 I should suppose that Caesar and Cleopatra marks about the turning tide of Bernard Shaw's fortune and fame. Up to this time he had known glory, but never a success. He had been wondered if something brilliant and barren like a meteor, but no one would accept him as a sun. For the test of a sun is that it can make something grow. Practically speaking, the two qualities of a modern drama are that it should play and that it should pay. It had been proved over and over again in weighty dramatic criticisms in careful readers' reports that the plays of Shaw could never play or pay, that the public did not want wit and the wars of intellect, and just about the time that this had been finally proved, the plays of Bernard Shaw promised to play like Charlie's aunt and to pay like Coleman's mustard. It is a fact in which we can all rejoice, not only because it redeems the reputation of Bernard Shaw, but because it redeems the character of the English people. All that is bravest in human nature, open challenge and unexpected wit and angry conviction, are not so very unpopular as the publishers and managers in their motorcars have been in the habit of telling us. But exactly because we have come to a turning point in the man's career, I propose to interrupt the mere catalogue of his plays and to treat his latest series rather as the proclamations of an acknowledged prophet. For the last plays, especially Man and Superman, are such that his whole position must be restated before attacking them seriously. For two reasons I have called this concluding series of plays not again by the name of the dramatist, by the general name of the philosopher. The first reason is that, given above, that we have come to the time of his triumph and may therefore treat him as having gained complete possession of a pulpit of his own. But there is a second reason, that it was just about this time that he began to create not only a pulpit of his own, but a church and a creed of his own. It is a very fast and universal religion, and it is not his fault that he is the only member of it. The planer way of putting it is this, that here, in the hour of his earthly victory, there dies in him the old mere denier, the mere dynamiter of criticism. In the warmth of popularity he begins to wish to put his faith positively, to offer some solid key to all creation. Perhaps the irony in the situation is this, that all the crowds are claiming him as the blasting and hypocritical of whom while he himself is seriously rallying his synthetic power, and with a grave face telling himself that it is time he had a faith to preach. His final success as the sort of charlatan coincides with his first grand failures as a theologian. For this reason, I have deliberately called a halt in his dramatic career in order to consider these two essential points. What did the mass of Englishmen, who had now learned to admire him, imagine his point of view to be? And second, what did he imagine it to be? Or if the phrase be premature, what did he imagine it was going to be? In his latest work, especially in Man and Superman, Shaw has become a complete and colossal mystic. That mysticism does grow quite rationally out of his older arguments, but very few people ever trouble to trace the connection. In order to do so it is necessary to say what was, at the time of his first success, the public impression of Shaw's philosophy. Now it is an irritating and pathetic thing that the three most popular phrases about Shaw are false. Modern criticism, like all weak things, is overloaded with words. In a healthy condition of language a man finds it very difficult to say the right thing, but at last says it. In this empire of journeys a man finds it so very easy to say the wrong thing that he never thinks of saying anything else. False or meaningless phrases lie so ready to his hand that it is easier to use them than not to use them. These wrong terms, picked up through idleness, are retained through habit, and so the man has begun to think wrong almost before he has begun to think at all. Such a lumbering logomachy is always injurious and oppressive to men of spirit, imagination or intellectual honor, and it has dealt very recklessly and wrongly with Bernard Shaw. He is contrived to get about three newspaper phrases tied to his tail, and those newspaper phrases are all and separately wrong. The three superstitions about him it would be considered are generally these. First, that he desires problem plays. Second, that he is paradoxical. And third, that in his dramas as elsewhere he is specially a socialist. And the interesting thing is that when we come to his philosophy all these three phrases are quite peculiarly inapplicable. To take the plays first there is a general disposition to describe that type of intimate or defiant drama which he approves as the problem play. Now the serious modern play is as a rule the very reverse of a problem play, for there can be no problem unless both points of view are equally and urgently presented. Hamlet really is a problem play because at the end of it one is really endowed as to whether upon the author showing Hamlet is something more than a man or something less. Henry IV and Henry V are really problem plays in this sense, that the reader or spectator is really doubtful whether the high but harsh efficiency, valor and ambition of Henry V are an improvement on his old black guard comrade and whether he was not a better man when he was a thief. This hearty and healthy doubt is very common in Shakespeare. I mean a doubt that exists in the writer as well as in the reader. But Bernard Shaw is far too much of a puritan to tolerate such doubts about points which he counts essential. There is no sort of doubt that the young lady in arms and the man is improved by losing her ideals. There is no sort of doubt that Captain Brass Bound is improved by giving up the object of his life. But a better case can be found in something that both dramatists have been concerned with. Shaw wrote Caesar and Cleopatra, Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra, and also Julius Caesar. And exactly what a noise Bernard Shaw about Shakespeare's version is this, that Shakespeare has an open mind, or in other words, that Shakespeare has really written a problem play. Shakespeare sees quite as clearly as Shaw that Brutus is unpractical and ineffectual. But he also sees what is quite as plain and practical in fact, that these ineffectual men do capture the hearts and influence the policies of mankind. Shaw would have nothing said in favor of Brutus because Brutus is on the wrong side in politics. Of the actual problem of public and private morality as it was presented to Brutus, he takes actually no notice at all. He can write the most energetic and outspoken of propaganda plays, but he cannot rise to a problem play. He cannot really divide his mind and let the two parts speak independently to each other. He has never so to speak, actually split his head in two, though I daresay there are many other people who are willing to do it for him. Sometimes, especially in his later plays, he allows his clear convictions to spoil even his admirable dialogue, making one side entirely weak as in an evangelical track. I do not know whether in Major Barbara the young Greek professor was supposed to be a fool. As a popular tradition which I trust more than anything else, declared that he is drawn from a real professor of my acquaintance, who is anything but a fool. I should imagine not, but in that case I am all the more mystified by the incredibly weak fight which he makes in the play in answer to the elephantine sophistries of undershaft. It is really a disgraceful case, and almost the only case in Shaw of there being no fair fight between the two sides. For instance, the professor mentions pity. Mr. undershaft says with melodramatic scorn, pity, the scavenger of the universe. Now, if any gentleman had said this to me, I should have replied, if I permit you to escape from the point by means of metaphors, will you tell me whether you disapprove of scavengers? Instead of this obvious retort, the miserable Greek professor only says, well then love, to which undershaft replies with unnecessary violence, that he won't have the Greek professor's love, to which the obvious answer, of course, would be, how the deuce can you prevent my loving you if I choose to do so? Instead of this, as far as I remember, that abject Hellena says nothing at all. I only mention this unfair dialogue because it marks, I think, the recent hardening for good or evil of Shaw out of a dramatist into a mere philosopher, and whoever hardens into a philosopher may be hardening into a fanatic. And just as there is nothing really problematic in Shaw's mind, so is there nothing really paradoxical. The meaning of the word paradoxical may indeed be made the subject of argument. In Greek, of course, it simply means something which is against the received opinion. In that sense, a missionary remonstrating with South Sea cannibals is paradoxical. But in the much more important world where words are used and altered in the using, paradox does not mean merely this. It means at least something of which the antimony or apparent inconsistency is sufficiently plain in the word used. And most commonly of all it means an idea expressed in a form which is verbally contradictory. Thus, for instance, the great saying that he shall lose his life, the same shall save it, is an example of what modern people mean by a paradox. If any learned person should read this book, which seems immeasurably improbable, he can content himself with putting it this way, but the moderns mistakenly say paradox when they should say oxymoron. Ultimately, in any case, it may be agreed that we commonly mean by a paradox some kind of collision between what is seemingly and what is really true. Now, if by a paradox we mean truth inherent in a contradiction, as in the saying of Christ that I have quoted, it is a very curious fact that Bernard Shaw is almost entirely without paradox. Moreover, he cannot even understand a paradox, and more than this, paradox is about the only thing in the world that he does not understand. All his splendid vistas and startling suggestions arise from carrying some one clear principle further than it has yet been carried. His madness is all consistency, not inconsistency. As the point can hardly be made clear without examples, let us take one example, the subject of education. Shaw has been all his life preaching to grown-up people the profound truth that liberty and responsibility go together, that the reason why freedom is so often easily withheld is simply that it is a terrible nuisance. This is true, though not the whole truth, of citizens, and so when Shaw comes to children he can only apply to them the same principle that he has already applied to citizens. He begins to play with the Herbert Spencer idea of teaching children by experience, perhaps the most fatuously silly idea that was ever gravely put down in print. On that there is no need to dwell. One has only to ask how the experimental method is to be applied to a precipice, and the theory no longer exists. But Shaw affected a further development, if possible more fantastic. He said that one should never tell a child anything without letting him hear the opposite opinion. That is to say, when you tell Tommy not to hit his sixth sister on the temple, you must make sure of the presence of some Nietzsche-eyed professor who will explain to him that such a course might possibly serve to eliminate the unfit. When you are in the act of telling Susan not to drink out of the bottle labeled poison, you must telegraph for a Christian scientist who will be ready to maintain that without her own consent it cannot do her any harm. What would happen to a child brought up on Shaw's principle? I cannot conceive. I should think he would commit suicide in his bath. But that is not here the question. The point is that this proposition seems quite sufficiently wild and startling to ensure that its author, if he escapes Hanwell, would reach the front rank of journalists, demagogues, or public entertainers. It is a perfect paradox. If a paradox only means something that makes one jump. But it is not a paradox at all in the sense of a contradiction. It is not a contradiction, but an enormous and outrageous consistency. The one principle a free thought carried to a point to which no other sane man would consent to carry it. Exactly what Shaw does not understand is the paradox, the unavoidable paradox of childhood. Though this child is much better than I, yet I must teach it. Though this being has much purer passions than I, I must control it. Although Tommy is quite right to rush towards a precipice, yet he must be stood in the corner for doing it. This contradiction is the only possible condition of having to do with children at all. Anyone who talks about a child without feeling this paradox might just as well be talking about a merman. He has never even seen the animal. But this paradox, Shaw in his intellectual simplicity, cannot see. He cannot see it, because it is a paradox. His only intellectual excitement is to carry one idea further and further across the world. It never occurs to him that it might meet another idea, and like the three winds in Martin Chuzzlewit, they might make a night of it. His only paradox is to pull out one thread or cord of truth, longer and longer, into waste and fantastic places. He does not allow for that deeper sort of paradox, by which two opposite cords of truth become entangled in an inextricable knot. Still less can he be made to realize that it is often this knot which ties safely together the whole bundle of human life. This blindness to paradox everywhere perplexes his outlook. He cannot understand marriage because he will not understand the paradox of marriage, that the woman is all the more the house for not being the head of it. He cannot understand patriotism because he will not understand the paradox of patriotism, that one is all the more human for not merely loving humanity. He does not understand Christianity because he will not understand the paradox of Christianity, that we can only really understand all myths when we know that one of them is true. I do not under radium for this anti-paradoxical temper I concede that much of his finest and keenest work in the way of intellectual purification would have been difficult or impossible without it. But I say that here lies the limitation of that lucid and compelling mind. He cannot quite understand life because he will not accept its contradictions. Nor is it by any means descriptive of Shaw to call him a socialist, insofar as that word can be extended to cover an ethical attitude. He is the least social of all socialists, and I pity the socialist state that tries to manage him. This anarchism of his is not a question of thinking for himself. Every decent man thinks for himself. It would be highly immodest to think for anybody else. Nor is it any instinctive license or egoism, as I have said before. He is a man of peculiarly acute public conscience. The unmanageable part of him, the fact that he cannot be conceived as part of a crowd or as really an invisibly helping a movement, has reference to another thing in him, or rather to another thing not in him. The great defect of that fine intelligence is a failure to grasp and enjoy the things commonly called convention and tradition, which are foods upon which all human creatures must feed frequently, if they are to live. Very few modern people, of course, have any idea of what they are. Convention is very nearly the same word as democracy. It has, again and again in history, been used as an alternative word to parliament. So far from suggesting anything stale or sober, the word convention rather conveys a hubbub. It is the coming together of men. Every mob is a convention. In its secondary sense, it means the common soul of such a crowd, its instinctive anger at the trader, or its instinctive salutation of the flag. Conventions may be cruel, they may be unsuitable, they may even be grossly superstitious or obscene. But there is one thing that they never are. Conventions are never dead. They are always full of accumulated emotions, the piled up and passionate experiences of many generations asserting what they could not explain. To be inside any true convention, as the Chinese respect for parents or the European respect for children, is to be surrounded by something which whatever else it is is not ledden, lifeless or automatic. Something which is talked and tingling with vitality at a hundred points, which is sensitive almost to madness and which is so much alive that it can kill. Now Bernard Shaw has always made this one immense mistake arising out of that bad progressive education of his. The mistake of treating convention as a dead thing, treating it as if it were a mere physical environment, like the pavement or the rain. Whereas it is a result of will, a rain of blessings, and a pavement of good intentions. Let it be remembered that I am not discussing in what degree one should allow for tradition. I am saying that men like Shaw do not allow for it at all. If Shaw had found in early life that he was contradicted by Brad Shaw's railway guide, or even by the Encyclopedia Britannica, he would have felt at least that he might be wrong. But if he had found himself contradicted by his father and mother, he would have thought it all the more probable that he was right. If the issue of the last evening paper contradicted him, he might be troubled to investigate or explain that the human tradition of two thousand years contradicted him did not trouble him for an instant, that Marx was not with him was important, that man was not with him was an irrelevant prehistoric joke. People have talked far too much about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw. Perhaps his only pure paradox is this almost unconscious one, that he has tended to think that because something has satisfied generations of men it must be untrue. CHAPTER VI. PART II. CHAPTER VI. PART II. THE PHILLOSOPHER. CHAPTER VI. PART II. THE PHILLOSOPHER. Shaw is wrong about nearly all the things one learns early in life, while one is still simple. Most human beings start with certain facts of psychology, to which the rest of life must be somewhat related. For instance, every man falls in love and no man falls into free love. When he falls into that he calls it lust, and is always ashamed of it even when he boasts of it. That there is some connection between a love and a vow, nearly every human being knows, before he is eighteen. That there is a solid and instinctive connection between the idea of sexual ecstasy and the idea of some sort of almost suicidal constancy. This I say is simply the first fact in one's own psychology. Boys and girls know it almost before they know their own language. How far it can be trusted, how it can best be dealt with, all that is another matter. But lovers lust after constancy more than after happiness. If you are in any sense prepared to give them what they ask, then what they ask beyond all question is an oath of final fidelity. Lovers may be lunatics, lovers may be children, lovers may be unfit for citizenship and outside human argument. You can take up that position if you will. But lovers do not only desire love. They desire marriage. The root of legal monogamy does not lie, as Shaw and his friends are forever drearily asserting, in the fact that the man is a mere tyrant and the woman a mere slave. It lies in the fact that, if their love for each other is the noblest and freest love conceivable, it can only find its heroic expression in both becoming slaves. I only mention this matter here, as a matter which most of us do not need to be taught, for it was the first lesson of life. In after years we may make up what code or compromise about sex we like, but we all know that constancy, jealousy, and the personal pledge are natural and inevitable in sex. We do not feel any surprise when we see them, either in a murder or in a valentine. We may or may not see wisdom in early marriages, but we know quite well that wherever the thing is genuine at all, early loves will mean early marriages. But Shaw had not learnt about this tragedy of the sexes. What the rustic ballads of any country on earth would have taught him, he had not learnt what universal common sense has put into all the folklore of the earth, that love cannot be thought of clearly for an instant, except as monogamous. The old English ballads never sing the praises of lovers, they always sing the praise of true lovers, and that is the final philosophy of the question. The same is true of Mr. Shaw's refusal to understand the love of the land, either in the form of patriotism or of private ownership. It is the attitude of an Irishman cut off from the soil of Ireland, retaining the audacity and even cynicism of the national type, but no longer fed from the roots with its pathos or its experience. This broader and more brotherly rendering of convention must be applied particularly to the conventions of the drama, since that is necessarily the most democratic of all the arts, and it will be found generally that most of the theatrical conventions rest on a real artistic basis. The Greek unities, for instance, were not proper objects of the meticulous and trivial imitation of Seneca or Gabriel Harvey. But still less were they the right objects for the equally trivial and far more vulgar impatience of men like Macaulay. That a tale should, if possible, be told of one place or one day or a manageable number of characters is an ideal, plainly rooted in an aesthetic instinct. But if this be so with classical drama, it is yet more certainly so with romantic drama against the somewhat decayed dignity of which Bernard Shaw was largely in rebellion. There was one point in particular upon which the Ibsenites claimed to have reformed the romantic convention, which is worthy of special illusion. Shaw and all the other Ibsenites were fond of insisting that a defect in the romantic drama was its tendency to end with wedding bells. Against this they set the modern drama of Middle Age, the drama which described marriage itself instead of its poetic preliminaries. Now if Bernard Shaw had been more patient with popular tradition, more prone to think that there might be some sense in its survival, he might have seen this particular problem much more clearly. The old playwrights have left us plenty of plays of marriage and Middle Age. Othello is as much about what follows the wedding bells as the doll's house. Macbeth is about a Middle Age couple as much as little Ioth. But we ask ourselves what is the real difference. We shall, I think, find that it can be fairly stated thus. The old tragedies of marriage, though not love stories, are like love stories in this, that they work up to some act or stroke which is irrevocable, as marriage is irrevocable, to the fact of death or of adultery. Now the reason why our fathers did not make marriage in the Middle Age and aesthetic sense, the subject of their plays, was a very simple one. It was that a play is a very bad place for discussing that topic. You cannot easily make a good drama out of the success or failure of a marriage, just as you could not make a good drama of the growth of an oak tree or the decay of an empire. As Polonius very reasonably observed, it is too long. A happy love affair will make a drama simply because it is dramatic. It depends on an ultimate yes or no, but a happy marriage is not dramatic. Perhaps it would be less happy if it were. The essence of a romantic heroine is that she asks herself an intense question, but the essence of a sensible wife is that she is much too sensible to ask herself any questions at all. All the things that make monogamy a success are in their nature, undramatic things. The silent growth of an instinctive confidence, the common wounds and victories, the accumulation of customs, the rich maturing of old jokes. Sane marriage is an untheatrical thing. It is therefore not surprising that most modern dramatists had devoted themselves to insane marriage. To summarize, before touching the philosophy which Shaw has ultimately adopted, we must quit the notion that we know it already, and that it is hit off in such journalistic terms as these three. Shaw does not wish to multiply problem plays or even problems. He has such skepticism as is the misfortune of his age, but he has this dignified and courageous quality that he does not come to ask questions but to answer them. He is not a paradox monger. He is a wild thudition, far too simple even to be called a sophist. He understands everything in life except its paradoxes, especially that ultimate paradox that the very things that we cannot comprehend are the things that we have to take for granted. Lastly, he is not especially social or collectivist. On the contrary, he rather dislikes men in the mass, though he can appreciate them individually. He has no respect for collective humanity in its two great forms, either in that momentary form which we call a mob, or that enduring form which we call a convention. The general cosmic theory, which can so far be traced through the earlier essays and plays of Bernard Shaw, may be expressed in the image of Schopenhauer, standing on his head. I cheerfully concede that Schopenhauer looks much nicer in that posture than in his original one, but I can hardly suppose that he feels more comfortable. The substance of the change is this. Roughly speaking, Schopenhauer maintained that life is unreasonable. The intellect, if it could be impartial, would tell us to cease. But a blind partiality and instinct, quite distinct from thought, drives us on to take desperate chances in an essentially bankrupt lottery. Shaw seems to accept this dingy estimate of the rational outlook, but adds a somewhat arresting comment. Schopenhauer had said, Life is unreasonable, so much the worse for all living things. Shaw said, Life is unreasonable, so much the worse for reason. Life is the higher call, life we must follow. It may be that there is some undetected fallacy in reason itself. Perhaps the whole man cannot get inside his own head. Any more than he can jump down his own throat. But there is about the need to live, to suffer, and to create that imperative quality which can truly be called supernatural, of whose voice it can indeed be said that it speaks with authority and not as describes. This is the first and the finest item of original Bernard Shaw creed. That if reason says that life is irrational, life must be content to reply that reason is lifeless. Life is the primary thing, and if reason impedes it, then reason must be trodden down into the mire amid the most abject superstitions. In the ordinary sense, it would be especially absurd to suggest that Shaw desires man to be a mere animal. But that is always associated with lust or incontinence, and Shaw's ideals are strict, hygienic, and even one might say, old mate-ish. But there is a mystical sense in which one may say literally that Shaw desires man to be an animal. That is, he desires him to cling first and last to life, to the spirit of animation, to the thing which is common to him and the birds and the plants. Man should have the blind faith of a beast. He should be as mystically immutable as a cow, and as deaf to sophistries as a fish. Shaw does not wish him to be a philosopher or an artist. He does not even wish him to be a man, so much as he wishes him to be in this holy sense, an animal. He must follow the flag of life as fiercely from conviction, as all other creatures follow it from instinct. But this Shavian worship of life is by no means lively. It has nothing in common either with the braver or baser forms of what we commonly call optimism. It has not of the omnivorous exultation of Walt Whitman or the fiery pantheism of Shelley. Bernard Shaw wishes to show himself not so much as an optimist, but rather as a sort of faithful and contented pessimist. This contradiction is the key to nearly all his early and more obvious contradictions, and to many which remain to the end. Whitman and many modern idealists have talked of taking even duty as a pleasure. It seems to me that Shaw takes even pleasure as a duty. In a queer way he seems to see existence as an illusion, and yet as an obligation. To every man and woman, bird, beast, and flower, life is a love call to be eagerly followed. To Bernard Shaw it is merely a military bugle to be obeyed. In short, he fails to feel the command of nature, if one must use the anthropomorphic fable of nature instead of the philosophic term God. Can be enjoyed as well as obeyed. He paints life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap in the dark. That is heroic, and to my instinct at least, Schopenhauer looks like a pygmy beside his pupil. But it is the heroism of a morbid and almost suffixiated age. It is awful to think that this world which so many poets have praised, has even for a time been depicted as a man-trap into which we may just have the manhood to jump. Think of all those ages through which men have talked of having the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live. It is exactly this oddity or dilemma which may be said to culminate in the crowning work of his later and more constructed period. The work in which he certainly attempted, whether with success or not, to state his ultimate and cosmic vision. I mean the play called Man and Superman. In approaching this play we must keep well in mind the distinction recently drawn that Shaw follows the banner of life but austerely, not joyously. For him, nature has authority, but hardly charm. But before we approach it, it is necessary to deal with three things that lead up to it. First, it is necessary to speak of what remained of his old critical and realistic method, and then it is necessary to speak of the two important influences which led up to his last and most important change of outlook. First, since all our spiritual epics overlap, and man is often doing the old work while he is thinking the new, we may deal first with what may be fairly called his last two plays of pure worldly criticism. These are Major Barbara and John Bull's Other Island. Major Barbara indeed contains a strong religious element, but when all is said, the whole point of the play is that the religious element is defeated. Moreover, the actual expressions of religion in the play are somewhat unsatisfactory as expressions of religion, or even of reason. I must frankly say that Bernard Shaw always seems to me to use the word God, not only without any idea of what it means, but without one moment's thought about what it could possibly mean. He said to some atheist, never believe in a God that you cannot improve on. The atheist, being a sound theologian, naturally replied that one should not believe in a God whom one could improve on, as that would show that he was not God. In the same style in Major Barbara, the heroine ends by suggesting that she will serve God without personal hope, so that she may owe nothing to God, and he owe everything to her. It does not seem to strike her that if God owes everything to her, he is not God. These things affect me merely as tedious perversions of a phrase. It is as if you said, I will never have a father unless I have begotten him. But the real sting and substance of Major Barbara is much more practical and to the point. It expresses not the new spirituality, but the old materialism of Bernard Shaw. Most every one of Shaw's plays is an expanded epigram. But the epigram is not expanded, as with most people, into a hundred common places. Rather, the epigram is expanded into a hundred other epigrams. The work is at least as brilliant in detail as it is in design, but it is generally possible to discover the original and pivotal epigram which is the center and purpose of the play. It is generally possible even amid the blinding jewelry of a million jokes to discover the grave, solemn, and sacred joke for which the play itself was written. The ultimate epigram of Major Barbara can be put thus. People say that poverty is no crime. Shaw says that poverty is a crime. That it is a crime to endure it, a crime to be content with it. That it is the mother of all crimes of brutality, corruption, and fear. If a man says to Shaw that he is born a poor but honest parent, Shaw tells him that the very word but shows that his parents were probably dishonest. In short, he maintains here what he had maintained elsewhere. That what the people at this moment require is not more patriotism or more art or more religion or more morality or more sociology, but simply more money. The evil is not ignorance of decadence or sin or pessimism. The evil is poverty. The point of this particular drama is that even the noblest enthusiasm of the girl who becomes the Salvation Army officer fails under the brute money power of her father, who is a modern capitalist. When I have said this, it will be clear why this play, fine and full of bitter sincerity, as it is, must in a manner be cleared out of the way before we come to talk of Shaw's final and serious faith. For his serious faith is in the sanctity of human will, in the divine capacity for creation and choice, rising higher than environment and doom. And so far as that goes, Major Barbara is not only apart from his faith but against his faith. Major Barbara is an account of environment victorious over heroic will. There are a thousand answers to the ethic and Major Barbara, which I should be inclined to offer. I might point out that the rich do not so much by honesty as curtains to cover dishonesty, that they do not so much by health as cushions to comfort disease. And I might suggest that the doctrine that poverty degrades the poor is much more likely to be used as an argument for keeping them powerless than as an argument for making them rich. But there is no need to find such answers to the materialistic pessimism of Major Barbara. The best answer to it is Shaw's own best and crowning philosophy, with which we shall shortly be concerned. John Bull's other island represents a realism somewhat more tinged with a later transcendentalism of its author. In one sense, of course, it is a satire on the conventional Englishman who is never so silly or sentimental as when he sees silliness and sentiment in the Irishman. Broadbent, whose mind is all fog and his morals all gush, is firmly persuaded that he is bringing reason and order among the Irish, whereas in truth they are all smiling at his illusions with a critical detachment of so many devils. There have been many plays depicting the absurd patty in a ring of Anglo-Saxons. The first purpose of this play is to depict the absurd Anglo-Saxon in a ring of ironical patties. But it has a second and more subtle purpose, which is very finely contrived. It is suggested that when all is said and done, there is in this preposterous Englishman a certain creative power which comes from his simplicity and optimism, from his profound resolution rather to live life than to criticize it. I know no finer dialogue of philosophical cross-purposes than that in which Broadbent posts of his common sense, and his subtler Irish friend mystifies him by telling him that he, Broadbent, has no common sense but only inspiration. The Irishman admits in Broadbent a certain unconscious spiritual force even in his very stupidity. Lord Roseberry coined the very clever phrase a practical mystic. Shaw is here maintaining that all practical men are practical mystics, and he is really maintaining also that the most practical of all the practical mystics is the one who is a fool. There is something unexpected and fascinating about this reversal of the usual argument touching enterprise and the businessman. This theory that success is created not by intelligence but by a certain half-witted and yet magical instinct. For Bernard Shaw apparently the forests of factories and the mountains of money are not the creations of human wisdom or even of human cunning. They are rather manifestations of the sacred maxim which declares that God has chosen the foolish things of the earth to confound the wise. It is simplicity and even innocence that has made Manchester. As a philosophical fancy this is interesting or even suggestive but it must be confessed that as a criticism of the relations of England to Ireland it is open to a strong historical objection. The one weak point in John Bull's other island is that it turns on the fact that Broadbent succeeds in Ireland but as a matter of fact Broadbent has not succeeded in Ireland. If getting what one wants is the test and fruit of this mysterious strength then the Irish peasants are certainly much stronger than the English merchants. For in spite of all the efforts of the merchants the land has remained a land of peasants. No glorification of the English practicality as if it were a universal thing can ever get over the fact that we have failed in dealing with the one white people in our power who were markedly unlike ourselves. And the kindness of Broadbent has failed just as much as his common sense because he was dealing with the people whose desire and ideal were different from his own. He did not share the Irish passion for small possession in land or for the more pathetic virtues of Christianity. In fact the kindness of Broadbent has failed for the same reason that the gigantic kindness of Shaw has failed. The roots are differed. It is like tying the tops of two trees together. Briefly the philosophy of John Bull's other island is quite effective and satisfactory except for this incurable fault. The fact that John Bull's other island is not John Bull's. End of Section XI. CHAPTER VI. CHAPTER VI. CHAPTER III. THE PHILLOSOPHER This clearing off of his last critical place we may classify as the first of the three facts which lead up to man and superman. The second of the three facts may be found, I think, in Shaw's discovery of Nitechie. This eloquent sophist has an influence upon Shaw and his school which it would require a separate book adequately to study. By descent Nitechie was a poll and probably a Polish noble, and to say that he was a Polish noble is to say that he was a frail, fastidious, and entirely useless anarchist, and is one of the best rhetoricians of the modern world. He had a remarkable power of saying things that master the reason for a moment by their gigantic unreasonableness. As for instance, your life is intolerable without immortality, but why should not your life be intolerable? His whole work is shot through with the pangs and fevers of his physical life which was one of extreme bad health, and in early middle age his brilliant brain broke down into impotence and darkness. All that was true in his teaching was this, that if a man looks fine on a horse it is so far irrelevant to tell him that he would be more economical on a donkey or more humane on a tricycle. In other words, the mere achievement of dignity, beauty, or triumph is strictly to be called a good thing. I do not know if Nitechie ever used the illustration, but it seems to me that all that is creditable or sound in Nitechie could be stated in the derivation of one word, the word valour. Valour means valour. It means of value. Courage is itself a solid good. It is an ultimate virtue. Valour is in itself valid. Insofar as he maintained this Nitechie was only taking part in that great Protestant game of seesaw which has been the amusement of northern Europe since the 16th century. Nitechie imagined that he was rebelling against ancient morality. As a matter of fact he was only rebelling against recent morality, against the half-baked impudence of the utilitarians and the materialists. He thought he was rebelling against Christianity. Curiously enough he was rebelling solely against the special enemies of Christianity, against Herbert Spencer and Mr. Edward Claude. Historic Christianity has always believed in the valour of St. Michael riding in front of the church militant, and in an ultimate and absolute pleasure not indirect or utilitarian, the intoxication of the spirit, the wine of the blood of God. There are indeed doctrines of Nitechie that are not Christian, but then by an entertaining coincidence they are also not true. His hatred of pity is not Christian, but that was not his doctrine, but his disease. Invalids are often hard on invalids, and there is another doctrine of his that is not Christianity, and also by the same laughable accident not common sense, and it is a most pathetic circumstance that this was the one doctrine which caught the eye of Shaw and captured him. He was not influenced at all by the morbid attack on mercy. It would require more than ten thousand to mad Polish professors to make Bernard Shaw anything but a generous and compassionate man. But it is certainly a nuisance that the one Nitechie doctrine which attracted him was not the one Nitechie doctrine that is humane and rectifying. Nitechie might really have done some good if he had taught Bernard Shaw how to draw the sword, to drink wine, or even to dance. But he only succeeded in putting into his head a new superstition, which bids fair to be the chief superstition of the Dark Ages which are possibly in front of us. I mean the superstition of what is called the Superman. In one of his least convincing phrases, Nitechie had said that just as the ape ultimately produced the man, so should we ultimately produce something higher than the man. The immediate answer, of course, is sufficiently obvious. The ape did not worry about the man, so why should we worry about the Superman? If the Superman will come by natural selection, may we leave it to natural selection? If the Superman will come by human selection, what sort of Superman are we to select? If he is simply to be more just, more brave, or more merciful, then Zara Thrustrit sinks into a Sunday school teacher. The only way we can work for it is to be more just, more brave, and more merciful. Sensible advice, but hardly startling. If he is to be anything else than this, why should we desire him, or what else are we to desire? These questions have been many times asked of the Nitechieites, and none of the Nitechieites have even attempted to answer them. The keen intellect of Bernard Shaw would, I think, certainly have seen through this fallacy and verbiage, had it not been then another important event about this time came to the help of Nitechie, and established the Superman on his pedestal. It is the third of the things which I have called stepping stones to man and Superman, and it is very important. It is nothing less than the breakdown of one of the three intellectual supports upon which Bernard Shaw had reposed through all his confident career. At the beginning of this book I have described the three ultimate supports of Shaw as the Irishman, the Puritan, and the Progressive. They are the three legs of the tripod upon which the Prophet sat to give the Oracle, and one of them broke. Just about this time, suddenly, by a mere shaft of illumination, Bernard Shaw ceased to believe in progress altogether. It is generally implied that it was reading Plato that did it. That philosopher was very well qualified to convey the first shock of the ancient civilization to Shaw, who had always thought instinctively of civilization as modern. This is not due merely to the daring splendor of the speculations and the vivid picture of Athenian life. It is due also to something analogous to the personalities of that particular ancient Greek and this particular modern Irishman. Bernard Shaw has much affinity to Plato. In his instinctive elevation of temper, his courageous pursuit of ideas as far as they will go, his civic idealism, and also, it must be confessed, in his dislike of poets and a touch of delicate inhumanity. But whatever influence produced the change, the change had all the dramatic suddenness and completeness which belongs to the conversions of great men. It had been perpetually implied through all the earlier works, not only that mankind is constantly improving, but that almost everything must be considered in the light of this fact. More than once he seemed to argue, in comparing the dramatists of the sixteenth with those of the nineteenth century, that the latter had a definite advantage merely because they were of the nineteenth century and not of the sixteenth. When accused of impertinence toward the greatest of the Elizabethians, Bernard Shaw had said, Shakespeare is a much taller man than I, but I stand on his shoulders, an epigram which sums up this doctrine with characteristic neatness. But Shaw fell off Shakespeare's shoulders with a crash. This chronological theory that Shaw stood on Shakespeare's shoulders logically involved the supposition that Shakespeare stood on Plato's shoulders, and Bernard Shaw found Plato from his point of view so much more advanced than Shakespeare that he decided in desperation that all three were equal. Such failure, as has partially attended the idea of human equality, is very largely due to the fact that no party in the modern state has heartily believed in it. Tories and radicals have both assumed that one set of men were, in essentials, superior to mankind. The only difference was that the Tory superiority was a superiority of place, while the radical superiority is a superiority of time. The great objection to Shaw being on Shakespeare's shoulders is a consideration for the sensations and personal dignity of Shakespeare. It is a democratic objection to anyone being on anyone else's shoulders. Eternal human nature refuses to submit to a man who rules merely by right of birth. To rule by right of century is to rule by right of birth. Shaw found this nearest kinsman in remote Athens, his remotest enemies in the closest historical proximity, and he began to see the enormous average and the vast level of mankind. If progress swung constantly between such extremes, it could not be progress at all. The paradox was sharp, but undeniable. If life had such continual ups and downs, it was upon the whole flat. With characteristics sincerity and love of sensation, he had no sooner seen this than he hastened to declare it. In the teeth of all his previous pronouncements he emphasized and re-emphasized in print that man had not progressed at all, that nineteen-nine hundredths of a man in a cave were the same as nineteen-nine hundredths of a man in a suburban villa. It is characteristic of him to say that he rushed into print with a frank confession of the failure of his old theory. But it is also characteristic of him that he rushed into print also with a new alternative theory quite as definite, quite as confident, and if one may put it so, quite as infallible as the old one. Progress had never happened hitherto because it had been sought solely through education. Education was rubbish. Fancy said he trying to produce a greyhound or a racehorse by education. The man of the future must not be taught, he must be bred. This notion of producing superior human beings by the methods of the stud farm had often been urged, though its difficulties had never been cleared up. I mean its practical difficulties, its moral difficulties, or rather impossibilities. For any animal fit to be called a man needs scarcely be discussed. But even as a scheme it had never been made clear. The first and most obvious objection to it of course is this, that if you are to breed men as pigs you require some overseer who is as much more subtle than a man as a man is more subtle than a pig. Such an individual is not easy to find. It was, however, in the heat of these three things, the decline of his merely destructive realism, the discovery of Niche, and the abandonment of the idea of a progressive education of mankind, that he attempted what is not necessarily his best but certainly his most important work. The two things are by no means necessarily the same. The most important work of Milton is paradise loss. His best work is Lycetus. There are other places in which Shaw's argument is more fascinating or his wit more startling than in man and Superman. There are other plays that he has made more brilliant. But I am sure that there is no other play that he wished to make more brilliant. I will not say that he is in this case more serious than elsewhere, for the word serious is a double meaning and a double dealing word, a traitor in the dictionary. It sometimes means solemn and it sometimes means sincere. A very short experience of private and public life will be enough to prove that the most solemn people are generally the most insincere. A somewhat more delicate and detailed consideration will also show that the most sincere men are generally not solemn, and of these is Bernard Shaw. But if we use the word serious in the old and Latin sense of the word grave, which means weighty or valid, full of substance, then we may say without any hesitation that this is the most serious play of the most serious man alive. The outline of the play is, I suppose, by this time sufficiently well known. It has two main philosophic motives. The first is what he calls the life force, the old infidels called it nature, which seems a neater word, and nobody knows the meaning of either of them. Desires above all things, to make suitable marriages, to produce a purer and prouder race, or eventually to produce a superman. The second is that, in this effecting of racial marriage, the woman is a more conscious agent than the man. In short, that woman disposes a long time before man proposes. In this play, therefore, woman is made the pursuer and a man the pursued. It cannot be denied, I think, that in this manner Shaw is handicapped by his habitual hardness of touch, by his lack of sympathy with the romance of which he writes, and to a certain extent, even by his own integrity and right conscience. Whether the man hunts the woman or the woman the man, at least it should be a splendid pagan hunt. But Shaw is not a sporting man, nor is he a pagan but a puritan. He cannot recover the impartiality of paganism, which allows Diana to propose to Andameon without thinking any the worse of her. The result is that while he makes Anne the woman who marries his hero a really powerful and convincing woman, he can only do it by making her a highly objectionable woman. She is a liar and a bully, not from sudden fear or excruciating dilemma. She is a liar and a bully in grain. She has no truth or magnanimity in her. The more we know that she is real, the more we know that she is vile. In short, Bernard Shaw is still haunted with his old impotence of the unromantic writer. He cannot imagine the main motives of human life from the inside. We are convinced successively that Anne wishes to marry Tanner, but in the very process we lose all power of conceiving why Tanner should ever consent to marry Anne. A writer with a more romantic strain in him might have imagined a woman choosing her lover without shamelessness and magnetizing him without fraud. But if the first movement were feminine, it need hardly be a movement like this. In truth, of course, the two sexes have their two methods of attraction, and in some of the happiest cases they are almost simultaneous. But even on the most cynical showing they need not be mixed up. It is one thing to say that the mouse trap is not there by accident. It is another to say in the face of ocular experience that the mouse trap runs after the mouse. But whenever Shaw shows the Puritan hardness or even the Puritan cheapness, he shows something also of the Puritan nobility, of the idea that sacrifice is really a frivolity in the face of a great purpose. The reasonableness of Kelvin and his followers will by the mercy of heaven be at last washed away, but their unreasonableness will remain an eternal splendor. Long after we have let drop the fancy that Protestantism was rational, it will be its glory that it was fanatical. So it is with Shaw. To make Anne a real woman, even a dangerous woman, he would need to be something stranger and softer than Bernard Shaw. But though I always argue with him, whenever he argues, I confess that he always conquers me in the one or two moments when he is emotional. There is one really noble moment when Anne offers for all her cynical husband hunting. The only defense that is really great enough to cover it. It will not be all happiness for me, perhaps death. And the man rises also at that real crisis, saying, Oh, that clutch holds and hurts. What have you grasped in me? Is there a father's heart as well as a mother's? That seems to me actually great. I do not like either of the characters an atom more than formerly, but I can see shining and shaking through them at that instant, the splendor of the God that made them, and of the image of the God who wrote their story. A logician is like a liar in many respects, but chiefly in the fact that he should have a good memory. That cutting and inquisitive style which Bernard Shaw has always adopted carries with it an inevitable criticism. And it cannot be denied that this new theory of the supreme importance of sound sexual union wrought by any means is hard logically to reconcile with Shaw's old diatribes against sentimentalism and operatic romance. If nature wishes primarily to entrap us into sexual union, then all the means of sexual attraction, even the most model and or theatrical, are justified at one stroke. The guitar of the troubadour is as practical as the plowshare of the husbandman. The waltz in the ballroom is as serious as the debate in the parish council. The justification of Anne as the potential mother of Superman is really the justification of all the humbugs and sentimentalists whom Shaw had been denouncing as a dramatic critic and as a dramatist since the beginning of his career. It was to no purpose that the earlier Bernard Shaw said that romance was all moonshine. The moonshine that ripens love is now as practical as the sunshine that ripens corn. It was vain to say that sexual chivalry was all rot. It might be as rotten as manure and also as fertile. It is vain to call first love a fiction. It may be as fictitious as the ink of the cuddle or the doubling of the hair, as fictitious, as efficient, and as indispensable. It is vain to call it a self-deception. Schopenhauer said that all existence was a self-deception and Shaw's only further comment seems to be that it is right to be deceived. To man and Superman, as to all his plays, the author attaches a most fascinating preface at the beginning. But I really think that he ought also to attach a hearty apology at the end. An apology to all the minor dramatists or preposterous actors whom he had cursed for romanticism in his youth. Whenever he objected to an actress for ogling, she might reasonably reply, but this is how I support my friend Anne in her sublime evolutionary effort. Whenever he laughed at an old-fashioned actor for renting, the actor might answer, my exaggeration is not more absurd than the tale of a peacock or the swagger of a cock. It is the way I preach the great fruitful lie of the life-force that I am a very fine fellow. We have remarked the end of Shaw's campaign in a favor of progress. This ought really to have been the end of his campaign against romance. All the tricks of love that he called artificial became natural, because they became nature. All the lies of love become truths, indeed they become the truth. The minor things of the play contain some thunderbolts of good thinking. Throughout this brief study I have deliberately not dwelt upon mere wit, because in anything of Shaw's that may be taken for granted. It is enough to say that this play which is full of his most serious quality is as full of any of his minor sort of success. In a more solid sense, two important facts stand out. The first is the character of the young American. The other is the character of Straker, the chauffeur. In these Shaw has realized and made vivid two most important facts. First, that America is not intellectually a go-ahead country, but both for good and evil and old-fashioned one. It is full of stale culture and ancestral simplicity. Just as Shaw's young millionaire quotes Macaulay and piously worships his wife. Second, he has pointed out in the character of Straker that there has arisen in our midst a new class that has education without breeding. Straker is the man who has ousted the handsome cab man, having neither his coarseness nor his kindliness. Great sociological credit is due to the man who has first clearly observed that Straker has appeared. How anybody can profess for a moment to be glad that he has appeared, I do not attempt to conjecture. Appended to the play is an entertaining, though somewhat mysterious document called The Revolutionist's Handbook. It contains many very sound remarks. This, for example, which I cannot too much applaud. If you hit your child, be sure that you hit him in anger. If that principle had been properly understood, we should have had less of Shaw's sociological friends and their meddling with the habits and instincts of the poor. But among the fragments of advice also occurs the following suggestive and even alluring remark. Every man over forty is a scoundrel. On the first personal opportunity I asked the author of this remarkable axiom what it meant. I gathered that what it really meant was something like this, that every man over forty had been all the essential use that he was likely to be and was, therefore, in a manner a parasite. It is gratifying to reflect that Bernard Shaw has sufficiently answered his own epigram by continuing to pour out treasures both of truth and folly long after this allotted time. But if the epigram might be interpreted in a rather looser style as meaning that, past a certain point, a man's work takes on its final character and does not greatly change the nature of its merits, it may certainly be said that with man and Superman Shaw reaches that stage. The two plays that have followed it, though of very great interest in themselves, do not require any reevaluation of or indeed any addition to our summary of his genius and success. They are both, in a sense, casts back to his primary energies, the first in a controversial and the second in a technical sense. Neither need prevent our saying that the moment when John Tanner and Anne agree that it is doom for him and death for her, and life only for the thing unborn, is the peak of his utterance as a prophet. by G. K. Chesterton The two important plays that he has since given us are The Doctor's Dilemma and Getting Married. The first is as regards its most amusing and effective elements a throwback to his old game of guying the men of science. It was a very good game and he was an admirable player. The actual story of The Doctor's Dilemma itself seems to me less poignant and important than the things with which Shaw had lately been dealing. First of all, it has been said Shaw has neither the kind of justice nor the kind of weakness that goes to make a true problem. We cannot feel The Doctor's Dilemma because we cannot really fancy Bernard Shaw being in a dilemma. His mind is both fond of abruptness and fond of finality. He always makes up his mind when he knows the facts and sometimes before. Moreover, this particular problem, though Shaw is certainly, as we shall see, nearer to pure doubt about it than about anything else, does not strike the critic as being such an exasperating problem after all. An artist of vast power and promise who is also a scamp of vast profligacy and treachery has a chance of life if specially treated for a special disease. The modern Doctors and even the modern dramatists are in doubt whether he should be specially favored because he is aesthetically important or especially disregarded because he is ethically antisocial. They seesaw between the two despicable modern doctrines, one that geniuses should be worshiped like idols and the other that criminals should be merely wiped out like germs. That both clever men and bad men ought to be treated like men does not seem to occur to them. As a matter of fact, in these affairs of life and death one never does think of such distinctions. Nobody does shout at the sea, bad citizens overboard. I should recommend the Doctor in his dilemma to do exactly what I am sure any decent Doctor would do without any dilemma at all, to treat the man simply as a man and give him no more and no less favor than he would to anybody else. In short, I am sure a practical physician would drop all these visionary, unworkable, modern dreams about type and criminology and go back to the plain business-like facts of the French Revolution and the rights of man. The other play, Getting Married, is a point in Shaw's career, but only as a play not as usual as a heresy. It is nothing but a conversation about marriage, and one cannot agree or disagree with the view of marriage because all views are given, which are held by anybody, and some I should think which are held by nobody. But its technical quality is of some importance in the life of its author. It is worth consideration as a play because it is not a play at all. It marks the culmination and completeness of that victory of Bernard Shaw over the British public, or rather over their official representatives of which I have spoken. Shaw had fought a long fight with businessmen, those incredible people who assured him that it was useless to have wit without murders, and that a good joke, which is the most popular thing everywhere else, was quite unsailable in the theatrical world. In spite of this, he had conquered by his wit and his good dialogue, and by the time of which we now speak, he was victorious and secure. All his plays were being produced as a matter of course in England and as a matter of the fiercest fashion and enthusiasm in America and Germany. No one who knows the nature of the man will doubt that under such circumstances his first act would be to produce his wit naked and unashamed. He had been told that he could not support a slight play by a mere dialogue. He therefore promptly produced a mere dialogue without the slightest play for it to support. Getting married is no more a play than Cicero's dialogue de Amacita, and is not half so much a play as Wilson's Noctez Ambrosiana. But though it is not a play, it was played, and played successfully. Everyone who went into the theatre felt that he was only eavesdropping at an accidental conversation. But the conversation was so sparkling and sensible that he went on eavesdropping. This, I think, as it is the final play of Shaw, is also, and fitly, his final triumph. He is a good dramatist, and sometimes even a great dramatist. But the occasions when we get glimpses of him as really a great man are on these occasions when he is utterly undramatic. From first to last Bernard Shaw has been nothing but a conversationalist. It is not a slur to say so. Socrates was one, and even Christ himself. He differs from that divine and that human prototype in the fact that, like most modern people, he does, to some extent, talk in order to find out what he thinks, whereas they knew it beforehand. But he has the virtues that go with a talkative man, one of which is humility. He will hardly ever find a really proud man talkative. He is afraid of talking too much. Bernard Shaw offered himself to the world with only one great qualification, that he could talk honestly and well. He did not speak. He talked to a crowd. He did not write. He talked to a typewriter. He did not really construct a play. He talked through ten mouths or masks instead of through one. His literary power and progress began in casual conversations, and it seems to me supremely right that it should end in one great and casual conversation. His last play is nothing but garrulous talking. That great thing called gossip. And I'm happy to say that the play has been as efficient and successful as talk and gossip have always been, among the children of men. Of his life in these later years I have made no pretense of telling even the little that there is to tell. Those who regard him as a mere self-advertising egoist may be surprised to hear that there is perhaps no man of whose private life less could be positively said by an outsider. Even those who know him can make little but a conjecture of what has lain behind this splendid stretch of intellectual self-expression. I only make my conjecture like the rest. I think that the first great turning point in Shaw's life, after the early things of which I have spoken, the taint of drink in the teetotaler home or the first fight with poverty, was the deadly illness which fell upon him at the end of his first flashing career as a Saturday reviewer. I know it would go to Shaw to madness to suggest that sickness could have softened him. That is why I suggest it. But I say for his comfort that I think it hardened him also, if that can be called hardening which is only the strengthening of our souls to meet some dreadful reality. At least it is certain that the larger spiritual ambitions, the desire to find a faith and found a church, come after that time. I also mention it because there is hardly anything else to mention. His life is singularly free from landmarks, while his literature is so oddly full of surprises. His marriage to Miss Payne Townsend, which occurred not long after his illness, was one of those quite successful things which are utterly silent. The placidity of his married life may be sufficiently indicated by saying that, as far as I can make out, the most important events in it were rouse about the executive of the Fabian Society. If such ripples do not express a still and lake-like life, I do not know what would. Honestly, the only thing in his later career that can be called an event is the stand made by Shaw at the Fabians against the sudden assault of Mr. H. G. Wells, which, after scenes of splendid exasperations, ended in Wells' resignation. It was another slight ruffling of the calm when Bernard Shaw said some quite sensible things about Sir Henry Irving. But on the whole, we confront the composure of one who has come into his own. The method of his life has remained mostly unchanged, and there is a great deal of method in his life. I can hear some people murmuring something about method in his madness. He is not only neat in business-like, but unlike some literary men, I know, does not conceal the fact. Having all the talents proper to an author, he delights to prove that he also has all the talents proper to a publisher or even to a publisher's clerk. Though many looking at his light-brown clothes would call him a Bohemian, he really hates and despises Bohemianism in the sense that he hates and despises disorder and uncleanness and irresponsibility. All that part of him is peculiarly normal and efficient. He gives good advice, he always answers letters and answers them in a decisive and very legible hand. He has said himself that the only educational art that he thinks important is that of being able to jump off tram cars at the proper moment. Though a rigid vegetarian, he is quite regular and rational in his meals, and though he detests sports, he takes quite sufficient exercise. While he has always made a mock of science in theory, he is by nature prone to meddle with it in practice. He is fond of photographing and even more fond of being photographed. He maintained in one of his moments of mad modernity that photography was a finer thing than portrait painting, more exquisite and more imaginative. He urged the characteristic argument that none of his own photographs were like each other, or like him. But he would certainly wash the chemicals off his hands the instant after an experiment, just as he would wash the blood off his hands the instant after a socialist massacre. He cannot endure stains or accretions. He is of that temperament which feels tradition itself to be a coat of dust, whose temptation it is to feel nothing but a sort of foul accumulation or living disease even in the creeper upon the cottage or the moss upon the grave. So thoroughly are his tastes, those of the civilized modern man, that if it had not been for the fire in him of justice and anger, he might have been the most trim and modern among the millions whom he shocks, and his bicycle and brown hat have been no menace in Brixton. But God sent among those suburban one who was a prophet, as well as a sanitary inspector. He had every qualification for living in a villa, except the necessary indifference to his brethren living in pigsties. But for the small fact that he hates with a sickening hatred, the hypocrisy, and class cruelty, he would really accept and admire the bathroom and the bicycle, and as best as stove, having no memory of rivers or of roaring fires. In these things like Mr. Straker he is the new man. But for his great soul he might have accepted modern civilization. It was a wonderful escape. The man whom men so foolishly call crazy and anarchic has really a dangerous affinity to the fourth-rate perfections of our provincial and Protestant civilization. He might even have been respectable if he had had less self-respect. His fulfilled fame and this tone of repose and reason in his life, together with the large circle of his private kindnesses and the regard of his fellow artists, should permit us to end the record in a tone of almost patriarchal quiet. If I wished to complete such a picture I could add many touches, that he has consented to wear evening dress, that he has supported the Times Book Club, and that his beard has turned gray, the last to his regret, as he wanted it to remain red till they had completed color photography. He can mix with the most conservative statesmen. His tone grows continuously more gentle in the manner of religion. It would be easy to end with the lion lying down with the lamb, the wild Irishman tamed or taming everybody. Shaw reconciled to the British public, as the British public is certainly largely reconciled to Shaw. But as I put these last papers together, having finished this rude study, I hear a piece of news. His latest play, the showing up of Blanco Poznet, has been forbidden by the censor. As far as I can discover, it has been forbidden because one of the characters professes a belief in God and states his conviction that God has got him. This is wholesome. This is like one crack of thunder in a clear sky. Not so easily does the Prince of this world forgive. Shaw's religious training and instinct is not mine, but in all honest religion there is something that is hateful to the prosperous compromise of our time. You are free in our time to say that God does not exist. You are free to say that he exists and is evil. You are free to say, like poor old Renan, that he would like to exist if he could. You may talk of God as a metaphor or a mystification. You may water him down with gallons of long words or boil him to the rags of metaphysics. And it is not merely that nobody punishes, but nobody protests. But if you speak of God as a fact, as a thing, like a tiger, as a reason for changing one's conduct, then the modern world will stop you somehow if it can. We are long past talking about whether an unbeliever should be punished for being irreverent. It is now thought irreverent to be a believer. I end where I began. It is the old Puritan in Shaw that jars the modern world like an electric shock. That vision with which I meant to end, that vision of culture and common sense of red brick and brown flannel, of the modern clerk broadened enough to embrace Shaw, and Shaw softened enough to embrace the clerk. All that vision of a new London begins to fade and alter. The red brick begins to burn red hot, and the smoke from all the chimneys has a strange smell. I find myself back in the fumes in which I started. Perhaps I have been misled by small modernities. Perhaps what I have called fastidiousness is a divine fear. Perhaps what I have called coldness is a predestinate and ancient endurance. The vision of the Fabian villa grows fainter and fainter until I see only a void place across which runs Bunyan's pilgrim with his fingers in his ears. Bernard Shaw has occupied much of his life in trying to elude his followers. The fox has enthusiastic followers, and Shaw seems to regard his in much the same way. This man whom men accuse of bidding for applause seems to me to shrink even from his scent. If you agree with Shaw, he is very likely to contradict you. I have contradicted Shaw throughout. That is why I come at last almost to agree with him. His critics have accused him of vulgar self-advertisement. In his relation to his followers he seems to me rather marked with a sort of mad modesty. He seems to wish to fly from agreement to have as few followers as possible. All this reaches back, I think, to the three roots from which his meditation grew. It is partly the mere impatience and irony of the Irishman. It is partly the thought of the Calvinist that the host of God should be thinned rather than thronged. That Gideon must reject soldiers rather than recruit them. And it is partly, alas, the unhappy, progressive trying to be in front of his own religion. Trying to destroy his own idol and even to desecrate his own tomb. But from whatever causes this furious escape from popularity has involved Shaw in some perversities and refinements which are almost mere insincerities and which make it necessary to disentangle the good he has done from the evil in this dazzling course. I will attempt some summary by stating the three things in which his influence seems to me thoroughly good, and the three things in which it seems bad. But for the pleasure of ending on a finer note I will speak first of those that seem bad. The primary respect in which Shaw has been a bad influence is that he has encouraged fastidiousness. He has made men dainty about their moral meals. This is indeed the root of his whole objection to romance. Many people have rejected to romance for being too airy and exquisite. Shaw objects to romance for being too rank and coarse. Many have despised romance because it is unreal. Shaw really hates it because it is a great deal too real. Shaw dislikes romance as he dislikes beef and beer, raw brandy, or raw beef steaks. Romance is too masculine for his taste. You will find throughout his criticisms amid all their truth the wild justice or pungent impartiality, a curious undercurrent of prejudice upon one point, the preference for the refined rather than the rude or ugly. Thus he will dislike a joke because it is coarse, without asking if it is really immoral. He objects to a man sitting down on his hat whereas the austere moralist should only object to his sitting down on someone else's hat. This sensibility is barren because it is universal. It is useless to object to a man being made ridiculous. Man is born ridiculous, as can easily be seen if you look at him soon after he is born. It is grotesque to drink beer, but it is equally grotesque to drink soda water. The grotesqueness lies in the act of filling yourself like a bottle through a hole. It is undignified to walk with a drunken stagger, but it is fairly undignified to walk at all. For all walking is the sort of balancing and there is always in the human being something of a quadruped on its hind legs. I do not say he would be more dignified if he went on all fours. I do not know that he ever is dignified except when he is dead. We shall not be refined till we are refined into dust. Of course it is only because he is not wholly an animal that man sees he is a rum animal. And if a man on his hind legs is in an artificial attitude, it is only because, like a dog, he is begging or saying thank you. Everything important is, in that sense, absurd from the grave baby to the grinning skull. Everything practical is a practical joke. But throughout Shaw's comedies, curiously enough, there is a certain kicking against this great doom of laughter. For instance, it is the first duty of a man who is in love to make a fool of himself, but Shaw's heroes always seem to flinch from this, an attempt in airy philosophic revenge to make a fool of the woman first. The attempts of Valentine and Chartres to divide their perceptions from their desires and tell the woman she is worthless even while trying to win her are sometimes almost torturing to watch. It is like seeing a man trying to play a different tune with each hand. I fancy this agony is not only in the spectator but in the dramatist as well. It is Bernard Shaw struggling with his reluctance to do anything so ridiculous as to make a proposal. For there are two types of great humorist, those who love to see a man absurd, and those who hate to see him absurd. Of the first kind are Ravallet and Dickens. Of the second are Swift and Bernard Shaw. So far as Shaw has spread or helped a certain modern reluctance or mauve's haunt in these grand and distest functions of man, I think he has definitely done harm. He has much influence among the young men, but it is not an influence in the direction of keeping them young. One cannot imagine him inspiring any of his followers to write a war song or drinking song or love song. The three forms of human utterance which come next in nobility to a prayer. It may seem odd to say that the net effect of a man, so apparently impudent, will be to make men shy, but it is certainly the truth. Shyness is always the sign of a divided soul. A man is shy because he somehow thinks his position at once despicable and important. If he were without humility, he would not care. And if he were without pride, he would not care. Now the main purpose of Shaw's theoretic teaching is to declare that we ought to fulfill these great functions of life, that we ought to eat and drink and love. But the main tendency of his habitual criticism is to suggest that all the sentiments, professions and postures of these things are not only comic, but even contemptibly comic, follies and almost frauds. The result would seem to be that a race of young men may arise who do all these things, but do them awkwardly. That which was of old a free and hilarious function becomes an important and embarrassing necessity. Let us endure all the pagan pleasures with the Christian patience. Let us eat, drink and be serious. The second of the two points on which I think Shaw has done definite harm is this. That he has, not always or even as a rule intentionally, increased that anarchy of thought which is always the destruction of thought. Much of his early writing has encouraged among the modern youth that most pestilent of all popular tricks and fallacies, what is called the argument of progress. I mean this kind of thing. Previous ages were often alas aristocratic in politics or clericalist in religion. But they were always democratic in philosophy. They appealed to men, not to particular men. And if most men were against an idea, that was so far against it. But nowadays that most men are against a thing is thought to be in its favor. It is vaguely supposed to show that someday most men will be for it. If a man says that cows are reptiles or that bacon rode Shakespeare, he can always quote the contempt of his contemporaries as in some mysterious way proving the complete conversion of posterity. The objection to this theory scarcely needs any elaborate indication. The final objection to it is that it amounts to this. Say anything, however idiotic, and you are in advance of your age. This kind of stuff must be stopped. The sort of democrat who appeals to the babe unborn must be classed with the sort of aristocrat who appeals to his deceased great-grandfather. Both should be sharply reminded they are appealing to individuals whom they know well to be at a disadvantage in the matter of prompt and witty reply. Now, although Bernard Shaw has survived this simple confusion, he has in his time greatly contributed to it. If there is, for instance, one thing that is really rare in Shaw, it is hesitation. He makes up his mind quicker than a calculating boy or a country magistrate. Yet on this subject of the next change in ethics he has felt hesitation, and being a strictly honest man has expressed it. Quote, I know no harder practical question than how much selfishness one ought to stand from a gifted person for the sake of his gifts or on the chance of his being right in the long run. The Superman will certainly come like a thief in the night and be shot at accordingly, but we cannot leave our property wholly undefended on that account. On the other hand, we cannot ask the Superman simply to add a higher set of virtues to current respectable morals, for he is undoubtedly going to empty a good deal of respectable morality out like so much dirty water and replace it by new and strange customs, shedding old obligations and accepting new and heavier ones. Every step of his progress must horrify conventional people, and if it were possible for even the most superior man to march ahead all the time, every pioneer of the march towards the Superman would be crucified. End of Section 13, End of Chapter 6, Part 4