George Bernard Shaw, his life and works

It is worthy of record that Bernard Shaw does not claim to be a great novelist, or a great dramatist, or a great critic. As Mr. Chesterton says, Shaw is very dogmatic, but very humble. Indeed, Mr. Shaw once wrote me that he does not claim to be great: either he is or he is not great, and that is an end of the matter! But it is highly significant that Shaw does specifically claim to be a philosopher. Shaw's philosophical ideas have generally been regarded by English and American critics either as of undoubted European derivation, or else as fantastic paradoxes totally unrelated to the existing body of thought. “I urge them to remember,” Shaw remonstrates, “that this body of thought is the slowest of growths and the rarest of blossomings, and that if there is such a thing on the philosophic plane as a matter of course, it is that no individual can make more than a minute contribution to it.” Whilst it is undoubtedly true that Shaw's philosophy has been partially shared in by many forerunners, nevertheless, he has made his own “minute contribution” to the existing body of thought. Bernard Shaw is an independent thinker and natural moralist, with a clearly co-ordinated system of philosophy. Let us critically endeavour, then, in the language of political economy, to award Shaw his merited “rent of ability.”

Shaw's fundamental postulate is that morality is not a stagnant quality, the same yesterday, to-day and for ever, but transitory and evolutional. Morality flows: “What people call vice is eternal; what they call virtue is mere fashion.” A celebrated French critic once declared: “La morale est purement géographique.” Shaw goes far beyond this in the assertion that morality is a creature of occasion, conditioned by circumstance. And why is it that morality comes to be regarded as not in itself a fixed quantity, a solid substratum of human consciousness, but a concomitant fluxion of civilization? It is because, historically considered, progress connotes repudiation of custom: social advance takes effect through the replacement of old institutions by new ones. “Since every institution involves the duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every turn.” History shows us a world strewn with the wrecks of institutions whose laws, upheld for a time as fixed, were eventually broken by the triumphant assertion of the crescent will of man. This phenomenon is not to be confused with that in which an institution is burst simply by the natural growth of the social organism. The phenomenon of which we are speaking involves a deliberate assertion of self-constituted authority on the part of the individual in defiance of established and generally accepted customs.[227]

“The ideal is dead; long live the ideal!” is the epitome of all human progress. It is the note of nineteenth century literature. For the first time in history the devil began to get his due. Men ceased to be always on the side of the angels; a new day was dawning, the day of the saintly anarch, the advocatus diaboli. Shaw has given us a brief history of the movement:

The whole anarchistic spirit of our time is summed up in the words of a character in one of Ibsen's plays: “The old beauty is no longer beautiful; the new truth is no longer true.”

Every age has its dominant accepted ideas and forms; but, as Georg Brandes has said: “besides these, it owns another whole class of quite different ideas, which have not yet taken shape, but are in the air, and are apprehended by the greatest men of the age as the results which must now be arrived at.” The ideas of the evolutionary trend of human ideals, of the triumphant hypocrisy of current morality, of the necessity for challenging and repudiating the code of the human herd were in the air: they were slowly being arrived at. We hear Chamfort's contemptuous assertion: “Il y a à parier que toute idée publique—toute convention reçue—est une sottise; car elle a convenue au plus grand nombre.” We see William Blake performing the ceremony of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell; the Pirate King in W. S. Gilbert's Pirates of Penzance repudiates bourgeois respectability in his reply to Frederic's urgent request to accompany him back to civilization: “No, Frederic, it cannot be. I don't think much of our profession, but, contrasted with respectability, it is comparatively honest. No, Frederic; I shall live and die a pirate king.” In The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, Mark Twain posits a new reading of the Lord's Prayer: “Lead us (not) into temptation”; he arraigns the morality of custom in Was It Heaven or Hell? Nietzsche works his way, through the “outer fortifications, the garb and masquerade; the occasional incrustation, petrification, dogmatization” of the ideal, to a position beyond good and evil, from which he transvalues all moral values.[229]

With Ibsen, the disciple as well as the master of his age, the newer ideas gained currency through the medium of the drama. The individualist Stockmann, in An Enemy of the People, preaches the salutary sermon of the “saving remnant” in his passionate declamation: “The majority is never right! That's one of the social lies a free, thinking man is bound to rebel against. Who make up the majority in any given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think all must agree that the fools are in a terribly overwhelming majority all the world over.... What sort of truths do the majority rally round? Truths that are decrepit with age. When a truth is as old as that, then it's in a fair way to become a lie.” Ibsen is one with Saint Augustine in the belief that it matters not so much what we are as what we are becoming. “Neither our moral conceptions nor our artistic forms,” he once said, “have an eternity before them. How much in duty are we really bound to hold on to? Who can afford me a guarantee that up yonder on Jupiter two and two do not make five?” And at a dinner at the Grand Hotel, Stockholm, he concretized this tenet of modern faith in the words: “It has been asserted on various occasions that I am a pessimist. So I am to this extent—that I do not believe human ideals to be eternal. But I am also an optimist, for I believe firmly in the power of those ideals to propagate and develop.” In like manner Zola declared that there was always a contest between men of unconquerable temperaments and the herd: “I am on the side of the temperaments, and I attack the herd.” How fiercely Schopenhauer and Shelley, Lassalle and Karl Marx, Ruskin and Carlyle, Morris and Wagner railed at all the orthodoxies, the respectabilities and the ideals! Heine tilted against the Philistine, “the strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of light,” with an élan equalled only by the detestation of Carlyle for the snobbery which he denominated “respectability in its thousand gigs.” The literature of the age resounded with the “rattle of twentieth century tumbrils.”

Nietzsche has declared that the good taste, the “honesty,” of a psychologist consists nowadays, if in anything, in his opposing the shamefully permoralized language by which as by a phlegm all modern judging on men and things is covered. His aim must be to “re-discover” the incarnate innocence in moralistic mendaciousness, to stagger the complacency of the illuded, ever “holding aloft the banner of the ideal,” to divorce the imagined life from the real. Mr. W. S. Gilbert was the first modern English dramatist to satirize the morality of custom; but his philosophy was a mere farcical masquerade and sham. “He would put forward a paradox,” Shaw has justly observed, “which at first promised to be one of those humane truths which so many modern men of fine spiritual insight, from William Blake onward, have worded so as to flash out their contradictions of some weighty rule of our systematized morality, and would then let it slip through his fingers, leaving nothing but a mechanical topsy-turvitude.”[230]

Bernard Shaw has identified the function of comedy with the destruction of old-established morals. In play after play, from Mrs. Warren's Profession and Arms and the Man to The Devil's Disciple and Man and Superman, he has mordantly and fiercely attacked that “inmost feminism which delights in calling itself idealism,” that Philistine respectability which vaunts itself on its “morality of custom,” and the genuine British narrowness, with its humdrum conservatism, its slavery to routine, its stupid distrust of new ideas and fear of bold thinking. Like Ibsen, he is always an outpost thinker, having no tolerance for conservatism—the attitude of “the little narrow-chested, short-winded crew that lie in our wake.” He has lived in passionate defiance of the precept:

“Be not the first by whom the new is tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”

The step from the premiss that morality is a variable function of civilization to the conclusion that salvation lies alone in revolt was inevitable. Historically considered, the stages in the growth of man's spirit may be classified under three heads: Faith, Reason, Will. First came the age of Faith: man accepted the precepts of the Bible as the revelation of God's voice. Faith in the Bible became the criterion of righteous intention, and for a time the authority of the Church reigned supreme. After a while came the age of free-thought, of Reason; the free-thinker begins to “find reasons for not doing what he does not want to do; and these reasons seem to him to be far more binding on the conscience than the precepts of a book of which the divine inspiration cannot be rationally proved.” Faith was dethroned by Reason, and rationalist “free-thinking” soon came to mean “syllogism worship with rites of human sacrifice.”

The great error of the Rationalists is latent in Voltaire's reply to the plea of the poetaster that he must live: “Je n'en vois pas la nécessité.” “The evasion was worthy of the Father of Lies himself,” Shaw has it; “for Voltaire was face to face with the very necessity he was denying—must have known, consciously or not, that it was the universal postulate—would have understood, if he had lived to-day, that since all human institutions are constructed to fulfil man's will, and that his will is to live even when his reason teaches him to die, logical necessity, which was the sort Voltaire meant (the other sort being visible enough) can never be a motor in human action, and is, in short, not necessity at all.” In the course of time came Schopenhauer to re-establish the old theological doctrine that reason is no motive power; that the true motive power in the world—otherwise life—is will, and that the setting up of reason above will is a damnable error.

Shaw has warned us that acceptance of the metaphysics of Schopenhauerism by no means involves endorsement of its philosophy. To Shaw, the cardinal Rationalist error into which Schopenhauer fell consisted in making happiness the test of the value of life. Shaw is the most vigorous possible combatant of the pessimist conclusion that life is not worth living, and that “the will which urges us to live in spite of this is necessarily a malign torturer, the desirable end of all things being the Nirvana of the stilling of the will, and the consequent setting of life's sun 'into the blind cave of eternal night.'” The keynote of the Shavian philosophy is the pursuit of life for its own sake. Life is realized only as activity that satisfies the will: that is, as self-assertion. Every extension or intensification of activity is an increase in life. Quantity and quality of activity measure the value of existence. Shaw has refused to acknowledge the validity of the will of the official theologians, because their God stands outside man and in authority above him. He accepted Schopenhauer's view of the will as a “purely secular force of nature, attaining various degrees of organization, here as a jelly-fish, there as a cabbage, more complexly as an ape or a tiger, and attaining its highest form, so far, in the human being.” This was Shaw's key to the works of two great artists, Wagner and Ibsen, notably, The Ring and Emperor and Galilean.

It is the idlest nonsense to say of Shaw, in Oscar Wilde's phrase, that he has the courage of other people's convictions. Shaw's most conspicuous trait is his courage in challenging and defying other people's convictions. Instead of clinging to the pessimism of Schopenhauer, he has been bold enough to “drop the Nirvana nonsense, the pessimism, the rationalism, the theology, and all the other subterfuges to which we cling because we are afraid to look life straight in the face and see in it, not the fulfilment of a moral law or the deductions of reason, but the satisfaction of a passion in us of which we can give no account.” Claiming for himself the faculty of unilluded vision, he conceives it his mission to tear away the veils with which we persist in hiding realities and to call things by their true names, instead of the false names with which we are content to dupe ourselves. Mr. Walkley once said: “Mr. Shaw takes up the empty bladders of life, the current commonplaces, the cant phrases, the windbags of rodomontade, the hollow conventions and the sham sentiments; quietly inserts his pin, and the thing collapses with a pop.” But Shaw regards this as a cheap job which any man might do and which Mr. Walkley himself excels in. “It is not the bubbles and bladders that require some tackling,” Mr. Shaw once observed to me; “it is the solid brass that has to be assayed and proved to be base metal.”

In many places, in varying ways, Shaw has given pungent expression to the opinion so well advanced in Meredith's words: “Our world is all but a sensational world at present, in maternal travail of a soberer, a braver, a bright-eyed.” The clarity of Shaw's vision has saved him from the cheap crudeness of pessimism: unlike Ibsen, plenty of “sound potatoes” have come under his observation. His position is clearly expressed in his own words:

The destruction of the principle of alien authority carries with it the necessity for the creation of the individual standard. The dethronement of rationalism, be it observed, involves no repudiation of logic and intellect as guides to everyday life. “Ability to reason accurately is as desirable as ever, since it is only by accurate reasoning that we can calculate our actions so as to do what we intend to do—that is, to fulfil our will.” Instead of accepting the nude, anarchistic formula of Maurice Barrés, for example, “Fais ce que tu veux,” Shaw may be understood to enjoin: “Form your moral conscience and act as it directs you.”[232]

A development in our moral views must first appear insane and blasphemous, Shaw has time and again warned us, to people who are satisfied, or more than satisfied, with the current morality. Henri Beyle was for long, and still is, much misunderstood for the simple reason that the characters he created evolve their own standard, pursue their cherished ideals with unfaltering determination, and brook no interference, make no compromise, until they have won and established their self-respect. All the while insisting on the prudence necessary to discover the way for the will, Shaw has unhesitatingly taken the supreme step, realizing always that “Every step in morals is made by challenging the validity of the existing conception of perfect propriety of conduct.... Heterodoxy in art is at worst rated as eccentricity or folly: heterodoxy in morals is at once rated as scoundrelism, and, what is worse, propagandist scoundrelism, which must, we are told, if successful, undermine society and bring us back to barbarism after a period of decadence like that which brought Imperial Rome to its downfall.”

The time comes, however, when the voice of instinctive temperament makes itself heard and heeded. In the past the younger generation waited, but with a divine impatience, until “they were old enough to find their aspirations toward the fullest attainable activity and satisfaction working out in practice very much as they have worked out in the life of the race; so that the revolutionist at twenty-five, who saw nothing for it but a clean sweep of all our institutions, found himself, at forty, accepting and even clinging to them on condition of a few reforms to bring them up to date.” To-day the younger generation is loud in its demands, imperious in its insistence. They are outspoken in their scepticism concerning the infallibility of their parents, they insist that their “spiritual pastors and masters” speak humanly, and not dogmatically, of morality, and are determined to try all pontifical wisdom by the touchstone of experience. They formulate their heresy as a faith, and Shaw is the arch-heretic of them all. Ibsen would abolish the State and inaugurate a bloodless revolution: a revolution of the spirit of man; Hauptmann poetizes the Nietzschean ideal in Die Versunkene Glocke; Sudermann challenges the equity of parental authority in Heimat. With all the appearance of profound wisdom and abstract justice, Maeterlinck teaches that the preservation of virtue and adherence to conventional moral standards may be the quintessence of selfishness and egotism. Tolstoy preaches an impossible ideal of celibacy, and Shaw would abolish marriage because it is the “most licentious of human institutions.” Modern literature from Ibsen and Nietzsche to Bourget and Shaw is a “long litany in praise of the man who wills.” Men to-day contemn the “slavery to duty and discipline which has left so many soured old people with nothing but envious regrets for a virtuous youth.” Moral heroism is the toast of the epoch—“the heroism of the man who believes in himself and dares do the thing he wills.” It finds complete expression in Henley's best known poem, with its clamant finale:

The philosophy whose pæan is glorification of the man whose standards are within himself, whose actions are controlled by his will, carries with it certain inevitable and shocking consequences. It is the clearest proof of Shaw's consistency that he has never swerved one jot from the course marked out by himself. He accepts the disagreeable consequences along with the rest, neither blinking nor shirking them. Georg Brandes epitomized his doctrine in the words: “To obey one's senses is to have character. He who allows himself to be guided by his own passions has individuality.” Shaw has avowed that he regards this as excellent doctrine, both in Brandes' form and in the older form: “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still; and he that is holy, let him be holy still.” Shaw is fundamentally an optimist; he identifies all life with the will itself. This will, this Life Force, he refuses to regard as naturally malign and devilish. His life-work may be said to consist in an attack upon the conception that passions are necessarily base and unclean; his art works are glorifications of the man of conviction who can find a motive, and not an excuse, for his passions; whose conduct flows from his own ideas of right and wrong; and who obeys the law of his own nature in defiance of appearance, of criticism, and of authority. This abrogation of authority, this repudiation of systematized morality is the step which the strongest spirits in all history have taken; it is the inevitable step for the naturally good man, who can breathe only in an atmosphere of truth and freedom. Emancipation comes only when man fulfils his duty to himself; but one's duty to oneself, as Shaw has reminded us, is no duty at all, since a debt is cancelled when the debtor and creditor are the same person. “Its payment is simply a fulfilment of the individual will, upon which all duty is a restriction.”

The obverse of the medal is not so clear: What will happen in the case of a person of ungovernable temper, of unbridled passions? The whole philosophy of his position, with all its appalling consequences, Shaw has expounded in that most remarkable of all his philosophical essays, entitled, A Degenerate's View of Nordau.

It is one of Shaw's disconcerting theories—after Blake—that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”; the law of the stern asceticism of satiety is that “you never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” In amplifying this idea Shaw once said: “When Blake told men that through excess they would learn moderation, he knew that the way for the present lay through the Venusberg, and that the race would assuredly not perish there as some individuals have, and as the Puritan fears we all shall unless we find a way round. Also, he no doubt foresaw the time when our children would be born on the other side of it, and so be spared that fiery purgation.”

It is not mal à propos that the arms of the Shaw family should have borne the motto, in Latin: “Know thyself.” Shaw insists upon the salutary virtue of experience, its reforming and educative effect. “If a young woman, in a mood of strong reaction against the preaching of duty and self-sacrifice and the rest of it,” Shaw once wrote, “were to tell Mr. Herbert Spencer that she was determined not to murder her own instincts and throw away her life in obedience to a mouthful of empty phrases, I suspect he would recommend the 'Data of Ethics' to her as a trustworthy and conclusive guide to conduct. Under similar circumstances I should unhesitatingly say to the young woman: 'By all means do as you propose. Try how wicked you can be; it is precisely the same experiment as trying how good you can be. At worst, you will only find out the sort of person you really are. At best, you will find that your passions, if you really and honestly let them all loose impartially, will discipline you with a severity your conventional friends, abandoning themselves to the mechanical routine of fashion, could not stand for a day.' As a matter of fact, I have seen over and over again this comedy of the 'emancipated' young enthusiast flinging duty and religion, convention and parental authority, to the winds, only to find herself becoming, for the first time in her life, plunged into duties, responsibilities and sacrifices from which she is often glad to retreat, after a few years' wearing down of her enthusiasm, into the comparatively loose life of an ordinary respectable woman of fashion.” It is not a case of after satiety, moderation; after Venus, Saint Elizabeth; after Bohemianism, the convent. This is not what happens, except to ordinary loose livers. What happens, according to Shaw, is, that when we cast off all moral restraint we find Saint Elizabeth and the convent drawing us more passionately to them than Venus and the Bohemians. The true trend of the movement, it scarcely need be remarked, has been mistaken by many of its supporters as well as by its opponents. “The ingrained habit of thinking of the propensities of which we are ashamed as 'our passions,'” Shaw has shrewdly remarked, “and our shame of them and of our propensities to noble conduct as a negative and inhibitory department called our conscience, leads us to conclude that to accept the guidance of our passions is to plunge recklessly into the insupportable tedium of what is called a life of pleasure. Reactionists against the almost equally insupportable slavery of what is called a life of duty are, nevertheless, willing to venture on these terms. The 'revolted daughter,' exasperated at being systematically lied to by her parents on every subject of vital importance to an eager and intensely curious young student of life, allies herself with really vicious people and with humorists who like to shock the pious with gay paradoxes, in claiming an impossible license in personal conduct. No great harm is done beyond the inevitable and temporary excesses produced by all reactions; for the would-be wicked ones find, when they come to the point, that the indispensable qualification for a wicked life is not freedom, but wickedness.”[233]

In the present state of the world's civilization, the universal application of the Shavian philosophy is neither possible nor desirable. Like Nietzsche, Shaw has evolved a philosophy for the naturally good man, for the strong man who realizes that freedom connotes, not license, but responsibility. His error inheres in the statement that no great harm would be done by people claiming an impossible license in personal conduct beyond the inevitable and temporary excesses produced by all reactions. Far from being temporary and negligible, the consequences that would result, were every person permitted to give a personal unrestricted interpretation of his own instincts, would be lasting and irremediable. The average sensual man, “the mean sensual man,” as Granville Barker translates it—for whom passion means merely sexual lust, would take every advantage of the loopholes for self-indulgence offered by the Shavian programme. Were every man a Martin Luther, a William Blake, a Bernard Shaw; were every woman a Mary Wollstonecraft, a Candida Burgess, the world might, indeed, be clear of cant, of hypocrisy, of moralistic mendaciousness, of idealistic sophistication!