Chapter XV (1)

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:

“Formerly, when there was a question of canonizing a pious
person, the devil was allowed an advocate to support his
claims to the pious person's soul. But nobody ever dreamt of
openly defending him as a much misunderstood and fundamentally
right-minded regenerator of the race until the nineteenth
century, when William Blake boldly went over to the other
side and started a devil's party. Fortunately for himself, he
was a poet, and so passed as a paradoxical madman instead of
a blasphemer. For a long time the party made little direct
progress, the nation being occupied with the passing of its
religion through the purifying fire of a criticism which did
at last smelt some of the grosser African elements out of
it, but which also exalted duty, morality, law and altruism
above faith; reared ethical societies; and left my poor old
friend the devil (for I, too, was a Diabolonian born) worse
off than ever. Mr. Swinburne explained Blake, and even went
so far as to exclaim: 'Come down and redeem us from virtue';
but the pious influences of Putney reclaimed him, and he is
now a respectable, Shakespeare-fearing man. Mark Twain emitted
some Diabolonian sparks, only to see them extinguished by
the overwhelming American atmosphere of chivalry, duty and
gentility. A miserable spurious Satanism, founded on the
essentially pious dogma that the Prince of Darkness is no
gentleman, sprang up in Paris, to the heavy discredit of the
true cult of the Son of the Morning. All seemed lost, when
suddenly the cause found its dramatist in Ibsen, the first
leader who really dragged duty, unselfishness, idealism,
self-sacrifice, and the rest of the anti-diabolic scheme to the
bar at which it had indicted so many excellent Diabolonians.
The outrageous assumption that a good man may do anything he
thinks right (which in the case of a _naturally_ good man
means, by definition, anything he likes), without regard to the
interests of bad men or of the community at large, was put on
its defence, and the party became influential at last.

“After the dramatist came the philosopher. In England, G. B.
S.; in Germany, Nietzsche.”[228]

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:

“Now to me, as a realist playwright, the applause of the
conscious, hardy pessimist is more exasperating than the abuse
of the unconscious, fearful one. I am not a pessimist at all.
It does not concern me that, according to certain ethical
systems, all human beings fall into classes labelled liar,
coward, thief, and so on. I am myself, according to these
systems, a liar, a coward, a thief, and a sensualist; and it is
my deliberate, cheerful and entirely self-respecting intention
to continue to the end of my life deceiving people, avoiding
danger, making my bargains with publishers and managers on
principles of supply and demand instead of abstract justice,
and indulging all my appetites, whenever circumstances commend
such actions to my judgment. If any creed or system deduces
from this that I am a rascal incapable on occasion of telling
the truth, facing a risk, forgoing a commercial advantage, or
resisting an intemperate impulse of any sort, then so much the
worse for the creed or system, since I have done all these
things, and will probably do them again. The saying, 'All have
sinned' is, in the sense in which it was written, certainly
true of all the people I have ever known. But the sinfulness
of my friends is not unmixed with saintliness: some of their
actions are sinful, others saintly. And here, again, if the
ethical system to which the classifications of saint and sinner
belong, involves the conclusion that a line of cleavage drawn
between my friends' sinful actions and their saintly ones will
coincide exactly with one drawn between their mistakes and
their successes (I include the highest and the widest sense of
the two terms), then so much the worse for the system; for the
facts contradict it. Persons obsessed by systems may retort:
'No; so much the worse for your friends'--implying that I must
move in a circle of rare blackguards; but I am quite prepared
not only to publish a list of friends of mine whose names would
put such a retort to open shame, but to take any human being,
alive or dead, of whose actions a genuinely miscellaneous
unselected dozen can be brought to light, to show that none
of the ethical systems habitually applied by dramatic critics
(not to mention other people) can verify their inferences.
As a realist dramatist, therefore, it is my business to get
outside these systems.... The fact is, though I am willing and
anxious to see the human race improved, if possible, still I
find that, with reasonably sound specimens, the more intimately
I know people the better I like them; and when a man concludes
from this that I am a cynic, and that he who prefers stage
monsters--walking catalogues of the systematized virtues--to
his own species, is a person of wholesome philanthropic tastes,
why, how can I feel toward him except as an Englishwoman feels
toward the Arab, who, faithful to _his_ system, denounces her
indecency in appearing in public with her mouth uncovered.”[231]

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:

“I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”

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_.

“If 'the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and
desperately wicked,' then truly, the man who allows himself
to be guided by his passions must needs be a scoundrel, and
his teacher might well be slain by his parents. But how if the
youth, thrown helpless on his passions, found that honesty,
that self-respect, that hatred of cruelty and injustice, that
the desire for soundness and health and efficiency, were master
passions--nay, that their excess is so dangerous to youth that
it is part of the wisdom of age to say to the young: 'Be not
righteous overmuch: why shouldst thou destroy thyself?'...
The people who profess to renounce and abjure their own
passions, and ostentatiously regulate their conduct by the most
convenient interpretation of what the Bible means, or, worse
still, by their ability to find reasons for it (as if there
were not excellent reasons to be found for every conceivable
course of conduct, from dynamite and vivisection to martyrdom),
seldom need a warning against being righteous overmuch, their
attention, indeed, often needing a rather pressing jog in the
opposite direction. The truth is that passion is the steam in
the engine of all religious and moral systems. In so far as it
is malevolent, the religions are malevolent too, and insist on
human sacrifices, on hell, wrath and vengeance. You cannot read
Browning's 'Caliban upon Setebos, or Natural Theology on the
Island' without admitting that all our religions have been made
as Caliban made his, and that the difference between Caliban
and Prospero is that Prospero is mastered by holier passions.
And as Caliban imagined his theology, so did Mill reason out
his essay on 'Liberty' and Spencer his 'Data of Ethics.' In
them we find the authors still trying to formulate abstract
principles of conduct--still missing the fact that truth and
justice are not abstract principles external to man, but human
passions, which have, in their time, conflicted with higher
passions as well as with lower ones.”

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!

_From a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn made in 1906._

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.

“Nobody can afford the time to do it on all points. The
professional thinker may on occasion make his own morality
and philosophy as the cobbler may make his own boots; but the
ordinary man of business must buy at the shop, so to speak, and
put up with what he finds on sale there, whether it exactly
suits him or not, because he can neither make a morality
for himself nor do without one. This typewriter with which
I am writing is the best I can get; but it is by no means a
perfect instrument; and I have not the smallest doubt that
in fifty years' time the authors of that day will wonder how
men could have put up with so clumsy a contrivance. When a
better one is invented, I shall buy it: until then I must make
the best of it, just as my Protestant and Roman Catholic and
Agnostic friends make the best of their creeds and systems.
This would be better recognized if people took consciously and
deliberately to the use of the creeds as they do to the use
of typewriters. Just as the traffic of a great city would be
impossible without a code of rules of the road which not one
wagoner in a thousand could draw up for himself, much less
promulgate, and without, in London at least, an unquestioning
consent to treat the policeman's raised hand as if it were an
impassable bar stretched half across the road, so the average
man is still unable to get through the world without being
told what to do at every turn, and basing such calculations as
he is capable of on the assumptions that everyone else will
calculate on the same assumptions. Even your man of genius
accepts a thousand rules for every one he challenges; and you
may lodge in the same house with an Anarchist for ten years
without noticing anything exceptional about him. Martin Luther,
the priest, horrified the greater half of Christendom by
marrying a nun, yet was a submissive conformist in countless
ways, living orderly as a husband and father, wearing what his
bootmaker and tailor made for him, and dwelling in what the
builder built for him, although he would have died rather than
take his Church from the Pope. And when he got a Church made by
himself to his liking, generations of men calling themselves
Lutherans took that Church from him just as unquestionably as
he took the fashion of his clothes from his tailor. As the
race evolves, many a convention which recommends itself by its
obvious utility to everyone passes into an automatic habit,
like breathing; and meanwhile the improvement in our nerves and
judgment enlarges the list of emergencies which individuals
may be trusted to deal with on the spur of the moment without
reference to regulations, but there will for many centuries
to come be a huge demand for a ready-made code of conduct for
general use, which will be used more or less as a matter of
overwhelming convenience by all members of communities.”[234]

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.

“It is this premature search for a meaning that produces the
comedy. We are not within a million years, as yet, of being
concerned with the meaning of the world. Why do we recognize
that philosophy is not a baby's business, although its facial
expression so strongly suggests the professional philosopher?
Because we know that all its mental energy is absorbed by the
struggle to attain ordinary physical consciousness. It is
learning to interpret the sensations of its eyes and ears and
nose and tongue and finger-tips. It is ridiculously delighted
by a silly toy, absurdly terrified by a harmless bogey, because
it cannot as yet see things as they really are. Well, we are
all still as much babies in the world of thought as we were
in our second year in the world of sense. Men are not real
to us; they are heroes and villains, respectable persons and
criminals. Their qualities are virtues and vices; the natural
laws that govern them are gods and devils; their destinies are
rewards and expiations; their conditions are innocence and
guilt--there is no end to the amazing transubstantiations and
childish imaginings which delight and terrify us because we
have not yet grown up enough to be capable of genuine natural
history. And then people come to you with their heads full of
these figments, which they call, if you please, 'the world,'
and ask you what is the meaning of them. The answer is, that
they have not even an existence, much less a meaning. The blank
incredulity of men to that reply, and their absurd attempts to
act on their illusions, are as funny as the antics of a baby:
that is what you call the world-comedy. But when they try to
force others to act on them, when they ostracize, punish,
murder, make war, impose by force their grotesque religious
and hideous criminal codes, then the comedy becomes a tragedy.
And only the dramatist sees through it; all the rest, the
Army, the Navy, the Church, and the Bar are busy bolstering
up the imposture. The dramatic faculty is nothing more nor
less than a little more than common forwardness in natural
history, a little more than common freedom from illusion, or,
to put it as the average dupe sees it, and as Ruskin flatly
expressed it concerning Shakespeare, a little less than common
conscience.... If the playgoer could see the dramatist's mind,
all the dramatists would be hanged, just as all the men and
women of forty would be massacred by all the youths and maidens
of twenty, if these young ones only knew.”[237]

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.”