Chapter XIV: Enter--G.b.s

Most of the distinguished personalities of the Eighteen Nineties challenged somebody or something. George Bernard Shaw challenged everybody and everything. He began the period as one entering the lists, and he has tilted more or less successfully ever since. No other man of the time broke so many lances as he, and looking backwards one is filled with amazement at his prodigality of ideas and wit, his persistent audacity and unfailing cheerfulness. Yet these very qualities limited his effectiveness, for it took even “the intellectuals,” whose high priest he became, twenty years to realise that he was in earnest and a genius. G.B.S. was Challenge incarnate--a rampant note of interrogation, eternally asking us uncomfortable questions about our most cherished habits. Why, for instance, we ate meat? Why we vivisected animals? Why we owned property? Why we tolerated such a brainless drama--such unimaginative art--such low wages--such long hours of labour--such inconvenient houses--such adulteration--such dirty cities--such illogical morals--such dead religions--in short, such a chaotic civilisation? And he did not wait for us to answer his innumerable questions; he answered them himself, or provoking a defence by a process of irritation, he smashed our replies with the nicest of dialectical art; tempting us in the pauses of our bewilderment with a new vision of life.

In the year 1890 Bernard Shaw was hardly a name to those who were outside of convinced Socialist and revolutionary circles, although his articles on music, over the pseudonym _Corno di Bassetto_, in _The Star_ (1888–1890), afterwards continued in _The World_ from 1890–1894, made him the subject of discussion in musical circles. Socialists knew him as a tireless and effective propagandist of the collectivism upheld by the Fabian Society, of which organisation he was one of the most able members, and as the editor of the famous _Fabian Essays in Socialism_ (1889), which contained two essays by himself, one of which had been delivered before the Economic Section at the Bath Meeting of the British Association, in the preceding year. He was also known in the inner circles of Socialism as a persistent enemy of the Marxian theory of value, which he attacked on every possible occasion. He was introduced to a wider public as a result of the first production of Ibsen’s plays in London. _Rosmersholm_, _Ghosts_ and _Hedda Gabler_ had been performed by the Stage Society, and the astonishment of the dramatic critics had expressed hopeless bewilderment and surprise in a venomous Press attack. The year before Shaw had lectured upon Henrik Ibsen before the Fabian Society at the St James’ Restaurant, and this lecture, rewritten in the form of a reply to the critics, was produced as a book in 1891, under the title of _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_. And in 1892 he followed up this defence of the modern drama with a play of his own, _Widowers’ Houses_, which was produced by Mr J. T. Grein at the Royalty Theatre and published in book form during the same year.

Between 1879 and 1883 Bernard Shaw began his literary career by writing five novels. The results were not encouraging from the publishing side, four only, after many vicissitudes, achieving print, and one only, _Cashel Byron’s Profession_, receiving anything approaching recognition from Press or public. So, checked but undismayed, he turned, like more than one unsuccessful novelist, to the sister art of drama. The rest of the decade was devoted to laying the foundation of that reputation which has placed him in the forefront of the modern dramatic movement. Between 1892 and 1896 he wrote, besides _Widowers’ Houses_:--_The Philanderer: A Topical Comedy_; _Mrs Warren’s Profession: A Play_; _Arms and the Man: A Comedy_; _Candida: A Mystery_; _The Man of Destiny: A Trifle_; and _You Never Can Tell: A Comedy_. These were afterwards collected and published in 1898 in two volumes called _Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant_, prefaced by one of those essays which are his favourite medium for the interpretation of himself and his ideas to a shy-witted public. Three other plays, _The Devil’s Disciple_, _Cæsar and Cleopatra_, and _Captain Brassbound’s Conversion_, followed, and were published, in the volume called _Three Plays for Puritans_, in 1901. Public performances of most of the plays were given, but it was not until the dawn of the new century and the historic Vedrenne-Barker repertoire season at the Court Theatre (1904–1907) that the general playgoing public was convinced of even the entertainment value of these remarkable dramas. But lack of public appreciation sat lightly on the shoulders of Bernard Shaw. Seemingly possessed of exhaustless energy, and quite indifferent to neglect, he went on with his work, putting his ideas and arguments into such essays as the _Impossibilities of Anarchism_ (1893); _The Perfect Wagnerite_ (1898); _Fabianism and the Empire_ (1900); and into the long series of dramatic criticisms contributed to _The Saturday Review_ between 1895 and 1898. Whenever occasion offered he carried his warfare into current polemics by means of letters to the Press, and one of these, attacking Max Nordau’s _Degeneration_, published in the American Anarchist paper _Liberty_ (27th July 1895), probably forms a record of its kind, for it fills practically the whole of that issue of the paper, and has since been published in a volume entitled _The Sanity of Art_. He also associated himself with the more typical literary movement of the period by contributing an essay “On Going to Church” to _The Savoy_.

In all this work Bernard Shaw assumed the rôle of critic. The newly awakened social conscience found in him a willing and effective instrument, and despite his unabashed and often self-announced cleverness, the intellectual vice of the time, mere “brilliance,” critical or otherwise, was rarely for him an end in itself, as was the wit of Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm. His cleverness subserved a creative end, an end which looked forward towards a new and resplendent civilisation. It was the sharp edge of the sword of purpose. He did not scruple to enlist the forces of art in his service, and his plays, therefore, are invariably didactic, though relieved from dullness by abundant wit, much humour and vivid flashes of characterisation. Such plays, for instance, as _Widowers’ Houses_ and _Mrs Warren’s Profession_ are pure sociology in the form of drama, or rather melodrama, for Shaw is the melodramatist of the intellect. He seeks to do for the head what Charles Reade sought to do for the heart, and there is no fundamental difference between the inspiration at the back of _Widowers’ Houses_ and _It’s Never Too Late to Mend_: both are dramatised tracts.

Art for art’s sake had come to its logical conclusion in decadence, and Bernard Shaw joined issue with the ascendant spirit of the times, whose more recent devotees have adopted the expressive phrase: art for life’s sake. It is probable that the decadents meant much the same thing, but they saw life as intensive and individual, whereas the later view is universal in scope. It roams extensively over humanity, realising the collective soul. The decadent art idea stood for individuals, and saw humanity only as a panoramic background. The ascendant view promotes the background to a front place; it sees life communally and sees it whole, and refuses to allow individual encroachments. Bernard Shaw upheld this vision of life, and strove to square it with his own inborn and emphatic individuality. He considered it legitimate to use art to establish and extend his ideas. “Fine art,” he said, “is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective means of moral propagandism in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favour of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant, unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing.” In the epistolary essay to _Liberty_ he emphasised and detailed his sense of the moral value of art, revealing his divergence from the Ruskin-Morris view of art as joyful work, as well as from the views of Gautier and Baudelaire:

“The claim of art to our respect must stand or fall with the validity of its pretension to cultivate and refine our senses and faculties until seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting become highly conscious and critical acts with us, protesting vehemently against ugliness, noise, discordant speech, frowsy clothing and foul air, and taking keen interest and pleasure in beauty, in music, and in the open air, besides making us insist, as necessary for comfort and decency, on clean, wholesome, handsome fabrics to wear, and utensils of fine material and elegant workmanship to handle. Further, art should refine our sense of character and conduct, of justice and sympathy, greatly heightening our self-knowledge, self-control, precision of action, and considerateness, and making us intolerant of baseness, cruelty, injustice and intellectual superficiality or vulgarity. The worthy artist or craftsman is he who responds to this cultivation of the physical or moral senses by feeding them with pictures, musical compositions, pleasant houses and gardens, good clothes and fine implements, poems, fictions, essays and dramas, which call the heightened senses and ennobled faculties into pleasurable activity. The greatest artist is he who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by supplying works of a higher beauty and a higher interest than have yet been perceived, succeeds, after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in adding this fresh extension of sense to the heritage of the race. This is why we value art: this is why we feel that the iconoclast and the Puritan are attacking something made holier, by solid usefulness, than their own theories of purity; this is why art has won the privileges of religion; so that London shopkeepers who would fiercely resent a compulsory church rate, who do not know ‘Yankee Doodle’ from ‘God save the Queen,’ and who are more interested in the photograph of the latest celebrity than in the Velasquez portraits in the National Gallery, tamely allow the London County Council to spend their money on bands, on municipal art inspectors, and on plaster casts from the antique.”

Bernard Shaw strove to add to the heritage of the race a keener sense of reality. He called it “the sense of fact.” And it was in pursuit of this idea that he defended the art of the French Impressionists and Richard Wagner and Henrik Ibsen. Much of his humour is based on the portrayal of the incongruity between those who see things clearly and those who don’t; between the faculty of seeing life and experiencing life with frank individual conviction, and the habit of seeing and living by the proxies of convention and tradition. His wit is designedly explosive, but only apparently impudent and irreverent, for it seeks to startle a moribund society out of its stultifying habits, duties and ideals. In _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_ he upholds realism against idealism, with the plays of Ibsen as text. But his sense of reality does not take reason for its basis. The basis of the new realism is the will. Reason takes the subsidiary place of defender of the will, and will and faith are treated as one. Reason does not indicate direction to the will, it proves that wilfulness is right--after the act. Shaw says, in effect, do what you want to do and then prove you are right. It will thus be seen that anything in the nature of an ideal, a formal duty or a fixed habit must necessarily conflict with the realist attitude. “The realist ... loses patience with ideals altogether, and sees in them only something to blind us, something to numb us, something whereby instead of resisting death, we can disarm it by committing suicide.” He associates his attack upon ideals with the idea of stripping the mask from the face of reality which is life.

Rationalism found a convinced and subtle enemy in this new master of dialectics, for those whose minds could survive the laughter provoked by the humorous presentation of the Shavian doctrine realised quickly enough, and, if they were rationalists, tragically enough, that the moral and religious system rationalism had expended so much energy in attacking was really rationalism triumphant. Shaw announced that civilisation was rational but wrong. Yet in the Eighteen Nineties he had no place for mysticism in his view of life. The rationalists came to grief by reasoning about something, and Shaw did not think it possible to improve matters by becoming a mystic and “reasoning about nothing.” Since then he has modified his view, but now as then his sole aim has been the conquest of reality. This is brought out nowhere so clearly as in the “Interlude” in _Man and Superman_, and in one passage, that in which Don Juan explains his ideas of heaven and hell, we have the quintessence of Shavianism. “Do you suppose heaven is like earth?” Don Juan asks Ana; “where people persuade themselves that what is done can be undone by repentance; that what is spoken can be unspoken by withdrawing it; that what is true can be annihilated by a general agreement to give it the lie? No: heaven is the home of the masters of reality: that is why I am going thither.” Ana answers that she has had quite enough reality on earth and that she is going to heaven for happiness. Don Juan advises her to remain in hell for “hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven, which is ... the home of the masters of reality, and from earth which is the home of the slaves of reality.” And again he says he would enjoy the contemplation of that which interests him above all things--“namely, Life: the force that ever strives to attain greater power of contemplating itself.” The end of this contemplation is to be the creation of a brain capable of wielding an imagination fine enough to help Life in its struggle upward.

With such a conception of life and its purpose Bernard Shaw entered the lists, advocating many causes which might tend towards the realisation of his idea. He managed to combine a firm anti-romantic attitude with convinced humanitarian preferences. Thus he became vegetarian, anti-vaccinationist, anti-vivisectionist and Socialist. His arguments and advocacy were able, and therefore useful to all of these causes, but it was as a Socialist that his genius for propaganda displayed itself to best advantage. Long before the outer public had heard of him, innumerable people whose minds were ripening under social and industrial discontent came under the spell of his eloquence in revolutionary club rooms, in Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park and other open-air forums of the people, and at the meetings of the Fabian Society. It was at the Fabian Society that he was heard to best advantage, for there he was matched in debate with some of the keenest intelligences and quickest minds in London.

To Socialism, however, he contributed no original thought. He was in the main content to advocate and buttress with eloquence and dialectic the collectivist opportunism of his friend, Sidney Webb. The constitutional methods of Webb and the Fabian Society have indeed seemed at times difficult to square with Bernard Shaw’s written views of what ought to be the true attitude of a revolutionist. Particularly is this obvious in such later plays as _Man and Superman_ and _Major Barbara_, where there are expressions which it is not easy to construe otherwise than as advocacy of direct action and revolt. Even in his Fabian utterances he has not always taken the orthodox Fabian line, which is always uncompromisingly middle-class, as, for instance, in his insistence on the complete acceptance of the idea of economic equality as the only basis of the Socialist state, and it is conceivable that, if the revolutionary philosophy of Shaw’s plays were pushed to its logical conclusion, their author would find himself in the ranks of those Socialists who believe less in parliamentary and legal processes of reform than in active revolt.

Bernard Shaw’s original contribution to the intellectual awakening of the Eighteen Nineties was not so much an idea as a new attitude of approaching all ideas and all facts. The approach by criticism is by no means a novel method in itself, but it is always a novelty in the stable mental atmosphere of English and, indeed, Teutonic culture. Anything in the nature of criticism and its correlatives, satire and caricature, are treated by most people in this country as mere irreverence. Shaw has always been considered irreverent, though probably few more earnest and essentially religious men ever existed. But the cumulative effect of his wit has moved a mountain range of indifference, and although the majority of those who go to his plays go to laugh and remain to laugh (often beyond reason), many remain to laugh and pray. These plays have had a more immediate and more intelligent success in Germany, but they have attracted little attention in France. This is not quite so hard to explain as it might appear at first sight. In England we could not see the seriousness of Shaw because his critical attack being local hit us before his humour could win home. In Germany a similar mental _milieu_ greeted him more readily because his irreverence, apparently the outcome of criticism of British institutions and morals, but really a criticism of modern civilised morality, did not hit Germany so hard, and consequently his wit was free to carry on its subtle trade in philosophy. But in France Shavianism was no new thing. Criticism had been freer in that country for over a century than in any other country in the world. Wit was no rarity; diabolonian humour no uncommon weapon, and idea-play no novelty. France in fact was the birthplace of modernity, and the modernity of Shaw was outmoded there before we began to notice its existence here. Whilst England and Germany were murmuring delightedly “brilliant”--“daring”--“clever”--at each successive Shavian sally, the land of Voltaire and Rousseau, Baudelaire and Zola, Anatole France and Brieux, could only say: “_Vieux jeu!_”--Queen Anne’s dead!

Shaw’s success in England has not been in any way national. It is at best a class acceptance and generally bourgeois. The mass of the people know him only as a name frequently appearing in the papers, and often enough in connection with some statement or idea which to them seemed incomprehensible or freakish. The reason is not far to seek, for Bernard Shaw is an apostle to the Middle Class, as, indeed, he is a product of that class. He displays all its characteristics in his personality and his art, what are called his eccentricities of thought and expression being often little more than advertisements of his own respectability. Puritanical, economical, methodical, deeply conscious of responsibility and a sound man of affairs, he sums up in his own personality all the virtues of the class satirised by Ibsen in _The Pillars of Society_. An examination of his most “advanced” ideas urges the point; for even his dialectic is bourgeois from its nicest subtleties to its most outrageous explosions. When he shocks the middle classes, which he does very often, he shocks them with the sort of squibs they would let off to shock themselves for fun; and when he argues with them he uses precisely the kind of argument they use in defence of the things they already know and like. As a Socialist he invariably appeals to the bourgeois instinct of self-interest; and much of his philosophy is a modern variation of the bourgeois ideals of self-help and self-reliance--namely, self-assertion. He tells the bourgeoisie that they are, politically, the neglected and abused class, and advises them to retaliate upon their oppressors by adopting a Socialism broad-based in the Utopian dream of a nationalised respectability. And when his interested, but by no means convinced, hearers stumble over the horrible thought that they may have to abandon the financial basis of their estate, Bernard Shaw produces a defence of money which turns consternation into delight and Socialist philosophy into self-interest.

All of which does not alter the freshness of his gospel nor the veritability of his unique contribution to modern thought. As a critic he has made it possible for all who desire to do so to look at life in their own way, and in doing so to surround their egoism with a margin of sweet tolerance; he has philosophised common-sense, and made anti-climax a popular literary, conversational and oratorical trick; and he has gone far towards reintroducing intelligence to the British theatre and proving that in some circumstances an intelligent drama is a sound commercial proposition. Above all he has demonstrated the dramatic possibilities of discussion, and by so doing linked up the literary drama with Platonic dialogue, and, at the same time, he has left the theatre free to develop at the right moment its natural emotional and imaginative tradition.

If circumstances have forced Bernard Shaw to give to the middle classes what was meant for humanity, it is consoling to think that his teaching is big enough and good enough for the latter. In the essence of things there is nothing in his teaching or his ideas fundamentally opposed to broad human needs. Rightly understood, Shaw’s gospel is universal, and none the less so because it is eclectic and has been assimilated and selected by one of the most able and distinguished minds our nation has produced from the thought of the most powerful and original of modern intelligences. Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen and Samuel Butler have all contributed material to augment that gospel of reality which Shaw has preached with so much original eloquence and wit. The Eighteen Nineties were largely indifferent to the high and bewildering purpose of this teaching, although it is not easy to imagine an atmosphere better suited for its development either on the part of its creator or of his possible followers. It was reserved for the new century to recognise Shaw’s great gifts by wide discussion and much protest, and it is certain that protest will die down when the ripe sanity and easy common-sense of his purpose is seen through the satiric _diablerie_ of the mask he chooses to wear.

No other modern writer in this country save Samuel Butler, and none in Europe save Tolstoy and Ibsen, have looked at life so frankly as Bernard Shaw. Zola, generally considered an arch-realist, but really a romantic, was so obsessed by the shibboleth of scientific accumulation of evidence that his vision is as blurred as that of Herbert Spencer; Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both looked at life through the distorting glass of theory; Ruskin and Carlyle saw only parts of life. But Tolstoy and Ibsen, Butler and Shaw possessed the faculty of looking at life with photographic vision. Realists of this type are the outcome of that impulsion towards frankness which produced the Impressionists. Manet and Degas are their prototypes in the graphic arts; and just as these artists demanded and accepted with all its consequences the full reality and accent of light, so the artist-philosophers, working in the same spirit, allowed light absolute freedom in the realms of observing intellect and informing imagination.

To look at life until you see it clearly is Bernard Shaw’s avowed aim. His concern being with humanity and the fine arts, he has made it his business to see these manifestations of life clearly and deduce his philosophy from them without fear of what has been said or believed or experienced. And although he now sets a higher value on contemplation, in the Nineties he knew that contemplation was not enough in itself. Writing of life, in 1896, he said: “Only by intercourse with men and women can we learn anything about it. This involves an active life, not a contemplative one; for unless you do something in the world, you can have no real business to transact with men; and unless you love and are loved, you can have no intimate relations with them. And you must transact business, wirepull politics, discuss religion, give and receive hate, love and friendship, with all sorts of people before you can acquire the sense of humanity. If you are to acquire the sense sufficiently to be a philosopher, you must do all these things unconditionally.” Facing life in suchwise himself he has hammered out his own religion of art, activity and contemplation, and this religion finds a voice in all his work, and is summed up in many passages, but in none so intimately and so personally as in a passage in _The Savoy_ essay, “On Going to Church”: “Any place where men dwell, village or city, is a reflection of the consciousness of every single man. In my consciousness there is a market, a garden, a dwelling, a workshop, a lovers’ walk--above all, a cathedral. My appeal to the master-builder is: Mirror this cathedral for me in enduring stone; make it with hands; let it direct its sure and clear appeal to my senses, so that when my spirit is vaguely groping after an elusive mood my eye shall be caught by the skyward tower, showing me where, within the cathedral, I may find my way to the cathedral within me.” Reading these words one might have paused, wondering whether Shaw would always believe mysticism to be argument about nothing, and whether his work might not bridge the rationalist gap between the old mysticism and the new.