to show how we must be always casting back to those concrete
+foundations with which we began. Bernard Shaw, as I have said, was never
+national enough to be domestic; he was never a part of his past; hence
+when he tries to interpret tradition he comes a terrible cropper, as in
+this case. Bernard Shaw (I strongly suspect) began to disbelieve in
+Santa Claus at a discreditably early age. And by this time Santa Claus
+has avenged himself by taking away the key of all the prehistoric
+scriptures; so that a noble and honourable artist flounders about like
+any German professor. Here is a whole fairy literature which is almost
+exclusively devoted to the unexpected victory of the weak over the
+strong; and Bernard Shaw manages to make it mean the inevitable victory
+of the strong over the weak--which, among other things, would not make a
+story at all. It all comes of that mistake about not keeping his
+birthday. A man should be always tied to his mother's apron strings; he
+should always have a hold on his childhood, and be ready at intervals to
+start anew from a childish standpoint. Theologically the thing is best
+expressed by saying, "You must be born again." Secularly it is best
+expressed by saying, "You must keep your birthday." Even if you will not
+be born again, at least remind yourself occasionally that you were born
+once.
+
+Some of the incidental wit in the Cæsarian drama is excellent although
+it is upon the whole less spontaneous and perfect than in the previous
+plays. One of its jests may be mentioned in passing, not merely to draw
+attention to its failure (though Shaw is brilliant enough to afford many
+failures) but because it is the best opportunity for mentioning one of
+the writer's minor notions to which he obstinately adheres. He
+describes the Ancient Briton in Cæsar's train as being exactly like a
+modern respectable Englishman. As a joke for a Christmas pantomime this
+would be all very well; but one expects the jokes of Bernard Shaw to
+have some intellectual root, however fantastic the flower. And obviously
+all historic common sense is against the idea that that dim Druid
+people, whoever they were, who dwelt in our land before it was lit up by
+Rome or loaded with varied invasions, were a precise facsimile of the
+commercial society of Birmingham or Brighton. But it is a part of the
+Puritan in Bernard Shaw, a part of the taut and high-strung quality of
+his mind, that he will never admit of any of his jokes that it was only
+a joke. When he has been most witty he will passionately deny his own
+wit; he will say something which Voltaire might envy and then declare
+that he has got it all out of a Blue book. And in connection with this
+eccentric type of self-denial, we may notice this mere detail about the
+Ancient Briton. Someone faintly hinted that a blue Briton when first
+found by Cæsar might not be quite like Mr. Broadbent; at the touch Shaw
+poured forth a torrent of theory, explaining that climate was the only
+thing that affected nationality; and that whatever races came into the
+English or Irish climate would become like the English or Irish. Now the
+modern theory of race is certainly a piece of stupid materialism; it is
+an attempt to explain the things we are sure of, France, Scotland, Rome,
+Japan, by means of the things we are not sure of at all, prehistoric
+conjectures, Celts, Mongols, and Iberians. Of course there is a reality
+in race; but there is no reality in the theories of race offered by some
+ethnological professors. Blood, perhaps, is thicker than water; but
+brains are sometimes thicker than anything. But if there is one thing
+yet more thick and obscure and senseless than this theory of the
+omnipotence of race it is, I think, that to which Shaw has fled for
+refuge from it; this doctrine of the omnipotence of climate. Climate
+again is something; but if climate were everything, Anglo-Indians would
+grow more and more to look like Hindoos, which is far from being the
+case. Something in the evil spirit of our time forces people always to
+pretend to have found some material and mechanical explanation. Bernard
+Shaw has filled all his last days with affirmations about the divinity
+of the non-mechanical part of man, the sacred quality in creation and
+choice. Yet it never seems to have occurred to him that the true key to
+national differentiations is the key of the will and not of the
+environment. It never crosses the modern mind to fancy that perhaps a
+people is chiefly influenced by how that people has chosen to behave. If
+I have to choose between race and weather I prefer race; I would rather
+be imprisoned and compelled by ancestors who were once alive than by mud
+and mists which never were. But I do not propose to be controlled by
+either; to me my national history is a chain of multitudinous choices.
+It is neither blood nor rain that has made England, but hope, the thing
+that all those dead men have desired. France was not France because she
+was made to be by the skulls of the Celts or by the sun of Gaul. France
+was France because she chose.
+
+I have stepped on one side from the immediate subject because this is as
+good an instance as any we are likely to come across of a certain almost
+extraneous fault which does deface the work of Bernard Shaw. It is a
+fault only to be mentioned when we have made the solidity of the merits
+quite clear. To say that Shaw is merely making game of people is
+demonstrably ridiculous; at least a fairly systematic philosophy can be
+traced through all his jokes, and one would not insist on such a unity
+in all the songs of Mr. Dan Leno. I have already pointed out that the
+genius of Shaw is really too harsh and earnest rather than too merry and
+irresponsible. I shall have occasion to point out later that Shaw is, in
+one very serious sense, the very opposite of paradoxical. In any case if
+any real student of Shaw says that Shaw is only making a fool of him, we
+can only say that of that student it is very superfluous for anyone to
+make a fool. But though the dramatist's jests are always serious and
+generally obvious, he is really affected from time to time by a certain
+spirit of which that climate theory is a case--a spirit that can only be
+called one of senseless ingenuity. I suppose it is a sort of nemesis of
+wit; the skidding of a wheel in the height of its speed. Perhaps it is
+connected with the nomadic nature of his mind. That lack of roots, this
+remoteness from ancient instincts and traditions is responsible for a
+certain bleak and heartless extravagance of statement on certain
+subjects which makes the author really unconvincing as well as
+exaggerative; satires that are _saugrenu_, jokes that are rather silly
+than wild, statements which even considered as lies have no symbolic
+relation to truth. They are exaggerations of something that does not
+exist. For instance, if a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical
+excuse for drunkenness and gluttony that would be false, but it would
+have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that
+Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by poulterers and wine
+merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which
+is not so much false as startlingly and arrestingly foolish. He might as
+well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to
+sell wedding rings. Or again, take the case of nationality and the unit
+of patriotism. If a man said that all boundaries between clans,
+kingdoms, or empires were nonsensical or non-existent, that would be a
+fallacy, but a consistent and philosophical fallacy. But when Mr.
+Bernard Shaw says that England matters so little that the British Empire
+might very well give up these islands to Germany, he has not only got
+hold of the sow by the wrong ear but the wrong sow by the wrong ear; a
+mythical sow, a sow that is not there at all. If Britain is unreal, the
+British Empire must be a thousand times more unreal. It is as if one
+said, "I do not believe that Michael Scott ever had any existence; but
+I am convinced, in spite of the absurd legend, that he had a shadow."
+
+As has been said already, there must be some truth in every popular
+impression. And the impression that Shaw, the most savagely serious man
+of his time, is a mere music-hall artist must have reference to such
+rare outbreaks as these. As a rule his speeches are full, not only of
+substance, but of substances, materials like pork, mahogany, lead, and
+leather. There is no man whose arguments cover a more Napoleonic map of
+detail. It is true that he jokes; but wherever he is he has topical
+jokes, one might almost say family jokes. If he talks to tailors he can
+allude to the last absurdity about buttons. If he talks to the soldiers
+he can see the exquisite and exact humour of the last gun-carriage. But
+when all his powerful practicality is allowed, there does run through
+him this erratic levity, an explosion of ineptitude. It is a queer
+quality in literature. It is a sort of cold extravagance; and it has
+made him all his enemies.
+
+
+
+
+_The Philosopher_
+
+
+I should suppose that _Cæsar and Cleopatra_ marks about the turning tide
+of Bernard Shaw's fortune and fame. Up to this time he had known glory,
+but never success. He had been wondered at as something brilliant and
+barren, like a meteor; but no one would accept him as a sun, for the
+test of a sun is that it can make something grow. Practically speaking
+the two qualities of a modern drama are, that it should play and that it
+should pay. It had been proved over and over again in weighty dramatic
+criticisms, in careful readers' reports, that the plays of Shaw could
+never play or pay; that the public did not want wit and the wars of
+intellect. And just about the time that this had been finally proved,
+the plays of Bernard Shaw promised to play like _Charley's Aunt_ and to
+pay like Colman's Mustard. It is a fact in which we can all rejoice, not
+only because it redeems the reputation of Bernard Shaw, but because it
+redeems the character of the English people. All that is bravest in
+human nature, open challenge and unexpected wit and angry conviction,
+are not so very unpopular as the publishers and managers in their
+motor-cars have been in the habit of telling us. But exactly because we
+have come to a turning point in the man's career I propose to interrupt
+the mere catalogue of his plays and to treat his latest series rather as
+the proclamations of an acknowledged prophet. For the last plays,
+especially _Man and Superman_, are such that his whole position must be
+re-stated before attacking them seriously.
+
+For two reasons I have called this concluding series of plays not again
+by the name of "The Dramatist," but by the general name of "The
+Philosopher." The first reason is that given above, that we have come to
+the time of his triumph and may therefore treat him as having gained
+complete possession of a pulpit of his own. But there is a second
+reason: that it was just about this time that he began to create not
+only a pulpit of his own, but a church and creed of his own. It is a
+very vast and universal religion; and it is not his fault that he is the
+only member of it. The plainer way of putting it is this: that here, in
+the hour of his earthly victory, there dies in him the old mere denier,
+the mere dynamiter of criticism. In the warmth of popularity he begins
+to wish to put his faith positively; to offer some solid key to all
+creation. Perhaps the irony in the situation is this: that all the
+crowds are acclaiming him as the blasting and hypercritical buffoon,
+while he himself is seriously rallying his synthetic power, and with a
+grave face telling himself that it is time he had a faith to preach. His
+final success as a sort of charlatan coincides with his first grand
+failures as a theologian.
+
+For this reason I have deliberately called a halt in his dramatic
+career, in order to consider these two essential points: What did the
+mass of Englishmen, who had now learnt to admire him, imagine his point
+of view to be? and second, What did he imagine it to be? or, if the
+phrase be premature, What did he imagine it was going to be? In his
+latest work, especially in _Man and Superman_, Shaw has become a
+complete and colossal mystic. That mysticism does grow quite rationally
+out of his older arguments; but very few people ever troubled to trace
+the connection. In order to do so it is necessary to say what was, at
+the time of his first success, the public impression of Shaw's
+philosophy.
+
+Now it is an irritating and pathetic thing that the three most popular
+phrases about Shaw are false. Modern criticism, like all weak things,
+is overloaded with words. In a healthy condition of language a man finds
+it very difficult to say the right thing, but at last says it. In this
+empire of journalese a man finds it so very easy to say the wrong thing
+that he never thinks of saying anything else. False or meaningless
+phrases lie so ready to his hand that it is easier to use them than not
+to use them. These wrong terms picked up through idleness are retained
+through habit, and so the man has begun to think wrong almost before he
+has begun to think at all. Such lumbering logomachy is always injurious
+and oppressive to men of spirit, imagination or intellectual honour, and
+it has dealt very recklessly and wrongly with Bernard Shaw. He has
+contrived to get about three newspaper phrases tied to his tail; and
+those newspaper phrases are all and separately wrong. The three
+superstitions about him, it will be conceded, are generally these: first
+that he desires "problem plays," second that he is "paradoxical," and
+third that in his dramas as elsewhere he is specially "a Socialist." And
+the interesting thing is that when we come to his philosophy, all these
+three phrases are quite peculiarly inapplicable.
+
+To take the plays first, there is a general disposition to describe that
+type of intimate or defiant drama which he approves as "the problem
+play." Now the serious modern play is, as a rule, the very reverse of a
+problem play; for there can be no problem unless both points of view are
+equally and urgently presented. _Hamlet_ really is a problem play
+because at the end of it one is really in doubt as to whether upon the
+author's showing Hamlet is something more than a man or something less.
+_Henry IV_ and _Henry V_ are really problem plays; in this sense, that
+the reader or spectator is really doubtful whether the high but harsh
+efficiency, valour, and ambition of Henry V are an improvement on his
+old blackguard camaraderie; and whether he was not a better man when he
+was a thief. This hearty and healthy doubt is very common in
+Shakespeare; I mean a doubt that exists in the writer as well as in the
+reader. But Bernard Shaw is far too much of a Puritan to tolerate such
+doubts about points which he counts essential. There is no sort of doubt
+that the young lady in _Arms and the Man_ is improved by losing her
+ideals. There is no sort of doubt that Captain Brassbound is improved by
+giving up the object of his life. But a better case can be found in
+something that both dramatists have been concerned with; Shaw wrote
+_Cæsar and Cleopatra_; Shakespeare wrote _Antony and Cleopatra_ and also
+_Julius Cæsar_. And exactly what annoys Bernard Shaw about Shakespeare's
+version is this: that Shakespeare has an open mind or, in other words,
+that Shakespeare has really written a problem play. Shakespeare sees
+quite as clearly as Shaw that Brutus is unpractical and ineffectual; but
+he also sees, what is quite as plain and practical a fact, that these
+ineffectual men do capture the hearts and influence the policies of
+mankind. Shaw would have nothing said in favour of Brutus; because
+Brutus is on the wrong side in politics. Of the actual problem of public
+and private morality, as it was presented to Brutus, he takes actually
+no notice at all. He can write the most energetic and outspoken of
+propaganda plays; but he cannot rise to a problem play. He cannot really
+divide his mind and let the two parts speak independently to each other.
+He has never, so to speak, actually split his head in two; though I
+daresay there are many other people who are willing to do it for him.
+
+Sometimes, especially in his later plays, he allows his clear conviction
+to spoil even his admirable dialogue, making one side entirely weak, as
+in an Evangelical tract. I do not know whether in _Major Barbara_ the
+young Greek professor was supposed to be a fool. As popular tradition
+(which I trust more than anything else) declared that he is drawn from a
+real Professor of my acquaintance, who is anything but a fool, I should
+imagine not. But in that case I am all the more mystified by the
+incredibly weak fight which he makes in the play in answer to the
+elephantine sophistries of Undershaft. It is really a disgraceful case,
+and almost the only case in Shaw of there being no fair fight between
+the two sides. For instance, the Professor mentions pity. Mr. Undershaft
+says with melodramatic scorn, "Pity! the scavenger of the Universe!" Now
+if any gentleman had said this to me, I should have replied, "If I
+permit you to escape from the point by means of metaphors, will you tell
+me whether you disapprove of scavengers?" Instead of this obvious
+retort, the miserable Greek professor only says, "Well then, love," to
+which Undershaft replies with unnecessary violence that he won't have
+the Greek professor's love, to which the obvious answer of course would
+be, "How the deuce can you prevent my loving you if I choose to do so?"
+Instead of this, as far as I remember, that abject Hellenist says
+nothing at all. I only mention this unfair dialogue, because it marks, I
+think, the recent hardening, for good or evil, of Shaw out of a
+dramatist into a mere philosopher, and whoever hardens into a
+philosopher may be hardening into a fanatic.
+
+And just as there is nothing really problematic in Shaw's mind, so there
+is nothing really paradoxical. The meaning of the word paradoxical may
+indeed be made the subject of argument. In Greek, of course, it simply
+means something which is against the received opinion; in that sense a
+missionary remonstrating with South Sea cannibals is paradoxical. But in
+the much more important world, where words are used and altered in the
+using, paradox does not mean merely this: it means at least something of
+which the antinomy or apparent inconsistency is sufficiently plain in
+the words used, and most commonly of all it means an idea expressed in a
+form which is verbally contradictory. Thus, for instance, the great
+saying, "He that shall lose his life, the same shall save it," is an
+example of what modern people mean by a paradox. If any learned person
+should read this book (which seems immeasurably improbable) he can
+content himself with putting it this way, that the moderns mistakenly
+say paradox when they should say oxymoron. Ultimately, in any case, it
+may be agreed that we commonly mean by a paradox some kind of collision
+between what is seemingly and what is really true.
+
+Now if by paradox we mean truth inherent in a contradiction, as in the
+saying of Christ that I have quoted, it is a very curious fact that
+Bernard Shaw is almost entirely without paradox. Moreover, he cannot
+even understand a paradox. And more than this, paradox is about the only
+thing in the world that he does not understand. All his splendid vistas
+and startling suggestions arise from carrying some one clear principle
+further than it has yet been carried. His madness is all consistency,
+not inconsistency. As the point can hardly be made clear without
+examples, let us take one example, the subject of education. Shaw has
+been all his life preaching to grown-up people the profound truth that
+liberty and responsibility go together; that the reason why freedom is
+so often easily withheld, is simply that it is a terrible nuisance. This
+is true, though not the whole truth, of citizens; and so when Shaw
+comes to children he can only apply to them the same principle that he
+has already applied to citizens. He begins to play with the Herbert
+Spencer idea of teaching children by experience; perhaps the most
+fatuously silly idea that was ever gravely put down in print. On that
+there is no need to dwell; one has only to ask how the experimental
+method is to be applied to a precipice; and the theory no longer exists.
+But Shaw effected a further development, if possible more fantastic. He
+said that one should never tell a child anything without letting him
+hear the opposite opinion. That is to say, when you tell Tommy not to
+hit his sick sister on the temple, you must make sure of the presence of
+some Nietzscheite professor, who will explain to him that such a course
+might possibly serve to eliminate the unfit. When you are in the act of
+telling Susan not to drink out of the bottle labelled "poison," you must
+telegraph for a Christian Scientist, who will be ready to maintain that
+without her own consent it cannot do her any harm. What would happen to
+a child brought up on Shaw's principle I cannot conceive; I should think
+he would commit suicide in his bath. But that is not here the question.
+The point is that this proposition seems quite sufficiently wild and
+startling to ensure that its author, if he escapes Hanwell, would reach
+the front rank of journalists, demagogues, or public entertainers. It is
+a perfect paradox, if a paradox only means something that makes one
+jump. But it is not a paradox at all in the sense of a contradiction. It
+is not a contradiction, but an enormous and outrageous consistency, the
+one principle of free thought carried to a point to which no other sane
+man would consent to carry it. Exactly what Shaw does not understand is
+the paradox; the unavoidable paradox of childhood. Although this child
+is much better than I, yet I must teach it. Although this being has much
+purer passions than I, yet I must control it. Although Tommy is quite
+right to rush towards a precipice, yet he must be stood in the corner
+for doing it. This contradiction is the only possible condition of
+having to do with children at all; anyone who talks about a child
+without feeling this paradox might just as well be talking about a
+merman. He has never even seen the animal. But this paradox Shaw in his
+intellectual simplicity cannot see; he cannot see it because it is a
+paradox. His only intellectual excitement is to carry one idea further
+and further across the world. It never occurs to him that it might meet
+another idea, and like the three winds in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, they
+might make a night of it. His only paradox is to pull out one thread or
+cord of truth longer and longer into waste and fantastic places. He does
+not allow for that deeper sort of paradox by which two opposite cords of
+truth become entangled in an inextricable knot. Still less can he be
+made to realise that it is often this knot which ties safely together
+the whole bundle of human life.
+
+This blindness to paradox everywhere perplexes his outlook. He cannot
+understand marriage because he will not understand the paradox of
+marriage; that the woman is all the more the house for not being the
+head of it. He cannot understand patriotism, because he will not
+understand the paradox of patriotism; that one is all the more human for
+not merely loving humanity. He does not understand Christianity because
+he will not understand the paradox of Christianity; that we can only
+really understand all myths when we know that one of them is true. I do
+not under-rate him for this anti-paradoxical temper; I concede that much
+of his finest and keenest work in the way of intellectual purification
+would have been difficult or impossible without it. But I say that here
+lies the limitation of that lucid and compelling mind; he cannot quite
+understand life, because he will not accept its contradictions.
+
+Nor is it by any means descriptive of Shaw to call him a Socialist; in
+so far as that word can be extended to cover an ethical attitude. He is
+the least social of all Socialists; and I pity the Socialist state that
+tries to manage him. This anarchism of his is not a question of thinking
+for himself; every decent man thinks for himself; it would be highly
+immodest to think for anybody else. Nor is it any instinctive licence or
+egoism; as I have said before, he is a man of peculiarly acute public
+conscience. The unmanageable part of him, the fact that he cannot be
+conceived as part of a crowd or as really and invisibly helping a
+movement, has reference to another thing in him, or rather to another
+thing not in him.
+
+The great defect of that fine intelligence is a failure to grasp and
+enjoy the things commonly called convention and tradition; which are
+foods upon which all human creatures must feed frequently if they are to
+live. Very few modern people of course have any idea of what they are.
+"Convention" is very nearly the same word as "democracy." It has again
+and again in history been used as an alternative word to Parliament. So
+far from suggesting anything stale or sober, the word convention rather
+conveys a hubbub; it is the coming together of men; every mob is a
+convention. In its secondary sense it means the common soul of such a
+crowd, its instinctive anger at the traitor or its instinctive
+salutation of the flag. Conventions may be cruel, they may be
+unsuitable, they may even be grossly superstitious or obscene; but there
+is one thing that they never are. Conventions are never dead. They are
+always full of accumulated emotions, the piled-up and passionate
+experiences of many generations asserting what they could not explain.
+To be inside any true convention, as the Chinese respect for parents or
+the European respect for children, is to be surrounded by something
+which whatever else it is is not leaden, lifeless or automatic,
+something which is taut and tingling with vitality at a hundred points,
+which is sensitive almost to madness and which is so much alive that it
+can kill. Now Bernard Shaw has always made this one immense mistake
+(arising out of that bad progressive education of his), the mistake of
+treating convention as a dead thing; treating it as if it were a mere
+physical environment like the pavement or the rain. Whereas it is a
+result of will; a rain of blessings and a pavement of good intentions.
+Let it be remembered that I am not discussing in what degree one should
+allow for tradition; I am saying that men like Shaw do not allow for it
+at all. If Shaw had found in early life that he was contradicted by
+_Bradshaw's Railway Guide_ or even by the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, he
+would have felt at least that he might be wrong. But if he had found
+himself contradicted by his father and mother, he would have thought it
+all the more probable that he was right. If the issue of the last
+evening paper contradicted him he might be troubled to investigate or
+explain. That the human tradition of two thousand years contradicted him
+did not trouble him for an instant. That Marx was not with him was
+important. That Man was not with him was an irrelevant prehistoric joke.
+People have talked far too much about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw.
+Perhaps his only pure paradox is this almost unconscious one; that he
+has tended to think that because something has satisfied generations of
+men it must be untrue.
+
+Shaw is wrong about nearly all the things one learns early in life and
+while one is still simple. Most human beings start with certain facts of
+psychology to which the rest of life must be somewhat related. For
+instance, every man falls in love; and no man falls into free love. When
+he falls into that he calls it lust, and is always ashamed of it even
+when he boasts of it. That there is some connection between a love and a
+vow nearly every human being knows before he is eighteen. That there is
+a solid and instinctive connection between the idea of sexual ecstasy
+and the idea of some sort of almost suicidal constancy, this I say is
+simply the first fact in one's own psychology; boys and girls know it
+almost before they know their own language. How far it can be trusted,
+how it can best be dealt with, all that is another matter. But lovers
+lust after constancy more than after happiness; if you are in any sense
+prepared to give them what they ask, then what they ask, beyond all
+question, is an oath of final fidelity. Lovers may be lunatics; lovers
+may be children; lovers may be unfit for citizenship and outside human
+argument; you can take up that position if you will. But lovers do not
+only desire love; they desire marriage. The root of legal monogamy does
+not lie (as Shaw and his friends are for ever drearily asserting) in the
+fact that the man is a mere tyrant and the woman a mere slave. It lies
+in the fact that _if_ their love for each other is the noblest and
+freest love conceivable, it can only find its heroic expression in both
+becoming slaves. I only mention this matter here as a matter which most
+of us do not need to be taught; for it was the first lesson of life. In
+after years we may make up what code or compromise about sex we like;
+but we all know that constancy, jealousy, and the personal pledge are
+natural and inevitable in sex; we do not feel any surprise when we see
+them either in a murder or in a valentine. We may or may not see wisdom
+in early marriages; but we know quite well that wherever the thing is
+genuine at all, early loves will mean early marriages. But Shaw had not
+learnt about this tragedy of the sexes, what the rustic ballads of any
+country on earth would have taught him. He had not learnt, what
+universal common sense has put into all the folk-lore of the earth,
+that love cannot be thought of clearly for an instant except as
+monogamous. The old English ballads never sing the praises of "lovers."
+They always sing the praises of "true lovers," and that is the final
+philosophy of the question.
+
+The same is true of Mr. Shaw's refusal to understand the love of the
+land either in the form of patriotism or of private ownership. It is the
+attitude of an Irishman cut off from the soil of Ireland, retaining the
+audacity and even cynicism of the national type, but no longer fed from
+the roots with its pathos or its experience.
+
+This broader and more brotherly rendering of convention must be applied
+particularly to the conventions of the drama; since that is necessarily
+the most democratic of all the arts. And it will be found generally that
+most of the theatrical conventions rest on a real artistic basis. The
+Greek Unities, for instance, were not proper objects of the meticulous
+and trivial imitation of Seneca or Gabriel Harvey. But still less were
+they the right objects for the equally trivial and far more vulgar
+impatience of men like Macaulay. That a tale should, if possible, be
+told of one place or one day or a manageable number of characters is an
+ideal plainly rooted in an æsthetic instinct. But if this be so with the
+classical drama, it is yet more certainly so with romantic drama,
+against the somewhat decayed dignity of which Bernard Shaw was largely
+in rebellion. There was one point in particular upon which the Ibsenites
+claimed to have reformed the romantic convention which is worthy of
+special allusion.
+
+Shaw and all the other Ibsenites were fond of insisting that a defect in
+the romantic drama was its tendency to end with wedding-bells. Against
+this they set the modern drama of middle-age, the drama which described
+marriage itself instead of its poetic preliminaries. Now if Bernard Shaw
+had been more patient with popular tradition, more prone to think that
+there might be some sense in its survival, he might have seen this
+particular problem much more clearly. The old playwrights have left us
+plenty of plays of marriage and middle-age. _Othello_ is as much about
+what follows the wedding-bells as _The Doll's House_. _Macbeth_ is about
+a middle-aged couple as much as _Little Eyolf_. But if we ask ourselves
+what is the real difference, we shall, I think, find that it can fairly
+be stated thus. The old tragedies of marriage, though not love stories,
+are like love stories in this, that they work up to some act or stroke
+which is irrevocable as marriage is irrevocable; to the fact of death or
+of adultery.
+
+Now the reason why our fathers did not make marriage, in the middle-aged
+and static sense, the subject of their plays was a very simple one; it
+was that a play is a very bad place for discussing that topic. You
+cannot easily make a good drama out of the success or failure of a
+marriage, just as you could not make a good drama out of the growth of
+an oak tree or the decay of an empire. As Polonius very reasonably
+observed, it is too long. A happy love-affair will make a drama simply
+because it is dramatic; it depends on an ultimate yes or no. But a happy
+marriage is not dramatic; perhaps it would be less happy if it were. The
+essence of a romantic heroine is that she asks herself an intense
+question; but the essence of a sensible wife is that she is much too
+sensible to ask herself any questions at all. All the things that make
+monogamy a success are in their nature undramatic things, the silent
+growth of an instinctive confidence, the common wounds and victories,
+the accumulation of customs, the rich maturing of old jokes. Sane
+marriage is an untheatrical thing; it is therefore not surprising that
+most modern dramatists have devoted themselves to insane marriage.
+
+To summarise; before touching the philosophy which Shaw has ultimately
+adopted, we must quit the notion that we know it already and that it is
+hit off in such journalistic terms as these three. Shaw does not wish to
+multiply problem plays or even problems. He has such scepticism as is
+the misfortune of his age; but he has this dignified and courageous
+quality, that he does not come to ask questions but to answer them. He
+is not a paradox-monger; he is a wild logician, far too simple even to
+be called a sophist. He understands everything in life except its
+paradoxes, especially that ultimate paradox that the very things that we
+cannot comprehend are the things that we have to take for granted.
+Lastly, he is not especially social or collectivist. On the contrary, he
+rather dislikes men in the mass, though he can appreciate them
+individually. He has no respect for collective humanity in its two great
+forms; either in that momentary form which we call a mob, or in that
+enduring form which we call a convention.
+
+The general cosmic theory which can so far be traced through the earlier
+essays and plays of Bernard Shaw may be expressed in the image of
+Schopenhauer standing on his head. I cheerfully concede that
+Schopenhauer looks much nicer in that posture than in his original one,
+but I can hardly suppose that he feels more comfortable. The substance
+of the change is this. Roughly speaking, Schopenhauer maintained that
+life is unreasonable. The intellect, if it could be impartial, would
+tell us to cease; but a blind partiality, an instinct quite distinct
+from thought, drives us on to take desperate chances in an essentially
+bankrupt lottery. Shaw seems to accept this dingy estimate of the
+rational outlook, but adds a somewhat arresting comment. Schopenhauer
+had said, "Life is unreasonable; so much the worse for all living
+things." Shaw said, "Life is unreasonable; so much the worse for
+reason." Life is the higher call, life we must follow. It may be that
+there is some undetected fallacy in reason itself. Perhaps the whole man
+cannot get inside his own head any more than he can jump down his own
+throat. But there is about the need to live, to suffer, and to create
+that imperative quality which can truly be called supernatural, of whose
+voice it can indeed be said that it speaks with authority, and not as
+the scribes.
+
+This is the first and finest item of the original Bernard Shaw creed:
+that if reason says that life is irrational, life must be content to
+reply that reason is lifeless; life is the primary thing, and if reason
+impedes it, then reason must be trodden down into the mire amid the most
+abject superstitions. In the ordinary sense it would be specially absurd
+to suggest that Shaw desires man to be a mere animal. For that is always
+associated with lust or incontinence; and Shaw's ideals are strict,
+hygienic, and even, one might say, old-maidish. But there is a mystical
+sense in which one may say literally that Shaw desires man to be an
+animal. That is, he desires him to cling first and last to life, to the
+spirit of animation, to the thing which is common to him and the birds
+and plants. Man should have the blind faith of a beast: he should be as
+mystically immutable as a cow, and as deaf to sophistries as a fish.
+Shaw does not wish him to be a philosopher or an artist; he does not
+even wish him to be a man, so much as he wishes him to be, in this holy
+sense, an animal. He must follow the flag of life as fiercely from
+conviction as all other creatures follow it from instinct.
+
+But this Shavian worship of life is by no means lively. It has nothing
+in common either with the braver or the baser forms of what we commonly
+call optimism. It has none of the omnivorous exultation of Walt Whitman
+or the fiery pantheism of Shelley. Bernard Shaw wishes to show himself
+not so much as an optimist, but rather as a sort of faithful and
+contented pessimist. This contradiction is the key to nearly all his
+early and more obvious contradictions and to many which remain to the
+end. Whitman and many modern idealists have talked of taking even duty
+as a pleasure; it seems to me that Shaw takes even pleasure as a duty.
+In a queer way he seems to see existence as an illusion and yet as an
+obligation. To every man and woman, bird, beast, and flower, life is a
+love-call to be eagerly followed. To Bernard Shaw it is merely a
+military bugle to be obeyed. In short, he fails to feel that the command
+of Nature (if one must use the anthropomorphic fable of Nature instead
+of the philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as well as obeyed. He paints
+life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap in
+the dark. That is heroic; and to my instinct at least Schopenhauer
+looks like a pigmy beside his pupil. But it is the heroism of a morbid
+and almost asphyxiated age. It is awful to think that this world which
+so many poets have praised has even for a time been depicted as a
+man-trap into which we may just have the manhood to jump. Think of all
+those ages through which men have talked of having the courage to die.
+And then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having
+the courage to live.
+
+It is exactly this oddity or dilemma which may be said to culminate in
+the crowning work of his later and more constructive period, the work in
+which he certainly attempted, whether with success or not, to state his
+ultimate and cosmic vision; I mean the play called _Man and Superman_.
+In approaching this play we must keep well in mind the distinction
+recently drawn: that Shaw follows the banner of life, but austerely, not
+joyously. For him nature has authority, but hardly charm. But before we
+approach it it is necessary to deal with three things that lead up to
+it. First it is necessary to speak of what remained of his old critical
+and realistic method; and then it is necessary to speak of the two
+important influences which led up to his last and most important change
+of outlook.
+
+First, since all our spiritual epochs overlap, and a man is often doing
+the old work while he is thinking of the new, we may deal first with
+what may be fairly called his last two plays of pure worldly criticism.
+These are _Major Barbara_ and _John Bull's Other Island_. _Major
+Barbara_ indeed contains a strong religious element; but, when all is
+said, the whole point of the play is that the religious element is
+defeated. Moreover, the actual expressions of religion in the play are
+somewhat unsatisfactory as expressions of religion--or even of reason. I
+must frankly say that Bernard Shaw always seems to me to use the word
+God not only without any idea of what it means, but without one moment's
+thought about what it could possibly mean. He said to some atheist,
+"Never believe in a God that you cannot improve on." The atheist (being
+a sound theologian) naturally replied that one should not believe in a
+God whom one could improve on; as that would show that he was not God.
+In the same style in _Major Barbara_ the heroine ends by suggesting that
+she will serve God without personal hope, so that she may owe nothing to
+God and He owe everything to her. It does not seem to strike her that
+if God owes everything to her He is not God. These things affect me
+merely as tedious perversions of a phrase. It is as if you said, "I will
+never have a father unless I have begotten him."
+
+But the real sting and substance of _Major Barbara_ is much more
+practical and to the point. It expresses not the new spirituality but
+the old materialism of Bernard Shaw. Almost every one of Shaw's plays is
+an expanded epigram. But the epigram is not expanded (as with most
+people) into a hundred commonplaces. Rather the epigram is expanded into
+a hundred other epigrams; the work is at least as brilliant in detail as
+it is in design. But it is generally possible to discover the original
+and pivotal epigram which is the centre and purpose of the play. It is
+generally possible, even amid that blinding jewellery of a million
+jokes, to discover the grave, solemn and sacred joke for which the play
+itself was written.
+
+The ultimate epigram of _Major Barbara_ can be put thus. People say that
+poverty is no crime; Shaw says that poverty is a crime; that it is a
+crime to endure it, a crime to be content with it, that it is the mother
+of all crimes of brutality, corruption, and fear. If a man says to Shaw
+that he is born of poor but honest parents, Shaw tells him that the very
+word "but" shows that his parents were probably dishonest. In short, he
+maintains here what he had maintained elsewhere: that what the people at
+this moment require is not more patriotism or more art or more religion
+or more morality or more sociology, but simply more money. The evil is
+not ignorance or decadence or sin or pessimism; the evil is poverty. The
+point of this particular drama is that even the noblest enthusiasm of
+the girl who becomes a Salvation Army officer fails under the brute
+money power of her father who is a modern capitalist. When I have said
+this it will be clear why this play, fine and full of bitter sincerity
+as it is, must in a manner be cleared out of the way before we come to
+talk of Shaw's final and serious faith. For his serious faith is in the
+sanctity of human will, in the divine capacity for creation and choice
+rising higher than environment and doom; and so far as that goes, _Major
+Barbara_ is not only apart from his faith but against his faith. _Major
+Barbara_ is an account of environment victorious over heroic will. There
+are a thousand answers to the ethic in _Major Barbara_ which I should
+be inclined to offer. I might point out that the rich do not so much buy
+honesty as curtains to cover dishonesty: that they do not so much buy
+health as cushions to comfort disease. And I might suggest that the
+doctrine that poverty degrades the poor is much more likely to be used
+as an argument for keeping them powerless than as an argument for making
+them rich. But there is no need to find such answers to the
+materialistic pessimism of _Major Barbara_. The best answer to it is in
+Shaw's own best and crowning philosophy, with which we shall shortly be
+concerned.
+
+_John Bull's Other Island_ represents a realism somewhat more tinged
+with the later transcendentalism of its author. In one sense, of course,
+it is a satire on the conventional Englishman, who is never so silly or
+sentimental as when he sees silliness and sentiment in the Irishman.
+Broadbent, whose mind is all fog and his morals all gush, is firmly
+persuaded that he is bringing reason and order among the Irish, whereas
+in truth they are all smiling at his illusions with the critical
+detachment of so many devils. There have been many plays depicting the
+absurd Paddy in a ring of Anglo-Saxons; the first purpose of this play
+is to depict the absurd Anglo-Saxon in a ring of ironical Paddies. But
+it has a second and more subtle purpose, which is very finely contrived.
+It is suggested that when all is said and done there is in this
+preposterous Englishman a certain creative power which comes from his
+simplicity and optimism, from his profound resolution rather to live
+life than to criticise it. I know no finer dialogue of philosophical
+cross-purposes than that in which Broadbent boasts of his commonsense,
+and his subtler Irish friend mystifies him by telling him that he,
+Broadbent, has no common-sense, but only inspiration. The Irishman
+admits in Broadbent a certain unconscious spiritual force even in his
+very stupidity. Lord Rosebery coined the very clever phrase "a practical
+mystic." Shaw is here maintaining that all practical men are practical
+mystics. And he is really maintaining also that the most practical of
+all the practical mystics is the one who is a fool.
+
+There is something unexpected and fascinating about this reversal of the
+usual argument touching enterprise and the business man; this theory
+that success is created not by intelligence, but by a certain
+half-witted and yet magical instinct. For Bernard Shaw, apparently, the
+forests of factories and the mountains of money are not the creations of
+human wisdom or even of human cunning; they are rather manifestations of
+the sacred maxim which declares that God has chosen the foolish things
+of the earth to confound the wise. It is simplicity and even innocence
+that has made Manchester. As a philosophical fancy this is interesting
+or even suggestive; but it must be confessed that as a criticism of the
+relations of England to Ireland it is open to a strong historical
+objection. The one weak point in _John Bull's Other Island_ is that it
+turns on the fact that Broadbent succeeds in Ireland. But as a matter of
+fact Broadbent has not succeeded in Ireland. If getting what one wants
+is the test and fruit of this mysterious strength, then the Irish
+peasants are certainly much stronger than the English merchants; for in
+spite of all the efforts of the merchants, the land has remained a land
+of peasants. No glorification of the English practicality as if it were
+a universal thing can ever get over the fact that we have failed in
+dealing with the one white people in our power who were markedly unlike
+ourselves. And the kindness of Broadbent has failed just as much as his
+common-sense; because he was dealing with a people whose desire and
+ideal were different from his own. He did not share the Irish passion
+for small possession in land or for the more pathetic virtues of
+Christianity. In fact the kindness of Broadbent has failed for the same
+reason that the gigantic kindness of Shaw has failed. The roots are
+different; it is like tying the tops of two trees together. Briefly, the
+philosophy of _John Bull's Other Island_ is quite effective and
+satisfactory except for this incurable fault: the fact that John Bull's
+other island is not John Bull's.
+
+This clearing off of his last critical plays we may classify as the
+first of the three facts which lead up to _Man and Superman_. The second
+of the three facts may be found, I think, in Shaw's discovery of
+Nietzsche. This eloquent sophist has an influence upon Shaw and his
+school which it would require a separate book adequately to study. By
+descent Nietzsche was a Pole, and probably a Polish noble; and to say
+that he was a Polish noble is to say that he was a frail, fastidious,
+and entirely useless anarchist. He had a wonderful poetic wit; and is
+one of the best rhetoricians of the modern world. He had a remarkable
+power of saying things that master the reason for a moment by their
+gigantic unreasonableness; as, for instance, "Your life is intolerable
+without immortality; but why should not your life be intolerable?" His
+whole work is shot through with the pangs and fevers of his physical
+life, which was one of extreme bad health; and in early middle age his
+brilliant brain broke down into impotence and darkness. All that was
+true in his teaching was this: that if a man looks fine on a horse it is
+so far irrelevant to tell him that he would be more economical on a
+donkey or more humane on a tricycle. In other words, the mere
+achievement of dignity, beauty, or triumph is strictly to be called a
+good thing. I do not know if Nietzsche ever used the illustration; but
+it seems to me that all that is creditable or sound in Nietzsche could
+be stated in the derivation of one word, the word "valour." Valour means
+_valeur_; it means a value; courage is itself a solid good; it is an
+ultimate virtue; valour is in itself _valid_. In so far as he maintained
+this Nietzsche was only taking part in that great Protestant game of
+see-saw which has been the amusement of northern Europe since the
+sixteenth century. Nietzsche imagined he was rebelling against ancient
+morality; as a matter of fact he was only rebelling against recent
+morality, against the half-baked impudence of the utilitarians and the
+materialists. He thought he was rebelling against Christianity;
+curiously enough he was rebelling solely against the special enemies of
+Christianity, against Herbert Spencer and Mr. Edward Clodd. Historic
+Christianity has always believed in the valour of St. Michael riding in
+front of the Church Militant; and in an ultimate and absolute pleasure,
+not indirect or utilitarian, the intoxication of the spirit, the wine of
+the blood of God.
+
+There are indeed doctrines of Nietzsche that are not Christian, but
+then, by an entertaining coincidence, they are also not true. His hatred
+of pity is not Christian, but that was not his doctrine but his disease.
+Invalids are often hard on invalids. And there is another doctrine of
+his that is not Christianity, and also (by the same laughable accident)
+not common-sense; and it is a most pathetic circumstance that this was
+the one doctrine which caught the eye of Shaw and captured him. He was
+not influenced at all by the morbid attack on mercy. It would require
+more than ten thousand mad Polish professors to make Bernard Shaw
+anything but a generous and compassionate man. But it is certainly a
+nuisance that the one Nietzsche doctrine which attracted him was not the
+one Nietzsche doctrine that is human and rectifying. Nietzsche might
+really have done some good if he had taught Bernard Shaw to draw the
+sword, to drink wine, or even to dance. But he only succeeded in putting
+into his head a new superstition, which bids fair to be the chief
+superstition of the dark ages which are possibly in front of us--I mean
+the superstition of what is called the Superman.
+
+In one of his least convincing phrases, Nietzsche had said that just as
+the ape ultimately produced the man, so should we ultimately produce
+something higher than the man. The immediate answer, of course, is
+sufficiently obvious: the ape did not worry about the man, so why should
+we worry about the Superman? If the Superman will come by natural
+selection, may we leave it to natural selection? If the Superman will
+come by human selection, what sort of Superman are we to select? If he
+is simply to be more just, more brave, or more merciful, then
+Zarathustra sinks into a Sunday-school teacher; the only way we can work
+for it is to be more just, more brave, and more merciful; sensible
+advice, but hardly startling. If he is to be anything else than this,
+why should we desire him, or what else are we to desire? These questions
+have been many times asked of the Nietzscheites, and none of the
+Nietzscheites have even attempted to answer them.
+
+The keen intellect of Bernard Shaw would, I think, certainly have seen
+through this fallacy and verbiage had it not been that another important
+event about this time came to the help of Nietzsche and established the
+Superman on his pedestal. It is the third of the things which I have
+called stepping-stones to _Man and Superman_, and it is very important.
+It is nothing less than the breakdown of one of the three intellectual
+supports upon which Bernard Shaw had reposed through all his confident
+career. At the beginning of this book I have described the three
+ultimate supports of Shaw as the Irishman, the Puritan, and the
+Progressive. They are the three legs of the tripod upon which the
+prophet sat to give the oracle; and one of them broke. Just about this
+time suddenly, by a mere shaft of illumination, Bernard Shaw ceased to
+believe in progress altogether.
+
+It is generally implied that it was reading Plato that did it. That
+philosopher was very well qualified to convey the first shock of the
+ancient civilisation to Shaw, who had always thought instinctively of
+civilisation as modern. This is not due merely to the daring splendour
+of the speculations and the vivid picture of Athenian life, it is due
+also to something analogous in the personalities of that particular
+ancient Greek and this particular modern Irishman. Bernard Shaw has much
+affinity to Plato--in his instinctive elevation of temper, his
+courageous pursuit of ideas as far as they will go, his civic idealism;
+and also, it must be confessed, in his dislike of poets and a touch of
+delicate inhumanity. But whatever influence produced the change, the
+change had all the dramatic suddenness and completeness which belongs to
+the conversions of great men. It had been perpetually implied through
+all the earlier works not only that mankind is constantly improving, but
+that almost everything must be considered in the light of this fact.
+More than once he seemed to argue, in comparing the dramatists of the
+sixteenth with those of the nineteenth century, that the latter had a
+definite advantage merely because they were of the nineteenth century
+and not of the sixteenth. When accused of impertinence towards the
+greatest of the Elizabethans, Bernard Shaw had said, "Shakespeare is a
+much taller man than I, but I stand on his shoulders"--an epigram which
+sums up this doctrine with characteristic neatness. But Shaw fell off
+Shakespeare's shoulders with a crash. This chronological theory that
+Shaw stood on Shakespeare's shoulders logically involved the supposition
+that Shakespeare stood on Plato's shoulders. And Bernard Shaw found
+Plato from his point of view so much more advanced than Shakespeare that
+he decided in desperation that all three were equal.
+
+Such failure as has partially attended the idea of human equality is
+very largely due to the fact that no party in the modern state has
+heartily believed in it. Tories and Radicals have both assumed that one
+set of men were in essentials superior to mankind. The only difference
+was that the Tory superiority was a superiority of place; while the
+Radical superiority is a superiority of time. The great objection to
+Shaw being on Shakespeare's shoulders is a consideration for the
+sensations and personal dignity of Shakespeare. It is a democratic
+objection to anyone being on anyone else's shoulders. Eternal human
+nature refuses to submit to a man who rules merely by right of birth.
+To rule by right of century is to rule by right of birth. Shaw found his
+nearest kinsman in remote Athens, his remotest enemies in the closest
+historical proximity; and he began to see the enormous average and the
+vast level of mankind. If progress swung constantly between such
+extremes it could not be progress at all. The paradox was sharp but
+undeniable; if life had such continual ups and downs, it was upon the
+whole flat. With characteristic sincerity and love of sensation he had
+no sooner seen this than he hastened to declare it. In the teeth of all
+his previous pronouncements he emphasised and re-emphasised in print
+that man had not progressed at all; that ninety-nine hundredths of a man
+in a cave were the same as ninety-nine hundredths of a man in a suburban
+villa.
+
+It is characteristic of him to say that he rushed into print with a
+frank confession of the failure of his old theory. But it is also
+characteristic of him that he rushed into print also with a new
+alternative theory, quite as definite, quite as confident, and, if one
+may put it so, quite as infallible as the old one. Progress had never
+happened hitherto, because it had been sought solely through education.
+Education was rubbish. "Fancy," said he, "trying to produce a greyhound
+or a racehorse by education!" The man of the future must not be taught;
+he must be bred. This notion of producing superior human beings by the
+methods of the stud-farm had often been urged, though its difficulties
+had never been cleared up. I mean its practical difficulties; its moral
+difficulties, or rather impossibilities, for any animal fit to be called
+a man need scarcely be discussed. But even as a scheme it had never been
+made clear. The first and most obvious objection to it of course is
+this: that if you are to breed men as pigs, you require some overseer
+who is as much more subtle than a man as a man is more subtle than a
+pig. Such an individual is not easy to find.
+
+It was, however, in the heat of these three things, the decline of his
+merely destructive realism, the discovery of Nietzsche, and the
+abandonment of the idea of a progressive education of mankind, that he
+attempted what is not necessarily his best, but certainly his most
+important work. The two things are by no means necessarily the same. The
+most important work of Milton is _Paradise Lost_; his best work is
+_Lycidas_. There are other places in which Shaw's argument is more
+fascinating or his wit more startling than in _Man and Superman_; there
+are other plays that he has made more brilliant. But I am sure that
+there is no other play that he wished to make more brilliant. I will not
+say that he is in this case more serious than elsewhere; for the word
+serious is a double-meaning and double-dealing word, a traitor in the
+dictionary. It sometimes means solemn, and it sometimes means sincere. A
+very short experience of private and public life will be enough to prove
+that the most solemn people are generally the most insincere. A somewhat
+more delicate and detailed consideration will show also that the most
+sincere men are generally not solemn; and of these is Bernard Shaw. But
+if we use the word serious in the old and Latin sense of the word
+"grave," which means weighty or valid, full of substance, then we may
+say without any hesitation that this is the most serious play of the
+most serious man alive.
+
+The outline of the play is, I suppose, by this time sufficiently well
+known. It has two main philosophic motives. The first is that what he
+calls the life-force (the old infidels called it Nature, which seems a
+neater word, and nobody knows the meaning of either of them) desires
+above all things to make suitable marriages, to produce a purer and
+prouder race, or eventually to produce a Superman. The second is that in
+this effecting of racial marriages the woman is a more conscious agent
+than the man. In short, that woman disposes a long time before man
+proposes. In this play, therefore, woman is made the pursuer and man the
+pursued. It cannot be denied, I think, that in this matter Shaw is
+handicapped by his habitual hardness of touch, by his lack of sympathy
+with the romance of which he writes, and to a certain extent even by his
+own integrity and right conscience. Whether the man hunts the woman or
+the woman the man, at least it should be a splendid pagan hunt; but Shaw
+is not a sporting man. Nor is he a pagan, but a Puritan. He cannot
+recover the impartiality of paganism which allowed Diana to propose to
+Endymion without thinking any the worse of her. The result is that while
+he makes Anne, the woman who marries his hero, a really powerful and
+convincing woman, he can only do it by making her a highly objectionable
+woman. She is a liar and a bully, not from sudden fear or excruciating
+dilemma; she is a liar and a bully in grain; she has no truth or
+magnanimity in her. The more we know that she is real, the more we know
+that she is vile. In short, Bernard Shaw is still haunted with his old
+impotence of the unromantic writer; he cannot imagine the main motives
+of human life from the inside. We are convinced successfully that Anne
+wishes to marry Tanner, but in the very process we lose all power of
+conceiving why Tanner should ever consent to marry Anne. A writer with a
+more romantic strain in him might have imagined a woman choosing her
+lover without shamelessness and magnetising him without fraud. Even if
+the first movement were feminine, it need hardly be a movement like
+this. In truth, of course, the two sexes have their two methods of
+attraction, and in some of the happiest cases they are almost
+simultaneous. But even on the most cynical showing they need not be
+mixed up. It is one thing to say that the mousetrap is not there by
+accident. It is another to say (in the face of ocular experience) that
+the mousetrap runs after the mouse.
+
+But whenever Shaw shows the Puritan hardness or even the Puritan
+cheapness, he shows something also of the Puritan nobility, of the idea
+that sacrifice is really a frivolity in the face of a great purpose. The
+reasonableness of Calvin and his followers will by the mercy of heaven
+be at last washed away; but their unreasonableness will remain an
+eternal splendour. Long after we have let drop the fancy that
+Protestantism was rational it will be its glory that it was fanatical.
+So it is with Shaw. To make Anne a real woman, even a dangerous woman,
+he would need to be something stranger and softer than Bernard Shaw. But
+though I always argue with him whenever he argues, I confess that he
+always conquers me in the one or two moments when he is emotional.
+
+There is one really noble moment when Anne offers for all her cynical
+husband-hunting the only defence that is really great enough to cover
+it. "It will not be all happiness for me. Perhaps death." And the man
+rises also at that real crisis, saying, "Oh, that clutch holds and
+hurts. What have you grasped in me? Is there a father's heart as well as
+a mother's?" That seems to me actually great; I do not like either of
+the characters an atom more than formerly; but I can see shining and
+shaking through them at that instant the splendour of the God that made
+them and of the image of God who wrote their story.
+
+A logician is like a liar in many respects, but chiefly in the fact
+that he should have a good memory. That cutting and inquisitive style
+which Bernard Shaw has always adopted carries with it an inevitable
+criticism. And it cannot be denied that this new theory of the supreme
+importance of sound sexual union, wrought by any means, is hard
+logically to reconcile with Shaw's old diatribes against sentimentalism
+and operatic romance. If Nature wishes primarily to entrap us into
+sexual union, then all the means of sexual attraction, even the most
+maudlin or theatrical, are justified at one stroke. The guitar of the
+troubadour is as practical as the ploughshare of the husbandman. The
+waltz in the ballroom is as serious as the debate in the parish council.
+The justification of Anne, as the potential mother of Superman, is
+really the justification of all the humbugs and sentimentalists whom
+Shaw had been denouncing as a dramatic critic and as a dramatist since
+the beginning of his career. It was to no purpose that the earlier
+Bernard Shaw said that romance was all moonshine. The moonshine that
+ripens love is now as practical as the sunshine that ripens corn. It was
+vain to say that sexual chivalry was all rot; it might be as rotten as
+manure--and also as fertile. It is vain to call first love a fiction;
+it may be as fictitious as the ink of the cuttle or the doubling of the
+hare; as fictitious, as efficient, and as indispensable. It is vain to
+call it a self-deception; Schopenhauer said that all existence was a
+self-deception; and Shaw's only further comment seems to be that it is
+right to be deceived. To _Man and Superman_, as to all his plays, the
+author attaches a most fascinating preface at the beginning. But I
+really think that he ought also to attach a hearty apology at the end;
+an apology to all the minor dramatists or preposterous actors whom he
+had cursed for romanticism in his youth. Whenever he objected to an
+actress for ogling she might reasonably reply, "But this is how I
+support my friend Anne in her sublime evolutionary effort." Whenever he
+laughed at an old-fashioned actor for ranting, the actor might answer,
+"My exaggeration is not more absurd than the tail of a peacock or the
+swagger of a cock; it is the way I preach the great fruitful lie of the
+life-force that I am a very fine fellow." We have remarked the end of
+Shaw's campaign in favour of progress. This ought really to have been
+the end of his campaign against romance. All the tricks of love that he
+called artificial become natural; because they become Nature. All the
+lies of love become truths; indeed they become the Truth.
+
+The minor things of the play contain some thunderbolts of good thinking.
+Throughout this brief study I have deliberately not dwelt upon mere wit,
+because in anything of Shaw's that may be taken for granted. It is
+enough to say that this play which is full of his most serious quality
+is as full as any of his minor sort of success. In a more solid sense
+two important facts stand out: the first is the character of the young
+American; the other is the character of Straker, the chauffeur. In these
+Shaw has realised and made vivid two most important facts. First, that
+America is not intellectually a go-ahead country, but both for good and
+evil an old-fashioned one. It is full of stale culture and ancestral
+simplicity, just as Shaw's young millionaire quotes Macaulay and piously
+worships his wife. Second, he has pointed out in the character of
+Straker that there has arisen in our midst a new class that has
+education without breeding. Straker is the man who has ousted the
+hansom-cabman, having neither his coarseness nor his kindliness. Great
+sociological credit is due to the man who has first clearly observed
+that Straker has appeared. How anybody can profess for a moment to be
+glad that he has appeared, I do not attempt to conjecture.
+
+Appended to the play is an entertaining though somewhat mysterious
+document called "The Revolutionist's Handbook." It contains many very
+sound remarks; this, for example, which I cannot too much applaud: "If
+you hit your child, be sure that you hit him in anger." If that
+principle had been properly understood, we should have had less of
+Shaw's sociological friends and their meddling with the habits and
+instincts of the poor. But among the fragments of advice also occurs the
+following suggestive and even alluring remark: "Every man over forty is
+a scoundrel." On the first personal opportunity I asked the author of
+this remarkable axiom what it meant. I gathered that what it really
+meant was something like this: that every man over forty had been all
+the essential use that he was likely to be, and was therefore in a
+manner a parasite. It is gratifying to reflect that Bernard Shaw has
+sufficiently answered his own epigram by continuing to pour out
+treasures both of truth and folly long after this allotted time. But if
+the epigram might be interpreted in a rather looser style as meaning
+that past a certain point a man's work takes on its final character and
+does not greatly change the nature of its merits, it may certainly be
+said that with _Man and Superman_, Shaw reaches that stage. The two
+plays that have followed it, though of very great interest in
+themselves, do not require any revaluation of, or indeed any addition
+to, our summary of his genius and success. They are both in a sense
+casts back to his primary energies; the first in a controversial and the
+second in a technical sense. Neither need prevent our saying that the
+moment when John Tanner and Anne agree that it is doom for him and death
+for her and life only for the thing unborn, is the peak of his utterance
+as a prophet.
+
+The two important plays that he has since given us are _The Doctor's
+Dilemma_ and _Getting Married_. The first is as regards its most amusing
+and effective elements a throw-back to his old game of guying the men of
+science. It was a very good game, and he was an admirable player. The
+actual story of the _Doctor's Dilemma_ itself seems to me less poignant
+and important than the things with which Shaw had lately been dealing.
+First of all, as has been said, Shaw has neither the kind of justice
+nor the kind of weakness that goes to make a true problem. We cannot
+feel the Doctor's Dilemma, because we cannot really fancy Bernard Shaw
+being in a dilemma. His mind is both fond of abruptness and fond of
+finality; he always makes up his mind when he knows the facts and
+sometimes before. Moreover, this particular problem (though Shaw is
+certainly, as we shall see, nearer to pure doubt about it than about
+anything else) does not strike the critic as being such an exasperating
+problem after all. An artist of vast power and promise, who is also a
+scamp of vast profligacy and treachery, has a chance of life if
+specially treated for a special disease. The modern doctors (and even
+the modern dramatist) are in doubt whether he should be specially
+favoured because he is æsthetically important or specially disregarded
+because he is ethically anti-social. They see-saw between the two
+despicable modern doctrines, one that geniuses should be worshipped like
+idols and the other that criminals should be merely wiped out like
+germs. That both clever men and bad men ought to be treated like men
+does not seem to occur to them. As a matter of fact, in these affairs of
+life and death one never does think of such distinctions. Nobody does
+shout out at sea, "Bad citizen overboard!" I should recommend the doctor
+in his dilemma to do exactly what I am sure any decent doctor would do
+without any dilemma at all: to treat the man simply as a man, and give
+him no more and no less favour than he would to anybody else. In short,
+I am sure a practical physician would drop all these visionary,
+unworkable modern dreams about type and criminology and go back to the
+plain business-like facts of the French Revolution and the Rights of
+Man.
+
+The other play, _Getting Married_, is a point in Shaw's career, but only
+as a play, not, as usual, as a heresy. It is nothing but a conversation
+about marriage; and one cannot agree or disagree with the view of
+marriage, because all views are given which are held by anybody, and
+some (I should think) which are held by nobody. But its technical
+quality is of some importance in the life of its author. It is worth
+consideration as a play, because it is not a play at all. It marks the
+culmination and completeness of that victory of Bernard Shaw over the
+British public, or rather over their official representatives, of which
+I have spoken. Shaw had fought a long fight with business men, those
+incredible people, who assured him that it was useless to have wit
+without murders, and that a good joke, which is the most popular thing
+everywhere else, was quite unsalable in the theatrical world. In spite
+of this he had conquered by his wit and his good dialogue; and by the
+time of which we now speak he was victorious and secure. All his plays
+were being produced as a matter of course in England and as a matter of
+the fiercest fashion and enthusiasm in America and Germany. No one who
+knows the nature of the man will doubt that under such circumstances his
+first act would be to produce his wit naked and unashamed. He had been
+told that he could not support a slight play by mere dialogue. He
+therefore promptly produced mere dialogue without the slightest play for
+it to support. _Getting Married_ is no more a play than Cicero's
+dialogue _De Amicitiâ_, and not half so much a play as Wilson's _Noctes
+Ambrosianæ_. But though it is not a play, it was played, and played
+successfully. Everyone who went into the theatre felt that he was only
+eavesdropping at an accidental conversation. But the conversation was so
+sparkling and sensible that he went on eavesdropping. This, I think, as
+it is the final play of Shaw, is also, and fitly, his final triumph. He
+is a good dramatist and sometimes even a great dramatist. But the
+occasions when we get glimpses of him as really a great man are on these
+occasions when he is utterly undramatic.
+
+From first to last Bernard Shaw has been nothing but a
+conversationalist. It is not a slur to say so; Socrates was one, and
+even Christ Himself. He differs from that divine and that human
+prototype in the fact that, like most modern people, he does to some
+extent talk in order to find out what he thinks; whereas they knew it
+beforehand. But he has the virtues that go with the talkative man; one
+of which is humility. You will hardly ever find a really proud man
+talkative; he is afraid of talking too much. Bernard Shaw offered
+himself to the world with only one great qualification, that he could
+talk honestly and well. He did not speak; he talked to a crowd. He did
+not write; he talked to a typewriter. He did not really construct a
+play; he talked through ten mouths or masks instead of through one. His
+literary power and progress began in casual conversations--and it seems
+to me supremely right that it should end in one great and casual
+conversation. His last play is nothing but garrulous talking, that
+great thing called gossip. And I am happy to say that the play has been
+as efficient and successful as talk and gossip have always been among
+the children of men.
+
+Of his life in these later years I have made no pretence of telling even
+the little that there is to tell. Those who regard him as a mere
+self-advertising egotist may be surprised to hear that there is perhaps
+no man of whose private life less could be positively said by an
+outsider. Even those who know him can make little but a conjecture of
+what has lain behind this splendid stretch of intellectual
+self-expression; I only make my conjecture like the rest. I think that
+the first great turning-point in Shaw's life (after the early things of
+which I have spoken, the taint of drink in the teetotal home, or the
+first fight with poverty) was the deadly illness which fell upon him, at
+the end of his first flashing career as a Saturday Reviewer. I know it
+would goad Shaw to madness to suggest that sickness could have softened
+him. That is why I suggest it. But I say for his comfort that I think it
+hardened him also; if that can be called hardening which is only the
+strengthening of our souls to meet some dreadful reality. At least it is
+certain that the larger spiritual ambitions, the desire to find a faith
+and found a church, come after that time. I also mention it because
+there is hardly anything else to mention; his life is singularly free
+from landmarks, while his literature is so oddly full of surprises. His
+marriage to Miss Payne-Townsend, which occurred not long after his
+illness, was one of those quite successful things which are utterly
+silent. The placidity of his married life may be sufficiently indicated
+by saying that (as far as I can make out) the most important events in
+it were rows about the Executive of the Fabian Society. If such ripples
+do not express a still and lake-like life, I do not know what would.
+Honestly, the only thing in his later career that can be called an event
+is the stand made by Shaw at the Fabians against the sudden assault of
+Mr. H. G. Wells, which, after scenes of splendid exasperations, ended in
+Wells' resignation. There was another slight ruffling of the calm when
+Bernard Shaw said some quite sensible things about Sir Henry Irving. But
+on the whole we confront the composure of one who has come into his own.
+
+The method of his life has remained mostly unchanged. And there is a
+great deal of method in his life; I can hear some people murmuring
+something about method in his madness. He is not only neat and
+business-like; but, unlike some literary men I know, does not conceal
+the fact. Having all the talents proper to an author, he delights to
+prove that he has also all the talents proper to a publisher; or even to
+a publisher's clerk. Though many looking at his light brown clothes
+would call him a Bohemian, he really hates and despises Bohemianism; in
+the sense that he hates and despises disorder and uncleanness and
+irresponsibility. All that part of him is peculiarly normal and
+efficient. He gives good advice; he always answers letters, and answers
+them in a decisive and very legible hand. He has said himself that the
+only educational art that he thinks important is that of being able to
+jump off tram-cars at the proper moment. Though a rigid vegetarian, he
+is quite regular and rational in his meals; and though he detests sport,
+he takes quite sufficient exercise. While he has always made a mock of
+science in theory, he is by nature prone to meddle with it in practice.
+He is fond of photographing, and even more fond of being photographed.
+He maintained (in one of his moments of mad modernity) that photography
+was a finer thing than portrait-painting, more exquisite and more
+imaginative; he urged the characteristic argument that none of his own
+photographs were like each other or like him. But he would certainly
+wash the chemicals off his hands the instant after an experiment; just
+as he would wash the blood off his hands the instant after a Socialist
+massacre. He cannot endure stains or accretions; he is of that
+temperament which feels tradition itself to be a coat of dust; whose
+temptation it is to feel nothing but a sort of foul accumulation or
+living disease even in the creeper upon the cottage or the moss upon the
+grave. So thoroughly are his tastes those of the civilised modern man
+that if it had not been for the fire in him of justice and anger he
+might have been the most trim and modern among the millions whom he
+shocks: and his bicycle and brown hat have been no menace in Brixton.
+But God sent among those suburbans one who was a prophet as well as a
+sanitary inspector. He had every qualification for living in a
+villa--except the necessary indifference to his brethren living in
+pigstyes. But for the small fact that he hates with a sickening hatred
+the hypocrisy and class cruelty, he would really accept and admire the
+bathroom and the bicycle and asbestos-stove, having no memory of rivers
+or of roaring fires. In these things, like Mr. Straker, he is the New
+Man. But for his great soul he might have accepted modern civilisation;
+it was a wonderful escape. This man whom men so foolishly call crazy and
+anarchic has really a dangerous affinity to the fourth-rate perfections
+of our provincial and Protestant civilisation. He might even have been
+respectable if he had had less self-respect.
+
+His fulfilled fame and this tone of repose and reason in his life,
+together with the large circle of his private kindness and the regard of
+his fellow-artists, should permit us to end the record in a tone of
+almost patriarchal quiet. If I wished to complete such a picture I could
+add many touches: that he has consented to wear evening dress; that he
+has supported the _Times_ Book Club; and that his beard has turned grey;
+the last to his regret, as he wanted it to remain red till they had
+completed colour-photography. He can mix with the most conservative
+statesmen; his tone grows continuously more gentle in the matter of
+religion. It would be easy to end with the lion lying down with the
+lamb, the wild Irishman tamed or taming everybody, Shaw reconciled to
+the British public as the British public is certainly largely reconciled
+to Shaw.
+
+But as I put these last papers together, having finished this rude
+study, I hear a piece of news. His latest play, _The Showing Up of
+Blanco Posnet_, has been forbidden by the Censor. As far as I can
+discover, it has been forbidden because one of the characters professes
+a belief in God and states his conviction that God has got him. This is
+wholesome; this is like one crack of thunder in a clear sky. Not so
+easily does the prince of this world forgive. Shaw's religious training
+and instinct is not mine, but in all honest religion there is something
+that is hateful to the prosperous compromise of our time. You are free
+in our time to say that God does not exist; you are free to say that He
+exists and is evil; you are free to say (like poor old Renan) that He
+would like to exist if He could. You may talk of God as a metaphor or a
+mystification; you may water Him down with gallons of long words, or
+boil Him to the rags of metaphysics; and it is not merely that nobody
+punishes, but nobody protests. But if you speak of God as a fact, as a
+thing like a tiger, as a reason for changing one's conduct, then the
+modern world will stop you somehow if it can. We are long past talking
+about whether an unbeliever should be punished for being irreverent. It
+is now thought irreverent to be a believer. I end where I began: it is
+the old Puritan in Shaw that jars the modern world like an electric
+shock. That vision with which I meant to end, that vision of culture and
+common-sense, of red brick and brown flannel, of the modern clerk
+broadened enough to embrace Shaw and Shaw softened enough to embrace the
+clerk, all that vision of a new London begins to fade and alter. The red
+brick begins to burn red-hot; and the smoke from all the chimneys has a
+strange smell. I find myself back in the fumes in which I started....
+Perhaps I have been misled by small modernities. Perhaps what I have
+called fastidiousness is a divine fear. Perhaps what I have called
+coldness is a predestinate and ancient endurance. The vision of the
+Fabian villas grows fainter and fainter, until I see only a void place
+across which runs Bunyan's Pilgrim with his fingers in his ears.
+
+Bernard Shaw has occupied much of his life in trying to elude his
+followers. The fox has enthusiastic followers, and Shaw seems to regard
+his in much the same way. This man whom men accuse of bidding for
+applause seems to me to shrink even from assent. If you agree with Shaw
+he is very likely to contradict you; I have contradicted Shaw
+throughout, that is why I come at last almost to agree with him. His
+critics have accused him of vulgar self-advertisement; in his relation
+to his followers he seems to me rather marked with a sort of mad
+modesty. He seems to wish to fly from agreement, to have as few
+followers as possible. All this reaches back, I think, to the three
+roots from which this meditation grew. It is partly the mere impatience
+and irony of the Irishman. It is partly the thought of the Calvinist
+that the host of God should be thinned rather than thronged; that Gideon
+must reject soldiers rather than recruit them. And it is partly, alas,
+the unhappy Progressive trying to be in front of his own religion,
+trying to destroy his own idol and even to desecrate his own tomb. But
+from whatever causes, this furious escape from popularity has involved
+Shaw in some perversities and refinements which are almost mere
+insincerities, and which make it necessary to disentangle the good he
+has done from the evil in this dazzling course. I will attempt some
+summary by stating the three things in which his influence seems to me
+thoroughly good and the three in which it seems bad. But for the
+pleasure of ending on the finer note I will speak first of those that
+seem bad.
+
+The primary respect in which Shaw has been a bad influence is that he
+has encouraged fastidiousness. He has made men dainty about their moral
+meals. This is indeed the root of his whole objection to romance. Many
+people have objected to romance for being too airy and exquisite. Shaw
+objects to romance for being too rank and coarse. Many have despised
+romance because it is unreal; Shaw really hates it because it is a great
+deal too real. Shaw dislikes romance as he dislikes beef and beer, raw
+brandy or raw beefsteaks. Romance is too masculine for his taste. You
+will find throughout his criticisms, amid all their truth, their wild
+justice or pungent impartiality, a curious undercurrent of prejudice
+upon one point: the preference for the refined rather than the rude or
+ugly. Thus he will dislike a joke because it is coarse without asking if
+it is really immoral. He objects to a man sitting down on his hat,
+whereas the austere moralist should only object to his sitting down on
+someone else's hat. This sensibility is barren because it is universal.
+It is useless to object to man being made ridiculous. Man is born
+ridiculous, as can easily be seen if you look at him soon after he is
+born. It is grotesque to drink beer, but it is equally grotesque to
+drink soda-water; the grotesqueness lies in the act of filling yourself
+like a bottle through a hole. It is undignified to walk with a drunken
+stagger; but it is fairly undignified to walk at all, for all walking is
+a sort of balancing, and there is always in the human being something of
+a quadruped on its hind legs. I do not say he would be more dignified if
+he went on all fours; I do not know that he ever is dignified except
+when he is dead. We shall not be refined till we are refined into dust.
+Of course it is only because he is not wholly an animal that man sees he
+is a rum animal; and if man on his hind legs is in an artificial
+attitude, it is only because, like a dog, he is begging or saying thank
+you.
+
+Everything important is in that sense absurd from the grave baby to the
+grinning skull; everything practical is a practical joke. But throughout
+Shaw's comedies, curiously enough, there is a certain kicking against
+this great doom of laughter. For instance, it is the first duty of a
+man who is in love to make a fool of himself; but Shaw's heroes always
+seem to flinch from this, and attempt, in airy, philosophic revenge, to
+make a fool of the woman first. The attempts of Valentine and Charteris
+to divide their perceptions from their desires, and tell the woman she
+is worthless even while trying to win her, are sometimes almost
+torturing to watch; it is like seeing a man trying to play a different
+tune with each hand. I fancy this agony is not only in the spectator,
+but in the dramatist as well. It is Bernard Shaw struggling with his
+reluctance to do anything so ridiculous as make a proposal. For there
+are two types of great humorist: those who love to see a man absurd and
+those who hate to see him absurd. Of the first kind are Rabelais and
+Dickens; of the second kind are Swift and Bernard Shaw.
+
+So far as Shaw has spread or helped a certain modern reluctance or
+_mauvaise honte_ in these grand and grotesque functions of man I think
+he has definitely done harm. He has much influence among the young men;
+but it is not an influence in the direction of keeping them young. One
+cannot imagine him inspiring any of his followers to write a war-song or
+a drinking-song or a love-song, the three forms of human utterance
+which come next in nobility to a prayer. It may seem odd to say that the
+net effect of a man so apparently impudent will be to make men shy. But
+it is certainly the truth. Shyness is always the sign of a divided soul;
+a man is shy because he somehow thinks his position at once despicable
+and important. If he were without humility he would not care; and if he
+were without pride he would not care. Now the main purpose of Shaw's
+theoretic teaching is to declare that we ought to fulfil these great
+functions of life, that we ought to eat and drink and love. But the main
+tendency of his habitual criticism is to suggest that all the
+sentiments, professions, and postures of these things are not only comic
+but even contemptibly comic, follies and almost frauds. The result would
+seem to be that a race of young men may arise who do all these things,
+but do them awkwardly. That which was of old a free and hilarious
+function becomes an important and embarrassing necessity. Let us endure
+all the pagan pleasures with a Christian patience. Let us eat, drink,
+and be serious.
+
+The second of the two points on which I think Shaw has done definite
+harm is this: that he has (not always or even as a rule intentionally)
+increased that anarchy of thought which is always the destruction of
+thought. Much of his early writing has encouraged among the modern youth
+that most pestilent of all popular tricks and fallacies; what is called
+the argument of progress. I mean this kind of thing. Previous ages were
+often, alas, aristocratic in politics or clericalist in religion; but
+they were always democratic in philosophy; they appealed to man, not to
+particular men. And if most men were against an idea, that was so far
+against it. But nowadays that most men are against a thing is thought to
+be in its favour; it is vaguely supposed to show that some day most men
+will be for it. If a man says that cows are reptiles, or that Bacon
+wrote Shakespeare, he can always quote the contempt of his
+contemporaries as in some mysterious way proving the complete conversion
+of posterity. The objections to this theory scarcely need any elaborate
+indication. The final objection to it is that it amounts to this: say
+anything, however idiotic, and you are in advance of your age. This kind
+of stuff must be stopped. The sort of democrat who appeals to the babe
+unborn must be classed with the sort of aristocrat who appeals to his
+deceased great-grandfather. Both should be sharply reminded that they
+are appealing to individuals whom they well know to be at a disadvantage
+in the matter of prompt and witty reply. Now although Bernard Shaw has
+survived this simple confusion, he has in his time greatly contributed
+to it. If there is, for instance, one thing that is really rare in Shaw
+it is hesitation. He makes up his mind quicker than a calculating boy or
+a county magistrate. Yet on this subject of the next change in ethics he
+has felt hesitation, and being a strictly honest man has expressed it.
+
+"I know no harder practical question than how much selfishness one ought
+to stand from a gifted person for the sake of his gifts or on the chance
+of his being right in the long run. The Superman will certainly come
+like a thief in the night, and be shot at accordingly; but we cannot
+leave our property wholly undefended on that account. On the other hand,
+we cannot ask the Superman simply to add a higher set of virtues to
+current respectable morals; for he is undoubtedly going to empty a good
+deal of respectable morality out like so much dirty water, and replace
+it by new and strange customs, shedding old obligations and accepting
+new and heavier ones. Every step of his progress must horrify
+conventional people; and if it were possible for even the most superior
+man to march ahead all the time, every pioneer of the march towards the
+Superman would be crucified."
+
+When the most emphatic man alive, a man unmatched in violent precision
+of statement, speaks with such avowed vagueness and doubt as this, it is
+no wonder if all his more weak-minded followers are in a mere whirlpool
+of uncritical and unmeaning innovation. If the superior person will be
+apparently criminal, the most probable result is simply that the
+criminal person will think himself superior. A very slight knowledge of
+human nature is required in the matter. If the Superman may possibly be
+a thief, you may bet your boots that the next thief will be a Superman.
+But indeed the Supermen (of whom I have met many) have generally been
+more weak in the head than in the moral conduct; they have simply
+offered the first fancy which occupied their minds as the new morality.
+I fear that Shaw had a way of encouraging these follies. It is obvious
+from the passage I have quoted that he has no way of restraining them.
+
+The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the future,
+because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what you
+like. The next age is blank, and I can paint it freely with my favourite
+colour. It requires real courage to face the past, because the past is
+full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser than we
+and of things done which we could not do. I know I cannot write a poem
+as good as _Lycidas_. But it is always easy to say that the particular
+sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry of the future.
+
+This I call the second evil influence of Shaw: that he has encouraged
+many to throw themselves for justification upon the shapeless and the
+unknown. In this, though courageous himself, he has encouraged cowards,
+and though sincere himself, has helped a mean escape. The third evil in
+his influence can, I think, be much more shortly dealt with. He has to a
+very slight extent, but still perceptibly, encouraged a kind of
+charlatanism of utterance among those who possess his Irish impudence
+without his Irish virtue. For instance, his amusing trick of self-praise
+is perfectly hearty and humorous in him; nay, it is even humble; for to
+confess vanity is itself humble. All that is the matter with the proud
+is that they will not admit that they are vain. Therefore when Shaw
+says that he alone is able to write such and such admirable work, or
+that he has just utterly wiped out some celebrated opponent, I for one
+never feel anything offensive in the tone, but, indeed, only the
+unmistakable intonation of a friend's voice. But I have noticed among
+younger, harder, and much shallower men a certain disposition to ape
+this insolent ease and certitude, and that without any fundamental
+frankness or mirth. So far the influence is bad. Egoism can be learnt as
+a lesson like any other "ism." It is not so easy to learn an Irish
+accent or a good temper. In its lower forms the thing becomes a most
+unmilitary trick of announcing the victory before one has gained it.
+
+When one has said those three things, one has said, I think, all that
+can be said by way of blaming Bernard Shaw. It is significant that he
+was never blamed for any of these things by the Censor. Such censures as
+the attitude of that official involves may be dismissed with a very
+light sort of disdain. To represent Shaw as profane or provocatively
+indecent is not a matter for discussion at all; it is a disgusting
+criminal libel upon a particularly respectable gentleman of the middle
+classes, of refined tastes and somewhat Puritanical views. But while
+the negative defence of Shaw is easy, the just praise of him is almost
+as complex as it is necessary; and I shall devote the last few pages of
+this book to a triad corresponding to the last one--to the three
+important elements in which the work of Shaw has been good as well as
+great.
+
+In the first place, and quite apart from all particular theories, the
+world owes thanks to Bernard Shaw for having combined being intelligent
+with being intelligible. He has popularised philosophy, or rather he has
+repopularised it, for philosophy is always popular, except in peculiarly
+corrupt and oligarchic ages like our own. We have passed the age of the
+demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come
+to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but
+says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper. After all,
+short words must mean something, even if they mean filth or lies; but
+long words may sometimes mean literally nothing, especially if they are
+used (as they mostly are in modern books and magazine articles) to
+balance and modify each other. A plain figure 4, scrawled in chalk
+anywhere, must always mean something; it must always mean 2 + 2. But
+the most enormous and mysterious algebraic equation, full of letters,
+brackets, and fractions, may all cancel out at last and be equal to
+nothing. When a demagogue says to a mob, "There is the Bank of England,
+why shouldn't you have some of that money?" he says something which is
+at least as honest and intelligible as the figure 4. When a writer in
+the _Times_ remarks, "We must raise the economic efficiency of the
+masses without diverting anything from those classes which represent the
+national prosperity and refinement," then his equation cancels out; in a
+literal and logical sense his remark amounts to nothing.
+
+There are two kinds of charlatans or people called quacks to-day. The
+power of the first is that he advertises--and cures. The power of the
+second is that though he is not learned enough to cure he is much too
+learned to advertise. The former give away their dignity with a pound of
+tea; the latter are paid a pound of tea merely for being dignified. I
+think them the worse quacks of the two. Shaw is certainly of the other
+sort. Dickens, another man who was great enough to be a demagogue (and
+greater than Shaw because more heartily a demagogue), puts for ever the
+true difference between the demagogue and the mystagogue in _Dr.
+Marigold_: "Except that we're cheap-jacks and they're dear-jacks, I
+don't see any difference between us." Bernard Shaw is a great
+cheap-jack, with plenty of patter and I dare say plenty of nonsense, but
+with this also (which is not wholly unimportant), with goods to sell.
+People accuse such a man of self-advertisement. But at least the
+cheap-jack does advertise his wares, whereas the don or dear-jack
+advertises nothing except himself. His very silence, nay his very
+sterility, are supposed to be marks of the richness of his erudition. He
+is too learned to teach, and sometimes too wise even to talk. St. Thomas
+Aquinas said: "In auctore auctoritas." But there is more than one man at
+Oxford or Cambridge who is considered an authority because he has never
+been an author.
+
+Against all this mystification both of silence and verbosity Shaw has
+been a splendid and smashing protest. He has stood up for the fact that
+philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and
+Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death. Nearly all the
+most awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable,
+from "A child is born" to "A soul is damned." If the ordinary man may
+not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it? About
+concrete matters indeed one naturally appeals to an oligarchy or select
+class. For information about Lapland I go to an aristocracy of
+Laplanders; for the ways of rabbits to an aristocracy of naturalists or,
+preferably, an aristocracy of poachers. But only mankind itself can bear
+witness to the abstract first principles of mankind, and in matters of
+theory I would always consult the mob. Only the mass of men, for
+instance, have authority to say whether life is good. Whether life is
+good is an especially mystical and delicate question, and, like all such
+questions, is asked in words of one syllable. It is also answered in
+words of one syllable, and Bernard Shaw (as also mankind) answers "yes."
+
+This plain, pugnacious style of Shaw has greatly clarified all
+controversies. He has slain the polysyllable, that huge and slimy
+centipede which has sprawled over all the valleys of England like the
+"loathly worm" who was slain by the ancient knight. He does not think
+that difficult questions will be made simpler by using difficult words
+about them. He has achieved the admirable work, never to be mentioned
+without gratitude, of discussing Evolution without mentioning it. The
+good work is of course more evident in the case of philosophy than any
+other region; because the case of philosophy was a crying one. It was
+really preposterous that the things most carefully reserved for the
+study of two or three men should actually be the things common to all
+men. It was absurd that certain men should be experts on the special
+subject of everything. But he stood for much the same spirit and style
+in other matters; in economics, for example. There never has been a
+better popular economist; one more lucid, entertaining, consistent, and
+essentially exact. The very comicality of his examples makes them and
+their argument stick in the mind; as in the case I remember in which he
+said that the big shops had now to please everybody, and were not
+entirely dependent on the lady who sails in "to order four governesses
+and five grand pianos." He is always preaching collectivism; yet he does
+not very often name it. He does not talk about collectivism, but about
+cash; of which the populace feel a much more definite need. He talks
+about cheese, boots, perambulators, and how people are really to live.
+For him economics really means housekeeping, as it does in Greek. His
+difference from the orthodox economists, like most of his differences,
+is very different from the attacks made by the main body of Socialists.
+The old Manchester economists are generally attacked for being too gross
+and material. Shaw really attacks them for not being gross or material
+enough. He thinks that they hide themselves behind long words, remote
+hypotheses or unreal generalisations. When the orthodox economist begins
+with his correct and primary formula, "Suppose there is a Man on an
+Island----" Shaw is apt to interrupt him sharply, saying, "There is a
+Man in the Street."
+
+The second phase of the man's really fruitful efficacy is in a sense the
+converse of this. He has improved philosophic discussions by making them
+more popular. But he has also improved popular amusements by making them
+more philosophic. And by more philosophic I do not mean duller, but
+funnier; that is more varied. All real fun is in cosmic contrasts, which
+involve a view of the cosmos. But I know that this second strength in
+Shaw is really difficult to state and must be approached by explanations
+and even by eliminations. Let me say at once that I think nothing of
+Shaw or anybody else merely for playing the daring sceptic. I do not
+think he has done any good or even achieved any effect simply by asking
+startling questions. It is possible that there have been ages so
+sluggish or automatic that anything that woke them up at all was a good
+thing. It is sufficient to be certain that ours is not such an age. We
+do not need waking up; rather we suffer from insomnia, with all its
+results of fear and exaggeration and frightful waking dreams. The modern
+mind is not a donkey which wants kicking to make it go on. The modern
+mind is more like a motor-car on a lonely road which two amateur
+motorists have been just clever enough to take to pieces, but are not
+quite clever enough to put together again. Under these circumstances
+kicking the car has never been found by the best experts to be
+effective. No one, therefore, does any good to our age merely by asking
+questions--unless he can answer the questions. Asking questions is
+already the fashionable and aristocratic sport which has brought most of
+us into the bankruptcy court. The note of our age is a note of
+interrogation. And the final point is so plain; no sceptical philosopher
+can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on
+a hot afternoon. "Am I a boy?--Why am I a boy?--Why aren't I a
+chair?--What is a chair?" A child will sometimes ask questions of this
+sort for two hours. And the philosophers of Protestant Europe have asked
+them for two hundred years.
+
+If that were all that I meant by Shaw making men more philosophic, I
+should put it not among his good influences but his bad. He did do that
+to some extent; and so far he is bad. But there is a much bigger and
+better sense in which he has been a philosopher. He has brought back
+into English drama all the streams of fact or tendency which are
+commonly called undramatic. They were there in Shakespeare's time; but
+they have scarcely been there since until Shaw. I mean that Shakespeare,
+being interested in everything, put everything into a play. If he had
+lately been thinking about the irony and even contradiction confronting
+us in self-preservation and suicide, he put it all into _Hamlet_. If he
+was annoyed by some passing boom in theatrical babies he put that into
+_Hamlet_ too. He would put anything into _Hamlet_ which he really
+thought was true, from his favourite nursery ballads to his personal
+(and perhaps unfashionable) conviction of the Catholic purgatory. There
+is no fact that strikes one, I think, about Shakespeare, except the fact
+of how dramatic he could be, so much as the fact of how undramatic he
+could be.
+
+In this great sense Shaw has brought philosophy back into
+drama--philosophy in the sense of a certain freedom of the mind. This is
+not a freedom to think what one likes (which is absurd, for one can only
+think what one thinks); it is a freedom to think about what one likes,
+which is quite a different thing and the spring of all thought.
+Shakespeare (in a weak moment, I think) said that all the world is a
+stage. But Shakespeare acted on the much finer principle that a stage is
+all the world. So there are in all Bernard Shaw's plays patches of what
+people would call essentially undramatic stuff, which the dramatist puts
+in because he is honest and would rather prove his case than succeed
+with his play. Shaw has brought back into English drama that
+Shakespearian universality which, if you like, you can call
+Shakespearian irrelevance. Perhaps a better definition than either is a
+habit of thinking the truth worth telling even when you meet it by
+accident. In Shaw's plays one meets an incredible number of truths by
+accident.
+
+To be up to date is a paltry ambition except in an almanac, and Shaw has
+sometimes talked this almanac philosophy. Nevertheless there is a real
+sense in which the phrase may be wisely used, and that is in cases where
+some stereotyped version of what is happening hides what is really
+happening from our eyes. Thus, for instance, newspapers are never up to
+date. The men who write leading articles are always behind the times,
+because they are in a hurry. They are forced to fall back on their
+old-fashioned view of things; they have no time to fashion a new one.
+Everything that is done in a hurry is certain to be antiquated; that is
+why modern industrial civilisation bears so curious a resemblance to
+barbarism. Thus when newspapers say that the _Times_ is a solemn old
+Tory paper, they are out of date; their talk is behind the talk in Fleet
+Street. Thus when newspapers say that Christian dogmas are crumbling,
+they are out of date; their talk is behind the talk in public-houses.
+Now in this sense Shaw has kept in a really stirring sense up to date.
+He has introduced into the theatre the things that no one else had
+introduced into a theatre--the things in the street outside. The theatre
+is a sort of thing which proudly sends a hansom-cab across the stage as
+Realism, while everybody outside is whistling for motor-cabs.
+
+Consider in this respect how many and fine have been Shaw's intrusions
+into the theatre with the things that were really going on. Daily papers
+and daily matinées were still gravely explaining how much modern war
+depended on gunpowder. _Arms and the Man_ explained how much modern war
+depends on chocolate. Every play and paper described the Vicar who was a
+mild Conservative. _Candida_ caught hold of the modern Vicar who is an
+advanced Socialist. Numberless magazine articles and society comedies
+describe the emancipated woman as new and wild. Only _You Never Can
+Tell_ was young enough to see that the emancipated woman is already old
+and respectable. Every comic paper has caricatured the uneducated
+upstart. Only the author of _Man and Superman_ knew enough about the
+modern world to caricature the educated upstart--the man Straker who can
+quote Beaumarchais, though he cannot pronounce him. This is the second
+real and great work of Shaw--the letting in of the world on to the
+stage, as the rivers were let in upon the Augean Stable. He has let a
+little of the Haymarket into the Haymarket Theatre. He has permitted
+some whispers of the Strand to enter the Strand Theatre. A variety of
+solutions in philosophy is as silly as it is in arithmetic, but one may
+be justly proud of a variety of materials for a solution. After Shaw,
+one may say, there is nothing that cannot be introduced into a play if
+one can make it decent, amusing, and relevant. The state of a man's
+health, the religion of his childhood, his ear for music, or his
+ignorance of cookery can all be made vivid if they have anything to do
+with the subject. A soldier may mention the commissariat as well as the
+cavalry; and, better still, a priest may mention theology as well as
+religion. That is being a philosopher; that is bringing the universe on
+the stage.
+
+Lastly, he has obliterated the mere cynic. He has been so much more
+cynical than anyone else for the public good that no one has dared since
+to be really cynical for anything smaller. The Chinese crackers of the
+frivolous cynics fail to excite us after the dynamite of the serious and
+aspiring cynic. Bernard Shaw and I (who are growing grey together) can
+remember an epoch which many of his followers do not know: an epoch of
+real pessimism. The years from 1885 to 1898 were like the hours of
+afternoon in a rich house with large rooms; the hours before tea-time.
+They believed in nothing except good manners; and the essence of good
+manners is to conceal a yawn. A yawn may be defined as a silent yell.
+The power which the young pessimist of that time showed in this
+direction would have astonished anyone but him. He yawned so wide as to
+swallow the world. He swallowed the world like an unpleasant pill before
+retiring to an eternal rest. Now the last and best glory of Shaw is that
+in the circles where this creature was found, he is not. He has not been
+killed (I don't know exactly why), but he has actually turned into a
+Shaw idealist. This is no exaggeration. I meet men who, when I knew them
+in 1898, were just a little too lazy to destroy the universe. They are
+now conscious of not being quite worthy to abolish some prison
+regulations. This destruction and conversion seem to me the mark of
+something actually great. It is always great to destroy a type without
+destroying a man. The followers of Shaw are optimists; some of them are
+so simple as even to use the word. They are sometimes rather pallid
+optimists, frequently very worried optimists, occasionally, to tell the
+truth, rather cross optimists: but they not pessimists; they can exult
+though they cannot laugh. He has at least withered up among them the
+mere pose of impossibility. Like every great teacher, he has cursed the
+barren fig-tree. For nothing except that impossibility is really
+impossible.
+
+
+I know it is all very strange. From the height of eight hundred years
+ago, or of eight hundred years hence, our age must look incredibly odd.
+We call the twelfth century ascetic. We call our own time hedonist and
+full of praise and pleasure. But in the ascetic age the love of life was
+evident and enormous, so that it had to be restrained. In an hedonist
+age pleasure has always sunk low, so that it has to be encouraged. How
+high the sea of human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now only
+know by the colossal walls that they built to keep it in bounds. How low
+human happiness sank in the twentieth century our children will only
+know by these extraordinary modern books, which tell people that it is a
+duty to be cheerful and that life is not so bad after all. Humanity
+never produces optimists till it has ceased to produce happy men. It is
+strange to be obliged to impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men
+to a banquet with spears. But this shall be written of our time: that
+when the spirit who denies besieged the last citadel, blaspheming life
+itself, there were some, there was one especially, whose voice was heard
+and whose spear was never broken.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENTS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
+
+Heretics. Essays. _12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents._
+
+    "Always entertaining."--_New York Evening Sun_.
+
+    "Always original."--_Chicago Tribune_.
+
+Orthodoxy. Uniform with "Heretics."
+
+            _12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents._
+
+    "Here is a man with something to say."--_Brooklyn Life_.
+
+    "A work of genius."--_Chicago Evening Post_.
+
+    "'Orthodoxy' is the most important religious work that has appeared
+    since Emerson."--_North American Review_.
+
+    "Is likely to produce a sensation. An extraordinary book which
+    will be much read and talked about."--_New York Globe_.
+
+All Things Considered. Essays on various subjects,
+such as:
+
+    Conceit and Caricature; Spiritualism; Science and
+    Religion; Woman, etc.
+
+            _12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents_.
+
+    "Full of the author's abundant vitality, wit and unflinching
+    optimism."--_Book News_.
+
+The Napoleon of Notting Hill.    12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+    "A brilliant piece of satire, gemmed with ingenious paradox."
+                                                --_Boston Herald_.
+
+George Bernard Shaw. An illustrated Biography.
+
+           _12 mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents_.
+
+The Ball and the Cross.       12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+Gilbert K. Chesterton. A Criticism.
+
+      _Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents_.
+
+    An illustrated biography of this brilliant author; also an
+    able review of his works.
+
+    "The anonymous author is a critic with uncommon discrimination
+    and good sense. Mr. Chesterton possesses one of the best attributes
+    of genius--impersonality."--_Baltimore News_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+VERNON LEE
+
+Uniform sets boxed. _8 volumes. Cloth. $12.00 net._ _Express extra.
+$1.50 net each. Postage 10 cents._
+
+    *** "If we were asked to name the three authors writing in English
+    to-day to whom the highest rank of cleverness and brilliancy might
+    be accorded, we would not hesitate to place among them Vernon
+    Lee."--_Baltimore Sun._
+
+Laurus Nobilis. Essays on Art and Life.
+
+Renaissance Fancies and Studies.
+
+The Countess of Albany.
+
+Limbo and Other Essays, including:
+    "Ariadne in Mantua"
+
+Pope Jacynth, and Other Fantastic Tales
+
+Hortus Vitæ, or the Hanging Gardens
+
+The Sentimental Traveller
+
+The Enchanted Woods
+
+The Spirit of Rome
+
+Genius Loci
+
+Hauntings
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+W. COMPTON LEITH
+
+Apologia Diffidentis. An intimate personal book.
+
+_Cloth. 8vo. $2.50 net. Postage 15 cents_.
+
+     *** "Mr. Leith formulates the anatomy of diffidence as Burton did
+     of melancholy; and it might almost be said that he has done it with
+     equal charm. The book surpasses in beauty and distinction of style
+     any other prose work of the past few years. Its charm is akin to
+     that of Mr. A. C. Benson's earlier books, yet Mr. Benson at his
+     best has never equalled this.... A human document as striking as it
+     is unusual.... The impress of truth and wisdom lies deep upon every
+     page."--_The Dial._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ANATOLE FRANCE
+
+     "Anatole France is a writer whose personality is very strongly
+     reflected in his works.... To reproduce his evanescent grace and
+     charm is not to be lightly achieved, but the translators have done
+     their work with care, distinction, and a very happy sense of the
+     value of words."--_Daily Graphic_.
+
+     "We must now all read all of Anatole France. The offer is too good
+     to be shirked. He is just Anatole France, the greatest living
+     writer of French."--_Daily Chronicle_.
+
+           _Complete Limited Edition in English_
+
+     Under the general editorship of Frederic Chapman. 8vo., special
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+     Ospovat. _$2.00 per volume_ (except John of Arc), _postpaid_.
+
+Balthasar
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+The Garden of Epicurus
+Thaïs
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+Joan of Arc. Two volumes. _$8 net per set. Postage extra._
+The Comedian's Tragedy
+The Amethyst Ring
+M. Bergeret in Paris
+The Lettered Life
+Pierre Noziere
+The White Stone
+Penguin Island
+The Opinions of Jerome Coignard
+Jocasta and the Famished Cat
+The Aspirations of Jean Servien
+The Elm Tree on the Mall
+My Friend's Book
+The Wicker-Work Woman
+At the Sign of the Queen Pedauque
+Profitable Tales
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ELIZABETH BISLAND
+
+The Secret Life. Being the Book of a Heretic.
+
+_12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 10 cents._
+
+     "A book of untrammelled thought on living topics. Extraordinarily
+     interesting."--_Philadelphia Press._
+
+     "Excellent style, quaint humor, and shrewd philosophy."--_Review of
+     Reviews._
+
+Seekers in Sicily. Being a Quest for Persephone, by ELIZABETH BISLAND
+and ANNE HOYT.
+
+_Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 20 cents. Illustrated._
+
+     *** A delightful account of Sicily, its people, country, and
+     villages. More than a guide book, this volume is a comprehensive
+     account of what all who are interested in this beautiful island wish
+     to know.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CHARLES H. SHERRILL
+
+Stained Glass Tours in France. How to reach the examples of XIIIth,
+XIVth, XVth and XVIth Century Stained Glass in France (with maps and
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+illustrated. $1.50. net. Postage 14 cents._
+
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+     subject."--_Ferdinand Schwill, Professor of Modern History,
+     University of Chicago._
+
+     "A more unique or more delightful travel book has not been
+     written."--_Toronto Mail and Empire._
+
+Stained Glass Tours in England.
+
+_Illustrated. Cloth 8vo. $2.50 net. Postage 20 cents._
+
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+
+     "Well conceived and original."--_Athenæum._
+
+     *** "In these days of universal travel and of the almost universal
+     writing of travel books, it is unusual to find an author whose
+     point of view is unique and whose subject-matter is unhackneyed.
+     Mr. Sherrill has met both of these difficult requirements."--_The
+     Dial._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+J. M. DIVER
+
+Captain Desmond, V.C.
+
+_Ornamental cloth. 12_mo._ $1.50._
+
+     "A story of the Punjab frontier. The theme is that of Kipling's
+     'Story of the Gadsbys'--a brilliant and convincing study of an
+     undying problem."--_London Post._
+
+The Great Amulet 12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+A love-story dealing with army life in India.
+
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+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+HUGH DE SELINCOURT
+
+The Strongest Plume 12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+     "Deals with a problem quite worthy of serious consideration,
+     frankly but restrainedly. Excellent studies of character."--_London
+     Daily News._
+
+A Boy's Marriage 12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+The High Adventure 12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+     "Admirably well told with distinctive literary
+     skill."--_Philadelphia Press._
+
+The Way Things Happen 12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+     "Fantastic and agreeable--an effort somewhat in the manner of Mr.
+     W. J. Locke."--_Glasgow Evening News._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A. NEIL LYONS
+
+Arthur's Hotel 12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+     "Sketches of low life in London. The book will delight visitors to
+     the slums."--_New York Sun._
+
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+
+     The Story of a "Sixpenny Doctor" in the East end of London. The
+     volume is instinct with a realism that differs altogether from the
+     so-called realism of the accepted "gutter" novels, for it is the
+     realism of life as it is, and not as imagined.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE COMPLETE WORKS
+OF
+WILLIAM J. LOCKE
+
+"LIFE IS A GLORIOUS THING."--_W. J. Locke_
+
+     "If you wish to be lifted out of the petty cares of to-day, read
+     one of Locke's novels. You may select any from the following titles
+     and be certain of meeting some new and delightful friends. His
+     characters are worth knowing."--_Baltimore Sun._
+
+The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
+At the Gate of Samaria
+A Study in Shadows
+Where Love Is
+Derelicts
+The Demagogue and Lady Phayre
+The Belovéd Vagabond
+The White Dove
+The Usurper
+Septimus
+Idols
+
+_12mo. Cloth. $1.50 each_.
+
+     Eleven volumes bound in green cloth. Uniform edition in box. $16.50
+     per set. Half morocco $45.00 net. Express prepaid.
+
+The Belovéd Vagabond
+
+     "'The Belovéd Vagabond' is a gently-written, fascinating tale. Make
+     his acquaintance some dreary, rain-soaked evening and find the
+     vagabond nerve-thrilling in your own heart."--_Chicago
+     Record-Herald._
+
+Septimus
+
+     "Septimus is the joy of the year."--_American Magazine._
+
+The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
+
+     "A literary event of the first importance."--_Boston Herald._
+
+     "One of those rare and much-to-be-desired stories which keep one
+     divided between an interested impatience to get on, and an
+     irresistible temptation to linger for full enjoyment by the
+     way."--_Life._
+
+Where Love Is
+
+     "A capital story told with skill."--_New York Evening Sun._
+
+     "One of those unusual novels of which the end is as good as the
+     beginning."--_New York Globe._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+WILLIAM J. LOCKE
+
+The Usurper
+
+     "Contains the hall-mark of genius itself. The plot is masterly
+     conception, the descriptions are all vivid flashes from a brilliant
+     pen. It is impossible to read and not marvel at the skilled
+     workmanship and the constant dramatic intensity of the incident,
+     situations and climax."--_The Boston Herald._
+
+Derelicts
+
+     "Mr. Locke tells his story in a very true, a very moving, and a
+     very noble book. If any one can read the last chapter with dry eyes
+     we shall be surprised. 'Derelicts' is an impressive, an important
+     book. Yvonne is a creation that any artist might be proud
+     of."--_The Daily Chronicle._
+
+Idols
+
+     "One of the very few distinguished novels of this present book
+     season."--_The Daily Mail._
+
+     "A brilliantly written and eminently readable
+     book."--_The London Daily Telegraph._
+
+A Study in Shadows
+
+     "Mr. Locke has achieved a distinct success in this novel. He has
+     struck many emotional chords, and struck them all with a firm, sure
+     hand. In the relations between Katherine and Raine he had a
+     delicate problem to handle, and he has handled it
+     delicately."--_The Daily Chronicle._
+
+The White Dove
+
+     "It is an interesting story. The characters are strongly conceived
+     and vividly presented, and the dramatic moments are powerfully
+     realized."--_The Morning Post._
+
+The Demagogue and Lady Phayre
+
+     "Think of Locke's clever books. Then think of a book as different
+     from any of these as one can well imagine--that will be Mr. Locke's
+     new book."--_New York World._
+
+At the Gate of Samaria
+
+     "William J. Locke's novels are nothing if not unusual. They are
+     marked by a quaint originality. The habitual novel reader
+     inevitably is grateful for a refreshing sense of escaping the
+     commonplace path of conclusion."--_Chicago Record-Herald._
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's George Bernard Shaw, by Gilbert K. Chesterton
+
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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of George Bernard Shaw, by Gilbert K. Chesterton.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
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+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of George Bernard Shaw, by Gilbert K. Chesterton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: George Bernard Shaw
+
+Author: Gilbert K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: October 13, 2006 [EBook #19535]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sigal Alon, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<h1>GEORGE BERNARD SHAW</h1>
+
+<h3><i>By</i></h3>
+
+<h2>GILBERT K. CHESTERTON</h2>
+
+<p class='tbrk'>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>NEW YORK<br/>JOHN LANE COMPANY<br/>MCMIX</h4>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h4>COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY<br/>JOHN LANE COMPANY</h4>
+
+<p class='tbrk'>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>THE PLIMPTON PRESS, NORWOOD, MASS.</h4>
+
+<hr />
+<p class="center"><img src="images/cover.jpg" width='416' height='700' alt="cover" /></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<table border='1' cellspacing='0' cellpadding='15' summary='books by the same author '>
+  <tr class='center'>
+    <td><i>BY THE SAME AUTHOR</i><br/><br/><br/>HERETICS.<br/><br />ORTHODOXY.<br /><br/>
+THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL:<br />A Romance. Illustrated by<br />
+<span class="smcap">W. Graham Robertson</span>.<br/><br />ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.<br />
+<br/>THE BALL AND THE CROSS.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2><i>CONTENTS</i></h2>
+
+<div class="index">
+<ul>
+<li><a href="#Introduction_to_the_First_Edition"><span class="smcap">Introduction to the First Edition</span></a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Problem_of_a_Preface"><span class="smcap">The Problem of a Preface</span></a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Irishman"><span class="smcap">The Irishman</span></a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Puritan"><span class="smcap">The Puritan</span></a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Progressive"><span class="smcap">The Progressive</span></a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Critic"><span class="smcap">The Critic</span></a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Dramatist"><span class="smcap">The Dramatist</span></a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Philosopher"><span class="smcap">The Philosopher</span></a></li>
+<li><a href="#ADVERTISEMENTS"><span class="smcap">Advertisements</span></a></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Introduction_to_the_First_Edition" id="Introduction_to_the_First_Edition"></a><i>Introduction to the First Edition</i></h2>
+
+<p>Most people either say that they agree with Bernard Shaw or that they do
+not understand him. I am the only person who understands him, and I do
+not agree with him.</p>
+
+<p class='right'>G. K. C.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="The_Problem_of_a_Preface" id="The_Problem_of_a_Preface"></a><i>The Problem of a Preface</i></h2>
+
+<p>A peculiar difficulty arrests the writer of this rough study at the very
+start. Many people know Mr. Bernard Shaw chiefly as a man who would
+write a very long preface even to a very short play. And there is truth
+in the idea; he is indeed a very prefatory sort of person. He always
+gives the explanation before the incident; but so, for the matter of
+that, does the Gospel of St. John. For Bernard Shaw, as for the mystics,
+Christian and heathen (and Shaw is best described as a heathen mystic),
+the philosophy of facts is anterior to the facts themselves. In due time
+we come to the fact, the incarnation; but in the beginning was the Word.</p>
+
+<p>This produces upon many minds an impression of needless preparation and
+a kind of bustling prolixity. But the truth is that the very rapidity of
+such a man's mind makes him seem slow in getting to the point. It is
+positively because he is quick-witted that he is long-winded. A quick
+eye for ideas may actually make a writer slow in reaching his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> goal,
+just as a quick eye for landscapes might make a motorist slow in
+reaching Brighton. An original man has to pause at every allusion or
+simile to re-explain historical parallels, to re-shape distorted words.
+Any ordinary leader-writer (let us say) might write swiftly and smoothly
+something like this: "The element of religion in the Puritan rebellion,
+if hostile to art, yet saved the movement from some of the evils in
+which the French Revolution involved morality." Now a man like Mr. Shaw,
+who has his own views on everything, would be forced to make the
+sentence long and broken instead of swift and smooth. He would say
+something like: "The element of religion, as I explain religion, in the
+Puritan rebellion (which you wholly misunderstand) if hostile to
+art&mdash;that is what I mean by art&mdash;may have saved it from some evils
+(remember my definition of evil) in which the French Revolution&mdash;of
+which I have my own opinion&mdash;involved morality, which I will define for
+you in a minute." That is the worst of being a really universal sceptic
+and philosopher; it is such slow work. The very forest of the man's
+thoughts chokes up his thoroughfare. A man must be orthodox upon most
+things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>Now the same difficulty which affects the work of Bernard Shaw affects
+also any book about him. There is an unavoidable artistic necessity to
+put the preface before the play; that is, there is a necessity to say
+something of what Bernard Shaw's experience means before one even says
+what it was. We have to mention what he did when we have already
+explained why he did it. Viewed superficially, his life consists of
+fairly conventional incidents, and might easily fall under fairly
+conventional phrases. It might be the life of any Dublin clerk or
+Manchester Socialist or London author. If I touch on the man's life
+before his work, it will seem trivial; yet taken with his work it is
+most important. In short, one could scarcely know what Shaw's doings
+meant unless one knew what he meant by them. This difficulty in mere
+order and construction has puzzled me very much. I am going to overcome
+it, clumsily perhaps, but in the way which affects me as most sincere.
+Before I write even a slight suggestion of his relation to the stage, I
+am going to write of three soils or atmospheres out of which that
+relation grew. In other words, before I write of Shaw I will write of
+the three great influences upon Shaw. They were all three there before
+he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> was born, yet each one of them is himself and a very vivid portrait
+of him from one point of view. I have called these three traditions:
+"The Irishman," "The Puritan," and "The Progressive." I do not see how
+this prefatory theorising is to be avoided; for if I simply said, for
+instance, that Bernard Shaw was an Irishman, the impression produced on
+the reader might be remote from my thought and, what is more important,
+from Shaw's. People might think, for instance, that I meant that he was
+"irresponsible." That would throw out the whole plan of these pages, for
+if there is one thing that Shaw is not, it is irresponsible. The
+responsibility in him rings like steel. Or, again, if I simply called
+him a Puritan, it might mean something about nude statues or "prudes on
+the prowl." Or if I called him a Progressive, it might be supposed to
+mean that he votes for Progressives at the County Council election,
+which I very much doubt. I have no other course but this: of briefly
+explaining such matters as Shaw himself might explain them. Some
+fastidious persons may object to my thus putting the moral in front of
+the fable. Some may imagine in their innocence that they already
+understand the word Puritan or the yet more mysterious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> word Irishman.
+The only person, indeed, of whose approval I feel fairly certain is Mr.
+Bernard Shaw himself, the man of many introductions.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p>
+<h1>GEORGE BERNARD SHAW</h1>
+
+<p class='tbrk'>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h2><a name="The_Irishman" id="The_Irishman"></a><i>The Irishman</i></h2>
+
+<p>The English public has commonly professed, with a kind of pride, that it
+cannot understand Mr. Bernard Shaw. There are many reasons for it which
+ought to be adequately considered in such a book as this. But the first
+and most obvious reason is the mere statement that George Bernard Shaw
+was born in Dublin in 1856. At least one reason why Englishmen cannot
+understand Mr. Shaw is that Englishmen have never taken the trouble to
+understand Irishmen. They will sometimes be generous to Ireland; but
+never just to Ireland. They will speak to Ireland; they will speak for
+Ireland; but they will not hear Ireland speak. All the real amiability
+which most Englishmen undoubtedly feel towards Irishmen is lavished upon
+a class of Irishmen which unfortunately does not exist. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> Irishman of
+the English farce, with his brogue, his buoyancy, and his tender-hearted
+irresponsibility, is a man who ought to have been thoroughly pampered
+with praise and sympathy, if he had only existed to receive them.
+Unfortunately, all the time that we were creating a comic Irishman in
+fiction, we were creating a tragic Irishman in fact. Never perhaps has
+there been a situation of such excruciating cross-purposes even in the
+three-act farce. The more we saw in the Irishman a sort of warm and weak
+fidelity, the more he regarded us with a sort of icy anger. The more the
+oppressor looked down with an amiable pity, the more did the oppressed
+look down with a somewhat unamiable contempt. But, indeed, it is
+needless to say that such comic cross-purposes could be put into a play;
+they have been put into a play. They have been put into what is perhaps
+the most real of Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays, <i>John Bull's Other Island</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is somewhat absurd to imagine that any one who has not read a play by
+Mr. Shaw will be reading a book about him. But if it comes to that it is
+(as I clearly perceive) absurd to be writing a book about Mr. Bernard
+Shaw at all. It is indefensibly foolish to attempt to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> explain a man
+whose whole object through life has been to explain himself. But even in
+nonsense there is a need for logic and consistency; therefore let us
+proceed on the assumption that when I say that all Mr. Shaw's blood and
+origin may be found in <i>John Bull's Other Island</i>, some reader may
+answer that he does not know the play. Besides, it is more important to
+put the reader right about England and Ireland even than to put him
+right about Shaw. If he reminds me that this is a book about Shaw, I can
+only assure him that I will reasonably, and at proper intervals,
+remember the fact.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Shaw himself said once, "I am a typical Irishman; my family came
+from Yorkshire." Scarcely anyone but a typical Irishman could have made
+the remark. It is in fact a bull, a conscious bull. A bull is only a
+paradox which people are too stupid to understand. It is the rapid
+summary of something which is at once so true and so complex that the
+speaker who has the swift intelligence to perceive it, has not the slow
+patience to explain it. Mystical dogmas are much of this kind. Dogmas
+are often spoken of as if they were signs of the slowness or endurance
+of the human mind. As a matter of fact, they are marks of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> mental
+promptitude and lucid impatience. A man will put his meaning mystically
+because he cannot waste time in putting it rationally. Dogmas are not
+dark and mysterious; rather a dogma is like a flash of lightning&mdash;an
+instantaneous lucidity that opens across a whole landscape. Of the same
+nature are Irish bulls; they are summaries which are too true to be
+consistent. The Irish make Irish bulls for the same reason that they
+accept Papal bulls. It is because it is better to speak wisdom
+foolishly, like the Saints, rather than to speak folly wisely, like the
+Dons.</p>
+
+<p>This is the truth about mystical dogmas and the truth about Irish bulls;
+it is also the truth about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw. Each of them
+is an argument impatiently shortened into an epigram. Each of them
+represents a truth hammered and hardened, with an almost disdainful
+violence until it is compressed into a small space, until it is made
+brief and almost incomprehensible. The case of that curt remark about
+Ireland and Yorkshire is a very typical one. If Mr. Shaw had really
+attempted to set out all the sensible stages of his joke, the sentence
+would have run something like this: "That I am an Irishman is a fact of
+psychology which I can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> trace in many of the things that come out of me,
+my fastidiousness, my frigid fierceness and my distrust of mere
+pleasure. But the thing must be tested by what comes from me; do not try
+on me the dodge of asking where I came from, how many batches of three
+hundred and sixty-five days my family was in Ireland. Do not play any
+games on me about whether I am a Celt, a word that is dim to the
+anthropologist and utterly unmeaning to anybody else. Do not start any
+drivelling discussions about whether the word Shaw is German or
+Scandinavian or Iberian or Basque. You know you are human; I know I am
+Irish. I know I belong to a certain type and temper of society; and I
+know that all sorts of people of all sorts of blood live in that society
+and by that society; and are therefore Irish. You can take your books of
+anthropology to hell or to Oxford." Thus gently, elaborately and at
+length, Mr. Shaw would have explained his meaning, if he had thought it
+worth his while. As he did not he merely flung the symbolic, but very
+complete sentence, "I am a typical Irishman; my family came from
+Yorkshire."</p>
+
+<p>What then is the colour of this Irish society of which Bernard Shaw,
+with all his individual<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> oddity, is yet an essential type? One
+generalisation, I think, may at least be made. Ireland has in it a
+quality which caused it (in the most ascetic age of Christianity) to be
+called the "Land of Saints"; and which still might give it a claim to be
+called the Land of Virgins. An Irish Catholic priest once said to me,
+"There is in our people a fear of the passions which is older even than
+Christianity." Everyone who has read Shaw's play upon Ireland will
+remember the thing in the horror of the Irish girl at being kissed in
+the public streets. But anyone who knows Shaw's work will recognize it
+in Shaw himself. There exists by accident an early and beardless
+portrait of him which really suggests in the severity and purity of its
+lines some of the early ascetic pictures of the beardless Christ.
+However he may shout profanities or seek to shatter the shrines, there
+is always something about him which suggests that in a sweeter and more
+solid civilisation he would have been a great saint. He would have been
+a saint of a sternly ascetic, perhaps of a sternly negative type. But he
+has this strange note of the saint in him: that he is literally
+unworldly. Worldliness has no human magic for him; he is not bewitched
+by rank nor drawn on by conviviality<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> at all. He could not understand
+the intellectual surrender of the snob. He is perhaps a defective
+character; but he is not a mixed one. All the virtues he has are heroic
+virtues. Shaw is like the Venus of Milo; all that there is of him is
+admirable.</p>
+
+<p>But in any case this Irish innocence is peculiar and fundamental in him;
+and strange as it may sound, I think that his innocence has a great deal
+to do with his suggestions of sexual revolution. Such a man is
+comparatively audacious in theory because he is comparatively clean in
+thought. Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their
+strength in forging chains for themselves; they alone know how strong
+the chains need to be. But there are other souls who walk the woods like
+Diana, with a sort of wild chastity. I confess I think that this Irish
+purity a little disables a critic in dealing, as Mr. Shaw has dealt,
+with the roots and reality of the marriage law. He forgets that those
+fierce and elementary functions which drive the universe have an impetus
+which goes beyond itself and cannot always easily be recovered. So the
+healthiest men may often erect a law to watch them, just as the
+healthiest sleepers may want an alarum clock to wake them up. However<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+this may be, Bernard Shaw certainly has all the virtues and all the
+powers that go with this original quality in Ireland. One of them is a
+sort of awful elegance; a dangerous and somewhat inhuman daintiness of
+taste which sometimes seems to shrink from matter itself, as though it
+were mud. Of the many sincere things Mr. Shaw has said he never said a
+more sincere one than when he stated he was a vegetarian, not because
+eating meat was bad morality, but because it was bad taste. It would be
+fanciful to say that Mr. Shaw is a vegetarian because he comes of a race
+of vegetarians, of peasants who are compelled to accept the simple life
+in the shape of potatoes. But I am sure that his fierce fastidiousness
+in such matters is one of the allotropic forms of the Irish purity; it
+is to the virtue of Father Matthew what a coal is to a diamond. It has,
+of course, the quality common to all special and unbalanced types of
+virtue, that you never know where it will stop. I can feel what Mr. Shaw
+probably means when he says that it is disgusting to feast off dead
+bodies, or to cut lumps off what was once a living thing. But I can
+never know at what moment he may not feel in the same way that it is
+disgusting to mutilate a pear-tree, or to root out of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> earth those
+miserable mandrakes which cannot even groan. There is no natural limit
+to this rush and riotous gallop of refinement.</p>
+
+<p>But it is not this physical and fantastic purity which I should chiefly
+count among the legacies of the old Irish morality. A much more
+important gift is that which all the saints declared to be the reward of
+chastity: a queer clearness of the intellect, like the hard clearness of
+a crystal. This certainly Mr. Shaw possesses; in such degree that at
+certain times the hardness seems rather clearer than the clearness. But
+so it does in all the most typical Irish characters and Irish attitudes
+of mind. This is probably why Irishmen succeed so much in such
+professions as require a certain crystalline realism, especially about
+results. Such professions are the soldier and the lawyer; these give
+ample opportunity for crimes but not much for mere illusions. If you
+have composed a bad opera you may persuade yourself that it is a good
+one; if you have carved a bad statue you can think yourself better than
+Michael Angelo. But if you have lost a battle you cannot believe you
+have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have
+got him off.</p>
+
+<p>There must be some sense in every popular<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> prejudice, even about
+foreigners. And the English people certainly have somehow got an
+impression and a tradition that the Irishman is genial, unreasonable,
+and sentimental. This legend of the tender, irresponsible Paddy has two
+roots; there are two elements in the Irish which made the mistake
+possible. First, the very logic of the Irishman makes him regard war or
+revolution as extra-logical, an <i>ultima ratio</i> which is beyond reason.
+When fighting a powerful enemy he no more worries whether all his
+charges are exact or all his attitudes dignified than a soldier worries
+whether a cannon-ball is shapely or a plan of campaign picturesque. He
+is aggressive; he attacks. He seems merely to be rowdy in Ireland when
+he is really carrying the war into Africa&mdash;or England. A Dublin
+tradesman printed his name and trade in archaic Erse on his cart. He
+knew that hardly anybody could read it; he did it to annoy. In his
+position I think he was quite right. When one is oppressed it is a mark
+of chivalry to hurt oneself in order to hurt the oppressor. But the
+English (never having had a real revolution since the Middle Ages) find
+it very hard to understand this steady passion for being a nuisance, and
+mistake it for mere whimsical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> impulsiveness and folly. When an Irish
+member holds up the whole business of the House of Commons by talking of
+his bleeding country for five or six hours, the simple English members
+suppose that he is a sentimentalist. The truth is that he is a scornful
+realist who alone remains unaffected by the sentimentalism of the House
+of Commons. The Irishman is neither poet enough nor snob enough to be
+swept away by those smooth social and historical tides and tendencies
+which carry Radicals and Labour members comfortably off their feet. He
+goes on asking for a thing because he wants it; and he tries really to
+hurt his enemies because they are his enemies. This is the first of the
+queer confusions which make the hard Irishman look soft. He seems to us
+wild and unreasonable because he is really much too reasonable to be
+anything but fierce when he is fighting.</p>
+
+<p>In all this it will not be difficult to see the Irishman in Bernard
+Shaw. Though personally one of the kindest men in the world, he has
+often written really in order to hurt; not because he hated any
+particular men (he is hardly hot and animal enough for that), but
+because he really hated certain ideas even unto slaying. He provokes; he
+will not let<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> people alone. One might even say that he bullies, only
+that this would be unfair, because he always wishes the other man to hit
+back. At least he always challenges, like a true Green Islander. An even
+stronger instance of this national trait can be found in another eminent
+Irishman, Oscar Wilde. His philosophy (which was vile) was a philosophy
+of ease, of acceptance, and luxurious illusion; yet, being Irish, he
+could not help putting it in pugnacious and propagandist epigrams. He
+preached his softness with hard decision; he praised pleasure in the
+words most calculated to give pain. This armed insolence, which was the
+noblest thing about him, was also the Irish thing; he challenged all
+comers. It is a good instance of how right popular tradition is even
+when it is most wrong, that the English have perceived and preserved
+this essential trait of Ireland in a proverbial phrase. It <i>is</i> true
+that the Irishman says, "Who will tread on the tail of my coat?"</p>
+
+<p>But there is a second cause which creates the English fallacy that the
+Irish are weak and emotional. This again springs from the very fact that
+the Irish are lucid and logical. For being logical they strictly
+separate poetry from prose; and as in prose they are strictly pro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>saic,
+so in poetry they are purely poetical. In this, as in one or two other
+things, they resemble the French, who make their gardens beautiful
+because they are gardens, but their fields ugly because they are only
+fields. An Irishman may like romance, but he will say, to use a frequent
+Shavian phrase, that it is "only romance." A great part of the English
+energy in fiction arises from the very fact that their fiction half
+deceives them. If Rudyard Kipling, for instance, had written his short
+stories in France, they would have been praised as cool, clever little
+works of art, rather cruel, and very nervous and feminine; Kipling's
+short stories would have been appreciated like Maupassant's short
+stories. In England they were not appreciated but believed. They were
+taken seriously by a startled nation as a true picture of the empire and
+the universe. The English people made haste to abandon England in favour
+of Mr. Kipling and his imaginary colonies; they made haste to abandon
+Christianity in favour of Mr. Kipling's rather morbid version of
+Judaism. Such a moral boom of a book would be almost impossible in
+Ireland, because the Irish mind distinguishes between life and
+literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>self summed this up as he sums up so
+many things in a compact sentence which he uttered in conversation with
+the present writer, "An Irishman has two eyes." He meant that with one
+eye an Irishman saw that a dream was inspiring, bewitching, or sublime,
+and with the other eye that after all it was a dream. Both the humour
+and the sentiment of an Englishman cause him to wink the other eye. Two
+other small examples will illustrate the English mistake. Take, for
+instance, that noble survival from a nobler age of politics&mdash;I mean
+Irish oratory. The English imagine that Irish politicians are so
+hot-headed and poetical that they have to pour out a torrent of burning
+words. The truth is that the Irish are so clear-headed and critical that
+they still regard rhetoric as a distinct art, as the ancients did. Thus
+a man makes a speech as a man plays a violin, not necessarily without
+feeling, but chiefly because he knows how to do it. Another instance of
+the same thing is that quality which is always called the Irish charm.
+The Irish are agreeable, not because they are particularly emotional,
+but because they are very highly civilised. Blarney is a ritual; as much
+of a ritual as kissing the Blarney Stone.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, there is one general truth about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> Ireland which may very well
+have influenced Bernard Shaw from the first; and almost certainly
+influenced him for good. Ireland is a country in which the political
+conflicts are at least genuine; they are about something. They are about
+patriotism, about religion, or about money: the three great realities.
+In other words, they are concerned with what commonwealth a man lives in
+or with what universe a man lives in or with how he is to manage to live
+in either. But they are not concerned with which of two wealthy cousins
+in the same governing class shall be allowed to bring in the same Parish
+Councils Bill; there is no party system in Ireland. The party system in
+England is an enormous and most efficient machine for preventing
+political conflicts. The party system is arranged on the same principle
+as a three-legged race: the principle that union is not always strength
+and is never activity. Nobody asks for what he really wants. But in
+Ireland the loyalist is just as ready to throw over the King as the
+Fenian to throw over Mr. Gladstone; each will throw over anything except
+the thing that he wants. Hence it happens that even the follies or the
+frauds of Irish politics are more genuine as symptoms and more
+honourable as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> symbols than the lumbering hypocrisies of the prosperous
+Parliamentarian. The very lies of Dublin and Belfast are truer than the
+truisms of Westminster. They have an object; they refer to a state of
+things. There was more honesty, in the sense of actuality, about
+Piggott's letters than about the <i>Times'</i> leading articles on them. When
+Parnell said calmly before the Royal Commission that he had made a
+certain remark "in order to mislead the House" he proved himself to be
+one of the few truthful men of his time. An ordinary British statesman
+would never have made the confession, because he would have grown quite
+accustomed to committing the crime. The party system itself implies a
+habit of stating something other than the actual truth. A Leader of the
+House means a Misleader of the House.</p>
+
+<p>Bernard Shaw was born outside all this; and he carries that freedom upon
+his face. Whether what he heard in boyhood was violent Nationalism or
+virulent Unionism, it was at least something which wanted a certain
+principle to be in force, not a certain clique to be in office. Of him
+the great Gilbertian generalisation is untrue; he was not born either a
+little Liberal or else a little Conservative. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> did not, like most of
+us, pass through the stage of being a good party man on his way to the
+difficult business of being a good man. He came to stare at our general
+elections as a Red Indian might stare at the Oxford and Cambridge
+boat-race, blind to all its irrelevant sentimentalities and to some of
+its legitimate sentiments. Bernard Shaw entered England as an alien, as
+an invader, as a conqueror. In other words, he entered England as an Irishman.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="The_Puritan" id="The_Puritan"></a><i>The Puritan</i></h2>
+
+<p>It has been said in the first section that Bernard Shaw draws from his
+own nation two unquestionable qualities, a kind of intellectual
+chastity, and the fighting spirit. He is so much of an idealist about
+his ideals that he can be a ruthless realist in his methods. His soul
+has (in short) the virginity and the violence of Ireland. But Bernard
+Shaw is not merely an Irishman; he is not even a typical one. He is a
+certain separated and peculiar kind of Irishman, which is not easy to
+describe. Some Nationalist Irishmen have referred to him contemptuously
+as a "West Briton." But this is really unfair; for whatever Mr. Shaw's
+mental faults may be, the easy adoption of an unmeaning phrase like
+"Briton" is certainly not one of them. It would be much nearer the truth
+to put the thing in the bold and bald terms of the old Irish song, and
+to call him "The anti-Irish Irishman." But it is only fair to say that
+the description is far less of a monstrosity than the anti-English
+Englishman would be; because the Irish are so much stronger in
+self-criticism. Compared with the constant self<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>-flattery of the
+English, nearly every Irishman is an anti-Irish Irishman. But here again
+popular phraseology hits the right word. This fairly educated and fairly
+wealthy Protestant wedge which is driven into the country at Dublin and
+elsewhere is a thing not easy superficially to summarise in any term. It
+cannot be described merely as a minority; for a minority means the part
+of a nation which is conquered. But this thing means something that
+conquers, and is not entirely part of a nation. Nor can one even fall
+back on the phrase of aristocracy. For an aristocracy implies at least
+some chorus of snobbish enthusiasm; it implies that some at least are
+willingly led by the leaders, if only towards vulgarity and vice. There
+is only one word for the minority in Ireland, and that is the word that
+public phraseology has found; I mean the word "Garrison." The Irish are
+essentially right when they talk as if all Protestant Unionists lived
+inside "The Castle." They have all the virtues and limitations of a
+literal garrison in a fort. That is, they are valiant, consistent,
+reliable in an obvious public sense; but their curse is that they can
+only tread the flagstones of the court-yard or the cold rock of the
+ramparts; they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> have never so much as set their foot upon their native
+soil.</p>
+
+<p>We have considered Bernard Shaw as an Irishman. The next step is to
+consider him as an exile from Ireland living in Ireland; that, some
+people would say, is a paradox after his own heart. But, indeed, such a
+complication is not really difficult to expound. The great religion and
+the great national tradition which have persisted for so many centuries
+in Ireland have encouraged these clean and cutting elements; but they
+have encouraged many other things which serve to balance them. The Irish
+peasant has these qualities which are somewhat peculiar to Ireland, a
+strange purity and a strange pugnacity. But the Irish peasant also has
+qualities which are common to all peasants, and his nation has qualities
+that are common to all healthy nations. I mean chiefly the things that
+most of us absorb in childhood; especially the sense of the supernatural
+and the sense of the natural; the love of the sky with its infinity of
+vision, and the love of the soil with its strict hedges and solid shapes
+of ownership. But here comes the paradox of Shaw; the greatest of all
+his paradoxes and the one of which he is unconscious. These one or two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
+plain truths which quite stupid people learn at the beginning are
+exactly the one or two truths which Bernard Shaw may not learn even at
+the end. He is a daring pilgrim who has set out from the grave to find
+the cradle. He started from points of view which no one else was clever
+enough to discover, and he is at last discovering points of view which
+no one else was ever stupid enough to ignore. This absence of the
+red-hot truisms of boyhood; this sense that he is not rooted in the
+ancient sagacities of infancy, has, I think, a great deal to do with his
+position as a member of an alien minority in Ireland. He who has no real
+country can have no real home. The average autochthonous Irishman is
+close to patriotism because he is close to the earth; he is close to
+domesticity because he is close to the earth; he is close to doctrinal
+theology and elaborate ritual because he is close to the earth. In
+short, he is close to the heavens because he is close to the earth. But
+we must not expect any of these elemental and collective virtues in the
+man of the garrison. He cannot be expected to exhibit the virtues of a
+people, but only (as Ibsen would say) of an enemy of the people. Mr.
+Shaw has no living traditions, no schoolboy tricks, no college cus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>toms,
+to link him with other men. Nothing about him can be supposed to refer
+to a family feud or to a family joke. He does not drink toasts; he does
+not keep anniversaries; musical as he is I doubt if he would consent to
+sing. All this has something in it of a tree with its roots in the air.
+The best way to shorten winter is to prolong Christmas; and the only way
+to enjoy the sun of April is to be an April Fool. When people asked
+Bernard Shaw to attend the Stratford Tercentenary, he wrote back with
+characteristic contempt: "I do not keep my own birthday, and I cannot
+see why I should keep Shakespeare's." I think that if Mr. Shaw had
+always kept his own birthday he would be better able to understand
+Shakespeare's birthday&mdash;and Shakespeare's poetry.</p>
+
+<p>In conjecturally referring this negative side of the man, his lack of
+the smaller charities of our common childhood, to his birth in the
+dominant Irish sect, I do not write without historic memory or reference
+to other cases. That minority of Protestant exiles which mainly
+represented Ireland to England during the eighteenth century did contain
+some specimens of the Irish lounger and even of the Irish blackguard;
+Sheridan and even Gold<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>smith suggest the type. Even in their
+irresponsibility these figures had a touch of Irish tartness and
+realism; but the type has been too much insisted on to the exclusion of
+others equally national and interesting. To one of these it is worth
+while to draw attention. At intervals during the eighteenth and
+nineteenth centuries there has appeared a peculiar kind of Irishman. He
+is so unlike the English image of Ireland that the English have actually
+fallen back on the pretence that he was not Irish at all. The type is
+commonly Protestant; and sometimes seems to be almost anti-national in
+its acrid instinct for judging itself. Its nationalism only appears when
+it flings itself with even bitterer pleasure into judging the foreigner
+or the invader. The first and greatest of such figures was Swift.
+Thackeray simply denied that Swift was an Irishman, because he was not a
+stage Irishman. He was not (in the English novelist's opinion) winning
+and agreeable enough to be Irish. The truth is that Swift was much too
+harsh and disagreeable to be English. There is a great deal of Jonathan
+Swift in Bernard Shaw. Shaw is like Swift, for instance, in combining
+extravagant fancy with a curious sort of coldness. But he is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> most like
+Swift in that very quality which Thackeray said was impossible in an
+Irishman, benevolent bullying, a pity touched with contempt, and a habit
+of knocking men down for their own good. Characters in novels are often
+described as so amiable that they hate to be thanked. It is not an
+amiable quality, and it is an extremely rare one; but Swift possessed
+it. When Swift was buried the Dublin poor came in crowds and wept by the
+grave of the broadest and most free-handed of their benefactors. Swift
+deserved the public tribute; but he might have writhed and kicked in his
+grave at the thought of receiving it. There is in G. B. S. something of
+the same inhumane humanity. Irish history has offered a third instance
+of this particular type of educated and Protestant Irishman, sincere,
+unsympathetic, aggressive, alone. I mean Parnell; and with him also a
+bewildered England tried the desperate dodge of saying that he was not
+Irish at all. As if any thinkable sensible snobbish law-abiding
+Englishman would ever have defied all the drawing-rooms by disdaining
+the House of Commons! Despite the difference between taciturnity and a
+torrent of fluency there is much in common also be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>tween Shaw and
+Parnell; something in common even in the figures of the two men, in the
+bony bearded faces with their almost Satanic self-possession. It will
+not do to pretend that none of these three men belong to their own
+nation; but it is true that they belonged to one special, though
+recurring, type of that nation. And they all three have this peculiar
+mark, that while Nationalists in their various ways they all give to the
+more genial English one common impression; I mean the impression that
+they do not so much love Ireland as hate England.</p>
+
+<p>I will not dogmatise upon the difficult question as to whether there is
+any religious significance in the fact that these three rather ruthless
+Irishmen were Protestant Irishmen. I incline to think myself that the
+Catholic Church has added charity and gentleness to the virtues of a
+people which would otherwise have been too keen and contemptuous, too
+aristocratic. But however this may be, there can surely be no question
+that Bernard Shaw's Protestant education in a Catholic country has made
+a great deal of difference to his mind. It has affected it in two ways,
+the first negative and the second positive. It has affected him by
+cutting him off (as we have said) from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> fields and fountains of his
+real home and history; by making him an Orangeman. And it has affected
+him by the particular colour of the particular religion which he
+received; by making him a Puritan.</p>
+
+<p>In one of his numerous prefaces he says, "I have always been on the side
+of the Puritans in the matter of Art"; and a closer study will, I think,
+reveal that he is on the side of the Puritans in almost everything.
+Puritanism was not a mere code of cruel regulations, though some of its
+regulations were more cruel than any that have disgraced Europe. Nor was
+Puritanism a mere nightmare, an evil shadow of eastern gloom and
+fatalism, though this element did enter it, and was as it were the
+symptom and punishment of its essential error. Something much nobler
+(even if almost equally mistaken) was the original energy in the Puritan
+creed. And it must be defined with a little more delicacy if we are
+really to understand the attitude of G. B. S., who is the greatest of
+the modern Puritans and perhaps the last.</p>
+
+<p>I should roughly define the first spirit in Puritanism thus. It was a
+refusal to contemplate God or goodness with anything lighter or milder
+than the most fierce concentration<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> of the intellect. A Puritan meant
+originally a man whose mind had no holidays. To use his own favourite
+phrase, he would let no living thing come between him and his God; an
+attitude which involved eternal torture for him and a cruel contempt for
+all the living things. It was better to worship in a barn than in a
+cathedral for the specific and specified reason that the cathedral was
+beautiful. Physical beauty was a false and sensual symbol coming in
+between the intellect and the object of its intellectual worship. The
+human brain ought to be at every instant a consuming fire which burns
+through all conventional images until they were as transparent as glass.</p>
+
+<p>This is the essential Puritan idea, that God can only be praised by
+direct contemplation of Him. You must praise God only with your brain;
+it is wicked to praise Him with your passions or your physical habits or
+your gesture or instinct of beauty. Therefore it is wicked to worship by
+singing or dancing or drinking sacramental wines or building beautiful
+churches or saying prayers when you are half asleep. We must not worship
+by dancing, drinking, building or singing; we can only worship by
+thinking. Our heads can praise God, but never our hands and feet. That<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+is the true and original impulse of the Puritans. There is a great deal
+to be said for it, and a great deal was said for it in Great Britain
+steadily for two hundred years. It has gradually decayed in England and
+Scotland, not because of the advance of modern thought (which means
+nothing), but because of the slow revival of the medi&aelig;val energy and
+character in the two peoples. The English were always hearty and humane,
+and they have made up their minds to be hearty and humane in spite of
+the Puritans. The result is that Dickens and W. W. Jacobs have picked up
+the tradition of Chaucer and Robin Hood. The Scotch were always
+romantic, and they have made up their minds to be romantic in spite of
+the Puritans. The result is that Scott and Stevenson have picked up the
+tradition of Bruce, Blind Harry and the vagabond Scottish kings. England
+has become English again; Scotland has become Scottish again, in spite
+of the splendid incubus, the noble nightmare of Calvin. There is only
+one place in the British Islands where one may naturally expect to find
+still surviving in its fulness the fierce detachment of the true
+Puritan. That place is the Protestant part of Ireland. The Orange
+Calvinists can be disturbed by no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> national resurrection, for they have
+no nation. In them, if in any people, will be found the rectangular
+consistency of the Calvinist. The Irish Protestant rioters are at least
+immeasurably finer fellows than any of their brethren in England. They
+have the two enormous superiorities: first, that the Irish Protestant
+rioters really believe in Protestant theology; and second, that the
+Irish Protestant rioters do really riot. Among these people, if
+anywhere, should be found the cult of theological clarity combined with
+barbarous external simplicity. Among these people Bernard Shaw was born.</p>
+
+<p>There is at least one outstanding fact about the man we are studying;
+Bernard Shaw is never frivolous. He never gives his opinions a holiday;
+he is never irresponsible even for an instant. He has no nonsensical
+second self which he can get into as one gets into a dressing-gown; that
+ridiculous disguise which is yet more real than the real person. That
+collapse and humorous confession of futility was much of the force in
+Charles Lamb and in Stevenson. There is nothing of this in Shaw; his wit
+is never a weakness; therefore it is never a sense of humour. For wit is
+always connected with the idea that truth is close and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> clear. Humour,
+on the other hand, is always connected with the idea that truth is
+tricky and mystical and easily mistaken. What Charles Lamb said of the
+Scotchman is far truer of this type of Puritan Irishman; he does not see
+things suddenly in a new light; all his brilliancy is a blindingly rapid
+calculation and deduction. Bernard Shaw never said an indefensible
+thing; that is, he never said a thing that he was not prepared
+brilliantly to defend. He never breaks out into that cry beyond reason
+and conviction, that cry of Lamb when he cried, "We would indict our
+dreams!" or of Stevenson, "Shall we never shed blood?" In short he is
+not a humorist, but a great wit, almost as great as Voltaire. Humour 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 the
+consistency in things is a wit&mdash;and a Calvinist. The man who sees the
+inconsistency in things is a humorist&mdash;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 obstruc<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>tive 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 favourite author is
+Bunyan.</p>
+
+<p>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 always a Puritan
+prejudice. For Puritanism has not been able to sustain through three
+centuries that native ecstacy of the direct contemplation of truth;
+indeed it was the whole mistake of Puritanism to imagine for a moment
+that it could. One cannot be serious for three hundred years. In
+institutions built so as to endure for ages you must have relaxation,
+symbolic relativity and healthy routine. In eternal temples you must
+have frivolity. You must "be at ease in Zion" unless you are only paying
+it a flying visit.</p>
+
+<p>By the middle of the nineteenth century this old austerity and actuality
+in the Puritan vision had fallen away into two principal lower forms.
+The first is a sort of idealistic garrulity upon which Bernard Shaw has
+made fierce and on the whole fruitful war. Perpetual talk about
+righteousness and unselfish<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>ness, about things that should elevate and
+things which cannot but degrade, about social purity and true Christian
+manhood, all poured out with fatal fluency and with very little
+reference to the real facts of anybody's soul or salary&mdash;into this weak
+and lukewarm torrent has melted down much of that mountainous ice which
+sparkled in the seventeenth century, bleak indeed, but blazing. The
+hardest thing of the seventeenth century bids fair to be the softest
+thing of the twentieth.</p>
+
+<p>Of all this sentimental and deliquescent Puritanism Bernard Shaw has
+always been the antagonist; and the only respect in which it has soiled
+him was that he believed for only too long that such sloppy idealism was
+the whole idealism of Christendom and so used "idealist" itself as a
+term of reproach. But there were other and negative effects of
+Puritanism which he did not escape so completely. I cannot think that he
+has wholly escaped that element in Puritanism which may fairly bear the
+title of the taboo. For it is a singular fact that although extreme
+Protestantism is dying in elaborate and over-refined civilisation, yet
+it is the barbaric patches of it that live longest and die last. Of the
+creed of John Knox the modern Protestant has abandoned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> the civilised
+part and retained only the savage part. He has given up that great and
+systematic philosophy of Calvinism which had much in common with modern
+science and strongly resembles ordinary and recurrent determinism. But
+he has retained the accidental veto upon cards or comic plays, which
+Knox only valued as mere proof of his people's concentration on their
+theology. All the awful but sublime affirmations of Puritan theology are
+gone. Only savage negations remain; such as that by which in Scotland on
+every seventh day the creed of fear lays his finger on all hearts and
+makes an evil silence in the streets.</p>
+
+<p>By the middle of the nineteenth century when Shaw was born this dim and
+barbaric element in Puritanism, being all that remained of it, had added
+another taboo to its philosophy of taboos; there had grown up a mystical
+horror of those fermented drinks which are part of the food of civilised
+mankind. Doubtless many persons take an extreme line on this matter
+solely because of some calculation of social harm; many, but not all and
+not even most. Many people think that paper money is a mistake and does
+much harm. But they do not shudder or snigger when they see a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+cheque-book. They do not whisper with unsavoury slyness that such and
+such a man was "seen" going into a bank. I am quite convinced that the
+English aristocracy is the curse of England, but I have not noticed
+either in myself or others any disposition to ostracise a man simply for
+accepting a peerage, as the modern Puritans would certainly ostracise
+him (from any of their positions of trust) for accepting a drink. The
+sentiment is certainly very largely a mystical one, like the sentiment
+about the seventh day. Like the Sabbath, it is defended with
+sociological reasons; but those reasons can be simply and sharply
+tested. If a Puritan tells you that all humanity should rest once a
+week, you have only to propose that they should rest on Wednesday. And
+if a Puritan tells you that he does not object to beer but to the
+tragedies of excess in beer, simply propose to him that in prisons and
+workhouses (where the amount can be absolutely regulated) the inmates
+should have three glasses of beer a day. The Puritan cannot call that
+excess; but he will find something to call it. For it is not the excess
+he objects to, but the beer. It is a transcendental taboo, and it is one
+of the two or three positive and painful prejudices with which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> Bernard
+Shaw began. A similar severity of outlook ran through all his earlier
+attitude towards the drama; especially towards the lighter or looser
+drama. His Puritan teachers could not prevent him from taking up
+theatricals, but they made him take theatricals seriously. All his plays
+were indeed "plays for Puritans." All his criticisms quiver with a
+refined and almost tortured contempt for the indulgencies of ballet and
+burlesque, for the tights and the <i>double entente</i>. He can endure
+lawlessness but not levity. He is not repelled by the divorces and the
+adulteries as he is by the "splits." And he has always been foremost
+among the fierce modern critics who ask indignantly, "Why do you object
+to a thing full of sincere philosophy like <i>The Wild Duck</i> while you
+tolerate a mere dirty joke like <i>The Spring Chicken</i>?" I do not think he
+has ever understood what seems to me the very sensible answer of the man
+in the street, "I laugh at the dirty joke of <i>The Spring Chicken</i>
+because it is a joke. I criticise the philosophy of <i>The Wild Duck</i>
+because it is a philosophy."</p>
+
+<p>Shaw does not do justice to the democratic ease and sanity on this
+subject; but indeed, whatever else he is, he is not democratic. As an
+Irishman he is an aristocrat, as a Calvinist<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> he is a soul apart; he
+drew the breath of his nostrils from a land of fallen principalities and
+proud gentility, and the breath of his spirit from a creed which made a
+wall of crystal around the elect. The two forces between them produced
+this potent and slender figure, swift, scornful, dainty and full of dry
+magnanimity; and it only needed the last touch of oligarchic mastery to
+be given by the overwhelming oligarchic atmosphere of our present age.
+Such was the Puritan Irishman who stepped out into the world. Into what
+kind of world did he step?</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="The_Progressive" id="The_Progressive"></a><i>The Progressive</i></h2>
+
+<p>It is now partly possible to justify the Shavian method of putting the
+explanations before the events. I can now give a fact or two with a
+partial certainty at least that the reader will give to the affairs of
+Bernard Shaw something of the same kind of significance which they have
+for Bernard Shaw himself. Thus, if I had simply said that Shaw was born
+in Dublin the average reader might exclaim, "Ah yes&mdash;a wild Irishman,
+gay, emotional and untrustworthy." The wrong note would be struck at the
+start. I have attempted to give some idea of what being born in Ireland
+meant to the man who was really born there. Now therefore for the first
+time I may be permitted to confess that Bernard Shaw was, like other
+men, born. He was born in Dublin on the 26th of July, 1856.</p>
+
+<p>Just as his birth can only be appreciated through some vision of
+Ireland, so his family can only be appreciated by some realisation of
+the Puritan. He was the youngest son of one George Carr Shaw, who had
+been a civil servant and was afterwards a somewhat unsuccessful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+business man. If I had merely said that his family was Protestant (which
+in Ireland means Puritan) it might have been passed over as a quite
+colourless detail. But if the reader will keep in mind what has been
+said about the degeneration of Calvinism into a few clumsy vetoes, he
+will see in its full and frightful significance such a sentence as this
+which comes from Shaw himself: "My father was in theory a vehement
+teetotaler, but in practice often a furtive drinker." The two things of
+course rest upon exactly the same philosophy; the philosophy of the
+taboo. There is a mystical substance, and it can give monstrous
+pleasures or call down monstrous punishments. The dipsomaniac and the
+abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same
+mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink. But if I
+had mentioned that fragment of family information without any ethical
+preface, people would have begun at once to talk nonsense about artistic
+heredity and Celtic weakness, and would have gained the general
+impression that Bernard Shaw was an Irish wastrel and the child of Irish
+wastrels. Whereas it is the whole point of the matter that Bernard Shaw
+comes of a Puritan middle-class family of the most solid
+respectability;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> and the only admission of error arises from the fact
+that one member of that Puritan family took a particularly Puritan view
+of strong drink. That is, he regarded it generally as a poison and
+sometimes as a medicine, if only a mental medicine. But a poison and a
+medicine are very closely akin, as the nearest chemist knows; and they
+are chiefly akin in this; that no one will drink either of them for fun.
+Moreover, medicine and a poison are also alike in this; that no one will
+by preference drink either of them in public. And this medical or
+poisonous view of alcohol is not confined to the one Puritan to whose
+failure I have referred, it is spread all over the whole of our dying
+Puritan civilisation. For instance, social reformers have fired a
+hundred shots against the public-house; but never one against its really
+shameful feature. The sign of decay is not in the public-house, but in
+the private bar; or rather the row of five or six private bars, into
+each of which a respectable dipsomaniac can go in solitude, and by
+indulging his own half-witted sin violate his own half-witted morality.
+Nearly all these places are equipped with an atrocious apparatus of
+ground-glass windows which can be so closed that they practically
+conceal the face of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> buyer from the seller. Words cannot express the
+abysses of human infamy and hateful shame expressed by that elaborate
+piece of furniture. Whenever I go into a public-house, which happens
+fairly often, I always carefully open all these apertures and then leave
+the place, in every way refreshed.</p>
+
+<p>In other ways also it is necessary to insist not only on the fact of an
+extreme Protestantism, but on that of the Protestantism of a garrison; a
+world where that religious force both grew and festered all the more for
+being at once isolated and protected. All the influences surrounding
+Bernard Shaw in boyhood were not only Puritan, but such that no
+non-Puritan force could possibly pierce or counteract. He belonged to
+that Irish group which, according to Catholicism, has hardened its
+heart, which, according to Protestantism has hardened its head, but
+which, as I fancy, has chiefly hardened its hide, lost its sensibility
+to the contact of the things around it. In reading about his youth, one
+forgets that it was passed in the island which is still one flame before
+the altar of St. Peter and St. Patrick. The whole thing might be
+happening in Wimbledon. He went to the Wesleyan Connexional School. He
+went to hear Moody<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> and Sankey. "I was," he writes, "wholly unmoved by
+their eloquence; and felt bound to inform the public that I was, on the
+whole, an atheist. My letter was solemnly printed in <i>Public Opinion</i>,
+to the extreme horror of my numerous aunts and uncles." That is the
+philosophical atmosphere; those are the religious postulates. It could
+never cross the mind of a man of the Garrison that before becoming an
+atheist he might stroll into one of the churches of his own country, and
+learn something of the philosophy that had satisfied Dante and Bossuet,
+Pascal and Descartes.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way I have to appeal to my theoretic preface at this third
+point of the drama of Shaw's career. On leaving school he stepped into a
+secure business position which he held steadily for four years and which
+he flung away almost in one day. He rushed even recklessly to London;
+where he was quite unsuccessful and practically starved for six years.
+If I had mentioned this act on the first page of this book it would have
+seemed to have either the simplicity of a mere fanatic or else to cover
+some ugly escapade of youth or some quite criminal looseness of
+temperament. But Bernard Shaw did not act thus because he was careless,
+but because he was ferociously<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> careful, careful especially of the one
+thing needful. What was he thinking about when he threw away his last
+halfpence and went to a strange place; what was he thinking about when
+he endured hunger and small-pox in London almost without hope? He was
+thinking of what he has ever since thought of, the slow but sure surge
+of the social revolution; you must read into all those bald sentences
+and empty years what I shall attempt to sketch in the third section. You
+must read the revolutionary movement of the later nineteenth century,
+darkened indeed by materialism and made mutable by fear and free
+thought, but full of awful vistas of an escape from the curse of Adam.</p>
+
+<p>Bernard Shaw happened to be born in an epoch, or rather at the end of an
+epoch, which was in its way unique in the ages of history. The
+nineteenth century was not unique in the success or rapidity of its
+reforms or in their ultimate cessation; but it was unique in the
+peculiar character of the failure which followed the success. The French
+Revolution was an enormous act of human realisation; it has altered the
+terms of every law and the shape of every town in Europe; but it was by
+no means the only example of a strong and swift<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> period of reform. What
+was really peculiar about the Republican energy was this, that it left
+behind it, not an ordinary reaction but a kind of dreary, drawn out and
+utterly unmeaning hope. The strong and evident idea of reform sank lower
+and lower until it became the timid and feeble idea of progress. Towards
+the end of the nineteenth century there appeared its two incredible
+figures; they were the pure Conservative and the pure Progressive; two
+figures which would have been overwhelmed with laughter by any other
+intellectual commonwealth of history. There was hardly a human
+generation which could not have seen the folly of merely going forward
+or merely standing still; of mere progressing or mere conserving. In the
+coarsest Greek Comedy we might have a joke about a man who wanted to
+keep what he had, whether it was yellow gold or yellow fever. In the
+dullest medi&aelig;val morality we might have a joke about a progressive
+gentleman who, having passed heaven and come to purgatory, decided to go
+further and fare worse. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were an age
+of quite impetuous progress; men made in one rush, roads, trades,
+synthetic philosophies, parliaments, university settlements, a law that
+could cover the world and such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> spires as had never struck the sky. But
+they would not have said that they wanted progress, but that they wanted
+the road, the parliaments, and the spires. In the same way the time from
+Richelieu to the Revolution was upon the whole a time of conservation,
+often of harsh and hideous conservation; it preserved tortures, legal
+quibbles, and despotism. But if you had asked the rulers they would not
+have said that they wanted conservation; but that they wanted the
+torture and the despotism. The old reformers and the old despots alike
+desired definite <i>things</i>, powers, licenses, payments, vetoes, and
+permissions. Only the modern progressive and the modern conservative
+have been content with two words.</p>
+
+<p>Other periods of active improvement have died by stiffening at last into
+some routine. Thus the Gothic gaiety of the thirteenth century
+stiffening into the mere Gothic ugliness of the fifteenth. Thus the
+mighty wave of the Renaissance, whose crest was lifted to heaven, was
+touched by a wintry witchery of classicism and frozen for ever before it
+fell. Alone of all such movements the democratic movement of the last
+two centuries has not frozen, but loosened and liquefied. Instead of
+becoming more pedantic in its old age, it has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> grown more bewildered. By
+the analogy of healthy history we ought to have gone on worshipping the
+republic and calling each other citizen with increasing seriousness
+until some other part of the truth broke into our republican temple. But
+in fact we have turned the freedom of democracy into a mere scepticism,
+destructive of everything, including democracy itself. It is none the
+less destructive because it is, so to speak, an optimistic
+scepticism&mdash;or, as I have said, a dreary hope. It was none the better
+because the destroyers were always talking about the new vistas and
+enlightenments which their new negations opened to us. The republican
+temple, like any other strong building, rested on certain definite
+limits and supports. But the modern man inside it went on indefinitely
+knocking holes in his own house and saying that they were windows. The
+result is not hard to calculate: the moral world was pretty well all
+windows and no house by the time that Bernard Shaw arrived on the scene.</p>
+
+<p>Then there entered into full swing that great game of which he soon
+became the greatest master. A progressive or advanced person was now to
+mean not a man who wanted democracy, but a man who wanted something<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+newer than democracy. A reformer was to be, not a man who wanted a
+parliament or a republic, but a man who wanted anything that he hadn't
+got. The emancipated man must cast a weird and suspicious eye round him
+at all the institutions of the world, wondering which of them was
+destined to die in the next few centuries. Each one of them was
+whispering to himself, "What can I alter?"</p>
+
+<p>This quite vague and varied discontent probably did lead to the
+revelation of many incidental wrongs and to much humane hard work in
+certain holes and corners. It also gave birth to a great deal of quite
+futile and frantic speculation, which seemed destined to take away
+babies from women, or to give votes to tom-cats. But it had an evil in
+it much deeper and more psychologically poisonous than any superficial
+absurdities. There was in this thirst to be "progressive" a subtle sort
+of double-mindedness and falsity. A man was so eager to be in advance of
+his age that he pretended to be in advance of himself. Institutions that
+his wholesome nature and habit fully accepted he had to sneer at as
+old-fashioned, out of a servile and snobbish fear of the future. Out of
+the primal forests, through all the real progress of history, man had
+picked his way<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> obeying his human instinct, or (in the excellent phrase)
+following his nose. But now he was trying, by violent athletic
+exertions, to get in front of his nose.</p>
+
+<p>Into this riot of all imaginary innovations Shaw brought the sharp edge
+of the Irishman and the concentration of the Puritan, and thoroughly
+thrashed all competitors in the difficult art of being at once modern
+and intelligent. In twenty twopenny controversies he took the
+revolutionary side, I fear in most cases because it was called
+revolutionary. But the other revolutionists were abruptly startled by
+the presentation of quite rational and ingenious arguments on their own
+side. The dreary thing about most new causes is that they are praised in
+such very old terms. Every new religion bores us with the same stale
+rhetoric about closer fellowship and the higher life. No one ever
+approximately equalled Bernard Shaw in the power of finding really fresh
+and personal arguments for these recent schemes and creeds. No one ever
+came within a mile of him in the knack of actually producing a new
+argument for a new philosophy. I give two instances to cover the kind of
+thing I mean. Bernard Shaw (being honestly eager to put himself on the
+modern side in every<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>thing) put himself on the side of what is called
+the feminist movement; the proposal to give the two sexes not merely
+equal social privileges, but identical. To this it is often answered
+that women cannot be soldiers; and to this again the sensible feminists
+answer that women run their own kind of physical risk, while the silly
+feminists answer that war is an outworn barbaric thing which women would
+abolish. But Bernard Shaw took the line of saying that women had been
+soldiers, in all occasions of natural and unofficial war, as in the
+French Revolution. That has the great fighting value of being an
+unexpected argument; it takes the other pugilist's breath away for one
+important instant. To take the other case, Mr. Shaw has found himself,
+led by the same mad imp of modernity, on the side of the people who want
+to have phonetic spelling. The people who want phonetic spelling
+generally depress the world with tireless and tasteless explanations of
+how much easier it would be for children or foreign bagmen if "height"
+were spelt "hite." Now children would curse spelling whatever it was,
+and we are not going to permit foreign bagmen to improve Shakespeare.
+Bernard Shaw charged along quite a different line; he urged that
+Shake<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>speare himself believed in phonetic spelling, since he spelt his
+own name in six different ways. According to Shaw, phonetic spelling is
+merely a return to the freedom and flexibility of Elizabethan
+literature. That, again, is exactly the kind of blow the old speller
+does not expect. As a matter of fact there is an answer to both the
+ingenuities I have quoted. When women have fought in revolutions they
+have generally shown that it was not natural to them, by their
+hysterical cruelty and insolence; it was the men who fought in the
+Revolution; it was the women who tortured the prisoners and mutilated
+the dead. And because Shakespeare could sing better than he could spell,
+it does not follow that his spelling and ours ought to be abruptly
+altered by a race that has lost all instinct for singing. But I do not
+wish to discuss these points; I only quote them as examples of the
+startling ability which really brought Shaw to the front; the ability to
+brighten even our modern movements with original and suggestive
+thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>But while Bernard Shaw pleasantly surprised innumerable cranks and
+revolutionists by finding quite rational arguments for them, he
+surprised them unpleasantly also by discovering something else. He
+discovered a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> turn of argument or trick of thought which has ever since
+been the plague of their lives, and given him in all assemblies of their
+kind, in the Fabian Society or in the whole Socialist movement, a
+fantastic but most formidable domination. This method may be
+approximately defined as that of revolutionising the revolutionists by
+turning their rationalism against their remaining sentimentalism. But
+definition leaves the matter dark unless we give one or two examples.
+Thus Bernard Shaw threw himself as thoroughly as any New Woman into the
+cause of the emancipation of women. But while the New Woman praised
+woman as a prophetess, the new man took the opportunity to curse her and
+kick her as a comrade. For the others sex equality meant the
+emancipation of women, which allowed them to be equal to men. For Shaw
+it mainly meant the emancipation of men, which allowed them to be rude
+to women. Indeed, almost every one of Bernard Shaw's earlier plays might
+be called an argument between a man and a woman, in which the woman is
+thumped and thrashed and outwitted until she admits that she is the
+equal of her conqueror. This is the first case of the Shavian trick of
+turning<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> on the romantic rationalists with their own rationalism. He
+said in substance, "If we are democrats, let us have votes for women;
+but if we are democrats, why on earth should we have respect for women?"
+I take one other example out of many. Bernard Shaw was thrown early into
+what may be called the cosmopolitan club of revolution. The Socialists
+of the S.D.F. call it "L'Internationale," but the club covers more than
+Socialists. It covers many who consider themselves the champions of
+oppressed nationalities&mdash;Poland, Finland, and even Ireland; and thus a
+strong nationalist tendency exists in the revolutionary movement.
+Against this nationalist tendency Shaw set himself with sudden violence.
+If the flag of England was a piece of piratical humbug, was not the flag
+of Poland a piece of piratical humbug too? If we hated the jingoism of
+the existing armies and frontiers, why should we bring into existence
+new jingo armies and new jingo frontiers? All the other revolutionists
+fell in instinctively with Home Rule for Ireland. Shaw urged, in effect,
+that Home Rule was as bad as Home Influences and Home Cooking, and all
+the other degrading domesticities that began with the word "Home." His
+ultimate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> support of the South African war was largely created by his
+irritation against the other revolutionists for favouring a nationalist
+resistance. The ordinary Imperialists objected to Pro-Boers because they
+were anti-patriots. Bernard Shaw objected to Pro-Boers because they were
+pro-patriots.</p>
+
+<p>But among these surprise attacks of G. B. S., these turnings of
+scepticism against the sceptics, there was one which has figured largely
+in his life; the most amusing and perhaps the most salutary of all these
+reactions. The "progressive" world being in revolt against religion had
+naturally felt itself allied to science; and against the authority of
+priests it would perpetually hurl the authority of scientific men. Shaw
+gazed for a few moments at this new authority, the veiled god of Huxley
+and Tyndall, and then with the greatest placidity and precision kicked
+it in the stomach. He declared to the astounded progressives around him
+that physical science was a mystical fake like sacerdotalism; that
+scientists, like priests, spoke with authority because they could not
+speak with proof or reason; that the very wonders of science were mostly
+lies, like the wonders of religion. "When astronomers tell me," he says
+somewhere, "that a star is so far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> off that its light takes a thousand
+years to reach us, the magnitude of the lie seems to me inartistic." The
+paralysing impudence of such remarks left everyone quite breathless; and
+even to this day this particular part of Shaw's satiric war has been far
+less followed up than it deserves. For there was present in it an
+element very marked in Shaw's controversies; I mean that his apparent
+exaggerations are generally much better backed up by knowledge than
+would appear from their nature. He can lure his enemy on with fantasies
+and then overwhelm him with facts. Thus the man of science, when he read
+some wild passage in which Shaw compared Huxley to a tribal soothsayer
+grubbing in the entrails of animals, supposed the writer to be a mere
+fantastic whom science could crush with one finger. He would therefore
+engage in a controversy with Shaw about (let us say) vivisection, and
+discover to his horror that Shaw really knew a great deal about the
+subject, and could pelt him with expert witnesses and hospital reports.
+Among the many singular contradictions in a singular character, there is
+none more interesting than this combination of exactitude and industry
+in the detail of opinions with audacity and a certain wildness in their outline.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>This great game of catching revolutionists napping, of catching the
+unconventional people in conventional poses, of outmarching and
+outman&oelig;uvring progressives till they felt like conservatives, of
+undermining the mines of Nihilists till they felt like the House of
+Lords, this great game of dishing the anarchists continued for some time
+to be his most effective business. It would be untrue to say that he was
+a cynic; he was never a cynic, for that implies a certain corrupt
+fatigue about human affairs, whereas he was vibrating with virtue and
+energy. Nor would it be fair to call him even a sceptic, for that
+implies a dogma of hopelessness and definite belief in unbelief. But it
+would be strictly just to describe him at this time, at any rate, as a
+merely destructive person. He was one whose main business was, in his
+own view, the pricking of illusions, the stripping away of disguises,
+and even the destruction of ideals. He was a sort of anti-confectioner
+whose whole business it was to take the gilt off the gingerbread.</p>
+
+<p>Now I have no particular objection to people who take the gilt off the
+gingerbread; if only for this excellent reason, that I am much fonder of
+gingerbread than I am<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> of gilt. But there are some objections to this
+task when it becomes a crusade or an obsession. One of them is this:
+that people who have really scraped the gilt off gingerbread generally
+waste the rest of their lives in attempting to scrape the gilt off
+gigantic lumps of gold. Such has too often been the case of Shaw. He
+can, if he likes, scrape the romance off the armaments of Europe or the
+party system of Great Britain. But he cannot scrape the romance off love
+or military valour, because it is all romance, and three thousand miles
+thick. It cannot, I think, be denied that much of Bernard Shaw's
+splendid mental energy has been wasted in this weary business of gnawing
+at the necessary pillars of all possible society. But it would be
+grossly unfair to indicate that even in his first and most destructive
+stage he uttered nothing except these accidental, if arresting,
+negations. He threw his whole genius heavily into the scale in favour of
+two positive projects or causes of the period. When we have stated these
+we have really stated the full intellectual equipment with which he
+started his literary life.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that Shaw was on the insurgent side in everything; but in
+the case of these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> two important convictions he exercised a solid power
+of choice. When he first went to London he mixed with every kind of
+revolutionary society, and met every kind of person except the ordinary
+person. He knew everybody, so to speak, except everybody. He was more
+than once a momentary apparition among the respectable atheists. He knew
+Bradlaugh and spoke on the platforms of that Hall of Science in which
+very simple and sincere masses of men used to hail with shouts of joy
+the assurance that they were not immortal. He retains to this day
+something of the noise and narrowness of that room; as, for instance,
+when he says that it is contemptible to have a craving for eternal life.
+This prejudice remains in direct opposition to all his present opinions,
+which are all to the effect that it is glorious to desire power,
+consciousness, and vitality even for one's self. But this old secularist
+tag, that it is selfish to save one's soul, remains with him long after
+he has practically glorified selfishness. It is a relic of those chaotic
+early days. And just as he mingled with the atheists he mingled with the
+anarchists, who were in the eighties a much more formidable body than
+now, disputing with the Socialists on almost equal terms the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> claim to
+be the true heirs of the Revolution. Shaw still talks entertainingly
+about this group. As far as I can make out, it was almost entirely
+female. When a book came out called <i>A Girl among the Anarchists</i>,
+G. B. S. was provoked to a sort of explosive reminiscence. "A girl among
+the anarchists!" he exclaimed to his present biographer; "if they had
+said 'A man among the anarchists' it would have been more of an
+adventure." He is ready to tell other tales of this eccentric
+environment, most of which does not convey an impression of a very
+bracing atmosphere. That revolutionary society must have contained many
+high public ideals, but also a fair number of low private desires. And
+when people blame Bernard Shaw for his pitiless and prosaic coldness,
+his cutting refusal to reverence or admire, I think they should remember
+this riff-raff of lawless sentimentalism against which his commonsense
+had to strive, all the grandiloquent "comrades" and all the gushing
+"affinities," all the sweetstuff sensuality and senseless sulking
+against law. If Bernard Shaw became a little too fond of throwing cold
+water upon prophecies or ideals, remember that he must have passed much
+of his youth among cosmopolitan idealists who wanted a little cold water
+in every sense of the word.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>Upon two of these modern crusades he concentrated, and, as I have said,
+he chose them well. The first was broadly what was called the
+Humanitarian cause. It did not mean the cause of humanity, but rather,
+if anything, the cause of everything else. At its noblest it meant a
+sort of mystical identification of our life with the whole life of
+nature. So a man might wince when a snail was crushed as if his toe were
+trodden on; so a man might shrink when a moth shrivelled as if his own
+hair had caught fire. Man might be a network of exquisite nerves running
+over the whole universe, a subtle spider's web of pity. This was a fine
+conception; though perhaps a somewhat severe enforcement of the
+theological conception of the special divinity of man. For the
+humanitarians certainly asked of humanity what can be asked of no other
+creature; no man ever required a dog to understand a cat or expected the
+cow to cry for the sorrows of the nightingale.</p>
+
+<p>Hence this sense has been strongest in saints of a very mystical sort;
+such as St. Francis who spoke of Sister Sparrow and Brother Wolf. Shaw
+adopted this crusade of cosmic pity but adopted it very much in his own
+style, severe, explanatory, and even un<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>sympathetic. He had no
+affectionate impulse to say "Brother Wolf"; at the best he would have
+said "Citizen Wolf," like a sound republican. In fact, he was full of
+healthy human compassion for the sufferings of animals; but in
+phraseology he loved to put the matter unemotionally and even harshly. I
+was once at a debating club at which Bernard Shaw said that he was not a
+humanitarian at all, but only an economist, that he merely hated to see
+life wasted by carelessness or cruelty. I felt inclined to get up and
+address to him the following lucid question: "If when you spare a
+herring you are only being oikonomikal, for what oikos are you being
+nomikal?" But in an average debating club I thought this question might
+not be quite clear; so I abandoned the idea. But certainly it is not
+plain for whom Bernard Shaw is economising if he rescues a rhinoceros
+from an early grave. But the truth is that Shaw only took this economic
+pose from his hatred of appearing sentimental. If Bernard Shaw killed a
+dragon and rescued a princess of romance, he would try to say "I have
+saved a princess" with exactly the same intonation as "I have saved a
+shilling." He tries to turn his own heroism into a sort of superhuman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+thrift. He would thoroughly sympathise with that passage in his
+favourite dramatic author in which the Button Moulder tells Peer Gynt
+that there is a sort of cosmic housekeeping; that God Himself is very
+economical, "and that is why He is so well to do."</p>
+
+<p>This combination of the widest kindness and consideration with a
+consistent ungraciousness of tone runs through all Shaw's ethical
+utterance, and is nowhere more evident than in his attitude towards
+animals. He would waste himself to a white-haired shadow to save a shark
+in an aquarium from inconvenience or to add any little comforts to the
+life of a carrion-crow. He would defy any laws or lose any friends to
+show mercy to the humblest beast or the most hidden bird. Yet I cannot
+recall in the whole of his works or in the whole of his conversation a
+single word of any tenderness or intimacy with any bird or beast. It was
+under the influence of this high and almost superhuman sense of duty
+that he became a vegetarian; and I seem to remember that when he was
+lying sick and near to death at the end of his <i>Saturday Review</i> career
+he wrote a fine fantastic article, declaring that his hearse ought to be
+drawn by all the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> animals that he had not eaten. Whenever that evil day
+comes there will be no need to fall back on the ranks of the brute
+creation; there will be no lack of men and women who owe him so much as
+to be glad to take the place of the animals; and the present writer for
+one will be glad to express his gratitude as an elephant. There is no
+doubt about the essential manhood and decency of Bernard Shaw's
+instincts in such matters. And quite apart from the vegetarian
+controversy, I do not doubt that the beasts also owe him much. But when
+we come to positive things (and passions are the only truly positive
+things) that obstinate doubt remains which remains after all eulogies of
+Shaw. That fixed fancy sticks to the mind; that Bernard Shaw is a
+vegetarian more because he dislikes dead beasts than because he likes
+live ones.</p>
+
+<p>It was the same with the other great cause to which Shaw more
+politically though not more publicly committed himself. The actual
+English people, without representation in Press or Parliament, but
+faintly expressed in public-houses and music-halls, would connect Shaw
+(so far as they have heard of him) with two ideas; they would say first
+that he was a vegetarian, and second that he was a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> Socialist. Like most
+of the impressions of the ignorant, these impressions would be on the
+whole very just. My only purpose here is to urge that Shaw's Socialism
+exemplifies the same trait of temperament as his vegetarianism. This
+book is not concerned with Bernard Shaw as a politician or a
+sociologist, but as a critic and creator of drama. I will therefore end
+in this chapter all that I have to say about Bernard Shaw as a
+politician or a political philosopher. I propose here to dismiss this
+aspect of Shaw: only let it be remembered, once and for all, that I am
+here dismissing the most important aspect of Shaw. It is as if one
+dismissed the sculpture of Michael Angelo and went on to his sonnets.
+Perhaps the highest and purest thing in him is simply that he cares more
+for politics than for anything else; more than for art or for
+philosophy. Socialism is the noblest thing for Bernard Shaw; and it is
+the noblest thing in him. He really desires less to win fame than to
+bear fruit. He is an absolute follower of that early sage who wished
+only to make two blades of grass grow instead of one. He is a loyal
+subject of Henri Quatre, who said that he only wanted every Frenchman to
+have a chicken in his pot on Sunday; except, of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> course, that he would
+call the repast cannibalism. But <i>c&aelig;teris paribus</i> he thinks more of
+that chicken than of the eagle of the universal empire; and he is always
+ready to support the grass against the laurel.</p>
+
+<p>Yet by the nature of this book the account of the most important Shaw,
+who is the Socialist, must be also the most brief. Socialism (which I am
+not here concerned either to attack or defend) is, as everyone knows,
+the proposal that all property should be nationally owned that it may be
+more decently distributed. It is a proposal resting upon two principles,
+unimpeachable as far as they go: first, that frightful human calamities
+call for immediate human aid; second, that such aid must almost always
+be collectively organised. If a ship is being wrecked, we organise a
+lifeboat; if a house is on fire, we organise a blanket; if half a nation
+is starving, we must organise work and food. That is the primary and
+powerful argument of the Socialist, and everything that he adds to it
+weakens it. The only possible line of protest is to suggest that it is
+rather shocking that we have to treat a normal nation as something
+exceptional, like a house on fire or a shipwreck. But of such things it
+may be necessary to speak later. The point<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> here is that Shaw behaved
+towards Socialism just as he behaved towards vegetarianism; he offered
+every reason except the emotional reason, which was the real one. When
+taxed in a <i>Daily News</i> discussion with being a Socialist for the
+obvious reason that poverty was cruel, he said this was quite wrong; it
+was only because poverty was wasteful. He practically professed that
+modern society annoyed him, not so much like an unrighteous kingdom, but
+rather like an untidy room. Everyone who knew him knew, of course, that
+he was full of a proper brotherly bitterness about the oppression of the
+poor. But here again he would not admit that he was anything but an
+Economist.</p>
+
+<p>In thus setting his face like flint against sentimental methods of
+argument he undoubtedly did one great service to the causes for which he
+stood. Every vulgar anti-humanitarian, every snob who wants monkeys
+vivisected or beggars flogged has always fallen back upon stereotyped
+phrases like "maudlin" and "sentimental," which indicated the
+humanitarian as a man in a weak condition of tears. The mere personality
+of Shaw has shattered those foolish phrases for ever. Shaw the
+humanitarian was like Voltaire the humanitarian, a man whose satire was
+like steel, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> hardest and coolest of fighters, upon whose piercing
+point the wretched defenders of a masculine brutality wriggled like
+worms.</p>
+
+<p>In this quarrel one cannot wish Shaw even an inch less contemptuous, for
+the people who call compassion "sentimentalism" deserve nothing but
+contempt. In this one does not even regret his coldness; it is an
+honourable contrast to the blundering emotionalism of the jingoes and
+flagellomaniacs. The truth is that the ordinary anti-humanitarian only
+manages to harden his heart by having already softened his head. It is
+the reverse of sentimental to insist that a nigger is being burned
+alive; for sentimentalism must be the clinging to pleasant thoughts. And
+no one, not even a Higher Evolutionist, can think a nigger burned alive
+a pleasant thought. The sentimental thing is to warm your hands at the
+fire while denying the existence of the nigger, and that is the ruling
+habit in England, as it has been the chief business of Bernard Shaw to
+show. And in this the brutalitarians hate him not because he is soft,
+but because he is hard, because he is not to be softened by conventional
+excuses; because he looks hard at a thing&mdash;and hits harder. Some foolish
+fellow of the Henley-Whibley reaction wrote that if we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> were to be
+conquerors we must be less tender and more ruthless. Shaw answered with
+really avenging irony, "What a light this principle throws on the defeat
+of the tender Dervish, the compassionate Zulu, and the morbidly humane
+Boxer at the hands of the hardy savages of England, France, and
+Germany." In that sentence an idiot is obliterated and the whole story
+of Europe told; but it is immensely stiffened by its ironic form. In the
+same way Shaw washed away for ever the idea that Socialists were weak
+dreamers, who said that things might be only because they wished them to
+be. G. B. S. in argument with an individualist showed himself, as a
+rule, much the better economist and much the worse rhetorician. In this
+atmosphere arose a celebrated Fabian Society, of which he is still the
+leading spirit&mdash;a society which answered all charges of impracticable
+idealism by pushing both its theoretic statements and its practical
+negotiations to the verge of cynicism. Bernard Shaw was the literary
+expert who wrote most of its pamphlets. In one of them, among such
+sections as <i>Fabian Temperance Reform</i>, <i>Fabian Education</i> and so on,
+there was an entry gravely headed "Fabian Natural Science," which stated
+that in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> Socialist cause light was needed more than heat.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the Irish detachment and the Puritan austerity did much good to the
+country and to the causes for which they were embattled. But there was
+one thing they did not do; they did nothing for Shaw himself in the
+matter of his primary mistakes and his real limitation. His great defect
+was and is the lack of democratic sentiment. And there was nothing
+democratic either in his humanitarianism or his Socialism. These new and
+refined faiths tended rather to make the Irishman yet more aristocratic,
+the Puritan yet more exclusive. To be a Socialist was to look down on
+all the peasant owners of the earth, especially on the peasant owners of
+his own island. To be a Vegetarian was to be a man with a strange and
+mysterious morality, a man who thought the good lord who roasted oxen
+for his vassals only less bad than the bad lord who roasted the vassals.
+None of these advanced views could the common people hear gladly; nor
+indeed was Shaw specially anxious to please the common people. It was
+his glory that he pitied animals like men; it was his defect that he
+pitied men only too much like animals. Foulon said of the democracy,
+"Let them eat grass." Shaw said, "Let them eat greens." He had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> more
+benevolence, but almost as much disdain. "I have never had any feelings
+about the English working classes," he said elsewhere, "except a desire
+to abolish them and replace them by sensible people." This is the
+unsympathetic side of the thing; but it had another and much nobler
+side, which must at least be seriously recognised before we pass on to
+much lighter things.</p>
+
+<p>Bernard Shaw is not a democrat; but he is a splendid republican. The
+nuance of difference between those terms precisely depicts him. And
+there is after all a good deal of dim democracy in England, in the sense
+that there is much of a blind sense of brotherhood, and nowhere more
+than among old-fashioned and even reactionary people. But a republican
+is a rare bird, and a noble one. Shaw is a republican in the literal and
+Latin sense; he cares more for the Public Thing than for any private
+thing. The interest of the State is with him a sincere thirst of the
+soul, as it was in the little pagan cities. Now this public passion,
+this clean appetite for order and equity, had fallen to a lower ebb, had
+more nearly disappeared altogether, during Shaw's earlier epoch than at
+any other time. Individualism of the worst type was on the top<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> of the
+wave; I mean artistic individualism, which is so much crueller, so much
+blinder and so much more irrational even than commercial individualism.
+The decay of society was praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is
+praised by worms. The &aelig;sthete was all receptiveness, like the flea. His
+only affair in this world was to feed on its facts and colours, like a
+parasite upon blood. The ego was the all; and the praise of it was
+enunciated in madder and madder rhythms by poets whose Helicon was
+absinthe and whose Pegasus was the nightmare. This diseased pride was
+not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all
+political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a
+question of one man one vote, but of one man one universe.</p>
+
+<p>I have in my time had my fling at the Fabian Society, at the pedantry of
+schemes, the arrogance of experts; nor do I regret it now. But when I
+remember that other world against which it reared its bourgeois banner
+of cleanliness and common sense, I will not end this chapter without
+doing it decent honour. Give me the drain pipes of the Fabians rather
+than the panpipes of the later poets; the drain pipes have a nicer
+smell. Give me even that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> business-like benevolence that herded men like
+beasts rather than that exquisite art which isolated them like devils;
+give me even the suppression of "Z&aelig;o" rather than the triumph of
+"Salome." And if I feel such a confession to be due to those Fabians who
+could hardly have been anything but experts in any society, such as Mr.
+Sidney Webb or Mr. Edward Pease, it is due yet more strongly to the
+greatest of the Fabians. Here was a man who could have enjoyed art among
+the artists, who could have been the wittiest of all the <i>fl&acirc;neurs</i>; who
+could have made epigrams like diamonds and drunk music like wine. He has
+instead laboured in a mill of statistics and crammed his mind with all
+the most dreary and the most filthy details, so that he can argue on the
+spur of the moment about sewing-machines or sewage, about typhus fever
+or twopenny tubes. The usual mean theory of motives will not cover the
+case; it is not ambition, for he could have been twenty times more
+prominent as a plausible and popular humorist. It is the real and
+ancient emotion of the <i>salus populi</i>, almost extinct in our
+oligarchical chaos; nor will I for one, as I pass on to many matters of
+argument or quarrel, neglect to salute a passion so implacable and so pure.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="The_Critic" id="The_Critic"></a><i>The Critic</i></h2>
+
+<p>It appears a point of some mystery to the present writer that Bernard
+Shaw should have been so long unrecognised and almost in beggary. I
+should have thought his talent was of the ringing and arresting sort;
+such as even editors and publishers would have sense enough to seize.
+Yet it is quite certain that he almost starved in London for many years,
+writing occasional columns for an advertisement or words for a picture.
+And it is equally certain (it is proved by twenty anecdotes, but no one
+who knows Shaw needs any anecdotes to prove it) that in those days of
+desperation he again and again threw up chances and flung back good
+bargains which did not suit his unique and erratic sense of honour. The
+fame of having first offered Shaw to the public upon a platform worthy
+of him belongs, like many other public services, to Mr. William Archer.</p>
+
+<p>I say it seems odd that such a writer should not be appreciated in a
+flash; but upon this point there is evidently a real difference of
+opinion, and it constitutes for me the strangest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> difficulty of the
+subject. I hear many people complain that Bernard Shaw deliberately
+mystifies them. I cannot imagine what they mean; it seems to me that he
+deliberately insults them. His language, especially on moral questions,
+is generally as straight and solid as that of a bargee and far less
+ornate and symbolic than that of a hansom-cabman. The prosperous English
+Philistine complains that Mr. Shaw is making a fool of him. Whereas Mr.
+Shaw is not in the least making a fool of him; Mr. Shaw is, with
+laborious lucidity, calling him a fool. G. B. S. calls a landlord a
+thief; and the landlord, instead of denying or resenting it, says, "Ah,
+that fellow hides his meaning so cleverly that one can never make out
+what he means, it is all so fine spun and fantastical." G. B. S. calls a
+statesman a liar to his face, and the statesman cries in a kind of
+ecstasy, "Ah, what quaint, intricate and half-tangled trains of thought!
+Ah, what elusive and many-coloured mysteries of half-meaning!" I think
+it is always quite plain what Mr. Shaw means, even when he is joking,
+and it generally means that the people he is talking to ought to howl
+aloud for their sins. But the average representative of them undoubtedly
+treats the Shavian meaning as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> tricky and complex, when it is really
+direct and offensive. He always accuses Shaw of pulling his leg, at the
+exact moment when Shaw is pulling his nose.</p>
+
+<p>This prompt and pungent style he learnt in the open, upon political tubs
+and platforms; and he is very legitimately proud of it. He boasts of
+being a demagogue; "The cart and the trumpet for me," he says, with
+admirable good sense. Everyone will remember the effective appearance of
+Cyrano de Bergerac in the first act of the fine play of that name; when
+instead of leaping in by any hackneyed door or window, he suddenly
+springs upon a chair above the crowd that has so far kept him invisible;
+"les bras crois&eacute;s, le feutre en bataille, la moustache h&eacute;riss&eacute;e, le nez
+terrible." I will not go so far as to say that when Bernard Shaw sprang
+upon a chair or tub in Trafalgar Square he had the hat in battle, or
+even that he had the nose terrible. But just as we see Cyrano best when
+he thus leaps above the crowd, I think we may take this moment of Shaw
+stepping on his little platform to see him clearly as he then was, and
+even as he has largely not ceased to be. I, at least, have only known
+him in his middle age; yet I think I can see him, younger yet only a
+little more alert, with hair more red<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> but with face yet paler, as he
+first stood up upon some cart or barrow in the tossing glare of the gas.</p>
+
+<p>The first fact that one realises about Shaw (independent of all one has
+read and often contradicting it) is his voice. Primarily it is the voice
+of an Irishman, and then something of the voice of a musician. It
+possibly explains much of his career; a man may be permitted to say so
+many impudent things with so pleasant an intonation. But the voice is
+not only Irish and agreeable, it is also frank and as it were inviting
+conference. This goes with a style and gesture which can only be
+described as at once very casual and very emphatic. He assumes that
+bodily supremacy which goes with oratory, but he assumes it with almost
+ostentatious carelessness; he throws back the head, but loosely and
+laughingly. He is at once swaggering and yet shrugging his shoulders, as
+if to drop from them the mantle of the orator which he has confidently
+assumed. Lastly, no man ever used voice or gesture better for the
+purpose of expressing certainty; no man can say "I tell Mr. Jones he is
+totally wrong" with more air of unforced and even casual conviction.</p>
+
+<p>This particular play of feature or pitch of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> voice, at once didactic and
+yet not uncomrade-like, must be counted a very important fact,
+especially in connection with the period when that voice was first
+heard. It must be remembered that Shaw emerged as a wit in a sort of
+secondary age of wits; one of those stale interludes of prematurely old
+young men, which separate the serious epochs of history. Oscar Wilde was
+its god; but he was somewhat more mystical, not to say monstrous, than
+the average of its dried and decorous impudence. The <i>two survivals</i> of
+that time, as far as I know, are Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. Graham
+Robertson; two most charming people; but the air they had to live in was
+the devil. One of its notes was an artificial reticence of speech, which
+waited till it could plant the perfect epigram. Its typical products
+were far too conceited to lay down the law. Now when people heard that
+Bernard Shaw was witty, as he most certainly was, when they heard his
+<i>mots</i> repeated like those of Whistler or Wilde, when they heard things
+like "the Seven deadly Virtues" or "Who <i>was</i> Hall Caine?" they expected
+another of these silent sarcastic dandies who went about with one
+epigram, patient and poisonous, like a bee with his one sting. And when
+they saw and heard the new<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> humorist they found no fixed sneer, no frock
+coat, no green carnation, no silent Savoy Restaurant good manners, no
+fear of looking a fool, no particular notion of looking a gentleman.
+They found a talkative Irishman with a kind voice and a brown coat; open
+gestures and an evident desire to make people really agree with him. He
+had his own kind of affectations no doubt, and his own kind of tricks of
+debate; but he broke, and, thank God, forever the spell of the little
+man with the single eye glass who had frozen both faith and fun at so
+many tea-tables. Shaw's humane voice and hearty manner were so obviously
+more the things of a great man than the hard, gem-like brilliancy of
+Wilde or the careful ill-temper of Whistler. He brought in a breezier
+sort of insolence; the single eye-glass fled before the single eye.</p>
+
+<p>Added to the effect of the amiable dogmatic voice and lean, loose
+swaggering figure, is that of the face with which so many caricaturists
+have fantastically delighted themselves, the Mephistophelean face with
+the fierce tufted eyebrows and forked red beard. Yet those caricaturists
+in their natural delight in coming upon so striking a face, have
+somewhat misrepresented it, making it merely Satanic; whereas its actual
+expression has quite as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> much benevolence as mockery. By this time his
+costume has become a part of his personality; one has come to think of
+the reddish brown Jaeger suit as if it were a sort of reddish brown fur,
+and were, like the hair and eyebrows, a part of the animal; yet there
+are those who claim to remember a Bernard Shaw of yet more awful aspect
+before Jaeger came to his assistance; a Bernard Shaw in a dilapidated
+frock-coat and some sort of straw hat. I can hardly believe it; the man
+is so much of a piece, and must always have dressed appropriately. In
+any case his brown woollen clothes, at once artistic and hygienic,
+completed the appeal for which he stood; which might be defined as an
+eccentric healthy-mindedness. But something of the vagueness and
+equivocation of his first fame is probably due to the different
+functions which he performed in the contemporary world of art.</p>
+
+<p>He began by writing novels. They are not much read, and indeed not
+imperatively worth reading, with the one exception of the crude and
+magnificent <i>Cashel Byron's Profession</i>. Mr. William Archer, in the
+course of his kindly efforts on behalf of his young Irish friend, sent
+this book to Samoa, for the opinion of the most elvish and yet
+efficient<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> of modern critics. Stevenson summed up much of Shaw even from
+that fragment when he spoke of a romantic griffin roaring with laughter
+at the nature of his own quest. He also added the not wholly unjustified
+postscript: "I say, Archer,&mdash;my God, what women!"</p>
+
+<p>The fiction was largely dropped; but when he began work he felt his way
+by the avenues of three arts. He was an art critic, a dramatic critic,
+and a musical critic; and in all three, it need hardly be said, he
+fought for the newest style and the most revolutionary school. He wrote
+on all these as he would have written on anything; but it was, I fancy,
+about the music that he cared most.</p>
+
+<p>It may often be remarked that mathematicians love and understand music
+more than they love or understand poetry. Bernard Shaw is in much the
+same condition; indeed, in attempting to do justice to Shakespeare's
+poetry, he always calls it "word music." It is not difficult to explain
+this special attachment of the mere logician to music. The logician,
+like every other man on earth, must have sentiment and romance in his
+existence; in every man's life, indeed, which can be called a life at
+all, sentiment is the most solid thing.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> But if the extreme logician
+turns for his emotions to poetry, he is exasperated and bewildered by
+discovering that the words of his own trade are used in an entirely
+different meaning. He conceives that he understands the word "visible,"
+and then finds Milton applying it to darkness, in which nothing is
+visible. He supposes that he understands the word "hide," and then finds
+Shelley talking of a poet hidden in the light. He has reason to believe
+that he understands the common word "hung"; and then William
+Shakespeare, Esquire, of Stratford-on-Avon, gravely assures him that the
+tops of the tall sea waves were hung with deafening clamours on the
+slippery clouds. That is why the common arithmetician prefers music to
+poetry. Words are his scientific instruments. It irritates him that they
+should be anyone else's musical instruments. He is willing to see men
+juggling, but not men juggling with his own private tools and
+possessions&mdash;his terms. It is then that he turns with an utter relief to
+music. Here are all the same fascination and inspiration, all the same
+purity and plunging force as in poetry; but not requiring any verbal
+confession that light conceals things or that darkness can be seen in
+the dark. Music is mere beauty; it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> beauty in the abstract, beauty in
+solution. It is a shapeless and liquid element of beauty, in which a man
+may really float, not indeed affirming the truth, but not denying it.
+Bernard Shaw, as I have already said, is infinitely far above all such
+mere mathematicians and pedantic reasoners; still his feeling is partly
+the same. He adores music because it cannot deal with romantic terms
+either in their right or their wrong sense. Music can be romantic
+without reminding him of Shakespeare and Walter Scott, with whom he has
+had personal quarrels. Music can be Catholic without reminding him
+verbally of the Catholic Church, which he has never seen, and is sure he
+does not like. Bernard Shaw can agree with Wagner, the musician, because
+he speaks without words; if it had been Wagner the man he would
+certainly have had words with him. Therefore I would suggest that Shaw's
+love of music (which is so fundamental that it must be mentioned early,
+if not first, in his story) may itself be considered in the first case
+as the imaginative safety-valve of the rationalistic Irishman.</p>
+
+<p>This much may be said conjecturally over the present signature; but more
+must not be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> said. Bernard Shaw understands music so much better than I
+do that it is just possible that he is, in that tongue and atmosphere,
+all that he is not elsewhere. While he is writing with a pen I know his
+limitations as much as I admire his genius; and I know it is true to say
+that he does not appreciate romance. But while he is playing on the
+piano he may be cocking a feather, drawing a sword or draining a flagon
+for all I know. While he is speaking I am sure that there are some
+things he does not understand. But while he is listening (at the Queen's
+Hall) he may understand everything, including God and me. Upon this part
+of him I am a reverent agnostic; it is well to have some such dark
+continent in the character of a man of whom one writes. It preserves two
+very important things&mdash;modesty in the biographer and mystery in the
+biography.</p>
+
+<p>For the purpose of our present generalisation it is only necessary to
+say that Shaw, as a musical critic, summed himself up as "The Perfect
+Wagnerite"; he threw himself into subtle and yet trenchant eulogy of
+that revolutionary voice in music. It was the same with the other arts.
+As he was a Perfect Wagnerite in music, so he was a Perfect Whistlerite
+in painting; so above all he was a Perfect Ibsenite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> in drama. And with
+this we enter that part of his career with which this book is more
+specially concerned. When Mr. William Archer got him established as
+dramatic critic of the <i>Saturday Review</i>, he became for the first time
+"a star of the stage"; a shooting star and sometimes a destroying comet.</p>
+
+<p>On the day of that appointment opened one of the very few exhilarating
+and honest battles that broke the silence of the slow and cynical
+collapse of the nineteenth century. Bernard Shaw the demagogue had got
+his cart and his trumpet; and was resolved to make them like the car of
+destiny and the trumpet of judgment. He had not the servility of the
+ordinary rebel, who is content to go on rebelling against kings and
+priests, because such rebellion is as old and as established as any
+priests or kings. He cast about him for something to attack which was
+not merely powerful or placid, but was unattacked. After a little quite
+sincere reflection, he found it. He would not be content to be a common
+atheist; he wished to blaspheme something in which even atheists
+believed. He was not satisfied with being revolutionary; there were so
+many revolutionists. He wanted to pick out some prominent institution
+which had been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> irrationally and instinctively accepted by the most
+violent and profane; something of which Mr. Foote would speak as
+respectfully on the front page of the <i>Freethinker</i> as Mr. St. Loe
+Strachey on the front page of the <i>Spectator</i>. He found the thing; he
+found the great unassailed English institution&mdash;Shakespeare.</p>
+
+<p>But Shaw's attack on Shakespeare, though exaggerated for the fun of the
+thing, was not by any means the mere folly or firework paradox that has
+been supposed. He meant what he said; what was called his levity was
+merely the laughter of a man who enjoyed saying what he meant&mdash;an
+occupation which is indeed one of the greatest larks in life. Moreover,
+it can honestly be said that Shaw did good by shaking the mere idolatry
+of Him of Avon. That idolatry was bad for England; it buttressed our
+perilous self-complacency by making us think that we alone had, not
+merely a great poet, but the one poet above criticism. It was bad for
+literature; it made a minute model out of work that was really a hasty
+and faulty masterpiece. And it was bad for religion and morals that
+there should be so huge a terrestrial idol, that we should put such
+utter and unreasoning trust in any child of man. It is true that it was
+largely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> through Shaw's own defects that he beheld the defects of
+Shakespeare. But it needed someone equally prosaic to resist what was
+perilous in the charm of such poetry; it may not be altogether a mistake
+to send a deaf man to destroy the rock of the sirens.</p>
+
+<p>This attitude of Shaw illustrates of course all three of the divisions
+or aspects to which the reader's attention has been drawn. It was partly
+the attitude of the Irishman objecting to the Englishman turning his
+mere artistic taste into a religion; especially when it was a taste
+merely taught him by his aunts and uncles. In Shaw's opinion (one might
+say) the English do not really enjoy Shakespeare or even admire
+Shakespeare; one can only say, in the strong colloquialism, that they
+swear by Shakespeare. He is a mere god; a thing to be invoked. And
+Shaw's whole business was to set up the things which were to be sworn by
+as things to be sworn at. It was partly again the revolutionist in
+pursuit of pure novelty, hating primarily the oppression of the past,
+almost hating history itself. For Bernard Shaw the prophets were to be
+stoned after, and not before, men had built their sepulchres. There was
+a Yankee smartness in the man which was irritated at the idea of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> being
+dominated by a person dead for three hundred years; like Mark Twain, he
+wanted a fresher corpse.</p>
+
+<p>These two motives there were, but they were small compared with the
+other. It was the third part of him, the Puritan, that was really at war
+with Shakespeare. He denounced that playwright almost exactly as any
+contemporary Puritan coming out of a conventicle in a steeple-crowned
+hat and stiff bands might have denounced the playwright coming out of
+the stage door of the old Globe Theatre. This is not a mere fancy; it is
+philosophically true. A legend has run round the newspapers that Bernard
+Shaw offered himself as a better writer than Shakespeare. This is false
+and quite unjust; Bernard Shaw never said anything of the kind. The
+writer whom he did say was better than Shakespeare was not himself, but
+Bunyan. And he justified it by attributing to Bunyan a virile acceptance
+of life as a high and harsh adventure, while in Shakespeare he saw
+nothing but profligate pessimism, the <i>vanitas vanitatum</i> of a
+disappointed voluptuary. According to this view Shakespeare was always
+saying, "Out, out, brief candle," because his was only a ballroom
+candle; while Bunyan was seeking to light such a candle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> as by God's
+grace should never be put out.</p>
+
+<p>It is odd that Bernard Shaw's chief error or insensibility should have
+been the instrument of his noblest affirmation. The denunciation of
+Shakespeare was a mere misunderstanding. But the denunciation of
+Shakespeare's pessimism was the most splendidly understanding of all his
+utterances. This is the greatest thing in Shaw, a serious optimism&mdash;even
+a tragic optimism. Life is a thing too glorious to be enjoyed. To be is
+an exacting and exhausting business; the trumpet though inspiring is
+terrible. Nothing that he ever wrote is so noble as his simple reference
+to the sturdy man who stepped up to the Keeper of the Book of Life and
+said, "Put down my name, Sir." It is true that Shaw called this heroic
+philosophy by wrong names and buttressed it with false metaphysics; that
+was the weakness of the age. The temporary decline of theology had
+involved the neglect of philosophy and all fine thinking; and Bernard
+Shaw had to find shaky justifications in Schopenhauer for the sons of
+God shouting for joy. He called it the Will to Live&mdash;a phrase invented
+by Prussian professors who would like to exist, but can't. Afterwards he
+asked people to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> worship the Life-Force; as if one could worship a
+hyphen. But though he covered it with crude new names (which are now
+fortunately crumbling everywhere like bad mortar) he was on the side of
+the good old cause; the oldest and the best of all causes, the cause of
+creation against destruction, the cause of yes against no, the cause of
+the seed against the stony earth and the star against the abyss.</p>
+
+<p>His misunderstanding of Shakespeare arose largely from the fact that he
+is a Puritan, while Shakespeare was spiritually a Catholic. The former
+is always screwing himself up to see truth; the latter is often content
+that truth is there. The Puritan is only strong enough to stiffen; the
+Catholic is strong enough to relax. Shaw, I think, has entirely
+misunderstood the pessimistic passages of Shakespeare. They are flying
+moods which a man with a fixed faith can afford to entertain. That all
+is vanity, that life is dust and love is ashes, these are frivolities,
+these are jokes that a Catholic can afford to utter. He knows well
+enough that there is a life that is not dust and a love that is not
+ashes. But just as he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the
+matter of enjoyment, so he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> may let himself go more than the Puritan in
+the matter of melancholy. The sad exuberances of Hamlet are merely like
+the glad exuberances of Falstaff. This is not conjecture; it is the text
+of Shakespeare. In the very act of uttering his pessimism, Hamlet admits
+that it is a mood and not the truth. Heaven <i>is</i> a heavenly thing, only
+to him it seems a foul congregation of vapours. Man <i>is</i> the paragon of
+animals, only to him he seems a quintessence of dust. Hamlet is quite
+the reverse of a sceptic. He is a man whose strong intellect believes
+much more than his weak temperament can make vivid to him. But this
+power of knowing a thing without feeling it, this power of believing a
+thing without experiencing it, this is an old Catholic complexity, and
+the Puritan has never understood it. Shakespeare confesses his moods
+(mostly by the mouths of villains and failures), but he never sets up
+his moods against his mind. His cry of <i>vanitas vanitatum</i> is itself
+only a harmless vanity. Readers may not agree with my calling him
+Catholic with a big C; but they will hardly complain of my calling him
+catholic with a small one. And that is here the principal point.
+Shakespeare was not in any sense a pessimist; he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> was, if anything, an
+optimist so universal as to be able to enjoy even pessimism. And this is
+exactly where he differs from the Puritan. The true Puritan is not
+squeamish: the true Puritan is free to say "Damn it!" But the Catholic
+Elizabethan was free (on passing provocation) to say "Damn it all!"</p>
+
+<p>It need hardly be explained that Bernard Shaw added to his negative case
+of a dramatist to be depreciated a corresponding affirmative case of a
+dramatist to be exalted and advanced. He was not content with so remote
+a comparison as that between Shakespeare and Bunyan. In his vivacious
+weekly articles in the <i>Saturday Review</i>, the real comparison upon which
+everything turned was the comparison between Shakespeare and Ibsen. He
+early threw himself with all possible eagerness into the public disputes
+about the great Scandinavian; and though there was no doubt whatever
+about which side he supported, there was much that was individual in the
+line he took. It is not our business here to explore that extinct
+volcano. You may say that anti-Ibsenism is dead, or you may say that
+Ibsen is dead; in any case, that controversy is dead, and death, as the
+Roman poet says, can alone confess of what small atoms we are made.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> The
+opponents of Ibsen largely exhibited the permanent qualities of the
+populace; that is, their instincts were right and their reasons wrong.
+They made the complete controversial mistake of calling Ibsen a
+pessimist; whereas, indeed, his chief weakness is a rather childish
+confidence in mere nature and freedom, and a blindness (either of
+experience or of culture) in the matter of original sin. In this sense
+Ibsen is not so much a pessimist as a highly crude kind of optimist.
+Nevertheless the man in the street was right in his fundamental
+instinct, as he always is. Ibsen, in his pale northern style, is an
+optimist; but for all that he is a depressing person. The optimism of
+Ibsen is less comforting than the pessimism of Dante; just as a
+Norwegian sunrise, however splendid, is colder than a southern night.</p>
+
+<p>But on the side of those who fought for Ibsen there was also a
+disagreement, and perhaps also a mistake. The vague army of "the
+advanced" (an army which advances in all directions) were united in
+feeling that they ought to be the friends of Ibsen because he also was
+advancing somewhere somehow. But they were also seriously impressed by
+Flaubert, by Oscar Wilde and all the rest who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> told them that a work of
+art was in another universe from ethics and social good. Therefore many,
+I think most, of the Ibsenites praised the Ibsen plays merely as <i>choses
+vues</i>, &aelig;sthetic affirmations of what can be without any reference to
+what ought to be. Mr. William Archer himself inclined to this view,
+though his strong sagacity kept him in a haze of healthy doubt on the
+subject. Mr. Walkley certainly took this view. But this view Mr. George
+Bernard Shaw abruptly and violently refused to take.</p>
+
+<p>With the full Puritan combination of passion and precision he informed
+everybody that Ibsen was not artistic, but moral; that his dramas were
+didactic, that all great art was didactic, that Ibsen was strongly on
+the side of some of his characters and strongly against others, that
+there was preaching and public spirit in the work of good dramatists;
+and that if this were not so, dramatists and all other artists would be
+mere panders of intellectual debauchery, to be locked up as the Puritans
+locked up the stage players. No one can understand Bernard Shaw who does
+not give full value to this early revolt of his on behalf of ethics
+against the ruling school of <i>l'art pour l'art</i>. It is interesting
+because<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> it is connected with other ambitions in the man, especially
+with that which has made him somewhat vainer of being a Parish
+Councillor than of being one of the most popular dramatists in Europe.
+But its chief interest is again to be referred to our stratification of
+the psychology; it is the lover of true things rebelling for once
+against merely new things; it is the Puritan suddenly refusing to be the
+mere Progressive.</p>
+
+<p>But this attitude obviously laid on the ethical lover of Ibsen a not
+inconsiderable obligation. If the new drama had an ethical purpose, what
+was it? and if Ibsen was a moral teacher, what the deuce was he
+teaching? Answers to this question, answers of manifold brilliancy and
+promise, were scattered through all the dramatic criticisms of those
+years on the <i>Saturday Review</i>. But even Bernard Shaw grew tired after a
+time of discussing Ibsen only in connection with the current pantomime
+or the latest musical comedy. It was felt that so much sincerity and
+fertility of explanation justified a concentrated attack; and in 1891
+appeared the brilliant book called <i>The Quintessence of Ibsenism</i>, which
+some have declared to be merely the quintessence of Shaw. However<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> this
+may be, it was in fact and profession the quintessence of Shaw's theory
+of the morality or propaganda of Ibsen.</p>
+
+<p>The book itself is much longer than the book that I am writing; and as
+is only right in so spirited an apologist, every paragraph is
+provocative. I could write an essay on every sentence which I accept and
+three essays on every sentence which I deny. Bernard Shaw himself is a
+master of compression; he can put a conception more compactly than any
+other man alive. It is therefore rather difficult to compress his
+compression; one feels as if one were trying to extract a beef essence
+from Bovril. But the shortest form in which I can state the idea of <i>The
+Quintessence of Ibsenism</i> is that it is the idea of distrusting ideals,
+which are universal, in comparison with facts, which are miscellaneous.
+The man whom he attacks throughout he calls "The Idealist"; that is the
+man who permits himself to be mainly moved by a moral generalisation.
+"Actions," he says, "are to be judged by their effect on happiness, and
+not by their conformity to any ideal." As we have already seen, there is
+a certain inconsistency here; for while Shaw had always chucked all
+ideals overboard the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> one he had chucked first was the ideal of
+happiness. Passing this however for the present, we may mark the above
+as the most satisfying summary. If I tell a lie I am not to blame myself
+for having violated the ideal of truth, but only for having perhaps got
+myself into a mess and made things worse than they were before. If I
+have broken my word I need not feel (as my fathers did) that I have
+broken something inside of me, as one who breaks a blood vessel. It all
+depends on whether I have broken up something outside me; as one who
+breaks up an evening party. If I shoot my father the only question is
+whether I have made him happy. I must not admit the idealistic
+conception that the mere shooting of my father might possibly make me
+unhappy. We are to judge of every individual case as it arises,
+apparently without any social summary or moral ready-reckoner at all.
+"The Golden Rule is that there is no Golden Rule." We must not say that
+it is right to keep promises, but that it may be right to keep this
+promise. Essentially it is anarchy; nor is it very easy to see how a
+state could be very comfortable which was Socialist in all its public
+morality and Anarchist in all its private.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> But if it is anarchy, it is
+anarchy without any of the abandon and exuberance of anarchy. It is a
+worried and conscientious anarchy; an anarchy of painful delicacy and
+even caution. For it refuses to trust in traditional experiments or
+plainly trodden tracks; every case must be considered anew from the
+beginning, and yet considered with the most wide-eyed care for human
+welfare; every man must act as if he were the first man made. Briefly,
+we must always be worrying about what is best for our children, and we
+must not take one hint or rule of thumb from our fathers. Some think
+that this anarchism would make a man tread down mighty cities in his
+madness. I think it would make a man walk down the street as if he were
+walking on egg-shells. I do not think this experiment in opportunism
+would end in frantic license; I think it would end in frozen timidity.
+If a man was forbidden to solve moral problems by moral science or the
+help of mankind, his course would be quite easy&mdash;he would not solve the
+problems. The world instead of being a knot so tangled as to need
+unravelling, would simply become a piece of clockwork too complicated to
+be touched. I cannot think that this untutored worry was what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> Ibsen
+meant; I have my doubts as to whether it was what Shaw meant; but I do
+not think that it can be substantially doubted that it was what he said.</p>
+
+<p>In any case it can be asserted that the general aim of the work was to
+exalt the immediate conclusions of practice against the general
+conclusions of theory. Shaw objected to the solution of every problem in
+a play being by its nature a general solution, applicable to all other
+such problems. He disliked the entrance of a universal justice at the
+end of the last act; treading down all the personal ultimatums and all
+the varied certainties of men. He disliked the god from the
+machine&mdash;because he was from a machine. But even without the machine he
+tended to dislike the god; because a god is more general than a man. His
+enemies have accused Shaw of being anti-domestic, a shaker of the
+roof-tree. But in this sense Shaw may be called almost madly domestic.
+He wishes each private problem to be settled in private, without
+reference to sociological ethics. And the only objection to this kind of
+gigantic casuistry is that the theatre is really too small to discuss
+it. It would not be fair to play David and Goliath on a stage too small
+to admit Goliath.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> And it is not fair to discuss private morality on a
+stage too small to admit the enormous presence of public morality; that
+character which has not appeared in a play since the Middle Ages; whose
+name is Everyman and whose honour we have all in our keeping.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="The_Dramatist" id="The_Dramatist"></a><i>The Dramatist</i></h2>
+
+<p>No one who was alive at the time and interested in such matters will
+ever forget the first acting of <i>Arms and the Man</i>. It was applauded by
+that indescribable element in all of us which rejoices to see the
+genuine thing prevail against the plausible; that element which rejoices
+that even its enemies are alive. Apart from the problems raised in the
+play, the very form of it was an attractive and forcible innovation.
+Classic plays which were wholly heroic, comic plays which were wholly
+and even heartlessly ironical, were common enough. Commonest of all in
+this particular time was the play that began playfully, with plenty of
+comic business, and was gradually sobered by sentiment until it ended on
+a note of romance or even of pathos. A commonplace little officer, the
+butt of the mess, becomes by the last act as high and hopeless a lover
+as Dante. Or a vulgar and violent pork-butcher remembers his own youth
+before the curtain goes down. The first thing that Bernard Shaw did when
+he stepped before<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> the footlights was to reverse this process. He
+resolved to build a play not on pathos, but on bathos. The officer
+should be heroic first and then everyone should laugh at him; the
+curtain should go up on a man remembering his youth, and he should only
+reveal himself as a violent pork-butcher when someone interrupted him
+with an order for pork. This merely technical originality is indicated
+in the very title of the play. The <i>Arma Virumque</i> of Virgil is a
+mounting and ascending phrase, the man is more than his weapons. The
+Latin line suggests a superb procession which should bring on to the
+stage the brazen and resounding armour, the shield and shattering axe,
+but end with the hero himself, taller and more terrible because unarmed.
+The technical effect of Shaw's scheme is like the same scene, in which a
+crowd should carry even more gigantic shapes of shield and helmet, but
+when the horns and howls were at their highest, should end with the
+figure of Little Tich. The name itself is meant to be a bathos;
+arms&mdash;and the man.</p>
+
+<p>It is well to begin with the superficial; and this is the superficial
+effectiveness of Shaw; the brilliancy of bathos. But of course the
+vitality and value of his plays does not lie<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> merely in this; any more
+than the value of Swinburne lies in alliteration or the value of Hood in
+puns. This is not his message; but it is his method; it is his style.
+The first taste we had of it was in this play of <i>Arms and the Man</i>; but
+even at the very first it was evident that there was much more in the
+play than that. Among other things there was one thing not unimportant;
+there was savage sincerity. Indeed, only a ferociously sincere person
+can produce such effective flippancies on a matter like war; just as
+only a strong man could juggle with cannon balls. It is all very well to
+use the word "fool" as synonymous with "jester"; but daily experience
+shows that it is generally the solemn and silent man who is the fool. It
+is all very well to accuse Mr. Shaw of standing on his head; but if you
+stand on your head you must have a hard and solid head to stand on. In
+<i>Arms and the Man</i> the bathos of form was strictly the incarnation of a
+strong satire in the idea. The play opens in an atmosphere of military
+melodrama; the dashing officer of cavalry going off to death in an
+attitude, the lovely heroine left in tearful rapture; the brass band,
+the noise of guns and the red fire. Into all this enters Bluntschli, the
+little sturdy crop-haired<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> Swiss professional soldier, a man without a
+country but with a trade. He tells the army-adoring heroine frankly that
+she is a humbug; and she, after a moment's reflection, appears to agree
+with him. The play is like nearly all Shaw's plays, the dialogue of a
+conversion. By the end of it the young lady has lost all her military
+illusions and admires this mercenary soldier not because he faces guns,
+but because he faces facts.</p>
+
+<p>This was a fitting entrance for Shaw to his didactic drama; because the
+commonplace courage which he respects in Bluntschli was the one virtue
+which he was destined to praise throughout. We can best see how the play
+symbolises and summarises Bernard Shaw if we compare it with some other
+attack by modern humanitarians upon war. Shaw has many of the actual
+opinions of Tolstoy. Like Tolstoy he tells men, with coarse innocence,
+that romantic war is only butchery and that romantic love is only lust.
+But Tolstoy objects to these things because they are real; he really
+wishes to abolish them. Shaw only objects to them in so far as they are
+ideal; that is in so far as they are idealised. Shaw objects not so much
+to war as to the attractiveness of war. He does not so much dislike love
+as the love<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> of love. Before the temple of Mars, Tolstoy stands and
+thunders, "There shall be no wars"; Bernard Shaw merely murmurs, "Wars
+if you must; but for God's sake, not war songs." Before the temple of
+Venus, Tolstoy cries terribly, "Come out of it!"; Shaw is quite content
+to say, "Do not be taken in by it." Tolstoy seems really to propose that
+high passion and patriotic valour should be destroyed. Shaw is more
+moderate; and only asks that they should be desecrated. Upon this note,
+both about sex and conflict, he was destined to dwell through much of
+his work with the most wonderful variations of witty adventure and
+intellectual surprise. It may be doubted perhaps whether this realism in
+love and war is quite so sensible as it looks. <i>Securus judicat orbis
+terrarum</i>; the world is wiser than the moderns. The world has kept
+sentimentalities simply because they are the most practical things in
+the world. They alone make men do things. The world does not encourage a
+quite rational lover, simply because a perfectly rational lover would
+never get married. The world does not encourage a perfectly rational
+army, because a perfectly rational army would run away.</p>
+
+<p>The brain of Bernard Shaw was like a wedge<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> in the literal sense. Its
+sharpest end was always in front; and it split our society from end to
+end the moment it had entrance at all. As I have said he was long
+unheard of; but he had not the tragedy of many authors, who were heard
+of long before they were heard. When you had read any Shaw you read all
+Shaw. When you had seen one of his plays you waited for more. And when
+he brought them out in volume form, you did what is repugnant to any
+literary man&mdash;you bought a book.</p>
+
+<p>The dramatic volume with which Shaw dazzled the public was called,
+<i>Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant</i>. I think the most striking and typical
+thing about it was that he did not know very clearly which plays were
+unpleasant and which were pleasant. "Pleasant" is a word which is almost
+unmeaning to Bernard Shaw. Except, as I suppose, in music (where I
+cannot follow him), relish and receptivity are things that simply do not
+appear. He has the best of tongues and the worst of palates. With the
+possible exception of <i>Mrs. Warren's Profession</i> (which was at least
+unpleasant in the sense of being forbidden) I can see no particular
+reason why any of the seven plays should be held specially to please or
+displease. First in fame and contemporary importance came the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> reprint
+of <i>Arms and the Man</i>, of which I have already spoken. Over all the rest
+towered unquestionably the two figures of Mrs. Warren and of Candida.
+They were neither of them pleasant, except as all good art is pleasant.
+They were neither of them really unpleasant except as all truth is
+unpleasant. But they did represent the author's normal preference and
+his principal fear; and those two sculptured giantesses largely upheld
+his fame.</p>
+
+<p>I fancy that the author rather dislikes <i>Candida</i> because it is so
+generally liked. I give my own feeling for what it is worth (a foolish
+phrase), but I think that there were only two moments when this powerful
+writer was truly, in the ancient and popular sense, inspired; that is,
+breathing from a bigger self and telling more truth than he knew. One is
+that scene in a later play where after the secrets and revenges of Egypt
+have rioted and rotted all round him, the colossal sanity of C&aelig;sar is
+suddenly acclaimed with swords. The other is that great last scene in
+<i>Candida</i> where the wife, stung into final speech, declared her purpose
+of remaining with the strong man because he is the weak man. The wife is
+asked to decide between two men, one a strenuous self-confident popular
+preacher, her husband, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> other a wild and weak young poet, logically
+futile and physically timid, her lover; and she chooses the former
+because he has more weakness and more need of her. Even among the plain
+and ringing paradoxes of the Shaw play this is one of the best reversals
+or turnovers ever effected. A paradoxical writer like Bernard Shaw is
+perpetually and tiresomely told that he stands on his head. But all
+romance and all religion consist in making the whole universe stand on
+its head. That reversal is the whole idea of virtue; that the last shall
+be first and the first last. Considered as a pure piece of Shaw
+therefore, the thing is of the best. But it is also something much
+better than Shaw. The writer touches certain realities commonly outside
+his scope; especially the reality of the normal wife's attitude to the
+normal husband, an attitude which is not romantic but which is yet quite
+quixotic; which is insanely unselfish and yet quite cynically
+clear-sighted. It involves human sacrifice without in the least
+involving idolatry.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is that in this place Bernard Shaw comes within an inch of
+expressing something that is not properly expressed anywhere else; the
+idea of marriage. Marriage is not a mere chain upon love as the
+anarchists<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> say; nor is it a mere crown upon love as the sentimentalists
+say. Marriage is a fact, an actual human relation like that of
+motherhood which has certain human habits and loyalties, except in a few
+monstrous cases where it is turned to torture by special insanity and
+sin. A marriage is neither an ecstasy nor a slavery; it is a
+commonwealth; it is a separate working and fighting thing like a nation.
+Kings and diplomatists talk of "forming alliances" when they make
+weddings; but indeed every wedding is primarily an alliance. The family
+is a fact even when it is not an agreeable fact, and a man is part of
+his wife even when he wishes he wasn't. The twain are one flesh&mdash;yes,
+even when they are not one spirit. Man is duplex. Man is a quadruped.</p>
+
+<p>Of this ancient and essential relation there are certain emotional
+results, which are subtle, like all the growths of nature. And one of
+them is the attitude of the wife to the husband, whom she regards at
+once as the strongest and most helpless of human figures. She regards
+him in some strange fashion at once as a warrior who must make his way
+and as an infant who is sure to lose his way. The man has emotions which
+exactly correspond; sometimes looking down at his wife and sometimes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> up
+at her; for marriage is like a splendid game of see-saw. Whatever else
+it is, it is not comradeship. This living, ancestral bond (not of love
+or fear, but strictly of marriage) has been twice expressed splendidly
+in literature. The man's incurable sense of the mother in his lawful
+wife was uttered by Browning in one of his two or three truly shattering
+lines of genius, when he makes the execrable Guido fall back finally
+upon the fact of marriage and the wife whom he has trodden like mire:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i4">"Christ! Maria! God,</div>
+<div>Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And the woman's witness to the same fact has been best expressed by
+Bernard Shaw in this great scene where she remains with the great
+stalwart successful public man because he is really too little to run
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>There are one or two errors in the play; and they are all due to the
+primary error of despising the mental attitude of romance, which is the
+only key to real human conduct. For instance, the love making of the
+young poet is all wrong. He is supposed to be a romantic and amorous
+boy; and therefore the dramatist tries to make him talk turgidly, about
+seeking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> for "an archangel with purple wings" who shall be worthy of his
+lady. But a lad in love would never talk in this mock heroic style;
+there is no period at which the young male is more sensitive and serious
+and afraid of looking a fool. This is a blunder; but there is another
+much bigger and blacker. It is completely and disastrously false to the
+whole nature of falling in love to make the young Eugene complain of the
+cruelty which makes Candida defile her fair hands with domestic duties.
+No boy in love with a beautiful woman would ever feel disgusted when she
+peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. He would like her to be domestic. He
+would simply feel that the potatoes had become poetical and the lamps
+gained an extra light. This may be irrational; but we are not talking of
+rationality, but of the psychology of first love. It may be very unfair
+to women that the toil and triviality of potato peeling should be seen
+through a glamour of romance; but the glamour is quite as certain a fact
+as the potatoes. It may be a bad thing in sociology that men should
+deify domesticity in girls as something dainty and magical; but all men
+do. Personally I do not think it a bad thing at all; but that is another
+argument. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> argument here is that Bernard Shaw, in aiming at mere
+realism, makes a big mistake in reality. Misled by his great heresy of
+looking at emotions from the outside, he makes Eugene a cold-blooded
+prig at the very moment when he is trying, for his own dramatic
+purposes, to make him a hot-blooded lover. He makes the young lover an
+idealistic theoriser about the very things about which he really would
+have been a sort of mystical materialist. Here the romantic Irishman is
+much more right than the very rational one; and there is far more truth
+to life as it is in Lover's couplet&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"And envied the chicken</div>
+<div>That Peggy was pickin'."</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>than in Eugene's solemn, &aelig;sthetic protest against the potato-skins and
+the lamp-oil. For dramatic purposes, G. B. S., even if he despises
+romance, ought to comprehend it. But then, if once he comprehended
+romance, he would not despise it.</p>
+
+<p>The series contained, besides its more substantial work, tragic and
+comic, a comparative frivolity called <i>The Man of Destiny</i>. It is a
+little comedy about Napoleon, and is chiefly interesting as a
+foreshadowing of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> after sketches of heroes and strong men; it is a
+kind of parody of <i>C&aelig;sar and Cleopatra</i> before it was written. In this
+connection the mere title of this Napoleonic play is of interest. All
+Shaw's generation and school of thought remembered Napoleon only by his
+late and corrupt title of "The Man of Destiny," a title only given to
+him when he was already fat and tired and destined to exile. They forgot
+that through all the really thrilling and creative part of his career he
+was not the man of destiny, but the man who defied destiny. Shaw's
+sketch is extraordinarily clever; but it is tinged with this unmilitary
+notion of an inevitable conquest; and this we must remember when we come
+to those larger canvases on which he painted his more serious heroes. As
+for the play, it is packed with good things, of which the last is
+perhaps the best. The long duologue between Bonaparte and the Irish lady
+ends with the General declaring that he will only be beaten when he
+meets an English army under an Irish general. It has always been one of
+Shaw's paradoxes that the English mind has the force to fulfil orders,
+while the Irish mind has the intelligence to give them, and it is among
+those of his paradoxes which contain a certain truth.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>A far more important play is <i>The Philanderer</i>, an ironic comedy which
+is full of fine strokes and real satire; it is more especially the
+vehicle of some of Shaw's best satire upon physical science. Nothing
+could be cleverer than the picture of the young, strenuous doctor, in
+the utter innocence of his professional ambition, who has discovered a
+new disease, and is delighted when he finds people suffering from it and
+cast down to despair when he finds that it does not exist. The point is
+worth a pause, because it is a good, short way of stating Shaw's
+attitude, right or wrong, upon the whole of formal morality. What he
+dislikes in young Doctor Paramore is that he has interposed a secondary
+and false conscience between himself and the facts. When his disease is
+disproved, instead of seeing the escape of a human being who thought he
+was going to die of it, Paramore sees the downfall of a kind of flag or
+cause. This is the whole contention of <i>The Quintessence of Ibsenism</i>,
+put better than the book puts it; it is a really sharp exposition of the
+dangers of "idealism," the sacrifice of people to principles, and Shaw
+is even wiser in his suggestion that this excessive idealism exists
+nowhere so strongly as in the world of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> physical science. He shows that
+the scientist tends to be more concerned about the sickness than about
+the sick man; but it was certainly in his mind to suggest here also that
+the idealist is more concerned about the sin than about the sinner.</p>
+
+<p>This business of Dr. Paramore's disease while it is the most farcical
+thing in the play is also the most philosophic and important. The rest
+of the figures, including the Philanderer himself, are in the full sense
+of those blasting and obliterating words "funny without being vulgar,"
+that is, funny without being of any importance to the masses of men. It
+is a play about a dashing and advanced "Ibsen Club," and the squabble
+between the young Ibsenites and the old people who are not yet up to
+Ibsen. It would be hard to find a stronger example of Shaw's only
+essential error, modernity&mdash;which means the seeking for truth in terms
+of time. Only a few years have passed and already almost half the wit of
+that wonderful play is wasted, because it all turns on the newness of a
+fashion that is no longer new. Doubtless many people still think the
+Ibsen drama a great thing, like the French classical drama. But going to
+"The Philanderer" is like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> going among periwigs and rapiers and hearing
+that the young men are now all for Racine. What makes such work sound
+unreal is not the praise of Ibsen, but the praise of the novelty of
+Ibsen. Any advantage that Bernard Shaw had over Colonel Craven I have
+over Bernard Shaw; we who happen to be born last have the meaningless
+and paltry triumph in that meaningless and paltry war. We are the
+superiors by that silliest and most snobbish of all superiorities, the
+mere aristocracy of time. All works must become thus old and insipid
+which have ever tried to be "modern," which have consented to smell of
+time rather than of eternity. Only those who have stooped to be in
+advance of their time will ever find themselves behind it.</p>
+
+<p>But it is irritating to think what diamonds, what dazzling silver of
+Shavian wit has been sunk in such an out-of-date warship. In <i>The
+Philanderer</i> there are five hundred excellent and about five magnificent
+things. The rattle of repartees between the doctor and the soldier about
+the humanity of their two trades is admirable. Or again, when the
+colonel tells Chartaris that "in his young days" he would have no more
+behaved like Chartaris than he would have cheated at cards. After a
+pause<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> Chartaris says, "You're getting old, Craven, and you make a
+virtue of it as usual." And there is an altitude of aerial tragedy in
+the words of Grace, who has refused the man she loves, to Julia, who is
+marrying the man she doesn't, "This is what they call a happy
+ending&mdash;these men."</p>
+
+<p>There is an acrid taste in <i>The Philanderer</i>; and certainly he might be
+considered a super-sensitive person who should find anything acrid in
+<i>You Never Can Tell</i>. This play is the nearest approach to frank and
+objectless exuberance in the whole of Shaw's work. <i>Punch</i>, with wisdom
+as well as wit, said that it might well be called not "You Never Can
+Tell" but "You Never Can be Shaw." And yet if anyone will read this
+blazing farce and then after it any of the romantic farces, such as
+<i>Pickwick</i> or even <i>The Wrong Box</i>, I do not think he will be disposed
+to erase or even to modify what I said at the beginning about the
+ingrained grimness and even inhumanity of Shaw's art. To take but one
+test: love, in an "extravaganza," may be light love or love in idleness,
+but it should be hearty and happy love if it is to add to the general
+hilarity. Such are the ludicrous but lucky love affairs of the sportsman
+Winkle and the Maestro Jimson. In Gloria's collapse before her bullying
+lover<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> there is something at once cold and unclean; it calls up all the
+modern supermen with their cruel and fishy eyes. Such farces should
+begin in a friendly air, in a tavern. There is something very symbolic
+of Shaw in the fact that his farce begins in a dentist's.</p>
+
+<p>The only one out of this brilliant batch of plays in which I think that
+the method adopted really fails, is the one called <i>Widower's Houses</i>.
+The best touch of Shaw is simply in the title. The simple substitution
+of widowers for widows contains almost the whole bitter and yet
+boisterous protest of Shaw; all his preference for undignified fact over
+dignified phrase; all his dislike of those subtle trends of sex or
+mystery which swing the logician off the straight line. We can imagine
+him crying, "Why in the name of death and conscience should it be tragic
+to be a widow but comic to be a widower?" But the rationalistic method
+is here applied quite wrong as regards the production of a drama. The
+most dramatic point in the affair is when the open and indecent
+rack-renter turns on the decent young man of means and proves to him
+that he is equally guilty, that he also can only grind his corn by
+grinding the faces of the poor. But even here the point is undramatic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+because it is indirect; it is indirect because it is merely
+sociological. It may be the truth that a young man living on an
+unexamined income which ultimately covers a great deal of house-property
+is as dangerous as any despot or thief. But it is a truth that you can
+no more put into a play than into a triolet. You can make a play out of
+one man robbing another man, but not out of one man robbing a million
+men; still less out of his robbing them unconsciously.</p>
+
+<p>Of the plays collected in this book I have kept <i>Mrs. Warren's
+Profession</i> to the last, because, fine as it is, it is even finer and
+more important because of its fate, which was to rouse a long and
+serious storm and to be vetoed by the Censor of Plays. I say that this
+drama is most important because of the quarrel that came out of it. If I
+were speaking of some mere artist this might be an insult. But there are
+high and heroic things in Bernard Shaw; and one of the highest and most
+heroic is this, that he certainly cares much more for a quarrel than for
+a play. And this quarrel about the censorship is one on which he feels
+so strongly that in a book embodying any sort of sympathy it would be
+much better to leave out Mrs. Warren than to leave out Mr. Redford. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>
+veto was the pivot of so very personal a movement by the dramatist, of
+so very positive an assertion of his own attitude towards things, that
+it is only just and necessary to state what were the two essential
+parties to the dispute; the play and the official who prevented the
+play.</p>
+
+<p>The play of <i>Mrs. Warren's Profession</i> is concerned with a coarse mother
+and a cold daughter; the mother drives the ordinary and dirty trade of
+harlotry; the daughter does not know until the end the atrocious origin
+of all her own comfort and refinement. The daughter, when the discovery
+is made, freezes up into an iceberg of contempt; which is indeed a very
+womanly thing to do. The mother explodes into pulverising cynicism and
+practicality; which is also very womanly. The dialogue is drastic and
+sweeping; the daughter says the trade is loathsome; the mother answers
+that she loathes it herself; that every healthy person does loathe the
+trade by which she lives. And beyond question the general effect of the
+play is that the trade is loathsome; supposing anyone to be so
+insensible as to require to be told of the fact. Undoubtedly the upshot
+is that a brothel is a miserable business, and a brothel-keeper a
+miserable woman. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> whole dramatic art of Shaw is in the literal sense
+of the word, tragi-comic; I mean that the comic part comes after the
+tragedy. But just as <i>You Never Can Tell</i> represents the nearest
+approach of Shaw to the purely comic, so <i>Mrs. Warren's Profession</i>
+represents his only complete, or nearly complete, tragedy. There is no
+twopenny modernism in it, as in <i>The Philanderer</i>. Mrs. Warren is as old
+as the Old Testament; "for she hath cast down many wounded, yea, many
+strong men have been slain by her; her house is in the gates of hell,
+going down into the chamber of death." Here is no subtle ethics, as in
+<i>Widowers' Houses</i>; for even those moderns who think it noble that a
+woman should throw away her honour, surely cannot think it especially
+noble that she should sell it. Here is no lighting up by laughter,
+astonishment, and happy coincidence, as in <i>You Never Can Tell</i>. The
+play is a pure tragedy about a permanent and quite plain human problem;
+the problem is as plain and permanent, the tragedy is as proud and pure,
+as in <i>&OElig;dipus</i> or <i>Macbeth</i>. This play was presented in the ordinary
+way for public performance and was suddenly stopped by the Censor of
+Plays.</p>
+
+<p>The Censor of Plays is a small and acci<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>dental eighteenth-century
+official. Like nearly all the powers which Englishmen now respect as
+ancient and rooted, he is very recent. Novels and newspapers still talk
+of the English aristocracy that came over with William the Conqueror.
+Little of our effective oligarchy is as old as the Reformation; and none
+of it came over with William the Conqueror. Some of the older English
+landlords came over with William of Orange; the rest have come by
+ordinary alien immigration. In the same way we always talk of the
+Victorian woman (with her smelling salts and sentiment) as the
+old-fashioned woman. But she really was a quite new-fashioned woman; she
+considered herself, and was, an advance in delicacy and civilisation
+upon the coarse and candid Elizabethan woman to whom we are now
+returning. We are never oppressed by old things; it is recent things
+that can really oppress. And in accordance with this principle modern
+England has accepted, as if it were a part of perennial morality, a
+tenth-rate job of Walpole's worst days called the Censorship of the
+Drama. Just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century parvenus to
+date from Hastings, just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century
+ladies to date from Eve, so they have supposed the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> eighteenth-century
+Censorship to date from Sinai. The origin of the thing was in truth
+purely political. Its first and principal achievement was to prevent
+Fielding from writing plays; not at all because the plays were coarse,
+but because they criticised the Government. Fielding was a free writer;
+but they did not resent his sexual freedom; the Censor would not have
+objected if he had torn away the most intimate curtains of decency or
+rent the last rag from private life. What the Censor disliked was his
+rending the curtain from public life. There is still much of that spirit
+in our country; there are no affairs which men seek so much to cover up
+as public affairs. But the thing was done somewhat more boldly and
+baldly in Walpole's day; and the Censorship of plays has its origin, not
+merely in tyranny, but in a quite trifling and temporary and partisan
+piece of tyranny; a thing in its nature far more ephemeral, far less
+essential, than Ship Money. Perhaps its brightest moment was when the
+office of censor was held by that filthy writer, Colman the younger; and
+when he gravely refused to license a work by the author of <i>Our
+Village</i>. Few funnier notions can ever have actually been facts than
+this notion that the restraint and chastity of George<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> Colman saved the
+English public from the eroticism and obscenity of Miss Mitford.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the play; and such was the power that stopped the play. A
+private man wrote it; another private man forbade it; nor was there any
+difference between Mr. Shaw's authority and Mr. Redford's, except that
+Mr. Shaw did defend his action on public grounds and Mr. Redford did
+not. The dramatist had simply been suppressed by a despot; and what was
+worse (because it was modern) by a silent and evasive despot; a despot
+in hiding. People talk about the pride of tyrants; but we at the present
+day suffer from the modesty of tyrants; from the shyness and the
+shrinking secrecy of the strong. Shaw's preface to <i>Mrs. Warren's
+Profession</i> was far more fit to be called a public document than the
+slovenly refusal of the individual official; it had more exactness, more
+universal application, more authority. Shaw on Redford was far more
+national and responsible than Redford on Shaw.</p>
+
+<p>The dramatist found in the quarrel one of the important occasions of his
+life, because the crisis called out something in him which is in many
+ways his highest quality&mdash;righteous indignation. As a mere matter of the
+art of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> controversy of course he carried the war into the enemy's camp
+at once. He did not linger over loose excuses for licence; he declared
+at once that the Censor was licentious, while he, Bernard Shaw, was
+clean. He did not discuss whether a Censorship ought to make the drama
+moral. He declared that it made the drama immoral. With a fine strategic
+audacity he attacked the Censor quite as much for what he permitted as
+for what he prevented. He charged him with encouraging all plays that
+attracted men to vice and only stopping those which discouraged them
+from it. Nor was this attitude by any means an idle paradox. Many plays
+appear (as Shaw pointed out) in which the prostitute and the procuress
+are practically obvious, and in which they are represented as revelling
+in beautiful surroundings and basking in brilliant popularity. The crime
+of Shaw was not that he introduced the Gaiety Girl; that had been done,
+with little enough decorum, in a hundred musical comedies. The crime of
+Shaw was that he introduced the Gaiety Girl, but did not represent her
+life as all gaiety. The pleasures of vice were already flaunted before
+the playgoers. It was the perils of vice that were carefully concealed
+from them. The gay adventures,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> the gorgeous dresses, the champagne and
+oysters, the diamonds and motor-cars, dramatists were allowed to drag
+all these dazzling temptations before any silly housemaid in the gallery
+who was grumbling at her wages. But they were not allowed to warn her of
+the vulgarity and the nausea, the dreary deceptions and the blasting
+diseases of that life. <i>Mrs. Warren's Profession</i> was not up to a
+sufficient standard of immorality; it was not spicy enough to pass the
+Censor. The acceptable and the accepted plays were those which made the
+fall of a woman fashionable and fascinating; for all the world as if the
+Censor's profession were the same as Mrs. Warren's profession.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the angle of Shaw's energetic attack; and it is not to be
+denied that there was exaggeration in it, and what is so much worse,
+omission. The argument might easily be carried too far; it might end
+with a scene of screaming torture in the Inquisition as a corrective to
+the too amiable view of a clergyman in <i>The Private Secretary</i>. But the
+controversy is definitely worth recording, if only as an excellent
+example of the author's aggressive attitude and his love of turning the
+tables in debate. Moreover, though this point of view involves a
+potential overstate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>ment, it also involves an important truth. One of
+the best points urged in the course of it was this, that though vice is
+punished in conventional drama, the punishment is not really impressive,
+because it is not inevitable or even probable. It does not arise out of
+the evil act. Years afterwards Bernard Shaw urged this argument again in
+connection with his friend Mr. Granville Barker's play of <i>Waste</i>, in
+which the woman dies from an illegal operation. Bernard Shaw said, truly
+enough, that if she had died from poison or a pistol shot it would have
+left everyone unmoved, for pistols do not in their nature follow female
+unchastity. Illegal operations very often do. The punishment was one
+which might follow the crime, not only in that case, but in many cases.
+Here, I think, the whole argument might be sufficiently cleared up by
+saying that the objection to such things on the stage is a purely
+artistic objection. There is nothing wrong in talking about an illegal
+operation; there are plenty of occasions when it would be very wrong not
+to talk about it. But it may easily be just a shade too ugly for the
+shape of any work of art. There is nothing wrong about being sick; but
+if Bernard Shaw wrote<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> a play in which all the characters expressed
+their dislike of animal food by vomiting on the stage, I think we should
+be justified in saying that the thing was outside, not the laws of
+morality, but the framework of civilised literature. The instinctive
+movement of repulsion which everyone has when hearing of the operation
+in <i>Waste</i> is not an ethical repulsion at all. But it is an &aelig;sthetic
+repulsion, and a right one.</p>
+
+<p>But I have only dwelt on this particular fighting phase because it
+leaves us facing the ultimate characteristics which I mentioned first.
+Bernard Shaw cares nothing for art; in comparison with morals, literally
+nothing. Bernard Shaw is a Puritan and his work is Puritan work. He has
+all the essentials of the old, virile and extinct Protestant type. In
+his work he is as ugly as a Puritan. He is as indecent as a Puritan. He
+is as full of gross words and sensual facts as a sermon of the
+seventeenth century. Up to this point of his life indeed hardly anyone
+would have dreamed of calling him a Puritan; he was called sometimes an
+anarchist, sometimes a buffoon, sometimes (by the more discerning stupid
+people) a prig. His attitude towards current problems was felt to be
+arresting and even indecent; I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> do not think that anyone thought of
+connecting it with the old Calvinistic morality. But Shaw, who knew
+better than the Shavians, was at this moment on the very eve of
+confessing his moral origin. The next book of plays he produced
+(including The <i>Devil's Disciple</i>, <i>Captain Brassbound's Conversion</i>,
+and <i>C&aelig;sar and Cleopatra</i>), actually bore the title of <i>Plays for
+Puritans</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The play called <i>The Devil's Disciple</i> has great merits, but the merits
+are incidental. Some of its jokes are serious and important, but its
+general plan can only be called a joke. Almost alone among Bernard
+Shaw's plays (except of course such things as <i>How he Lied to her
+Husband</i> and <i>The Admirable Bashville</i>) this drama does not turn on any
+very plain pivot of ethical or philosophical conviction. The artistic
+idea seems to be the notion of a melodrama in which all the conventional
+melodramatic situations shall suddenly take unconventional turns. Just
+where the melodramatic clergyman would show courage he appears to show
+cowardice; just where the melodramatic sinner would confess his love he
+confesses his indifference. This is a little too like the Shaw of the
+newspaper critics rather than the Shaw of reality. There are indeed
+present in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> play two of the writer's principal moral conceptions.
+The first is the idea of a great heroic action coming in a sense from
+nowhere; that is, not coming from any commonplace motive; being born in
+the soul in naked beauty, coming with its own authority and testifying
+only to itself. Shaw's agent does not act towards something, but from
+something. The hero dies, not because he desires heroism, but because he
+has it. So in this particular play the Devil's Disciple finds that his
+own nature will not permit him to put the rope around another man's
+neck; he has no reasons of desire, affection, or even equity; his death
+is a sort of divine whim. And in connection with this the dramatist
+introduces another favourite moral; the objection to perpetual playing
+upon the motive of sex. He deliberately lures the onlooker into the net
+of Cupid in order to tell him with salutary decision that Cupid is not
+there at all. Millions of melodramatic dramatists have made a man face
+death for the woman he loves; Shaw makes him face death for the woman he
+does not love&mdash;merely in order to put woman in her place. He objects to
+that idolatry of sexualism which makes it the fountain of all forcible
+enthusiasms; he dislikes the amorous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> drama which makes the female the
+only key to the male. He is Feminist in politics, but Anti-feminist in
+emotion. His key to most problems is, "Ne cherchez pas la femme."</p>
+
+<p>As has been observed, the incidental felicities of the play are frequent
+and memorable, especially those connected with the character of General
+Burgoyne, the real full-blooded, free-thinking eighteenth century
+gentleman, who was much too much of an aristocrat not to be a liberal.
+One of the best thrusts in all the Shavian fencing matches is that which
+occurs when Richard Dudgeon, condemned to be hanged, asks rhetorically
+why he cannot be shot like a soldier. "Now there you speak like a
+civilian," replies General Burgoyne. "Have you formed any conception of
+the condition of marksmanship in the British Army?" Excellent, too, is
+the passage in which his subordinate speaks of crushing the enemy in
+America, and Burgoyne asks him who will crush their enemies in England,
+snobbery and jobbery and incurable carelessness and sloth. And in one
+sentence towards the end, Shaw reaches a wider and more genial
+comprehension of mankind than he shows anywhere else; "it takes all
+sorts to make a world, saints as well as soldiers." If Shaw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> had
+remembered that sentence on other occasions he would have avoided his
+mistake about C&aelig;sar and Brutus. It is not only true that it takes all
+sorts to make a world; but the world cannot succeed without its
+failures. Perhaps the most doubtful point of all in the play is why it
+is a play for Puritans; except the hideous picture of a Calvinistic home
+is meant to destroy Puritanism. And indeed in this connection it is
+constantly necessary to fall back upon the facts of which I have spoken
+at the beginning of this brief study; it is necessary especially to
+remember that Shaw could in all probability speak of Puritanism from the
+inside. In that domestic circle which took him to hear Moody and Sankey,
+in that domestic circle which was teetotal even when it was intoxicated,
+in that atmosphere and society Shaw might even have met the monstrous
+mother in <i>The Devil's Disciple</i>, the horrible old woman who declares
+that she has hardened her heart to hate her children, because the heart
+of man is desperately wicked, the old ghoul who has made one of her
+children an imbecile and the other an outcast. Such types do occur in
+small societies drunk with the dismal wine of Puritan determinism. It is
+possible that there were among Irish<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> Calvinists people who denied that
+charity was a Christian virtue. It is possible that among Puritans there
+were people who thought a heart was a kind of heart disease. But it is
+enough to make one tear one's hair to think that a man of genius
+received his first impressions in so small a corner of Europe that he
+could for a long time suppose that this Puritanism was current among
+Christian men. The question, however, need not detain us, for the batch
+of plays contained two others about which it is easier to speak.</p>
+
+<p>The third play in order in the series called <i>Plays for Puritans</i> is a
+very charming one; <i>Captain Brassbound's Conversion</i>. This also turns,
+as does so much of the C&aelig;sar drama, on the idea of vanity of
+revenge&mdash;the idea that it is too slight and silly a thing for a man to
+allow to occupy and corrupt his consciousness. It is not, of course, the
+morality that is new here, but the touch of cold laughter in the core of
+the morality. Many saints and sages have denounced vengeance. But they
+treated vengeance as something too great for man. "Vengeance is Mine,
+saith the Lord; I will repay." Shaw treats vengeance as something too
+small for man&mdash;a monkey trick he ought to have outlived, a childish
+storm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> of tears which he ought to be able to control. In the story in
+question Captain Brassbound has nourished through his whole erratic
+existence, racketting about all the unsavoury parts of Africa&mdash;a mission
+of private punishment which appears to him as a mission of holy justice.
+His mother has died in consequence of a judge's decision, and Brassbound
+roams and schemes until the judge falls into his hands. Then a pleasant
+society lady, Lady Cicely Waynefleet tells him in an easy conversational
+undertone&mdash;a rivulet of speech which ripples while she is mending his
+coat&mdash;that he is making a fool of himself, that his wrong is irrelevant,
+that his vengeance is objectless, that he would be much better if he
+flung his morbid fancy away for ever; in short, she tells him he is
+ruining himself for the sake of ruining a total stranger. Here again we
+have the note of the economist, the hatred of mere loss. Shaw (one might
+almost say) dislikes murder, not so much because it wastes the life of
+the corpse as because it wastes the time of the murderer. If he were
+endeavouring to persuade one of his moon-lighting fellow-countrymen not
+to shoot his landlord, I can imagine him explaining with benevolent
+emphasis that it was not so much<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> a question of losing a life as of
+throwing away a bullet. But indeed the Irish comparison alone suggests a
+doubt which wriggles in the recesses of my mind about the complete
+reliability of the philosophy of Lady Cicely Waynefleet, the complete
+finality of the moral of <i>Captain Brassbound's Conversion</i>. Of course,
+it was very natural in an aristocrat like Lady Cicely Waynefleet to wish
+to let sleeping dogs lie, especially those whom Mr. Blatchford calls
+under-dogs. Of course it was natural for her to wish everything to be
+smooth and sweet-tempered. But I have the obstinate question in the
+corner of my brain, whether if a few Captain Brassbounds did revenge
+themselves on judges, the quality of our judges might not materially
+improve.</p>
+
+<p>When this doubt is once off one's conscience one can lose oneself in the
+bottomless beatitude of Lady Cicely Waynefleet, one of the most living
+and laughing things that her maker has made. I do not know any stronger
+way of stating the beauty of the character than by saying that it was
+written specially for Ellen Terry, and that it is, with Beatrice, one of
+the very few characters in which the dramatist can claim some part of
+her triumph.</p>
+
+<p>We may now pass to the more important<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> of the plays. For some time
+Bernard Shaw would seem to have been brooding upon the soul of Julius
+C&aelig;sar. There must always be a strong human curiosity about the soul of
+Julius C&aelig;sar; and, among other things, about whether he had a soul. The
+conjunction of Shaw and C&aelig;sar has about it something smooth and
+inevitable; for this decisive reason, that C&aelig;sar is really the only
+great man of history to whom the Shaw theories apply. C&aelig;sar <i>was</i> a Shaw
+hero. C&aelig;sar was merciful without being in the least pitiful; his mercy
+was colder than justice. C&aelig;sar was a conqueror without being in any
+hearty sense a soldier; his courage was lonelier than fear. C&aelig;sar was a
+demagogue without being a democrat. In the same way Bernard Shaw is a
+demagogue without being a democrat. If he had tried to prove his
+principle from any of the other heroes or sages of mankind he would have
+found it much more difficult. Napoleon achieved more miraculous
+conquest; but during his most conquering epoch he was a burning boy
+suicidally in love with a woman far beyond his age. Joan of Arc achieved
+far more instant and incredible worldly success; but Joan of Arc
+achieved worldly success because she believed in another world.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> Nelson
+was a figure fully as fascinating and dramatically decisive; but Nelson
+was "romantic"; Nelson was a devoted patriot and a devoted lover.
+Alexander was passionate; Cromwell could shed tears; Bismarck had some
+suburban religion; Frederick was a poet; Charlemagne was fond of
+children. But Julius C&aelig;sar attracted Shaw not less by his positive than
+by his negative enormousness. Nobody can say with certainty that C&aelig;sar
+cared for anything. It is unjust to call C&aelig;sar an egoist; for there is
+no proof that he cared even for C&aelig;sar. He may not have been either an
+atheist or a pessimist. But he may have been; that is exactly the rub.
+He may have been an ordinary decently good man slightly deficient in
+spiritual expansiveness. On the other hand, he may have been the
+incarnation of paganism in the sense that Christ was the incarnation of
+Christianity. As Christ expressed how great a man can be humble and
+humane, C&aelig;sar may have expressed how great a man can be frigid and
+flippant. According to most legends Antichrist was to come soon after
+Christ. One has only to suppose that Antichrist came shortly before
+Christ; and Antichrist might very well be C&aelig;sar.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>It is, I think, no injustice to Bernard Shaw to say that he does not
+attempt to make his C&aelig;sar superior except in this naked and negative
+sense. There is no suggestion, as there is in the Jehovah of the Old
+Testament, that the very cruelty of the higher being conceals some
+tremendous and even tortured love. C&aelig;sar is superior to other men not
+because he loves more, but because he hates less. C&aelig;sar is magnanimous
+not because he is warm-hearted enough to pardon, but because he is not
+warm-hearted enough to avenge. There is no suggestion anywhere in the
+play that he is hiding any great genial purpose or powerful tenderness
+towards men. In order to put this point beyond a doubt the dramatist has
+introduced a soliloquy of C&aelig;sar alone with the Sphinx. There if anywhere
+he would have broken out into ultimate brotherhood or burning pity for
+the people. But in that scene between the Sphinx and C&aelig;sar, C&aelig;sar is as
+cold and as lonely and as dead as the Sphinx.</p>
+
+<p>But whether the Shavian C&aelig;sar is a sound ideal or no, there can be
+little doubt that he is a very fine reality. Shaw has done nothing
+greater as a piece of artistic creation. If the man is a little like a
+statue, it is a statue by a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> great sculptor; a statue of the best
+period. If his nobility is a little negative in its character, it is the
+negative darkness of the great dome of night; not as in some "new
+moralities" the mere mystery of the coal-hole. Indeed, this somewhat
+austere method of work is very suitable to Shaw when he is serious.
+There is nothing Gothic about his real genius; he could not build a
+medi&aelig;val cathedral in which laughter and terror are twisted together in
+stone, molten by mystical passion. He can build, by way of amusement, a
+Chinese pagoda; but when he is in earnest, only a Roman temple. He has a
+keen eye for truth; but he is one of those people who like, as the
+saying goes, to put down the truth in black and white. He is always
+girding and jeering at romantics and idealists because they will not put
+down the truth in black and white. But black and white are not the only
+two colours in the world. The modern man of science who writes down a
+fact in black and white is not more but less accurate than the medi&aelig;val
+monk who wrote it down in gold and scarlet, sea-green and turquoise.
+Nevertheless, it is a good thing that the more austere method should
+exist separately, and that some men should be specially good at it.
+Bernard Shaw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> is specially good at it; he is pre-eminently a black and
+white artist.</p>
+
+<p>And as a study in black and white nothing could be better than this
+sketch of Julius C&aelig;sar. He is not so much represented as "bestriding the
+earth like a Colossus" (which is indeed a rather comic attitude for a
+hero to stand in), but rather walking the earth with a sort of stern
+levity, lightly touching the planet and yet spurning it away like a
+stone. He walks like a winged man who has chosen to fold his wings.
+There is something creepy even about his kindness; it makes the men in
+front of him feel as if they were made of glass. The nature of the
+C&aelig;sarian mercy is massively suggested. C&aelig;sar dislikes a massacre, not
+because it is a great sin, but because it is a small sin. It is felt
+that he classes it with a flirtation or a fit of the sulks; a senseless
+temporary subjugation of man's permanent purpose by his passing and
+trivial feelings. He will plunge into slaughter for a great purpose,
+just as he plunges into the sea. But to be stung into such action he
+deems as undignified as to be tipped off the pier. In a singularly fine
+passage Cleopatra, having hired assassins to stab an enemy, appeals to
+her wrongs as justifying her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> revenge, and says, "If you can find one
+man in all Africa who says that I did wrong, I will be crucified by my
+own slaves." "If you can find one man in all the world," replies C&aelig;sar,
+"who can see that you did wrong, he will either conquer the world as I
+have done or be crucified by it." That is the high water mark of this
+heathen sublimity; and we do not feel it inappropriate, or unlike Shaw,
+when a few minutes afterwards the hero is saluted with a blaze of
+swords.</p>
+
+<p>As usually happens in the author's works, there is even more about
+Julius C&aelig;sar in the preface than there is in the play. But in the
+preface I think the portrait is less imaginative and more fanciful. He
+attempts to connect his somewhat chilly type of superman with the heroes
+of the old fairy tales. But Shaw should not talk about the fairy tales;
+for he does not feel them from the inside. As I have said, on all this
+side of historic and domestic traditions Bernard Shaw is weak and
+deficient. He does not approach them as fairy tales, as if he were four,
+but as "folk-lore" as if he were forty. And he makes a big mistake about
+them which he would never have made if he had kept his birthday and hung
+up his stocking, and generally kept<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> alive inside him the firelight of a
+home. The point is so peculiarly characteristic of Bernard Shaw, and is
+indeed so much of a summary of his most interesting assertion and his
+most interesting error, that it deserves a word by itself, though it is
+a word which must be remembered in connection with nearly all the other
+plays.</p>
+
+<p>His primary and defiant proposition is the Calvinistic proposition: that
+the elect do not earn virtue, but possess it. The goodness of a man does
+not consist in trying to be good, but in being good. Julius C&aelig;sar
+prevails over other people by possessing more <i>virtus</i> than they; not by
+having striven or suffered or bought his virtue; not because he has
+struggled heroically, but because he is a hero. So far Bernard Shaw is
+only what I have called him at the beginning; he is simply a
+seventeenth-century Calvinist. C&aelig;sar is not saved by works, or even by
+faith; he is saved because he is one of the elect. Unfortunately for
+himself, however, Bernard Shaw went back further than the seventeenth
+century; and professing his opinion to be yet more antiquated, invoked
+the original legends of mankind. He argued that when the fairy tales
+gave Jack the Giant Killer a coat of dark<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>ness or a magic sword it
+removed all credit from Jack in the "common moral" sense; he won as
+C&aelig;sar won only because he was superior. I will confess, in passing, to
+the conviction that Bernard Shaw in the course of his whole simple and
+strenuous life was never quite so near to hell as at the moment when he
+wrote down those words. But in this question of fairy tales my immediate
+point is, not how near he was to hell, but how very far off he was from
+fairyland. That notion about the hero with a magic sword being the
+superman with a magic superiority is the caprice of a pedant; no child,
+boy, or man ever felt it in the story of Jack the Giant Killer.
+Obviously the moral is all the other way. Jack's fairy sword and
+invisible coat are clumsy expedients for enabling him to fight at all
+with something which is by nature stronger. They are a rough, savage
+substitute for psychological descriptions of special valour or unwearied
+patience. But no one in his five wits can doubt that the idea of "Jack
+the Giant Killer" is exactly the opposite to Shaw's idea. If it were not
+a tale of effort and triumph hardly earned it would not be called "Jack
+the Giant Killer." If it were a tale of the victory of natural
+advantages it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> would be called "Giant the Jack Killer." If the teller of
+fairy tales had merely wanted to urge that some beings are born stronger
+than others he would not have fallen back on elaborate tricks of weapon
+and costume for conquering an ogre. He would simply have let the ogre
+conquer. I will not speak of my own emotions in connection with this
+incredibly caddish doctrine that the strength of the strong is
+admirable, but not the valour of the weak. It is enough to say that I
+have to summon up the physical presence of Shaw, his frank gestures,
+kind eyes, and exquisite Irish voice, to cure me of a mere sensation of
+contempt. But I do not dwell upon the point for any such purpose; but
+merely to show how we must be always casting back to those concrete
+foundations with which we began. Bernard Shaw, as I have said, was never
+national enough to be domestic; he was never a part of his past; hence
+when he tries to interpret tradition he comes a terrible cropper, as in
+this case. Bernard Shaw (I strongly suspect) began to disbelieve in
+Santa Claus at a discreditably early age. And by this time Santa Claus
+has avenged himself by taking away the key of all the prehistoric
+scriptures; so that a noble and honourable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> artist flounders about like
+any German professor. Here is a whole fairy literature which is almost
+exclusively devoted to the unexpected victory of the weak over the
+strong; and Bernard Shaw manages to make it mean the inevitable victory
+of the strong over the weak&mdash;which, among other things, would not make a
+story at all. It all comes of that mistake about not keeping his
+birthday. A man should be always tied to his mother's apron strings; he
+should always have a hold on his childhood, and be ready at intervals to
+start anew from a childish standpoint. Theologically the thing is best
+expressed by saying, "You must be born again." Secularly it is best
+expressed by saying, "You must keep your birthday." Even if you will not
+be born again, at least remind yourself occasionally that you were born
+once.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the incidental wit in the C&aelig;sarian drama is excellent although
+it is upon the whole less spontaneous and perfect than in the previous
+plays. One of its jests may be mentioned in passing, not merely to draw
+attention to its failure (though Shaw is brilliant enough to afford many
+failures) but because it is the best opportunity for mentioning one of
+the writer's minor notions to which he obstinately<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> adheres. He
+describes the Ancient Briton in C&aelig;sar's train as being exactly like a
+modern respectable Englishman. As a joke for a Christmas pantomime this
+would be all very well; but one expects the jokes of Bernard Shaw to
+have some intellectual root, however fantastic the flower. And obviously
+all historic common sense is against the idea that that dim Druid
+people, whoever they were, who dwelt in our land before it was lit up by
+Rome or loaded with varied invasions, were a precise facsimile of the
+commercial society of Birmingham or Brighton. But it is a part of the
+Puritan in Bernard Shaw, a part of the taut and high-strung quality of
+his mind, that he will never admit of any of his jokes that it was only
+a joke. When he has been most witty he will passionately deny his own
+wit; he will say something which Voltaire might envy and then declare
+that he has got it all out of a Blue book. And in connection with this
+eccentric type of self-denial, we may notice this mere detail about the
+Ancient Briton. Someone faintly hinted that a blue Briton when first
+found by C&aelig;sar might not be quite like Mr. Broadbent; at the touch Shaw
+poured forth a torrent of theory, explaining that climate was the only
+thing that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> affected nationality; and that whatever races came into the
+English or Irish climate would become like the English or Irish. Now the
+modern theory of race is certainly a piece of stupid materialism; it is
+an attempt to explain the things we are sure of, France, Scotland, Rome,
+Japan, by means of the things we are not sure of at all, prehistoric
+conjectures, Celts, Mongols, and Iberians. Of course there is a reality
+in race; but there is no reality in the theories of race offered by some
+ethnological professors. Blood, perhaps, is thicker than water; but
+brains are sometimes thicker than anything. But if there is one thing
+yet more thick and obscure and senseless than this theory of the
+omnipotence of race it is, I think, that to which Shaw has fled for
+refuge from it; this doctrine of the omnipotence of climate. Climate
+again is something; but if climate were everything, Anglo-Indians would
+grow more and more to look like Hindoos, which is far from being the
+case. Something in the evil spirit of our time forces people always to
+pretend to have found some material and mechanical explanation. Bernard
+Shaw has filled all his last days with affirmations about the divinity
+of the non-mechanical part of man, the sacred quality in creation and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>
+choice. Yet it never seems to have occurred to him that the true key to
+national differentiations is the key of the will and not of the
+environment. It never crosses the modern mind to fancy that perhaps a
+people is chiefly influenced by how that people has chosen to behave. If
+I have to choose between race and weather I prefer race; I would rather
+be imprisoned and compelled by ancestors who were once alive than by mud
+and mists which never were. But I do not propose to be controlled by
+either; to me my national history is a chain of multitudinous choices.
+It is neither blood nor rain that has made England, but hope, the thing
+that all those dead men have desired. France was not France because she
+was made to be by the skulls of the Celts or by the sun of Gaul. France
+was France because she chose.</p>
+
+<p>I have stepped on one side from the immediate subject because this is as
+good an instance as any we are likely to come across of a certain almost
+extraneous fault which does deface the work of Bernard Shaw. It is a
+fault only to be mentioned when we have made the solidity of the merits
+quite clear. To say that Shaw is merely making game of people is
+demonstrably ridiculous; at least a fairly sys<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>tematic philosophy can be
+traced through all his jokes, and one would not insist on such a unity
+in all the songs of Mr. Dan Leno. I have already pointed out that the
+genius of Shaw is really too harsh and earnest rather than too merry and
+irresponsible. I shall have occasion to point out later that Shaw is, in
+one very serious sense, the very opposite of paradoxical. In any case if
+any real student of Shaw says that Shaw is only making a fool of him, we
+can only say that of that student it is very superfluous for anyone to
+make a fool. But though the dramatist's jests are always serious and
+generally obvious, he is really affected from time to time by a certain
+spirit of which that climate theory is a case&mdash;a spirit that can only be
+called one of senseless ingenuity. I suppose it is a sort of nemesis of
+wit; the skidding of a wheel in the height of its speed. Perhaps it is
+connected with the nomadic nature of his mind. That lack of roots, this
+remoteness from ancient instincts and traditions is responsible for a
+certain bleak and heartless extravagance of statement on certain
+subjects which makes the author really unconvincing as well as
+exaggerative; satires that are <i>saugrenu</i>, jokes that are rather silly
+than wild, statements which even considered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> as lies have no symbolic
+relation to truth. They are exaggerations of something that does not
+exist. For instance, if a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical
+excuse for drunkenness and gluttony that would be false, but it would
+have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that
+Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by poulterers and wine
+merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which
+is not so much false as startlingly and arrestingly foolish. He might as
+well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to
+sell wedding rings. Or again, take the case of nationality and the unit
+of patriotism. If a man said that all boundaries between clans,
+kingdoms, or empires were nonsensical or non-existent, that would be a
+fallacy, but a consistent and philosophical fallacy. But when Mr.
+Bernard Shaw says that England matters so little that the British Empire
+might very well give up these islands to Germany, he has not only got
+hold of the sow by the wrong ear but the wrong sow by the wrong ear; a
+mythical sow, a sow that is not there at all. If Britain is unreal, the
+British Empire must be a thousand times more unreal. It is as if one
+said, "I do not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> believe that Michael Scott ever had any existence; but
+I am convinced, in spite of the absurd legend, that he had a shadow."</p>
+
+<p>As has been said already, there must be some truth in every popular
+impression. And the impression that Shaw, the most savagely serious man
+of his time, is a mere music-hall artist must have reference to such
+rare outbreaks as these. As a rule his speeches are full, not only of
+substance, but of substances, materials like pork, mahogany, lead, and
+leather. There is no man whose arguments cover a more Napoleonic map of
+detail. It is true that he jokes; but wherever he is he has topical
+jokes, one might almost say family jokes. If he talks to tailors he can
+allude to the last absurdity about buttons. If he talks to the soldiers
+he can see the exquisite and exact humour of the last gun-carriage. But
+when all his powerful practicality is allowed, there does run through
+him this erratic levity, an explosion of ineptitude. It is a queer
+quality in literature. It is a sort of cold extravagance; and it has
+made him all his enemies.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="The_Philosopher" id="The_Philosopher"></a><i>The Philosopher</i></h2>
+
+<p>I should suppose that <i>C&aelig;sar and Cleopatra</i> marks about the turning tide
+of Bernard Shaw's fortune and fame. Up to this time he had known glory,
+but never success. He had been wondered at as something brilliant and
+barren, like a meteor; but no one would accept him as a sun, for the
+test of a sun is that it can make something grow. Practically speaking
+the two qualities of a modern drama are, that it should play and that it
+should pay. It had been proved over and over again in weighty dramatic
+criticisms, in careful readers' reports, that the plays of Shaw could
+never play or pay; that the public did not want wit and the wars of
+intellect. And just about the time that this had been finally proved,
+the plays of Bernard Shaw promised to play like <i>Charley's Aunt</i> and to
+pay like Colman's Mustard. It is a fact in which we can all rejoice, not
+only because it redeems the reputation of Bernard Shaw, but because it
+redeems the character of the English people. All that is bravest in
+human nature, open challenge and unexpected wit and angry conviction,
+are not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> so very unpopular as the publishers and managers in their
+motor-cars have been in the habit of telling us. But exactly because we
+have come to a turning point in the man's career I propose to interrupt
+the mere catalogue of his plays and to treat his latest series rather as
+the proclamations of an acknowledged prophet. For the last plays,
+especially <i>Man and Superman</i>, are such that his whole position must be
+re-stated before attacking them seriously.</p>
+
+<p>For two reasons I have called this concluding series of plays not again
+by the name of "The Dramatist," but by the general name of "The
+Philosopher." The first reason is that given above, that we have come to
+the time of his triumph and may therefore treat him as having gained
+complete possession of a pulpit of his own. But there is a second
+reason: that it was just about this time that he began to create not
+only a pulpit of his own, but a church and creed of his own. It is a
+very vast and universal religion; and it is not his fault that he is the
+only member of it. The plainer way of putting it is this: that here, in
+the hour of his earthly victory, there dies in him the old mere denier,
+the mere dynamiter of criticism. In the warmth of popularity he begins
+to wish to put his faith<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> positively; to offer some solid key to all
+creation. Perhaps the irony in the situation is this: that all the
+crowds are acclaiming him as the blasting and hypercritical buffoon,
+while he himself is seriously rallying his synthetic power, and with a
+grave face telling himself that it is time he had a faith to preach. His
+final success as a sort of charlatan coincides with his first grand
+failures as a theologian.</p>
+
+<p>For this reason I have deliberately called a halt in his dramatic
+career, in order to consider these two essential points: What did the
+mass of Englishmen, who had now learnt to admire him, imagine his point
+of view to be? and second, What did he imagine it to be? or, if the
+phrase be premature, What did he imagine it was going to be? In his
+latest work, especially in <i>Man and Superman</i>, Shaw has become a
+complete and colossal mystic. That mysticism does grow quite rationally
+out of his older arguments; but very few people ever troubled to trace
+the connection. In order to do so it is necessary to say what was, at
+the time of his first success, the public impression of Shaw's
+philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is an irritating and pathetic thing that the three most popular
+phrases about Shaw are false. Modern criticism, like all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> weak things,
+is overloaded with words. In a healthy condition of language a man finds
+it very difficult to say the right thing, but at last says it. In this
+empire of journalese a man finds it so very easy to say the wrong thing
+that he never thinks of saying anything else. False or meaningless
+phrases lie so ready to his hand that it is easier to use them than not
+to use them. These wrong terms picked up through idleness are retained
+through habit, and so the man has begun to think wrong almost before he
+has begun to think at all. Such lumbering logomachy is always injurious
+and oppressive to men of spirit, imagination or intellectual honour, and
+it has dealt very recklessly and wrongly with Bernard Shaw. He has
+contrived to get about three newspaper phrases tied to his tail; and
+those newspaper phrases are all and separately wrong. The three
+superstitions about him, it will be conceded, are generally these: first
+that he desires "problem plays," second that he is "paradoxical," and
+third that in his dramas as elsewhere he is specially "a Socialist." And
+the interesting thing is that when we come to his philosophy, all these
+three phrases are quite peculiarly inapplicable.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>To take the plays first, there is a general disposition to describe that
+type of intimate or defiant drama which he approves as "the problem
+play." Now the serious modern play is, as a rule, the very reverse of a
+problem play; for there can be no problem unless both points of view are
+equally and urgently presented. <i>Hamlet</i> really is a problem play
+because at the end of it one is really in doubt as to whether upon the
+author's showing Hamlet is something more than a man or something less.
+<i>Henry IV</i> and <i>Henry V</i> are really problem plays; in this sense, that
+the reader or spectator is really doubtful whether the high but harsh
+efficiency, valour, and ambition of Henry V are an improvement on his
+old blackguard camaraderie; and whether he was not a better man when he
+was a thief. This hearty and healthy doubt is very common in
+Shakespeare; I mean a doubt that exists in the writer as well as in the
+reader. But Bernard Shaw is far too much of a Puritan to tolerate such
+doubts about points which he counts essential. There is no sort of doubt
+that the young lady in <i>Arms and the Man</i> is improved by losing her
+ideals. There is no sort of doubt that Captain Brassbound is improved by
+giving up the object of his life.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> But a better case can be found in
+something that both dramatists have been concerned with; Shaw wrote
+<i>C&aelig;sar and Cleopatra</i>; Shakespeare wrote <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> and also
+<i>Julius C&aelig;sar</i>. And exactly what annoys Bernard Shaw about Shakespeare's
+version is this: that Shakespeare has an open mind or, in other words,
+that Shakespeare has really written a problem play. Shakespeare sees
+quite as clearly as Shaw that Brutus is unpractical and ineffectual; but
+he also sees, what is quite as plain and practical a fact, that these
+ineffectual men do capture the hearts and influence the policies of
+mankind. Shaw would have nothing said in favour of Brutus; because
+Brutus is on the wrong side in politics. Of the actual problem of public
+and private morality, as it was presented to Brutus, he takes actually
+no notice at all. He can write the most energetic and outspoken of
+propaganda plays; but he cannot rise to a problem play. He cannot really
+divide his mind and let the two parts speak independently to each other.
+He has never, so to speak, actually split his head in two; though I
+daresay there are many other people who are willing to do it for him.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes, especially in his later plays, he allows his clear conviction
+to spoil even his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> admirable dialogue, making one side entirely weak, as
+in an Evangelical tract. I do not know whether in <i>Major Barbara</i> the
+young Greek professor was supposed to be a fool. As popular tradition
+(which I trust more than anything else) declared that he is drawn from a
+real Professor of my acquaintance, who is anything but a fool, I should
+imagine not. But in that case I am all the more mystified by the
+incredibly weak fight which he makes in the play in answer to the
+elephantine sophistries of Undershaft. It is really a disgraceful case,
+and almost the only case in Shaw of there being no fair fight between
+the two sides. For instance, the Professor mentions pity. Mr. Undershaft
+says with melodramatic scorn, "Pity! the scavenger of the Universe!" Now
+if any gentleman had said this to me, I should have replied, "If I
+permit you to escape from the point by means of metaphors, will you tell
+me whether you disapprove of scavengers?" Instead of this obvious
+retort, the miserable Greek professor only says, "Well then, love," to
+which Undershaft replies with unnecessary violence that he won't have
+the Greek professor's love, to which the obvious answer of course would
+be, "How the deuce can you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> prevent my loving you if I choose to do so?"
+Instead of this, as far as I remember, that abject Hellenist says
+nothing at all. I only mention this unfair dialogue, because it marks, I
+think, the recent hardening, for good or evil, of Shaw out of a
+dramatist into a mere philosopher, and whoever hardens into a
+philosopher may be hardening into a fanatic.</p>
+
+<p>And just as there is nothing really problematic in Shaw's mind, so there
+is nothing really paradoxical. The meaning of the word paradoxical may
+indeed be made the subject of argument. In Greek, of course, it simply
+means something which is against the received opinion; in that sense a
+missionary remonstrating with South Sea cannibals is paradoxical. But in
+the much more important world, where words are used and altered in the
+using, paradox does not mean merely this: it means at least something of
+which the antinomy or apparent inconsistency is sufficiently plain in
+the words used, and most commonly of all it means an idea expressed in a
+form which is verbally contradictory. Thus, for instance, the great
+saying, "He that shall lose his life, the same shall save it," is an
+example of what modern people mean by a paradox. If any learned person<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>
+should read this book (which seems immeasurably improbable) he can
+content himself with putting it this way, that the moderns mistakenly
+say paradox when they should say oxymoron. Ultimately, in any case, it
+may be agreed that we commonly mean by a paradox some kind of collision
+between what is seemingly and what is really true.</p>
+
+<p>Now if by paradox we mean truth inherent in a contradiction, as in the
+saying of Christ that I have quoted, it is a very curious fact that
+Bernard Shaw is almost entirely without paradox. Moreover, he cannot
+even understand a paradox. And more than this, paradox is about the only
+thing in the world that he does not understand. All his splendid vistas
+and startling suggestions arise from carrying some one clear principle
+further than it has yet been carried. His madness is all consistency,
+not inconsistency. As the point can hardly be made clear without
+examples, let us take one example, the subject of education. Shaw has
+been all his life preaching to grown-up people the profound truth that
+liberty and responsibility go together; that the reason why freedom is
+so often easily withheld, is simply that it is a terrible nuisance. This
+is true, though not the whole truth, of citizens;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> and so when Shaw
+comes to children he can only apply to them the same principle that he
+has already applied to citizens. He begins to play with the Herbert
+Spencer idea of teaching children by experience; perhaps the most
+fatuously silly idea that was ever gravely put down in print. On that
+there is no need to dwell; one has only to ask how the experimental
+method is to be applied to a precipice; and the theory no longer exists.
+But Shaw effected a further development, if possible more fantastic. He
+said that one should never tell a child anything without letting him
+hear the opposite opinion. That is to say, when you tell Tommy not to
+hit his sick sister on the temple, you must make sure of the presence of
+some Nietzscheite professor, who will explain to him that such a course
+might possibly serve to eliminate the unfit. When you are in the act of
+telling Susan not to drink out of the bottle labelled "poison," you must
+telegraph for a Christian Scientist, who will be ready to maintain that
+without her own consent it cannot do her any harm. What would happen to
+a child brought up on Shaw's principle I cannot conceive; I should think
+he would commit suicide in his bath. But that is not here the question.
+The point<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> is that this proposition seems quite sufficiently wild and
+startling to ensure that its author, if he escapes Hanwell, would reach
+the front rank of journalists, demagogues, or public entertainers. It is
+a perfect paradox, if a paradox only means something that makes one
+jump. But it is not a paradox at all in the sense of a contradiction. It
+is not a contradiction, but an enormous and outrageous consistency, the
+one principle of free thought carried to a point to which no other sane
+man would consent to carry it. Exactly what Shaw does not understand is
+the paradox; the unavoidable paradox of childhood. Although this child
+is much better than I, yet I must teach it. Although this being has much
+purer passions than I, yet I must control it. Although Tommy is quite
+right to rush towards a precipice, yet he must be stood in the corner
+for doing it. This contradiction is the only possible condition of
+having to do with children at all; anyone who talks about a child
+without feeling this paradox might just as well be talking about a
+merman. He has never even seen the animal. But this paradox Shaw in his
+intellectual simplicity cannot see; he cannot see it because it is a
+paradox. His only intellectual excitement is to carry one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> idea further
+and further across the world. It never occurs to him that it might meet
+another idea, and like the three winds in <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>, they
+might make a night of it. His only paradox is to pull out one thread or
+cord of truth longer and longer into waste and fantastic places. He does
+not allow for that deeper sort of paradox by which two opposite cords of
+truth become entangled in an inextricable knot. Still less can he be
+made to realise that it is often this knot which ties safely together
+the whole bundle of human life.</p>
+
+<p>This blindness to paradox everywhere perplexes his outlook. He cannot
+understand marriage because he will not understand the paradox of
+marriage; that the woman is all the more the house for not being the
+head of it. He cannot understand patriotism, because he will not
+understand the paradox of patriotism; that one is all the more human for
+not merely loving humanity. He does not understand Christianity because
+he will not understand the paradox of Christianity; that we can only
+really understand all myths when we know that one of them is true. I do
+not under-rate him for this anti-paradoxical temper; I concede that much
+of his finest and keenest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> work in the way of intellectual purification
+would have been difficult or impossible without it. But I say that here
+lies the limitation of that lucid and compelling mind; he cannot quite
+understand life, because he will not accept its contradictions.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is it by any means descriptive of Shaw to call him a Socialist; in
+so far as that word can be extended to cover an ethical attitude. He is
+the least social of all Socialists; and I pity the Socialist state that
+tries to manage him. This anarchism of his is not a question of thinking
+for himself; every decent man thinks for himself; it would be highly
+immodest to think for anybody else. Nor is it any instinctive licence or
+egoism; as I have said before, he is a man of peculiarly acute public
+conscience. The unmanageable part of him, the fact that he cannot be
+conceived as part of a crowd or as really and invisibly helping a
+movement, has reference to another thing in him, or rather to another
+thing not in him.</p>
+
+<p>The great defect of that fine intelligence is a failure to grasp and
+enjoy the things commonly called convention and tradition; which are
+foods upon which all human creatures must feed frequently if they are to
+live.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> Very few modern people of course have any idea of what they are.
+"Convention" is very nearly the same word as "democracy." It has again
+and again in history been used as an alternative word to Parliament. So
+far from suggesting anything stale or sober, the word convention rather
+conveys a hubbub; it is the coming together of men; every mob is a
+convention. In its secondary sense it means the common soul of such a
+crowd, its instinctive anger at the traitor or its instinctive
+salutation of the flag. Conventions may be cruel, they may be
+unsuitable, they may even be grossly superstitious or obscene; but there
+is one thing that they never are. Conventions are never dead. They are
+always full of accumulated emotions, the piled-up and passionate
+experiences of many generations asserting what they could not explain.
+To be inside any true convention, as the Chinese respect for parents or
+the European respect for children, is to be surrounded by something
+which whatever else it is is not leaden, lifeless or automatic,
+something which is taut and tingling with vitality at a hundred points,
+which is sensitive almost to madness and which is so much alive that it
+can kill. Now Bernard Shaw has always made this one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> immense mistake
+(arising out of that bad progressive education of his), the mistake of
+treating convention as a dead thing; treating it as if it were a mere
+physical environment like the pavement or the rain. Whereas it is a
+result of will; a rain of blessings and a pavement of good intentions.
+Let it be remembered that I am not discussing in what degree one should
+allow for tradition; I am saying that men like Shaw do not allow for it
+at all. If Shaw had found in early life that he was contradicted by
+<i>Bradshaw's Railway Guide</i> or even by the <i>Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica</i>, he
+would have felt at least that he might be wrong. But if he had found
+himself contradicted by his father and mother, he would have thought it
+all the more probable that he was right. If the issue of the last
+evening paper contradicted him he might be troubled to investigate or
+explain. That the human tradition of two thousand years contradicted him
+did not trouble him for an instant. That Marx was not with him was
+important. That Man was not with him was an irrelevant prehistoric joke.
+People have talked far too much about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw.
+Perhaps his only pure paradox is this almost unconscious one; that he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+has tended to think that because something has satisfied generations of
+men it must be untrue.</p>
+
+<p>Shaw is wrong about nearly all the things one learns early in life and
+while one is still simple. Most human beings start with certain facts of
+psychology to which the rest of life must be somewhat related. For
+instance, every man falls in love; and no man falls into free love. When
+he falls into that he calls it lust, and is always ashamed of it even
+when he boasts of it. That there is some connection between a love and a
+vow nearly every human being knows before he is eighteen. That there is
+a solid and instinctive connection between the idea of sexual ecstasy
+and the idea of some sort of almost suicidal constancy, this I say is
+simply the first fact in one's own psychology; boys and girls know it
+almost before they know their own language. How far it can be trusted,
+how it can best be dealt with, all that is another matter. But lovers
+lust after constancy more than after happiness; if you are in any sense
+prepared to give them what they ask, then what they ask, beyond all
+question, is an oath of final fidelity. Lovers may be lunatics; lovers
+may be children; lovers may be unfit for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> citizenship and outside human
+argument; you can take up that position if you will. But lovers do not
+only desire love; they desire marriage. The root of legal monogamy does
+not lie (as Shaw and his friends are for ever drearily asserting) in the
+fact that the man is a mere tyrant and the woman a mere slave. It lies
+in the fact that <i>if</i> their love for each other is the noblest and
+freest love conceivable, it can only find its heroic expression in both
+becoming slaves. I only mention this matter here as a matter which most
+of us do not need to be taught; for it was the first lesson of life. In
+after years we may make up what code or compromise about sex we like;
+but we all know that constancy, jealousy, and the personal pledge are
+natural and inevitable in sex; we do not feel any surprise when we see
+them either in a murder or in a valentine. We may or may not see wisdom
+in early marriages; but we know quite well that wherever the thing is
+genuine at all, early loves will mean early marriages. But Shaw had not
+learnt about this tragedy of the sexes, what the rustic ballads of any
+country on earth would have taught him. He had not learnt, what
+universal common sense has put into all the folk-lore of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> earth,
+that love cannot be thought of clearly for an instant except as
+monogamous. The old English ballads never sing the praises of "lovers."
+They always sing the praises of "true lovers," and that is the final
+philosophy of the question.</p>
+
+<p>The same is true of Mr. Shaw's refusal to understand the love of the
+land either in the form of patriotism or of private ownership. It is the
+attitude of an Irishman cut off from the soil of Ireland, retaining the
+audacity and even cynicism of the national type, but no longer fed from
+the roots with its pathos or its experience.</p>
+
+<p>This broader and more brotherly rendering of convention must be applied
+particularly to the conventions of the drama; since that is necessarily
+the most democratic of all the arts. And it will be found generally that
+most of the theatrical conventions rest on a real artistic basis. The
+Greek Unities, for instance, were not proper objects of the meticulous
+and trivial imitation of Seneca or Gabriel Harvey. But still less were
+they the right objects for the equally trivial and far more vulgar
+impatience of men like Macaulay. That a tale should, if possible, be
+told of one place or one day or a manageable number of characters is an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+ideal plainly rooted in an &aelig;sthetic instinct. But if this be so with the
+classical drama, it is yet more certainly so with romantic drama,
+against the somewhat decayed dignity of which Bernard Shaw was largely
+in rebellion. There was one point in particular upon which the Ibsenites
+claimed to have reformed the romantic convention which is worthy of
+special allusion.</p>
+
+<p>Shaw and all the other Ibsenites were fond of insisting that a defect in
+the romantic drama was its tendency to end with wedding-bells. Against
+this they set the modern drama of middle-age, the drama which described
+marriage itself instead of its poetic preliminaries. Now if Bernard Shaw
+had been more patient with popular tradition, more prone to think that
+there might be some sense in its survival, he might have seen this
+particular problem much more clearly. The old playwrights have left us
+plenty of plays of marriage and middle-age. <i>Othello</i> is as much about
+what follows the wedding-bells as <i>The Doll's House</i>. <i>Macbeth</i> is about
+a middle-aged couple as much as <i>Little Eyolf</i>. But if we ask ourselves
+what is the real difference, we shall, I think, find that it can fairly
+be stated thus. The old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> tragedies of marriage, though not love stories,
+are like love stories in this, that they work up to some act or stroke
+which is irrevocable as marriage is irrevocable; to the fact of death or
+of adultery.</p>
+
+<p>Now the reason why our fathers did not make marriage, in the middle-aged
+and static sense, the subject of their plays was a very simple one; it
+was that a play is a very bad place for discussing that topic. You
+cannot easily make a good drama out of the success or failure of a
+marriage, just as you could not make a good drama out of the growth of
+an oak tree or the decay of an empire. As Polonius very reasonably
+observed, it is too long. A happy love-affair will make a drama simply
+because it is dramatic; it depends on an ultimate yes or no. But a happy
+marriage is not dramatic; perhaps it would be less happy if it were. The
+essence of a romantic heroine is that she asks herself an intense
+question; but the essence of a sensible wife is that she is much too
+sensible to ask herself any questions at all. All the things that make
+monogamy a success are in their nature undramatic things, the silent
+growth of an instinctive confidence, the common wounds and victories,
+the accumulation of customs,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> the rich maturing of old jokes. Sane
+marriage is an untheatrical thing; it is therefore not surprising that
+most modern dramatists have devoted themselves to insane marriage.</p>
+
+<p>To summarise; before touching the philosophy which Shaw has ultimately
+adopted, we must quit the notion that we know it already and that it is
+hit off in such journalistic terms as these three. Shaw does not wish to
+multiply problem plays or even problems. He has such scepticism as is
+the misfortune of his age; but he has this dignified and courageous
+quality, that he does not come to ask questions but to answer them. He
+is not a paradox-monger; he is a wild logician, far too simple even to
+be called a sophist. He understands everything in life except its
+paradoxes, especially that ultimate paradox that the very things that we
+cannot comprehend are the things that we have to take for granted.
+Lastly, he is not especially social or collectivist. On the contrary, he
+rather dislikes men in the mass, though he can appreciate them
+individually. He has no respect for collective humanity in its two great
+forms; either in that momentary form which we call a mob, or in that
+enduring form which we call a convention.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>The general cosmic theory which can so far be traced through the earlier
+essays and plays of Bernard Shaw may be expressed in the image of
+Schopenhauer standing on his head. I cheerfully concede that
+Schopenhauer looks much nicer in that posture than in his original one,
+but I can hardly suppose that he feels more comfortable. The substance
+of the change is this. Roughly speaking, Schopenhauer maintained that
+life is unreasonable. The intellect, if it could be impartial, would
+tell us to cease; but a blind partiality, an instinct quite distinct
+from thought, drives us on to take desperate chances in an essentially
+bankrupt lottery. Shaw seems to accept this dingy estimate of the
+rational outlook, but adds a somewhat arresting comment. Schopenhauer
+had said, "Life is unreasonable; so much the worse for all living
+things." Shaw said, "Life is unreasonable; so much the worse for
+reason." Life is the higher call, life we must follow. It may be that
+there is some undetected fallacy in reason itself. Perhaps the whole man
+cannot get inside his own head any more than he can jump down his own
+throat. But there is about the need to live, to suffer, and to create
+that imperative quality which can truly be called supernatural, of whose
+voice it can indeed be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> said that it speaks with authority, and not as
+the scribes.</p>
+
+<p>This is the first and finest item of the original Bernard Shaw creed:
+that if reason says that life is irrational, life must be content to
+reply that reason is lifeless; life is the primary thing, and if reason
+impedes it, then reason must be trodden down into the mire amid the most
+abject superstitions. In the ordinary sense it would be specially absurd
+to suggest that Shaw desires man to be a mere animal. For that is always
+associated with lust or incontinence; and Shaw's ideals are strict,
+hygienic, and even, one might say, old-maidish. But there is a mystical
+sense in which one may say literally that Shaw desires man to be an
+animal. That is, he desires him to cling first and last to life, to the
+spirit of animation, to the thing which is common to him and the birds
+and plants. Man should have the blind faith of a beast: he should be as
+mystically immutable as a cow, and as deaf to sophistries as a fish.
+Shaw does not wish him to be a philosopher or an artist; he does not
+even wish him to be a man, so much as he wishes him to be, in this holy
+sense, an animal. He must follow the flag of life as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> fiercely from
+conviction as all other creatures follow it from instinct.</p>
+
+<p>But this Shavian worship of life is by no means lively. It has nothing
+in common either with the braver or the baser forms of what we commonly
+call optimism. It has none of the omnivorous exultation of Walt Whitman
+or the fiery pantheism of Shelley. Bernard Shaw wishes to show himself
+not so much as an optimist, but rather as a sort of faithful and
+contented pessimist. This contradiction is the key to nearly all his
+early and more obvious contradictions and to many which remain to the
+end. Whitman and many modern idealists have talked of taking even duty
+as a pleasure; it seems to me that Shaw takes even pleasure as a duty.
+In a queer way he seems to see existence as an illusion and yet as an
+obligation. To every man and woman, bird, beast, and flower, life is a
+love-call to be eagerly followed. To Bernard Shaw it is merely a
+military bugle to be obeyed. In short, he fails to feel that the command
+of Nature (if one must use the anthropomorphic fable of Nature instead
+of the philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as well as obeyed. He paints
+life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap in
+the dark. That is heroic; and to my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> instinct at least Schopenhauer
+looks like a pigmy beside his pupil. But it is the heroism of a morbid
+and almost asphyxiated age. It is awful to think that this world which
+so many poets have praised has even for a time been depicted as a
+man-trap into which we may just have the manhood to jump. Think of all
+those ages through which men have talked of having the courage to die.
+And then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having
+the courage to live.</p>
+
+<p>It is exactly this oddity or dilemma which may be said to culminate in
+the crowning work of his later and more constructive period, the work in
+which he certainly attempted, whether with success or not, to state his
+ultimate and cosmic vision; I mean the play called <i>Man and Superman</i>.
+In approaching this play we must keep well in mind the distinction
+recently drawn: that Shaw follows the banner of life, but austerely, not
+joyously. For him nature has authority, but hardly charm. But before we
+approach it it is necessary to deal with three things that lead up to
+it. First it is necessary to speak of what remained of his old critical
+and realistic method; and then it is necessary to speak of the two
+important influences which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> led up to his last and most important change
+of outlook.</p>
+
+<p>First, since all our spiritual epochs overlap, and a man is often doing
+the old work while he is thinking of the new, we may deal first with
+what may be fairly called his last two plays of pure worldly criticism.
+These are <i>Major Barbara</i> and <i>John Bull's Other Island</i>. <i>Major
+Barbara</i> indeed contains a strong religious element; but, when all is
+said, the whole point of the play is that the religious element is
+defeated. Moreover, the actual expressions of religion in the play are
+somewhat unsatisfactory as expressions of religion&mdash;or even of reason. I
+must frankly say that Bernard Shaw always seems to me to use the word
+God not only without any idea of what it means, but without one moment's
+thought about what it could possibly mean. He said to some atheist,
+"Never believe in a God that you cannot improve on." The atheist (being
+a sound theologian) naturally replied that one should not believe in a
+God whom one could improve on; as that would show that he was not God.
+In the same style in <i>Major Barbara</i> the heroine ends by suggesting that
+she will serve God without personal hope, so that she may owe nothing to
+God and He owe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> everything to her. It does not seem to strike her that
+if God owes everything to her He is not God. These things affect me
+merely as tedious perversions of a phrase. It is as if you said, "I will
+never have a father unless I have begotten him."</p>
+
+<p>But the real sting and substance of <i>Major Barbara</i> is much more
+practical and to the point. It expresses not the new spirituality but
+the old materialism of Bernard Shaw. Almost every one of Shaw's plays is
+an expanded epigram. But the epigram is not expanded (as with most
+people) into a hundred commonplaces. Rather the epigram is expanded into
+a hundred other epigrams; the work is at least as brilliant in detail as
+it is in design. But it is generally possible to discover the original
+and pivotal epigram which is the centre and purpose of the play. It is
+generally possible, even amid that blinding jewellery of a million
+jokes, to discover the grave, solemn and sacred joke for which the play
+itself was written.</p>
+
+<p>The ultimate epigram of <i>Major Barbara</i> can be put thus. People say that
+poverty is no crime; Shaw says that poverty is a crime; that it is a
+crime to endure it, a crime to be content with it, that it is the mother
+of all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> crimes of brutality, corruption, and fear. If a man says to Shaw
+that he is born of poor but honest parents, Shaw tells him that the very
+word "but" shows that his parents were probably dishonest. In short, he
+maintains here what he had maintained elsewhere: that what the people at
+this moment require is not more patriotism or more art or more religion
+or more morality or more sociology, but simply more money. The evil is
+not ignorance or decadence or sin or pessimism; the evil is poverty. The
+point of this particular drama is that even the noblest enthusiasm of
+the girl who becomes a Salvation Army officer fails under the brute
+money power of her father who is a modern capitalist. When I have said
+this it will be clear why this play, fine and full of bitter sincerity
+as it is, must in a manner be cleared out of the way before we come to
+talk of Shaw's final and serious faith. For his serious faith is in the
+sanctity of human will, in the divine capacity for creation and choice
+rising higher than environment and doom; and so far as that goes, <i>Major
+Barbara</i> is not only apart from his faith but against his faith. <i>Major
+Barbara</i> is an account of environment victorious over heroic will. There
+are a thousand answers to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> ethic in <i>Major Barbara</i> which I should
+be inclined to offer. I might point out that the rich do not so much buy
+honesty as curtains to cover dishonesty: that they do not so much buy
+health as cushions to comfort disease. And I might suggest that the
+doctrine that poverty degrades the poor is much more likely to be used
+as an argument for keeping them powerless than as an argument for making
+them rich. But there is no need to find such answers to the
+materialistic pessimism of <i>Major Barbara</i>. The best answer to it is in
+Shaw's own best and crowning philosophy, with which we shall shortly be
+concerned.</p>
+
+<p><i>John Bull's Other Island</i> represents a realism somewhat more tinged
+with the later transcendentalism of its author. In one sense, of course,
+it is a satire on the conventional Englishman, who is never so silly or
+sentimental as when he sees silliness and sentiment in the Irishman.
+Broadbent, whose mind is all fog and his morals all gush, is firmly
+persuaded that he is bringing reason and order among the Irish, whereas
+in truth they are all smiling at his illusions with the critical
+detachment of so many devils. There have been many plays depicting the
+absurd Paddy in a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> ring of Anglo-Saxons; the first purpose of this play
+is to depict the absurd Anglo-Saxon in a ring of ironical Paddies. But
+it has a second and more subtle purpose, which is very finely contrived.
+It is suggested that when all is said and done there is in this
+preposterous Englishman a certain creative power which comes from his
+simplicity and optimism, from his profound resolution rather to live
+life than to criticise it. I know no finer dialogue of philosophical
+cross-purposes than that in which Broadbent boasts of his commonsense,
+and his subtler Irish friend mystifies him by telling him that he,
+Broadbent, has no common-sense, but only inspiration. The Irishman
+admits in Broadbent a certain unconscious spiritual force even in his
+very stupidity. Lord Rosebery coined the very clever phrase "a practical
+mystic." Shaw is here maintaining that all practical men are practical
+mystics. And he is really maintaining also that the most practical of
+all the practical mystics is the one who is a fool.</p>
+
+<p>There is something unexpected and fascinating about this reversal of the
+usual argument touching enterprise and the business man; this theory
+that success is created not by intelligence, but by a certain
+half-witted and yet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> magical instinct. For Bernard Shaw, apparently, the
+forests of factories and the mountains of money are not the creations of
+human wisdom or even of human cunning; they are rather manifestations of
+the sacred maxim which declares that God has chosen the foolish things
+of the earth to confound the wise. It is simplicity and even innocence
+that has made Manchester. As a philosophical fancy this is interesting
+or even suggestive; but it must be confessed that as a criticism of the
+relations of England to Ireland it is open to a strong historical
+objection. The one weak point in <i>John Bull's Other Island</i> is that it
+turns on the fact that Broadbent succeeds in Ireland. But as a matter of
+fact Broadbent has not succeeded in Ireland. If getting what one wants
+is the test and fruit of this mysterious strength, then the Irish
+peasants are certainly much stronger than the English merchants; for in
+spite of all the efforts of the merchants, the land has remained a land
+of peasants. No glorification of the English practicality as if it were
+a universal thing can ever get over the fact that we have failed in
+dealing with the one white people in our power who were markedly unlike
+ourselves. And the kindness of Broadbent has failed just as much as his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>
+common-sense; because he was dealing with a people whose desire and
+ideal were different from his own. He did not share the Irish passion
+for small possession in land or for the more pathetic virtues of
+Christianity. In fact the kindness of Broadbent has failed for the same
+reason that the gigantic kindness of Shaw has failed. The roots are
+different; it is like tying the tops of two trees together. Briefly, the
+philosophy of <i>John Bull's Other Island</i> is quite effective and
+satisfactory except for this incurable fault: the fact that John Bull's
+other island is not John Bull's.</p>
+
+<p>This clearing off of his last critical plays we may classify as the
+first of the three facts which lead up to <i>Man and Superman</i>. The second
+of the three facts may be found, I think, in Shaw's discovery of
+Nietzsche. This eloquent sophist has an influence upon Shaw and his
+school which it would require a separate book adequately to study. By
+descent Nietzsche was a Pole, and probably a Polish noble; and to say
+that he was a Polish noble is to say that he was a frail, fastidious,
+and entirely useless anarchist. He had a wonderful poetic wit; and is
+one of the best rhetoricians of the modern world. He had a remarkable
+power of saying things that master the reason for a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> moment by their
+gigantic unreasonableness; as, for instance, "Your life is intolerable
+without immortality; but why should not your life be intolerable?" His
+whole work is shot through with the pangs and fevers of his physical
+life, which was one of extreme bad health; and in early middle age his
+brilliant brain broke down into impotence and darkness. All that was
+true in his teaching was this: that if a man looks fine on a horse it is
+so far irrelevant to tell him that he would be more economical on a
+donkey or more humane on a tricycle. In other words, the mere
+achievement of dignity, beauty, or triumph is strictly to be called a
+good thing. I do not know if Nietzsche ever used the illustration; but
+it seems to me that all that is creditable or sound in Nietzsche could
+be stated in the derivation of one word, the word "valour." Valour means
+<i>valeur</i>; it means a value; courage is itself a solid good; it is an
+ultimate virtue; valour is in itself <i>valid</i>. In so far as he maintained
+this Nietzsche was only taking part in that great Protestant game of
+see-saw which has been the amusement of northern Europe since the
+sixteenth century. Nietzsche imagined he was rebelling against ancient
+morality; as a matter of fact he was only rebelling against<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> recent
+morality, against the half-baked impudence of the utilitarians and the
+materialists. He thought he was rebelling against Christianity;
+curiously enough he was rebelling solely against the special enemies of
+Christianity, against Herbert Spencer and Mr. Edward Clodd. Historic
+Christianity has always believed in the valour of St. Michael riding in
+front of the Church Militant; and in an ultimate and absolute pleasure,
+not indirect or utilitarian, the intoxication of the spirit, the wine of
+the blood of God.</p>
+
+<p>There are indeed doctrines of Nietzsche that are not Christian, but
+then, by an entertaining coincidence, they are also not true. His hatred
+of pity is not Christian, but that was not his doctrine but his disease.
+Invalids are often hard on invalids. And there is another doctrine of
+his that is not Christianity, and also (by the same laughable accident)
+not common-sense; and it is a most pathetic circumstance that this was
+the one doctrine which caught the eye of Shaw and captured him. He was
+not influenced at all by the morbid attack on mercy. It would require
+more than ten thousand mad Polish professors to make Bernard Shaw
+anything but a generous and compassionate man. But it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> certainly a
+nuisance that the one Nietzsche doctrine which attracted him was not the
+one Nietzsche doctrine that is human and rectifying. Nietzsche might
+really have done some good if he had taught Bernard Shaw to draw the
+sword, to drink wine, or even to dance. But he only succeeded in putting
+into his head a new superstition, which bids fair to be the chief
+superstition of the dark ages which are possibly in front of us&mdash;I mean
+the superstition of what is called the Superman.</p>
+
+<p>In one of his least convincing phrases, Nietzsche had said that just as
+the ape ultimately produced the man, so should we ultimately produce
+something higher than the man. The immediate answer, of course, is
+sufficiently obvious: the ape did not worry about the man, so why should
+we worry about the Superman? If the Superman will come by natural
+selection, may we leave it to natural selection? If the Superman will
+come by human selection, what sort of Superman are we to select? If he
+is simply to be more just, more brave, or more merciful, then
+Zarathustra sinks into a Sunday-school teacher; the only way we can work
+for it is to be more just, more brave, and more merci<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>ful; sensible
+advice, but hardly startling. If he is to be anything else than this,
+why should we desire him, or what else are we to desire? These questions
+have been many times asked of the Nietzscheites, and none of the
+Nietzscheites have even attempted to answer them.</p>
+
+<p>The keen intellect of Bernard Shaw would, I think, certainly have seen
+through this fallacy and verbiage had it not been that another important
+event about this time came to the help of Nietzsche and established the
+Superman on his pedestal. It is the third of the things which I have
+called stepping-stones to <i>Man and Superman</i>, and it is very important.
+It is nothing less than the breakdown of one of the three intellectual
+supports upon which Bernard Shaw had reposed through all his confident
+career. At the beginning of this book I have described the three
+ultimate supports of Shaw as the Irishman, the Puritan, and the
+Progressive. They are the three legs of the tripod upon which the
+prophet sat to give the oracle; and one of them broke. Just about this
+time suddenly, by a mere shaft of illumination, Bernard Shaw ceased to
+believe in progress altogether.</p>
+
+<p>It is generally implied that it was reading Plato that did it. That
+philosopher was very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> well qualified to convey the first shock of the
+ancient civilisation to Shaw, who had always thought instinctively of
+civilisation as modern. This is not due merely to the daring splendour
+of the speculations and the vivid picture of Athenian life, it is due
+also to something analogous in the personalities of that particular
+ancient Greek and this particular modern Irishman. Bernard Shaw has much
+affinity to Plato&mdash;in his instinctive elevation of temper, his
+courageous pursuit of ideas as far as they will go, his civic idealism;
+and also, it must be confessed, in his dislike of poets and a touch of
+delicate inhumanity. But whatever influence produced the change, the
+change had all the dramatic suddenness and completeness which belongs to
+the conversions of great men. It had been perpetually implied through
+all the earlier works not only that mankind is constantly improving, but
+that almost everything must be considered in the light of this fact.
+More than once he seemed to argue, in comparing the dramatists of the
+sixteenth with those of the nineteenth century, that the latter had a
+definite advantage merely because they were of the nineteenth century
+and not of the sixteenth. When accused of impertinence towards the
+greatest of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> Elizabethans, Bernard Shaw had said, "Shakespeare is a
+much taller man than I, but I stand on his shoulders"&mdash;an epigram which
+sums up this doctrine with characteristic neatness. But Shaw fell off
+Shakespeare's shoulders with a crash. This chronological theory that
+Shaw stood on Shakespeare's shoulders logically involved the supposition
+that Shakespeare stood on Plato's shoulders. And Bernard Shaw found
+Plato from his point of view so much more advanced than Shakespeare that
+he decided in desperation that all three were equal.</p>
+
+<p>Such failure as has partially attended the idea of human equality is
+very largely due to the fact that no party in the modern state has
+heartily believed in it. Tories and Radicals have both assumed that one
+set of men were in essentials superior to mankind. The only difference
+was that the Tory superiority was a superiority of place; while the
+Radical superiority is a superiority of time. The great objection to
+Shaw being on Shakespeare's shoulders is a consideration for the
+sensations and personal dignity of Shakespeare. It is a democratic
+objection to anyone being on anyone else's shoulders. Eternal human
+nature refuses to submit to a man who rules merely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> by right of birth.
+To rule by right of century is to rule by right of birth. Shaw found his
+nearest kinsman in remote Athens, his remotest enemies in the closest
+historical proximity; and he began to see the enormous average and the
+vast level of mankind. If progress swung constantly between such
+extremes it could not be progress at all. The paradox was sharp but
+undeniable; if life had such continual ups and downs, it was upon the
+whole flat. With characteristic sincerity and love of sensation he had
+no sooner seen this than he hastened to declare it. In the teeth of all
+his previous pronouncements he emphasised and re-emphasised in print
+that man had not progressed at all; that ninety-nine hundredths of a man
+in a cave were the same as ninety-nine hundredths of a man in a suburban
+villa.</p>
+
+<p>It is characteristic of him to say that he rushed into print with a
+frank confession of the failure of his old theory. But it is also
+characteristic of him that he rushed into print also with a new
+alternative theory, quite as definite, quite as confident, and, if one
+may put it so, quite as infallible as the old one. Progress had never
+happened hitherto, because it had been sought solely through education.
+Education was rubbish. "Fancy," said he,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> "trying to produce a greyhound
+or a racehorse by education!" The man of the future must not be taught;
+he must be bred. This notion of producing superior human beings by the
+methods of the stud-farm had often been urged, though its difficulties
+had never been cleared up. I mean its practical difficulties; its moral
+difficulties, or rather impossibilities, for any animal fit to be called
+a man need scarcely be discussed. But even as a scheme it had never been
+made clear. The first and most obvious objection to it of course is
+this: that if you are to breed men as pigs, you require some overseer
+who is as much more subtle than a man as a man is more subtle than a
+pig. Such an individual is not easy to find.</p>
+
+<p>It was, however, in the heat of these three things, the decline of his
+merely destructive realism, the discovery of Nietzsche, and the
+abandonment of the idea of a progressive education of mankind, that he
+attempted what is not necessarily his best, but certainly his most
+important work. The two things are by no means necessarily the same. The
+most important work of Milton is <i>Paradise Lost</i>; his best work is
+<i>Lycidas</i>. There are other places in which Shaw's argument is more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>
+fascinating or his wit more startling than in <i>Man and Superman</i>; there
+are other plays that he has made more brilliant. But I am sure that
+there is no other play that he wished to make more brilliant. I will not
+say that he is in this case more serious than elsewhere; for the word
+serious is a double-meaning and double-dealing word, a traitor in the
+dictionary. It sometimes means solemn, and it sometimes means sincere. A
+very short experience of private and public life will be enough to prove
+that the most solemn people are generally the most insincere. A somewhat
+more delicate and detailed consideration will show also that the most
+sincere men are generally not solemn; and of these is Bernard Shaw. But
+if we use the word serious in the old and Latin sense of the word
+"grave," which means weighty or valid, full of substance, then we may
+say without any hesitation that this is the most serious play of the
+most serious man alive.</p>
+
+<p>The outline of the play is, I suppose, by this time sufficiently well
+known. It has two main philosophic motives. The first is that what he
+calls the life-force (the old infidels called it Nature, which seems a
+neater word, and nobody knows the meaning of either of them) desires
+above all things to make suitable marriages,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> to produce a purer and
+prouder race, or eventually to produce a Superman. The second is that in
+this effecting of racial marriages the woman is a more conscious agent
+than the man. In short, that woman disposes a long time before man
+proposes. In this play, therefore, woman is made the pursuer and man the
+pursued. It cannot be denied, I think, that in this matter Shaw is
+handicapped by his habitual hardness of touch, by his lack of sympathy
+with the romance of which he writes, and to a certain extent even by his
+own integrity and right conscience. Whether the man hunts the woman or
+the woman the man, at least it should be a splendid pagan hunt; but Shaw
+is not a sporting man. Nor is he a pagan, but a Puritan. He cannot
+recover the impartiality of paganism which allowed Diana to propose to
+Endymion without thinking any the worse of her. The result is that while
+he makes Anne, the woman who marries his hero, a really powerful and
+convincing woman, he can only do it by making her a highly objectionable
+woman. She is a liar and a bully, not from sudden fear or excruciating
+dilemma; she is a liar and a bully in grain; she has no truth or
+magnanimity in her. The more we know that she is real, the more we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> know
+that she is vile. In short, Bernard Shaw is still haunted with his old
+impotence of the unromantic writer; he cannot imagine the main motives
+of human life from the inside. We are convinced successfully that Anne
+wishes to marry Tanner, but in the very process we lose all power of
+conceiving why Tanner should ever consent to marry Anne. A writer with a
+more romantic strain in him might have imagined a woman choosing her
+lover without shamelessness and magnetising him without fraud. Even if
+the first movement were feminine, it need hardly be a movement like
+this. In truth, of course, the two sexes have their two methods of
+attraction, and in some of the happiest cases they are almost
+simultaneous. But even on the most cynical showing they need not be
+mixed up. It is one thing to say that the mousetrap is not there by
+accident. It is another to say (in the face of ocular experience) that
+the mousetrap runs after the mouse.</p>
+
+<p>But whenever Shaw shows the Puritan hardness or even the Puritan
+cheapness, he shows something also of the Puritan nobility, of the idea
+that sacrifice is really a frivolity in the face of a great purpose. The
+reasonableness of Calvin and his followers will by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> the mercy of heaven
+be at last washed away; but their unreasonableness will remain an
+eternal splendour. Long after we have let drop the fancy that
+Protestantism was rational it will be its glory that it was fanatical.
+So it is with Shaw. To make Anne a real woman, even a dangerous woman,
+he would need to be something stranger and softer than Bernard Shaw. But
+though I always argue with him whenever he argues, I confess that he
+always conquers me in the one or two moments when he is emotional.</p>
+
+<p>There is one really noble moment when Anne offers for all her cynical
+husband-hunting the only defence that is really great enough to cover
+it. "It will not be all happiness for me. Perhaps death." And the man
+rises also at that real crisis, saying, "Oh, that clutch holds and
+hurts. What have you grasped in me? Is there a father's heart as well as
+a mother's?" That seems to me actually great; I do not like either of
+the characters an atom more than formerly; but I can see shining and
+shaking through them at that instant the splendour of the God that made
+them and of the image of God who wrote their story.</p>
+
+<p>A logician is like a liar in many respects,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> but chiefly in the fact
+that he should have a good memory. That cutting and inquisitive style
+which Bernard Shaw has always adopted carries with it an inevitable
+criticism. And it cannot be denied that this new theory of the supreme
+importance of sound sexual union, wrought by any means, is hard
+logically to reconcile with Shaw's old diatribes against sentimentalism
+and operatic romance. If Nature wishes primarily to entrap us into
+sexual union, then all the means of sexual attraction, even the most
+maudlin or theatrical, are justified at one stroke. The guitar of the
+troubadour is as practical as the ploughshare of the husbandman. The
+waltz in the ballroom is as serious as the debate in the parish council.
+The justification of Anne, as the potential mother of Superman, is
+really the justification of all the humbugs and sentimentalists whom
+Shaw had been denouncing as a dramatic critic and as a dramatist since
+the beginning of his career. It was to no purpose that the earlier
+Bernard Shaw said that romance was all moonshine. The moonshine that
+ripens love is now as practical as the sunshine that ripens corn. It was
+vain to say that sexual chivalry was all rot; it might be as rotten as
+manure&mdash;and also as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> fertile. It is vain to call first love a fiction;
+it may be as fictitious as the ink of the cuttle or the doubling of the
+hare; as fictitious, as efficient, and as indispensable. It is vain to
+call it a self-deception; Schopenhauer said that all existence was a
+self-deception; and Shaw's only further comment seems to be that it is
+right to be deceived. To <i>Man and Superman</i>, as to all his plays, the
+author attaches a most fascinating preface at the beginning. But I
+really think that he ought also to attach a hearty apology at the end;
+an apology to all the minor dramatists or preposterous actors whom he
+had cursed for romanticism in his youth. Whenever he objected to an
+actress for ogling she might reasonably reply, "But this is how I
+support my friend Anne in her sublime evolutionary effort." Whenever he
+laughed at an old-fashioned actor for ranting, the actor might answer,
+"My exaggeration is not more absurd than the tail of a peacock or the
+swagger of a cock; it is the way I preach the great fruitful lie of the
+life-force that I am a very fine fellow." We have remarked the end of
+Shaw's campaign in favour of progress. This ought really to have been
+the end of his campaign against romance. All the tricks of love that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> he
+called artificial become natural; because they become Nature. All the
+lies of love become truths; indeed they become the Truth.</p>
+
+<p>The minor things of the play contain some thunderbolts of good thinking.
+Throughout this brief study I have deliberately not dwelt upon mere wit,
+because in anything of Shaw's that may be taken for granted. It is
+enough to say that this play which is full of his most serious quality
+is as full as any of his minor sort of success. In a more solid sense
+two important facts stand out: the first is the character of the young
+American; the other is the character of Straker, the chauffeur. In these
+Shaw has realised and made vivid two most important facts. First, that
+America is not intellectually a go-ahead country, but both for good and
+evil an old-fashioned one. It is full of stale culture and ancestral
+simplicity, just as Shaw's young millionaire quotes Macaulay and piously
+worships his wife. Second, he has pointed out in the character of
+Straker that there has arisen in our midst a new class that has
+education without breeding. Straker is the man who has ousted the
+hansom-cabman, having neither his coarseness nor his kindliness. Great
+sociological credit is due to the man who has first clearly observed
+that Straker<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> has appeared. How anybody can profess for a moment to be
+glad that he has appeared, I do not attempt to conjecture.</p>
+
+<p>Appended to the play is an entertaining though somewhat mysterious
+document called "The Revolutionist's Handbook." It contains many very
+sound remarks; this, for example, which I cannot too much applaud: "If
+you hit your child, be sure that you hit him in anger." If that
+principle had been properly understood, we should have had less of
+Shaw's sociological friends and their meddling with the habits and
+instincts of the poor. But among the fragments of advice also occurs the
+following suggestive and even alluring remark: "Every man over forty is
+a scoundrel." On the first personal opportunity I asked the author of
+this remarkable axiom what it meant. I gathered that what it really
+meant was something like this: that every man over forty had been all
+the essential use that he was likely to be, and was therefore in a
+manner a parasite. It is gratifying to reflect that Bernard Shaw has
+sufficiently answered his own epigram by continuing to pour out
+treasures both of truth and folly long after this allotted time. But if
+the epigram might be interpreted in a rather looser style as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> meaning
+that past a certain point a man's work takes on its final character and
+does not greatly change the nature of its merits, it may certainly be
+said that with <i>Man and Superman</i>, Shaw reaches that stage. The two
+plays that have followed it, though of very great interest in
+themselves, do not require any revaluation of, or indeed any addition
+to, our summary of his genius and success. They are both in a sense
+casts back to his primary energies; the first in a controversial and the
+second in a technical sense. Neither need prevent our saying that the
+moment when John Tanner and Anne agree that it is doom for him and death
+for her and life only for the thing unborn, is the peak of his utterance
+as a prophet.</p>
+
+<p>The two important plays that he has since given us are <i>The Doctor's
+Dilemma</i> and <i>Getting Married</i>. The first is as regards its most amusing
+and effective elements a throw-back to his old game of guying the men of
+science. It was a very good game, and he was an admirable player. The
+actual story of the <i>Doctor's Dilemma</i> itself seems to me less poignant
+and important than the things with which Shaw had lately been dealing.
+First of all, as has been said, Shaw has neither the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> kind of justice
+nor the kind of weakness that goes to make a true problem. We cannot
+feel the Doctor's Dilemma, because we cannot really fancy Bernard Shaw
+being in a dilemma. His mind is both fond of abruptness and fond of
+finality; he always makes up his mind when he knows the facts and
+sometimes before. Moreover, this particular problem (though Shaw is
+certainly, as we shall see, nearer to pure doubt about it than about
+anything else) does not strike the critic as being such an exasperating
+problem after all. An artist of vast power and promise, who is also a
+scamp of vast profligacy and treachery, has a chance of life if
+specially treated for a special disease. The modern doctors (and even
+the modern dramatist) are in doubt whether he should be specially
+favoured because he is &aelig;sthetically important or specially disregarded
+because he is ethically anti-social. They see-saw between the two
+despicable modern doctrines, one that geniuses should be worshipped like
+idols and the other that criminals should be merely wiped out like
+germs. That both clever men and bad men ought to be treated like men
+does not seem to occur to them. As a matter of fact, in these affairs of
+life and death one never does think of such distinctions. Nobody<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> does
+shout out at sea, "Bad citizen overboard!" I should recommend the doctor
+in his dilemma to do exactly what I am sure any decent doctor would do
+without any dilemma at all: to treat the man simply as a man, and give
+him no more and no less favour than he would to anybody else. In short,
+I am sure a practical physician would drop all these visionary,
+unworkable modern dreams about type and criminology and go back to the
+plain business-like facts of the French Revolution and the Rights of
+Man.</p>
+
+<p>The other play, <i>Getting Married</i>, is a point in Shaw's career, but only
+as a play, not, as usual, as a heresy. It is nothing but a conversation
+about marriage; and one cannot agree or disagree with the view of
+marriage, because all views are given which are held by anybody, and
+some (I should think) which are held by nobody. But its technical
+quality is of some importance in the life of its author. It is worth
+consideration as a play, because it is not a play at all. It marks the
+culmination and completeness of that victory of Bernard Shaw over the
+British public, or rather over their official representatives, of which
+I have spoken. Shaw had fought a long fight with business men, those
+incredible people, who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> assured him that it was useless to have wit
+without murders, and that a good joke, which is the most popular thing
+everywhere else, was quite unsalable in the theatrical world. In spite
+of this he had conquered by his wit and his good dialogue; and by the
+time of which we now speak he was victorious and secure. All his plays
+were being produced as a matter of course in England and as a matter of
+the fiercest fashion and enthusiasm in America and Germany. No one who
+knows the nature of the man will doubt that under such circumstances his
+first act would be to produce his wit naked and unashamed. He had been
+told that he could not support a slight play by mere dialogue. He
+therefore promptly produced mere dialogue without the slightest play for
+it to support. <i>Getting Married</i> is no more a play than Cicero's
+dialogue <i>De Amiciti&acirc;</i>, and not half so much a play as Wilson's <i>Noctes
+Ambrosian&aelig;</i>. But though it is not a play, it was played, and played
+successfully. Everyone who went into the theatre felt that he was only
+eavesdropping at an accidental conversation. But the conversation was so
+sparkling and sensible that he went on eavesdropping. This, I think, as
+it is the final play of Shaw, is also, and fitly, his final<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> triumph. He
+is a good dramatist and sometimes even a great dramatist. But the
+occasions when we get glimpses of him as really a great man are on these
+occasions when he is utterly undramatic.</p>
+
+<p>From first to last Bernard Shaw has been nothing but a
+conversationalist. It is not a slur to say so; Socrates was one, and
+even Christ Himself. He differs from that divine and that human
+prototype in the fact that, like most modern people, he does to some
+extent talk in order to find out what he thinks; whereas they knew it
+beforehand. But he has the virtues that go with the talkative man; one
+of which is humility. You will hardly ever find a really proud man
+talkative; he is afraid of talking too much. Bernard Shaw offered
+himself to the world with only one great qualification, that he could
+talk honestly and well. He did not speak; he talked to a crowd. He did
+not write; he talked to a typewriter. He did not really construct a
+play; he talked through ten mouths or masks instead of through one. His
+literary power and progress began in casual conversations&mdash;and it seems
+to me supremely right that it should end in one great and casual
+conversation. His last play is nothing but garrulous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> talking, that
+great thing called gossip. And I am happy to say that the play has been
+as efficient and successful as talk and gossip have always been among
+the children of men.</p>
+
+<p>Of his life in these later years I have made no pretence of telling even
+the little that there is to tell. Those who regard him as a mere
+self-advertising egotist may be surprised to hear that there is perhaps
+no man of whose private life less could be positively said by an
+outsider. Even those who know him can make little but a conjecture of
+what has lain behind this splendid stretch of intellectual
+self-expression; I only make my conjecture like the rest. I think that
+the first great turning-point in Shaw's life (after the early things of
+which I have spoken, the taint of drink in the teetotal home, or the
+first fight with poverty) was the deadly illness which fell upon him, at
+the end of his first flashing career as a Saturday Reviewer. I know it
+would goad Shaw to madness to suggest that sickness could have softened
+him. That is why I suggest it. But I say for his comfort that I think it
+hardened him also; if that can be called hardening which is only the
+strengthening of our souls to meet some dreadful reality. At least it is
+certain that the larger<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> spiritual ambitions, the desire to find a faith
+and found a church, come after that time. I also mention it because
+there is hardly anything else to mention; his life is singularly free
+from landmarks, while his literature is so oddly full of surprises. His
+marriage to Miss Payne-Townsend, which occurred not long after his
+illness, was one of those quite successful things which are utterly
+silent. The placidity of his married life may be sufficiently indicated
+by saying that (as far as I can make out) the most important events in
+it were rows about the Executive of the Fabian Society. If such ripples
+do not express a still and lake-like life, I do not know what would.
+Honestly, the only thing in his later career that can be called an event
+is the stand made by Shaw at the Fabians against the sudden assault of
+Mr. H. G. Wells, which, after scenes of splendid exasperations, ended in
+Wells' resignation. There was another slight ruffling of the calm when
+Bernard Shaw said some quite sensible things about Sir Henry Irving. But
+on the whole we confront the composure of one who has come into his own.</p>
+
+<p>The method of his life has remained mostly unchanged. And there is a
+great deal of method in his life; I can hear some people<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> murmuring
+something about method in his madness. He is not only neat and
+business-like; but, unlike some literary men I know, does not conceal
+the fact. Having all the talents proper to an author, he delights to
+prove that he has also all the talents proper to a publisher; or even to
+a publisher's clerk. Though many looking at his light brown clothes
+would call him a Bohemian, he really hates and despises Bohemianism; in
+the sense that he hates and despises disorder and uncleanness and
+irresponsibility. All that part of him is peculiarly normal and
+efficient. He gives good advice; he always answers letters, and answers
+them in a decisive and very legible hand. He has said himself that the
+only educational art that he thinks important is that of being able to
+jump off tram-cars at the proper moment. Though a rigid vegetarian, he
+is quite regular and rational in his meals; and though he detests sport,
+he takes quite sufficient exercise. While he has always made a mock of
+science in theory, he is by nature prone to meddle with it in practice.
+He is fond of photographing, and even more fond of being photographed.
+He maintained (in one of his moments of mad modernity) that photography
+was a finer thing than portrait-painting,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> more exquisite and more
+imaginative; he urged the characteristic argument that none of his own
+photographs were like each other or like him. But he would certainly
+wash the chemicals off his hands the instant after an experiment; just
+as he would wash the blood off his hands the instant after a Socialist
+massacre. He cannot endure stains or accretions; he is of that
+temperament which feels tradition itself to be a coat of dust; whose
+temptation it is to feel nothing but a sort of foul accumulation or
+living disease even in the creeper upon the cottage or the moss upon the
+grave. So thoroughly are his tastes those of the civilised modern man
+that if it had not been for the fire in him of justice and anger he
+might have been the most trim and modern among the millions whom he
+shocks: and his bicycle and brown hat have been no menace in Brixton.
+But God sent among those suburbans one who was a prophet as well as a
+sanitary inspector. He had every qualification for living in a
+villa&mdash;except the necessary indifference to his brethren living in
+pigstyes. But for the small fact that he hates with a sickening hatred
+the hypocrisy and class cruelty, he would really accept and admire the
+bathroom and the bicycle and asbestos-stove, having no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> memory of rivers
+or of roaring fires. In these things, like Mr. Straker, he is the New
+Man. But for his great soul he might have accepted modern civilisation;
+it was a wonderful escape. This man whom men so foolishly call crazy and
+anarchic has really a dangerous affinity to the fourth-rate perfections
+of our provincial and Protestant civilisation. He might even have been
+respectable if he had had less self-respect.</p>
+
+<p>His fulfilled fame and this tone of repose and reason in his life,
+together with the large circle of his private kindness and the regard of
+his fellow-artists, should permit us to end the record in a tone of
+almost patriarchal quiet. If I wished to complete such a picture I could
+add many touches: that he has consented to wear evening dress; that he
+has supported the <i>Times</i> Book Club; and that his beard has turned grey;
+the last to his regret, as he wanted it to remain red till they had
+completed colour-photography. He can mix with the most conservative
+statesmen; his tone grows continuously more gentle in the matter of
+religion. It would be easy to end with the lion lying down with the
+lamb, the wild Irishman tamed or taming everybody, Shaw recon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>ciled to
+the British public as the British public is certainly largely reconciled
+to Shaw.</p>
+
+<p>But as I put these last papers together, having finished this rude
+study, I hear a piece of news. His latest play, <i>The Showing Up of
+Blanco Posnet</i>, has been forbidden by the Censor. As far as I can
+discover, it has been forbidden because one of the characters professes
+a belief in God and states his conviction that God has got him. This is
+wholesome; this is like one crack of thunder in a clear sky. Not so
+easily does the prince of this world forgive. Shaw's religious training
+and instinct is not mine, but in all honest religion there is something
+that is hateful to the prosperous compromise of our time. You are free
+in our time to say that God does not exist; you are free to say that He
+exists and is evil; you are free to say (like poor old Renan) that He
+would like to exist if He could. You may talk of God as a metaphor or a
+mystification; you may water Him down with gallons of long words, or
+boil Him to the rags of metaphysics; and it is not merely that nobody
+punishes, but nobody protests. But if you speak of God as a fact, as a
+thing like a tiger, as a reason for changing one's conduct, then the
+modern world will stop you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> somehow if it can. We are long past talking
+about whether an unbeliever should be punished for being irreverent. It
+is now thought irreverent to be a believer. I end where I began: it is
+the old Puritan in Shaw that jars the modern world like an electric
+shock. That vision with which I meant to end, that vision of culture and
+common-sense, of red brick and brown flannel, of the modern clerk
+broadened enough to embrace Shaw and Shaw softened enough to embrace the
+clerk, all that vision of a new London begins to fade and alter. The red
+brick begins to burn red-hot; and the smoke from all the chimneys has a
+strange smell. I find myself back in the fumes in which I started....
+Perhaps I have been misled by small modernities. Perhaps what I have
+called fastidiousness is a divine fear. Perhaps what I have called
+coldness is a predestinate and ancient endurance. The vision of the
+Fabian villas grows fainter and fainter, until I see only a void place
+across which runs Bunyan's Pilgrim with his fingers in his ears.</p>
+
+<p>Bernard Shaw has occupied much of his life in trying to elude his
+followers. The fox has enthusiastic followers, and Shaw seems to regard
+his in much the same way. This man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> whom men accuse of bidding for
+applause seems to me to shrink even from assent. If you agree with Shaw
+he is very likely to contradict you; I have contradicted Shaw
+throughout, that is why I come at last almost to agree with him. His
+critics have accused him of vulgar self-advertisement; in his relation
+to his followers he seems to me rather marked with a sort of mad
+modesty. He seems to wish to fly from agreement, to have as few
+followers as possible. All this reaches back, I think, to the three
+roots from which this meditation grew. It is partly the mere impatience
+and irony of the Irishman. It is partly the thought of the Calvinist
+that the host of God should be thinned rather than thronged; that Gideon
+must reject soldiers rather than recruit them. And it is partly, alas,
+the unhappy Progressive trying to be in front of his own religion,
+trying to destroy his own idol and even to desecrate his own tomb. But
+from whatever causes, this furious escape from popularity has involved
+Shaw in some perversities and refinements which are almost mere
+insincerities, and which make it necessary to disentangle the good he
+has done from the evil in this dazzling course. I will attempt some
+summary by stating the three<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> things in which his influence seems to me
+thoroughly good and the three in which it seems bad. But for the
+pleasure of ending on the finer note I will speak first of those that
+seem bad.</p>
+
+<p>The primary respect in which Shaw has been a bad influence is that he
+has encouraged fastidiousness. He has made men dainty about their moral
+meals. This is indeed the root of his whole objection to romance. Many
+people have objected to romance for being too airy and exquisite. Shaw
+objects to romance for being too rank and coarse. Many have despised
+romance because it is unreal; Shaw really hates it because it is a great
+deal too real. Shaw dislikes romance as he dislikes beef and beer, raw
+brandy or raw beefsteaks. Romance is too masculine for his taste. You
+will find throughout his criticisms, amid all their truth, their wild
+justice or pungent impartiality, a curious undercurrent of prejudice
+upon one point: the preference for the refined rather than the rude or
+ugly. Thus he will dislike a joke because it is coarse without asking if
+it is really immoral. He objects to a man sitting down on his hat,
+whereas the austere moralist should only object to his sitting down on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>
+someone else's hat. This sensibility is barren because it is universal.
+It is useless to object to man being made ridiculous. Man is born
+ridiculous, as can easily be seen if you look at him soon after he is
+born. It is grotesque to drink beer, but it is equally grotesque to
+drink soda-water; the grotesqueness lies in the act of filling yourself
+like a bottle through a hole. It is undignified to walk with a drunken
+stagger; but it is fairly undignified to walk at all, for all walking is
+a sort of balancing, and there is always in the human being something of
+a quadruped on its hind legs. I do not say he would be more dignified if
+he went on all fours; I do not know that he ever is dignified except
+when he is dead. We shall not be refined till we are refined into dust.
+Of course it is only because he is not wholly an animal that man sees he
+is a rum animal; and if man on his hind legs is in an artificial
+attitude, it is only because, like a dog, he is begging or saying thank
+you.</p>
+
+<p>Everything important is in that sense absurd from the grave baby to the
+grinning skull; everything practical is a practical joke. But throughout
+Shaw's comedies, curiously enough, there is a certain kicking against
+this great doom of laughter. For instance, it is the first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> duty of a
+man who is in love to make a fool of himself; but Shaw's heroes always
+seem to flinch from this, and attempt, in airy, philosophic revenge, to
+make a fool of the woman first. The attempts of Valentine and Charteris
+to divide their perceptions from their desires, and tell the woman she
+is worthless even while trying to win her, are sometimes almost
+torturing to watch; it is like seeing a man trying to play a different
+tune with each hand. I fancy this agony is not only in the spectator,
+but in the dramatist as well. It is Bernard Shaw struggling with his
+reluctance to do anything so ridiculous as make a proposal. For there
+are two types of great humorist: those who love to see a man absurd and
+those who hate to see him absurd. Of the first kind are Rabelais and
+Dickens; of the second kind are Swift and Bernard Shaw.</p>
+
+<p>So far as Shaw has spread or helped a certain modern reluctance or
+<i>mauvaise honte</i> in these grand and grotesque functions of man I think
+he has definitely done harm. He has much influence among the young men;
+but it is not an influence in the direction of keeping them young. One
+cannot imagine him inspiring any of his followers to write a war-song or
+a drinking-song or a love-song, the three<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> forms of human utterance
+which come next in nobility to a prayer. It may seem odd to say that the
+net effect of a man so apparently impudent will be to make men shy. But
+it is certainly the truth. Shyness is always the sign of a divided soul;
+a man is shy because he somehow thinks his position at once despicable
+and important. If he were without humility he would not care; and if he
+were without pride he would not care. Now the main purpose of Shaw's
+theoretic teaching is to declare that we ought to fulfil these great
+functions of life, that we ought to eat and drink and love. But the main
+tendency of his habitual criticism is to suggest that all the
+sentiments, professions, and postures of these things are not only comic
+but even contemptibly comic, follies and almost frauds. The result would
+seem to be that a race of young men may arise who do all these things,
+but do them awkwardly. That which was of old a free and hilarious
+function becomes an important and embarrassing necessity. Let us endure
+all the pagan pleasures with a Christian patience. Let us eat, drink,
+and be serious.</p>
+
+<p>The second of the two points on which I think Shaw has done definite
+harm is this: that he has (not always or even as a rule in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>tentionally)
+increased that anarchy of thought which is always the destruction of
+thought. Much of his early writing has encouraged among the modern youth
+that most pestilent of all popular tricks and fallacies; what is called
+the argument of progress. I mean this kind of thing. Previous ages were
+often, alas, aristocratic in politics or clericalist in religion; but
+they were always democratic in philosophy; they appealed to man, not to
+particular men. And if most men were against an idea, that was so far
+against it. But nowadays that most men are against a thing is thought to
+be in its favour; it is vaguely supposed to show that some day most men
+will be for it. If a man says that cows are reptiles, or that Bacon
+wrote Shakespeare, he can always quote the contempt of his
+contemporaries as in some mysterious way proving the complete conversion
+of posterity. The objections to this theory scarcely need any elaborate
+indication. The final objection to it is that it amounts to this: say
+anything, however idiotic, and you are in advance of your age. This kind
+of stuff must be stopped. The sort of democrat who appeals to the babe
+unborn must be classed with the sort of aristocrat who appeals to his
+deceased great-grandfather. Both<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> should be sharply reminded that they
+are appealing to individuals whom they well know to be at a disadvantage
+in the matter of prompt and witty reply. Now although Bernard Shaw has
+survived this simple confusion, he has in his time greatly contributed
+to it. If there is, for instance, one thing that is really rare in Shaw
+it is hesitation. He makes up his mind quicker than a calculating boy or
+a county magistrate. Yet on this subject of the next change in ethics he
+has felt hesitation, and being a strictly honest man has expressed it.</p>
+
+<p>"I know no harder practical question than how much selfishness one ought
+to stand from a gifted person for the sake of his gifts or on the chance
+of his being right in the long run. The Superman will certainly come
+like a thief in the night, and be shot at accordingly; but we cannot
+leave our property wholly undefended on that account. On the other hand,
+we cannot ask the Superman simply to add a higher set of virtues to
+current respectable morals; for he is undoubtedly going to empty a good
+deal of respectable morality out like so much dirty water, and replace
+it by new and strange customs, shedding old obligations and accepting
+new and heavier ones. Every step<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> of his progress must horrify
+conventional people; and if it were possible for even the most superior
+man to march ahead all the time, every pioneer of the march towards the
+Superman would be crucified."</p>
+
+<p>When the most emphatic man alive, a man unmatched in violent precision
+of statement, speaks with such avowed vagueness and doubt as this, it is
+no wonder if all his more weak-minded followers are in a mere whirlpool
+of uncritical and unmeaning innovation. If the superior person will be
+apparently criminal, the most probable result is simply that the
+criminal person will think himself superior. A very slight knowledge of
+human nature is required in the matter. If the Superman may possibly be
+a thief, you may bet your boots that the next thief will be a Superman.
+But indeed the Supermen (of whom I have met many) have generally been
+more weak in the head than in the moral conduct; they have simply
+offered the first fancy which occupied their minds as the new morality.
+I fear that Shaw had a way of encouraging these follies. It is obvious
+from the passage I have quoted that he has no way of restraining them.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> live in the future,
+because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what you
+like. The next age is blank, and I can paint it freely with my favourite
+colour. It requires real courage to face the past, because the past is
+full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser than we
+and of things done which we could not do. I know I cannot write a poem
+as good as <i>Lycidas</i>. But it is always easy to say that the particular
+sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry of the future.</p>
+
+<p>This I call the second evil influence of Shaw: that he has encouraged
+many to throw themselves for justification upon the shapeless and the
+unknown. In this, though courageous himself, he has encouraged cowards,
+and though sincere himself, has helped a mean escape. The third evil in
+his influence can, I think, be much more shortly dealt with. He has to a
+very slight extent, but still perceptibly, encouraged a kind of
+charlatanism of utterance among those who possess his Irish impudence
+without his Irish virtue. For instance, his amusing trick of self-praise
+is perfectly hearty and humorous in him; nay, it is even humble; for to
+confess vanity is itself humble. All that is the matter with the proud
+is that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> they will not admit that they are vain. Therefore when Shaw
+says that he alone is able to write such and such admirable work, or
+that he has just utterly wiped out some celebrated opponent, I for one
+never feel anything offensive in the tone, but, indeed, only the
+unmistakable intonation of a friend's voice. But I have noticed among
+younger, harder, and much shallower men a certain disposition to ape
+this insolent ease and certitude, and that without any fundamental
+frankness or mirth. So far the influence is bad. Egoism can be learnt as
+a lesson like any other "ism." It is not so easy to learn an Irish
+accent or a good temper. In its lower forms the thing becomes a most
+unmilitary trick of announcing the victory before one has gained it.</p>
+
+<p>When one has said those three things, one has said, I think, all that
+can be said by way of blaming Bernard Shaw. It is significant that he
+was never blamed for any of these things by the Censor. Such censures as
+the attitude of that official involves may be dismissed with a very
+light sort of disdain. To represent Shaw as profane or provocatively
+indecent is not a matter for discussion at all; it is a disgusting
+criminal libel upon a particularly respectable gentleman of the middle
+classes, of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> refined tastes and somewhat Puritanical views. But while
+the negative defence of Shaw is easy, the just praise of him is almost
+as complex as it is necessary; and I shall devote the last few pages of
+this book to a triad corresponding to the last one&mdash;to the three
+important elements in which the work of Shaw has been good as well as
+great.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, and quite apart from all particular theories, the
+world owes thanks to Bernard Shaw for having combined being intelligent
+with being intelligible. He has popularised philosophy, or rather he has
+repopularised it, for philosophy is always popular, except in peculiarly
+corrupt and oligarchic ages like our own. We have passed the age of the
+demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come
+to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but
+says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper. After all,
+short words must mean something, even if they mean filth or lies; but
+long words may sometimes mean literally nothing, especially if they are
+used (as they mostly are in modern books and magazine articles) to
+balance and modify each other. A plain figure 4, scrawled in chalk
+anywhere, must<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> always mean something; it must always mean 2 + 2. But
+the most enormous and mysterious algebraic equation, full of letters,
+brackets, and fractions, may all cancel out at last and be equal to
+nothing. When a demagogue says to a mob, "There is the Bank of England,
+why shouldn't you have some of that money?" he says something which is
+at least as honest and intelligible as the figure 4. When a writer in
+the <i>Times</i> remarks, "We must raise the economic efficiency of the
+masses without diverting anything from those classes which represent the
+national prosperity and refinement," then his equation cancels out; in a
+literal and logical sense his remark amounts to nothing.</p>
+
+<p>There are two kinds of charlatans or people called quacks to-day. The
+power of the first is that he advertises&mdash;and cures. The power of the
+second is that though he is not learned enough to cure he is much too
+learned to advertise. The former give away their dignity with a pound of
+tea; the latter are paid a pound of tea merely for being dignified. I
+think them the worse quacks of the two. Shaw is certainly of the other
+sort. Dickens, another man who was great enough to be a demagogue (and
+greater than Shaw because more heartily<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> a demagogue), puts for ever the
+true difference between the demagogue and the mystagogue in <i>Dr.
+Marigold</i>: "Except that we're cheap-jacks and they're dear-jacks, I
+don't see any difference between us." Bernard Shaw is a great
+cheap-jack, with plenty of patter and I dare say plenty of nonsense, but
+with this also (which is not wholly unimportant), with goods to sell.
+People accuse such a man of self-advertisement. But at least the
+cheap-jack does advertise his wares, whereas the don or dear-jack
+advertises nothing except himself. His very silence, nay his very
+sterility, are supposed to be marks of the richness of his erudition. He
+is too learned to teach, and sometimes too wise even to talk. St. Thomas
+Aquinas said: "In auctore auctoritas." But there is more than one man at
+Oxford or Cambridge who is considered an authority because he has never
+been an author.</p>
+
+<p>Against all this mystification both of silence and verbosity Shaw has
+been a splendid and smashing protest. He has stood up for the fact that
+philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and
+Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death. Nearly all the
+most awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>
+from "A child is born" to "A soul is damned." If the ordinary man may
+not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it? About
+concrete matters indeed one naturally appeals to an oligarchy or select
+class. For information about Lapland I go to an aristocracy of
+Laplanders; for the ways of rabbits to an aristocracy of naturalists or,
+preferably, an aristocracy of poachers. But only mankind itself can bear
+witness to the abstract first principles of mankind, and in matters of
+theory I would always consult the mob. Only the mass of men, for
+instance, have authority to say whether life is good. Whether life is
+good is an especially mystical and delicate question, and, like all such
+questions, is asked in words of one syllable. It is also answered in
+words of one syllable, and Bernard Shaw (as also mankind) answers "yes."</p>
+
+<p>This plain, pugnacious style of Shaw has greatly clarified all
+controversies. He has slain the polysyllable, that huge and slimy
+centipede which has sprawled over all the valleys of England like the
+"loathly worm" who was slain by the ancient knight. He does not think
+that difficult questions will be made simpler by using difficult words
+about them. He has achieved the admirable work, never to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> be mentioned
+without gratitude, of discussing Evolution without mentioning it. The
+good work is of course more evident in the case of philosophy than any
+other region; because the case of philosophy was a crying one. It was
+really preposterous that the things most carefully reserved for the
+study of two or three men should actually be the things common to all
+men. It was absurd that certain men should be experts on the special
+subject of everything. But he stood for much the same spirit and style
+in other matters; in economics, for example. There never has been a
+better popular economist; one more lucid, entertaining, consistent, and
+essentially exact. The very comicality of his examples makes them and
+their argument stick in the mind; as in the case I remember in which he
+said that the big shops had now to please everybody, and were not
+entirely dependent on the lady who sails in "to order four governesses
+and five grand pianos." He is always preaching collectivism; yet he does
+not very often name it. He does not talk about collectivism, but about
+cash; of which the populace feel a much more definite need. He talks
+about cheese, boots, perambulators, and how people are really to live.
+For him economics really means<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> housekeeping, as it does in Greek. His
+difference from the orthodox economists, like most of his differences,
+is very different from the attacks made by the main body of Socialists.
+The old Manchester economists are generally attacked for being too gross
+and material. Shaw really attacks them for not being gross or material
+enough. He thinks that they hide themselves behind long words, remote
+hypotheses or unreal generalisations. When the orthodox economist begins
+with his correct and primary formula, "Suppose there is a Man on an
+Island&mdash;&mdash;" Shaw is apt to interrupt him sharply, saying, "There is a
+Man in the Street."</p>
+
+<p>The second phase of the man's really fruitful efficacy is in a sense the
+converse of this. He has improved philosophic discussions by making them
+more popular. But he has also improved popular amusements by making them
+more philosophic. And by more philosophic I do not mean duller, but
+funnier; that is more varied. All real fun is in cosmic contrasts, which
+involve a view of the cosmos. But I know that this second strength in
+Shaw is really difficult to state and must be approached by explanations
+and even by eliminations. Let me say at once that I think<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> nothing of
+Shaw or anybody else merely for playing the daring sceptic. I do not
+think he has done any good or even achieved any effect simply by asking
+startling questions. It is possible that there have been ages so
+sluggish or automatic that anything that woke them up at all was a good
+thing. It is sufficient to be certain that ours is not such an age. We
+do not need waking up; rather we suffer from insomnia, with all its
+results of fear and exaggeration and frightful waking dreams. The modern
+mind is not a donkey which wants kicking to make it go on. The modern
+mind is more like a motor-car on a lonely road which two amateur
+motorists have been just clever enough to take to pieces, but are not
+quite clever enough to put together again. Under these circumstances
+kicking the car has never been found by the best experts to be
+effective. No one, therefore, does any good to our age merely by asking
+questions&mdash;unless he can answer the questions. Asking questions is
+already the fashionable and aristocratic sport which has brought most of
+us into the bankruptcy court. The note of our age is a note of
+interrogation. And the final point is so plain; no sceptical philosopher
+can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> tired child on
+a hot afternoon. "Am I a boy?&mdash;Why am I a boy?&mdash;Why aren't I a
+chair?&mdash;What is a chair?" A child will sometimes ask questions of this
+sort for two hours. And the philosophers of Protestant Europe have asked
+them for two hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>If that were all that I meant by Shaw making men more philosophic, I
+should put it not among his good influences but his bad. He did do that
+to some extent; and so far he is bad. But there is a much bigger and
+better sense in which he has been a philosopher. He has brought back
+into English drama all the streams of fact or tendency which are
+commonly called undramatic. They were there in Shakespeare's time; but
+they have scarcely been there since until Shaw. I mean that Shakespeare,
+being interested in everything, put everything into a play. If he had
+lately been thinking about the irony and even contradiction confronting
+us in self-preservation and suicide, he put it all into <i>Hamlet</i>. If he
+was annoyed by some passing boom in theatrical babies he put that into
+<i>Hamlet</i> too. He would put anything into <i>Hamlet</i> which he really
+thought was true, from his favourite nursery ballads to his personal
+(and perhaps unfashionable) conviction of the Catholic purgatory.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> There
+is no fact that strikes one, I think, about Shakespeare, except the fact
+of how dramatic he could be, so much as the fact of how undramatic he
+could be.</p>
+
+<p>In this great sense Shaw has brought philosophy back into
+drama&mdash;philosophy in the sense of a certain freedom of the mind. This is
+not a freedom to think what one likes (which is absurd, for one can only
+think what one thinks); it is a freedom to think about what one likes,
+which is quite a different thing and the spring of all thought.
+Shakespeare (in a weak moment, I think) said that all the world is a
+stage. But Shakespeare acted on the much finer principle that a stage is
+all the world. So there are in all Bernard Shaw's plays patches of what
+people would call essentially undramatic stuff, which the dramatist puts
+in because he is honest and would rather prove his case than succeed
+with his play. Shaw has brought back into English drama that
+Shakespearian universality which, if you like, you can call
+Shakespearian irrelevance. Perhaps a better definition than either is a
+habit of thinking the truth worth telling even when you meet it by
+accident. In Shaw's plays one meets an incredible number of truths by
+accident.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To be up to date is a paltry ambition except in an almanac, and Shaw has
+sometimes talked this almanac philosophy. Nevertheless there is a real
+sense in which the phrase may be wisely used, and that is in cases where
+some stereotyped version of what is happening hides what is really
+happening from our eyes. Thus, for instance, newspapers are never up to
+date. The men who write leading articles are always behind the times,
+because they are in a hurry. They are forced to fall back on their
+old-fashioned view of things; they have no time to fashion a new one.
+Everything that is done in a hurry is certain to be antiquated; that is
+why modern industrial civilisation bears so curious a resemblance to
+barbarism. Thus when newspapers say that the <i>Times</i> is a solemn old
+Tory paper, they are out of date; their talk is behind the talk in Fleet
+Street. Thus when newspapers say that Christian dogmas are crumbling,
+they are out of date; their talk is behind the talk in public-houses.
+Now in this sense Shaw has kept in a really stirring sense up to date.
+He has introduced into the theatre the things that no one else had
+introduced into a theatre&mdash;the things in the street outside. The theatre
+is a sort of thing which proudly sends a hansom-cab<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> across the stage as
+Realism, while everybody outside is whistling for motor-cabs.</p>
+
+<p>Consider in this respect how many and fine have been Shaw's intrusions
+into the theatre with the things that were really going on. Daily papers
+and daily matin&eacute;es were still gravely explaining how much modern war
+depended on gunpowder. <i>Arms and the Man</i> explained how much modern war
+depends on chocolate. Every play and paper described the Vicar who was a
+mild Conservative. <i>Candida</i> caught hold of the modern Vicar who is an
+advanced Socialist. Numberless magazine articles and society comedies
+describe the emancipated woman as new and wild. Only <i>You Never Can
+Tell</i> was young enough to see that the emancipated woman is already old
+and respectable. Every comic paper has caricatured the uneducated
+upstart. Only the author of <i>Man and Superman</i> knew enough about the
+modern world to caricature the educated upstart&mdash;the man Straker who can
+quote Beaumarchais, though he cannot pronounce him. This is the second
+real and great work of Shaw&mdash;the letting in of the world on to the
+stage, as the rivers were let in upon the Augean Stable. He has let a
+little of the Haymarket into the Haymarket Theatre. He has permitted
+some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> whispers of the Strand to enter the Strand Theatre. A variety of
+solutions in philosophy is as silly as it is in arithmetic, but one may
+be justly proud of a variety of materials for a solution. After Shaw,
+one may say, there is nothing that cannot be introduced into a play if
+one can make it decent, amusing, and relevant. The state of a man's
+health, the religion of his childhood, his ear for music, or his
+ignorance of cookery can all be made vivid if they have anything to do
+with the subject. A soldier may mention the commissariat as well as the
+cavalry; and, better still, a priest may mention theology as well as
+religion. That is being a philosopher; that is bringing the universe on
+the stage.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, he has obliterated the mere cynic. He has been so much more
+cynical than anyone else for the public good that no one has dared since
+to be really cynical for anything smaller. The Chinese crackers of the
+frivolous cynics fail to excite us after the dynamite of the serious and
+aspiring cynic. Bernard Shaw and I (who are growing grey together) can
+remember an epoch which many of his followers do not know: an epoch of
+real pessimism. The years from 1885 to 1898 were like the hours of
+afternoon in a rich<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> house with large rooms; the hours before tea-time.
+They believed in nothing except good manners; and the essence of good
+manners is to conceal a yawn. A yawn may be defined as a silent yell.
+The power which the young pessimist of that time showed in this
+direction would have astonished anyone but him. He yawned so wide as to
+swallow the world. He swallowed the world like an unpleasant pill before
+retiring to an eternal rest. Now the last and best glory of Shaw is that
+in the circles where this creature was found, he is not. He has not been
+killed (I don't know exactly why), but he has actually turned into a
+Shaw idealist. This is no exaggeration. I meet men who, when I knew them
+in 1898, were just a little too lazy to destroy the universe. They are
+now conscious of not being quite worthy to abolish some prison
+regulations. This destruction and conversion seem to me the mark of
+something actually great. It is always great to destroy a type without
+destroying a man. The followers of Shaw are optimists; some of them are
+so simple as even to use the word. They are sometimes rather pallid
+optimists, frequently very worried optimists, occasionally, to tell the
+truth, rather cross<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> optimists: but they not pessimists; they can exult
+though they cannot laugh. He has at least withered up among them the
+mere pose of impossibility. Like every great teacher, he has cursed the
+barren fig-tree. For nothing except that impossibility is really
+impossible.</p>
+
+<hr class='smler' />
+
+<p>I know it is all very strange. From the height of eight hundred years
+ago, or of eight hundred years hence, our age must look incredibly odd.
+We call the twelfth century ascetic. We call our own time hedonist and
+full of praise and pleasure. But in the ascetic age the love of life was
+evident and enormous, so that it had to be restrained. In an hedonist
+age pleasure has always sunk low, so that it has to be encouraged. How
+high the sea of human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now only
+know by the colossal walls that they built to keep it in bounds. How low
+human happiness sank in the twentieth century our children will only
+know by these extraordinary modern books, which tell people that it is a
+duty to be cheerful and that life is not so bad after all. Humanity
+never produces optimists till it has ceased to produce<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> happy men. It is
+strange to be obliged to impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men
+to a banquet with spears. But this shall be written of our time: that
+when the spirit who denies besieged the last citadel, blaspheming life
+itself, there were some, there was one especially, whose voice was heard
+and whose spear was never broken.</p>
+
+<p class='tbrk'>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class='center'>THE END</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="ADVERTISEMENTS" id="ADVERTISEMENTS"></a>ADVERTISEMENTS</h2>
+
+<hr class='smler' />
+
+<h3>GILBERT K. CHESTERTON</h3>
+
+<p><b>Heretics</b>. Essays. <i>12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents.</i></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Always entertaining."&mdash;<i>New York Evening Sun</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"Always original."&mdash;<i>Chicago Tribune</i>.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>Orthodoxy</b>. Uniform with "Heretics."</p>
+
+<p class='center'><i>12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents.</i></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Here is a man with something to say."&mdash;<i>Brooklyn Life</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"A work of genius."&mdash;<i>Chicago Evening Post</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"'Orthodoxy' is the most important religious work that has appeared since Emerson."&mdash;<i>North American Review</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"Is likely to produce a sensation. An extraordinary book which
+ill be much read and talked about."&mdash;<i>New York Globe</i>.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>All Things Considered</b>. Essays on various subjects, such as:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Conceit and Caricature; Spiritualism; Science and Religion; Woman, etc.</p>
+
+<p class='center'><i>12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"Full of the author's abundant vitality, wit and unflinching optimism."&mdash;<i>Book News</i>.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>The Napoleon of Notting Hill</b>. 12<i>mo.</i> $1.50.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"A brilliant piece of satire, gemmed with ingenious paradox." &mdash;<i>Boston Herald</i>.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>George Bernard Shaw</b>. An illustrated Biography.</p>
+
+<p class='center'><i>12 mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents</i>.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Ball and the Cross</b>. 12<i>mo.</i> $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Gilbert K. Chesterton.</b> A Criticism.</p>
+
+<p class='center'><i>Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents</i>.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>An illustrated biography of this brilliant author; also an able review of his works.</p>
+
+<p>"The anonymous author is a critic with uncommon discrimination
+and good sense. Mr. Chesterton possesses one of the best attributes
+of genius&mdash;impersonality."&mdash;<i>Baltimore News</i>.</p></blockquote>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h3>VERNON LEE</h3>
+
+<p>Uniform sets boxed. <i>8 volumes. Cloth. $12.00 net.</i> <i>Express extra.
+$1.50 net each. Postage 10 cents.</i></p>
+
+<blockquote><p><sup>*</sup>*<sup>*</sup> "If
+we were asked to name the three authors writing in English to-day
+to whom the highest rank of cleverness and brilliancy might be
+accorded, we would not hesitate to place among them Vernon
+Lee."&mdash;<i>Baltimore Sun.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>Laurus Nobilis.</b> Essays on Art and Life.</p>
+
+<p><b>Renaissance Fancies and Studies.</b></p>
+
+<p><b>The Countess of Albany.</b></p>
+
+<p><b>Limbo and Other Essays, including: "Ariadne in Mantua"</b></p>
+
+<p><b>Pope Jacynth, and Other Fantastic Tales</b></p>
+
+<p><b>Hortus Vit&aelig;, or the Hanging Gardens</b></p>
+
+<p><b>The Sentimental Traveller</b></p>
+
+<p><b>The Enchanted Woods</b></p>
+
+<p><b>The Spirit of Rome</b></p>
+
+<p><b>Genius Loci</b></p>
+
+<p><b>Hauntings</b></p>
+
+<hr class='smler' />
+
+<h3>W. COMPTON LEITH</h3>
+
+<p><b>Apologia Diffidentis.</b> An intimate personal book.</p>
+
+<p class='center'><i>Cloth. 8vo. $2.50 net. Postage 15 cents</i>.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p><sup>*</sup>*<sup>*</sup> "Mr.
+Leith formulates the anatomy of diffidence as Burton did of
+melancholy; and it might almost be said that he has done it with
+equal charm. The book surpasses in beauty and distinction of style
+any other prose work of the past few years. Its charm is akin to
+that of Mr. A. C. Benson's earlier books, yet Mr. Benson at his
+best has never equalled this.... A human document as striking as it
+is unusual.... The impress of truth and wisdom lies deep upon every
+page."&mdash;<i>The Dial.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h3>ANATOLE FRANCE</h3>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Anatole France is a writer whose personality is very strongly
+reflected in his works.... To reproduce his evanescent grace and
+charm is not to be lightly achieved, but the translators have done
+their work with care, distinction, and a very happy sense of the
+value of words."&mdash;<i>Daily Graphic</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"We must now all read all of Anatole France. The offer is too good
+to be shirked. He is just Anatole France, the greatest living
+writer of French."&mdash;<i>Daily Chronicle</i>.</p>
+
+<p class='center'><i>Complete Limited Edition in English</i></p>
+
+<p>Under the general editorship of Frederic Chapman. 8vo., special
+light-weight paper, wide margins, Caslon type, bound in red and
+gold, gilt top, and papers from designs by Beardsley, initials by
+Ospovat. <i>$2.00 per volume</i> (except John of Arc), <i>postpaid</i>.</p></blockquote>
+
+
+<table border='0' cellspacing='0' cellpadding='5' summary='books by Anatole France'>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Balthasar</td>
+    <td>Pierre Noziere</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Well of St. Clare</td>
+    <td>The White Stone</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Red Lily</td>
+    <td>Penguin Island</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Mother of Pearl</td>
+    <td>The Opinions of Jerome Coignard</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard</td>
+    <td>Jocasta and the Famished Cat</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Garden of Epicurus</td>
+    <td>The Aspirations of Jean Servien</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Tha&iuml;s</td>
+    <td>The Elm Tree on the Mall</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Merrie Tales of Jacques Tournebroche &nbsp; </td>
+    <td>My Friend's Book</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Joan of Arc. Two volumes.<br /><i>$8 net per set. Postage extra.</i></td>
+    <td>The Wicker-Work Woman</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Comedian's Tragedy</td>
+    <td>At the Sign of the Queen Pedauque</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Amethyst Ring</td>
+    <td>Profitable Tales</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>M. Bergeret in Paris</td>
+    <td>The Lettered Life</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h3>ELIZABETH BISLAND</h3>
+
+<p><b>The Secret Life.</b> Being the Book of a Heretic.</p>
+
+<p class='center'><i>12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 10 cents.</i></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"A book of untrammelled thought on living topics. Extraordinarily
+interesting."&mdash;<i>Philadelphia Press.</i></p>
+
+<p>"Excellent style, quaint humor, and shrewd philosophy."&mdash;<i>Review of
+Reviews.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>Seekers in Sicily.</b> Being a Quest for Persephone, by <span class="smcap">Elizabeth Bisland</span>
+and <span class="smcap">Anne Hoyt</span>.</p>
+
+<p class='center'><i>Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 20 cents. Illustrated.</i></p>
+
+<blockquote><p><sup>*</sup>*<sup>*</sup> A
+delightful account of Sicily, its people, country, and villages.
+More than a guide book, this volume is a comprehensive account of
+what all who are interested in this beautiful island wish to know.</p></blockquote>
+
+<hr class='smler' />
+
+<h3>CHARLES H. SHERRILL</h3>
+
+<p><b>Stained Glass Tours in France.</b> How to reach the examples of XIIIth,
+XIVth, XVth and XVIth Century Stained Glass in France (with maps and
+itineraries) and what they are. <i>Ornamental cloth. 12mo. Profusely
+illustrated. $1.50. net. Postage 14 cents.</i></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"This book should make a place for itself."&mdash;<i>Chicago Tribune.</i></p>
+
+<p>"This story of glass has swept me off my feet. Instead of a world
+of technicalities I met entertainment, and yet that entertainment
+never abandoned the natural level of dignity belonging to the
+subject."&mdash;<i>Ferdinand Schwill, Professor of Modern History,
+University of Chicago.</i></p>
+
+<p>"A more unique or more delightful travel book has not been
+written."&mdash;<i>Toronto Mail and Empire.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>Stained Glass Tours in England.</b></p>
+
+<p class='center'><i>Illustrated. Cloth 8vo. $2.50 net. Postage 20 cents.</i></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Just the information that many travellers in England need. All in
+an orderly and sprightly manner."&mdash;<i>Professor William Lyon Phelps,
+Yale University.</i></p>
+
+<p>"Well conceived and original."&mdash;<i>Athen&aelig;um.</i></p>
+
+<p><sup>*</sup>*<sup>*</sup> "In these days of universal travel and of the almost
+universal writing of travel books, it is unusual to find an author
+whose point of view is unique and whose subject-matter is
+unhackneyed. Mr. Sherrill has met both of these difficult
+requirements."&mdash;<i>The Dial.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h3>J. M. DIVER</h3>
+
+<p><b>Captain Desmond, V.C.</b></p>
+
+<p class='center'><i>Ornamental cloth.</i> 12<i>mo. $1.50.</i></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"A story of the Punjab frontier. The theme is that of Kipling's
+'Story of the Gadsbys'&mdash;a brilliant and convincing study of an
+undying problem."&mdash;<i>London Post.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>The Great Amulet</b> 12<i>mo.</i> $1.50.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>A love-story dealing with army life in India.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>Candles in the Wind</b> 12<i>mo.</i> $1.50.</p>
+
+<hr class='smler' />
+
+<h3>HUGH DE SELINCOURT</h3>
+
+<p><b>The Strongest Plume</b> 12<i>mo.</i> $1.50.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Deals with a problem quite worthy of serious consideration,
+frankly but restrainedly. Excellent studies of character."&mdash;<i>London
+Daily News.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>A Boy's Marriage</b> 12<i>mo.</i> $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The High Adventure</b> 12<i>mo.</i> $1.50.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Admirably well told with distinctive literary
+skill."&mdash;<i>Philadelphia Press.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>The Way Things Happen</b> 12<i>mo.</i> $1.50.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Fantastic and agreeable&mdash;an effort somewhat in the manner of Mr.
+W. J. Locke."&mdash;<i>Glasgow Evening News.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<hr class='smler' />
+
+<h3>A. NEIL LYONS</h3>
+
+<p><b>Arthur's Hotel</b> 12<i>mo.</i> $1.50.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Sketches of low life in London. The book will delight visitors to
+the slums."&mdash;<i>New York Sun.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>Sixpenny Pieces</b> 12<i>mo.</i> $1.50.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>The Story of a "Sixpenny Doctor" in the East end of London. The volume
+is instinct with a realism that differs altogether from the so-called
+realism of the accepted "gutter" novels, for it is the realism of life
+as it is, and not as imagined.</p></blockquote>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h3>THE COMPLETE WORKS<br />OF<br />WILLIAM J. LOCKE</h3>
+
+<p class='center'><span class="smcap">Life is a glorious thing</span>."&mdash;<i>W. J. Locke</i></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"If you wish to be lifted out of the petty cares of to-day, read
+one of Locke's novels. You may select any from the following titles
+and be certain of meeting some new and delightful friends. His
+characters are worth knowing."&mdash;<i>Baltimore Sun.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<table border='0' cellspacing='0' cellpadding='5' summary='works of william j. locke'>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne</td>
+    <td>The Demagogue and Lady Phayre</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>At the Gate of Samaria</td>
+    <td>The Belov&eacute;d Vagabond</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A Study in Shadows</td>
+    <td>The White Dove</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Where Love Is</td>
+    <td>The Usurper</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Derelicts</td>
+    <td>Septimus</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Idols</td>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class='center'><i>12mo. Cloth. $1.50 each</i>.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Eleven volumes bound in green cloth. Uniform edition in box. $16.50
+per set. Half morocco $45.00 net. Express prepaid.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>The Belov&eacute;d Vagabond</b></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"'The Belov&eacute;d Vagabond' is a gently-written, fascinating tale. Make
+his acquaintance some dreary, rain-soaked evening and find the
+vagabond nerve-thrilling in your own heart."&mdash;<i>Chicago
+Record-Herald.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>Septimus</b></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Septimus is the joy of the year."&mdash;<i>American Magazine.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne</b></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"A literary event of the first importance."&mdash;<i>Boston Herald.</i></p>
+
+<p>"One of those rare and much-to-be-desired stories which keep one
+divided between an interested impatience to get on, and an
+irresistible temptation to linger for full enjoyment by the
+way."&mdash;<i>Life.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>Where Love Is</b></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"A capital story told with skill."&mdash;<i>New York Evening Sun.</i></p>
+
+<p>"One of those unusual novels of which the end is as good as the
+beginning."&mdash;<i>New York Globe.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h3>WILLIAM J. LOCKE</h3>
+
+<p><b>The Usurper</b></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Contains the hall-mark of genius itself. The plot is masterly
+conception, the descriptions are all vivid flashes from a brilliant
+pen. It is impossible to read and not marvel at the skilled
+workmanship and the constant dramatic intensity of the incident,
+situations and climax."&mdash;<i>The Boston Herald.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>Derelicts</b></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Mr. Locke tells his story in a very true, a very moving, and a
+very noble book. If any one can read the last chapter with dry eyes
+we shall be surprised. 'Derelicts' is an impressive, an important
+book. Yvonne is a creation that any artist might be proud
+of."&mdash;<i>The Daily Chronicle.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>Idols</b></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"One of the very few distinguished novels of this present book
+season."&mdash;<i>The Daily Mail.</i></p>
+
+<p>"A brilliantly written and eminently readable
+book."&mdash;<i>The London Daily Telegraph.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>A Study in Shadows</b></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Mr. Locke has achieved a distinct success in this novel. He has
+struck many emotional chords, and struck them all with a firm, sure
+hand. In the relations between Katherine and Raine he had a
+delicate problem to handle, and he has handled it
+delicately."&mdash;<i>The Daily Chronicle.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>The White Dove</b></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"It is an interesting story. The characters are strongly conceived
+and vividly presented, and the dramatic moments are powerfully
+realized."&mdash;<i>The Morning Post.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>The Demagogue and Lady Phayre</b></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Think of Locke's clever books. Then think of a book as different
+from any of these as one can well imagine&mdash;that will be Mr. Locke's
+new book."&mdash;<i>New York World.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><b>At the Gate of Samaria</b></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"William J. Locke's novels are nothing if not unusual. They are
+marked by a quaint originality. The habitual novel reader
+inevitably is grateful for a refreshing sense of escaping the
+commonplace path of conclusion."&mdash;<i>Chicago Record-Herald.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's George Bernard Shaw, by Gilbert K. Chesterton
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ***
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+</body>
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+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of George Bernard Shaw, by Gilbert K. Chesterton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: George Bernard Shaw
+
+Author: Gilbert K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: October 13, 2006 [EBook #19535]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sigal Alon, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
+
+
+_By_
+
+GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+MCMIX
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY
+JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+
+THE PLIMPTON PRESS, NORWOOD, MASS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+
+HERETICS.
+
+ORTHODOXY.
+
+THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL: A Romance.
+Illustrated by W. GRAHAM ROBERTSON.
+
+ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
+
+THE BALL AND THE CROSS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Introduction to the First Edition_
+
+
+Most people either say that they agree with Bernard Shaw or that they do
+not understand him. I am the only person who understands him, and I do
+not agree with him.
+
+                                                          G. K. C.
+
+
+
+
+_The Problem of a Preface_
+
+
+A peculiar difficulty arrests the writer of this rough study at the very
+start. Many people know Mr. Bernard Shaw chiefly as a man who would
+write a very long preface even to a very short play. And there is truth
+in the idea; he is indeed a very prefatory sort of person. He always
+gives the explanation before the incident; but so, for the matter of
+that, does the Gospel of St. John. For Bernard Shaw, as for the mystics,
+Christian and heathen (and Shaw is best described as a heathen mystic),
+the philosophy of facts is anterior to the facts themselves. In due time
+we come to the fact, the incarnation; but in the beginning was the Word.
+
+This produces upon many minds an impression of needless preparation and
+a kind of bustling prolixity. But the truth is that the very rapidity of
+such a man's mind makes him seem slow in getting to the point. It is
+positively because he is quick-witted that he is long-winded. A quick
+eye for ideas may actually make a writer slow in reaching his goal,
+just as a quick eye for landscapes might make a motorist slow in
+reaching Brighton. An original man has to pause at every allusion or
+simile to re-explain historical parallels, to re-shape distorted words.
+Any ordinary leader-writer (let us say) might write swiftly and smoothly
+something like this: "The element of religion in the Puritan rebellion,
+if hostile to art, yet saved the movement from some of the evils in
+which the French Revolution involved morality." Now a man like Mr. Shaw,
+who has his own views on everything, would be forced to make the
+sentence long and broken instead of swift and smooth. He would say
+something like: "The element of religion, as I explain religion, in the
+Puritan rebellion (which you wholly misunderstand) if hostile to
+art--that is what I mean by art--may have saved it from some evils
+(remember my definition of evil) in which the French Revolution--of
+which I have my own opinion--involved morality, which I will define for
+you in a minute." That is the worst of being a really universal sceptic
+and philosopher; it is such slow work. The very forest of the man's
+thoughts chokes up his thoroughfare. A man must be orthodox upon most
+things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
+
+Now the same difficulty which affects the work of Bernard Shaw affects
+also any book about him. There is an unavoidable artistic necessity to
+put the preface before the play; that is, there is a necessity to say
+something of what Bernard Shaw's experience means before one even says
+what it was. We have to mention what he did when we have already
+explained why he did it. Viewed superficially, his life consists of
+fairly conventional incidents, and might easily fall under fairly
+conventional phrases. It might be the life of any Dublin clerk or
+Manchester Socialist or London author. If I touch on the man's life
+before his work, it will seem trivial; yet taken with his work it is
+most important. In short, one could scarcely know what Shaw's doings
+meant unless one knew what he meant by them. This difficulty in mere
+order and construction has puzzled me very much. I am going to overcome
+it, clumsily perhaps, but in the way which affects me as most sincere.
+Before I write even a slight suggestion of his relation to the stage, I
+am going to write of three soils or atmospheres out of which that
+relation grew. In other words, before I write of Shaw I will write of
+the three great influences upon Shaw. They were all three there before
+he was born, yet each one of them is himself and a very vivid portrait
+of him from one point of view. I have called these three traditions:
+"The Irishman," "The Puritan," and "The Progressive." I do not see how
+this prefatory theorising is to be avoided; for if I simply said, for
+instance, that Bernard Shaw was an Irishman, the impression produced on
+the reader might be remote from my thought and, what is more important,
+from Shaw's. People might think, for instance, that I meant that he was
+"irresponsible." That would throw out the whole plan of these pages, for
+if there is one thing that Shaw is not, it is irresponsible. The
+responsibility in him rings like steel. Or, again, if I simply called
+him a Puritan, it might mean something about nude statues or "prudes on
+the prowl." Or if I called him a Progressive, it might be supposed to
+mean that he votes for Progressives at the County Council election,
+which I very much doubt. I have no other course but this: of briefly
+explaining such matters as Shaw himself might explain them. Some
+fastidious persons may object to my thus putting the moral in front of
+the fable. Some may imagine in their innocence that they already
+understand the word Puritan or the yet more mysterious word Irishman.
+The only person, indeed, of whose approval I feel fairly certain is Mr.
+Bernard Shaw himself, the man of many introductions.
+
+
+
+
+_CONTENTS_
+
+                                    _Page_
+INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION        5
+
+THE PROBLEM OF A PREFACE                 7
+
+THE IRISHMAN                            17
+
+THE PURITAN                             34
+
+THE PROGRESSIVE                         53
+
+THE CRITIC                              87
+
+THE DRAMATIST                          114
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER                        165
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
+
+
+
+
+_The Irishman_
+
+
+The English public has commonly professed, with a kind of pride, that it
+cannot understand Mr. Bernard Shaw. There are many reasons for it which
+ought to be adequately considered in such a book as this. But the first
+and most obvious reason is the mere statement that George Bernard Shaw
+was born in Dublin in 1856. At least one reason why Englishmen cannot
+understand Mr. Shaw is that Englishmen have never taken the trouble to
+understand Irishmen. They will sometimes be generous to Ireland; but
+never just to Ireland. They will speak to Ireland; they will speak for
+Ireland; but they will not hear Ireland speak. All the real amiability
+which most Englishmen undoubtedly feel towards Irishmen is lavished upon
+a class of Irishmen which unfortunately does not exist. The Irishman of
+the English farce, with his brogue, his buoyancy, and his tender-hearted
+irresponsibility, is a man who ought to have been thoroughly pampered
+with praise and sympathy, if he had only existed to receive them.
+Unfortunately, all the time that we were creating a comic Irishman in
+fiction, we were creating a tragic Irishman in fact. Never perhaps has
+there been a situation of such excruciating cross-purposes even in the
+three-act farce. The more we saw in the Irishman a sort of warm and weak
+fidelity, the more he regarded us with a sort of icy anger. The more the
+oppressor looked down with an amiable pity, the more did the oppressed
+look down with a somewhat unamiable contempt. But, indeed, it is
+needless to say that such comic cross-purposes could be put into a play;
+they have been put into a play. They have been put into what is perhaps
+the most real of Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays, _John Bull's Other Island_.
+
+It is somewhat absurd to imagine that any one who has not read a play by
+Mr. Shaw will be reading a book about him. But if it comes to that it is
+(as I clearly perceive) absurd to be writing a book about Mr. Bernard
+Shaw at all. It is indefensibly foolish to attempt to explain a man
+whose whole object through life has been to explain himself. But even in
+nonsense there is a need for logic and consistency; therefore let us
+proceed on the assumption that when I say that all Mr. Shaw's blood and
+origin may be found in _John Bull's Other Island_, some reader may
+answer that he does not know the play. Besides, it is more important to
+put the reader right about England and Ireland even than to put him
+right about Shaw. If he reminds me that this is a book about Shaw, I can
+only assure him that I will reasonably, and at proper intervals,
+remember the fact.
+
+Mr. Shaw himself said once, "I am a typical Irishman; my family came
+from Yorkshire." Scarcely anyone but a typical Irishman could have made
+the remark. It is in fact a bull, a conscious bull. A bull is only a
+paradox which people are too stupid to understand. It is the rapid
+summary of something which is at once so true and so complex that the
+speaker who has the swift intelligence to perceive it, has not the slow
+patience to explain it. Mystical dogmas are much of this kind. Dogmas
+are often spoken of as if they were signs of the slowness or endurance
+of the human mind. As a matter of fact, they are marks of mental
+promptitude and lucid impatience. A man will put his meaning mystically
+because he cannot waste time in putting it rationally. Dogmas are not
+dark and mysterious; rather a dogma is like a flash of lightning--an
+instantaneous lucidity that opens across a whole landscape. Of the same
+nature are Irish bulls; they are summaries which are too true to be
+consistent. The Irish make Irish bulls for the same reason that they
+accept Papal bulls. It is because it is better to speak wisdom
+foolishly, like the Saints, rather than to speak folly wisely, like the
+Dons.
+
+This is the truth about mystical dogmas and the truth about Irish bulls;
+it is also the truth about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw. Each of them
+is an argument impatiently shortened into an epigram. Each of them
+represents a truth hammered and hardened, with an almost disdainful
+violence until it is compressed into a small space, until it is made
+brief and almost incomprehensible. The case of that curt remark about
+Ireland and Yorkshire is a very typical one. If Mr. Shaw had really
+attempted to set out all the sensible stages of his joke, the sentence
+would have run something like this: "That I am an Irishman is a fact of
+psychology which I can trace in many of the things that come out of me,
+my fastidiousness, my frigid fierceness and my distrust of mere
+pleasure. But the thing must be tested by what comes from me; do not try
+on me the dodge of asking where I came from, how many batches of three
+hundred and sixty-five days my family was in Ireland. Do not play any
+games on me about whether I am a Celt, a word that is dim to the
+anthropologist and utterly unmeaning to anybody else. Do not start any
+drivelling discussions about whether the word Shaw is German or
+Scandinavian or Iberian or Basque. You know you are human; I know I am
+Irish. I know I belong to a certain type and temper of society; and I
+know that all sorts of people of all sorts of blood live in that society
+and by that society; and are therefore Irish. You can take your books of
+anthropology to hell or to Oxford." Thus gently, elaborately and at
+length, Mr. Shaw would have explained his meaning, if he had thought it
+worth his while. As he did not he merely flung the symbolic, but very
+complete sentence, "I am a typical Irishman; my family came from
+Yorkshire."
+
+What then is the colour of this Irish society of which Bernard Shaw,
+with all his individual oddity, is yet an essential type? One
+generalisation, I think, may at least be made. Ireland has in it a
+quality which caused it (in the most ascetic age of Christianity) to be
+called the "Land of Saints"; and which still might give it a claim to be
+called the Land of Virgins. An Irish Catholic priest once said to me,
+"There is in our people a fear of the passions which is older even than
+Christianity." Everyone who has read Shaw's play upon Ireland will
+remember the thing in the horror of the Irish girl at being kissed in
+the public streets. But anyone who knows Shaw's work will recognize it
+in Shaw himself. There exists by accident an early and beardless
+portrait of him which really suggests in the severity and purity of its
+lines some of the early ascetic pictures of the beardless Christ.
+However he may shout profanities or seek to shatter the shrines, there
+is always something about him which suggests that in a sweeter and more
+solid civilisation he would have been a great saint. He would have been
+a saint of a sternly ascetic, perhaps of a sternly negative type. But he
+has this strange note of the saint in him: that he is literally
+unworldly. Worldliness has no human magic for him; he is not bewitched
+by rank nor drawn on by conviviality at all. He could not understand
+the intellectual surrender of the snob. He is perhaps a defective
+character; but he is not a mixed one. All the virtues he has are heroic
+virtues. Shaw is like the Venus of Milo; all that there is of him is
+admirable.
+
+But in any case this Irish innocence is peculiar and fundamental in him;
+and strange as it may sound, I think that his innocence has a great deal
+to do with his suggestions of sexual revolution. Such a man is
+comparatively audacious in theory because he is comparatively clean in
+thought. Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their
+strength in forging chains for themselves; they alone know how strong
+the chains need to be. But there are other souls who walk the woods like
+Diana, with a sort of wild chastity. I confess I think that this Irish
+purity a little disables a critic in dealing, as Mr. Shaw has dealt,
+with the roots and reality of the marriage law. He forgets that those
+fierce and elementary functions which drive the universe have an impetus
+which goes beyond itself and cannot always easily be recovered. So the
+healthiest men may often erect a law to watch them, just as the
+healthiest sleepers may want an alarum clock to wake them up. However
+this may be, Bernard Shaw certainly has all the virtues and all the
+powers that go with this original quality in Ireland. One of them is a
+sort of awful elegance; a dangerous and somewhat inhuman daintiness of
+taste which sometimes seems to shrink from matter itself, as though it
+were mud. Of the many sincere things Mr. Shaw has said he never said a
+more sincere one than when he stated he was a vegetarian, not because
+eating meat was bad morality, but because it was bad taste. It would be
+fanciful to say that Mr. Shaw is a vegetarian because he comes of a race
+of vegetarians, of peasants who are compelled to accept the simple life
+in the shape of potatoes. But I am sure that his fierce fastidiousness
+in such matters is one of the allotropic forms of the Irish purity; it
+is to the virtue of Father Matthew what a coal is to a diamond. It has,
+of course, the quality common to all special and unbalanced types of
+virtue, that you never know where it will stop. I can feel what Mr. Shaw
+probably means when he says that it is disgusting to feast off dead
+bodies, or to cut lumps off what was once a living thing. But I can
+never know at what moment he may not feel in the same way that it is
+disgusting to mutilate a pear-tree, or to root out of the earth those
+miserable mandrakes which cannot even groan. There is no natural limit
+to this rush and riotous gallop of refinement.
+
+But it is not this physical and fantastic purity which I should chiefly
+count among the legacies of the old Irish morality. A much more
+important gift is that which all the saints declared to be the reward of
+chastity: a queer clearness of the intellect, like the hard clearness of
+a crystal. This certainly Mr. Shaw possesses; in such degree that at
+certain times the hardness seems rather clearer than the clearness. But
+so it does in all the most typical Irish characters and Irish attitudes
+of mind. This is probably why Irishmen succeed so much in such
+professions as require a certain crystalline realism, especially about
+results. Such professions are the soldier and the lawyer; these give
+ample opportunity for crimes but not much for mere illusions. If you
+have composed a bad opera you may persuade yourself that it is a good
+one; if you have carved a bad statue you can think yourself better than
+Michael Angelo. But if you have lost a battle you cannot believe you
+have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have
+got him off.
+
+There must be some sense in every popular prejudice, even about
+foreigners. And the English people certainly have somehow got an
+impression and a tradition that the Irishman is genial, unreasonable,
+and sentimental. This legend of the tender, irresponsible Paddy has two
+roots; there are two elements in the Irish which made the mistake
+possible. First, the very logic of the Irishman makes him regard war or
+revolution as extra-logical, an _ultima ratio_ which is beyond reason.
+When fighting a powerful enemy he no more worries whether all his
+charges are exact or all his attitudes dignified than a soldier worries
+whether a cannon-ball is shapely or a plan of campaign picturesque. He
+is aggressive; he attacks. He seems merely to be rowdy in Ireland when
+he is really carrying the war into Africa--or England. A Dublin
+tradesman printed his name and trade in archaic Erse on his cart. He
+knew that hardly anybody could read it; he did it to annoy. In his
+position I think he was quite right. When one is oppressed it is a mark
+of chivalry to hurt oneself in order to hurt the oppressor. But the
+English (never having had a real revolution since the Middle Ages) find
+it very hard to understand this steady passion for being a nuisance, and
+mistake it for mere whimsical impulsiveness and folly. When an Irish
+member holds up the whole business of the House of Commons by talking of
+his bleeding country for five or six hours, the simple English members
+suppose that he is a sentimentalist. The truth is that he is a scornful
+realist who alone remains unaffected by the sentimentalism of the House
+of Commons. The Irishman is neither poet enough nor snob enough to be
+swept away by those smooth social and historical tides and tendencies
+which carry Radicals and Labour members comfortably off their feet. He
+goes on asking for a thing because he wants it; and he tries really to
+hurt his enemies because they are his enemies. This is the first of the
+queer confusions which make the hard Irishman look soft. He seems to us
+wild and unreasonable because he is really much too reasonable to be
+anything but fierce when he is fighting.
+
+In all this it will not be difficult to see the Irishman in Bernard
+Shaw. Though personally one of the kindest men in the world, he has
+often written really in order to hurt; not because he hated any
+particular men (he is hardly hot and animal enough for that), but
+because he really hated certain ideas even unto slaying. He provokes; he
+will not let people alone. One might even say that he bullies, only
+that this would be unfair, because he always wishes the other man to hit
+back. At least he always challenges, like a true Green Islander. An even
+stronger instance of this national trait can be found in another eminent
+Irishman, Oscar Wilde. His philosophy (which was vile) was a philosophy
+of ease, of acceptance, and luxurious illusion; yet, being Irish, he
+could not help putting it in pugnacious and propagandist epigrams. He
+preached his softness with hard decision; he praised pleasure in the
+words most calculated to give pain. This armed insolence, which was the
+noblest thing about him, was also the Irish thing; he challenged all
+comers. It is a good instance of how right popular tradition is even
+when it is most wrong, that the English have perceived and preserved
+this essential trait of Ireland in a proverbial phrase. It _is_ true
+that the Irishman says, "Who will tread on the tail of my coat?"
+
+But there is a second cause which creates the English fallacy that the
+Irish are weak and emotional. This again springs from the very fact that
+the Irish are lucid and logical. For being logical they strictly
+separate poetry from prose; and as in prose they are strictly prosaic,
+so in poetry they are purely poetical. In this, as in one or two other
+things, they resemble the French, who make their gardens beautiful
+because they are gardens, but their fields ugly because they are only
+fields. An Irishman may like romance, but he will say, to use a frequent
+Shavian phrase, that it is "only romance." A great part of the English
+energy in fiction arises from the very fact that their fiction half
+deceives them. If Rudyard Kipling, for instance, had written his short
+stories in France, they would have been praised as cool, clever little
+works of art, rather cruel, and very nervous and feminine; Kipling's
+short stories would have been appreciated like Maupassant's short
+stories. In England they were not appreciated but believed. They were
+taken seriously by a startled nation as a true picture of the empire and
+the universe. The English people made haste to abandon England in favour
+of Mr. Kipling and his imaginary colonies; they made haste to abandon
+Christianity in favour of Mr. Kipling's rather morbid version of
+Judaism. Such a moral boom of a book would be almost impossible in
+Ireland, because the Irish mind distinguishes between life and
+literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw himself summed this up as he sums up so
+many things in a compact sentence which he uttered in conversation with
+the present writer, "An Irishman has two eyes." He meant that with one
+eye an Irishman saw that a dream was inspiring, bewitching, or sublime,
+and with the other eye that after all it was a dream. Both the humour
+and the sentiment of an Englishman cause him to wink the other eye. Two
+other small examples will illustrate the English mistake. Take, for
+instance, that noble survival from a nobler age of politics--I mean
+Irish oratory. The English imagine that Irish politicians are so
+hot-headed and poetical that they have to pour out a torrent of burning
+words. The truth is that the Irish are so clear-headed and critical that
+they still regard rhetoric as a distinct art, as the ancients did. Thus
+a man makes a speech as a man plays a violin, not necessarily without
+feeling, but chiefly because he knows how to do it. Another instance of
+the same thing is that quality which is always called the Irish charm.
+The Irish are agreeable, not because they are particularly emotional,
+but because they are very highly civilised. Blarney is a ritual; as much
+of a ritual as kissing the Blarney Stone.
+
+Lastly, there is one general truth about Ireland which may very well
+have influenced Bernard Shaw from the first; and almost certainly
+influenced him for good. Ireland is a country in which the political
+conflicts are at least genuine; they are about something. They are about
+patriotism, about religion, or about money: the three great realities.
+In other words, they are concerned with what commonwealth a man lives in
+or with what universe a man lives in or with how he is to manage to live
+in either. But they are not concerned with which of two wealthy cousins
+in the same governing class shall be allowed to bring in the same Parish
+Councils Bill; there is no party system in Ireland. The party system in
+England is an enormous and most efficient machine for preventing
+political conflicts. The party system is arranged on the same principle
+as a three-legged race: the principle that union is not always strength
+and is never activity. Nobody asks for what he really wants. But in
+Ireland the loyalist is just as ready to throw over the King as the
+Fenian to throw over Mr. Gladstone; each will throw over anything except
+the thing that he wants. Hence it happens that even the follies or the
+frauds of Irish politics are more genuine as symptoms and more
+honourable as symbols than the lumbering hypocrisies of the prosperous
+Parliamentarian. The very lies of Dublin and Belfast are truer than the
+truisms of Westminster. They have an object; they refer to a state of
+things. There was more honesty, in the sense of actuality, about
+Piggott's letters than about the _Times'_ leading articles on them. When
+Parnell said calmly before the Royal Commission that he had made a
+certain remark "in order to mislead the House" he proved himself to be
+one of the few truthful men of his time. An ordinary British statesman
+would never have made the confession, because he would have grown quite
+accustomed to committing the crime. The party system itself implies a
+habit of stating something other than the actual truth. A Leader of the
+House means a Misleader of the House.
+
+Bernard Shaw was born outside all this; and he carries that freedom upon
+his face. Whether what he heard in boyhood was violent Nationalism or
+virulent Unionism, it was at least something which wanted a certain
+principle to be in force, not a certain clique to be in office. Of him
+the great Gilbertian generalisation is untrue; he was not born either a
+little Liberal or else a little Conservative. He did not, like most of
+us, pass through the stage of being a good party man on his way to the
+difficult business of being a good man. He came to stare at our general
+elections as a Red Indian might stare at the Oxford and Cambridge
+boat-race, blind to all its irrelevant sentimentalities and to some of
+its legitimate sentiments. Bernard Shaw entered England as an alien, as
+an invader, as a conqueror. In other words, he entered England as an
+Irishman.
+
+
+
+
+_The Puritan_
+
+
+It has been said in the first section that Bernard Shaw draws from his
+own nation two unquestionable qualities, a kind of intellectual
+chastity, and the fighting spirit. He is so much of an idealist about
+his ideals that he can be a ruthless realist in his methods. His soul
+has (in short) the virginity and the violence of Ireland. But Bernard
+Shaw is not merely an Irishman; he is not even a typical one. He is a
+certain separated and peculiar kind of Irishman, which is not easy to
+describe. Some Nationalist Irishmen have referred to him contemptuously
+as a "West Briton." But this is really unfair; for whatever Mr. Shaw's
+mental faults may be, the easy adoption of an unmeaning phrase like
+"Briton" is certainly not one of them. It would be much nearer the truth
+to put the thing in the bold and bald terms of the old Irish song, and
+to call him "The anti-Irish Irishman." But it is only fair to say that
+the description is far less of a monstrosity than the anti-English
+Englishman would be; because the Irish are so much stronger in
+self-criticism. Compared with the constant self-flattery of the
+English, nearly every Irishman is an anti-Irish Irishman. But here again
+popular phraseology hits the right word. This fairly educated and fairly
+wealthy Protestant wedge which is driven into the country at Dublin and
+elsewhere is a thing not easy superficially to summarise in any term. It
+cannot be described merely as a minority; for a minority means the part
+of a nation which is conquered. But this thing means something that
+conquers, and is not entirely part of a nation. Nor can one even fall
+back on the phrase of aristocracy. For an aristocracy implies at least
+some chorus of snobbish enthusiasm; it implies that some at least are
+willingly led by the leaders, if only towards vulgarity and vice. There
+is only one word for the minority in Ireland, and that is the word that
+public phraseology has found; I mean the word "Garrison." The Irish are
+essentially right when they talk as if all Protestant Unionists lived
+inside "The Castle." They have all the virtues and limitations of a
+literal garrison in a fort. That is, they are valiant, consistent,
+reliable in an obvious public sense; but their curse is that they can
+only tread the flagstones of the court-yard or the cold rock of the
+ramparts; they have never so much as set their foot upon their native
+soil.
+
+We have considered Bernard Shaw as an Irishman. The next step is to
+consider him as an exile from Ireland living in Ireland; that, some
+people would say, is a paradox after his own heart. But, indeed, such a
+complication is not really difficult to expound. The great religion and
+the great national tradition which have persisted for so many centuries
+in Ireland have encouraged these clean and cutting elements; but they
+have encouraged many other things which serve to balance them. The Irish
+peasant has these qualities which are somewhat peculiar to Ireland, a
+strange purity and a strange pugnacity. But the Irish peasant also has
+qualities which are common to all peasants, and his nation has qualities
+that are common to all healthy nations. I mean chiefly the things that
+most of us absorb in childhood; especially the sense of the supernatural
+and the sense of the natural; the love of the sky with its infinity of
+vision, and the love of the soil with its strict hedges and solid shapes
+of ownership. But here comes the paradox of Shaw; the greatest of all
+his paradoxes and the one of which he is unconscious. These one or two
+plain truths which quite stupid people learn at the beginning are
+exactly the one or two truths which Bernard Shaw may not learn even at
+the end. He is a daring pilgrim who has set out from the grave to find
+the cradle. He started from points of view which no one else was clever
+enough to discover, and he is at last discovering points of view which
+no one else was ever stupid enough to ignore. This absence of the
+red-hot truisms of boyhood; this sense that he is not rooted in the
+ancient sagacities of infancy, has, I think, a great deal to do with his
+position as a member of an alien minority in Ireland. He who has no real
+country can have no real home. The average autochthonous Irishman is
+close to patriotism because he is close to the earth; he is close to
+domesticity because he is close to the earth; he is close to doctrinal
+theology and elaborate ritual because he is close to the earth. In
+short, he is close to the heavens because he is close to the earth. But
+we must not expect any of these elemental and collective virtues in the
+man of the garrison. He cannot be expected to exhibit the virtues of a
+people, but only (as Ibsen would say) of an enemy of the people. Mr.
+Shaw has no living traditions, no schoolboy tricks, no college customs,
+to link him with other men. Nothing about him can be supposed to refer
+to a family feud or to a family joke. He does not drink toasts; he does
+not keep anniversaries; musical as he is I doubt if he would consent to
+sing. All this has something in it of a tree with its roots in the air.
+The best way to shorten winter is to prolong Christmas; and the only way
+to enjoy the sun of April is to be an April Fool. When people asked
+Bernard Shaw to attend the Stratford Tercentenary, he wrote back with
+characteristic contempt: "I do not keep my own birthday, and I cannot
+see why I should keep Shakespeare's." I think that if Mr. Shaw had
+always kept his own birthday he would be better able to understand
+Shakespeare's birthday--and Shakespeare's poetry.
+
+In conjecturally referring this negative side of the man, his lack of
+the smaller charities of our common childhood, to his birth in the
+dominant Irish sect, I do not write without historic memory or reference
+to other cases. That minority of Protestant exiles which mainly
+represented Ireland to England during the eighteenth century did contain
+some specimens of the Irish lounger and even of the Irish blackguard;
+Sheridan and even Goldsmith suggest the type. Even in their
+irresponsibility these figures had a touch of Irish tartness and
+realism; but the type has been too much insisted on to the exclusion of
+others equally national and interesting. To one of these it is worth
+while to draw attention. At intervals during the eighteenth and
+nineteenth centuries there has appeared a peculiar kind of Irishman. He
+is so unlike the English image of Ireland that the English have actually
+fallen back on the pretence that he was not Irish at all. The type is
+commonly Protestant; and sometimes seems to be almost anti-national in
+its acrid instinct for judging itself. Its nationalism only appears when
+it flings itself with even bitterer pleasure into judging the foreigner
+or the invader. The first and greatest of such figures was Swift.
+Thackeray simply denied that Swift was an Irishman, because he was not a
+stage Irishman. He was not (in the English novelist's opinion) winning
+and agreeable enough to be Irish. The truth is that Swift was much too
+harsh and disagreeable to be English. There is a great deal of Jonathan
+Swift in Bernard Shaw. Shaw is like Swift, for instance, in combining
+extravagant fancy with a curious sort of coldness. But he is most like
+Swift in that very quality which Thackeray said was impossible in an
+Irishman, benevolent bullying, a pity touched with contempt, and a habit
+of knocking men down for their own good. Characters in novels are often
+described as so amiable that they hate to be thanked. It is not an
+amiable quality, and it is an extremely rare one; but Swift possessed
+it. When Swift was buried the Dublin poor came in crowds and wept by the
+grave of the broadest and most free-handed of their benefactors. Swift
+deserved the public tribute; but he might have writhed and kicked in his
+grave at the thought of receiving it. There is in G. B. S. something of
+the same inhumane humanity. Irish history has offered a third instance
+of this particular type of educated and Protestant Irishman, sincere,
+unsympathetic, aggressive, alone. I mean Parnell; and with him also a
+bewildered England tried the desperate dodge of saying that he was not
+Irish at all. As if any thinkable sensible snobbish law-abiding
+Englishman would ever have defied all the drawing-rooms by disdaining
+the House of Commons! Despite the difference between taciturnity and a
+torrent of fluency there is much in common also between Shaw and
+Parnell; something in common even in the figures of the two men, in the
+bony bearded faces with their almost Satanic self-possession. It will
+not do to pretend that none of these three men belong to their own
+nation; but it is true that they belonged to one special, though
+recurring, type of that nation. And they all three have this peculiar
+mark, that while Nationalists in their various ways they all give to the
+more genial English one common impression; I mean the impression that
+they do not so much love Ireland as hate England.
+
+I will not dogmatise upon the difficult question as to whether there is
+any religious significance in the fact that these three rather ruthless
+Irishmen were Protestant Irishmen. I incline to think myself that the
+Catholic Church has added charity and gentleness to the virtues of a
+people which would otherwise have been too keen and contemptuous, too
+aristocratic. But however this may be, there can surely be no question
+that Bernard Shaw's Protestant education in a Catholic country has made
+a great deal of difference to his mind. It has affected it in two ways,
+the first negative and the second positive. It has affected him by
+cutting him off (as we have said) from the fields and fountains of his
+real home and history; by making him an Orangeman. And it has affected
+him by the particular colour of the particular religion which he
+received; by making him a Puritan.
+
+In one of his numerous prefaces he says, "I have always been on the side
+of the Puritans in the matter of Art"; and a closer study will, I think,
+reveal that he is on the side of the Puritans in almost everything.
+Puritanism was not a mere code of cruel regulations, though some of its
+regulations were more cruel than any that have disgraced Europe. Nor was
+Puritanism a mere nightmare, an evil shadow of eastern gloom and
+fatalism, though this element did enter it, and was as it were the
+symptom and punishment of its essential error. Something much nobler
+(even if almost equally mistaken) was the original energy in the Puritan
+creed. And it must be defined with a little more delicacy if we are
+really to understand the attitude of G. B. S., who is the greatest of
+the modern Puritans and perhaps the last.
+
+I should roughly define the first spirit in Puritanism thus. It was a
+refusal to contemplate God or goodness with anything lighter or milder
+than the most fierce concentration of the intellect. A Puritan meant
+originally a man whose mind had no holidays. To use his own favourite
+phrase, he would let no living thing come between him and his God; an
+attitude which involved eternal torture for him and a cruel contempt for
+all the living things. It was better to worship in a barn than in a
+cathedral for the specific and specified reason that the cathedral was
+beautiful. Physical beauty was a false and sensual symbol coming in
+between the intellect and the object of its intellectual worship. The
+human brain ought to be at every instant a consuming fire which burns
+through all conventional images until they were as transparent as glass.
+
+This is the essential Puritan idea, that God can only be praised by
+direct contemplation of Him. You must praise God only with your brain;
+it is wicked to praise Him with your passions or your physical habits or
+your gesture or instinct of beauty. Therefore it is wicked to worship by
+singing or dancing or drinking sacramental wines or building beautiful
+churches or saying prayers when you are half asleep. We must not worship
+by dancing, drinking, building or singing; we can only worship by
+thinking. Our heads can praise God, but never our hands and feet. That
+is the true and original impulse of the Puritans. There is a great deal
+to be said for it, and a great deal was said for it in Great Britain
+steadily for two hundred years. It has gradually decayed in England and
+Scotland, not because of the advance of modern thought (which means
+nothing), but because of the slow revival of the mediaeval energy and
+character in the two peoples. The English were always hearty and humane,
+and they have made up their minds to be hearty and humane in spite of
+the Puritans. The result is that Dickens and W. W. Jacobs have picked up
+the tradition of Chaucer and Robin Hood. The Scotch were always
+romantic, and they have made up their minds to be romantic in spite of
+the Puritans. The result is that Scott and Stevenson have picked up the
+tradition of Bruce, Blind Harry and the vagabond Scottish kings. England
+has become English again; Scotland has become Scottish again, in spite
+of the splendid incubus, the noble nightmare of Calvin. There is only
+one place in the British Islands where one may naturally expect to find
+still surviving in its fulness the fierce detachment of the true
+Puritan. That place is the Protestant part of Ireland. The Orange
+Calvinists can be disturbed by no national resurrection, for they have
+no nation. In them, if in any people, will be found the rectangular
+consistency of the Calvinist. The Irish Protestant rioters are at least
+immeasurably finer fellows than any of their brethren in England. They
+have the two enormous superiorities: first, that the Irish Protestant
+rioters really believe in Protestant theology; and second, that the
+Irish Protestant rioters do really riot. Among these people, if
+anywhere, should be found the cult of theological clarity combined with
+barbarous external simplicity. Among these people Bernard Shaw was born.
+
+There is at least one outstanding fact about the man we are studying;
+Bernard Shaw is never frivolous. He never gives his opinions a holiday;
+he is never irresponsible even for an instant. He has no nonsensical
+second self which he can get into as one gets into a dressing-gown; that
+ridiculous disguise which is yet more real than the real person. That
+collapse and humorous confession of futility was much of the force in
+Charles Lamb and in Stevenson. There is nothing of this in Shaw; his wit
+is never a weakness; therefore it is never a sense of humour. For wit is
+always connected with the idea that truth is close and clear. Humour,
+on the other hand, is always connected with the idea that truth is
+tricky and mystical and easily mistaken. What Charles Lamb said of the
+Scotchman is far truer of this type of Puritan Irishman; he does not see
+things suddenly in a new light; all his brilliancy is a blindingly rapid
+calculation and deduction. Bernard Shaw never said an indefensible
+thing; that is, he never said a thing that he was not prepared
+brilliantly to defend. He never breaks out into that cry beyond reason
+and conviction, that cry of Lamb when he cried, "We would indict our
+dreams!" or of Stevenson, "Shall we never shed blood?" In short he is
+not a humorist, but a great wit, almost as great as Voltaire. Humour 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 the
+consistency in things is a wit--and a Calvinist. The man who sees the
+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 favourite 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 always a Puritan
+prejudice. For Puritanism has not been able to sustain through three
+centuries that native ecstacy of the direct contemplation of truth;
+indeed it was the whole mistake of Puritanism to imagine for a moment
+that it could. One cannot be serious for three hundred years. In
+institutions built so as to endure for ages you must have relaxation,
+symbolic relativity and healthy routine. In eternal temples you must
+have frivolity. You must "be at ease in Zion" unless you are only paying
+it a flying visit.
+
+By the middle of the nineteenth century this old austerity and actuality
+in the Puritan vision had fallen away into two principal lower forms.
+The first is a sort of idealistic garrulity upon which Bernard Shaw has
+made fierce and on the whole fruitful war. Perpetual talk about
+righteousness and unselfishness, about things that should elevate and
+things which cannot but degrade, about social purity and true Christian
+manhood, all poured out with fatal fluency and with very little
+reference to the real facts of anybody's soul or salary--into this weak
+and lukewarm torrent has melted down much of that mountainous ice which
+sparkled in the seventeenth century, bleak indeed, but blazing. The
+hardest thing of the seventeenth century bids fair to be the softest
+thing of the twentieth.
+
+Of all this sentimental and deliquescent Puritanism Bernard Shaw has
+always been the antagonist; and the only respect in which it has soiled
+him was that he believed for only too long that such sloppy idealism was
+the whole idealism of Christendom and so used "idealist" itself as a
+term of reproach. But there were other and negative effects of
+Puritanism which he did not escape so completely. I cannot think that he
+has wholly escaped that element in Puritanism which may fairly bear the
+title of the taboo. For it is a singular fact that although extreme
+Protestantism is dying in elaborate and over-refined civilisation, yet
+it is the barbaric patches of it that live longest and die last. Of the
+creed of John Knox the modern Protestant has abandoned the civilised
+part and retained only the savage part. He has given up that great and
+systematic philosophy of Calvinism which had much in common with modern
+science and strongly resembles ordinary and recurrent determinism. But
+he has retained the accidental veto upon cards or comic plays, which
+Knox only valued as mere proof of his people's concentration on their
+theology. All the awful but sublime affirmations of Puritan theology are
+gone. Only savage negations remain; such as that by which in Scotland on
+every seventh day the creed of fear lays his finger on all hearts and
+makes an evil silence in the streets.
+
+By the middle of the nineteenth century when Shaw was born this dim and
+barbaric element in Puritanism, being all that remained of it, had added
+another taboo to its philosophy of taboos; there had grown up a mystical
+horror of those fermented drinks which are part of the food of civilised
+mankind. Doubtless many persons take an extreme line on this matter
+solely because of some calculation of social harm; many, but not all and
+not even most. Many people think that paper money is a mistake and does
+much harm. But they do not shudder or snigger when they see a
+cheque-book. They do not whisper with unsavoury slyness that such and
+such a man was "seen" going into a bank. I am quite convinced that the
+English aristocracy is the curse of England, but I have not noticed
+either in myself or others any disposition to ostracise a man simply for
+accepting a peerage, as the modern Puritans would certainly ostracise
+him (from any of their positions of trust) for accepting a drink. The
+sentiment is certainly very largely a mystical one, like the sentiment
+about the seventh day. Like the Sabbath, it is defended with
+sociological reasons; but those reasons can be simply and sharply
+tested. If a Puritan tells you that all humanity should rest once a
+week, you have only to propose that they should rest on Wednesday. And
+if a Puritan tells you that he does not object to beer but to the
+tragedies of excess in beer, simply propose to him that in prisons and
+workhouses (where the amount can be absolutely regulated) the inmates
+should have three glasses of beer a day. The Puritan cannot call that
+excess; but he will find something to call it. For it is not the excess
+he objects to, but the beer. It is a transcendental taboo, and it is one
+of the two or three positive and painful prejudices with which Bernard
+Shaw began. A similar severity of outlook ran through all his earlier
+attitude towards the drama; especially towards the lighter or looser
+drama. His Puritan teachers could not prevent him from taking up
+theatricals, but they made him take theatricals seriously. All his plays
+were indeed "plays for Puritans." All his criticisms quiver with a
+refined and almost tortured contempt for the indulgencies of ballet and
+burlesque, for the tights and the _double entente_. He can endure
+lawlessness but not levity. He is not repelled by the divorces and the
+adulteries as he is by the "splits." And he has always been foremost
+among the fierce modern critics who ask indignantly, "Why do you object
+to a thing full of sincere philosophy like _The Wild Duck_ while you
+tolerate a mere dirty joke like _The Spring Chicken_?" I do not think he
+has ever understood what seems to me the very sensible answer of the man
+in the street, "I laugh at the dirty joke of _The Spring Chicken_
+because it is a joke. I criticise the philosophy of _The Wild Duck_
+because it is a philosophy."
+
+Shaw does not do justice to the democratic ease and sanity on this
+subject; but indeed, whatever else he is, he is not democratic. As an
+Irishman he is an aristocrat, as a Calvinist he is a soul apart; he
+drew the breath of his nostrils from a land of fallen principalities and
+proud gentility, and the breath of his spirit from a creed which made a
+wall of crystal around the elect. The two forces between them produced
+this potent and slender figure, swift, scornful, dainty and full of dry
+magnanimity; and it only needed the last touch of oligarchic mastery to
+be given by the overwhelming oligarchic atmosphere of our present age.
+Such was the Puritan Irishman who stepped out into the world. Into what
+kind of world did he step?
+
+
+
+
+_The Progressive_
+
+
+It is now partly possible to justify the Shavian method of putting the
+explanations before the events. I can now give a fact or two with a
+partial certainty at least that the reader will give to the affairs of
+Bernard Shaw something of the same kind of significance which they have
+for Bernard Shaw himself. Thus, if I had simply said that Shaw was born
+in Dublin the average reader might exclaim, "Ah yes--a wild Irishman,
+gay, emotional and untrustworthy." The wrong note would be struck at the
+start. I have attempted to give some idea of what being born in Ireland
+meant to the man who was really born there. Now therefore for the first
+time I may be permitted to confess that Bernard Shaw was, like other
+men, born. He was born in Dublin on the 26th of July, 1856.
+
+Just as his birth can only be appreciated through some vision of
+Ireland, so his family can only be appreciated by some realisation of
+the Puritan. He was the youngest son of one George Carr Shaw, who had
+been a civil servant and was afterwards a somewhat unsuccessful
+business man. If I had merely said that his family was Protestant (which
+in Ireland means Puritan) it might have been passed over as a quite
+colourless detail. But if the reader will keep in mind what has been
+said about the degeneration of Calvinism into a few clumsy vetoes, he
+will see in its full and frightful significance such a sentence as this
+which comes from Shaw himself: "My father was in theory a vehement
+teetotaler, but in practice often a furtive drinker." The two things of
+course rest upon exactly the same philosophy; the philosophy of the
+taboo. There is a mystical substance, and it can give monstrous
+pleasures or call down monstrous punishments. The dipsomaniac and the
+abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same
+mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink. But if I
+had mentioned that fragment of family information without any ethical
+preface, people would have begun at once to talk nonsense about artistic
+heredity and Celtic weakness, and would have gained the general
+impression that Bernard Shaw was an Irish wastrel and the child of Irish
+wastrels. Whereas it is the whole point of the matter that Bernard Shaw
+comes of a Puritan middle-class family of the most solid
+respectability; and the only admission of error arises from the fact
+that one member of that Puritan family took a particularly Puritan view
+of strong drink. That is, he regarded it generally as a poison and
+sometimes as a medicine, if only a mental medicine. But a poison and a
+medicine are very closely akin, as the nearest chemist knows; and they
+are chiefly akin in this; that no one will drink either of them for fun.
+Moreover, medicine and a poison are also alike in this; that no one will
+by preference drink either of them in public. And this medical or
+poisonous view of alcohol is not confined to the one Puritan to whose
+failure I have referred, it is spread all over the whole of our dying
+Puritan civilisation. For instance, social reformers have fired a
+hundred shots against the public-house; but never one against its really
+shameful feature. The sign of decay is not in the public-house, but in
+the private bar; or rather the row of five or six private bars, into
+each of which a respectable dipsomaniac can go in solitude, and by
+indulging his own half-witted sin violate his own half-witted morality.
+Nearly all these places are equipped with an atrocious apparatus of
+ground-glass windows which can be so closed that they practically
+conceal the face of the buyer from the seller. Words cannot express the
+abysses of human infamy and hateful shame expressed by that elaborate
+piece of furniture. Whenever I go into a public-house, which happens
+fairly often, I always carefully open all these apertures and then leave
+the place, in every way refreshed.
+
+In other ways also it is necessary to insist not only on the fact of an
+extreme Protestantism, but on that of the Protestantism of a garrison; a
+world where that religious force both grew and festered all the more for
+being at once isolated and protected. All the influences surrounding
+Bernard Shaw in boyhood were not only Puritan, but such that no
+non-Puritan force could possibly pierce or counteract. He belonged to
+that Irish group which, according to Catholicism, has hardened its
+heart, which, according to Protestantism has hardened its head, but
+which, as I fancy, has chiefly hardened its hide, lost its sensibility
+to the contact of the things around it. In reading about his youth, one
+forgets that it was passed in the island which is still one flame before
+the altar of St. Peter and St. Patrick. The whole thing might be
+happening in Wimbledon. He went to the Wesleyan Connexional School. He
+went to hear Moody and Sankey. "I was," he writes, "wholly unmoved by
+their eloquence; and felt bound to inform the public that I was, on the
+whole, an atheist. My letter was solemnly printed in _Public Opinion_,
+to the extreme horror of my numerous aunts and uncles." That is the
+philosophical atmosphere; those are the religious postulates. It could
+never cross the mind of a man of the Garrison that before becoming an
+atheist he might stroll into one of the churches of his own country, and
+learn something of the philosophy that had satisfied Dante and Bossuet,
+Pascal and Descartes.
+
+In the same way I have to appeal to my theoretic preface at this third
+point of the drama of Shaw's career. On leaving school he stepped into a
+secure business position which he held steadily for four years and which
+he flung away almost in one day. He rushed even recklessly to London;
+where he was quite unsuccessful and practically starved for six years.
+If I had mentioned this act on the first page of this book it would have
+seemed to have either the simplicity of a mere fanatic or else to cover
+some ugly escapade of youth or some quite criminal looseness of
+temperament. But Bernard Shaw did not act thus because he was careless,
+but because he was ferociously careful, careful especially of the one
+thing needful. What was he thinking about when he threw away his last
+halfpence and went to a strange place; what was he thinking about when
+he endured hunger and small-pox in London almost without hope? He was
+thinking of what he has ever since thought of, the slow but sure surge
+of the social revolution; you must read into all those bald sentences
+and empty years what I shall attempt to sketch in the third section. You
+must read the revolutionary movement of the later nineteenth century,
+darkened indeed by materialism and made mutable by fear and free
+thought, but full of awful vistas of an escape from the curse of Adam.
+
+Bernard Shaw happened to be born in an epoch, or rather at the end of an
+epoch, which was in its way unique in the ages of history. The
+nineteenth century was not unique in the success or rapidity of its
+reforms or in their ultimate cessation; but it was unique in the
+peculiar character of the failure which followed the success. The French
+Revolution was an enormous act of human realisation; it has altered the
+terms of every law and the shape of every town in Europe; but it was by
+no means the only example of a strong and swift period of reform. What
+was really peculiar about the Republican energy was this, that it left
+behind it, not an ordinary reaction but a kind of dreary, drawn out and
+utterly unmeaning hope. The strong and evident idea of reform sank lower
+and lower until it became the timid and feeble idea of progress. Towards
+the end of the nineteenth century there appeared its two incredible
+figures; they were the pure Conservative and the pure Progressive; two
+figures which would have been overwhelmed with laughter by any other
+intellectual commonwealth of history. There was hardly a human
+generation which could not have seen the folly of merely going forward
+or merely standing still; of mere progressing or mere conserving. In the
+coarsest Greek Comedy we might have a joke about a man who wanted to
+keep what he had, whether it was yellow gold or yellow fever. In the
+dullest mediaeval morality we might have a joke about a progressive
+gentleman who, having passed heaven and come to purgatory, decided to go
+further and fare worse. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were an age
+of quite impetuous progress; men made in one rush, roads, trades,
+synthetic philosophies, parliaments, university settlements, a law that
+could cover the world and such spires as had never struck the sky. But
+they would not have said that they wanted progress, but that they wanted
+the road, the parliaments, and the spires. In the same way the time from
+Richelieu to the Revolution was upon the whole a time of conservation,
+often of harsh and hideous conservation; it preserved tortures, legal
+quibbles, and despotism. But if you had asked the rulers they would not
+have said that they wanted conservation; but that they wanted the
+torture and the despotism. The old reformers and the old despots alike
+desired definite _things_, powers, licenses, payments, vetoes, and
+permissions. Only the modern progressive and the modern conservative
+have been content with two words.
+
+Other periods of active improvement have died by stiffening at last into
+some routine. Thus the Gothic gaiety of the thirteenth century
+stiffening into the mere Gothic ugliness of the fifteenth. Thus the
+mighty wave of the Renaissance, whose crest was lifted to heaven, was
+touched by a wintry witchery of classicism and frozen for ever before it
+fell. Alone of all such movements the democratic movement of the last
+two centuries has not frozen, but loosened and liquefied. Instead of
+becoming more pedantic in its old age, it has grown more bewildered. By
+the analogy of healthy history we ought to have gone on worshipping the
+republic and calling each other citizen with increasing seriousness
+until some other part of the truth broke into our republican temple. But
+in fact we have turned the freedom of democracy into a mere scepticism,
+destructive of everything, including democracy itself. It is none the
+less destructive because it is, so to speak, an optimistic
+scepticism--or, as I have said, a dreary hope. It was none the better
+because the destroyers were always talking about the new vistas and
+enlightenments which their new negations opened to us. The republican
+temple, like any other strong building, rested on certain definite
+limits and supports. But the modern man inside it went on indefinitely
+knocking holes in his own house and saying that they were windows. The
+result is not hard to calculate: the moral world was pretty well all
+windows and no house by the time that Bernard Shaw arrived on the scene.
+
+Then there entered into full swing that great game of which he soon
+became the greatest master. A progressive or advanced person was now to
+mean not a man who wanted democracy, but a man who wanted something
+newer than democracy. A reformer was to be, not a man who wanted a
+parliament or a republic, but a man who wanted anything that he hadn't
+got. The emancipated man must cast a weird and suspicious eye round him
+at all the institutions of the world, wondering which of them was
+destined to die in the next few centuries. Each one of them was
+whispering to himself, "What can I alter?"
+
+This quite vague and varied discontent probably did lead to the
+revelation of many incidental wrongs and to much humane hard work in
+certain holes and corners. It also gave birth to a great deal of quite
+futile and frantic speculation, which seemed destined to take away
+babies from women, or to give votes to tom-cats. But it had an evil in
+it much deeper and more psychologically poisonous than any superficial
+absurdities. There was in this thirst to be "progressive" a subtle sort
+of double-mindedness and falsity. A man was so eager to be in advance of
+his age that he pretended to be in advance of himself. Institutions that
+his wholesome nature and habit fully accepted he had to sneer at as
+old-fashioned, out of a servile and snobbish fear of the future. Out of
+the primal forests, through all the real progress of history, man had
+picked his way obeying his human instinct, or (in the excellent phrase)
+following his nose. But now he was trying, by violent athletic
+exertions, to get in front of his nose.
+
+Into this riot of all imaginary innovations Shaw brought the sharp edge
+of the Irishman and the concentration of the Puritan, and thoroughly
+thrashed all competitors in the difficult art of being at once modern
+and intelligent. In twenty twopenny controversies he took the
+revolutionary side, I fear in most cases because it was called
+revolutionary. But the other revolutionists were abruptly startled by
+the presentation of quite rational and ingenious arguments on their own
+side. The dreary thing about most new causes is that they are praised in
+such very old terms. Every new religion bores us with the same stale
+rhetoric about closer fellowship and the higher life. No one ever
+approximately equalled Bernard Shaw in the power of finding really fresh
+and personal arguments for these recent schemes and creeds. No one ever
+came within a mile of him in the knack of actually producing a new
+argument for a new philosophy. I give two instances to cover the kind of
+thing I mean. Bernard Shaw (being honestly eager to put himself on the
+modern side in everything) put himself on the side of what is called
+the feminist movement; the proposal to give the two sexes not merely
+equal social privileges, but identical. To this it is often answered
+that women cannot be soldiers; and to this again the sensible feminists
+answer that women run their own kind of physical risk, while the silly
+feminists answer that war is an outworn barbaric thing which women would
+abolish. But Bernard Shaw took the line of saying that women had been
+soldiers, in all occasions of natural and unofficial war, as in the
+French Revolution. That has the great fighting value of being an
+unexpected argument; it takes the other pugilist's breath away for one
+important instant. To take the other case, Mr. Shaw has found himself,
+led by the same mad imp of modernity, on the side of the people who want
+to have phonetic spelling. The people who want phonetic spelling
+generally depress the world with tireless and tasteless explanations of
+how much easier it would be for children or foreign bagmen if "height"
+were spelt "hite." Now children would curse spelling whatever it was,
+and we are not going to permit foreign bagmen to improve Shakespeare.
+Bernard Shaw charged along quite a different line; he urged that
+Shakespeare himself believed in phonetic spelling, since he spelt his
+own name in six different ways. According to Shaw, phonetic spelling is
+merely a return to the freedom and flexibility of Elizabethan
+literature. That, again, is exactly the kind of blow the old speller
+does not expect. As a matter of fact there is an answer to both the
+ingenuities I have quoted. When women have fought in revolutions they
+have generally shown that it was not natural to them, by their
+hysterical cruelty and insolence; it was the men who fought in the
+Revolution; it was the women who tortured the prisoners and mutilated
+the dead. And because Shakespeare could sing better than he could spell,
+it does not follow that his spelling and ours ought to be abruptly
+altered by a race that has lost all instinct for singing. But I do not
+wish to discuss these points; I only quote them as examples of the
+startling ability which really brought Shaw to the front; the ability to
+brighten even our modern movements with original and suggestive
+thoughts.
+
+But while Bernard Shaw pleasantly surprised innumerable cranks and
+revolutionists by finding quite rational arguments for them, he
+surprised them unpleasantly also by discovering something else. He
+discovered a turn of argument or trick of thought which has ever since
+been the plague of their lives, and given him in all assemblies of their
+kind, in the Fabian Society or in the whole Socialist movement, a
+fantastic but most formidable domination. This method may be
+approximately defined as that of revolutionising the revolutionists by
+turning their rationalism against their remaining sentimentalism. But
+definition leaves the matter dark unless we give one or two examples.
+Thus Bernard Shaw threw himself as thoroughly as any New Woman into the
+cause of the emancipation of women. But while the New Woman praised
+woman as a prophetess, the new man took the opportunity to curse her and
+kick her as a comrade. For the others sex equality meant the
+emancipation of women, which allowed them to be equal to men. For Shaw
+it mainly meant the emancipation of men, which allowed them to be rude
+to women. Indeed, almost every one of Bernard Shaw's earlier plays might
+be called an argument between a man and a woman, in which the woman is
+thumped and thrashed and outwitted until she admits that she is the
+equal of her conqueror. This is the first case of the Shavian trick of
+turning on the romantic rationalists with their own rationalism. He
+said in substance, "If we are democrats, let us have votes for women;
+but if we are democrats, why on earth should we have respect for women?"
+I take one other example out of many. Bernard Shaw was thrown early into
+what may be called the cosmopolitan club of revolution. The Socialists
+of the S.D.F. call it "L'Internationale," but the club covers more than
+Socialists. It covers many who consider themselves the champions of
+oppressed nationalities--Poland, Finland, and even Ireland; and thus a
+strong nationalist tendency exists in the revolutionary movement.
+Against this nationalist tendency Shaw set himself with sudden violence.
+If the flag of England was a piece of piratical humbug, was not the flag
+of Poland a piece of piratical humbug too? If we hated the jingoism of
+the existing armies and frontiers, why should we bring into existence
+new jingo armies and new jingo frontiers? All the other revolutionists
+fell in instinctively with Home Rule for Ireland. Shaw urged, in effect,
+that Home Rule was as bad as Home Influences and Home Cooking, and all
+the other degrading domesticities that began with the word "Home." His
+ultimate support of the South African war was largely created by his
+irritation against the other revolutionists for favouring a nationalist
+resistance. The ordinary Imperialists objected to Pro-Boers because they
+were anti-patriots. Bernard Shaw objected to Pro-Boers because they were
+pro-patriots.
+
+But among these surprise attacks of G. B. S., these turnings of
+scepticism against the sceptics, there was one which has figured largely
+in his life; the most amusing and perhaps the most salutary of all these
+reactions. The "progressive" world being in revolt against religion had
+naturally felt itself allied to science; and against the authority of
+priests it would perpetually hurl the authority of scientific men. Shaw
+gazed for a few moments at this new authority, the veiled god of Huxley
+and Tyndall, and then with the greatest placidity and precision kicked
+it in the stomach. He declared to the astounded progressives around him
+that physical science was a mystical fake like sacerdotalism; that
+scientists, like priests, spoke with authority because they could not
+speak with proof or reason; that the very wonders of science were mostly
+lies, like the wonders of religion. "When astronomers tell me," he says
+somewhere, "that a star is so far off that its light takes a thousand
+years to reach us, the magnitude of the lie seems to me inartistic." The
+paralysing impudence of such remarks left everyone quite breathless; and
+even to this day this particular part of Shaw's satiric war has been far
+less followed up than it deserves. For there was present in it an
+element very marked in Shaw's controversies; I mean that his apparent
+exaggerations are generally much better backed up by knowledge than
+would appear from their nature. He can lure his enemy on with fantasies
+and then overwhelm him with facts. Thus the man of science, when he read
+some wild passage in which Shaw compared Huxley to a tribal soothsayer
+grubbing in the entrails of animals, supposed the writer to be a mere
+fantastic whom science could crush with one finger. He would therefore
+engage in a controversy with Shaw about (let us say) vivisection, and
+discover to his horror that Shaw really knew a great deal about the
+subject, and could pelt him with expert witnesses and hospital reports.
+Among the many singular contradictions in a singular character, there is
+none more interesting than this combination of exactitude and industry
+in the detail of opinions with audacity and a certain wildness in their
+outline.
+
+This great game of catching revolutionists napping, of catching the
+unconventional people in conventional poses, of outmarching and
+outmanoeuvring progressives till they felt like conservatives, of
+undermining the mines of Nihilists till they felt like the House of
+Lords, this great game of dishing the anarchists continued for some time
+to be his most effective business. It would be untrue to say that he was
+a cynic; he was never a cynic, for that implies a certain corrupt
+fatigue about human affairs, whereas he was vibrating with virtue and
+energy. Nor would it be fair to call him even a sceptic, for that
+implies a dogma of hopelessness and definite belief in unbelief. But it
+would be strictly just to describe him at this time, at any rate, as a
+merely destructive person. He was one whose main business was, in his
+own view, the pricking of illusions, the stripping away of disguises,
+and even the destruction of ideals. He was a sort of anti-confectioner
+whose whole business it was to take the gilt off the gingerbread.
+
+Now I have no particular objection to people who take the gilt off the
+gingerbread; if only for this excellent reason, that I am much fonder of
+gingerbread than I am of gilt. But there are some objections to this
+task when it becomes a crusade or an obsession. One of them is this:
+that people who have really scraped the gilt off gingerbread generally
+waste the rest of their lives in attempting to scrape the gilt off
+gigantic lumps of gold. Such has too often been the case of Shaw. He
+can, if he likes, scrape the romance off the armaments of Europe or the
+party system of Great Britain. But he cannot scrape the romance off love
+or military valour, because it is all romance, and three thousand miles
+thick. It cannot, I think, be denied that much of Bernard Shaw's
+splendid mental energy has been wasted in this weary business of gnawing
+at the necessary pillars of all possible society. But it would be
+grossly unfair to indicate that even in his first and most destructive
+stage he uttered nothing except these accidental, if arresting,
+negations. He threw his whole genius heavily into the scale in favour of
+two positive projects or causes of the period. When we have stated these
+we have really stated the full intellectual equipment with which he
+started his literary life.
+
+I have said that Shaw was on the insurgent side in everything; but in
+the case of these two important convictions he exercised a solid power
+of choice. When he first went to London he mixed with every kind of
+revolutionary society, and met every kind of person except the ordinary
+person. He knew everybody, so to speak, except everybody. He was more
+than once a momentary apparition among the respectable atheists. He knew
+Bradlaugh and spoke on the platforms of that Hall of Science in which
+very simple and sincere masses of men used to hail with shouts of joy
+the assurance that they were not immortal. He retains to this day
+something of the noise and narrowness of that room; as, for instance,
+when he says that it is contemptible to have a craving for eternal life.
+This prejudice remains in direct opposition to all his present opinions,
+which are all to the effect that it is glorious to desire power,
+consciousness, and vitality even for one's self. But this old secularist
+tag, that it is selfish to save one's soul, remains with him long after
+he has practically glorified selfishness. It is a relic of those chaotic
+early days. And just as he mingled with the atheists he mingled with the
+anarchists, who were in the eighties a much more formidable body than
+now, disputing with the Socialists on almost equal terms the claim to
+be the true heirs of the Revolution. Shaw still talks entertainingly
+about this group. As far as I can make out, it was almost entirely
+female. When a book came out called _A Girl among the Anarchists_,
+G. B. S. was provoked to a sort of explosive reminiscence. "A girl among
+the anarchists!" he exclaimed to his present biographer; "if they had
+said 'A man among the anarchists' it would have been more of an
+adventure." He is ready to tell other tales of this eccentric
+environment, most of which does not convey an impression of a very
+bracing atmosphere. That revolutionary society must have contained many
+high public ideals, but also a fair number of low private desires. And
+when people blame Bernard Shaw for his pitiless and prosaic coldness,
+his cutting refusal to reverence or admire, I think they should remember
+this riff-raff of lawless sentimentalism against which his commonsense
+had to strive, all the grandiloquent "comrades" and all the gushing
+"affinities," all the sweetstuff sensuality and senseless sulking
+against law. If Bernard Shaw became a little too fond of throwing cold
+water upon prophecies or ideals, remember that he must have passed much
+of his youth among cosmopolitan idealists who wanted a little cold water
+in every sense of the word.
+
+Upon two of these modern crusades he concentrated, and, as I have said,
+he chose them well. The first was broadly what was called the
+Humanitarian cause. It did not mean the cause of humanity, but rather,
+if anything, the cause of everything else. At its noblest it meant a
+sort of mystical identification of our life with the whole life of
+nature. So a man might wince when a snail was crushed as if his toe were
+trodden on; so a man might shrink when a moth shrivelled as if his own
+hair had caught fire. Man might be a network of exquisite nerves running
+over the whole universe, a subtle spider's web of pity. This was a fine
+conception; though perhaps a somewhat severe enforcement of the
+theological conception of the special divinity of man. For the
+humanitarians certainly asked of humanity what can be asked of no other
+creature; no man ever required a dog to understand a cat or expected the
+cow to cry for the sorrows of the nightingale.
+
+Hence this sense has been strongest in saints of a very mystical sort;
+such as St. Francis who spoke of Sister Sparrow and Brother Wolf. Shaw
+adopted this crusade of cosmic pity but adopted it very much in his own
+style, severe, explanatory, and even unsympathetic. He had no
+affectionate impulse to say "Brother Wolf"; at the best he would have
+said "Citizen Wolf," like a sound republican. In fact, he was full of
+healthy human compassion for the sufferings of animals; but in
+phraseology he loved to put the matter unemotionally and even harshly. I
+was once at a debating club at which Bernard Shaw said that he was not a
+humanitarian at all, but only an economist, that he merely hated to see
+life wasted by carelessness or cruelty. I felt inclined to get up and
+address to him the following lucid question: "If when you spare a
+herring you are only being oikonomikal, for what oikos are you being
+nomikal?" But in an average debating club I thought this question might
+not be quite clear; so I abandoned the idea. But certainly it is not
+plain for whom Bernard Shaw is economising if he rescues a rhinoceros
+from an early grave. But the truth is that Shaw only took this economic
+pose from his hatred of appearing sentimental. If Bernard Shaw killed a
+dragon and rescued a princess of romance, he would try to say "I have
+saved a princess" with exactly the same intonation as "I have saved a
+shilling." He tries to turn his own heroism into a sort of superhuman
+thrift. He would thoroughly sympathise with that passage in his
+favourite dramatic author in which the Button Moulder tells Peer Gynt
+that there is a sort of cosmic housekeeping; that God Himself is very
+economical, "and that is why He is so well to do."
+
+This combination of the widest kindness and consideration with a
+consistent ungraciousness of tone runs through all Shaw's ethical
+utterance, and is nowhere more evident than in his attitude towards
+animals. He would waste himself to a white-haired shadow to save a shark
+in an aquarium from inconvenience or to add any little comforts to the
+life of a carrion-crow. He would defy any laws or lose any friends to
+show mercy to the humblest beast or the most hidden bird. Yet I cannot
+recall in the whole of his works or in the whole of his conversation a
+single word of any tenderness or intimacy with any bird or beast. It was
+under the influence of this high and almost superhuman sense of duty
+that he became a vegetarian; and I seem to remember that when he was
+lying sick and near to death at the end of his _Saturday Review_ career
+he wrote a fine fantastic article, declaring that his hearse ought to be
+drawn by all the animals that he had not eaten. Whenever that evil day
+comes there will be no need to fall back on the ranks of the brute
+creation; there will be no lack of men and women who owe him so much as
+to be glad to take the place of the animals; and the present writer for
+one will be glad to express his gratitude as an elephant. There is no
+doubt about the essential manhood and decency of Bernard Shaw's
+instincts in such matters. And quite apart from the vegetarian
+controversy, I do not doubt that the beasts also owe him much. But when
+we come to positive things (and passions are the only truly positive
+things) that obstinate doubt remains which remains after all eulogies of
+Shaw. That fixed fancy sticks to the mind; that Bernard Shaw is a
+vegetarian more because he dislikes dead beasts than because he likes
+live ones.
+
+It was the same with the other great cause to which Shaw more
+politically though not more publicly committed himself. The actual
+English people, without representation in Press or Parliament, but
+faintly expressed in public-houses and music-halls, would connect Shaw
+(so far as they have heard of him) with two ideas; they would say first
+that he was a vegetarian, and second that he was a Socialist. Like most
+of the impressions of the ignorant, these impressions would be on the
+whole very just. My only purpose here is to urge that Shaw's Socialism
+exemplifies the same trait of temperament as his vegetarianism. This
+book is not concerned with Bernard Shaw as a politician or a
+sociologist, but as a critic and creator of drama. I will therefore end
+in this chapter all that I have to say about Bernard Shaw as a
+politician or a political philosopher. I propose here to dismiss this
+aspect of Shaw: only let it be remembered, once and for all, that I am
+here dismissing the most important aspect of Shaw. It is as if one
+dismissed the sculpture of Michael Angelo and went on to his sonnets.
+Perhaps the highest and purest thing in him is simply that he cares more
+for politics than for anything else; more than for art or for
+philosophy. Socialism is the noblest thing for Bernard Shaw; and it is
+the noblest thing in him. He really desires less to win fame than to
+bear fruit. He is an absolute follower of that early sage who wished
+only to make two blades of grass grow instead of one. He is a loyal
+subject of Henri Quatre, who said that he only wanted every Frenchman to
+have a chicken in his pot on Sunday; except, of course, that he would
+call the repast cannibalism. But _caeteris paribus_ he thinks more of
+that chicken than of the eagle of the universal empire; and he is always
+ready to support the grass against the laurel.
+
+Yet by the nature of this book the account of the most important Shaw,
+who is the Socialist, must be also the most brief. Socialism (which I am
+not here concerned either to attack or defend) is, as everyone knows,
+the proposal that all property should be nationally owned that it may be
+more decently distributed. It is a proposal resting upon two principles,
+unimpeachable as far as they go: first, that frightful human calamities
+call for immediate human aid; second, that such aid must almost always
+be collectively organised. If a ship is being wrecked, we organise a
+lifeboat; if a house is on fire, we organise a blanket; if half a nation
+is starving, we must organise work and food. That is the primary and
+powerful argument of the Socialist, and everything that he adds to it
+weakens it. The only possible line of protest is to suggest that it is
+rather shocking that we have to treat a normal nation as something
+exceptional, like a house on fire or a shipwreck. But of such things it
+may be necessary to speak later. The point here is that Shaw behaved
+towards Socialism just as he behaved towards vegetarianism; he offered
+every reason except the emotional reason, which was the real one. When
+taxed in a _Daily News_ discussion with being a Socialist for the
+obvious reason that poverty was cruel, he said this was quite wrong; it
+was only because poverty was wasteful. He practically professed that
+modern society annoyed him, not so much like an unrighteous kingdom, but
+rather like an untidy room. Everyone who knew him knew, of course, that
+he was full of a proper brotherly bitterness about the oppression of the
+poor. But here again he would not admit that he was anything but an
+Economist.
+
+In thus setting his face like flint against sentimental methods of
+argument he undoubtedly did one great service to the causes for which he
+stood. Every vulgar anti-humanitarian, every snob who wants monkeys
+vivisected or beggars flogged has always fallen back upon stereotyped
+phrases like "maudlin" and "sentimental," which indicated the
+humanitarian as a man in a weak condition of tears. The mere personality
+of Shaw has shattered those foolish phrases for ever. Shaw the
+humanitarian was like Voltaire the humanitarian, a man whose satire was
+like steel, the hardest and coolest of fighters, upon whose piercing
+point the wretched defenders of a masculine brutality wriggled like
+worms.
+
+In this quarrel one cannot wish Shaw even an inch less contemptuous, for
+the people who call compassion "sentimentalism" deserve nothing but
+contempt. In this one does not even regret his coldness; it is an
+honourable contrast to the blundering emotionalism of the jingoes and
+flagellomaniacs. The truth is that the ordinary anti-humanitarian only
+manages to harden his heart by having already softened his head. It is
+the reverse of sentimental to insist that a nigger is being burned
+alive; for sentimentalism must be the clinging to pleasant thoughts. And
+no one, not even a Higher Evolutionist, can think a nigger burned alive
+a pleasant thought. The sentimental thing is to warm your hands at the
+fire while denying the existence of the nigger, and that is the ruling
+habit in England, as it has been the chief business of Bernard Shaw to
+show. And in this the brutalitarians hate him not because he is soft,
+but because he is hard, because he is not to be softened by conventional
+excuses; because he looks hard at a thing--and hits harder. Some foolish
+fellow of the Henley-Whibley reaction wrote that if we were to be
+conquerors we must be less tender and more ruthless. Shaw answered with
+really avenging irony, "What a light this principle throws on the defeat
+of the tender Dervish, the compassionate Zulu, and the morbidly humane
+Boxer at the hands of the hardy savages of England, France, and
+Germany." In that sentence an idiot is obliterated and the whole story
+of Europe told; but it is immensely stiffened by its ironic form. In the
+same way Shaw washed away for ever the idea that Socialists were weak
+dreamers, who said that things might be only because they wished them to
+be. G. B. S. in argument with an individualist showed himself, as a
+rule, much the better economist and much the worse rhetorician. In this
+atmosphere arose a celebrated Fabian Society, of which he is still the
+leading spirit--a society which answered all charges of impracticable
+idealism by pushing both its theoretic statements and its practical
+negotiations to the verge of cynicism. Bernard Shaw was the literary
+expert who wrote most of its pamphlets. In one of them, among such
+sections as _Fabian Temperance Reform_, _Fabian Education_ and so on,
+there was an entry gravely headed "Fabian Natural Science," which stated
+that in the Socialist cause light was needed more than heat.
+
+Thus the Irish detachment and the Puritan austerity did much good to the
+country and to the causes for which they were embattled. But there was
+one thing they did not do; they did nothing for Shaw himself in the
+matter of his primary mistakes and his real limitation. His great defect
+was and is the lack of democratic sentiment. And there was nothing
+democratic either in his humanitarianism or his Socialism. These new and
+refined faiths tended rather to make the Irishman yet more aristocratic,
+the Puritan yet more exclusive. To be a Socialist was to look down on
+all the peasant owners of the earth, especially on the peasant owners of
+his own island. To be a Vegetarian was to be a man with a strange and
+mysterious morality, a man who thought the good lord who roasted oxen
+for his vassals only less bad than the bad lord who roasted the vassals.
+None of these advanced views could the common people hear gladly; nor
+indeed was Shaw specially anxious to please the common people. It was
+his glory that he pitied animals like men; it was his defect that he
+pitied men only too much like animals. Foulon said of the democracy,
+"Let them eat grass." Shaw said, "Let them eat greens." He had more
+benevolence, but almost as much disdain. "I have never had any feelings
+about the English working classes," he said elsewhere, "except a desire
+to abolish them and replace them by sensible people." This is the
+unsympathetic side of the thing; but it had another and much nobler
+side, which must at least be seriously recognised before we pass on to
+much lighter things.
+
+Bernard Shaw is not a democrat; but he is a splendid republican. The
+nuance of difference between those terms precisely depicts him. And
+there is after all a good deal of dim democracy in England, in the sense
+that there is much of a blind sense of brotherhood, and nowhere more
+than among old-fashioned and even reactionary people. But a republican
+is a rare bird, and a noble one. Shaw is a republican in the literal and
+Latin sense; he cares more for the Public Thing than for any private
+thing. The interest of the State is with him a sincere thirst of the
+soul, as it was in the little pagan cities. Now this public passion,
+this clean appetite for order and equity, had fallen to a lower ebb, had
+more nearly disappeared altogether, during Shaw's earlier epoch than at
+any other time. Individualism of the worst type was on the top of the
+wave; I mean artistic individualism, which is so much crueller, so much
+blinder and so much more irrational even than commercial individualism.
+The decay of society was praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is
+praised by worms. The aesthete was all receptiveness, like the flea. His
+only affair in this world was to feed on its facts and colours, like a
+parasite upon blood. The ego was the all; and the praise of it was
+enunciated in madder and madder rhythms by poets whose Helicon was
+absinthe and whose Pegasus was the nightmare. This diseased pride was
+not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all
+political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a
+question of one man one vote, but of one man one universe.
+
+I have in my time had my fling at the Fabian Society, at the pedantry of
+schemes, the arrogance of experts; nor do I regret it now. But when I
+remember that other world against which it reared its bourgeois banner
+of cleanliness and common sense, I will not end this chapter without
+doing it decent honour. Give me the drain pipes of the Fabians rather
+than the panpipes of the later poets; the drain pipes have a nicer
+smell. Give me even that business-like benevolence that herded men like
+beasts rather than that exquisite art which isolated them like devils;
+give me even the suppression of "Zaeo" rather than the triumph of
+"Salome." And if I feel such a confession to be due to those Fabians who
+could hardly have been anything but experts in any society, such as Mr.
+Sidney Webb or Mr. Edward Pease, it is due yet more strongly to the
+greatest of the Fabians. Here was a man who could have enjoyed art among
+the artists, who could have been the wittiest of all the _flaneurs_; who
+could have made epigrams like diamonds and drunk music like wine. He has
+instead laboured in a mill of statistics and crammed his mind with all
+the most dreary and the most filthy details, so that he can argue on the
+spur of the moment about sewing-machines or sewage, about typhus fever
+or twopenny tubes. The usual mean theory of motives will not cover the
+case; it is not ambition, for he could have been twenty times more
+prominent as a plausible and popular humorist. It is the real and
+ancient emotion of the _salus populi_, almost extinct in our
+oligarchical chaos; nor will I for one, as I pass on to many matters of
+argument or quarrel, neglect to salute a passion so implacable and so
+pure.
+
+
+
+
+_The Critic_
+
+
+It appears a point of some mystery to the present writer that Bernard
+Shaw should have been so long unrecognised and almost in beggary. I
+should have thought his talent was of the ringing and arresting sort;
+such as even editors and publishers would have sense enough to seize.
+Yet it is quite certain that he almost starved in London for many years,
+writing occasional columns for an advertisement or words for a picture.
+And it is equally certain (it is proved by twenty anecdotes, but no one
+who knows Shaw needs any anecdotes to prove it) that in those days of
+desperation he again and again threw up chances and flung back good
+bargains which did not suit his unique and erratic sense of honour. The
+fame of having first offered Shaw to the public upon a platform worthy
+of him belongs, like many other public services, to Mr. William Archer.
+
+I say it seems odd that such a writer should not be appreciated in a
+flash; but upon this point there is evidently a real difference of
+opinion, and it constitutes for me the strangest difficulty of the
+subject. I hear many people complain that Bernard Shaw deliberately
+mystifies them. I cannot imagine what they mean; it seems to me that he
+deliberately insults them. His language, especially on moral questions,
+is generally as straight and solid as that of a bargee and far less
+ornate and symbolic than that of a hansom-cabman. The prosperous English
+Philistine complains that Mr. Shaw is making a fool of him. Whereas Mr.
+Shaw is not in the least making a fool of him; Mr. Shaw is, with
+laborious lucidity, calling him a fool. G. B. S. calls a landlord a
+thief; and the landlord, instead of denying or resenting it, says, "Ah,
+that fellow hides his meaning so cleverly that one can never make out
+what he means, it is all so fine spun and fantastical." G. B. S. calls a
+statesman a liar to his face, and the statesman cries in a kind of
+ecstasy, "Ah, what quaint, intricate and half-tangled trains of thought!
+Ah, what elusive and many-coloured mysteries of half-meaning!" I think
+it is always quite plain what Mr. Shaw means, even when he is joking,
+and it generally means that the people he is talking to ought to howl
+aloud for their sins. But the average representative of them undoubtedly
+treats the Shavian meaning as tricky and complex, when it is really
+direct and offensive. He always accuses Shaw of pulling his leg, at the
+exact moment when Shaw is pulling his nose.
+
+This prompt and pungent style he learnt in the open, upon political tubs
+and platforms; and he is very legitimately proud of it. He boasts of
+being a demagogue; "The cart and the trumpet for me," he says, with
+admirable good sense. Everyone will remember the effective appearance of
+Cyrano de Bergerac in the first act of the fine play of that name; when
+instead of leaping in by any hackneyed door or window, he suddenly
+springs upon a chair above the crowd that has so far kept him invisible;
+"les bras croises, le feutre en bataille, la moustache herissee, le nez
+terrible." I will not go so far as to say that when Bernard Shaw sprang
+upon a chair or tub in Trafalgar Square he had the hat in battle, or
+even that he had the nose terrible. But just as we see Cyrano best when
+he thus leaps above the crowd, I think we may take this moment of Shaw
+stepping on his little platform to see him clearly as he then was, and
+even as he has largely not ceased to be. I, at least, have only known
+him in his middle age; yet I think I can see him, younger yet only a
+little more alert, with hair more red but with face yet paler, as he
+first stood up upon some cart or barrow in the tossing glare of the gas.
+
+The first fact that one realises about Shaw (independent of all one has
+read and often contradicting it) is his voice. Primarily it is the voice
+of an Irishman, and then something of the voice of a musician. It
+possibly explains much of his career; a man may be permitted to say so
+many impudent things with so pleasant an intonation. But the voice is
+not only Irish and agreeable, it is also frank and as it were inviting
+conference. This goes with a style and gesture which can only be
+described as at once very casual and very emphatic. He assumes that
+bodily supremacy which goes with oratory, but he assumes it with almost
+ostentatious carelessness; he throws back the head, but loosely and
+laughingly. He is at once swaggering and yet shrugging his shoulders, as
+if to drop from them the mantle of the orator which he has confidently
+assumed. Lastly, no man ever used voice or gesture better for the
+purpose of expressing certainty; no man can say "I tell Mr. Jones he is
+totally wrong" with more air of unforced and even casual conviction.
+
+This particular play of feature or pitch of voice, at once didactic and
+yet not uncomrade-like, must be counted a very important fact,
+especially in connection with the period when that voice was first
+heard. It must be remembered that Shaw emerged as a wit in a sort of
+secondary age of wits; one of those stale interludes of prematurely old
+young men, which separate the serious epochs of history. Oscar Wilde was
+its god; but he was somewhat more mystical, not to say monstrous, than
+the average of its dried and decorous impudence. The _two survivals_ of
+that time, as far as I know, are Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. Graham
+Robertson; two most charming people; but the air they had to live in was
+the devil. One of its notes was an artificial reticence of speech, which
+waited till it could plant the perfect epigram. Its typical products
+were far too conceited to lay down the law. Now when people heard that
+Bernard Shaw was witty, as he most certainly was, when they heard his
+_mots_ repeated like those of Whistler or Wilde, when they heard things
+like "the Seven deadly Virtues" or "Who _was_ Hall Caine?" they expected
+another of these silent sarcastic dandies who went about with one
+epigram, patient and poisonous, like a bee with his one sting. And when
+they saw and heard the new humorist they found no fixed sneer, no frock
+coat, no green carnation, no silent Savoy Restaurant good manners, no
+fear of looking a fool, no particular notion of looking a gentleman.
+They found a talkative Irishman with a kind voice and a brown coat; open
+gestures and an evident desire to make people really agree with him. He
+had his own kind of affectations no doubt, and his own kind of tricks of
+debate; but he broke, and, thank God, forever the spell of the little
+man with the single eye glass who had frozen both faith and fun at so
+many tea-tables. Shaw's humane voice and hearty manner were so obviously
+more the things of a great man than the hard, gem-like brilliancy of
+Wilde or the careful ill-temper of Whistler. He brought in a breezier
+sort of insolence; the single eye-glass fled before the single eye.
+
+Added to the effect of the amiable dogmatic voice and lean, loose
+swaggering figure, is that of the face with which so many caricaturists
+have fantastically delighted themselves, the Mephistophelean face with
+the fierce tufted eyebrows and forked red beard. Yet those caricaturists
+in their natural delight in coming upon so striking a face, have
+somewhat misrepresented it, making it merely Satanic; whereas its actual
+expression has quite as much benevolence as mockery. By this time his
+costume has become a part of his personality; one has come to think of
+the reddish brown Jaeger suit as if it were a sort of reddish brown fur,
+and were, like the hair and eyebrows, a part of the animal; yet there
+are those who claim to remember a Bernard Shaw of yet more awful aspect
+before Jaeger came to his assistance; a Bernard Shaw in a dilapidated
+frock-coat and some sort of straw hat. I can hardly believe it; the man
+is so much of a piece, and must always have dressed appropriately. In
+any case his brown woollen clothes, at once artistic and hygienic,
+completed the appeal for which he stood; which might be defined as an
+eccentric healthy-mindedness. But something of the vagueness and
+equivocation of his first fame is probably due to the different
+functions which he performed in the contemporary world of art.
+
+He began by writing novels. They are not much read, and indeed not
+imperatively worth reading, with the one exception of the crude and
+magnificent _Cashel Byron's Profession_. Mr. William Archer, in the
+course of his kindly efforts on behalf of his young Irish friend, sent
+this book to Samoa, for the opinion of the most elvish and yet
+efficient of modern critics. Stevenson summed up much of Shaw even from
+that fragment when he spoke of a romantic griffin roaring with laughter
+at the nature of his own quest. He also added the not wholly unjustified
+postscript: "I say, Archer,--my God, what women!"
+
+The fiction was largely dropped; but when he began work he felt his way
+by the avenues of three arts. He was an art critic, a dramatic critic,
+and a musical critic; and in all three, it need hardly be said, he
+fought for the newest style and the most revolutionary school. He wrote
+on all these as he would have written on anything; but it was, I fancy,
+about the music that he cared most.
+
+It may often be remarked that mathematicians love and understand music
+more than they love or understand poetry. Bernard Shaw is in much the
+same condition; indeed, in attempting to do justice to Shakespeare's
+poetry, he always calls it "word music." It is not difficult to explain
+this special attachment of the mere logician to music. The logician,
+like every other man on earth, must have sentiment and romance in his
+existence; in every man's life, indeed, which can be called a life at
+all, sentiment is the most solid thing. But if the extreme logician
+turns for his emotions to poetry, he is exasperated and bewildered by
+discovering that the words of his own trade are used in an entirely
+different meaning. He conceives that he understands the word "visible,"
+and then finds Milton applying it to darkness, in which nothing is
+visible. He supposes that he understands the word "hide," and then finds
+Shelley talking of a poet hidden in the light. He has reason to believe
+that he understands the common word "hung"; and then William
+Shakespeare, Esquire, of Stratford-on-Avon, gravely assures him that the
+tops of the tall sea waves were hung with deafening clamours on the
+slippery clouds. That is why the common arithmetician prefers music to
+poetry. Words are his scientific instruments. It irritates him that they
+should be anyone else's musical instruments. He is willing to see men
+juggling, but not men juggling with his own private tools and
+possessions--his terms. It is then that he turns with an utter relief to
+music. Here are all the same fascination and inspiration, all the same
+purity and plunging force as in poetry; but not requiring any verbal
+confession that light conceals things or that darkness can be seen in
+the dark. Music is mere beauty; it is beauty in the abstract, beauty in
+solution. It is a shapeless and liquid element of beauty, in which a man
+may really float, not indeed affirming the truth, but not denying it.
+Bernard Shaw, as I have already said, is infinitely far above all such
+mere mathematicians and pedantic reasoners; still his feeling is partly
+the same. He adores music because it cannot deal with romantic terms
+either in their right or their wrong sense. Music can be romantic
+without reminding him of Shakespeare and Walter Scott, with whom he has
+had personal quarrels. Music can be Catholic without reminding him
+verbally of the Catholic Church, which he has never seen, and is sure he
+does not like. Bernard Shaw can agree with Wagner, the musician, because
+he speaks without words; if it had been Wagner the man he would
+certainly have had words with him. Therefore I would suggest that Shaw's
+love of music (which is so fundamental that it must be mentioned early,
+if not first, in his story) may itself be considered in the first case
+as the imaginative safety-valve of the rationalistic Irishman.
+
+This much may be said conjecturally over the present signature; but more
+must not be said. Bernard Shaw understands music so much better than I
+do that it is just possible that he is, in that tongue and atmosphere,
+all that he is not elsewhere. While he is writing with a pen I know his
+limitations as much as I admire his genius; and I know it is true to say
+that he does not appreciate romance. But while he is playing on the
+piano he may be cocking a feather, drawing a sword or draining a flagon
+for all I know. While he is speaking I am sure that there are some
+things he does not understand. But while he is listening (at the Queen's
+Hall) he may understand everything, including God and me. Upon this part
+of him I am a reverent agnostic; it is well to have some such dark
+continent in the character of a man of whom one writes. It preserves two
+very important things--modesty in the biographer and mystery in the
+biography.
+
+For the purpose of our present generalisation it is only necessary to
+say that Shaw, as a musical critic, summed himself up as "The Perfect
+Wagnerite"; he threw himself into subtle and yet trenchant eulogy of
+that revolutionary voice in music. It was the same with the other arts.
+As he was a Perfect Wagnerite in music, so he was a Perfect Whistlerite
+in painting; so above all he was a Perfect Ibsenite in drama. And with
+this we enter that part of his career with which this book is more
+specially concerned. When Mr. William Archer got him established as
+dramatic critic of the _Saturday Review_, he became for the first time
+"a star of the stage"; a shooting star and sometimes a destroying comet.
+
+On the day of that appointment opened one of the very few exhilarating
+and honest battles that broke the silence of the slow and cynical
+collapse of the nineteenth century. Bernard Shaw the demagogue had got
+his cart and his trumpet; and was resolved to make them like the car of
+destiny and the trumpet of judgment. He had not the servility of the
+ordinary rebel, who is content to go on rebelling against kings and
+priests, because such rebellion is as old and as established as any
+priests or kings. He cast about him for something to attack which was
+not merely powerful or placid, but was unattacked. After a little quite
+sincere reflection, he found it. He would not be content to be a common
+atheist; he wished to blaspheme something in which even atheists
+believed. He was not satisfied with being revolutionary; there were so
+many revolutionists. He wanted to pick out some prominent institution
+which had been irrationally and instinctively accepted by the most
+violent and profane; something of which Mr. Foote would speak as
+respectfully on the front page of the _Freethinker_ as Mr. St. Loe
+Strachey on the front page of the _Spectator_. He found the thing; he
+found the great unassailed English institution--Shakespeare.
+
+But Shaw's attack on Shakespeare, though exaggerated for the fun of the
+thing, was not by any means the mere folly or firework paradox that has
+been supposed. He meant what he said; what was called his levity was
+merely the laughter of a man who enjoyed saying what he meant--an
+occupation which is indeed one of the greatest larks in life. Moreover,
+it can honestly be said that Shaw did good by shaking the mere idolatry
+of Him of Avon. That idolatry was bad for England; it buttressed our
+perilous self-complacency by making us think that we alone had, not
+merely a great poet, but the one poet above criticism. It was bad for
+literature; it made a minute model out of work that was really a hasty
+and faulty masterpiece. And it was bad for religion and morals that
+there should be so huge a terrestrial idol, that we should put such
+utter and unreasoning trust in any child of man. It is true that it was
+largely through Shaw's own defects that he beheld the defects of
+Shakespeare. But it needed someone equally prosaic to resist what was
+perilous in the charm of such poetry; it may not be altogether a mistake
+to send a deaf man to destroy the rock of the sirens.
+
+This attitude of Shaw illustrates of course all three of the divisions
+or aspects to which the reader's attention has been drawn. It was partly
+the attitude of the Irishman objecting to the Englishman turning his
+mere artistic taste into a religion; especially when it was a taste
+merely taught him by his aunts and uncles. In Shaw's opinion (one might
+say) the English do not really enjoy Shakespeare or even admire
+Shakespeare; one can only say, in the strong colloquialism, that they
+swear by Shakespeare. He is a mere god; a thing to be invoked. And
+Shaw's whole business was to set up the things which were to be sworn by
+as things to be sworn at. It was partly again the revolutionist in
+pursuit of pure novelty, hating primarily the oppression of the past,
+almost hating history itself. For Bernard Shaw the prophets were to be
+stoned after, and not before, men had built their sepulchres. There was
+a Yankee smartness in the man which was irritated at the idea of being
+dominated by a person dead for three hundred years; like Mark Twain, he
+wanted a fresher corpse.
+
+These two motives there were, but they were small compared with the
+other. It was the third part of him, the Puritan, that was really at war
+with Shakespeare. He denounced that playwright almost exactly as any
+contemporary Puritan coming out of a conventicle in a steeple-crowned
+hat and stiff bands might have denounced the playwright coming out of
+the stage door of the old Globe Theatre. This is not a mere fancy; it is
+philosophically true. A legend has run round the newspapers that Bernard
+Shaw offered himself as a better writer than Shakespeare. This is false
+and quite unjust; Bernard Shaw never said anything of the kind. The
+writer whom he did say was better than Shakespeare was not himself, but
+Bunyan. And he justified it by attributing to Bunyan a virile acceptance
+of life as a high and harsh adventure, while in Shakespeare he saw
+nothing but profligate pessimism, the _vanitas vanitatum_ of a
+disappointed voluptuary. According to this view Shakespeare was always
+saying, "Out, out, brief candle," because his was only a ballroom
+candle; while Bunyan was seeking to light such a candle as by God's
+grace should never be put out.
+
+It is odd that Bernard Shaw's chief error or insensibility should have
+been the instrument of his noblest affirmation. The denunciation of
+Shakespeare was a mere misunderstanding. But the denunciation of
+Shakespeare's pessimism was the most splendidly understanding of all his
+utterances. This is the greatest thing in Shaw, a serious optimism--even
+a tragic optimism. Life is a thing too glorious to be enjoyed. To be is
+an exacting and exhausting business; the trumpet though inspiring is
+terrible. Nothing that he ever wrote is so noble as his simple reference
+to the sturdy man who stepped up to the Keeper of the Book of Life and
+said, "Put down my name, Sir." It is true that Shaw called this heroic
+philosophy by wrong names and buttressed it with false metaphysics; that
+was the weakness of the age. The temporary decline of theology had
+involved the neglect of philosophy and all fine thinking; and Bernard
+Shaw had to find shaky justifications in Schopenhauer for the sons of
+God shouting for joy. He called it the Will to Live--a phrase invented
+by Prussian professors who would like to exist, but can't. Afterwards he
+asked people to worship the Life-Force; as if one could worship a
+hyphen. But though he covered it with crude new names (which are now
+fortunately crumbling everywhere like bad mortar) he was on the side of
+the good old cause; the oldest and the best of all causes, the cause of
+creation against destruction, the cause of yes against no, the cause of
+the seed against the stony earth and the star against the abyss.
+
+His misunderstanding of Shakespeare arose largely from the fact that he
+is a Puritan, while Shakespeare was spiritually a Catholic. The former
+is always screwing himself up to see truth; the latter is often content
+that truth is there. The Puritan is only strong enough to stiffen; the
+Catholic is strong enough to relax. Shaw, I think, has entirely
+misunderstood the pessimistic passages of Shakespeare. They are flying
+moods which a man with a fixed faith can afford to entertain. That all
+is vanity, that life is dust and love is ashes, these are frivolities,
+these are jokes that a Catholic can afford to utter. He knows well
+enough that there is a life that is not dust and a love that is not
+ashes. But just as he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the
+matter of enjoyment, so he may let himself go more than the Puritan in
+the matter of melancholy. The sad exuberances of Hamlet are merely like
+the glad exuberances of Falstaff. This is not conjecture; it is the text
+of Shakespeare. In the very act of uttering his pessimism, Hamlet admits
+that it is a mood and not the truth. Heaven _is_ a heavenly thing, only
+to him it seems a foul congregation of vapours. Man _is_ the paragon of
+animals, only to him he seems a quintessence of dust. Hamlet is quite
+the reverse of a sceptic. He is a man whose strong intellect believes
+much more than his weak temperament can make vivid to him. But this
+power of knowing a thing without feeling it, this power of believing a
+thing without experiencing it, this is an old Catholic complexity, and
+the Puritan has never understood it. Shakespeare confesses his moods
+(mostly by the mouths of villains and failures), but he never sets up
+his moods against his mind. His cry of _vanitas vanitatum_ is itself
+only a harmless vanity. Readers may not agree with my calling him
+Catholic with a big C; but they will hardly complain of my calling him
+catholic with a small one. And that is here the principal point.
+Shakespeare was not in any sense a pessimist; he was, if anything, an
+optimist so universal as to be able to enjoy even pessimism. And this is
+exactly where he differs from the Puritan. The true Puritan is not
+squeamish: the true Puritan is free to say "Damn it!" But the Catholic
+Elizabethan was free (on passing provocation) to say "Damn it all!"
+
+It need hardly be explained that Bernard Shaw added to his negative case
+of a dramatist to be depreciated a corresponding affirmative case of a
+dramatist to be exalted and advanced. He was not content with so remote
+a comparison as that between Shakespeare and Bunyan. In his vivacious
+weekly articles in the _Saturday Review_, the real comparison upon which
+everything turned was the comparison between Shakespeare and Ibsen. He
+early threw himself with all possible eagerness into the public disputes
+about the great Scandinavian; and though there was no doubt whatever
+about which side he supported, there was much that was individual in the
+line he took. It is not our business here to explore that extinct
+volcano. You may say that anti-Ibsenism is dead, or you may say that
+Ibsen is dead; in any case, that controversy is dead, and death, as the
+Roman poet says, can alone confess of what small atoms we are made. The
+opponents of Ibsen largely exhibited the permanent qualities of the
+populace; that is, their instincts were right and their reasons wrong.
+They made the complete controversial mistake of calling Ibsen a
+pessimist; whereas, indeed, his chief weakness is a rather childish
+confidence in mere nature and freedom, and a blindness (either of
+experience or of culture) in the matter of original sin. In this sense
+Ibsen is not so much a pessimist as a highly crude kind of optimist.
+Nevertheless the man in the street was right in his fundamental
+instinct, as he always is. Ibsen, in his pale northern style, is an
+optimist; but for all that he is a depressing person. The optimism of
+Ibsen is less comforting than the pessimism of Dante; just as a
+Norwegian sunrise, however splendid, is colder than a southern night.
+
+But on the side of those who fought for Ibsen there was also a
+disagreement, and perhaps also a mistake. The vague army of "the
+advanced" (an army which advances in all directions) were united in
+feeling that they ought to be the friends of Ibsen because he also was
+advancing somewhere somehow. But they were also seriously impressed by
+Flaubert, by Oscar Wilde and all the rest who told them that a work of
+art was in another universe from ethics and social good. Therefore many,
+I think most, of the Ibsenites praised the Ibsen plays merely as _choses
+vues_, aesthetic affirmations of what can be without any reference to
+what ought to be. Mr. William Archer himself inclined to this view,
+though his strong sagacity kept him in a haze of healthy doubt on the
+subject. Mr. Walkley certainly took this view. But this view Mr. George
+Bernard Shaw abruptly and violently refused to take.
+
+With the full Puritan combination of passion and precision he informed
+everybody that Ibsen was not artistic, but moral; that his dramas were
+didactic, that all great art was didactic, that Ibsen was strongly on
+the side of some of his characters and strongly against others, that
+there was preaching and public spirit in the work of good dramatists;
+and that if this were not so, dramatists and all other artists would be
+mere panders of intellectual debauchery, to be locked up as the Puritans
+locked up the stage players. No one can understand Bernard Shaw who does
+not give full value to this early revolt of his on behalf of ethics
+against the ruling school of _l'art pour l'art_. It is interesting
+because it is connected with other ambitions in the man, especially
+with that which has made him somewhat vainer of being a Parish
+Councillor than of being one of the most popular dramatists in Europe.
+But its chief interest is again to be referred to our stratification of
+the psychology; it is the lover of true things rebelling for once
+against merely new things; it is the Puritan suddenly refusing to be the
+mere Progressive.
+
+But this attitude obviously laid on the ethical lover of Ibsen a not
+inconsiderable obligation. If the new drama had an ethical purpose, what
+was it? and if Ibsen was a moral teacher, what the deuce was he
+teaching? Answers to this question, answers of manifold brilliancy and
+promise, were scattered through all the dramatic criticisms of those
+years on the _Saturday Review_. But even Bernard Shaw grew tired after a
+time of discussing Ibsen only in connection with the current pantomime
+or the latest musical comedy. It was felt that so much sincerity and
+fertility of explanation justified a concentrated attack; and in 1891
+appeared the brilliant book called _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_, which
+some have declared to be merely the quintessence of Shaw. However this
+may be, it was in fact and profession the quintessence of Shaw's theory
+of the morality or propaganda of Ibsen.
+
+The book itself is much longer than the book that I am writing; and as
+is only right in so spirited an apologist, every paragraph is
+provocative. I could write an essay on every sentence which I accept and
+three essays on every sentence which I deny. Bernard Shaw himself is a
+master of compression; he can put a conception more compactly than any
+other man alive. It is therefore rather difficult to compress his
+compression; one feels as if one were trying to extract a beef essence
+from Bovril. But the shortest form in which I can state the idea of _The
+Quintessence of Ibsenism_ is that it is the idea of distrusting ideals,
+which are universal, in comparison with facts, which are miscellaneous.
+The man whom he attacks throughout he calls "The Idealist"; that is the
+man who permits himself to be mainly moved by a moral generalisation.
+"Actions," he says, "are to be judged by their effect on happiness, and
+not by their conformity to any ideal." As we have already seen, there is
+a certain inconsistency here; for while Shaw had always chucked all
+ideals overboard the one he had chucked first was the ideal of
+happiness. Passing this however for the present, we may mark the above
+as the most satisfying summary. If I tell a lie I am not to blame myself
+for having violated the ideal of truth, but only for having perhaps got
+myself into a mess and made things worse than they were before. If I
+have broken my word I need not feel (as my fathers did) that I have
+broken something inside of me, as one who breaks a blood vessel. It all
+depends on whether I have broken up something outside me; as one who
+breaks up an evening party. If I shoot my father the only question is
+whether I have made him happy. I must not admit the idealistic
+conception that the mere shooting of my father might possibly make me
+unhappy. We are to judge of every individual case as it arises,
+apparently without any social summary or moral ready-reckoner at all.
+"The Golden Rule is that there is no Golden Rule." We must not say that
+it is right to keep promises, but that it may be right to keep this
+promise. Essentially it is anarchy; nor is it very easy to see how a
+state could be very comfortable which was Socialist in all its public
+morality and Anarchist in all its private. But if it is anarchy, it is
+anarchy without any of the abandon and exuberance of anarchy. It is a
+worried and conscientious anarchy; an anarchy of painful delicacy and
+even caution. For it refuses to trust in traditional experiments or
+plainly trodden tracks; every case must be considered anew from the
+beginning, and yet considered with the most wide-eyed care for human
+welfare; every man must act as if he were the first man made. Briefly,
+we must always be worrying about what is best for our children, and we
+must not take one hint or rule of thumb from our fathers. Some think
+that this anarchism would make a man tread down mighty cities in his
+madness. I think it would make a man walk down the street as if he were
+walking on egg-shells. I do not think this experiment in opportunism
+would end in frantic license; I think it would end in frozen timidity.
+If a man was forbidden to solve moral problems by moral science or the
+help of mankind, his course would be quite easy--he would not solve the
+problems. The world instead of being a knot so tangled as to need
+unravelling, would simply become a piece of clockwork too complicated to
+be touched. I cannot think that this untutored worry was what Ibsen
+meant; I have my doubts as to whether it was what Shaw meant; but I do
+not think that it can be substantially doubted that it was what he said.
+
+In any case it can be asserted that the general aim of the work was to
+exalt the immediate conclusions of practice against the general
+conclusions of theory. Shaw objected to the solution of every problem in
+a play being by its nature a general solution, applicable to all other
+such problems. He disliked the entrance of a universal justice at the
+end of the last act; treading down all the personal ultimatums and all
+the varied certainties of men. He disliked the god from the
+machine--because he was from a machine. But even without the machine he
+tended to dislike the god; because a god is more general than a man. His
+enemies have accused Shaw of being anti-domestic, a shaker of the
+roof-tree. But in this sense Shaw may be called almost madly domestic.
+He wishes each private problem to be settled in private, without
+reference to sociological ethics. And the only objection to this kind of
+gigantic casuistry is that the theatre is really too small to discuss
+it. It would not be fair to play David and Goliath on a stage too small
+to admit Goliath. And it is not fair to discuss private morality on a
+stage too small to admit the enormous presence of public morality; that
+character which has not appeared in a play since the Middle Ages; whose
+name is Everyman and whose honour we have all in our keeping.
+
+
+
+
+_The Dramatist_
+
+
+No one who was alive at the time and interested in such matters will
+ever forget the first acting of _Arms and the Man_. It was applauded by
+that indescribable element in all of us which rejoices to see the
+genuine thing prevail against the plausible; that element which rejoices
+that even its enemies are alive. Apart from the problems raised in the
+play, the very form of it was an attractive and forcible innovation.
+Classic plays which were wholly heroic, comic plays which were wholly
+and even heartlessly ironical, were common enough. Commonest of all in
+this particular time was the play that began playfully, with plenty of
+comic business, and was gradually sobered by sentiment until it ended on
+a note of romance or even of pathos. A commonplace little officer, the
+butt of the mess, becomes by the last act as high and hopeless a lover
+as Dante. Or a vulgar and violent pork-butcher remembers his own youth
+before the curtain goes down. The first thing that Bernard Shaw did when
+he stepped before the footlights was to reverse this process. He
+resolved to build a play not on pathos, but on bathos. The officer
+should be heroic first and then everyone should laugh at him; the
+curtain should go up on a man remembering his youth, and he should only
+reveal himself as a violent pork-butcher when someone interrupted him
+with an order for pork. This merely technical originality is indicated
+in the very title of the play. The _Arma Virumque_ of Virgil is a
+mounting and ascending phrase, the man is more than his weapons. The
+Latin line suggests a superb procession which should bring on to the
+stage the brazen and resounding armour, the shield and shattering axe,
+but end with the hero himself, taller and more terrible because unarmed.
+The technical effect of Shaw's scheme is like the same scene, in which a
+crowd should carry even more gigantic shapes of shield and helmet, but
+when the horns and howls were at their highest, should end with the
+figure of Little Tich. The name itself is meant to be a bathos;
+arms--and the man.
+
+It is well to begin with the superficial; and this is the superficial
+effectiveness of Shaw; the brilliancy of bathos. But of course the
+vitality and value of his plays does not lie merely in this; any more
+than the value of Swinburne lies in alliteration or the value of Hood in
+puns. This is not his message; but it is his method; it is his style.
+The first taste we had of it was in this play of _Arms and the Man_; but
+even at the very first it was evident that there was much more in the
+play than that. Among other things there was one thing not unimportant;
+there was savage sincerity. Indeed, only a ferociously sincere person
+can produce such effective flippancies on a matter like war; just as
+only a strong man could juggle with cannon balls. It is all very well to
+use the word "fool" as synonymous with "jester"; but daily experience
+shows that it is generally the solemn and silent man who is the fool. It
+is all very well to accuse Mr. Shaw of standing on his head; but if you
+stand on your head you must have a hard and solid head to stand on. In
+_Arms and the Man_ the bathos of form was strictly the incarnation of a
+strong satire in the idea. The play opens in an atmosphere of military
+melodrama; the dashing officer of cavalry going off to death in an
+attitude, the lovely heroine left in tearful rapture; the brass band,
+the noise of guns and the red fire. Into all this enters Bluntschli, the
+little sturdy crop-haired Swiss professional soldier, a man without a
+country but with a trade. He tells the army-adoring heroine frankly that
+she is a humbug; and she, after a moment's reflection, appears to agree
+with him. The play is like nearly all Shaw's plays, the dialogue of a
+conversion. By the end of it the young lady has lost all her military
+illusions and admires this mercenary soldier not because he faces guns,
+but because he faces facts.
+
+This was a fitting entrance for Shaw to his didactic drama; because the
+commonplace courage which he respects in Bluntschli was the one virtue
+which he was destined to praise throughout. We can best see how the play
+symbolises and summarises Bernard Shaw if we compare it with some other
+attack by modern humanitarians upon war. Shaw has many of the actual
+opinions of Tolstoy. Like Tolstoy he tells men, with coarse innocence,
+that romantic war is only butchery and that romantic love is only lust.
+But Tolstoy objects to these things because they are real; he really
+wishes to abolish them. Shaw only objects to them in so far as they are
+ideal; that is in so far as they are idealised. Shaw objects not so much
+to war as to the attractiveness of war. He does not so much dislike love
+as the love of love. Before the temple of Mars, Tolstoy stands and
+thunders, "There shall be no wars"; Bernard Shaw merely murmurs, "Wars
+if you must; but for God's sake, not war songs." Before the temple of
+Venus, Tolstoy cries terribly, "Come out of it!"; Shaw is quite content
+to say, "Do not be taken in by it." Tolstoy seems really to propose that
+high passion and patriotic valour should be destroyed. Shaw is more
+moderate; and only asks that they should be desecrated. Upon this note,
+both about sex and conflict, he was destined to dwell through much of
+his work with the most wonderful variations of witty adventure and
+intellectual surprise. It may be doubted perhaps whether this realism in
+love and war is quite so sensible as it looks. _Securus judicat orbis
+terrarum_; the world is wiser than the moderns. The world has kept
+sentimentalities simply because they are the most practical things in
+the world. They alone make men do things. The world does not encourage a
+quite rational lover, simply because a perfectly rational lover would
+never get married. The world does not encourage a perfectly rational
+army, because a perfectly rational army would run away.
+
+The brain of Bernard Shaw was like a wedge in the literal sense. Its
+sharpest end was always in front; and it split our society from end to
+end the moment it had entrance at all. As I have said he was long
+unheard of; but he had not the tragedy of many authors, who were heard
+of long before they were heard. When you had read any Shaw you read all
+Shaw. When you had seen one of his plays you waited for more. And when
+he brought them out in volume form, you did what is repugnant to any
+literary man--you bought a book.
+
+The dramatic volume with which Shaw dazzled the public was called,
+_Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_. I think the most striking and typical
+thing about it was that he did not know very clearly which plays were
+unpleasant and which were pleasant. "Pleasant" is a word which is almost
+unmeaning to Bernard Shaw. Except, as I suppose, in music (where I
+cannot follow him), relish and receptivity are things that simply do not
+appear. He has the best of tongues and the worst of palates. With the
+possible exception of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ (which was at least
+unpleasant in the sense of being forbidden) I can see no particular
+reason why any of the seven plays should be held specially to please or
+displease. First in fame and contemporary importance came the reprint
+of _Arms and the Man_, of which I have already spoken. Over all the rest
+towered unquestionably the two figures of Mrs. Warren and of Candida.
+They were neither of them pleasant, except as all good art is pleasant.
+They were neither of them really unpleasant except as all truth is
+unpleasant. But they did represent the author's normal preference and
+his principal fear; and those two sculptured giantesses largely upheld
+his fame.
+
+I fancy that the author rather dislikes _Candida_ because it is so
+generally liked. I give my own feeling for what it is worth (a foolish
+phrase), but I think that there were only two moments when this powerful
+writer was truly, in the ancient and popular sense, inspired; that is,
+breathing from a bigger self and telling more truth than he knew. One is
+that scene in a later play where after the secrets and revenges of Egypt
+have rioted and rotted all round him, the colossal sanity of Caesar is
+suddenly acclaimed with swords. The other is that great last scene in
+_Candida_ where the wife, stung into final speech, declared her purpose
+of remaining with the strong man because he is the weak man. The wife is
+asked to decide between two men, one a strenuous self-confident popular
+preacher, her husband, the other a wild and weak young poet, logically
+futile and physically timid, her lover; and she chooses the former
+because he has more weakness and more need of her. Even among the plain
+and ringing paradoxes of the Shaw play this is one of the best reversals
+or turnovers ever effected. A paradoxical writer like Bernard Shaw is
+perpetually and tiresomely told that he stands on his head. But all
+romance and all religion consist in making the whole universe stand on
+its head. That reversal is the whole idea of virtue; that the last shall
+be first and the first last. Considered as a pure piece of Shaw
+therefore, the thing is of the best. But it is also something much
+better than Shaw. The writer touches certain realities commonly outside
+his scope; especially the reality of the normal wife's attitude to the
+normal husband, an attitude which is not romantic but which is yet quite
+quixotic; which is insanely unselfish and yet quite cynically
+clear-sighted. It involves human sacrifice without in the least
+involving idolatry.
+
+The truth is that in this place Bernard Shaw comes within an inch of
+expressing something that is not properly expressed anywhere else; the
+idea of marriage. Marriage is not a mere chain upon love as the
+anarchists say; nor is it a mere crown upon love as the sentimentalists
+say. Marriage is a fact, an actual human relation like that of
+motherhood which has certain human habits and loyalties, except in a few
+monstrous cases where it is turned to torture by special insanity and
+sin. A marriage is neither an ecstasy nor a slavery; it is a
+commonwealth; it is a separate working and fighting thing like a nation.
+Kings and diplomatists talk of "forming alliances" when they make
+weddings; but indeed every wedding is primarily an alliance. The family
+is a fact even when it is not an agreeable fact, and a man is part of
+his wife even when he wishes he wasn't. The twain are one flesh--yes,
+even when they are not one spirit. Man is duplex. Man is a quadruped.
+
+Of this ancient and essential relation there are certain emotional
+results, which are subtle, like all the growths of nature. And one of
+them is the attitude of the wife to the husband, whom she regards at
+once as the strongest and most helpless of human figures. She regards
+him in some strange fashion at once as a warrior who must make his way
+and as an infant who is sure to lose his way. The man has emotions which
+exactly correspond; sometimes looking down at his wife and sometimes up
+at her; for marriage is like a splendid game of see-saw. Whatever else
+it is, it is not comradeship. This living, ancestral bond (not of love
+or fear, but strictly of marriage) has been twice expressed splendidly
+in literature. The man's incurable sense of the mother in his lawful
+wife was uttered by Browning in one of his two or three truly shattering
+lines of genius, when he makes the execrable Guido fall back finally
+upon the fact of marriage and the wife whom he has trodden like mire:
+
+
+                "Christ! Maria! God,
+     Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"
+
+
+And the woman's witness to the same fact has been best expressed by
+Bernard Shaw in this great scene where she remains with the great
+stalwart successful public man because he is really too little to run
+alone.
+
+There are one or two errors in the play; and they are all due to the
+primary error of despising the mental attitude of romance, which is the
+only key to real human conduct. For instance, the love making of the
+young poet is all wrong. He is supposed to be a romantic and amorous
+boy; and therefore the dramatist tries to make him talk turgidly, about
+seeking for "an archangel with purple wings" who shall be worthy of his
+lady. But a lad in love would never talk in this mock heroic style;
+there is no period at which the young male is more sensitive and serious
+and afraid of looking a fool. This is a blunder; but there is another
+much bigger and blacker. It is completely and disastrously false to the
+whole nature of falling in love to make the young Eugene complain of the
+cruelty which makes Candida defile her fair hands with domestic duties.
+No boy in love with a beautiful woman would ever feel disgusted when she
+peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. He would like her to be domestic. He
+would simply feel that the potatoes had become poetical and the lamps
+gained an extra light. This may be irrational; but we are not talking of
+rationality, but of the psychology of first love. It may be very unfair
+to women that the toil and triviality of potato peeling should be seen
+through a glamour of romance; but the glamour is quite as certain a fact
+as the potatoes. It may be a bad thing in sociology that men should
+deify domesticity in girls as something dainty and magical; but all men
+do. Personally I do not think it a bad thing at all; but that is another
+argument. The argument here is that Bernard Shaw, in aiming at mere
+realism, makes a big mistake in reality. Misled by his great heresy of
+looking at emotions from the outside, he makes Eugene a cold-blooded
+prig at the very moment when he is trying, for his own dramatic
+purposes, to make him a hot-blooded lover. He makes the young lover an
+idealistic theoriser about the very things about which he really would
+have been a sort of mystical materialist. Here the romantic Irishman is
+much more right than the very rational one; and there is far more truth
+to life as it is in Lover's couplet--
+
+
+     "And envied the chicken
+     That Peggy was pickin'."
+
+
+than in Eugene's solemn, aesthetic protest against the potato-skins and
+the lamp-oil. For dramatic purposes, G. B. S., even if he despises
+romance, ought to comprehend it. But then, if once he comprehended
+romance, he would not despise it.
+
+The series contained, besides its more substantial work, tragic and
+comic, a comparative frivolity called _The Man of Destiny_. It is a
+little comedy about Napoleon, and is chiefly interesting as a
+foreshadowing of his after sketches of heroes and strong men; it is a
+kind of parody of _Caesar and Cleopatra_ before it was written. In this
+connection the mere title of this Napoleonic play is of interest. All
+Shaw's generation and school of thought remembered Napoleon only by his
+late and corrupt title of "The Man of Destiny," a title only given to
+him when he was already fat and tired and destined to exile. They forgot
+that through all the really thrilling and creative part of his career he
+was not the man of destiny, but the man who defied destiny. Shaw's
+sketch is extraordinarily clever; but it is tinged with this unmilitary
+notion of an inevitable conquest; and this we must remember when we come
+to those larger canvases on which he painted his more serious heroes. As
+for the play, it is packed with good things, of which the last is
+perhaps the best. The long duologue between Bonaparte and the Irish lady
+ends with the General declaring that he will only be beaten when he
+meets an English army under an Irish general. It has always been one of
+Shaw's paradoxes that the English mind has the force to fulfil orders,
+while the Irish mind has the intelligence to give them, and it is among
+those of his paradoxes which contain a certain truth.
+
+A far more important play is _The Philanderer_, an ironic comedy which
+is full of fine strokes and real satire; it is more especially the
+vehicle of some of Shaw's best satire upon physical science. Nothing
+could be cleverer than the picture of the young, strenuous doctor, in
+the utter innocence of his professional ambition, who has discovered a
+new disease, and is delighted when he finds people suffering from it and
+cast down to despair when he finds that it does not exist. The point is
+worth a pause, because it is a good, short way of stating Shaw's
+attitude, right or wrong, upon the whole of formal morality. What he
+dislikes in young Doctor Paramore is that he has interposed a secondary
+and false conscience between himself and the facts. When his disease is
+disproved, instead of seeing the escape of a human being who thought he
+was going to die of it, Paramore sees the downfall of a kind of flag or
+cause. This is the whole contention of _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_,
+put better than the book puts it; it is a really sharp exposition of the
+dangers of "idealism," the sacrifice of people to principles, and Shaw
+is even wiser in his suggestion that this excessive idealism exists
+nowhere so strongly as in the world of physical science. He shows that
+the scientist tends to be more concerned about the sickness than about
+the sick man; but it was certainly in his mind to suggest here also that
+the idealist is more concerned about the sin than about the sinner.
+
+This business of Dr. Paramore's disease while it is the most farcical
+thing in the play is also the most philosophic and important. The rest
+of the figures, including the Philanderer himself, are in the full sense
+of those blasting and obliterating words "funny without being vulgar,"
+that is, funny without being of any importance to the masses of men. It
+is a play about a dashing and advanced "Ibsen Club," and the squabble
+between the young Ibsenites and the old people who are not yet up to
+Ibsen. It would be hard to find a stronger example of Shaw's only
+essential error, modernity--which means the seeking for truth in terms
+of time. Only a few years have passed and already almost half the wit of
+that wonderful play is wasted, because it all turns on the newness of a
+fashion that is no longer new. Doubtless many people still think the
+Ibsen drama a great thing, like the French classical drama. But going to
+"The Philanderer" is like going among periwigs and rapiers and hearing
+that the young men are now all for Racine. What makes such work sound
+unreal is not the praise of Ibsen, but the praise of the novelty of
+Ibsen. Any advantage that Bernard Shaw had over Colonel Craven I have
+over Bernard Shaw; we who happen to be born last have the meaningless
+and paltry triumph in that meaningless and paltry war. We are the
+superiors by that silliest and most snobbish of all superiorities, the
+mere aristocracy of time. All works must become thus old and insipid
+which have ever tried to be "modern," which have consented to smell of
+time rather than of eternity. Only those who have stooped to be in
+advance of their time will ever find themselves behind it.
+
+But it is irritating to think what diamonds, what dazzling silver of
+Shavian wit has been sunk in such an out-of-date warship. In _The
+Philanderer_ there are five hundred excellent and about five magnificent
+things. The rattle of repartees between the doctor and the soldier about
+the humanity of their two trades is admirable. Or again, when the
+colonel tells Chartaris that "in his young days" he would have no more
+behaved like Chartaris than he would have cheated at cards. After a
+pause Chartaris says, "You're getting old, Craven, and you make a
+virtue of it as usual." And there is an altitude of aerial tragedy in
+the words of Grace, who has refused the man she loves, to Julia, who is
+marrying the man she doesn't, "This is what they call a happy
+ending--these men."
+
+There is an acrid taste in _The Philanderer_; and certainly he might be
+considered a super-sensitive person who should find anything acrid in
+_You Never Can Tell_. This play is the nearest approach to frank and
+objectless exuberance in the whole of Shaw's work. _Punch_, with wisdom
+as well as wit, said that it might well be called not "You Never Can
+Tell" but "You Never Can be Shaw." And yet if anyone will read this
+blazing farce and then after it any of the romantic farces, such as
+_Pickwick_ or even _The Wrong Box_, I do not think he will be disposed
+to erase or even to modify what I said at the beginning about the
+ingrained grimness and even inhumanity of Shaw's art. To take but one
+test: love, in an "extravaganza," may be light love or love in idleness,
+but it should be hearty and happy love if it is to add to the general
+hilarity. Such are the ludicrous but lucky love affairs of the sportsman
+Winkle and the Maestro Jimson. In Gloria's collapse before her bullying
+lover there is something at once cold and unclean; it calls up all the
+modern supermen with their cruel and fishy eyes. Such farces should
+begin in a friendly air, in a tavern. There is something very symbolic
+of Shaw in the fact that his farce begins in a dentist's.
+
+The only one out of this brilliant batch of plays in which I think that
+the method adopted really fails, is the one called _Widower's Houses_.
+The best touch of Shaw is simply in the title. The simple substitution
+of widowers for widows contains almost the whole bitter and yet
+boisterous protest of Shaw; all his preference for undignified fact over
+dignified phrase; all his dislike of those subtle trends of sex or
+mystery which swing the logician off the straight line. We can imagine
+him crying, "Why in the name of death and conscience should it be tragic
+to be a widow but comic to be a widower?" But the rationalistic method
+is here applied quite wrong as regards the production of a drama. The
+most dramatic point in the affair is when the open and indecent
+rack-renter turns on the decent young man of means and proves to him
+that he is equally guilty, that he also can only grind his corn by
+grinding the faces of the poor. But even here the point is undramatic
+because it is indirect; it is indirect because it is merely
+sociological. It may be the truth that a young man living on an
+unexamined income which ultimately covers a great deal of house-property
+is as dangerous as any despot or thief. But it is a truth that you can
+no more put into a play than into a triolet. You can make a play out of
+one man robbing another man, but not out of one man robbing a million
+men; still less out of his robbing them unconsciously.
+
+Of the plays collected in this book I have kept _Mrs. Warren's
+Profession_ to the last, because, fine as it is, it is even finer and
+more important because of its fate, which was to rouse a long and
+serious storm and to be vetoed by the Censor of Plays. I say that this
+drama is most important because of the quarrel that came out of it. If I
+were speaking of some mere artist this might be an insult. But there are
+high and heroic things in Bernard Shaw; and one of the highest and most
+heroic is this, that he certainly cares much more for a quarrel than for
+a play. And this quarrel about the censorship is one on which he feels
+so strongly that in a book embodying any sort of sympathy it would be
+much better to leave out Mrs. Warren than to leave out Mr. Redford. The
+veto was the pivot of so very personal a movement by the dramatist, of
+so very positive an assertion of his own attitude towards things, that
+it is only just and necessary to state what were the two essential
+parties to the dispute; the play and the official who prevented the
+play.
+
+The play of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ is concerned with a coarse mother
+and a cold daughter; the mother drives the ordinary and dirty trade of
+harlotry; the daughter does not know until the end the atrocious origin
+of all her own comfort and refinement. The daughter, when the discovery
+is made, freezes up into an iceberg of contempt; which is indeed a very
+womanly thing to do. The mother explodes into pulverising cynicism and
+practicality; which is also very womanly. The dialogue is drastic and
+sweeping; the daughter says the trade is loathsome; the mother answers
+that she loathes it herself; that every healthy person does loathe the
+trade by which she lives. And beyond question the general effect of the
+play is that the trade is loathsome; supposing anyone to be so
+insensible as to require to be told of the fact. Undoubtedly the upshot
+is that a brothel is a miserable business, and a brothel-keeper a
+miserable woman. The whole dramatic art of Shaw is in the literal sense
+of the word, tragi-comic; I mean that the comic part comes after the
+tragedy. But just as _You Never Can Tell_ represents the nearest
+approach of Shaw to the purely comic, so _Mrs. Warren's Profession_
+represents his only complete, or nearly complete, tragedy. There is no
+twopenny modernism in it, as in _The Philanderer_. Mrs. Warren is as old
+as the Old Testament; "for she hath cast down many wounded, yea, many
+strong men have been slain by her; her house is in the gates of hell,
+going down into the chamber of death." Here is no subtle ethics, as in
+_Widowers' Houses_; for even those moderns who think it noble that a
+woman should throw away her honour, surely cannot think it especially
+noble that she should sell it. Here is no lighting up by laughter,
+astonishment, and happy coincidence, as in _You Never Can Tell_. The
+play is a pure tragedy about a permanent and quite plain human problem;
+the problem is as plain and permanent, the tragedy is as proud and pure,
+as in _OEdipus_ or _Macbeth_. This play was presented in the ordinary
+way for public performance and was suddenly stopped by the Censor of
+Plays.
+
+The Censor of Plays is a small and accidental eighteenth-century
+official. Like nearly all the powers which Englishmen now respect as
+ancient and rooted, he is very recent. Novels and newspapers still talk
+of the English aristocracy that came over with William the Conqueror.
+Little of our effective oligarchy is as old as the Reformation; and none
+of it came over with William the Conqueror. Some of the older English
+landlords came over with William of Orange; the rest have come by
+ordinary alien immigration. In the same way we always talk of the
+Victorian woman (with her smelling salts and sentiment) as the
+old-fashioned woman. But she really was a quite new-fashioned woman; she
+considered herself, and was, an advance in delicacy and civilisation
+upon the coarse and candid Elizabethan woman to whom we are now
+returning. We are never oppressed by old things; it is recent things
+that can really oppress. And in accordance with this principle modern
+England has accepted, as if it were a part of perennial morality, a
+tenth-rate job of Walpole's worst days called the Censorship of the
+Drama. Just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century parvenus to
+date from Hastings, just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century
+ladies to date from Eve, so they have supposed the eighteenth-century
+Censorship to date from Sinai. The origin of the thing was in truth
+purely political. Its first and principal achievement was to prevent
+Fielding from writing plays; not at all because the plays were coarse,
+but because they criticised the Government. Fielding was a free writer;
+but they did not resent his sexual freedom; the Censor would not have
+objected if he had torn away the most intimate curtains of decency or
+rent the last rag from private life. What the Censor disliked was his
+rending the curtain from public life. There is still much of that spirit
+in our country; there are no affairs which men seek so much to cover up
+as public affairs. But the thing was done somewhat more boldly and
+baldly in Walpole's day; and the Censorship of plays has its origin, not
+merely in tyranny, but in a quite trifling and temporary and partisan
+piece of tyranny; a thing in its nature far more ephemeral, far less
+essential, than Ship Money. Perhaps its brightest moment was when the
+office of censor was held by that filthy writer, Colman the younger; and
+when he gravely refused to license a work by the author of _Our
+Village_. Few funnier notions can ever have actually been facts than
+this notion that the restraint and chastity of George Colman saved the
+English public from the eroticism and obscenity of Miss Mitford.
+
+Such was the play; and such was the power that stopped the play. A
+private man wrote it; another private man forbade it; nor was there any
+difference between Mr. Shaw's authority and Mr. Redford's, except that
+Mr. Shaw did defend his action on public grounds and Mr. Redford did
+not. The dramatist had simply been suppressed by a despot; and what was
+worse (because it was modern) by a silent and evasive despot; a despot
+in hiding. People talk about the pride of tyrants; but we at the present
+day suffer from the modesty of tyrants; from the shyness and the
+shrinking secrecy of the strong. Shaw's preface to _Mrs. Warren's
+Profession_ was far more fit to be called a public document than the
+slovenly refusal of the individual official; it had more exactness, more
+universal application, more authority. Shaw on Redford was far more
+national and responsible than Redford on Shaw.
+
+The dramatist found in the quarrel one of the important occasions of his
+life, because the crisis called out something in him which is in many
+ways his highest quality--righteous indignation. As a mere matter of the
+art of controversy of course he carried the war into the enemy's camp
+at once. He did not linger over loose excuses for licence; he declared
+at once that the Censor was licentious, while he, Bernard Shaw, was
+clean. He did not discuss whether a Censorship ought to make the drama
+moral. He declared that it made the drama immoral. With a fine strategic
+audacity he attacked the Censor quite as much for what he permitted as
+for what he prevented. He charged him with encouraging all plays that
+attracted men to vice and only stopping those which discouraged them
+from it. Nor was this attitude by any means an idle paradox. Many plays
+appear (as Shaw pointed out) in which the prostitute and the procuress
+are practically obvious, and in which they are represented as revelling
+in beautiful surroundings and basking in brilliant popularity. The crime
+of Shaw was not that he introduced the Gaiety Girl; that had been done,
+with little enough decorum, in a hundred musical comedies. The crime of
+Shaw was that he introduced the Gaiety Girl, but did not represent her
+life as all gaiety. The pleasures of vice were already flaunted before
+the playgoers. It was the perils of vice that were carefully concealed
+from them. The gay adventures, the gorgeous dresses, the champagne and
+oysters, the diamonds and motor-cars, dramatists were allowed to drag
+all these dazzling temptations before any silly housemaid in the gallery
+who was grumbling at her wages. But they were not allowed to warn her of
+the vulgarity and the nausea, the dreary deceptions and the blasting
+diseases of that life. _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ was not up to a
+sufficient standard of immorality; it was not spicy enough to pass the
+Censor. The acceptable and the accepted plays were those which made the
+fall of a woman fashionable and fascinating; for all the world as if the
+Censor's profession were the same as Mrs. Warren's profession.
+
+Such was the angle of Shaw's energetic attack; and it is not to be
+denied that there was exaggeration in it, and what is so much worse,
+omission. The argument might easily be carried too far; it might end
+with a scene of screaming torture in the Inquisition as a corrective to
+the too amiable view of a clergyman in _The Private Secretary_. But the
+controversy is definitely worth recording, if only as an excellent
+example of the author's aggressive attitude and his love of turning the
+tables in debate. Moreover, though this point of view involves a
+potential overstatement, it also involves an important truth. One of
+the best points urged in the course of it was this, that though vice is
+punished in conventional drama, the punishment is not really impressive,
+because it is not inevitable or even probable. It does not arise out of
+the evil act. Years afterwards Bernard Shaw urged this argument again in
+connection with his friend Mr. Granville Barker's play of _Waste_, in
+which the woman dies from an illegal operation. Bernard Shaw said, truly
+enough, that if she had died from poison or a pistol shot it would have
+left everyone unmoved, for pistols do not in their nature follow female
+unchastity. Illegal operations very often do. The punishment was one
+which might follow the crime, not only in that case, but in many cases.
+Here, I think, the whole argument might be sufficiently cleared up by
+saying that the objection to such things on the stage is a purely
+artistic objection. There is nothing wrong in talking about an illegal
+operation; there are plenty of occasions when it would be very wrong not
+to talk about it. But it may easily be just a shade too ugly for the
+shape of any work of art. There is nothing wrong about being sick; but
+if Bernard Shaw wrote a play in which all the characters expressed
+their dislike of animal food by vomiting on the stage, I think we should
+be justified in saying that the thing was outside, not the laws of
+morality, but the framework of civilised literature. The instinctive
+movement of repulsion which everyone has when hearing of the operation
+in _Waste_ is not an ethical repulsion at all. But it is an aesthetic
+repulsion, and a right one.
+
+But I have only dwelt on this particular fighting phase because it
+leaves us facing the ultimate characteristics which I mentioned first.
+Bernard Shaw cares nothing for art; in comparison with morals, literally
+nothing. Bernard Shaw is a Puritan and his work is Puritan work. He has
+all the essentials of the old, virile and extinct Protestant type. In
+his work he is as ugly as a Puritan. He is as indecent as a Puritan. He
+is as full of gross words and sensual facts as a sermon of the
+seventeenth century. Up to this point of his life indeed hardly anyone
+would have dreamed of calling him a Puritan; he was called sometimes an
+anarchist, sometimes a buffoon, sometimes (by the more discerning stupid
+people) a prig. His attitude towards current problems was felt to be
+arresting and even indecent; I do not think that anyone thought of
+connecting it with the old Calvinistic morality. But Shaw, who knew
+better than the Shavians, was at this moment on the very eve of
+confessing his moral origin. The next book of plays he produced
+(including The _Devil's Disciple_, _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_,
+and _Caesar and Cleopatra_), actually bore the title of _Plays for
+Puritans_.
+
+The play called _The Devil's Disciple_ has great merits, but the merits
+are incidental. Some of its jokes are serious and important, but its
+general plan can only be called a joke. Almost alone among Bernard
+Shaw's plays (except of course such things as _How he Lied to her
+Husband_ and _The Admirable Bashville_) this drama does not turn on any
+very plain pivot of ethical or philosophical conviction. The artistic
+idea seems to be the notion of a melodrama in which all the conventional
+melodramatic situations shall suddenly take unconventional turns. Just
+where the melodramatic clergyman would show courage he appears to show
+cowardice; just where the melodramatic sinner would confess his love he
+confesses his indifference. This is a little too like the Shaw of the
+newspaper critics rather than the Shaw of reality. There are indeed
+present in the play two of the writer's principal moral conceptions.
+The first is the idea of a great heroic action coming in a sense from
+nowhere; that is, not coming from any commonplace motive; being born in
+the soul in naked beauty, coming with its own authority and testifying
+only to itself. Shaw's agent does not act towards something, but from
+something. The hero dies, not because he desires heroism, but because he
+has it. So in this particular play the Devil's Disciple finds that his
+own nature will not permit him to put the rope around another man's
+neck; he has no reasons of desire, affection, or even equity; his death
+is a sort of divine whim. And in connection with this the dramatist
+introduces another favourite moral; the objection to perpetual playing
+upon the motive of sex. He deliberately lures the onlooker into the net
+of Cupid in order to tell him with salutary decision that Cupid is not
+there at all. Millions of melodramatic dramatists have made a man face
+death for the woman he loves; Shaw makes him face death for the woman he
+does not love--merely in order to put woman in her place. He objects to
+that idolatry of sexualism which makes it the fountain of all forcible
+enthusiasms; he dislikes the amorous drama which makes the female the
+only key to the male. He is Feminist in politics, but Anti-feminist in
+emotion. His key to most problems is, "Ne cherchez pas la femme."
+
+As has been observed, the incidental felicities of the play are frequent
+and memorable, especially those connected with the character of General
+Burgoyne, the real full-blooded, free-thinking eighteenth century
+gentleman, who was much too much of an aristocrat not to be a liberal.
+One of the best thrusts in all the Shavian fencing matches is that which
+occurs when Richard Dudgeon, condemned to be hanged, asks rhetorically
+why he cannot be shot like a soldier. "Now there you speak like a
+civilian," replies General Burgoyne. "Have you formed any conception of
+the condition of marksmanship in the British Army?" Excellent, too, is
+the passage in which his subordinate speaks of crushing the enemy in
+America, and Burgoyne asks him who will crush their enemies in England,
+snobbery and jobbery and incurable carelessness and sloth. And in one
+sentence towards the end, Shaw reaches a wider and more genial
+comprehension of mankind than he shows anywhere else; "it takes all
+sorts to make a world, saints as well as soldiers." If Shaw had
+remembered that sentence on other occasions he would have avoided his
+mistake about Caesar and Brutus. It is not only true that it takes all
+sorts to make a world; but the world cannot succeed without its
+failures. Perhaps the most doubtful point of all in the play is why it
+is a play for Puritans; except the hideous picture of a Calvinistic home
+is meant to destroy Puritanism. And indeed in this connection it is
+constantly necessary to fall back upon the facts of which I have spoken
+at the beginning of this brief study; it is necessary especially to
+remember that Shaw could in all probability speak of Puritanism from the
+inside. In that domestic circle which took him to hear Moody and Sankey,
+in that domestic circle which was teetotal even when it was intoxicated,
+in that atmosphere and society Shaw might even have met the monstrous
+mother in _The Devil's Disciple_, the horrible old woman who declares
+that she has hardened her heart to hate her children, because the heart
+of man is desperately wicked, the old ghoul who has made one of her
+children an imbecile and the other an outcast. Such types do occur in
+small societies drunk with the dismal wine of Puritan determinism. It is
+possible that there were among Irish Calvinists people who denied that
+charity was a Christian virtue. It is possible that among Puritans there
+were people who thought a heart was a kind of heart disease. But it is
+enough to make one tear one's hair to think that a man of genius
+received his first impressions in so small a corner of Europe that he
+could for a long time suppose that this Puritanism was current among
+Christian men. The question, however, need not detain us, for the batch
+of plays contained two others about which it is easier to speak.
+
+The third play in order in the series called _Plays for Puritans_ is a
+very charming one; _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_. This also turns,
+as does so much of the Caesar drama, on the idea of vanity of
+revenge--the idea that it is too slight and silly a thing for a man to
+allow to occupy and corrupt his consciousness. It is not, of course, the
+morality that is new here, but the touch of cold laughter in the core of
+the morality. Many saints and sages have denounced vengeance. But they
+treated vengeance as something too great for man. "Vengeance is Mine,
+saith the Lord; I will repay." Shaw treats vengeance as something too
+small for man--a monkey trick he ought to have outlived, a childish
+storm of tears which he ought to be able to control. In the story in
+question Captain Brassbound has nourished through his whole erratic
+existence, racketting about all the unsavoury parts of Africa--a mission
+of private punishment which appears to him as a mission of holy justice.
+His mother has died in consequence of a judge's decision, and Brassbound
+roams and schemes until the judge falls into his hands. Then a pleasant
+society lady, Lady Cicely Waynefleet tells him in an easy conversational
+undertone--a rivulet of speech which ripples while she is mending his
+coat--that he is making a fool of himself, that his wrong is irrelevant,
+that his vengeance is objectless, that he would be much better if he
+flung his morbid fancy away for ever; in short, she tells him he is
+ruining himself for the sake of ruining a total stranger. Here again we
+have the note of the economist, the hatred of mere loss. Shaw (one might
+almost say) dislikes murder, not so much because it wastes the life of
+the corpse as because it wastes the time of the murderer. If he were
+endeavouring to persuade one of his moon-lighting fellow-countrymen not
+to shoot his landlord, I can imagine him explaining with benevolent
+emphasis that it was not so much a question of losing a life as of
+throwing away a bullet. But indeed the Irish comparison alone suggests a
+doubt which wriggles in the recesses of my mind about the complete
+reliability of the philosophy of Lady Cicely Waynefleet, the complete
+finality of the moral of _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_. Of course,
+it was very natural in an aristocrat like Lady Cicely Waynefleet to wish
+to let sleeping dogs lie, especially those whom Mr. Blatchford calls
+under-dogs. Of course it was natural for her to wish everything to be
+smooth and sweet-tempered. But I have the obstinate question in the
+corner of my brain, whether if a few Captain Brassbounds did revenge
+themselves on judges, the quality of our judges might not materially
+improve.
+
+When this doubt is once off one's conscience one can lose oneself in the
+bottomless beatitude of Lady Cicely Waynefleet, one of the most living
+and laughing things that her maker has made. I do not know any stronger
+way of stating the beauty of the character than by saying that it was
+written specially for Ellen Terry, and that it is, with Beatrice, one of
+the very few characters in which the dramatist can claim some part of
+her triumph.
+
+We may now pass to the more important of the plays. For some time
+Bernard Shaw would seem to have been brooding upon the soul of Julius
+Caesar. There must always be a strong human curiosity about the soul of
+Julius Caesar; and, among other things, about whether he had a soul. The
+conjunction of Shaw and Caesar has about it something smooth and
+inevitable; for this decisive reason, that Caesar is really the only
+great man of history to whom the Shaw theories apply. Caesar _was_ a Shaw
+hero. Caesar was merciful without being in the least pitiful; his mercy
+was colder than justice. Caesar was a conqueror without being in any
+hearty sense a soldier; his courage was lonelier than fear. Caesar was a
+demagogue without being a democrat. In the same way Bernard Shaw is a
+demagogue without being a democrat. If he had tried to prove his
+principle from any of the other heroes or sages of mankind he would have
+found it much more difficult. Napoleon achieved more miraculous
+conquest; but during his most conquering epoch he was a burning boy
+suicidally in love with a woman far beyond his age. Joan of Arc achieved
+far more instant and incredible worldly success; but Joan of Arc
+achieved worldly success because she believed in another world. Nelson
+was a figure fully as fascinating and dramatically decisive; but Nelson
+was "romantic"; Nelson was a devoted patriot and a devoted lover.
+Alexander was passionate; Cromwell could shed tears; Bismarck had some
+suburban religion; Frederick was a poet; Charlemagne was fond of
+children. But Julius Caesar attracted Shaw not less by his positive than
+by his negative enormousness. Nobody can say with certainty that Caesar
+cared for anything. It is unjust to call Caesar an egoist; for there is
+no proof that he cared even for Caesar. He may not have been either an
+atheist or a pessimist. But he may have been; that is exactly the rub.
+He may have been an ordinary decently good man slightly deficient in
+spiritual expansiveness. On the other hand, he may have been the
+incarnation of paganism in the sense that Christ was the incarnation of
+Christianity. As Christ expressed how great a man can be humble and
+humane, Caesar may have expressed how great a man can be frigid and
+flippant. According to most legends Antichrist was to come soon after
+Christ. One has only to suppose that Antichrist came shortly before
+Christ; and Antichrist might very well be Caesar.
+
+It is, I think, no injustice to Bernard Shaw to say that he does not
+attempt to make his Caesar superior except in this naked and negative
+sense. There is no suggestion, as there is in the Jehovah of the Old
+Testament, that the very cruelty of the higher being conceals some
+tremendous and even tortured love. Caesar is superior to other men not
+because he loves more, but because he hates less. Caesar is magnanimous
+not because he is warm-hearted enough to pardon, but because he is not
+warm-hearted enough to avenge. There is no suggestion anywhere in the
+play that he is hiding any great genial purpose or powerful tenderness
+towards men. In order to put this point beyond a doubt the dramatist has
+introduced a soliloquy of Caesar alone with the Sphinx. There if anywhere
+he would have broken out into ultimate brotherhood or burning pity for
+the people. But in that scene between the Sphinx and Caesar, Caesar is as
+cold and as lonely and as dead as the Sphinx.
+
+But whether the Shavian Caesar is a sound ideal or no, there can be
+little doubt that he is a very fine reality. Shaw has done nothing
+greater as a piece of artistic creation. If the man is a little like a
+statue, it is a statue by a great sculptor; a statue of the best
+period. If his nobility is a little negative in its character, it is the
+negative darkness of the great dome of night; not as in some "new
+moralities" the mere mystery of the coal-hole. Indeed, this somewhat
+austere method of work is very suitable to Shaw when he is serious.
+There is nothing Gothic about his real genius; he could not build a
+mediaeval cathedral in which laughter and terror are twisted together in
+stone, molten by mystical passion. He can build, by way of amusement, a
+Chinese pagoda; but when he is in earnest, only a Roman temple. He has a
+keen eye for truth; but he is one of those people who like, as the
+saying goes, to put down the truth in black and white. He is always
+girding and jeering at romantics and idealists because they will not put
+down the truth in black and white. But black and white are not the only
+two colours in the world. The modern man of science who writes down a
+fact in black and white is not more but less accurate than the mediaeval
+monk who wrote it down in gold and scarlet, sea-green and turquoise.
+Nevertheless, it is a good thing that the more austere method should
+exist separately, and that some men should be specially good at it.
+Bernard Shaw is specially good at it; he is pre-eminently a black and
+white artist.
+
+And as a study in black and white nothing could be better than this
+sketch of Julius Caesar. He is not so much represented as "bestriding the
+earth like a Colossus" (which is indeed a rather comic attitude for a
+hero to stand in), but rather walking the earth with a sort of stern
+levity, lightly touching the planet and yet spurning it away like a
+stone. He walks like a winged man who has chosen to fold his wings.
+There is something creepy even about his kindness; it makes the men in
+front of him feel as if they were made of glass. The nature of the
+Caesarian mercy is massively suggested. Caesar dislikes a massacre, not
+because it is a great sin, but because it is a small sin. It is felt
+that he classes it with a flirtation or a fit of the sulks; a senseless
+temporary subjugation of man's permanent purpose by his passing and
+trivial feelings. He will plunge into slaughter for a great purpose,
+just as he plunges into the sea. But to be stung into such action he
+deems as undignified as to be tipped off the pier. In a singularly fine
+passage Cleopatra, having hired assassins to stab an enemy, appeals to
+her wrongs as justifying her revenge, and says, "If you can find one
+man in all Africa who says that I did wrong, I will be crucified by my
+own slaves." "If you can find one man in all the world," replies Caesar,
+"who can see that you did wrong, he will either conquer the world as I
+have done or be crucified by it." That is the high water mark of this
+heathen sublimity; and we do not feel it inappropriate, or unlike Shaw,
+when a few minutes afterwards the hero is saluted with a blaze of
+swords.
+
+As usually happens in the author's works, there is even more about
+Julius Caesar in the preface than there is in the play. But in the
+preface I think the portrait is less imaginative and more fanciful. He
+attempts to connect his somewhat chilly type of superman with the heroes
+of the old fairy tales. But Shaw should not talk about the fairy tales;
+for he does not feel them from the inside. As I have said, on all this
+side of historic and domestic traditions Bernard Shaw is weak and
+deficient. He does not approach them as fairy tales, as if he were four,
+but as "folk-lore" as if he were forty. And he makes a big mistake about
+them which he would never have made if he had kept his birthday and hung
+up his stocking, and generally kept alive inside him the firelight of a
+home. The point is so peculiarly characteristic of Bernard Shaw, and is
+indeed so much of a summary of his most interesting assertion and his
+most interesting error, that it deserves a word by itself, though it is
+a word which must be remembered in connection with nearly all the other
+plays.
+
+His primary and defiant proposition is the Calvinistic proposition: that
+the elect do not earn virtue, but possess it. The goodness of a man does
+not consist in trying to be good, but in being good. Julius Caesar
+prevails over other people by possessing more _virtus_ than they; not by
+having striven or suffered or bought his virtue; not because he has
+struggled heroically, but because he is a hero. So far Bernard Shaw is
+only what I have called him at the beginning; he is simply a
+seventeenth-century Calvinist. Caesar is not saved by works, or even by
+faith; he is saved because he is one of the elect. Unfortunately for
+himself, however, Bernard Shaw went back further than the seventeenth
+century; and professing his opinion to be yet more antiquated, invoked
+the original legends of mankind. He argued that when the fairy tales
+gave Jack the Giant Killer a coat of darkness or a magic sword it
+removed all credit from Jack in the "common moral" sense; he won as
+Caesar won only because he was superior. I will confess, in passing, to
+the conviction that Bernard Shaw in the course of his whole simple and
+strenuous life was never quite so near to hell as at the moment when he
+wrote down those words. But in this question of fairy tales my immediate
+point is, not how near he was to hell, but how very far off he was from
+fairyland. That notion about the hero with a magic sword being the
+superman with a magic superiority is the caprice of a pedant; no child,
+boy, or man ever felt it in the story of Jack the Giant Killer.
+Obviously the moral is all the other way. Jack's fairy sword and
+invisible coat are clumsy expedients for enabling him to fight at all
+with something which is by nature stronger. They are a rough, savage
+substitute for psychological descriptions of special valour or unwearied
+patience. But no one in his five wits can doubt that the idea of "Jack
+the Giant Killer" is exactly the opposite to Shaw's idea. If it were not
+a tale of effort and triumph hardly earned it would not be called "Jack
+the Giant Killer." If it were a tale of the victory of natural
+advantages it would be called "Giant the Jack Killer." If the teller of
+fairy tales had merely wanted to urge that some beings are born stronger
+than others he would not have fallen back on elaborate tricks of weapon
+and costume for conquering an ogre. He would simply have let the ogre
+conquer. I will not speak of my own emotions in connection with this
+incredibly caddish doctrine that the strength of the strong is
+admirable, but not the valour of the weak. It is enough to say that I
+have to summon up the physical presence of Shaw, his frank gestures,
+kind eyes, and exquisite Irish voice, to cure me of a mere sensation of
+contempt. But I do not dwell upon the point for any such purpose; but
+merely to show how we must be always casting back to those concrete
+foundations with which we began. Bernard Shaw, as I have said, was never
+national enough to be domestic; he was never a part of his past; hence
+when he tries to interpret tradition he comes a terrible cropper, as in
+this case. Bernard Shaw (I strongly suspect) began to disbelieve in
+Santa Claus at a discreditably early age. And by this time Santa Claus
+has avenged himself by taking away the key of all the prehistoric
+scriptures; so that a noble and honourable artist flounders about like
+any German professor. Here is a whole fairy literature which is almost
+exclusively devoted to the unexpected victory of the weak over the
+strong; and Bernard Shaw manages to make it mean the inevitable victory
+of the strong over the weak--which, among other things, would not make a
+story at all. It all comes of that mistake about not keeping his
+birthday. A man should be always tied to his mother's apron strings; he
+should always have a hold on his childhood, and be ready at intervals to
+start anew from a childish standpoint. Theologically the thing is best
+expressed by saying, "You must be born again." Secularly it is best
+expressed by saying, "You must keep your birthday." Even if you will not
+be born again, at least remind yourself occasionally that you were born
+once.
+
+Some of the incidental wit in the Caesarian drama is excellent although
+it is upon the whole less spontaneous and perfect than in the previous
+plays. One of its jests may be mentioned in passing, not merely to draw
+attention to its failure (though Shaw is brilliant enough to afford many
+failures) but because it is the best opportunity for mentioning one of
+the writer's minor notions to which he obstinately adheres. He
+describes the Ancient Briton in Caesar's train as being exactly like a
+modern respectable Englishman. As a joke for a Christmas pantomime this
+would be all very well; but one expects the jokes of Bernard Shaw to
+have some intellectual root, however fantastic the flower. And obviously
+all historic common sense is against the idea that that dim Druid
+people, whoever they were, who dwelt in our land before it was lit up by
+Rome or loaded with varied invasions, were a precise facsimile of the
+commercial society of Birmingham or Brighton. But it is a part of the
+Puritan in Bernard Shaw, a part of the taut and high-strung quality of
+his mind, that he will never admit of any of his jokes that it was only
+a joke. When he has been most witty he will passionately deny his own
+wit; he will say something which Voltaire might envy and then declare
+that he has got it all out of a Blue book. And in connection with this
+eccentric type of self-denial, we may notice this mere detail about the
+Ancient Briton. Someone faintly hinted that a blue Briton when first
+found by Caesar might not be quite like Mr. Broadbent; at the touch Shaw
+poured forth a torrent of theory, explaining that climate was the only
+thing that affected nationality; and that whatever races came into the
+English or Irish climate would become like the English or Irish. Now the
+modern theory of race is certainly a piece of stupid materialism; it is
+an attempt to explain the things we are sure of, France, Scotland, Rome,
+Japan, by means of the things we are not sure of at all, prehistoric
+conjectures, Celts, Mongols, and Iberians. Of course there is a reality
+in race; but there is no reality in the theories of race offered by some
+ethnological professors. Blood, perhaps, is thicker than water; but
+brains are sometimes thicker than anything. But if there is one thing
+yet more thick and obscure and senseless than this theory of the
+omnipotence of race it is, I think, that to which Shaw has fled for
+refuge from it; this doctrine of the omnipotence of climate. Climate
+again is something; but if climate were everything, Anglo-Indians would
+grow more and more to look like Hindoos, which is far from being the
+case. Something in the evil spirit of our time forces people always to
+pretend to have found some material and mechanical explanation. Bernard
+Shaw has filled all his last days with affirmations about the divinity
+of the non-mechanical part of man, the sacred quality in creation and
+choice. Yet it never seems to have occurred to him that the true key to
+national differentiations is the key of the will and not of the
+environment. It never crosses the modern mind to fancy that perhaps a
+people is chiefly influenced by how that people has chosen to behave. If
+I have to choose between race and weather I prefer race; I would rather
+be imprisoned and compelled by ancestors who were once alive than by mud
+and mists which never were. But I do not propose to be controlled by
+either; to me my national history is a chain of multitudinous choices.
+It is neither blood nor rain that has made England, but hope, the thing
+that all those dead men have desired. France was not France because she
+was made to be by the skulls of the Celts or by the sun of Gaul. France
+was France because she chose.
+
+I have stepped on one side from the immediate subject because this is as
+good an instance as any we are likely to come across of a certain almost
+extraneous fault which does deface the work of Bernard Shaw. It is a
+fault only to be mentioned when we have made the solidity of the merits
+quite clear. To say that Shaw is merely making game of people is
+demonstrably ridiculous; at least a fairly systematic philosophy can be
+traced through all his jokes, and one would not insist on such a unity
+in all the songs of Mr. Dan Leno. I have already pointed out that the
+genius of Shaw is really too harsh and earnest rather than too merry and
+irresponsible. I shall have occasion to point out later that Shaw is, in
+one very serious sense, the very opposite of paradoxical. In any case if
+any real student of Shaw says that Shaw is only making a fool of him, we
+can only say that of that student it is very superfluous for anyone to
+make a fool. But though the dramatist's jests are always serious and
+generally obvious, he is really affected from time to time by a certain
+spirit of which that climate theory is a case--a spirit that can only be
+called one of senseless ingenuity. I suppose it is a sort of nemesis of
+wit; the skidding of a wheel in the height of its speed. Perhaps it is
+connected with the nomadic nature of his mind. That lack of roots, this
+remoteness from ancient instincts and traditions is responsible for a
+certain bleak and heartless extravagance of statement on certain
+subjects which makes the author really unconvincing as well as
+exaggerative; satires that are _saugrenu_, jokes that are rather silly
+than wild, statements which even considered as lies have no symbolic
+relation to truth. They are exaggerations of something that does not
+exist. For instance, if a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical
+excuse for drunkenness and gluttony that would be false, but it would
+have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that
+Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by poulterers and wine
+merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which
+is not so much false as startlingly and arrestingly foolish. He might as
+well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to
+sell wedding rings. Or again, take the case of nationality and the unit
+of patriotism. If a man said that all boundaries between clans,
+kingdoms, or empires were nonsensical or non-existent, that would be a
+fallacy, but a consistent and philosophical fallacy. But when Mr.
+Bernard Shaw says that England matters so little that the British Empire
+might very well give up these islands to Germany, he has not only got
+hold of the sow by the wrong ear but the wrong sow by the wrong ear; a
+mythical sow, a sow that is not there at all. If Britain is unreal, the
+British Empire must be a thousand times more unreal. It is as if one
+said, "I do not believe that Michael Scott ever had any existence; but
+I am convinced, in spite of the absurd legend, that he had a shadow."
+
+As has been said already, there must be some truth in every popular
+impression. And the impression that Shaw, the most savagely serious man
+of his time, is a mere music-hall artist must have reference to such
+rare outbreaks as these. As a rule his speeches are full, not only of
+substance, but of substances, materials like pork, mahogany, lead, and
+leather. There is no man whose arguments cover a more Napoleonic map of
+detail. It is true that he jokes; but wherever he is he has topical
+jokes, one might almost say family jokes. If he talks to tailors he can
+allude to the last absurdity about buttons. If he talks to the soldiers
+he can see the exquisite and exact humour of the last gun-carriage. But
+when all his powerful practicality is allowed, there does run through
+him this erratic levity, an explosion of ineptitude. It is a queer
+quality in literature. It is a sort of cold extravagance; and it has
+made him all his enemies.
+
+
+
+
+_The Philosopher_
+
+
+I should suppose that _Caesar and Cleopatra_ marks about the turning tide
+of Bernard Shaw's fortune and fame. Up to this time he had known glory,
+but never success. He had been wondered at as something brilliant and
+barren, like a meteor; but no one would accept him as a sun, for the
+test of a sun is that it can make something grow. Practically speaking
+the two qualities of a modern drama are, that it should play and that it
+should pay. It had been proved over and over again in weighty dramatic
+criticisms, in careful readers' reports, that the plays of Shaw could
+never play or pay; that the public did not want wit and the wars of
+intellect. And just about the time that this had been finally proved,
+the plays of Bernard Shaw promised to play like _Charley's Aunt_ and to
+pay like Colman's Mustard. It is a fact in which we can all rejoice, not
+only because it redeems the reputation of Bernard Shaw, but because it
+redeems the character of the English people. All that is bravest in
+human nature, open challenge and unexpected wit and angry conviction,
+are not so very unpopular as the publishers and managers in their
+motor-cars have been in the habit of telling us. But exactly because we
+have come to a turning point in the man's career I propose to interrupt
+the mere catalogue of his plays and to treat his latest series rather as
+the proclamations of an acknowledged prophet. For the last plays,
+especially _Man and Superman_, are such that his whole position must be
+re-stated before attacking them seriously.
+
+For two reasons I have called this concluding series of plays not again
+by the name of "The Dramatist," but by the general name of "The
+Philosopher." The first reason is that given above, that we have come to
+the time of his triumph and may therefore treat him as having gained
+complete possession of a pulpit of his own. But there is a second
+reason: that it was just about this time that he began to create not
+only a pulpit of his own, but a church and creed of his own. It is a
+very vast and universal religion; and it is not his fault that he is the
+only member of it. The plainer way of putting it is this: that here, in
+the hour of his earthly victory, there dies in him the old mere denier,
+the mere dynamiter of criticism. In the warmth of popularity he begins
+to wish to put his faith positively; to offer some solid key to all
+creation. Perhaps the irony in the situation is this: that all the
+crowds are acclaiming him as the blasting and hypercritical buffoon,
+while he himself is seriously rallying his synthetic power, and with a
+grave face telling himself that it is time he had a faith to preach. His
+final success as a sort of charlatan coincides with his first grand
+failures as a theologian.
+
+For this reason I have deliberately called a halt in his dramatic
+career, in order to consider these two essential points: What did the
+mass of Englishmen, who had now learnt to admire him, imagine his point
+of view to be? and second, What did he imagine it to be? or, if the
+phrase be premature, What did he imagine it was going to be? In his
+latest work, especially in _Man and Superman_, Shaw has become a
+complete and colossal mystic. That mysticism does grow quite rationally
+out of his older arguments; but very few people ever troubled to trace
+the connection. In order to do so it is necessary to say what was, at
+the time of his first success, the public impression of Shaw's
+philosophy.
+
+Now it is an irritating and pathetic thing that the three most popular
+phrases about Shaw are false. Modern criticism, like all weak things,
+is overloaded with words. In a healthy condition of language a man finds
+it very difficult to say the right thing, but at last says it. In this
+empire of journalese a man finds it so very easy to say the wrong thing
+that he never thinks of saying anything else. False or meaningless
+phrases lie so ready to his hand that it is easier to use them than not
+to use them. These wrong terms picked up through idleness are retained
+through habit, and so the man has begun to think wrong almost before he
+has begun to think at all. Such lumbering logomachy is always injurious
+and oppressive to men of spirit, imagination or intellectual honour, and
+it has dealt very recklessly and wrongly with Bernard Shaw. He has
+contrived to get about three newspaper phrases tied to his tail; and
+those newspaper phrases are all and separately wrong. The three
+superstitions about him, it will be conceded, are generally these: first
+that he desires "problem plays," second that he is "paradoxical," and
+third that in his dramas as elsewhere he is specially "a Socialist." And
+the interesting thing is that when we come to his philosophy, all these
+three phrases are quite peculiarly inapplicable.
+
+To take the plays first, there is a general disposition to describe that
+type of intimate or defiant drama which he approves as "the problem
+play." Now the serious modern play is, as a rule, the very reverse of a
+problem play; for there can be no problem unless both points of view are
+equally and urgently presented. _Hamlet_ really is a problem play
+because at the end of it one is really in doubt as to whether upon the
+author's showing Hamlet is something more than a man or something less.
+_Henry IV_ and _Henry V_ are really problem plays; in this sense, that
+the reader or spectator is really doubtful whether the high but harsh
+efficiency, valour, and ambition of Henry V are an improvement on his
+old blackguard camaraderie; and whether he was not a better man when he
+was a thief. This hearty and healthy doubt is very common in
+Shakespeare; I mean a doubt that exists in the writer as well as in the
+reader. But Bernard Shaw is far too much of a Puritan to tolerate such
+doubts about points which he counts essential. There is no sort of doubt
+that the young lady in _Arms and the Man_ is improved by losing her
+ideals. There is no sort of doubt that Captain Brassbound is improved by
+giving up the object of his life. But a better case can be found in
+something that both dramatists have been concerned with; Shaw wrote
+_Caesar and Cleopatra_; Shakespeare wrote _Antony and Cleopatra_ and also
+_Julius Caesar_. And exactly what annoys Bernard Shaw about Shakespeare's
+version is this: that Shakespeare has an open mind or, in other words,
+that Shakespeare has really written a problem play. Shakespeare sees
+quite as clearly as Shaw that Brutus is unpractical and ineffectual; but
+he also sees, what is quite as plain and practical a fact, that these
+ineffectual men do capture the hearts and influence the policies of
+mankind. Shaw would have nothing said in favour of Brutus; because
+Brutus is on the wrong side in politics. Of the actual problem of public
+and private morality, as it was presented to Brutus, he takes actually
+no notice at all. He can write the most energetic and outspoken of
+propaganda plays; but he cannot rise to a problem play. He cannot really
+divide his mind and let the two parts speak independently to each other.
+He has never, so to speak, actually split his head in two; though I
+daresay there are many other people who are willing to do it for him.
+
+Sometimes, especially in his later plays, he allows his clear conviction
+to spoil even his admirable dialogue, making one side entirely weak, as
+in an Evangelical tract. I do not know whether in _Major Barbara_ the
+young Greek professor was supposed to be a fool. As popular tradition
+(which I trust more than anything else) declared that he is drawn from a
+real Professor of my acquaintance, who is anything but a fool, I should
+imagine not. But in that case I am all the more mystified by the
+incredibly weak fight which he makes in the play in answer to the
+elephantine sophistries of Undershaft. It is really a disgraceful case,
+and almost the only case in Shaw of there being no fair fight between
+the two sides. For instance, the Professor mentions pity. Mr. Undershaft
+says with melodramatic scorn, "Pity! the scavenger of the Universe!" Now
+if any gentleman had said this to me, I should have replied, "If I
+permit you to escape from the point by means of metaphors, will you tell
+me whether you disapprove of scavengers?" Instead of this obvious
+retort, the miserable Greek professor only says, "Well then, love," to
+which Undershaft replies with unnecessary violence that he won't have
+the Greek professor's love, to which the obvious answer of course would
+be, "How the deuce can you prevent my loving you if I choose to do so?"
+Instead of this, as far as I remember, that abject Hellenist says
+nothing at all. I only mention this unfair dialogue, because it marks, I
+think, the recent hardening, for good or evil, of Shaw out of a
+dramatist into a mere philosopher, and whoever hardens into a
+philosopher may be hardening into a fanatic.
+
+And just as there is nothing really problematic in Shaw's mind, so there
+is nothing really paradoxical. The meaning of the word paradoxical may
+indeed be made the subject of argument. In Greek, of course, it simply
+means something which is against the received opinion; in that sense a
+missionary remonstrating with South Sea cannibals is paradoxical. But in
+the much more important world, where words are used and altered in the
+using, paradox does not mean merely this: it means at least something of
+which the antinomy or apparent inconsistency is sufficiently plain in
+the words used, and most commonly of all it means an idea expressed in a
+form which is verbally contradictory. Thus, for instance, the great
+saying, "He that shall lose his life, the same shall save it," is an
+example of what modern people mean by a paradox. If any learned person
+should read this book (which seems immeasurably improbable) he can
+content himself with putting it this way, that the moderns mistakenly
+say paradox when they should say oxymoron. Ultimately, in any case, it
+may be agreed that we commonly mean by a paradox some kind of collision
+between what is seemingly and what is really true.
+
+Now if by paradox we mean truth inherent in a contradiction, as in the
+saying of Christ that I have quoted, it is a very curious fact that
+Bernard Shaw is almost entirely without paradox. Moreover, he cannot
+even understand a paradox. And more than this, paradox is about the only
+thing in the world that he does not understand. All his splendid vistas
+and startling suggestions arise from carrying some one clear principle
+further than it has yet been carried. His madness is all consistency,
+not inconsistency. As the point can hardly be made clear without
+examples, let us take one example, the subject of education. Shaw has
+been all his life preaching to grown-up people the profound truth that
+liberty and responsibility go together; that the reason why freedom is
+so often easily withheld, is simply that it is a terrible nuisance. This
+is true, though not the whole truth, of citizens; and so when Shaw
+comes to children he can only apply to them the same principle that he
+has already applied to citizens. He begins to play with the Herbert
+Spencer idea of teaching children by experience; perhaps the most
+fatuously silly idea that was ever gravely put down in print. On that
+there is no need to dwell; one has only to ask how the experimental
+method is to be applied to a precipice; and the theory no longer exists.
+But Shaw effected a further development, if possible more fantastic. He
+said that one should never tell a child anything without letting him
+hear the opposite opinion. That is to say, when you tell Tommy not to
+hit his sick sister on the temple, you must make sure of the presence of
+some Nietzscheite professor, who will explain to him that such a course
+might possibly serve to eliminate the unfit. When you are in the act of
+telling Susan not to drink out of the bottle labelled "poison," you must
+telegraph for a Christian Scientist, who will be ready to maintain that
+without her own consent it cannot do her any harm. What would happen to
+a child brought up on Shaw's principle I cannot conceive; I should think
+he would commit suicide in his bath. But that is not here the question.
+The point is that this proposition seems quite sufficiently wild and
+startling to ensure that its author, if he escapes Hanwell, would reach
+the front rank of journalists, demagogues, or public entertainers. It is
+a perfect paradox, if a paradox only means something that makes one
+jump. But it is not a paradox at all in the sense of a contradiction. It
+is not a contradiction, but an enormous and outrageous consistency, the
+one principle of free thought carried to a point to which no other sane
+man would consent to carry it. Exactly what Shaw does not understand is
+the paradox; the unavoidable paradox of childhood. Although this child
+is much better than I, yet I must teach it. Although this being has much
+purer passions than I, yet I must control it. Although Tommy is quite
+right to rush towards a precipice, yet he must be stood in the corner
+for doing it. This contradiction is the only possible condition of
+having to do with children at all; anyone who talks about a child
+without feeling this paradox might just as well be talking about a
+merman. He has never even seen the animal. But this paradox Shaw in his
+intellectual simplicity cannot see; he cannot see it because it is a
+paradox. His only intellectual excitement is to carry one idea further
+and further across the world. It never occurs to him that it might meet
+another idea, and like the three winds in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, they
+might make a night of it. His only paradox is to pull out one thread or
+cord of truth longer and longer into waste and fantastic places. He does
+not allow for that deeper sort of paradox by which two opposite cords of
+truth become entangled in an inextricable knot. Still less can he be
+made to realise that it is often this knot which ties safely together
+the whole bundle of human life.
+
+This blindness to paradox everywhere perplexes his outlook. He cannot
+understand marriage because he will not understand the paradox of
+marriage; that the woman is all the more the house for not being the
+head of it. He cannot understand patriotism, because he will not
+understand the paradox of patriotism; that one is all the more human for
+not merely loving humanity. He does not understand Christianity because
+he will not understand the paradox of Christianity; that we can only
+really understand all myths when we know that one of them is true. I do
+not under-rate him for this anti-paradoxical temper; I concede that much
+of his finest and keenest work in the way of intellectual purification
+would have been difficult or impossible without it. But I say that here
+lies the limitation of that lucid and compelling mind; he cannot quite
+understand life, because he will not accept its contradictions.
+
+Nor is it by any means descriptive of Shaw to call him a Socialist; in
+so far as that word can be extended to cover an ethical attitude. He is
+the least social of all Socialists; and I pity the Socialist state that
+tries to manage him. This anarchism of his is not a question of thinking
+for himself; every decent man thinks for himself; it would be highly
+immodest to think for anybody else. Nor is it any instinctive licence or
+egoism; as I have said before, he is a man of peculiarly acute public
+conscience. The unmanageable part of him, the fact that he cannot be
+conceived as part of a crowd or as really and invisibly helping a
+movement, has reference to another thing in him, or rather to another
+thing not in him.
+
+The great defect of that fine intelligence is a failure to grasp and
+enjoy the things commonly called convention and tradition; which are
+foods upon which all human creatures must feed frequently if they are to
+live. Very few modern people of course have any idea of what they are.
+"Convention" is very nearly the same word as "democracy." It has again
+and again in history been used as an alternative word to Parliament. So
+far from suggesting anything stale or sober, the word convention rather
+conveys a hubbub; it is the coming together of men; every mob is a
+convention. In its secondary sense it means the common soul of such a
+crowd, its instinctive anger at the traitor or its instinctive
+salutation of the flag. Conventions may be cruel, they may be
+unsuitable, they may even be grossly superstitious or obscene; but there
+is one thing that they never are. Conventions are never dead. They are
+always full of accumulated emotions, the piled-up and passionate
+experiences of many generations asserting what they could not explain.
+To be inside any true convention, as the Chinese respect for parents or
+the European respect for children, is to be surrounded by something
+which whatever else it is is not leaden, lifeless or automatic,
+something which is taut and tingling with vitality at a hundred points,
+which is sensitive almost to madness and which is so much alive that it
+can kill. Now Bernard Shaw has always made this one immense mistake
+(arising out of that bad progressive education of his), the mistake of
+treating convention as a dead thing; treating it as if it were a mere
+physical environment like the pavement or the rain. Whereas it is a
+result of will; a rain of blessings and a pavement of good intentions.
+Let it be remembered that I am not discussing in what degree one should
+allow for tradition; I am saying that men like Shaw do not allow for it
+at all. If Shaw had found in early life that he was contradicted by
+_Bradshaw's Railway Guide_ or even by the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, he
+would have felt at least that he might be wrong. But if he had found
+himself contradicted by his father and mother, he would have thought it
+all the more probable that he was right. If the issue of the last
+evening paper contradicted him he might be troubled to investigate or
+explain. That the human tradition of two thousand years contradicted him
+did not trouble him for an instant. That Marx was not with him was
+important. That Man was not with him was an irrelevant prehistoric joke.
+People have talked far too much about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw.
+Perhaps his only pure paradox is this almost unconscious one; that he
+has tended to think that because something has satisfied generations of
+men it must be untrue.
+
+Shaw is wrong about nearly all the things one learns early in life and
+while one is still simple. Most human beings start with certain facts of
+psychology to which the rest of life must be somewhat related. For
+instance, every man falls in love; and no man falls into free love. When
+he falls into that he calls it lust, and is always ashamed of it even
+when he boasts of it. That there is some connection between a love and a
+vow nearly every human being knows before he is eighteen. That there is
+a solid and instinctive connection between the idea of sexual ecstasy
+and the idea of some sort of almost suicidal constancy, this I say is
+simply the first fact in one's own psychology; boys and girls know it
+almost before they know their own language. How far it can be trusted,
+how it can best be dealt with, all that is another matter. But lovers
+lust after constancy more than after happiness; if you are in any sense
+prepared to give them what they ask, then what they ask, beyond all
+question, is an oath of final fidelity. Lovers may be lunatics; lovers
+may be children; lovers may be unfit for citizenship and outside human
+argument; you can take up that position if you will. But lovers do not
+only desire love; they desire marriage. The root of legal monogamy does
+not lie (as Shaw and his friends are for ever drearily asserting) in the
+fact that the man is a mere tyrant and the woman a mere slave. It lies
+in the fact that _if_ their love for each other is the noblest and
+freest love conceivable, it can only find its heroic expression in both
+becoming slaves. I only mention this matter here as a matter which most
+of us do not need to be taught; for it was the first lesson of life. In
+after years we may make up what code or compromise about sex we like;
+but we all know that constancy, jealousy, and the personal pledge are
+natural and inevitable in sex; we do not feel any surprise when we see
+them either in a murder or in a valentine. We may or may not see wisdom
+in early marriages; but we know quite well that wherever the thing is
+genuine at all, early loves will mean early marriages. But Shaw had not
+learnt about this tragedy of the sexes, what the rustic ballads of any
+country on earth would have taught him. He had not learnt, what
+universal common sense has put into all the folk-lore of the earth,
+that love cannot be thought of clearly for an instant except as
+monogamous. The old English ballads never sing the praises of "lovers."
+They always sing the praises of "true lovers," and that is the final
+philosophy of the question.
+
+The same is true of Mr. Shaw's refusal to understand the love of the
+land either in the form of patriotism or of private ownership. It is the
+attitude of an Irishman cut off from the soil of Ireland, retaining the
+audacity and even cynicism of the national type, but no longer fed from
+the roots with its pathos or its experience.
+
+This broader and more brotherly rendering of convention must be applied
+particularly to the conventions of the drama; since that is necessarily
+the most democratic of all the arts. And it will be found generally that
+most of the theatrical conventions rest on a real artistic basis. The
+Greek Unities, for instance, were not proper objects of the meticulous
+and trivial imitation of Seneca or Gabriel Harvey. But still less were
+they the right objects for the equally trivial and far more vulgar
+impatience of men like Macaulay. That a tale should, if possible, be
+told of one place or one day or a manageable number of characters is an
+ideal plainly rooted in an aesthetic instinct. But if this be so with the
+classical drama, it is yet more certainly so with romantic drama,
+against the somewhat decayed dignity of which Bernard Shaw was largely
+in rebellion. There was one point in particular upon which the Ibsenites
+claimed to have reformed the romantic convention which is worthy of
+special allusion.
+
+Shaw and all the other Ibsenites were fond of insisting that a defect in
+the romantic drama was its tendency to end with wedding-bells. Against
+this they set the modern drama of middle-age, the drama which described
+marriage itself instead of its poetic preliminaries. Now if Bernard Shaw
+had been more patient with popular tradition, more prone to think that
+there might be some sense in its survival, he might have seen this
+particular problem much more clearly. The old playwrights have left us
+plenty of plays of marriage and middle-age. _Othello_ is as much about
+what follows the wedding-bells as _The Doll's House_. _Macbeth_ is about
+a middle-aged couple as much as _Little Eyolf_. But if we ask ourselves
+what is the real difference, we shall, I think, find that it can fairly
+be stated thus. The old tragedies of marriage, though not love stories,
+are like love stories in this, that they work up to some act or stroke
+which is irrevocable as marriage is irrevocable; to the fact of death or
+of adultery.
+
+Now the reason why our fathers did not make marriage, in the middle-aged
+and static sense, the subject of their plays was a very simple one; it
+was that a play is a very bad place for discussing that topic. You
+cannot easily make a good drama out of the success or failure of a
+marriage, just as you could not make a good drama out of the growth of
+an oak tree or the decay of an empire. As Polonius very reasonably
+observed, it is too long. A happy love-affair will make a drama simply
+because it is dramatic; it depends on an ultimate yes or no. But a happy
+marriage is not dramatic; perhaps it would be less happy if it were. The
+essence of a romantic heroine is that she asks herself an intense
+question; but the essence of a sensible wife is that she is much too
+sensible to ask herself any questions at all. All the things that make
+monogamy a success are in their nature undramatic things, the silent
+growth of an instinctive confidence, the common wounds and victories,
+the accumulation of customs, the rich maturing of old jokes. Sane
+marriage is an untheatrical thing; it is therefore not surprising that
+most modern dramatists have devoted themselves to insane marriage.
+
+To summarise; before touching the philosophy which Shaw has ultimately
+adopted, we must quit the notion that we know it already and that it is
+hit off in such journalistic terms as these three. Shaw does not wish to
+multiply problem plays or even problems. He has such scepticism as is
+the misfortune of his age; but he has this dignified and courageous
+quality, that he does not come to ask questions but to answer them. He
+is not a paradox-monger; he is a wild logician, far too simple even to
+be called a sophist. He understands everything in life except its
+paradoxes, especially that ultimate paradox that the very things that we
+cannot comprehend are the things that we have to take for granted.
+Lastly, he is not especially social or collectivist. On the contrary, he
+rather dislikes men in the mass, though he can appreciate them
+individually. He has no respect for collective humanity in its two great
+forms; either in that momentary form which we call a mob, or in that
+enduring form which we call a convention.
+
+The general cosmic theory which can so far be traced through the earlier
+essays and plays of Bernard Shaw may be expressed in the image of
+Schopenhauer standing on his head. I cheerfully concede that
+Schopenhauer looks much nicer in that posture than in his original one,
+but I can hardly suppose that he feels more comfortable. The substance
+of the change is this. Roughly speaking, Schopenhauer maintained that
+life is unreasonable. The intellect, if it could be impartial, would
+tell us to cease; but a blind partiality, an instinct quite distinct
+from thought, drives us on to take desperate chances in an essentially
+bankrupt lottery. Shaw seems to accept this dingy estimate of the
+rational outlook, but adds a somewhat arresting comment. Schopenhauer
+had said, "Life is unreasonable; so much the worse for all living
+things." Shaw said, "Life is unreasonable; so much the worse for
+reason." Life is the higher call, life we must follow. It may be that
+there is some undetected fallacy in reason itself. Perhaps the whole man
+cannot get inside his own head any more than he can jump down his own
+throat. But there is about the need to live, to suffer, and to create
+that imperative quality which can truly be called supernatural, of whose
+voice it can indeed be said that it speaks with authority, and not as
+the scribes.
+
+This is the first and finest item of the original Bernard Shaw creed:
+that if reason says that life is irrational, life must be content to
+reply that reason is lifeless; life is the primary thing, and if reason
+impedes it, then reason must be trodden down into the mire amid the most
+abject superstitions. In the ordinary sense it would be specially absurd
+to suggest that Shaw desires man to be a mere animal. For that is always
+associated with lust or incontinence; and Shaw's ideals are strict,
+hygienic, and even, one might say, old-maidish. But there is a mystical
+sense in which one may say literally that Shaw desires man to be an
+animal. That is, he desires him to cling first and last to life, to the
+spirit of animation, to the thing which is common to him and the birds
+and plants. Man should have the blind faith of a beast: he should be as
+mystically immutable as a cow, and as deaf to sophistries as a fish.
+Shaw does not wish him to be a philosopher or an artist; he does not
+even wish him to be a man, so much as he wishes him to be, in this holy
+sense, an animal. He must follow the flag of life as fiercely from
+conviction as all other creatures follow it from instinct.
+
+But this Shavian worship of life is by no means lively. It has nothing
+in common either with the braver or the baser forms of what we commonly
+call optimism. It has none of the omnivorous exultation of Walt Whitman
+or the fiery pantheism of Shelley. Bernard Shaw wishes to show himself
+not so much as an optimist, but rather as a sort of faithful and
+contented pessimist. This contradiction is the key to nearly all his
+early and more obvious contradictions and to many which remain to the
+end. Whitman and many modern idealists have talked of taking even duty
+as a pleasure; it seems to me that Shaw takes even pleasure as a duty.
+In a queer way he seems to see existence as an illusion and yet as an
+obligation. To every man and woman, bird, beast, and flower, life is a
+love-call to be eagerly followed. To Bernard Shaw it is merely a
+military bugle to be obeyed. In short, he fails to feel that the command
+of Nature (if one must use the anthropomorphic fable of Nature instead
+of the philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as well as obeyed. He paints
+life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap in
+the dark. That is heroic; and to my instinct at least Schopenhauer
+looks like a pigmy beside his pupil. But it is the heroism of a morbid
+and almost asphyxiated age. It is awful to think that this world which
+so many poets have praised has even for a time been depicted as a
+man-trap into which we may just have the manhood to jump. Think of all
+those ages through which men have talked of having the courage to die.
+And then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having
+the courage to live.
+
+It is exactly this oddity or dilemma which may be said to culminate in
+the crowning work of his later and more constructive period, the work in
+which he certainly attempted, whether with success or not, to state his
+ultimate and cosmic vision; I mean the play called _Man and Superman_.
+In approaching this play we must keep well in mind the distinction
+recently drawn: that Shaw follows the banner of life, but austerely, not
+joyously. For him nature has authority, but hardly charm. But before we
+approach it it is necessary to deal with three things that lead up to
+it. First it is necessary to speak of what remained of his old critical
+and realistic method; and then it is necessary to speak of the two
+important influences which led up to his last and most important change
+of outlook.
+
+First, since all our spiritual epochs overlap, and a man is often doing
+the old work while he is thinking of the new, we may deal first with
+what may be fairly called his last two plays of pure worldly criticism.
+These are _Major Barbara_ and _John Bull's Other Island_. _Major
+Barbara_ indeed contains a strong religious element; but, when all is
+said, the whole point of the play is that the religious element is
+defeated. Moreover, the actual expressions of religion in the play are
+somewhat unsatisfactory as expressions of religion--or even of reason. I
+must frankly say that Bernard Shaw always seems to me to use the word
+God not only without any idea of what it means, but without one moment's
+thought about what it could possibly mean. He said to some atheist,
+"Never believe in a God that you cannot improve on." The atheist (being
+a sound theologian) naturally replied that one should not believe in a
+God whom one could improve on; as that would show that he was not God.
+In the same style in _Major Barbara_ the heroine ends by suggesting that
+she will serve God without personal hope, so that she may owe nothing to
+God and He owe everything to her. It does not seem to strike her that
+if God owes everything to her He is not God. These things affect me
+merely as tedious perversions of a phrase. It is as if you said, "I will
+never have a father unless I have begotten him."
+
+But the real sting and substance of _Major Barbara_ is much more
+practical and to the point. It expresses not the new spirituality but
+the old materialism of Bernard Shaw. Almost every one of Shaw's plays is
+an expanded epigram. But the epigram is not expanded (as with most
+people) into a hundred commonplaces. Rather the epigram is expanded into
+a hundred other epigrams; the work is at least as brilliant in detail as
+it is in design. But it is generally possible to discover the original
+and pivotal epigram which is the centre and purpose of the play. It is
+generally possible, even amid that blinding jewellery of a million
+jokes, to discover the grave, solemn and sacred joke for which the play
+itself was written.
+
+The ultimate epigram of _Major Barbara_ can be put thus. People say that
+poverty is no crime; Shaw says that poverty is a crime; that it is a
+crime to endure it, a crime to be content with it, that it is the mother
+of all crimes of brutality, corruption, and fear. If a man says to Shaw
+that he is born of poor but honest parents, Shaw tells him that the very
+word "but" shows that his parents were probably dishonest. In short, he
+maintains here what he had maintained elsewhere: that what the people at
+this moment require is not more patriotism or more art or more religion
+or more morality or more sociology, but simply more money. The evil is
+not ignorance or decadence or sin or pessimism; the evil is poverty. The
+point of this particular drama is that even the noblest enthusiasm of
+the girl who becomes a Salvation Army officer fails under the brute
+money power of her father who is a modern capitalist. When I have said
+this it will be clear why this play, fine and full of bitter sincerity
+as it is, must in a manner be cleared out of the way before we come to
+talk of Shaw's final and serious faith. For his serious faith is in the
+sanctity of human will, in the divine capacity for creation and choice
+rising higher than environment and doom; and so far as that goes, _Major
+Barbara_ is not only apart from his faith but against his faith. _Major
+Barbara_ is an account of environment victorious over heroic will. There
+are a thousand answers to the ethic in _Major Barbara_ which I should
+be inclined to offer. I might point out that the rich do not so much buy
+honesty as curtains to cover dishonesty: that they do not so much buy
+health as cushions to comfort disease. And I might suggest that the
+doctrine that poverty degrades the poor is much more likely to be used
+as an argument for keeping them powerless than as an argument for making
+them rich. But there is no need to find such answers to the
+materialistic pessimism of _Major Barbara_. The best answer to it is in
+Shaw's own best and crowning philosophy, with which we shall shortly be
+concerned.
+
+_John Bull's Other Island_ represents a realism somewhat more tinged
+with the later transcendentalism of its author. In one sense, of course,
+it is a satire on the conventional Englishman, who is never so silly or
+sentimental as when he sees silliness and sentiment in the Irishman.
+Broadbent, whose mind is all fog and his morals all gush, is firmly
+persuaded that he is bringing reason and order among the Irish, whereas
+in truth they are all smiling at his illusions with the critical
+detachment of so many devils. There have been many plays depicting the
+absurd Paddy in a ring of Anglo-Saxons; the first purpose of this play
+is to depict the absurd Anglo-Saxon in a ring of ironical Paddies. But
+it has a second and more subtle purpose, which is very finely contrived.
+It is suggested that when all is said and done there is in this
+preposterous Englishman a certain creative power which comes from his
+simplicity and optimism, from his profound resolution rather to live
+life than to criticise it. I know no finer dialogue of philosophical
+cross-purposes than that in which Broadbent boasts of his commonsense,
+and his subtler Irish friend mystifies him by telling him that he,
+Broadbent, has no common-sense, but only inspiration. The Irishman
+admits in Broadbent a certain unconscious spiritual force even in his
+very stupidity. Lord Rosebery coined the very clever phrase "a practical
+mystic." Shaw is here maintaining that all practical men are practical
+mystics. And he is really maintaining also that the most practical of
+all the practical mystics is the one who is a fool.
+
+There is something unexpected and fascinating about this reversal of the
+usual argument touching enterprise and the business man; this theory
+that success is created not by intelligence, but by a certain
+half-witted and yet magical instinct. For Bernard Shaw, apparently, the
+forests of factories and the mountains of money are not the creations of
+human wisdom or even of human cunning; they are rather manifestations of
+the sacred maxim which declares that God has chosen the foolish things
+of the earth to confound the wise. It is simplicity and even innocence
+that has made Manchester. As a philosophical fancy this is interesting
+or even suggestive; but it must be confessed that as a criticism of the
+relations of England to Ireland it is open to a strong historical
+objection. The one weak point in _John Bull's Other Island_ is that it
+turns on the fact that Broadbent succeeds in Ireland. But as a matter of
+fact Broadbent has not succeeded in Ireland. If getting what one wants
+is the test and fruit of this mysterious strength, then the Irish
+peasants are certainly much stronger than the English merchants; for in
+spite of all the efforts of the merchants, the land has remained a land
+of peasants. No glorification of the English practicality as if it were
+a universal thing can ever get over the fact that we have failed in
+dealing with the one white people in our power who were markedly unlike
+ourselves. And the kindness of Broadbent has failed just as much as his
+common-sense; because he was dealing with a people whose desire and
+ideal were different from his own. He did not share the Irish passion
+for small possession in land or for the more pathetic virtues of
+Christianity. In fact the kindness of Broadbent has failed for the same
+reason that the gigantic kindness of Shaw has failed. The roots are
+different; it is like tying the tops of two trees together. Briefly, the
+philosophy of _John Bull's Other Island_ is quite effective and
+satisfactory except for this incurable fault: the fact that John Bull's
+other island is not John Bull's.
+
+This clearing off of his last critical plays we may classify as the
+first of the three facts which lead up to _Man and Superman_. The second
+of the three facts may be found, I think, in Shaw's discovery of
+Nietzsche. This eloquent sophist has an influence upon Shaw and his
+school which it would require a separate book adequately to study. By
+descent Nietzsche was a Pole, and probably a Polish noble; and to say
+that he was a Polish noble is to say that he was a frail, fastidious,
+and entirely useless anarchist. He had a wonderful poetic wit; and is
+one of the best rhetoricians of the modern world. He had a remarkable
+power of saying things that master the reason for a moment by their
+gigantic unreasonableness; as, for instance, "Your life is intolerable
+without immortality; but why should not your life be intolerable?" His
+whole work is shot through with the pangs and fevers of his physical
+life, which was one of extreme bad health; and in early middle age his
+brilliant brain broke down into impotence and darkness. All that was
+true in his teaching was this: that if a man looks fine on a horse it is
+so far irrelevant to tell him that he would be more economical on a
+donkey or more humane on a tricycle. In other words, the mere
+achievement of dignity, beauty, or triumph is strictly to be called a
+good thing. I do not know if Nietzsche ever used the illustration; but
+it seems to me that all that is creditable or sound in Nietzsche could
+be stated in the derivation of one word, the word "valour." Valour means
+_valeur_; it means a value; courage is itself a solid good; it is an
+ultimate virtue; valour is in itself _valid_. In so far as he maintained
+this Nietzsche was only taking part in that great Protestant game of
+see-saw which has been the amusement of northern Europe since the
+sixteenth century. Nietzsche imagined he was rebelling against ancient
+morality; as a matter of fact he was only rebelling against recent
+morality, against the half-baked impudence of the utilitarians and the
+materialists. He thought he was rebelling against Christianity;
+curiously enough he was rebelling solely against the special enemies of
+Christianity, against Herbert Spencer and Mr. Edward Clodd. Historic
+Christianity has always believed in the valour of St. Michael riding in
+front of the Church Militant; and in an ultimate and absolute pleasure,
+not indirect or utilitarian, the intoxication of the spirit, the wine of
+the blood of God.
+
+There are indeed doctrines of Nietzsche that are not Christian, but
+then, by an entertaining coincidence, they are also not true. His hatred
+of pity is not Christian, but that was not his doctrine but his disease.
+Invalids are often hard on invalids. And there is another doctrine of
+his that is not Christianity, and also (by the same laughable accident)
+not common-sense; and it is a most pathetic circumstance that this was
+the one doctrine which caught the eye of Shaw and captured him. He was
+not influenced at all by the morbid attack on mercy. It would require
+more than ten thousand mad Polish professors to make Bernard Shaw
+anything but a generous and compassionate man. But it is certainly a
+nuisance that the one Nietzsche doctrine which attracted him was not the
+one Nietzsche doctrine that is human and rectifying. Nietzsche might
+really have done some good if he had taught Bernard Shaw to draw the
+sword, to drink wine, or even to dance. But he only succeeded in putting
+into his head a new superstition, which bids fair to be the chief
+superstition of the dark ages which are possibly in front of us--I mean
+the superstition of what is called the Superman.
+
+In one of his least convincing phrases, Nietzsche had said that just as
+the ape ultimately produced the man, so should we ultimately produce
+something higher than the man. The immediate answer, of course, is
+sufficiently obvious: the ape did not worry about the man, so why should
+we worry about the Superman? If the Superman will come by natural
+selection, may we leave it to natural selection? If the Superman will
+come by human selection, what sort of Superman are we to select? If he
+is simply to be more just, more brave, or more merciful, then
+Zarathustra sinks into a Sunday-school teacher; the only way we can work
+for it is to be more just, more brave, and more merciful; sensible
+advice, but hardly startling. If he is to be anything else than this,
+why should we desire him, or what else are we to desire? These questions
+have been many times asked of the Nietzscheites, and none of the
+Nietzscheites have even attempted to answer them.
+
+The keen intellect of Bernard Shaw would, I think, certainly have seen
+through this fallacy and verbiage had it not been that another important
+event about this time came to the help of Nietzsche and established the
+Superman on his pedestal. It is the third of the things which I have
+called stepping-stones to _Man and Superman_, and it is very important.
+It is nothing less than the breakdown of one of the three intellectual
+supports upon which Bernard Shaw had reposed through all his confident
+career. At the beginning of this book I have described the three
+ultimate supports of Shaw as the Irishman, the Puritan, and the
+Progressive. They are the three legs of the tripod upon which the
+prophet sat to give the oracle; and one of them broke. Just about this
+time suddenly, by a mere shaft of illumination, Bernard Shaw ceased to
+believe in progress altogether.
+
+It is generally implied that it was reading Plato that did it. That
+philosopher was very well qualified to convey the first shock of the
+ancient civilisation to Shaw, who had always thought instinctively of
+civilisation as modern. This is not due merely to the daring splendour
+of the speculations and the vivid picture of Athenian life, it is due
+also to something analogous in the personalities of that particular
+ancient Greek and this particular modern Irishman. Bernard Shaw has much
+affinity to Plato--in his instinctive elevation of temper, his
+courageous pursuit of ideas as far as they will go, his civic idealism;
+and also, it must be confessed, in his dislike of poets and a touch of
+delicate inhumanity. But whatever influence produced the change, the
+change had all the dramatic suddenness and completeness which belongs to
+the conversions of great men. It had been perpetually implied through
+all the earlier works not only that mankind is constantly improving, but
+that almost everything must be considered in the light of this fact.
+More than once he seemed to argue, in comparing the dramatists of the
+sixteenth with those of the nineteenth century, that the latter had a
+definite advantage merely because they were of the nineteenth century
+and not of the sixteenth. When accused of impertinence towards the
+greatest of the Elizabethans, Bernard Shaw had said, "Shakespeare is a
+much taller man than I, but I stand on his shoulders"--an epigram which
+sums up this doctrine with characteristic neatness. But Shaw fell off
+Shakespeare's shoulders with a crash. This chronological theory that
+Shaw stood on Shakespeare's shoulders logically involved the supposition
+that Shakespeare stood on Plato's shoulders. And Bernard Shaw found
+Plato from his point of view so much more advanced than Shakespeare that
+he decided in desperation that all three were equal.
+
+Such failure as has partially attended the idea of human equality is
+very largely due to the fact that no party in the modern state has
+heartily believed in it. Tories and Radicals have both assumed that one
+set of men were in essentials superior to mankind. The only difference
+was that the Tory superiority was a superiority of place; while the
+Radical superiority is a superiority of time. The great objection to
+Shaw being on Shakespeare's shoulders is a consideration for the
+sensations and personal dignity of Shakespeare. It is a democratic
+objection to anyone being on anyone else's shoulders. Eternal human
+nature refuses to submit to a man who rules merely by right of birth.
+To rule by right of century is to rule by right of birth. Shaw found his
+nearest kinsman in remote Athens, his remotest enemies in the closest
+historical proximity; and he began to see the enormous average and the
+vast level of mankind. If progress swung constantly between such
+extremes it could not be progress at all. The paradox was sharp but
+undeniable; if life had such continual ups and downs, it was upon the
+whole flat. With characteristic sincerity and love of sensation he had
+no sooner seen this than he hastened to declare it. In the teeth of all
+his previous pronouncements he emphasised and re-emphasised in print
+that man had not progressed at all; that ninety-nine hundredths of a man
+in a cave were the same as ninety-nine hundredths of a man in a suburban
+villa.
+
+It is characteristic of him to say that he rushed into print with a
+frank confession of the failure of his old theory. But it is also
+characteristic of him that he rushed into print also with a new
+alternative theory, quite as definite, quite as confident, and, if one
+may put it so, quite as infallible as the old one. Progress had never
+happened hitherto, because it had been sought solely through education.
+Education was rubbish. "Fancy," said he, "trying to produce a greyhound
+or a racehorse by education!" The man of the future must not be taught;
+he must be bred. This notion of producing superior human beings by the
+methods of the stud-farm had often been urged, though its difficulties
+had never been cleared up. I mean its practical difficulties; its moral
+difficulties, or rather impossibilities, for any animal fit to be called
+a man need scarcely be discussed. But even as a scheme it had never been
+made clear. The first and most obvious objection to it of course is
+this: that if you are to breed men as pigs, you require some overseer
+who is as much more subtle than a man as a man is more subtle than a
+pig. Such an individual is not easy to find.
+
+It was, however, in the heat of these three things, the decline of his
+merely destructive realism, the discovery of Nietzsche, and the
+abandonment of the idea of a progressive education of mankind, that he
+attempted what is not necessarily his best, but certainly his most
+important work. The two things are by no means necessarily the same. The
+most important work of Milton is _Paradise Lost_; his best work is
+_Lycidas_. There are other places in which Shaw's argument is more
+fascinating or his wit more startling than in _Man and Superman_; there
+are other plays that he has made more brilliant. But I am sure that
+there is no other play that he wished to make more brilliant. I will not
+say that he is in this case more serious than elsewhere; for the word
+serious is a double-meaning and double-dealing word, a traitor in the
+dictionary. It sometimes means solemn, and it sometimes means sincere. A
+very short experience of private and public life will be enough to prove
+that the most solemn people are generally the most insincere. A somewhat
+more delicate and detailed consideration will show also that the most
+sincere men are generally not solemn; and of these is Bernard Shaw. But
+if we use the word serious in the old and Latin sense of the word
+"grave," which means weighty or valid, full of substance, then we may
+say without any hesitation that this is the most serious play of the
+most serious man alive.
+
+The outline of the play is, I suppose, by this time sufficiently well
+known. It has two main philosophic motives. The first is that what he
+calls the life-force (the old infidels called it Nature, which seems a
+neater word, and nobody knows the meaning of either of them) desires
+above all things to make suitable marriages, to produce a purer and
+prouder race, or eventually to produce a Superman. The second is that in
+this effecting of racial marriages the woman is a more conscious agent
+than the man. In short, that woman disposes a long time before man
+proposes. In this play, therefore, woman is made the pursuer and man the
+pursued. It cannot be denied, I think, that in this matter Shaw is
+handicapped by his habitual hardness of touch, by his lack of sympathy
+with the romance of which he writes, and to a certain extent even by his
+own integrity and right conscience. Whether the man hunts the woman or
+the woman the man, at least it should be a splendid pagan hunt; but Shaw
+is not a sporting man. Nor is he a pagan, but a Puritan. He cannot
+recover the impartiality of paganism which allowed Diana to propose to
+Endymion without thinking any the worse of her. The result is that while
+he makes Anne, the woman who marries his hero, a really powerful and
+convincing woman, he can only do it by making her a highly objectionable
+woman. She is a liar and a bully, not from sudden fear or excruciating
+dilemma; she is a liar and a bully in grain; she has no truth or
+magnanimity in her. The more we know that she is real, the more we know
+that she is vile. In short, Bernard Shaw is still haunted with his old
+impotence of the unromantic writer; he cannot imagine the main motives
+of human life from the inside. We are convinced successfully that Anne
+wishes to marry Tanner, but in the very process we lose all power of
+conceiving why Tanner should ever consent to marry Anne. A writer with a
+more romantic strain in him might have imagined a woman choosing her
+lover without shamelessness and magnetising him without fraud. Even if
+the first movement were feminine, it need hardly be a movement like
+this. In truth, of course, the two sexes have their two methods of
+attraction, and in some of the happiest cases they are almost
+simultaneous. But even on the most cynical showing they need not be
+mixed up. It is one thing to say that the mousetrap is not there by
+accident. It is another to say (in the face of ocular experience) that
+the mousetrap runs after the mouse.
+
+But whenever Shaw shows the Puritan hardness or even the Puritan
+cheapness, he shows something also of the Puritan nobility, of the idea
+that sacrifice is really a frivolity in the face of a great purpose. The
+reasonableness of Calvin and his followers will by the mercy of heaven
+be at last washed away; but their unreasonableness will remain an
+eternal splendour. Long after we have let drop the fancy that
+Protestantism was rational it will be its glory that it was fanatical.
+So it is with Shaw. To make Anne a real woman, even a dangerous woman,
+he would need to be something stranger and softer than Bernard Shaw. But
+though I always argue with him whenever he argues, I confess that he
+always conquers me in the one or two moments when he is emotional.
+
+There is one really noble moment when Anne offers for all her cynical
+husband-hunting the only defence that is really great enough to cover
+it. "It will not be all happiness for me. Perhaps death." And the man
+rises also at that real crisis, saying, "Oh, that clutch holds and
+hurts. What have you grasped in me? Is there a father's heart as well as
+a mother's?" That seems to me actually great; I do not like either of
+the characters an atom more than formerly; but I can see shining and
+shaking through them at that instant the splendour of the God that made
+them and of the image of God who wrote their story.
+
+A logician is like a liar in many respects, but chiefly in the fact
+that he should have a good memory. That cutting and inquisitive style
+which Bernard Shaw has always adopted carries with it an inevitable
+criticism. And it cannot be denied that this new theory of the supreme
+importance of sound sexual union, wrought by any means, is hard
+logically to reconcile with Shaw's old diatribes against sentimentalism
+and operatic romance. If Nature wishes primarily to entrap us into
+sexual union, then all the means of sexual attraction, even the most
+maudlin or theatrical, are justified at one stroke. The guitar of the
+troubadour is as practical as the ploughshare of the husbandman. The
+waltz in the ballroom is as serious as the debate in the parish council.
+The justification of Anne, as the potential mother of Superman, is
+really the justification of all the humbugs and sentimentalists whom
+Shaw had been denouncing as a dramatic critic and as a dramatist since
+the beginning of his career. It was to no purpose that the earlier
+Bernard Shaw said that romance was all moonshine. The moonshine that
+ripens love is now as practical as the sunshine that ripens corn. It was
+vain to say that sexual chivalry was all rot; it might be as rotten as
+manure--and also as fertile. It is vain to call first love a fiction;
+it may be as fictitious as the ink of the cuttle or the doubling of the
+hare; as fictitious, as efficient, and as indispensable. It is vain to
+call it a self-deception; Schopenhauer said that all existence was a
+self-deception; and Shaw's only further comment seems to be that it is
+right to be deceived. To _Man and Superman_, as to all his plays, the
+author attaches a most fascinating preface at the beginning. But I
+really think that he ought also to attach a hearty apology at the end;
+an apology to all the minor dramatists or preposterous actors whom he
+had cursed for romanticism in his youth. Whenever he objected to an
+actress for ogling she might reasonably reply, "But this is how I
+support my friend Anne in her sublime evolutionary effort." Whenever he
+laughed at an old-fashioned actor for ranting, the actor might answer,
+"My exaggeration is not more absurd than the tail of a peacock or the
+swagger of a cock; it is the way I preach the great fruitful lie of the
+life-force that I am a very fine fellow." We have remarked the end of
+Shaw's campaign in favour of progress. This ought really to have been
+the end of his campaign against romance. All the tricks of love that he
+called artificial become natural; because they become Nature. All the
+lies of love become truths; indeed they become the Truth.
+
+The minor things of the play contain some thunderbolts of good thinking.
+Throughout this brief study I have deliberately not dwelt upon mere wit,
+because in anything of Shaw's that may be taken for granted. It is
+enough to say that this play which is full of his most serious quality
+is as full as any of his minor sort of success. In a more solid sense
+two important facts stand out: the first is the character of the young
+American; the other is the character of Straker, the chauffeur. In these
+Shaw has realised and made vivid two most important facts. First, that
+America is not intellectually a go-ahead country, but both for good and
+evil an old-fashioned one. It is full of stale culture and ancestral
+simplicity, just as Shaw's young millionaire quotes Macaulay and piously
+worships his wife. Second, he has pointed out in the character of
+Straker that there has arisen in our midst a new class that has
+education without breeding. Straker is the man who has ousted the
+hansom-cabman, having neither his coarseness nor his kindliness. Great
+sociological credit is due to the man who has first clearly observed
+that Straker has appeared. How anybody can profess for a moment to be
+glad that he has appeared, I do not attempt to conjecture.
+
+Appended to the play is an entertaining though somewhat mysterious
+document called "The Revolutionist's Handbook." It contains many very
+sound remarks; this, for example, which I cannot too much applaud: "If
+you hit your child, be sure that you hit him in anger." If that
+principle had been properly understood, we should have had less of
+Shaw's sociological friends and their meddling with the habits and
+instincts of the poor. But among the fragments of advice also occurs the
+following suggestive and even alluring remark: "Every man over forty is
+a scoundrel." On the first personal opportunity I asked the author of
+this remarkable axiom what it meant. I gathered that what it really
+meant was something like this: that every man over forty had been all
+the essential use that he was likely to be, and was therefore in a
+manner a parasite. It is gratifying to reflect that Bernard Shaw has
+sufficiently answered his own epigram by continuing to pour out
+treasures both of truth and folly long after this allotted time. But if
+the epigram might be interpreted in a rather looser style as meaning
+that past a certain point a man's work takes on its final character and
+does not greatly change the nature of its merits, it may certainly be
+said that with _Man and Superman_, Shaw reaches that stage. The two
+plays that have followed it, though of very great interest in
+themselves, do not require any revaluation of, or indeed any addition
+to, our summary of his genius and success. They are both in a sense
+casts back to his primary energies; the first in a controversial and the
+second in a technical sense. Neither need prevent our saying that the
+moment when John Tanner and Anne agree that it is doom for him and death
+for her and life only for the thing unborn, is the peak of his utterance
+as a prophet.
+
+The two important plays that he has since given us are _The Doctor's
+Dilemma_ and _Getting Married_. The first is as regards its most amusing
+and effective elements a throw-back to his old game of guying the men of
+science. It was a very good game, and he was an admirable player. The
+actual story of the _Doctor's Dilemma_ itself seems to me less poignant
+and important than the things with which Shaw had lately been dealing.
+First of all, as has been said, Shaw has neither the kind of justice
+nor the kind of weakness that goes to make a true problem. We cannot
+feel the Doctor's Dilemma, because we cannot really fancy Bernard Shaw
+being in a dilemma. His mind is both fond of abruptness and fond of
+finality; he always makes up his mind when he knows the facts and
+sometimes before. Moreover, this particular problem (though Shaw is
+certainly, as we shall see, nearer to pure doubt about it than about
+anything else) does not strike the critic as being such an exasperating
+problem after all. An artist of vast power and promise, who is also a
+scamp of vast profligacy and treachery, has a chance of life if
+specially treated for a special disease. The modern doctors (and even
+the modern dramatist) are in doubt whether he should be specially
+favoured because he is aesthetically important or specially disregarded
+because he is ethically anti-social. They see-saw between the two
+despicable modern doctrines, one that geniuses should be worshipped like
+idols and the other that criminals should be merely wiped out like
+germs. That both clever men and bad men ought to be treated like men
+does not seem to occur to them. As a matter of fact, in these affairs of
+life and death one never does think of such distinctions. Nobody does
+shout out at sea, "Bad citizen overboard!" I should recommend the doctor
+in his dilemma to do exactly what I am sure any decent doctor would do
+without any dilemma at all: to treat the man simply as a man, and give
+him no more and no less favour than he would to anybody else. In short,
+I am sure a practical physician would drop all these visionary,
+unworkable modern dreams about type and criminology and go back to the
+plain business-like facts of the French Revolution and the Rights of
+Man.
+
+The other play, _Getting Married_, is a point in Shaw's career, but only
+as a play, not, as usual, as a heresy. It is nothing but a conversation
+about marriage; and one cannot agree or disagree with the view of
+marriage, because all views are given which are held by anybody, and
+some (I should think) which are held by nobody. But its technical
+quality is of some importance in the life of its author. It is worth
+consideration as a play, because it is not a play at all. It marks the
+culmination and completeness of that victory of Bernard Shaw over the
+British public, or rather over their official representatives, of which
+I have spoken. Shaw had fought a long fight with business men, those
+incredible people, who assured him that it was useless to have wit
+without murders, and that a good joke, which is the most popular thing
+everywhere else, was quite unsalable in the theatrical world. In spite
+of this he had conquered by his wit and his good dialogue; and by the
+time of which we now speak he was victorious and secure. All his plays
+were being produced as a matter of course in England and as a matter of
+the fiercest fashion and enthusiasm in America and Germany. No one who
+knows the nature of the man will doubt that under such circumstances his
+first act would be to produce his wit naked and unashamed. He had been
+told that he could not support a slight play by mere dialogue. He
+therefore promptly produced mere dialogue without the slightest play for
+it to support. _Getting Married_ is no more a play than Cicero's
+dialogue _De Amicitia_, and not half so much a play as Wilson's _Noctes
+Ambrosianae_. But though it is not a play, it was played, and played
+successfully. Everyone who went into the theatre felt that he was only
+eavesdropping at an accidental conversation. But the conversation was so
+sparkling and sensible that he went on eavesdropping. This, I think, as
+it is the final play of Shaw, is also, and fitly, his final triumph. He
+is a good dramatist and sometimes even a great dramatist. But the
+occasions when we get glimpses of him as really a great man are on these
+occasions when he is utterly undramatic.
+
+From first to last Bernard Shaw has been nothing but a
+conversationalist. It is not a slur to say so; Socrates was one, and
+even Christ Himself. He differs from that divine and that human
+prototype in the fact that, like most modern people, he does to some
+extent talk in order to find out what he thinks; whereas they knew it
+beforehand. But he has the virtues that go with the talkative man; one
+of which is humility. You will hardly ever find a really proud man
+talkative; he is afraid of talking too much. Bernard Shaw offered
+himself to the world with only one great qualification, that he could
+talk honestly and well. He did not speak; he talked to a crowd. He did
+not write; he talked to a typewriter. He did not really construct a
+play; he talked through ten mouths or masks instead of through one. His
+literary power and progress began in casual conversations--and it seems
+to me supremely right that it should end in one great and casual
+conversation. His last play is nothing but garrulous talking, that
+great thing called gossip. And I am happy to say that the play has been
+as efficient and successful as talk and gossip have always been among
+the children of men.
+
+Of his life in these later years I have made no pretence of telling even
+the little that there is to tell. Those who regard him as a mere
+self-advertising egotist may be surprised to hear that there is perhaps
+no man of whose private life less could be positively said by an
+outsider. Even those who know him can make little but a conjecture of
+what has lain behind this splendid stretch of intellectual
+self-expression; I only make my conjecture like the rest. I think that
+the first great turning-point in Shaw's life (after the early things of
+which I have spoken, the taint of drink in the teetotal home, or the
+first fight with poverty) was the deadly illness which fell upon him, at
+the end of his first flashing career as a Saturday Reviewer. I know it
+would goad Shaw to madness to suggest that sickness could have softened
+him. That is why I suggest it. But I say for his comfort that I think it
+hardened him also; if that can be called hardening which is only the
+strengthening of our souls to meet some dreadful reality. At least it is
+certain that the larger spiritual ambitions, the desire to find a faith
+and found a church, come after that time. I also mention it because
+there is hardly anything else to mention; his life is singularly free
+from landmarks, while his literature is so oddly full of surprises. His
+marriage to Miss Payne-Townsend, which occurred not long after his
+illness, was one of those quite successful things which are utterly
+silent. The placidity of his married life may be sufficiently indicated
+by saying that (as far as I can make out) the most important events in
+it were rows about the Executive of the Fabian Society. If such ripples
+do not express a still and lake-like life, I do not know what would.
+Honestly, the only thing in his later career that can be called an event
+is the stand made by Shaw at the Fabians against the sudden assault of
+Mr. H. G. Wells, which, after scenes of splendid exasperations, ended in
+Wells' resignation. There was another slight ruffling of the calm when
+Bernard Shaw said some quite sensible things about Sir Henry Irving. But
+on the whole we confront the composure of one who has come into his own.
+
+The method of his life has remained mostly unchanged. And there is a
+great deal of method in his life; I can hear some people murmuring
+something about method in his madness. He is not only neat and
+business-like; but, unlike some literary men I know, does not conceal
+the fact. Having all the talents proper to an author, he delights to
+prove that he has also all the talents proper to a publisher; or even to
+a publisher's clerk. Though many looking at his light brown clothes
+would call him a Bohemian, he really hates and despises Bohemianism; in
+the sense that he hates and despises disorder and uncleanness and
+irresponsibility. All that part of him is peculiarly normal and
+efficient. He gives good advice; he always answers letters, and answers
+them in a decisive and very legible hand. He has said himself that the
+only educational art that he thinks important is that of being able to
+jump off tram-cars at the proper moment. Though a rigid vegetarian, he
+is quite regular and rational in his meals; and though he detests sport,
+he takes quite sufficient exercise. While he has always made a mock of
+science in theory, he is by nature prone to meddle with it in practice.
+He is fond of photographing, and even more fond of being photographed.
+He maintained (in one of his moments of mad modernity) that photography
+was a finer thing than portrait-painting, more exquisite and more
+imaginative; he urged the characteristic argument that none of his own
+photographs were like each other or like him. But he would certainly
+wash the chemicals off his hands the instant after an experiment; just
+as he would wash the blood off his hands the instant after a Socialist
+massacre. He cannot endure stains or accretions; he is of that
+temperament which feels tradition itself to be a coat of dust; whose
+temptation it is to feel nothing but a sort of foul accumulation or
+living disease even in the creeper upon the cottage or the moss upon the
+grave. So thoroughly are his tastes those of the civilised modern man
+that if it had not been for the fire in him of justice and anger he
+might have been the most trim and modern among the millions whom he
+shocks: and his bicycle and brown hat have been no menace in Brixton.
+But God sent among those suburbans one who was a prophet as well as a
+sanitary inspector. He had every qualification for living in a
+villa--except the necessary indifference to his brethren living in
+pigstyes. But for the small fact that he hates with a sickening hatred
+the hypocrisy and class cruelty, he would really accept and admire the
+bathroom and the bicycle and asbestos-stove, having no memory of rivers
+or of roaring fires. In these things, like Mr. Straker, he is the New
+Man. But for his great soul he might have accepted modern civilisation;
+it was a wonderful escape. This man whom men so foolishly call crazy and
+anarchic has really a dangerous affinity to the fourth-rate perfections
+of our provincial and Protestant civilisation. He might even have been
+respectable if he had had less self-respect.
+
+His fulfilled fame and this tone of repose and reason in his life,
+together with the large circle of his private kindness and the regard of
+his fellow-artists, should permit us to end the record in a tone of
+almost patriarchal quiet. If I wished to complete such a picture I could
+add many touches: that he has consented to wear evening dress; that he
+has supported the _Times_ Book Club; and that his beard has turned grey;
+the last to his regret, as he wanted it to remain red till they had
+completed colour-photography. He can mix with the most conservative
+statesmen; his tone grows continuously more gentle in the matter of
+religion. It would be easy to end with the lion lying down with the
+lamb, the wild Irishman tamed or taming everybody, Shaw reconciled to
+the British public as the British public is certainly largely reconciled
+to Shaw.
+
+But as I put these last papers together, having finished this rude
+study, I hear a piece of news. His latest play, _The Showing Up of
+Blanco Posnet_, has been forbidden by the Censor. As far as I can
+discover, it has been forbidden because one of the characters professes
+a belief in God and states his conviction that God has got him. This is
+wholesome; this is like one crack of thunder in a clear sky. Not so
+easily does the prince of this world forgive. Shaw's religious training
+and instinct is not mine, but in all honest religion there is something
+that is hateful to the prosperous compromise of our time. You are free
+in our time to say that God does not exist; you are free to say that He
+exists and is evil; you are free to say (like poor old Renan) that He
+would like to exist if He could. You may talk of God as a metaphor or a
+mystification; you may water Him down with gallons of long words, or
+boil Him to the rags of metaphysics; and it is not merely that nobody
+punishes, but nobody protests. But if you speak of God as a fact, as a
+thing like a tiger, as a reason for changing one's conduct, then the
+modern world will stop you somehow if it can. We are long past talking
+about whether an unbeliever should be punished for being irreverent. It
+is now thought irreverent to be a believer. I end where I began: it is
+the old Puritan in Shaw that jars the modern world like an electric
+shock. That vision with which I meant to end, that vision of culture and
+common-sense, of red brick and brown flannel, of the modern clerk
+broadened enough to embrace Shaw and Shaw softened enough to embrace the
+clerk, all that vision of a new London begins to fade and alter. The red
+brick begins to burn red-hot; and the smoke from all the chimneys has a
+strange smell. I find myself back in the fumes in which I started....
+Perhaps I have been misled by small modernities. Perhaps what I have
+called fastidiousness is a divine fear. Perhaps what I have called
+coldness is a predestinate and ancient endurance. The vision of the
+Fabian villas grows fainter and fainter, until I see only a void place
+across which runs Bunyan's Pilgrim with his fingers in his ears.
+
+Bernard Shaw has occupied much of his life in trying to elude his
+followers. The fox has enthusiastic followers, and Shaw seems to regard
+his in much the same way. This man whom men accuse of bidding for
+applause seems to me to shrink even from assent. If you agree with Shaw
+he is very likely to contradict you; I have contradicted Shaw
+throughout, that is why I come at last almost to agree with him. His
+critics have accused him of vulgar self-advertisement; in his relation
+to his followers he seems to me rather marked with a sort of mad
+modesty. He seems to wish to fly from agreement, to have as few
+followers as possible. All this reaches back, I think, to the three
+roots from which this meditation grew. It is partly the mere impatience
+and irony of the Irishman. It is partly the thought of the Calvinist
+that the host of God should be thinned rather than thronged; that Gideon
+must reject soldiers rather than recruit them. And it is partly, alas,
+the unhappy Progressive trying to be in front of his own religion,
+trying to destroy his own idol and even to desecrate his own tomb. But
+from whatever causes, this furious escape from popularity has involved
+Shaw in some perversities and refinements which are almost mere
+insincerities, and which make it necessary to disentangle the good he
+has done from the evil in this dazzling course. I will attempt some
+summary by stating the three things in which his influence seems to me
+thoroughly good and the three in which it seems bad. But for the
+pleasure of ending on the finer note I will speak first of those that
+seem bad.
+
+The primary respect in which Shaw has been a bad influence is that he
+has encouraged fastidiousness. He has made men dainty about their moral
+meals. This is indeed the root of his whole objection to romance. Many
+people have objected to romance for being too airy and exquisite. Shaw
+objects to romance for being too rank and coarse. Many have despised
+romance because it is unreal; Shaw really hates it because it is a great
+deal too real. Shaw dislikes romance as he dislikes beef and beer, raw
+brandy or raw beefsteaks. Romance is too masculine for his taste. You
+will find throughout his criticisms, amid all their truth, their wild
+justice or pungent impartiality, a curious undercurrent of prejudice
+upon one point: the preference for the refined rather than the rude or
+ugly. Thus he will dislike a joke because it is coarse without asking if
+it is really immoral. He objects to a man sitting down on his hat,
+whereas the austere moralist should only object to his sitting down on
+someone else's hat. This sensibility is barren because it is universal.
+It is useless to object to man being made ridiculous. Man is born
+ridiculous, as can easily be seen if you look at him soon after he is
+born. It is grotesque to drink beer, but it is equally grotesque to
+drink soda-water; the grotesqueness lies in the act of filling yourself
+like a bottle through a hole. It is undignified to walk with a drunken
+stagger; but it is fairly undignified to walk at all, for all walking is
+a sort of balancing, and there is always in the human being something of
+a quadruped on its hind legs. I do not say he would be more dignified if
+he went on all fours; I do not know that he ever is dignified except
+when he is dead. We shall not be refined till we are refined into dust.
+Of course it is only because he is not wholly an animal that man sees he
+is a rum animal; and if man on his hind legs is in an artificial
+attitude, it is only because, like a dog, he is begging or saying thank
+you.
+
+Everything important is in that sense absurd from the grave baby to the
+grinning skull; everything practical is a practical joke. But throughout
+Shaw's comedies, curiously enough, there is a certain kicking against
+this great doom of laughter. For instance, it is the first duty of a
+man who is in love to make a fool of himself; but Shaw's heroes always
+seem to flinch from this, and attempt, in airy, philosophic revenge, to
+make a fool of the woman first. The attempts of Valentine and Charteris
+to divide their perceptions from their desires, and tell the woman she
+is worthless even while trying to win her, are sometimes almost
+torturing to watch; it is like seeing a man trying to play a different
+tune with each hand. I fancy this agony is not only in the spectator,
+but in the dramatist as well. It is Bernard Shaw struggling with his
+reluctance to do anything so ridiculous as make a proposal. For there
+are two types of great humorist: those who love to see a man absurd and
+those who hate to see him absurd. Of the first kind are Rabelais and
+Dickens; of the second kind are Swift and Bernard Shaw.
+
+So far as Shaw has spread or helped a certain modern reluctance or
+_mauvaise honte_ in these grand and grotesque functions of man I think
+he has definitely done harm. He has much influence among the young men;
+but it is not an influence in the direction of keeping them young. One
+cannot imagine him inspiring any of his followers to write a war-song or
+a drinking-song or a love-song, the three forms of human utterance
+which come next in nobility to a prayer. It may seem odd to say that the
+net effect of a man so apparently impudent will be to make men shy. But
+it is certainly the truth. Shyness is always the sign of a divided soul;
+a man is shy because he somehow thinks his position at once despicable
+and important. If he were without humility he would not care; and if he
+were without pride he would not care. Now the main purpose of Shaw's
+theoretic teaching is to declare that we ought to fulfil these great
+functions of life, that we ought to eat and drink and love. But the main
+tendency of his habitual criticism is to suggest that all the
+sentiments, professions, and postures of these things are not only comic
+but even contemptibly comic, follies and almost frauds. The result would
+seem to be that a race of young men may arise who do all these things,
+but do them awkwardly. That which was of old a free and hilarious
+function becomes an important and embarrassing necessity. Let us endure
+all the pagan pleasures with a Christian patience. Let us eat, drink,
+and be serious.
+
+The second of the two points on which I think Shaw has done definite
+harm is this: that he has (not always or even as a rule intentionally)
+increased that anarchy of thought which is always the destruction of
+thought. Much of his early writing has encouraged among the modern youth
+that most pestilent of all popular tricks and fallacies; what is called
+the argument of progress. I mean this kind of thing. Previous ages were
+often, alas, aristocratic in politics or clericalist in religion; but
+they were always democratic in philosophy; they appealed to man, not to
+particular men. And if most men were against an idea, that was so far
+against it. But nowadays that most men are against a thing is thought to
+be in its favour; it is vaguely supposed to show that some day most men
+will be for it. If a man says that cows are reptiles, or that Bacon
+wrote Shakespeare, he can always quote the contempt of his
+contemporaries as in some mysterious way proving the complete conversion
+of posterity. The objections to this theory scarcely need any elaborate
+indication. The final objection to it is that it amounts to this: say
+anything, however idiotic, and you are in advance of your age. This kind
+of stuff must be stopped. The sort of democrat who appeals to the babe
+unborn must be classed with the sort of aristocrat who appeals to his
+deceased great-grandfather. Both should be sharply reminded that they
+are appealing to individuals whom they well know to be at a disadvantage
+in the matter of prompt and witty reply. Now although Bernard Shaw has
+survived this simple confusion, he has in his time greatly contributed
+to it. If there is, for instance, one thing that is really rare in Shaw
+it is hesitation. He makes up his mind quicker than a calculating boy or
+a county magistrate. Yet on this subject of the next change in ethics he
+has felt hesitation, and being a strictly honest man has expressed it.
+
+"I know no harder practical question than how much selfishness one ought
+to stand from a gifted person for the sake of his gifts or on the chance
+of his being right in the long run. The Superman will certainly come
+like a thief in the night, and be shot at accordingly; but we cannot
+leave our property wholly undefended on that account. On the other hand,
+we cannot ask the Superman simply to add a higher set of virtues to
+current respectable morals; for he is undoubtedly going to empty a good
+deal of respectable morality out like so much dirty water, and replace
+it by new and strange customs, shedding old obligations and accepting
+new and heavier ones. Every step of his progress must horrify
+conventional people; and if it were possible for even the most superior
+man to march ahead all the time, every pioneer of the march towards the
+Superman would be crucified."
+
+When the most emphatic man alive, a man unmatched in violent precision
+of statement, speaks with such avowed vagueness and doubt as this, it is
+no wonder if all his more weak-minded followers are in a mere whirlpool
+of uncritical and unmeaning innovation. If the superior person will be
+apparently criminal, the most probable result is simply that the
+criminal person will think himself superior. A very slight knowledge of
+human nature is required in the matter. If the Superman may possibly be
+a thief, you may bet your boots that the next thief will be a Superman.
+But indeed the Supermen (of whom I have met many) have generally been
+more weak in the head than in the moral conduct; they have simply
+offered the first fancy which occupied their minds as the new morality.
+I fear that Shaw had a way of encouraging these follies. It is obvious
+from the passage I have quoted that he has no way of restraining them.
+
+The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the future,
+because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what you
+like. The next age is blank, and I can paint it freely with my favourite
+colour. It requires real courage to face the past, because the past is
+full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser than we
+and of things done which we could not do. I know I cannot write a poem
+as good as _Lycidas_. But it is always easy to say that the particular
+sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry of the future.
+
+This I call the second evil influence of Shaw: that he has encouraged
+many to throw themselves for justification upon the shapeless and the
+unknown. In this, though courageous himself, he has encouraged cowards,
+and though sincere himself, has helped a mean escape. The third evil in
+his influence can, I think, be much more shortly dealt with. He has to a
+very slight extent, but still perceptibly, encouraged a kind of
+charlatanism of utterance among those who possess his Irish impudence
+without his Irish virtue. For instance, his amusing trick of self-praise
+is perfectly hearty and humorous in him; nay, it is even humble; for to
+confess vanity is itself humble. All that is the matter with the proud
+is that they will not admit that they are vain. Therefore when Shaw
+says that he alone is able to write such and such admirable work, or
+that he has just utterly wiped out some celebrated opponent, I for one
+never feel anything offensive in the tone, but, indeed, only the
+unmistakable intonation of a friend's voice. But I have noticed among
+younger, harder, and much shallower men a certain disposition to ape
+this insolent ease and certitude, and that without any fundamental
+frankness or mirth. So far the influence is bad. Egoism can be learnt as
+a lesson like any other "ism." It is not so easy to learn an Irish
+accent or a good temper. In its lower forms the thing becomes a most
+unmilitary trick of announcing the victory before one has gained it.
+
+When one has said those three things, one has said, I think, all that
+can be said by way of blaming Bernard Shaw. It is significant that he
+was never blamed for any of these things by the Censor. Such censures as
+the attitude of that official involves may be dismissed with a very
+light sort of disdain. To represent Shaw as profane or provocatively
+indecent is not a matter for discussion at all; it is a disgusting
+criminal libel upon a particularly respectable gentleman of the middle
+classes, of refined tastes and somewhat Puritanical views. But while
+the negative defence of Shaw is easy, the just praise of him is almost
+as complex as it is necessary; and I shall devote the last few pages of
+this book to a triad corresponding to the last one--to the three
+important elements in which the work of Shaw has been good as well as
+great.
+
+In the first place, and quite apart from all particular theories, the
+world owes thanks to Bernard Shaw for having combined being intelligent
+with being intelligible. He has popularised philosophy, or rather he has
+repopularised it, for philosophy is always popular, except in peculiarly
+corrupt and oligarchic ages like our own. We have passed the age of the
+demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come
+to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but
+says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper. After all,
+short words must mean something, even if they mean filth or lies; but
+long words may sometimes mean literally nothing, especially if they are
+used (as they mostly are in modern books and magazine articles) to
+balance and modify each other. A plain figure 4, scrawled in chalk
+anywhere, must always mean something; it must always mean 2 + 2. But
+the most enormous and mysterious algebraic equation, full of letters,
+brackets, and fractions, may all cancel out at last and be equal to
+nothing. When a demagogue says to a mob, "There is the Bank of England,
+why shouldn't you have some of that money?" he says something which is
+at least as honest and intelligible as the figure 4. When a writer in
+the _Times_ remarks, "We must raise the economic efficiency of the
+masses without diverting anything from those classes which represent the
+national prosperity and refinement," then his equation cancels out; in a
+literal and logical sense his remark amounts to nothing.
+
+There are two kinds of charlatans or people called quacks to-day. The
+power of the first is that he advertises--and cures. The power of the
+second is that though he is not learned enough to cure he is much too
+learned to advertise. The former give away their dignity with a pound of
+tea; the latter are paid a pound of tea merely for being dignified. I
+think them the worse quacks of the two. Shaw is certainly of the other
+sort. Dickens, another man who was great enough to be a demagogue (and
+greater than Shaw because more heartily a demagogue), puts for ever the
+true difference between the demagogue and the mystagogue in _Dr.
+Marigold_: "Except that we're cheap-jacks and they're dear-jacks, I
+don't see any difference between us." Bernard Shaw is a great
+cheap-jack, with plenty of patter and I dare say plenty of nonsense, but
+with this also (which is not wholly unimportant), with goods to sell.
+People accuse such a man of self-advertisement. But at least the
+cheap-jack does advertise his wares, whereas the don or dear-jack
+advertises nothing except himself. His very silence, nay his very
+sterility, are supposed to be marks of the richness of his erudition. He
+is too learned to teach, and sometimes too wise even to talk. St. Thomas
+Aquinas said: "In auctore auctoritas." But there is more than one man at
+Oxford or Cambridge who is considered an authority because he has never
+been an author.
+
+Against all this mystification both of silence and verbosity Shaw has
+been a splendid and smashing protest. He has stood up for the fact that
+philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and
+Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death. Nearly all the
+most awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable,
+from "A child is born" to "A soul is damned." If the ordinary man may
+not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it? About
+concrete matters indeed one naturally appeals to an oligarchy or select
+class. For information about Lapland I go to an aristocracy of
+Laplanders; for the ways of rabbits to an aristocracy of naturalists or,
+preferably, an aristocracy of poachers. But only mankind itself can bear
+witness to the abstract first principles of mankind, and in matters of
+theory I would always consult the mob. Only the mass of men, for
+instance, have authority to say whether life is good. Whether life is
+good is an especially mystical and delicate question, and, like all such
+questions, is asked in words of one syllable. It is also answered in
+words of one syllable, and Bernard Shaw (as also mankind) answers "yes."
+
+This plain, pugnacious style of Shaw has greatly clarified all
+controversies. He has slain the polysyllable, that huge and slimy
+centipede which has sprawled over all the valleys of England like the
+"loathly worm" who was slain by the ancient knight. He does not think
+that difficult questions will be made simpler by using difficult words
+about them. He has achieved the admirable work, never to be mentioned
+without gratitude, of discussing Evolution without mentioning it. The
+good work is of course more evident in the case of philosophy than any
+other region; because the case of philosophy was a crying one. It was
+really preposterous that the things most carefully reserved for the
+study of two or three men should actually be the things common to all
+men. It was absurd that certain men should be experts on the special
+subject of everything. But he stood for much the same spirit and style
+in other matters; in economics, for example. There never has been a
+better popular economist; one more lucid, entertaining, consistent, and
+essentially exact. The very comicality of his examples makes them and
+their argument stick in the mind; as in the case I remember in which he
+said that the big shops had now to please everybody, and were not
+entirely dependent on the lady who sails in "to order four governesses
+and five grand pianos." He is always preaching collectivism; yet he does
+not very often name it. He does not talk about collectivism, but about
+cash; of which the populace feel a much more definite need. He talks
+about cheese, boots, perambulators, and how people are really to live.
+For him economics really means housekeeping, as it does in Greek. His
+difference from the orthodox economists, like most of his differences,
+is very different from the attacks made by the main body of Socialists.
+The old Manchester economists are generally attacked for being too gross
+and material. Shaw really attacks them for not being gross or material
+enough. He thinks that they hide themselves behind long words, remote
+hypotheses or unreal generalisations. When the orthodox economist begins
+with his correct and primary formula, "Suppose there is a Man on an
+Island----" Shaw is apt to interrupt him sharply, saying, "There is a
+Man in the Street."
+
+The second phase of the man's really fruitful efficacy is in a sense the
+converse of this. He has improved philosophic discussions by making them
+more popular. But he has also improved popular amusements by making them
+more philosophic. And by more philosophic I do not mean duller, but
+funnier; that is more varied. All real fun is in cosmic contrasts, which
+involve a view of the cosmos. But I know that this second strength in
+Shaw is really difficult to state and must be approached by explanations
+and even by eliminations. Let me say at once that I think nothing of
+Shaw or anybody else merely for playing the daring sceptic. I do not
+think he has done any good or even achieved any effect simply by asking
+startling questions. It is possible that there have been ages so
+sluggish or automatic that anything that woke them up at all was a good
+thing. It is sufficient to be certain that ours is not such an age. We
+do not need waking up; rather we suffer from insomnia, with all its
+results of fear and exaggeration and frightful waking dreams. The modern
+mind is not a donkey which wants kicking to make it go on. The modern
+mind is more like a motor-car on a lonely road which two amateur
+motorists have been just clever enough to take to pieces, but are not
+quite clever enough to put together again. Under these circumstances
+kicking the car has never been found by the best experts to be
+effective. No one, therefore, does any good to our age merely by asking
+questions--unless he can answer the questions. Asking questions is
+already the fashionable and aristocratic sport which has brought most of
+us into the bankruptcy court. The note of our age is a note of
+interrogation. And the final point is so plain; no sceptical philosopher
+can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on
+a hot afternoon. "Am I a boy?--Why am I a boy?--Why aren't I a
+chair?--What is a chair?" A child will sometimes ask questions of this
+sort for two hours. And the philosophers of Protestant Europe have asked
+them for two hundred years.
+
+If that were all that I meant by Shaw making men more philosophic, I
+should put it not among his good influences but his bad. He did do that
+to some extent; and so far he is bad. But there is a much bigger and
+better sense in which he has been a philosopher. He has brought back
+into English drama all the streams of fact or tendency which are
+commonly called undramatic. They were there in Shakespeare's time; but
+they have scarcely been there since until Shaw. I mean that Shakespeare,
+being interested in everything, put everything into a play. If he had
+lately been thinking about the irony and even contradiction confronting
+us in self-preservation and suicide, he put it all into _Hamlet_. If he
+was annoyed by some passing boom in theatrical babies he put that into
+_Hamlet_ too. He would put anything into _Hamlet_ which he really
+thought was true, from his favourite nursery ballads to his personal
+(and perhaps unfashionable) conviction of the Catholic purgatory. There
+is no fact that strikes one, I think, about Shakespeare, except the fact
+of how dramatic he could be, so much as the fact of how undramatic he
+could be.
+
+In this great sense Shaw has brought philosophy back into
+drama--philosophy in the sense of a certain freedom of the mind. This is
+not a freedom to think what one likes (which is absurd, for one can only
+think what one thinks); it is a freedom to think about what one likes,
+which is quite a different thing and the spring of all thought.
+Shakespeare (in a weak moment, I think) said that all the world is a
+stage. But Shakespeare acted on the much finer principle that a stage is
+all the world. So there are in all Bernard Shaw's plays patches of what
+people would call essentially undramatic stuff, which the dramatist puts
+in because he is honest and would rather prove his case than succeed
+with his play. Shaw has brought back into English drama that
+Shakespearian universality which, if you like, you can call
+Shakespearian irrelevance. Perhaps a better definition than either is a
+habit of thinking the truth worth telling even when you meet it by
+accident. In Shaw's plays one meets an incredible number of truths by
+accident.
+
+To be up to date is a paltry ambition except in an almanac, and Shaw has
+sometimes talked this almanac philosophy. Nevertheless there is a real
+sense in which the phrase may be wisely used, and that is in cases where
+some stereotyped version of what is happening hides what is really
+happening from our eyes. Thus, for instance, newspapers are never up to
+date. The men who write leading articles are always behind the times,
+because they are in a hurry. They are forced to fall back on their
+old-fashioned view of things; they have no time to fashion a new one.
+Everything that is done in a hurry is certain to be antiquated; that is
+why modern industrial civilisation bears so curious a resemblance to
+barbarism. Thus when newspapers say that the _Times_ is a solemn old
+Tory paper, they are out of date; their talk is behind the talk in Fleet
+Street. Thus when newspapers say that Christian dogmas are crumbling,
+they are out of date; their talk is behind the talk in public-houses.
+Now in this sense Shaw has kept in a really stirring sense up to date.
+He has introduced into the theatre the things that no one else had
+introduced into a theatre--the things in the street outside. The theatre
+is a sort of thing which proudly sends a hansom-cab across the stage as
+Realism, while everybody outside is whistling for motor-cabs.
+
+Consider in this respect how many and fine have been Shaw's intrusions
+into the theatre with the things that were really going on. Daily papers
+and daily matinees were still gravely explaining how much modern war
+depended on gunpowder. _Arms and the Man_ explained how much modern war
+depends on chocolate. Every play and paper described the Vicar who was a
+mild Conservative. _Candida_ caught hold of the modern Vicar who is an
+advanced Socialist. Numberless magazine articles and society comedies
+describe the emancipated woman as new and wild. Only _You Never Can
+Tell_ was young enough to see that the emancipated woman is already old
+and respectable. Every comic paper has caricatured the uneducated
+upstart. Only the author of _Man and Superman_ knew enough about the
+modern world to caricature the educated upstart--the man Straker who can
+quote Beaumarchais, though he cannot pronounce him. This is the second
+real and great work of Shaw--the letting in of the world on to the
+stage, as the rivers were let in upon the Augean Stable. He has let a
+little of the Haymarket into the Haymarket Theatre. He has permitted
+some whispers of the Strand to enter the Strand Theatre. A variety of
+solutions in philosophy is as silly as it is in arithmetic, but one may
+be justly proud of a variety of materials for a solution. After Shaw,
+one may say, there is nothing that cannot be introduced into a play if
+one can make it decent, amusing, and relevant. The state of a man's
+health, the religion of his childhood, his ear for music, or his
+ignorance of cookery can all be made vivid if they have anything to do
+with the subject. A soldier may mention the commissariat as well as the
+cavalry; and, better still, a priest may mention theology as well as
+religion. That is being a philosopher; that is bringing the universe on
+the stage.
+
+Lastly, he has obliterated the mere cynic. He has been so much more
+cynical than anyone else for the public good that no one has dared since
+to be really cynical for anything smaller. The Chinese crackers of the
+frivolous cynics fail to excite us after the dynamite of the serious and
+aspiring cynic. Bernard Shaw and I (who are growing grey together) can
+remember an epoch which many of his followers do not know: an epoch of
+real pessimism. The years from 1885 to 1898 were like the hours of
+afternoon in a rich house with large rooms; the hours before tea-time.
+They believed in nothing except good manners; and the essence of good
+manners is to conceal a yawn. A yawn may be defined as a silent yell.
+The power which the young pessimist of that time showed in this
+direction would have astonished anyone but him. He yawned so wide as to
+swallow the world. He swallowed the world like an unpleasant pill before
+retiring to an eternal rest. Now the last and best glory of Shaw is that
+in the circles where this creature was found, he is not. He has not been
+killed (I don't know exactly why), but he has actually turned into a
+Shaw idealist. This is no exaggeration. I meet men who, when I knew them
+in 1898, were just a little too lazy to destroy the universe. They are
+now conscious of not being quite worthy to abolish some prison
+regulations. This destruction and conversion seem to me the mark of
+something actually great. It is always great to destroy a type without
+destroying a man. The followers of Shaw are optimists; some of them are
+so simple as even to use the word. They are sometimes rather pallid
+optimists, frequently very worried optimists, occasionally, to tell the
+truth, rather cross optimists: but they not pessimists; they can exult
+though they cannot laugh. He has at least withered up among them the
+mere pose of impossibility. Like every great teacher, he has cursed the
+barren fig-tree. For nothing except that impossibility is really
+impossible.
+
+
+I know it is all very strange. From the height of eight hundred years
+ago, or of eight hundred years hence, our age must look incredibly odd.
+We call the twelfth century ascetic. We call our own time hedonist and
+full of praise and pleasure. But in the ascetic age the love of life was
+evident and enormous, so that it had to be restrained. In an hedonist
+age pleasure has always sunk low, so that it has to be encouraged. How
+high the sea of human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now only
+know by the colossal walls that they built to keep it in bounds. How low
+human happiness sank in the twentieth century our children will only
+know by these extraordinary modern books, which tell people that it is a
+duty to be cheerful and that life is not so bad after all. Humanity
+never produces optimists till it has ceased to produce happy men. It is
+strange to be obliged to impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men
+to a banquet with spears. But this shall be written of our time: that
+when the spirit who denies besieged the last citadel, blaspheming life
+itself, there were some, there was one especially, whose voice was heard
+and whose spear was never broken.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENTS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
+
+Heretics. Essays. _12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents._
+
+    "Always entertaining."--_New York Evening Sun_.
+
+    "Always original."--_Chicago Tribune_.
+
+Orthodoxy. Uniform with "Heretics."
+
+            _12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents._
+
+    "Here is a man with something to say."--_Brooklyn Life_.
+
+    "A work of genius."--_Chicago Evening Post_.
+
+    "'Orthodoxy' is the most important religious work that has appeared
+    since Emerson."--_North American Review_.
+
+    "Is likely to produce a sensation. An extraordinary book which
+    will be much read and talked about."--_New York Globe_.
+
+All Things Considered. Essays on various subjects,
+such as:
+
+    Conceit and Caricature; Spiritualism; Science and
+    Religion; Woman, etc.
+
+            _12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents_.
+
+    "Full of the author's abundant vitality, wit and unflinching
+    optimism."--_Book News_.
+
+The Napoleon of Notting Hill.    12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+    "A brilliant piece of satire, gemmed with ingenious paradox."
+                                                --_Boston Herald_.
+
+George Bernard Shaw. An illustrated Biography.
+
+           _12 mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents_.
+
+The Ball and the Cross.       12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+Gilbert K. Chesterton. A Criticism.
+
+      _Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 12 cents_.
+
+    An illustrated biography of this brilliant author; also an
+    able review of his works.
+
+    "The anonymous author is a critic with uncommon discrimination
+    and good sense. Mr. Chesterton possesses one of the best attributes
+    of genius--impersonality."--_Baltimore News_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+VERNON LEE
+
+Uniform sets boxed. _8 volumes. Cloth. $12.00 net._ _Express extra.
+$1.50 net each. Postage 10 cents._
+
+    *** "If we were asked to name the three authors writing in English
+    to-day to whom the highest rank of cleverness and brilliancy might
+    be accorded, we would not hesitate to place among them Vernon
+    Lee."--_Baltimore Sun._
+
+Laurus Nobilis. Essays on Art and Life.
+
+Renaissance Fancies and Studies.
+
+The Countess of Albany.
+
+Limbo and Other Essays, including:
+    "Ariadne in Mantua"
+
+Pope Jacynth, and Other Fantastic Tales
+
+Hortus Vitae, or the Hanging Gardens
+
+The Sentimental Traveller
+
+The Enchanted Woods
+
+The Spirit of Rome
+
+Genius Loci
+
+Hauntings
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+W. COMPTON LEITH
+
+Apologia Diffidentis. An intimate personal book.
+
+_Cloth. 8vo. $2.50 net. Postage 15 cents_.
+
+     *** "Mr. Leith formulates the anatomy of diffidence as Burton did
+     of melancholy; and it might almost be said that he has done it with
+     equal charm. The book surpasses in beauty and distinction of style
+     any other prose work of the past few years. Its charm is akin to
+     that of Mr. A. C. Benson's earlier books, yet Mr. Benson at his
+     best has never equalled this.... A human document as striking as it
+     is unusual.... The impress of truth and wisdom lies deep upon every
+     page."--_The Dial._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ANATOLE FRANCE
+
+     "Anatole France is a writer whose personality is very strongly
+     reflected in his works.... To reproduce his evanescent grace and
+     charm is not to be lightly achieved, but the translators have done
+     their work with care, distinction, and a very happy sense of the
+     value of words."--_Daily Graphic_.
+
+     "We must now all read all of Anatole France. The offer is too good
+     to be shirked. He is just Anatole France, the greatest living
+     writer of French."--_Daily Chronicle_.
+
+           _Complete Limited Edition in English_
+
+     Under the general editorship of Frederic Chapman. 8vo., special
+     light-weight paper, wide margins, Caslon type, bound in red and
+     gold, gilt top, and papers from designs by Beardsley, initials by
+     Ospovat. _$2.00 per volume_ (except John of Arc), _postpaid_.
+
+Balthasar
+The Well of St. Clare
+The Red Lily
+Mother of Pearl
+The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
+The Garden of Epicurus
+Thais
+The Merrie Tales of Jacques Tournebroche
+Joan of Arc. Two volumes. _$8 net per set. Postage extra._
+The Comedian's Tragedy
+The Amethyst Ring
+M. Bergeret in Paris
+The Lettered Life
+Pierre Noziere
+The White Stone
+Penguin Island
+The Opinions of Jerome Coignard
+Jocasta and the Famished Cat
+The Aspirations of Jean Servien
+The Elm Tree on the Mall
+My Friend's Book
+The Wicker-Work Woman
+At the Sign of the Queen Pedauque
+Profitable Tales
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ELIZABETH BISLAND
+
+The Secret Life. Being the Book of a Heretic.
+
+_12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 10 cents._
+
+     "A book of untrammelled thought on living topics. Extraordinarily
+     interesting."--_Philadelphia Press._
+
+     "Excellent style, quaint humor, and shrewd philosophy."--_Review of
+     Reviews._
+
+Seekers in Sicily. Being a Quest for Persephone, by ELIZABETH BISLAND
+and ANNE HOYT.
+
+_Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 20 cents. Illustrated._
+
+     *** A delightful account of Sicily, its people, country, and
+     villages. More than a guide book, this volume is a comprehensive
+     account of what all who are interested in this beautiful island wish
+     to know.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CHARLES H. SHERRILL
+
+Stained Glass Tours in France. How to reach the examples of XIIIth,
+XIVth, XVth and XVIth Century Stained Glass in France (with maps and
+itineraries) and what they are. _Ornamental cloth. 12mo. Profusely
+illustrated. $1.50. net. Postage 14 cents._
+
+     "This book should make a place for itself."--_Chicago Tribune._
+
+     "This story of glass has swept me off my feet. Instead of a world
+     of technicalities I met entertainment, and yet that entertainment
+     never abandoned the natural level of dignity belonging to the
+     subject."--_Ferdinand Schwill, Professor of Modern History,
+     University of Chicago._
+
+     "A more unique or more delightful travel book has not been
+     written."--_Toronto Mail and Empire._
+
+Stained Glass Tours in England.
+
+_Illustrated. Cloth 8vo. $2.50 net. Postage 20 cents._
+
+     "Just the information that many travellers in England need. All in
+     an orderly and sprightly manner."--_Professor William Lyon Phelps,
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+
+     "Well conceived and original."--_Athenaeum._
+
+     *** "In these days of universal travel and of the almost universal
+     writing of travel books, it is unusual to find an author whose
+     point of view is unique and whose subject-matter is unhackneyed.
+     Mr. Sherrill has met both of these difficult requirements."--_The
+     Dial._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+J. M. DIVER
+
+Captain Desmond, V.C.
+
+_Ornamental cloth. 12_mo._ $1.50._
+
+     "A story of the Punjab frontier. The theme is that of Kipling's
+     'Story of the Gadsbys'--a brilliant and convincing study of an
+     undying problem."--_London Post._
+
+The Great Amulet 12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+A love-story dealing with army life in India.
+
+Candles in the Wind 12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+HUGH DE SELINCOURT
+
+The Strongest Plume 12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+     "Deals with a problem quite worthy of serious consideration,
+     frankly but restrainedly. Excellent studies of character."--_London
+     Daily News._
+
+A Boy's Marriage 12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+The High Adventure 12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+     "Admirably well told with distinctive literary
+     skill."--_Philadelphia Press._
+
+The Way Things Happen 12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+     "Fantastic and agreeable--an effort somewhat in the manner of Mr.
+     W. J. Locke."--_Glasgow Evening News._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A. NEIL LYONS
+
+Arthur's Hotel 12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+     "Sketches of low life in London. The book will delight visitors to
+     the slums."--_New York Sun._
+
+Sixpenny Pieces 12_mo._ $1.50.
+
+     The Story of a "Sixpenny Doctor" in the East end of London. The
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+     realism of life as it is, and not as imagined.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE COMPLETE WORKS
+OF
+WILLIAM J. LOCKE
+
+"LIFE IS A GLORIOUS THING."--_W. J. Locke_
+
+     "If you wish to be lifted out of the petty cares of to-day, read
+     one of Locke's novels. You may select any from the following titles
+     and be certain of meeting some new and delightful friends. His
+     characters are worth knowing."--_Baltimore Sun._
+
+The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
+At the Gate of Samaria
+A Study in Shadows
+Where Love Is
+Derelicts
+The Demagogue and Lady Phayre
+The Beloved Vagabond
+The White Dove
+The Usurper
+Septimus
+Idols
+
+_12mo. Cloth. $1.50 each_.
+
+     Eleven volumes bound in green cloth. Uniform edition in box. $16.50
+     per set. Half morocco $45.00 net. Express prepaid.
+
+The Beloved Vagabond
+
+     "'The Beloved Vagabond' is a gently-written, fascinating tale. Make
+     his acquaintance some dreary, rain-soaked evening and find the
+     vagabond nerve-thrilling in your own heart."--_Chicago
+     Record-Herald._
+
+Septimus
+
+     "Septimus is the joy of the year."--_American Magazine._
+
+The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
+
+     "A literary event of the first importance."--_Boston Herald._
+
+     "One of those rare and much-to-be-desired stories which keep one
+     divided between an interested impatience to get on, and an
+     irresistible temptation to linger for full enjoyment by the
+     way."--_Life._
+
+Where Love Is
+
+     "A capital story told with skill."--_New York Evening Sun._
+
+     "One of those unusual novels of which the end is as good as the
+     beginning."--_New York Globe._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+WILLIAM J. LOCKE
+
+The Usurper
+
+     "Contains the hall-mark of genius itself. The plot is masterly
+     conception, the descriptions are all vivid flashes from a brilliant
+     pen. It is impossible to read and not marvel at the skilled
+     workmanship and the constant dramatic intensity of the incident,
+     situations and climax."--_The Boston Herald._
+
+Derelicts
+
+     "Mr. Locke tells his story in a very true, a very moving, and a
+     very noble book. If any one can read the last chapter with dry eyes
+     we shall be surprised. 'Derelicts' is an impressive, an important
+     book. Yvonne is a creation that any artist might be proud
+     of."--_The Daily Chronicle._
+
+Idols
+
+     "One of the very few distinguished novels of this present book
+     season."--_The Daily Mail._
+
+     "A brilliantly written and eminently readable
+     book."--_The London Daily Telegraph._
+
+A Study in Shadows
+
+     "Mr. Locke has achieved a distinct success in this novel. He has
+     struck many emotional chords, and struck them all with a firm, sure
+     hand. In the relations between Katherine and Raine he had a
+     delicate problem to handle, and he has handled it
+     delicately."--_The Daily Chronicle._
+
+The White Dove
+
+     "It is an interesting story. The characters are strongly conceived
+     and vividly presented, and the dramatic moments are powerfully
+     realized."--_The Morning Post._
+
+The Demagogue and Lady Phayre
+
+     "Think of Locke's clever books. Then think of a book as different
+     from any of these as one can well imagine--that will be Mr. Locke's
+     new book."--_New York World._
+
+At the Gate of Samaria
+
+     "William J. Locke's novels are nothing if not unusual. They are
+     marked by a quaint originality. The habitual novel reader
+     inevitably is grateful for a refreshing sense of escaping the
+     commonplace path of conclusion."--_Chicago Record-Herald._
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's George Bernard Shaw, by Gilbert K. Chesterton
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