George Bernard Shaw
G >> Gilbert K. Chesterton >> George Bernard ShawTo 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.