Mr. Shaw once went so far as to assure me that the universal application of the Shavian philosophy does actually take place. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of people do not do what they please, but, aside from scruples of conscience, find it vastly more convenient and satisfactory to conform to prevailing standards of right and wrong. Indeed, the limits to the application of the Shavian philosophy are given by Shaw himself when he tells us that “the men in the street have no use for principles, because they can neither understand nor apply them; and that what they can understand and apply are arbitrary rules of conduct, often frightfully destructive and inhuman, but at least definite rules enabling the common stupid man to know where he stands, and what he may do and not do without getting into trouble.” That is, most people can and actually do fulfil their desires only within the limits prescribed by the prevailing code of morality. Most men are neither philosophers nor moralists. Under present circumstances, as Shaw himself admits, the number of people who can think out a line of conduct for themselves is very small, and the number who can afford the time for it still smaller.

The final effect of the philosophy of Ibsen, of Nietzsche, of Shaw is to substitute conscience for conformity.[235] With the dramatists of the Restoration, as Meredith has reminded us, morality was a duenna to be circumvented; with Shaw, morality is a mere convenience, like etiquette at a dinner-table or drill on a parade-ground. “For too long a time man regarded his natural bents with an 'evil eye,'” writes Nietzsche, “so that in the end they became related to 'bad conscience.' A reverse experiment is in itself possible—but who is strong enough for it?” Readiness to override tradition, to act unconventionally, to violate the current code of morality requires moral courage of the very highest order. The sense of moral responsibility is infinitely deepened. “Before conversion the individual anticipates nothing worse in the way of examination at the judgment bar of his conscience,” wrote Shaw before he had ever heard of Nietzsche, “than such questions as: Have you kept the commandments? Have you obeyed the law? Have you attended church regularly; paid your rates and taxes to Cæsar; and contributed, in reason, to charitable institutions? It may be hard to do all these things; but it is still harder not to do them, as our ninety-nine moral cowards in the hundred know. And even a scoundrel can do them all and yet live a worse life than the smuggler or prostitute, who must answer 'No' all the way through the catechism. Substitute for such a technical examination one in which the whole point to be settled is, Guilty or Not Guilty?—one in which there is no more and no less respect for chastity than for incontinence, for subordination than for rebellion, for legality than for illegality, for piety than for blasphemy, in short, for the standard virtues than for the standard vices, and immediately, instead of lowering the moral standard by relaxing the tests of worth, you raise it by increasing their stringency to a point at which no mere pharisaism or moral cowardice can pass them.” One of John Tanner's epigrams was “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” All the stock excuses of the average man vanish before the inexorable fact of this responsibility: “'The woman tempted me'; 'The serpent tempted me'; 'I was not myself at the time'; 'I meant well'; 'My passion got the better of my reason'; 'It was my duty to do it'; 'The Bible says that we should do it'; 'Everybody does it,' and so on. Nothing is left but the frank avowal: 'I did it because I am built that way.' Every man hates to say that. He wants to believe that his generous actions are characteristic of him, and that his meannesses are aberrations or concessions to the force of circumstances.” Most men are lacking in the “vigilant open-mindedness,” the splendid moral courage of an Ibsen; few men are willing to face the fearful responsibility entailed by revolt against the will of the majority. Only a master impulse, a ruling passion will drive them to it. Shavianism means liberty with a string to it; while knocking off the fetters of alien authority, it forges upon one the iron band of liberty with responsibility.[236] Shavianism is the philosophy for the reformer who is driven by the “passion of a great faith”; in the words of Nietzsche, it is “the privilege of the fewest.” The keynote of Shaw's philosophy he has sounded in the perfect epigram, “The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.” But, as Mr. Chesterton rightly reminds us, the saying can be simply answered by being turned around. “That there is no golden rule is itself a golden rule, or, rather, it is much worse than a golden rule. It is an iron rule, a fetter on the first movement of a man.”

The battle-cry of Shaw's life is the Nietzschean command: “Forward, march! our old morality, too, is a piece of comedy.” Originality in regard to moral notions he regards as the true diagnostic of the first order in literature, the distinction that “sets Shakespeare's Hamlet above his other plays, and that sets Ibsen's work as a whole above Shakespeare's work as a whole.” Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth and Turner (these four apart and above all the English classics), Goethe, Shelley, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, he has told us, are among the writers whose peculiar sense of the world he recognizes as more or less akin to his own. While granting to Dickens and Shakespeare the “specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree,” he yet insists that in spite of their combination of sound moral judgment with light-hearted good-humour, they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities. His highest meed of praise goes to the artist-philosopher who identifies himself with the purpose of the world. He classes himself with writers of the “first order,” so called, because he has recognized and proclaimed in all his works that the rules of code-morality and the “need for them produced by the moral and intellectual incompetence of the ordinary human animal, are no more invariably beneficial and respectable than the sunlight which ripens the wheat in Sussex and leaves the desert deadly in Sahara, making the cheeks of the ploughman's child rosy in the morning and striking the ploughman brainsick or dead in the afternoon; no more inspired (and no less) than the religion of the Andaman Islanders: as much in need of frequent throwing away and replacement as the community's boots.”

The prime reason for the accusation that in his plays Shaw ignores all human feeling is not as simple as it seems. It is not enough to say it is because he is judicially impartial or even that he ignores stage logic. Humanity may possibly move by clockwork in Shaw's plays, as Mr. Arthur Symons once said; but even if it did, there must be some key which sets the machine in motion. That key is not intellect, but will; against which systems, creeds, conventions, every sort of formalism is ineffective and impotent. “Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get”; that is the creed of all his characters; or, in the words of Ann Whitefield: “The only really simple thing to do is to go straight for what you want, and grab it.” It is his view that “people imagine that their actions and feelings are dictated by moral systems, by religious systems, by codes of honour and conventions of conduct which lie outside the real human will.” As a dramatist, he recognizes that these conventions do not supply them with their motives, but merely serve as very plausible ex post facto excuses for their conduct. He has sought to reveal to us real people with real motives which are deep down in the will itself. It was Sainte Beuve's aim, as he himself phrased it, to set forth “the natural history of the intellect.” One might say of Shaw, the dramatist, that his aim is to set forth the natural history of the human will. “Far from ignoring idiosyncrasy, will, passion, impulse, whim, as factors in human action, I have placed them so nakedly on the stage that the elderly citizen, accustomed to see them clothed with the veil of manufactured logic about duty, and to disguise even his own impulses from himself in this way, finds the picture as unnatural as Carlyle's suggested painting of Parliament sitting without its clothes.”

It is this unmasking of all the ideals, this shattering of all the illusions, this demolition of the romantic cast of life which makes Shaw appear as a cynic, representing human creatures as frauds, impostors, poseurs, cads, bounders, hypocrites and humbugs. It is difficult to convince some people, especially women, that Shaw is not a cynic and pessimist. Like Schopenhauer, Shaw is a pure metaphysiologist. It is the inevitable result of his disbelief in the validity of custom-made morality that he should appear as a cynic, and the characters of his plays as frauds and shams. But he has deliberately averred: “It is not my object in the least to represent people as hypocrites and humbugs. It is conceit, not hypocrisy, that makes a man think he is guided by reasoned principles when he is really obeying his instincts.” And in explaining his view of the world-comedy, he has shown that, as a dramatist, he pretends to be, not the historian, but the naturalist of his age.

The world-comedy, in Shaw's eyes, consists in the imaginative self-delusion, the moralistic sophistication of man; the world-tragedy in the bankruptcy of what we delight in calling progress with a P.

Progress, from Shaw's point of view, means increased command over self; this lamentable desideratum is the cause of his scepticism. But let us observe the open-minded, clear-eyed consistency of Shaw. While heartily subscribing to the metaphysics of Schopenhauer, he yet as heartily refuses to accept his pessimistic philosophy. At one with Darwin and Huxley in their scientific, realistic, yet anarchistic challenge of the validity of Biblical theology, Shaw, by his deliberate rejection of their materialistic views, occupies the opposite pole of conviction. It is useless to pretend to a “generation which has ceased to believe in heaven and has not yet learned that the degradation by poverty of four out of every five of its number is artificial,” that the “pessimism of Koheleth, Shakespeare, Dryden and Swift can be refuted if the world progresses solely by the destruction of the unfit, and yet can only maintain its civilization by manufacturing the unfit in swarms of which that appalling proportion of four to one represents but the comparatively fit survivors.” To Shaw, progress means, not an effect of the survival of the fittest brought about by the destruction of the unfit, but the growth of the spirit of man. He has refused to accept the Darwinian theory of evolution, since it “only accounted for progress at all on the hypothesis of a continuous increase in the severity of the conditions of existence—that is, on an assumption of just the reverse of what was actually taking place”—a fact which escaped Huxley. He finds in the world no signs of progress in the humanitarian and ethical sense; only a few more discoveries in physics. And even the much-trumpeted “increased command over nature,” harnessing continents, circling the globe, and so on, as an argument for progress vanishes before the inevitable query as to whether a negro of to-day using a telephone is superior to George Washington. Shaw rails at the “theistic credulity” of Voltaire as he rails at the “tribal soothsayings” of Huxley. As he recently wrote me: “I have not escaped from a literal belief in the Book of Genesis only to fall back into the gross blindness of seeing nothing in the world but the result of natural selection operating on a chapter of accidents, which is popular Darwinism.”

In that most whimsical and witty essay, entitled, The Conflict Between Science and Common Sense, Shaw declares that he has “found out” the man of science: “In future my attitude towards him will be one of more or less polite incredulity. Impostor for impostor, I prefer the mystic to the scientist—the man who at least has the decency to call his nonsense a mystery, to him who pretends that it is ascertained, weighed, measured, analyzed fact.” In a sense, Shaw's part in the humanitarian campaign against vivisection, modern science generally, vaccination, education, flogging, “cannibalism,” and so on, are all part of his attitude as a “mystic.” He has no faith in the scientist with his specious invitation: “My friend, by a diabolically cruel process I have procured a revoltingly filthy substance. Allow me to inject this under your skin, and you can never get hydrophobia, or enteric fever, or diphtheria, etc. I have even a very choice preparation, of unmentionable nastiness, which will enable you, if not to live for ever (though I think that quite possible), at least to renew in your old age the excesses of your youth.” While the average man, with incomprehensible credulity, jumps at the bait, Shaw refuses to be so easily duped. While science has taught him that dirt is “only matter in the wrong place,” his own common sense has taught him that “disease is only matter in the wrong condition, and that to inject matter in the wrong condition into matter in the right condition (healthy flesh, to wit) is to put matter in the wrong place with a vengeance.” In the public prints, in his novels and plays, notably, Cashel Byron's Profession and The Philanderer, Shaw has fulminated as vigorously against vivisection as against vaccination. From the first he perceived that the vivisector was “just the same phenomenon in science as the dynamiter in politics, and that to all humane men both methods of research and reform, effective or not, were eternally barred, precisely as highway robbery is barred as a method of supporting one's family.” His persistent vegetarianism is not based upon a scientific inquiry into the amount of hydrocarbons, uric acid, or what not deleterious stuff there may be in meat, but in his perfectly natural and humane distaste for the shedding of blood. “I have not the slightest doubt myself,” he once said, “that a diet of nice tender babies, carefully selected, cleanly killed and tenderly cooked, would make us far healthier and handsomer than the haphazard dinners of to-day, whether carnivorous or vegetarian.... There is no objection whatever to a baby from a nitrogenous point of view. Eaten with sugar, or with beer, it would leave nothing to be desired in the way of carbon. My sole objection to such a diet is that it happens to be repugnant to me. I prefer bread and butter.” Shaw's “three centuries” of life have taught him, mainly, to regard “men's principles as excuses for doing what they want to do.” And in the moral sphere, he contends that “the world remains as dependent as ever on pure dogmatic, instinctive recoil from suffering on the one hand, and pure dogmatic, instinctive love of inflicting it on the other. Common to both these temperaments, and to the compound temperament in which they struggle for mastery, is the timid perception that society can only exist through a compact to live and let live.... All sorts of virtuously indignant persons, clamouring for all sorts of vulgar retaliations, from the kicking of a cad to the humiliation of a minister by an election defeat, are indulging the destructive instincts under cover of solicitude for the common weal, as unmistakably as the scientist who, with a thousand humane departments of research open to him, deliberately prefers cruel experiments, and pleads that the man who ascertains how long it takes to bake a dog to death confers as great a boon on humanity as the man who discovers the Röntgen rays and their application to surgery. The cruel (loving to read the description of his experiments), the selfish (hoping for cures), the sportsman (anxious to be kept in countenance), and the cowardly (seeking an excuse for tolerating an evil they dare not attack) will accept his excuse: the humane will not. The final conflict is not between the excuses in their logical disguise of scientific arguments, but between the cruel will and the humane will.”

A leading cause for Shaw's “divine discontent” with progress, with moral systems, with institutions, with “regimentation,” with flogging in the navy, vaccination, science, cannibalism, and a thousand other things, is his loss of faith in education. He has lost his illusions on the subject. Education and culture, he maintains, are for the most part “nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.” He sees Masters of Art as “patentees of highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the majority but half valid, representations of life.” This is the natural attitude for one who said only the other day that “great communities are built by men who sign with a mark: they are wrecked by men who write Latin verses.” The ruthless repression which we practise on our fellow creatures whilst they are still too small to defend themselves, he insists, ends in their “reaching their full bodily growth in a hopelessly lamed and intimidated condition, unable to conceive of any forces in the world except physically coercive and socially conventional ones.” “Modern” education, he declares, “differs from Dr. Johnson's education only in substituting Jenner and Pasteur for Plato and Euripides as academic idols, and replacing the recognition of a purpose in the world, and the investigation of that purpose, by a conception of the universe as the accidental result of a senseless raging of mechanical forces, and by a boundless credulity, not outdone in dirt, cruelty, and stupidity, by any known savage tribe, as to the possibility of circumventing these forces by nostrums and conjurations.” The hope of the world lies in the development of individuality and self-reliance. Real live learning would soon flourish on the boundless basis of human curiosity and ambition.[238]