Chapter I: George Bernard Shaw (1)

Dramatic Critic of Life

I am a journalist, proud of it, deliberately cutting out of
my works all that is not journalism, convinced that nothing
that is not journalism will live long as literature, or be
of any use whilst it does live. I deal with all periods, but
I never study any period but the present; and as a dramatist
I have no clue to any historical or other personage save
that part of him which is also myself.... The man who writes
about himself and his own time is the only man who writes
about all people and about all time.--G. B. S., in "The
Sanity of Art."

August 4, 1914, cuts time in two like a knife. The continuity of human progress in science, arts, letters, commerce, philosophy, everything, was broken off at that point--to be taken up again, who knows when? Nothing in the world can remain quite the same as before. Everything is seen in a new light. All our old ideas, even the most ancient and most reverenced, will have to be taken out and looked over to see how many of them remain intact and useful, just as after an earthquake one overhauls the china closet. "The transvaluation of all values", which Nietzsche looked for, has come to pass sooner than he expected, although the results of this reëstimation are not likely to be what he anticipated. It is not merely that the geographies will have to be revised and the histories rewritten, but all books will be classified as antebellum or postbellum literature. It will, however, not be necessary to mark them A. B. or P. B., for they will by their style of thought and language bear an indelible though invisible date with reference to this line of demarcation.

We are already beginning to look back upon the antebellum days as a closed period, and those who were conspicuous in it are being seen in an historical perspective such as the lapse of a generation of ordinary times is needed to produce. Some reputations are shrinking, others are rising, as mountains seem from a departing train to rearrange themselves according to their true height. The true prophets are becoming distinguishable from the false.

Among those who have taken the test and stand higher than before is George Bernard Shaw. Whether he will write better plays than before remains to be seen. Perhaps he will write no more of any kind. But those he has written will be regarded with more respect because we can see their essential truth, whereas before we feared lest we might be merely fascinated by their glitter. Warnings which the world took for jokes because of their fantastic guise now turn out too terribly real, and advice which the world ignored would better have been heeded.

Few writers have as little to take back on account of the war as Shaw, although few have expressed such decided opinions in such extreme language on so many topics. For instance, Kipling's "The Bear that Walks Like a Man" makes queer reading now that England is fighting to give Russia what then she was ready to fight to prevent her getting. But the full significance of Shaw's fable farce of "Androcles and the Lion" is now for the first time being realized. The philosophy of this, his most frivolous and serious play, is summed up by Ferrovius, a converted giant of the Ursus type, who finds it impossible to keep to his Christian principle of nonresistance when brought into the arena. The natural man rises in him and he slays six gladiators single-handed. This delights the emperor, who thereupon offers him a post in the Pretorian Guards which he had formerly refused. The fallen and victorious Ferrovius accepts, saying:

In my youth I worshiped Mars, the god of war. I turned from
him to serve the Christian God; but to-day the Christian God
forsook me; and Mars overcame me and took back his own. The
Christian God is not yet. He will come when Mars and I are
dust; but meanwhile I must serve the gods that are, not the
God that will be. Until then I accept service in the Guard,
Caesar.

The great cataclysm does not seem to have changed Shaw's opinions one iota, but all England is changed, and so he appears in a different light. More of his countrymen agree with what he used to preach to them than ever before, yet he was never so disliked as he is to-day--which is saying a great deal. The British press has boycotted him. His letters, once so sought after by the most dignified journals, now no longer appear except in _The New Statesman_. His speeches, be they never so witty and timely, are not reported or even announced.

Consequently those who wish to hear him have to resort to the advertising expedients of the era before printing. A friend of mine just back from London tells me that he saw chalked on the side-walk a notice of a meeting to be addressed by Shaw in some out-of-the-way hall. Going there, he found it packed with an enthusiastic crowd gathered to hear Shaw discuss the questions of the day. The anti-Shavian press said that he had to keep to his house, that he was afraid to stir abroad for fear of a mob, that his career was over, that he was exploded, repudiated, disgraced, boycotted, dead and done for. At the very time when we were reading things like this, he was, as we since have learned, addressing weekly meetings in one of the largest halls in London. Reporters who were sent to see him hounded off the platform witnessed an ovation instead. The audience at his invitation asked him many questions, but not of a hostile character.

Shaw thrives on unpopularity or at least on public disapproval, which is not quite the same thing. It is not only that Shaw would rather be right than Prime Minister; he would rather be leader of the Opposition than Prime Minister. He would be "in the right with two or three"; in fact, if his followers increased much beyond the poet's minimum, he would begin to feel uneasy and suspect that he was wrong.

When Shaw sees a lonely mistreated kitten or a lonely mistreated theory, his tender heart yearns over it. For instance, when all his set started sneering at "natural rights" as eighteenth-century pedantry, he appeared as their champion, and, practically alone among modern radicals and art lovers, he has dared to commend the Puritans. The iconoclastic views which he expressed as dramatic and musical critic in the nineties have been vindicated by events, and now when a young reader opens for the first time "The Quintessence of Ibsenism", "The Perfect Wagnerite", and the collection of "Dramatic Opinions and Essays", he wonders only why Shaw should get so excited about such conventional and undisputed things. It is no wonder Shaw is "the most hated man in England." Nothing is more irritating than to say "I told you so", and he can--and does--ay it oftener than anybody else, unless it is Doctor Dillon.

Shaw's brain secretes automatically the particular antitoxin needed to counteract whatever disease may be epidemic in the community at the time. This injected with some vigor into the veins of thought may not effect a cure, but always excites a feverish state in the organism. It is his habit of seeing that there is another side to a question and calling attention to it at inconvenient times that makes him so irritating to the public. His opponents tried to intern him in Coventry as a pro-German on account of his pamphlet, "Commonsense about the War." But this is almost the only thing produced in England during the first weeks of the war that reads well now. Compare it with its numerous replies and see which seems absurd. Doubtless it was not tactful, it might have been called treasonable, but it certainly was sensible. Shaw kept his head level when others lost theirs. That was because he had thought out things in advance and so did not have to make up his mind in a hurry with the great probability of making it up wrong. In that pamphlet he presented the case for the Allies in a way much more convincing to the American mind than many that came to us in the early days of the war, and his arguments have been strengthened by the course of events, while others advanced at that time have been weakened. Shaw was arguing before a neutral and international jury, and so he did not rest his case on the specious and patriotic pleas that passed muster at that time with the British public.

As for the charge of pro-Germanism, that may best be met by quoting from a letter written by him to a friend in Vienna early in 1915. The language is evidently not pure Shavian. It has been translated into Austrian-German and thence retranslated into British journalese.

As regards myself, I am not what is called a pro-German. The
Germans would not respect me, were I at such a time as this,
when all thoughts of culture have vanished, not to stand by
my people. But also, I am not an anti-German. The war brings
us all on to the same plane of savagery. Every London coster
can stick his bayonet deeper into the stomach of Richard
Strauss than Richard Strauss would care to do to him.

Militarism has just now compelled me to pay a thousand
pounds war taxation in order that some "brave little
Servian" may be facilitated in cutting your throat or, that
a Russian mujik may cleave your skull in twain, although I
would gladly pay twice that sum to save your life, or to buy
some beautiful picture in Vienna for our National Gallery.

Shaw has always condemned militarism because of the type of mind it engenders in officers and men. But he has never been opposed to preparedness or to the use of force. In the London _Daily News_ of January 1, 1914,--note the date,--he said:

I like courage (like most constitutionally timid civilians)
and the active use of strength for the salvation of the
world. It is good to have a giant's strength and it is not
at all tyrannous to use it like a giant provided you are
a decent sort of giant. What on earth is strength for but
to be used and will any reasonable man tell me that we are
using our strength now to any purpose?

Let us get the value of our money in strength and influence
instead of casting every new cannon in an ecstasy of terror
and then being afraid to aim it at anybody.

At that time, seven months before the storm burst, he not only anticipated the war, but said that it might be averted,

By politely announcing that war between France and Germany
would be so inconvenient to England that the latter country
is prepared to pledge herself to defend either country if
attacked by the other.

If we are asked how we are to decide which nation is really
the aggressor we can reply that we shall take our choice, or
when the problem is unsolvable we shall toss up, but that we
will take a hand in the war anyhow.

International warfare is an unmitigated nuisance. Have as
much character-building civil war as you like, but there
must be no sowing of dragon's teeth like the Franco-Prussian
War. England can put a stop to such a crime single-handed
easily enough if she can keep her knees from knocking
together in her present militarist fashion.

Of course Shaw may have been wrong in supposing that an open announcement of Great Britain's determination to enter the war would have deterred Germany, but as we now know from the White Paper this same opinion was held by the governments of both France and Russia. On July 30 the President of France said to the British Ambassador at Paris that

If His Majesty's Government announced that England would
come to the aid of France in the event of a conflict between
France and Germany as a result of the present differences
between Austria and Servia, there would be no war, for
Germany would at once modify her attitude.

And on July 25, M. Sazonof, the Russian Foreign Minister, said to the British Ambassador at Petrograd that

He did not believe that Germany really wanted war, but her
attitude was decided by ours. If we took our stand firmly
with France and Russia, there would be no war. If we failed
her now, rivers of blood would flow, and we would in the end
be dragged into war.

Shaw now gives the same advice to the United States that he gave to his own country before the war, that is, to increase its armament and not be afraid to use it. In a recent letter to the American _Intercollegiate Socialist_ he said:

I should strenuously recommend the United States to build
thirty-two new dreadnoughts instead of sixteen, and to spend
two billion dollars on its armament program instead of one.
This would cost only a fraction of the money you are wasting
every year in demoralizing luxury, a good deal of it having
been in the past scattered over the continental countries
which are now using what they saved out of it to slaughter
one another.

If the United States wishes to stop war as an institution,
that is, to undertake the policing of the world, it will
need a very big club for the purpose.

If I were an American statesman I should tell the country
flatly that it should maintain a Pacific navy capable of
resisting an attack from Japan and an Atlantic navy capable
of resisting an attack from England, with Zeppelins on the
same scale, a proportionate land equipment of siege guns,
and so forth. And until the nations see the suicidal folly
of staking everything in the last instance on the ordeal of
battle, no other advice will be honest advice.

In "Major Barbara" Cusins abandons the teaching of Greek to take up the manufacture of munitions because he has the courage "to make war on war." It is in this play that is expounded the theory on which President Wilson based his policy. Lady Britomart tells Cusins: "You must simply sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals." But Undershaft, the munition-maker, replies: "No; none of that. You must keep the true faith of an Armorer, or you don't come in here." And when Cusins asks: "What on earth is the true faith of an Armorer?" he answers:

To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for
them, without respect of persons or principles; to
aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to burglar
and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to
all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths,
all follies, all causes and all crimes.... I will take an
order from a good man as cheerfully as from a bad one. If
you good people prefer preaching and shirking to buying my
weapons and fighting the rascals, don't blame me. I can make
cannons; I cannot make courage and conviction.

In this same conversation Shaw also gives a hint of his theology, when Cusins says to Undershaft: "You have no power. You do not drive this place; it drives you. And what drives this place?" Undershaft answers, enigmatically, "A will of which I am a part." This doctrine of an immanent God working through nature and man to higher things was developed more definitely in an address which Mr. Shaw delivered some years ago in the City Temple at the invitation of the Reverend R. J. Campbell. Here he argued that God created human beings to be "his helpers and servers, not his sycophants and apologists." Shaw continues:

If my actions are God's nobody can fairly hold me
responsible for them; my conscience is mere lunacy.... But
if I am a part of God, if my eyes are God's eyes, my hands
God's hands, and my conscience God's conscience then also I
share his responsibility for the world; and wo is me if the
world goes wrong!

This position enables him to explain evil on evolutionary principles as "the Method of Trial and Error." When Blake asks of the tiger, "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" Shaw conceives the Life-Force as replying:

Yes, it was the best I could devise at the time; but now
that I have evolved something better, part of the work
of that something better, Man, to wit, is to kill out my
earlier attempt. And in due time I hope to evolve Superman,
who will in his turn kill out and supersede Man, whose
abominable cruelties, stupidities and follies have utterly
disappointed me.

In the unactable third act of his "Man and Superman",[1] this theology is put into the mouths of two most unpromising preachers, Don Juan and the Devil. Here is found one of the most eloquent arraignments of war in all literature. It is, remember, the Devil who is speaking:

I tell you that in the arts of life Man invests nothing;
but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and
produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of
plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt to-day
eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants
of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has
not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion
of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes
out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets
loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular
energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe
of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a
bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with
machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had
wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters
and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles; they are
toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat.
There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed
and sloth. His heart is in his weapons.... Man measures his
force by his destructiveness.... In the old chronicles you
read of earthquakes and pestilences, and are told that these
showed the power and majesty of God and the littleness of
Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles. In a battle
two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and
explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others
chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces
as they fly. And this, the chronicle concludes, shows the
greatness and majesty of empires, and the littleness of
the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about the
streets yelling with delight, and egg their Governments on
to spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter,
whilst the strongest ministers dare not spend an extra penny
in the pound against the poverty and pestilence in which
they themselves daily walk.... The plague, the famine, the
earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action;
the tiger and the crocodile were too easily satiated and not
cruel enough; something more constantly, more ruthlessly,
more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something
was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows
and the executioner; of the sword and gun; above all,
of justice, duty, patriotism, and all the other isms by
which even those clever enough to be humanely disposed are
persuaded to become the most destructive of all destroyers.

Three years before the war Shaw wrote a little satirical skit, "Press Cuttings",[2] which was deemed so dangerous to both Britain and Germany that the censors of both countries agreed in prohibiting its production on the stage. Since the British censor seemed to fear that the principal characters, "Balsquith" and "Mitchener", might be taken by the public as referring to certain well-known statesmen, Shaw offered to change the names to "Bones" and "Johnson." But even that concession would not satisfy the censor's scruples, so the play was never publicly put on the stage, though, since there was then no censorship of literature, it was published as a book. Here is a bit of the dialogue:

_Balsquith_--The Germans have laid down four more
Dreadnoughts.

_Mitchener_--Then you must lay down twelve.

_Balsquith_--Oh, yes; it's easy to say that; but think of
what they'll cost.

_Mitchener_--Think of what it would cost to be invaded by
Germany and forced to pay an indemnity of five hundred
millions....

_Balsquith_--After all, why should the Germans invade us?

_Mitchener_--Why shouldn't they? What else have their army
to do? What else are they building a navy for?

_Balsquith_--Well, we never think of invading Germany.

_Mitchener_--Yes, we do. I have thought of nothing else
for the last ten years. Say what you will, Balsquith, the
Germans have never recognized, and until they get a stern
lesson, they never _will_ recognize, the plain fact that the
interests of the British Empire are paramount, and that the
command of the sea belongs by nature to England.

_Balsquith_--But if they wont recognize it, what can I do?

_Mitchener_--Shoot them down.

_Balsquith_--I cant shoot them down.

_Mitchener_--Yes, you can. You dont realize it; but if you
fire a rifle into a German he drops just as surely as a
rabbit does.

_Balsquith_--But dash it all, man, a rabbit hasn't got a
rifle and a German has. Suppose he shoots you down.

_Mitchener_--Excuse me, Balsquith; but that consideration is
what we call cowardice in the army. A soldier always assumes
that he is going to shoot, not to be shot.

_Balsquith_--Oh, come! I like to hear you military people
talking of cowardice. Why, you spend your lives in an
ecstasy of terror of imaginary invasions. I don't believe
you ever go to bed without looking under it for a burglar.

_Mitchener_--A very sensible precaution,

_Balsquith._ I always take it. And in consequence I've never
been burgled.

_Balsquith_--Neither have I. Anyhow dont you taunt me with
cowardice. I never look under my bed for a burglar. I'm not
always looking under the nation's bed for an invader. And
if it comes to fighting, Im quite willing to fight without
being three to one.

_Mitchener_--These are the romantic ravings of a Jingo
civilian, Balsquith. At least you'll not deny that the
absolute command of the sea is essential to our security.

_Balsquith_--The absolute command of the sea is essential to
the security of the principality of Monaco. But Monaco isn't
going to get it.

_Mitchener_--And consequently Monaco enjoys no security.
What a frightful thing! How do the inhabitants sleep with
the possibility of invasion, of bombardment, continually
present to their minds? Would you have our English slumbers
broken in this way? Are we also to live without security?

_Balsquith_--Yes. Theres no such thing as security in the
world; and there never can be as long as men are mortal.
England will be secure when England is dead, just as the
streets of London will be safe when there is no longer a man
in her streets to be run over, or a vehicle to run over him.
When you military chaps ask for security you are crying for
the moon.

_Mitchener_--Let me tell you, Balsquith, that in these days
of aeroplanes and Zeppelin airships, the question of the
moon is becoming one of the greatest importance. It will be
reached at no very distant date. Can you as an Englishman
tamely contemplate the possibility of having to live
under a German moon? The British flag must be planted there
at all hazards.

The play ends with the establishment of universal military training and equal suffrage, thus doing away with a militarism that was both timorous and tyrannical, snobbish and inefficient, and at the same time making the nation truly democratic. It is characteristic of Shaw that recently, when the papers were discussing what sort of a monument should commemorate Edith Cavell, he interjected the unwelcome suggestion that the country could honor her best by enfranchising her sex.

There is ever something in Bernard Shaw that suggests the eighteenth century, the age of Swift and Voltaire and Doctor Johnson. On the credit side we must reckon lucidity, incisive wit, cleareyed logic, unashamed common sense, love of discussion and openness to new ideas, freedom from prejudice of race or class, humanitarian aspiration --in a word the _Aufklärung_. On the debit side some items must unhappily be listed also: doctrinaire intellectualism, inability to see either the limits of one's own doctrines or the point in other people's, inadequate appreciation of historic institutions and popular sentiments, contempt for romance, intolerance for science, and incapacity for poetry.

Shaw seems to have inherited the famous _saeva indignatio_ of his great countryman, Swift. For all his simple diet he is not so eupeptic as Chesterton. Chesterton is most closely akin to Dickens, as may be seen from his sympathetic appreciations of Dickens's works. If I may be permitted to express the relationship of the four in a mathematical formula, I should put it:

Shaw: Chesterton = Swift: Dickens.

The mordant wit of the two Irishmen is a very different thing from the genial humor of the two Englishmen. Chesterton as usual makes a theological issue out of it. He says of Shaw:

He is not a humorist, but a great wit, almost as great
as Voltaire. Humor is akin to agnosticism, which is only
the negative side of mysticism. But pure wit is akin to
Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the
final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees
consistency in things is a wit--and a Calvinist. The man who
sees inconsistency in things is a humorist--and a Catholic.
However this may be, Bernard Shaw exhibits all that is
purest in the Puritan; the desire to see truth face to face
even if it slay us, the high impatience with irrelevant
sentiment or obstructive symbol; the constant effort to keep
the soul at its highest pressure and speed. His instincts
upon all social customs and questions are Puritan. His
favorite author is Bunyan. But along with what was inspiring
and direct in Puritanism, Bernard Shaw has inherited also
some of the things that were cumbersome and traditional. If
ever Shaw exhibits a prejudice it is a Puritan prejudice.

When Shaw in the preface of his "Plays for Puritans" declared himself "a Puritan in art" it was regarded as one of his jokes. So it was, but, as the world has found out since, his jokes are not nonsense. The main reason why the assumption and ascription of the term "Puritan" to Shaw was thought absurd was because of the prevalent misconception of what sort of people the Puritans were. The word in its common acceptance implies orthodoxy, conventionality, prudishness, asceticism. Now the real Puritan was a revolutionary of the most radical type. Of all the socialists, anarchists, and extremists of various views with whom I am acquainted, there is not one who lives in antagonism to his conventional contemporaries on so many points as did the Puritan in his day. Milton's pamphlets in favor of republicanism, free speech, divorce, and new theology were as scandalous to the seventeenth century as Shaw's "Revolutionist's Handbook" to the nineteenth. The Puritans insisted that marriage was a purely civil contract to be made and annulled by the State, and they even forbade ministers to perform the ceremony, while Catholics, Roman and Anglican, hold the contrary theory, that marriage is a religious rite, only performed by priests and indissoluble. The Pilgrim Fathers who had a dozen children and two or three wives apiece--consecutive, of course--are not to be classed as ascetics; and if any one thinks them prudish, he has not read their literature.

Of course Shaw's opinions are different from those of the Puritans, indeed quite the opposite on some points. The Puritans, for example, were not averse to blood, either in their food, their politics, or their theology, while Shaw is almost Buddhistic in his tender-heartedness. Androcles is his caricature of himself. But still we may say that Shaw is puritanical in his type of mind, his attitude toward the established institutions and moral codes of his time, and even in his faults.

Consider for instance his intolerance. No, I do not mean dogmatism. That he comes to emphatic conclusions is much to his credit and differentiates him from the colloidal-minded mass of modern writers who hold no convictions to have the courage of. But he does not, for instance, content himself with the attitude: "For the life of me I can't see what you find to admire in that absurd, romantic, weak-minded, sentimental, butcherly Scott." He would be quite justified in expressing his opinion thus-wise. He must add: "There's nothing to him and if you say there is, you are deceiving me or--what is wickeder--yourself. In either case you are an Idealist, which in my unique vocabulary means liar." To which we might return an answer of the Quaker sort: "Friend, thee has two eyes and the usual number of brains and so a right to thine opinion. But it need not follow that because thee sees not a merit in a writer that it does in nowise exist." Every one of Shaw's early heroes and heroines, from the Unsocial Socialist and the daughter of Mrs. Warren to Undershaft and Larry Doyle, admires himself or herself immensely for saying to every upholder of supposedly current morality: "Bah! Humbug! Hypocrite!" To which again the gentle reply should come: "Friend, I be not an Humbug, nor yet an Hypocrite, nor even a Bah. A man may differ from thee and yet be sincere in his views, although this fact be dreamed not in thy philosophy. I may be right or I may be wrong, but if thee call me an Idealist yet again, lo, I will lift this brick and cast it at thee."

Wells and Shaw are quite commonly bracketed like Scylla and Charybdis, Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, and the Royal Bloodsweating Chesterbelloc of Holy Writ. These couplings are often absurd but rarely arbitrary. Some likeness of thought or mood or some contrast of viewpoint usually accounts for if not justifies such literary _mésalliances_. Wells and Shaw are both socialists, but this is not the tie, for, as the English aristocrat said: "We are all socialists now." The real likeness is that each is an intellectual anarchist, although a political Socialist. Shaw is an isolated, not to say eccentric, figure even for a Socialist. Wells has gone further yet in his self-isolation by leaving the Fabian movement. But the unlikeness between the two men lies in the motive driving them to their respective hermitages. Shaw may often change his point of view, but at any given moment it is almost brutally clear and detailed, and he insists upon the fullest conformity on the part of his would-be followers. If they fall a step short of his iron boundary they are mere Philistines and bourgeois, if they go a step beyond they are inefficient and contemptible sentimental revolutionists. Shaw always has "doots o' Jamie's orthodoxy." But Wells seeks a Socialism without boundaries. Marxian Socialism, Fabian Socialism, State Socialism are all too narrow and dogmatic for his taste as he has said time and time again. Finding no true all-inclusive, universe-wide Socialism he erects his own banner for the nations to rally to and as a result suffers the universal fate of those who try to found Churches of Humanity and World Languages, that is, merely succeeding in founding a new sect and a new dialect.

Shaw has two defects which militate against his popularity; first, he is too conventional, and, second, his conventions are peculiarly his own. "There is," says his Undershaft, "only one true morality for every man, but not every man has the same morality." Shaw is easily shocked, but never by the same things that shock other people.

He himself ascribes his inability to see the same as others to his sight being abnormally normal. The oculist who examined them said they were the only pair of absolutely correct eyes he had ever come across.

Of course this illusion of possessing perfect mental vision is common to everybody. All the opinions I hold at this moment are, I believe, absolutely correct; otherwise I should change them instanter, though I must admit, seeing how often I have erred in the past, that _a priori_ the chances are against my being altogether right now. But what Shaw means by his normality of vision is not merely common confidence in one's own orthodoxy, but has reference to his fanatical efforts to tear away all the illusions of life and see things as they are. I do not think that he often succeeds. Isis has many veils, and those who have torn away the first and the second are all the more likely to be deceived in mistaking the third for the naked truth.

There is no doubting Shaw's intent to undeceive the world or his willingness to undeceive himself. "My way of joking is to tell the truth," says his Father Keegan in "John Bull's Other Island." But when he strains his eyes to see something clearly he sees only that one thing. By following consistently one line of logic--instead of several as he should--he gets tangled up in illogicalities. His mode of reasoning is often the _reductio ad absurdum_ of his own theories, and this is not a persuasive way of argumentation.

By temperament Shaw is a mystic, but his conscience compels him to assume the method of cold intellectualism. He is an artist in the disguise of a scientist, not an uncommon thing to see in this so-called age of science.

Probably Shaw is not more inconsistent than any man of agile mind who is capable of seeing in succession different sides of a thing, but he is franker in expressing the point of view he holds at the time. Consequently he has many admirers but few followers. They can't keep up. The only possible Shavian is Shaw.

As somebody has remarked there are two ways of saying a thing; there are writers who provoke thought and writers who provoke thinkers. Shaw does both. This is intentional, and he defends it on the ground that; "If you don't say a thing in an irritating way, you may just as well not say it at all--since nobody will trouble themselves about anything that does not trouble them." In short Shaw first got the ear of the public by pulling it, and he does not know how to let go. Shaw's argument is a wedge, but it is driven in blunt end first. A startling statement, some monstrous paradox, is presented to the reader and rouses his antagonism, then it is gradually qualified and whittled down, or wittily diverted, so that it seems, in contrast to its first form, quite innocuous and acceptable, and the reader is so relieved at not having to swallow the dose first presented to him that he willingly takes more than he otherwise would. Shaw has not the judicial mind and does not want to have. "The way to get at the merits of a case," he says "is not to listen to a fool who imagines himself impartial, but to get it argued with reckless bias for and against." Put this on your bookmark when you read Shaw.

George Bernard Shaw's collection of opinions is unique. Perhaps no single view of his is quite original, but the combination certainly is. He belongs to no type and has founded no school. This makes Shaw an exasperating person for some people to read and causes them to set him down as frivolous or inconsistent. They find, for instance, from "The Revolutionist's Handbook" that Shaw believes in eugenics and the importance of natural science. "Good!" people say, "now we can classify him." They read "The Doctor's Dilemma" and find him a rabid antivivisectionist and filled with a profound contempt for modern medicine in general. Or they find out that he is a vegetarian, a teetotaler, and a Puritan, and classify him as some nonconformist minister of a pallid and overconscientious type. When they read what he actually has to say about marriage in "Misalliance", about popular religion and salvation by money and gunpowder in "Major Barbara", they rush to the opposite conclusion that he is constitutionally an unconstitutional rebel with a fondness for aimless violence such as appears in "Fanny's First Play." Reading "The Conversion of Blanco Bosnet" they discover that he is a devout Theist. Reading the preface to "Androcles" they find him a higher critic. As a Fabian pamphleteer he is in favor of abolishing all individual property of a productive sort and has no use for _laissez faire_. But when it comes to children (see "Misalliance") there cannot be too much _laissez faire_. He appears as an ultramodernist, a universal cynic, a disillusioned Ibsenite, and a disbeliever in the very existence of progress. (Preface to "Man and Superman".) He offended half the radicals by his "Impossibilities of Anarchism" and the other half by his "Illusions of Socialism", and the conservatives by both.

But those who will take the trouble to compare these apparent antinomies will find that the contradictions are not so great as they seem from their paradoxical and partisan form, and that Shaw has preserved his intellectual consistency to a remarkable degree.

When Shaw first burst into London, a young, red-haired Irishman, he announced himself as an atheist, an anarchist, and a vegetarian, these heresies being arranged in crescendo fashion, putting last what was most calculated to shock the British public. Now when we look back over his career we find that he has not been any more successful in sticking to his youthful heresy than others are in sticking to their youthful orthodoxy. Whether he has ever violated his vegetarian faith by eating a beefsteak on the sly I do not know, but he has drifted far from orthodox anarchism, for Socialism is, in theory at least, at the opposite pole from anarchy. Once when Shaw was talking Socialism in Hyde Park, he was much annoyed by the anarchists who circulated through the crowd, selling copies of an early pamphlet of his on "The Illusions of Socialism." As for his atheism he seems to have left that still farther behind, for his present theological views, if expressed in less provocative language, would pass muster in many a pulpit to-day. In fact, they have as it is.

In a recent letter to me, Mr. Shaw refers to the cordial reception he always received when Reverend Reginald Campbell invited him to occupy the pulpit of City Temple,[3] and adds:

My greatest and surest successes as a public speaker have
been on religious subjects to religious audiences; but
this is the common experience of all speakers. People are
still more concerned about religion than anything else,
and any reasonably good preacher can easily leave the best
political spellbinder behind.

Shaw as a Socialist differs from others who bear that name. He is too intense an individualist to be a good party man. He puts no faith in Marx as the prophet of the millennium, and he has no Utopian vision of his own. But what chiefly distinguishes him as a reformer is his power of penetrating through shams to fundamental realities and his ability to do original constructive thinking.[4] All of us can find fault with the existing order of things, and most of us do. But to point out just "what's wrong with the world" and to suggest a practical line of improvement is not so easy. The Fabian Society has done more than set off fireworks and stir up mud. The Minority Report on the reform of the Poor Law is a fine piece of constructive statesmanship. This Minority Report was largely the work of the Fabian Society, though how much Shaw had to do with it personally I do not know. We now know, however, that he was the author of Fabian Tract Number 2 of 1884 that startled the conservative classes of England, including the orthodox Marxians. Here are a few of the "Opinions Held by the Fabians" set forth in this famous tract:

That since competition among producers admittedly secures to
the public the most satisfactory products, the state should
compete with all its might in every department of production.

That no branch of industry should be carried on at a profit
by the central administration.

That men no longer need special political privileges to
protect them against women, and that the sexes should
henceforth enjoy equal political rights.

That the established government has no more right to call
itself the State than the smoke of London has to call itself
the weather.

Shaw also wrote Fabian Tract Number 45 on "The Impossibilities of Anarchism", in which he pointed out what was not so clear in 1888 as it is to-day, that society was rapidly becoming communistic through the efforts of those who were most opposed to communism as a theory:

Most people will tell you that communism is known in this
country only as a visionary project advocated by a handful
of amiable cranks. Then they will stroll across a common
bridge, along the common embankment, by the light of the
common street lamp shining alike on the just and the unjust,
up the common street and into the common Trafalgar Square
where on the smallest hint that communism is to be tolerated
for an instant in a civilized country, they will be handily
bludgeoned by a common policeman and hauled off to the
common gaol.

Shaw's latest contribution to Fabian literature, the appendix to Pease's "History of the Fabian Society", seems to me one of the most important, for in the final paragraphs he points out clearly a defect in our democracy that is rarely recognized and altogether unremedied:

Another subject which has hardly yet been touched, and which
also must begin with deductive treatment, is what may be
called the democratization of democracy, and its extension
from mere negative and very uncertain check on tyranny to a
positive organizing force. No experienced Fabian believes
that society can be reconstructed (or rather constructed,
for the difficulty is that society is as yet only half
removed from chaos) by men of the type produced by popular
election under existing circumstances likely to be achieved
before the reconstruction. The fact that a hawker cannot
ply his trade without a license whilst a man may sit in
Parliament without any relevant qualifications is a typical
and significant anomaly which will certainly not be removed
by allowing everybody to be a hawker at will. Sooner or
later, unless democracy is to be discarded in a reaction
of disgust such as killed it in ancient Athens, democracy
will demand that only such men should be presented to its
choice as have proved themselves qualified for more
serious and disinterested work than "stoking up" election
meetings to momentary and foolish excitement. Without
qualified rulers a Socialist State is impossible; and it
must not be forgotten (though the reminder is as old as
Plato) that the qualified men may be very reluctant men
instead of very ambitious ones.

It is this doubt, more or less clearly felt, lest a genuinely democratic society will fail to secure able and qualified leaders, that lies at the bottom of the prevalent distrust of popular government and causes many persons to cling to antiquated and irrational institutions like aristocracy and even monarchy.

I sent Mr. Shaw a copy of an editorial entitled, "And There Shall Be No More Kings", in _The Independent_ of March 22, 1915, and the following, penned on the margin of the clipping in his careful handwriting, is his comment on what he calls "a wise and timely article."

This war raises in an acute form the whole question of
republicanism versus German dynasticism. After the mischief
done by Franz Josef's second childhood as displayed in
his launching the forty-eight-hour ultimatum to Serbia
before the Kaiser could return from Stockholm, the world
has the right--indeed the duty--to demand that monarchies
shall at least be subject to superannuation as well as to
constitutional limitation.

All recent historical research has shown that the position
of a king, even in a jealously limited monarchy like the
British, makes him so strong that George III, who was
childish when he was not under restraint as an admitted
lunatic, was uncontrollable by the strongest body of
statesmen the eighteenth century produced. It is undoubtedly
inconvenient that the head of the state should be selected
at short intervals; but it does not follow that he (or she)
should be an unqualified person or hold office for life or
be a member of a dynasty.

I may add that if the policy of dismembering the Central
Empires by making separate national states of Bohemia,
Poland and Hungary, and making Serbia include Bosnia and
Herzegovina, is seriously put forward, it would involve
making them republics; for if they were kingdoms their
thrones would be occupied by cousins of the Hohenzollerns,
Hapsburgs and Romanoffs, strengthening the German hegemony
instead of restraining it.

Perhaps the reader will think that I am rather too presumptuous in professing to know just what Shaw means and believes, when most people are puzzled by him. So I should explain that I have the advantage of a personal acquaintance with Shaw. I may say without boasting--or at least without lying--that at one period of his life I was nearer to him than any other human being. The distance between us was in fact the diameter of one of those round tables in the A. B. C. restaurants, and the period was confined to the time it took to consume a penny bun and a cup of tea, both being paid for by him. I resorted to thorough Fletchering for the purpose of prolonging the interview, and I wished that either he or I had been a smoker. But although a vegetarian, he eschews the weed, and smoking did not seem to be in accordance with Fabian tactics.

The occasion was a recess in a Fabian Society conference. I did not suppose that anything could shut off Socialists in the midst of debate. The theme of discussion was the House of Lords, which the Fabians unanimously agreed ought to be abolished, though no two of them agreed on the substitute. But while they were iconoclasts as to one British institution, they rendered homage to another by stopping to take tea in the midst of a lovely scrap.

The Fabian Society was indirectly the fruit of one of the seeds which Thomas Davidson scattered in many lands. You can track this peripatetic philosopher through life, as you can Johnny Appleseed, by the societies that sprung up along his pathway. In the Adirondacks he founded the Glenmore School of Philosophy. In the Jewish quarter of New York City another of his schools still thrives and is enthused with something of his zeal for learning. The circle of earnest young men and women whom he gathered about him in London were the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, the Fellowship of the New Life, and the Fabian Society. Yet Davidson himself was neither a spiritualist nor a Socialist.[5]

At the Fabian Society one sees Shaw in his element. Every creature, says Browning, like the moon,

Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, One to show a woman when he loves her.

The Fabian Society is Shaw's own true love, and to her he turns a different face than to the outside world. As I watched him during the afternoon--preceding and following the brief period of personal contact of which I have been bragging--I was struck by the tact and kindliness which he showed in the course of the discussion. There was in his occasional remarks no trace of the caustic and dogmatic tone which one gets from his writings. He has been not so much the "shining light" or "presiding genius" of the society, as one of the "wheel horses", and devoted himself diligently to the detailed and inconspicuous work of the organization. He had for twenty-seven years served on the Executive Committee of the society when in 1911 he resigned to make way for the younger generation.

The question under discussion was, as I have said, that of the reconstruction of the House of Lords. This was shortly before the war, when such questions were regarded as important. Various plans were proposed in order to secure the election of the fittest, when Shaw took the floor in defense of genuine democracy. His argument ran like this, as I remember it:

Our idea is that any 670 people is as good as any other for
governing, just as any twelve chosen by chance on the jury
have our lives and property in their hands.

Now if I and Mr. Sydney Webb here were sent to the House
of Commons it should be with unlimited opportunity to talk
but not to vote. To give us a vote would be to permit the
violation of the fundamental principle of democracy that
people should never be governed better than they want to
be. If you had a government of saints and philosophers the
people would be miserable. For instance, I would want to
stop all smoking and meat-eating and liquor drinking, but
like all superior persons now I have to convince other
people because I cannot compel them.

No elected body can possibly be representative, because
no man is elected as a normal man, but as an exceptional
one. The House of Lords is more representative than the
House of Commons, because a man in the House of Commons
is there because he has uncommon abilities, high or low.
Representatives ought to be, like jurymen, samples of the
commonalty picked at random and compelled to serve. Their
function is to explain where the shoe pinches. But the shoe
must be made by skilled legislators and statesmen, and these
should be eligible only when they have satisfied a very high
standard of qualification, and should sit without votes
though with unlimited powers of explanation and criticism.

These remarks, delivered in a musical and sympathetic voice with frequent flashes of a broad row of white teeth, sounded very different from the way they read in cold type. I do hope the phonograph will be perfected before Shaw dies or his voice goes cracked, so posterity can have a vocal version of his plays and prefaces. Otherwise his personality stands little chance of being understood.

Shaw is tall and uses his eyeglasses for gesticulating as an orchestra leader uses a baton. His hair was once a fiery red, but is now tempered into gray. His eyes are light blue. Between his brows there are three perpendicular wrinkles, but not of the cross and fretful type. His face is long and pointed, but he looks not in the least Mephistophelian as the caricaturists represent him. In short, Shaw is not so black as he is painted by himself and others.

It is not necessary in this chapter, as it was in the case of some of my "Twelve Major Prophets of To-day", for me to give biographical details at any length, for these are easily accessible. Shaw has not been reticent in talking about himself in various books and prefaces, and he is fortunate in having in Professor Henderson of the University of North Carolina a biographer of the Boswell kind--probably the best kind there is. His big volume contains as much about Shaw's life and words up to the time it was published, 1911, as any one needs to know. Chesterton's book on Shaw is an impressionistic sketch rather than a portrait, giving the author an opportunity of saying "what's wrong with the world", including Shaw. Other lives of Shaw are mentioned in the appendix of this chapter.

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, July 25, 1856. His father was an Irish gentleman, Protestant, improvident and respectable, a wholesale dealer in corn, with a profound contempt for all retail tradesmen. His mother was a musician, and it was to her that Mr. Shaw owed his own moderate talent and remarkable knowledge of music. When he went to London at the age of twenty, with artistic, musical and literary ambitions, his mother practically supported the family by teaching music there. As Shaw says in one of his autobiographical fragments:

I did not throw myself into the struggle for life. I threw
my mother into it. I was not a staff to my father's old
age. I hung on to his coat tails. His reward was to live
just long enough to read a review of one of these silly
novels written in an obscure journal by a personal friend
of my own, prefiguring me to some extent as a considerable
author. I think, myself, that this is a handsome reward, far
better worth having than a nice pension from a dutiful son
struggling slavishly for his parents' bread in some sordid
trade.

His only schooling was at Dublin, where he says he learned little, and this is confirmed by the school records which place him near the bottom of his class. His opinion of the sort of education he got he has expressed in several places, especially in the preface to "Misalliance."