 It appears a point of some mystery to the present writer that Bernard Shaw should have been so long unrecognized and almost in beggary. I should have thought his talent was of the ringing and arresting sort, such as even editors and publishers would have sense enough to seize. Yet it is quite certain that he almost starved in London for many years, writing occasional columns for an advertisement or words for a picture. And it is equally certain, it is proved by twenty anecdotes, but no one who knows Shaw needs any anecdotes to prove it, that in those days of desperation he again and again threw up chances and flung back good bargains which did not suit his unique and erratic sense of honor. The fame of having first offered Shaw to the public upon a platform worthy of him belongs like many other public services to Mr. William Archer. I say it seems odd that such a writer should not be appreciated in a flash, but upon this point there is evidently a real difference of opinion, and it constitutes for me the strangest difficulty of the subject. I hear many people complain that Bernard Shaw deliberately mystifies them. I cannot imagine what they mean. It seems to me that he deliberately insults them. His language, especially on moral questions, is generally as straight and solid as that of a barge, and far less ornate and symbolic than that of a handsome cadman. The prosperous English Philistine complains that Mr. Shaw is making a fool of him, whereas Mr. Shaw is not in the least making a fool of him. Mr. Shaw is, with laborious lucidity, calling him a fool. G.B.S. calls a landlord a thief, and the landlord, instead of denying or resending it, says, ah, that fellow hides his meaning so cleverly that one can never make out what he means. It is also fine-spun and fantastical. G.B.S. calls the statesman a liar to his face, and the statesman cries in a kind of ecstasy, ah, what quaint intricate and half-tangled trains of thought, ah, what elusive and many colored mysteries of half meaning. I think it is always quite plain what Mr. Shaw means, even when he is joking, and it generally means that the people he is talking to are to howl aloud for their sins. But the average representative of them undoubtedly treats the Shavian meaning as tricky and complex when it is really direct and offensive. He always accuses Shaw of pulling his leg at the exact moment when Shaw is pulling his nose. His prompt and pungent style he learned in the open, upon political tubs and platforms, and he is very legitimately proud of it. He boasts of being a demagogue. The cart and the trumpet for me, he says, with admirable good sense. Everyone will remember the effective appearance of Cyrano de Bergerac in the first act of the fine play of that name, when instead of leaping in by any hackney door or window, he suddenly springs upon a chair above the crowd that has so far kept him invisible. A French phrase. I will not go so far as to say that when Bernard Shaw sprang upon a chair or tub in Trafalgar Square, he had the hat in battle, or even that he had the nose terrible. But just as we see Cyrano best when he thus leaps above the crowd, I think we may take this moment of Shaw stepping on his little platform to see him clearly as he then was, and even as he has largely not ceased to be. I at least have only known him in his middle age, yet I think I can see him, younger yet only a little more alert, with hair more red but with face yet paler, as he first stood up upon some cart or barrel in the tossing glare of the gas. The first fact that one realizes about Shaw, independent of all one has read and often contradicting it, is his voice. Primarily it is the voice of an Irishman, and then something of the voice of a musician. It possibly explains much of his career. A man may be permitted to say so many imputed things, with so pleasant an intonation. But the voice is not only Irish and agreeable, it is also frank, as it were inviting conference. This goes with the style and gesture which can only be described as at once very casual and very emphatic. He assumes that bodily supremacy which goes with oratory, but he assumes it with almost ostentatious carelessness. He throws back his head, but loosely and laughingly. He is at once swaggering and yet shrugging his shoulders as if to drop from them the mantle of the orator which he has confidently assumed. Lastly, no man ever used voice or gesture better for the purpose of expressing certainty. No man can say, I tell Mr. Jones he is totally wrong, with more air of unforced and even casual conviction. This particular play of feature, or pitch of voice, at once didactic and yet not uncomrade-like, must be countered a very important fact, especially in connection with the period when that voice was first heard. It must be remembered that Shaw emerged as a wit in a sort of secondary age of wits, one of those stale interludes of prematurely old young men, which separates the serious epics of history. Oscar Wilde was its god, but he was somewhat more mystical, not to say monstrous, than the average of its dried and decorous impudence. The two survivals of that time, as far as I know, are Mr. Max Bierbaum and Mr. Graham Robertson, two most charming people. But the air they had to live in was the devil. One of its notes was an artificial reticence of speech which waited till it could plant the perfect epigram. Its typical products were far too conceited to lay down the law. Now when people heard that Bernard Shaw was witty, as he most certainly was, when they heard his moths repeated like those of Whistler or Wilde, when they heard things like the Seven Deadly Virtues, or who was Hale Cain, they expected another of those silent, sarcastic dandies who went about with one epigram, patient and poisonous like a bee with his one sting. And when they saw and heard the new humorous, they found no fixed sneer, no frock coat, no green carnation, no silence, savoy restaurant good manners, no fear of looking a fool, no particular notion of looking a gentleman. They found a talkative Irishman with a kind voice and a brown coat, open gestures and an evident desire to make people really agree with him. He had his own kind of effectations, no doubt, and his own kinds of tricks of debate, but he broke and, thank God, forever, the spell of the little man with the kingly eyeglass who had frozen both faith and fun at so many tea-tables. Because humane voice and hearty manner were so obviously more the things of a great man than the hard, gem-like brilliancy of Wilde or the careful, ill temper of Whistler, he brought him a breezier sort of insolence, the single eyeglass fled before the single eye. Added to the effect of the amiable, dogmatic voice and lean, loose, swaggering figure is that of the face with which so many caricatures to have fantastically delighted themselves. The Mephistophelian face, with the fierce, tufted eyebrows and forked red beard, yet those caricatures in their natural delight in coming upon so striking a face have somewhat misrepresented it, making it merely satanic, whereas its actual expression has quite as much benevolence as mockery. By this time his costume has become a part of his personality. One has come to think of the reddish-brown Yeager suit, as if it were a sort of reddish-brown fur, and were, like the hair and eyebrows, a part of the animal. Yet there are those who claim to remember a Bernard Shaw of a yet more awful aspect, before Yeager came to his assistance. A Bernard Shaw in a dilapidated frock coat and some sort of straw hat. I can hardly believe it. The man is so much of a piece and must have always dressed appropriately. In any case his brown woolen clothes, at once artistic and hygienic, completed the appeal for which he stood, which might be defined as eccentric, healthy-mindedness. But something of the vagueness and equivocation of his first fame is probably due to the different functions which he performed in the contemporary world of art. He began by writing novels. They are not much read, and indeed not imperatively worth reading, with the one exception of the crude and magnificent, casual Byron's profession. Mr. William Archer, in the course of his kindly efforts on behalf of his young Irish friend, sent this book to Samoa for the opinion of the most elvish yet efficient of modern critics. Stevenson summed up much of Shaw, even from that fragment, when he spoke of a romantic griffin roaring with laughter at the nature of his own quest. He also added the not wholly unjustified post-script, I say, Archer, my God, what women! The fiction was largely dropped, but when he began work he felt his way by the avenues of three arts. It was an art critic, a dramatic critic, and a musical critic, and in all three it need hardly be said he fought for the newest style and the most revolutionary school. He wrote on all these as he would have written on anything, but it was a fancy about the music that he cared most. It may often be remarked that mathematicians love and understand music more than they love or understand poetry. Bernard Shaw is in much the same condition indeed. In attempting to do justice to Shakespeare's poetry, he always calls it word music. It is not difficult to explain this special attachment of the mere logician to music. The logician, like every other man on earth, must have sentiment and romance in his existence. In every man's life, indeed, which can be called a life at all, sentiment is the most solid thing. But if the extreme logician turns for his emotions to poetry, he is exasperated and bewildered by discovering that the words of his own trade are used in an entirely different meaning. He conceives that he understands the word visible and then finds Milton applying it to darkness, in which nothing is visible. He supposes that he understands the word hide and then finds Shelley talking of a poet hidden in the light. He has a reason to believe that he understands the common word hung and then William Shakespeare's Esquire of Stratford on Avon, gravely and assures him that the tops of the tall sea waves were hung with deafening clamors on the slippery clouds. That is why the common arithmetician prefers music to poetry. Words are his scientific instruments. It irritates him that they should be anyone else's musical instruments. He is willing to see men juggling, but not men juggling with his own private tools and possessions, his terms. It is then that he turns with an utter relief to music. Here are all the same fascination and inspiration, all the same purity and plunging forces in poetry, but not requiring any verbal confession that light conceals things or that darkness can be seen in the dark. Music is mere beauty. It is beauty in the abstract, beauty in solution. It is a shapeless and liquid element of beauty, in which a man may really float, not indeed affirming the truth, but not denying it. Bernard Shaw, as I have already said, is infinitely far above all such mere mathematicians and pedantic reasoners. Still his feeling is partly the same. He adores music because he cannot deal with romantic terms either in their right or wrong sense. Music can be romantic without reminding him of Shakespeare and Walter Scott, with whom he has had personal quarrels. Music can be Catholic without reminding him verbally of the Catholic Church, which he has never seen and is sure he does not like. Bernard Shaw can agree with Wagner, the musician, because he speaks without words. If it had been Wagner, the man, he would certainly have had words with him. Therefore I would suggest that Shaw's love of music, which is so fundamental that it must be mentioned early, if not first, in this story, may itself be considered, in the first case, as the imaginative safety valve of the rationalistic Irishman. This much may be said conjecturally over the present signature, but more must not be said. Bernard Shaw understands music so much better than I do that it is just possible that he is, in that tongue and atmosphere, all that he is not elsewhere. While he is writing with a pen, I know his limitations as much as I admire his genius, and I know it is true to say that he does not appreciate romance. But while he is playing on the piano, he may be cocking a feather drawing a sword, or draining a flagon for all I know. While he is speaking, I am sure that there are some things he does not understand. While he is listening at the Queen's Hall, he may understand everything, including God and me. Upon this part of him I am a reverent agnostic. It is well to have some such dark continence in the character of a man of whom one writes. It preserves two very important things, modesty in the biographer and mystery in the biography. For the purpose of our present generalization, it is only necessary to say that Shaw, as a musical critic, summed himself up as the perfect Wagnerite. He threw himself into subtle and yet trenchant eulogy of that revolutionary voice in music. It was the same with the other arts, as he was a perfect Wagnerite in music, so he was a perfect Whistlerite in painting. So above all, he was a perfect Ibsenite in drama, and with this we enter that part of his career with which this book is more specially concerned. When Mr. William Archer got him established as a dramatic critic of the Saturday Review, he became, for the first time, a star of the stage, a shooting star, and sometimes a destroying comet. On the day of that appointment opened one of the very few exhilarating and honest battles that broke the silence of the slow and cynical collapse of the nineteenth century. Bernard Shaw, the demagogue, had got his cart and his trumpet. He was resolved to make them like the car of destiny and the trumpet of judgment. He had not the civility of the ordinary rebel, who is content to go on rebelling against kings and priests, because such rebellion is as old and as established as any priests or kings. He cast about him for something to attack which was not merely powerful or placid, but was unattacked. After a little quite sincere reflection, he found it. He would not be content to be a common atheist. He wished to blaspheme something in which even atheists believed. He was not satisfied with being revolutionary. There were so many revolutionists. He wanted to pick out some prominent institution which had been irrationally and instinctively accepted by the most violent and profane. Something of which Mr. Foot would speak as respectfully on the front page of the free-thinker as Mr. St. Joe Straykey on the front page of the spectator. He found the thing. He found the great unassailed English institution, Shakespeare. But Shaw's attack on Shakespeare, though exaggerated for the fun of the thing, was not by any means the mere folly or firework paradox that it has been supposed. He meant what he said. What was called his levity was merely the laughter of a man who enjoyed saying what he meant, an occupation which is indeed one of the greatest larks in life. Moreover, it can honestly be said that Shaw did good by shaking the mere idolatry of him of Avon. That idolatry was bad for England. It buttressed our perilous self-complacency by making us think that we alone had not merely a great poet but the one poet above criticism. It was bad for literature. It made a minute model out of work that was really a hasty and faulty masterpiece. And it was bad for religion and morals that there should be so huge a terrestrial idol that we should put such utter and unreasoning trust in any child of man. It is true that it was largely through Shaw's own defects that he beheld the defects of Shakespeare, but it needed some unequally prosaic to resist what was perilous in the charms of such poetry. It may not be altogether a mistake to send a deaf man to destroy the rock of the sirens. This attitude of Shaw illustrates, of course, all three of the divisions or aspects to which the reader's attention has been drawn. It was partly the attitude of the Irishman objecting to the Englishman, turning his mere artistic taste into a religion, especially when it was a taste merely taught him by his aunts and uncles. In Shaw's opinion, one might say, the English do not really enjoy Shakespeare or even admire Shakespeare. One can only say in the strong colloquialism that they swear by Shakespeare. He is a mere God, a thing to be invoked, and Shaw's whole business was to set up the things which were to be sworn by as things to be sworn at. It was partly again the revolutionist in pursuit of pure novelty, hating primarily the oppression of the past, almost hating history itself. For Bernard Shaw, the prophets were to be stoned after, and not before, men had built their sepulchres. There was a Yankee smartness in the man, which was irritated at the idea of being dominated by a person dead for three hundred years. Like Mark Twain, he wanted a fresher corpse. These two motives there were. But they were small compared with the other. It was the third part of him, the Puritan, that was really at war with Shakespeare. He denounced that playwright almost exactly as any contemporary Puritan coming out of a conventional, in a steep, crowned hat and stiff bands might have denounced the playwright coming out of the stage door of the old Globe Theater. This is not a mere fancy, it is philosophically true. A legend has run round the newspapers that Bernard Shaw offered himself as a better writer than Shakespeare. This is false, and quite unjust. Bernard Shaw never said anything of the kind. The writer whom he did say was better than Shakespeare was not himself, but Bunyan, and he justified it by attributing to Bunyan a virile acceptance of life as a high and harsh adventure, while in Shakespeare he saw nothing but profligate pessimism, the vanittus vanitatum of a disappointed voluptuary. According to this view, Shakespeare was always saying out, out, brief candle, because his was only a ballroom candle, while Bunyan was seeking to light such a candle, as by God's grace should never be put out. End of Section 5, Chapter 4, Part I. Section 6, Chapter 4, Part II. The Critic It is odd that Bernard Shaw's chief error or insensibility should have been the instrument of his noblest affirmation. The denunciation of Shakespeare was a mere misunderstanding, but the denunciation of Shakespeare's pessimism was the most splendidly understanding of all his utterances. This is the greatest thing in Shaw, a serious optimism, even a tragic optimism. Life is the thing too glorious to be enjoyed. To be is an exacting and exhausting business. The trumpet, though inspiring, is terrible. Nothing that he ever wrote is so noble, as his simple reference to the sturdy man who stepped up to the keeper of the book of life and said, Put down my name, sir. It is true that Shaw called this heroic philosophy by wrong names and buttressed it with false metaphysics that was the weakness of the age. The temporary decline of theology had involved the neglect of philosophy and all fine thinking, and Bernard Shaw had to find shaky justifications in shop an hour for the sons of God shouting for joy. He called it the will to live, a phrase invented by Prussian professors who would like to exist but can't. Afterwards he asked people to worship the life force, as if one could worship a hyphen. But though he covered it with crude new names, which are now fortunately crumbling everywhere like badmortar, he was on the side of the good old cause, the oldest and the best of all causes, the cause of creation against destruction, the cause of yes against no, the cause of the seed against the stony earth and the star against the abyss. His misunderstanding of Shakespeare arose largely from the fact that he is a Puritan, while Shakespeare was spiritually a Catholic. The former is always screwing himself up to see the truth. The latter is often content that truth is there. The Puritan is only strong enough to stiffen, the Catholic is strong enough to relax. Shaw I think has entirely misunderstood the pessimistic passages of Shakespeare. They are flying moods which a man with a fixed faith can afford to entertain. That all is vanity, that life is dust, and love is ashes. These are fivolities, these are jokes, that a Catholic can afford to utter. He knows well enough that there is a life that is not dust and a love that is not ashes. Just as he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the matter of enjoyment. So he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the matter of melancholy. The sad exuberances of Hamlet are merely like the glad exuberances of false staff. This is not conjecture, it is the text of Shakespeare. In a very act of uttering his pessimism, Hamlet admits that it is a mood and not the truth. Heaven is a heavenly thing. Only to him it seems a foul congregation of vapors. Man is the paragon of animals. Only to him he seems a quintessence of dust. Hamlet is quite the reverse of a skeptic. He is a man whose strong intellect believes much more than his weak temperament can make vivid to him. But this power of knowing a thing without feeling it, this power of believing a thing without experiencing it, this is an old Catholic complexity, and the Puritan has never understood it. Shakespeare confesses his moods mostly by the mouths of villains and failures, but he never sets up his moods against his mind. His cry of vanitas vanitatum is itself only a harmless vanity. Readers may not agree with my calling him Catholic with a big C, but they will hardly complain of my calling him Catholic with a small one. And that is here the principle point. Shakespeare was not, in any sense, a pessimist. He was, if anything, an optimist so universal as to be able to enjoy even pessimism. And this is exactly where he differs from the Puritan. The true Puritan is not squeamish. The true Puritan is free to say, damn it. But the Catholic Elizabethan was free on passing provocation to say, damn it all. It need hardly be explained that Bernard Shaw added to his negative case of a dramatist to be depreciated as a corresponding affirmative case of a dramatist to be exalted and advanced. He was not content with so remote a comparison as that between Shakespeare and Bunyan. In his vivacious, weekly articles in the Saturday review, the real comparison upon which everything turned was the comparison between Shakespeare and Ibsen. He early threw himself with all possible eagerness into the public disputes about the great Scandinavian, and though there was no doubt whatever about which side he supported, there was much that was individual in the line he took. It is not our business here to explore that extinct volcano. You may say that anti-Ibsenism is dead, or you may say that Ibsen is dead, in any case that controversy is dead, and death, as the Roman poet says, can alone confess of what small atoms we are made. The opponents of Ibsen largely exhibited the permanent qualities of the populace, that is their instincts were right and their reasons wrong. They made the complete controversial mistake of calling Ibsen a pessimist, whereas indeed his chief weakness is a rather childish confidence in mere nature and freedom and a blindness, either of experience or of culture, in the matter of original sin. In this sense Ibsen is not so much a pessimist as a highly crude kind of optimist. Nevertheless, the man in the street was right in his fundamental instinct, as he always is. Ibsen in his pale northern style is an optimist, but for all that he is a depressing person. The optimism of Ibsen is less comforting than the pessimism of Dante, just as the Norwegian sunrise, however splendid, is colder than a southern night. But on the side of those who fought for Ibsen there was also a disagreement and perhaps also a mistake. The vague army of the advanced, an army which advances in all directions, were united in feeling that they ought to be the friends of Ibsen, because he also was advancing somewhere somehow, but they were also seriously impressed by Flaubert, by Oscar Wilde, and all the rest who told him that the work of art was in another universe from ethics and social good. Therefore many, I think most, of the Ibsenites praised the Ibsen plays merely as Chose's views, aesthetic affirmations of what can be without any reference to what ought to be. Mr. William Archer himself inclined to this view, though his strong sagacity kept him in a haze of healthy doubt on the subject. Mr. Walkley certainly took this view, but this view Mr. George Bernard Shaw abruptly and violently refused to take. With the full, puretson combination of passion and precision he informed everybody that Ibsen was not artistic, but moral, that his dramas were didactic, that all great art was didactic, that Ibsen was strongly on the side of some of his characters and strongly against others, that there was preaching and public spirit in the work of good dramatists, and that if this were not so, dramatists and all other artists would be mere panders of intellectual debauchery to be locked up as the puretons locked up the stage-players. No one can understand Bernard Shaw, who does not give full value to this early revolt on his behalf of ethics against the ruling school of la art, poor la art. It is interesting, because it is connected with other ambitions in the man, especially with that which has made him somewhat vainer of being a parish counselor than of being one of the most popular dramatists in Europe. But his chief interest is again to be referred to our stratification of the psychology. It is a lover of true things, rebelling for wants against merely new things. It is the pureton suddenly refusing to be the mere progressive. But this attitude, obviously, laid on the ethical lover of Ibsen, a not inconsiderable obligation. Since the new drama had an ethical purpose, what was it? And if Ibsen was a moral teacher, what the deuce was he teaching? Answers to this question, answers of manifold brilliancy and promise, were scattered through all the dramatic criticisms of those years on the Saturday review. But even Bernard Shaw grew tired after a time of discussing Ibsen only in connection with the current pantomime or the latest musical comedy. It was felt that so much sincerity and fertility of explanation justified a concentrated attack, and in 1891 appeared the brilliant book called The Quintessence of Ibsenism, which some have declared to be merely the quintessence of Shaw. However, this may be, it was in fact and profession the quintessence of Shaw's theory of the morality or propaganda of Ibsen. The book itself is much longer than the book I am writing, and, as is only right and so spirited and apologist, every paragraph is provocative. I could write an essay on every sentence which I accept and three essays on every sentence which I deny. Bernard Shaw himself is a master of compression. He can put a conception more compactly than any other man alive. It is therefore rather difficult to compress his compression. One feels as if he were trying to extract a beef essence from Boverelle. But the shortest form in which I can state the idea of the quintessence of Ibsenism is that it is the idea of distrusting ideals which are universal in comparison with facts which are miscellaneous. The man whom he attacks throughout, he calls the idealist. That is the man who permits himself to be mainly moved by a moral generalization. Since he says are to be judged by their effect on happiness and not by their conformity to any ideal. As we have already seen, there is a certain inconsistency here. For while Shaw had always chucked all ideals overboard, the one he had chucked first was the ideal of happiness. Passing this, however, for the present, we may mark the above as the most satisfying summary. If I tell a lie, I am not to blame myself for having violated the ideal of truth, but only for perhaps have gotten myself into a mess and made things worse than they were before. If I have broken my word, I need not feel, as my fathers did, that I have broken something inside of me as one who breaks a blood vessel. It all depends on whether I have broken up something outside of me as one who breaks up an evening party. If I shoot my father, the only question is whether I have made him happy. I must not admit the idealistic conception that the mere shooting of my father might possibly make me unhappy. We are to judge of every individual case as it arises, apparently without any social summary or moral ready reckoner at all. The golden rule is that there is no golden rule. We must not say that it is right to keep promises, but that it may be right to keep this promise. Essentially it is anarchy. Nor is it very easy to see how a state could be very comfortable which was socialist in all its public morality and anarchist in all its private. But if it is anarchy, it is anarchy without any of the abandon and exuberance of anarchy. It is a worried and conscientious anarchy, an anarchy of painful delicacy and even caution. For it refuses to trust in traditional experiments or plainly trodden tracks. Every case must be considered anew from the beginning and yet considered with the most wide-eyed care for human welfare. Every man must act as if he were the first man made. Briefly we must always be worrying about what is best for our children and we must not take one hint or rule of thumb from our fathers. Some think that this anarchism would make a man tread down mighty cities in his madness. I think it would make a man walk down the street as if he were walking on eggshells. I do not think this experiment in opportunism would end in frantic license. I think it would end in frozen timidity. If a man was forbidden to solve moral problems by moral science or the help of mankind, his course would be quite easy. He would not solve the problems. The world, instead of being a knot so tangled as to need unraveling, would simply become a piece of clockwork too complicated to be touched. I cannot think that this untutored worry was what Ibsen meant. I have my doubts as to whether it was what Shaw meant, but I do not think that it can be substantially doubted that it was what he said. In any case, it can be asserted that the general aim of the work was to exalt the immediate conclusions of practice against the general conclusions of theory. Shaw objected to the solution of every problem in a play being by its nature a general solution, applicable to all other such problems. He disliked the entrance of a universal justice at the end of the last act, treading down all the personal ultimatums and all the varied certainties of men. He disliked the God from the machine, because he was from a machine. But even without the machine, he tended to dislike the God, because a God is more general than a man. His enemies have accused Shaw of being anti-domestic, a shaker of the roof tree. But in this sense, Shaw may be called almost madly domestic. He wishes each private problem to be settled in private without reference to sociological ethics, and the only objection to this kind of gigantic cause history is that the theatre is really too small to discuss it. It would not be fair to play David and Goliath on a stage too small to admit Goliath. But it is not fair to discuss private morality on a stage too small to admit the enormous presence of public morality. That character which has not appeared in a play since the Middle Ages, whose name is every man, and whose honor we have all in our keeping. CHAPTER V PART I THE DRAMATIST No one who was alive at the time and interested in such matters will ever forget the first acting of arms in the man. It was applauded by that indescribable element in all of us which rejoices to see the genuine thing prevail against the plausible. That element which rejoices that even its enemies are alive. Apart from the problems raised in the play, the very form of it was an attractive and forcible innovation. Comic plays which were wholly heroic, comic plays which were wholly and even heartlessly ironical, were common enough. Commonest of all in this particular time was the play that began playfully, with plenty of comic business, and was gradually sobered by sentiment, until it ended on a note of romance, or even pathos. A common-placed little officer, the butt of the mess, becomes by the last act as high and hopeless a lover as Dante, or a vulgar and violent pork butcher, remembers his own youth, before the curtain goes down. The first thing that Bernard Shaw did when he stepped before the footlights was to reverse this process. He resolved to build a play not on pathos, but on pathos. The officer should be heroic, first, and then everyone should laugh at him. The curtain should go up on a man remembering his youth, and he should only reveal himself as a violent pork butcher when someone interrupted him with an order for pork. This merely technical originality is indicated in the very title of the play. The Arma Vermique of Virgil is a mounting and ascending phrase. The man is more than his weapons. The Latin line suggests a suburb procession which should bring on to the stage the brazen and resounding armor, the shield and shattering axe, but end with the hero himself taller and more terrible because unarmed. The technical effect of Shaw's scheme is like the same scene in which a crowd should carry even more gigantic shapes of shield and helmet, but when the horns and howls were at their highest, should end with a figure of little tick. The name itself is meant to be a bathos, arms, and a man. It is well to begin with the superficial, and this is the superficial effectiveness of Shaw, the brilliancy of bathos. But of course the vitality and value of his plays does not lie merely in this any more than the value of swimburn, lies in alliteration, or the value of hood in puns. This is not his message, but it is his method. It is his style. The first taste we had of it was in this play of arms and the man, but even at the very first it was evident that there was much more in the play than that. Among other things there was one thing not unimportant. There was savage sincerity. Indeed only a ferociously sincere person can produce such effective flippancies on a matter like war. Just as only a strong man could juggle with cannonballs, it is all very well to use the word fool as synonymous with jester, but daily experience shows that it is generally the solemn and silent man who is the fool. It is all very well to accuse Mr. Shaw of standing on his head. But if you stand on your head, you must have a hard and solid head to stand on. In arms and the man, the bathos of form was strictly the incarnation of a strong satire in an idea. The play opens in an atmosphere of military melodrama, the dashing officer of cavalry going off to death in an attitude, the lovely heroine left in tearful rapture, the brass band, the noise of guns and the red fire. Into all this enters blanched sleigh, the little sturdy crop-haired Swiss professional soldier, a man without a country, but with a trade. He tells the army, adoring heroine, frankly that she is a humbug, and she, after a moment's reflection, appears to agree with him. The play is like nearly all Shaw's plays, the dialogue of conversion. By the end of it the young lady has lost all her military illusions and admires this mercenary soldier not because he faces guns, but because he faces facts. This was a fitting entrance for Shaw to his didantic drama, because the commonplace courage which he respects in blanchly was the one virtue which he was destined to praise throughout. We can best see how the play symbolizes and summarizes Bernard Shaw if we compare it with some other attack by modern human attarians upon war. Shaw has many of the actual opinions of Tolstoy. Like Tolstoy he tells men with coarse innocence that romantic war is only butchery and that romantic love is only lust. But Tolstoy objects to these things because they are real. He really wishes to abolish them. Shaw only objects to them insofar as they are idealized. Shaw objects not so much to war as to the attractiveness of war. He does not so much dislike love as the love of love. Before the temple of Mars Tolstoy stands and thunders, there shall be no wars. Bernard Shaw merely murmurs, wars if you must, but for God's sake not war songs. Before the temple of Venus Tolstoy cries terribly, come out of it. Shaw is quite content to say do not be taken in by it. Tolstoy seems really to propose that high passion and patriotic valor should be destroyed. Shaw is more moderate and only asks that they should be desecrated. Upon this note, both about sex and variations of witty adventure and intellectual surprise, it may be doubted perhaps whether this realism in love and war is quite so sensible as it looks. Securus judicat orbis terreum. The world is wiser than the moderns. The world has kept sentimentalities simply because they are the most practical things in the world. They alone make men do things. The world does not encourage a quite rational lover simply because a perfectly rational lover would never get married. The world does not encourage a perfectly rational army because a perfectly rational army would run away. The brain of Bernard Shaw was like a wedge in the literal sense. Its sharpest end was always in front and it split our society from end to end the moment it had entrants at all. As I have said, he was long unheard of, but he had not the tragedy of many authors who were heard of long before they were heard. When you had read any Shaw, you read all Shaw. When you had seen one of his plays, you waited for more. And when he brought them out in volume form, you did what is repugnant to any literary man, you bought a book. The dramatic volume with which Shaw dazzled the public was called plays, pleasant and unpleasant. I think the most striking and typical thing about it was that he did not know very clearly which plays were unpleasant and which were pleasant. Pleasant is a word which is almost unmeaning to Bernard Shaw, except as I suppose in music where I cannot follow him. Dish and receptivity are things that simply do not appear. He has the best of tongues and the worst of palates. With the possible exception of Mrs. Warren's profession, which was at least unpleasant in the sense of being forbidden, I can see no particular reason why any of the seven plays should be held especially to please or displease. First in fame and contemporary importance came the reprint of Arms and the Man, of which I have already spoken. For all the rest towered unquestionably the two figures of Mrs. Warren and of Candida. They were neither of them pleasant, except as all good art is pleasant. They were neither of them really unpleasant, except as all truth is unpleasant. But they did represent the author's normal preference and his principal fear, and those two sculptured giantesses largely upheld his fame. I fancy that the author rather dislikes Candida, because it is so generally liked. I give my own feeling for what it is worth, a foolish phrase, but I think that there were only two moments when this powerful writer was truly, in the ancient and popular sense, inspired. That is, breathing from a bigger self and telling more truth than he knew. One is that scene in a later play where, after the secrets and revenges of Egypt have rioted and rotted all around him, the colossal sanity of Caesar is suddenly acclaimed with swords. The other is that great last scene in Candida, where the wife stung into final speech, declared her purpose of remaining with the strong man, because he is the weak man. The wife is asked to decide between two men one strenuous, self-confident, popular preacher, her husband, the other a wild and weak young poet, logically futile and physically timid, her lover, and she chooses the former, because he has more weaknesses and more need of her. Even among the plain and ringing paradoxes of the Shah play, this is one of the best reversals or turnovers ever affected. A paradoxical writer like Bernard Shaw is perpetually and tire-simly told that he stands on his head. But all romance and all religion consist in making the whole universe stand on its head. The reversal is the whole idea of virtue, that the last shall be first, and the first last. Considered as a pure piece of Shaw, therefore, the thing is of the best. But it is also something much better than Shaw. The writer touches certain realities commonly outside his scope, especially the reality of the normal wife's attitude to the normal husband, an attitude which is not romantic, but which is yet chaotic, which is insanely unselfish and yet quite cynically clear-sighted. It involves human sacrifice without in the least involving idolatry. The truth is that in this place Bernard Shaw comes within an inch of expressing something that is not properly expressed anywhere else. The idea of marriage. Marriage is not a mere chain upon love, as the anarchists say, nor is it a mere crown upon love, as the sentimentalists say. Marriage is a fact, an actual human relation, like that of motherhood, which has certain human habits and loyalties, except in a few monstrous cases where it is turned to torture by special insanity and sin. A marriage is neither an ecstasy nor a slavery, it is a common wealth. It is a separate working and fighting thing, like a nation. Kings and diplomatists talk of forming alliances when they make weddings, but indeed every wedding is primarily an alliance. The family is a fact, even when it is not an agreeable fact, and a man is part of his wife even when he wishes he wasn't. The twain are one flesh, yes, even when they are not one spirit. Man is duplex, man is a quadruped. Of this ancient and essential relation there are certain emotional results which are subtle, like all the gross of nature, and one of them is the attitude of the wife to the husband, whom she regards at once as the strongest and most helpless of human figures. She regards him in some strange fashion at once as a warrior who must make his way and as an infant who is sure to lose his way. The man has emotions which exactly correspond, sometimes looking down at his wife and sometimes up at her. For marriage is like a splendid game of seesaw. Whatever else it is, it is not comradeship. This living ancestral bond, not of love or fear, but strictly of marriage, has been twice expressed splendidly in literature. The man's injurable sense of the mother in his lawful wife was uttered by Browning in one of his two or three truly shattering lines of genius when he makes the extruable Guido fall back finally upon the fact of marriage and the wife whom he has trodden like Meyer. Christ, Maria, God, Pampilia, will you let them murder me? And the woman's witness to the same fact has been best expressed by Bernard Shaw in this great scene where she remains with the great stalwart successful public man, because he is really too little to run alone. There are one or two errors in the play and they are all due to the primary error of despising the mental attitude of romance, which is the only key to real human conduct. For instance, the love-making of the young poet is all wrong. He is supposed to be a romantic and amorous boy and therefore the dramatist tries to make him talk turgidly about seeking for an archangel with purple wings who shall be worthy of his lady. But Aladdin love would never talk in this mock heroic style. There is no period at which the young male is more sensitive and serious and afraid of looking a fool. This is a blunder, but there is another much bigger and blacker. It is completely and disastrously false to the whole nature of falling in love to make the young Eugene complain of the cruelty which makes Candida defile her fair hands with domestic duties. No boy in love with a beautiful woman would ever feel disgusted when she peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. He would like her to be domestic. He would simply feel that the potatoes had become poetical and the lamps gained an extra light. This may be irrational, but we're not talking of rationality, but the psychology of first love. It may be very unfair to women that the toil and triviality of potato peeling should be seen through a glamour of romance. But the glamour is quite a certain effect as the potatoes. It may be a bad thing in sociology that men should deify domesticity in girls as something dainty and magical, but all men do. Personally I do not think it a bad thing at all, but that is another argument. The argument here is that Bernard Shaw, in aiming at mere realism, makes a big mistake in reality. Misled by his great heresy of looking at emotions from the outside, he makes Eugene a cold-blooded prig at the very moment when he is trying for his own dramatic purposes to make him a hot-blooded lover. He makes the young lover an idealistic theorizer about the very things about which he really would have been a sort of mystical materialist. Here the romantic Irishman is much more right than the very rational one, and there is far more truth to life as it is in lover's couplet. And envy the chicken that Peggy was picking. Then in Eugene's solemn aesthetic protest against the potato skins and the lamp oil. For dramatic purposes, GBS, even if he despises romance, ought to comprehend it, but then if he wants comprehended romance, he would not despise it. The series, contained besides its more substantial work, tragic and comic, a comparative frivolity called The Man of Destiny. It is a little comedy about Napoleon, and is chiefly interesting as a foreshadowing of his after sketches of heroes and strong men. It is a kind of parody of Caesar and Cleopatra before it was written. In this connection, the mere title of this Napoleonic play is of interest. All Shaw's generation and school of thought remembered Napoleon only by his late and corrupt title of The Man of Destiny, a title only given to him when he was already fat and tired and destined to exile. They forgot that through all the really thrilling and creative part of his career, he was not The Man of Destiny, but The Man Who Defied Destiny. Shaw's sketch is extraordinarily clever, but it is tinged with this unmilitary notion of an inevitable conquest and this we must remember when we come to those larger canvases on which he painted his more serious heroes. As for the play, it is packed with good things of which the last is perhaps the best. The long duolog between Bonaparte and the Irish lady ends with the general declaring that he will only be beaten when he meets an English army under an Irish general. It has always been one of Shaw's paradoxes that the English mind has the force to fulfill orders, while the Irish mind has the intelligence to give them, and it is among those of his paradoxes which contain a certain truth. A far more important play is The Philanderer, an ironic comedy which is full of fine strokes and real satire. It is more especially the vehicle of some of Shaw's best satire upon physical science. Nothing could be cleverer than the picture of the young, strenuous doctor in the utter innocence of his professional ambition, who has discovered a new disease and is delighted when he finds people suffering from it, and cast down to despair when he finds that it does not exist. The point is worth a pause, because it is a good short way of stating Shaw's attitude, right or wrong, upon the whole of formal morality. What he dislikes in young Dr. Paramore is that he has interposed a secondary and false conscience between himself and the facts. When his disease is disproved, instead of seeing the escape of a human being who thought he was going to die of it, Paramore sees the downfall of a kind of flag or cause. This is the whole contention of the quintessence of Ibsenism, put better than the book puts it. It is a really sharp exposition of the dangers of idealism, the sacrifice of people to principles, and Shaw is even wiser in his suggestion that his excessive idealism exists nowhere so strongly as in the world of physical science. He shows that the scientist tends to be more concerned about the sickness than about the sick man, but it was certainly in his mind to suggest here also that the idealist is more concerned about the sin than about the sinner. This business of Dr. Paramore's disease, while it is the most farcical thing in the play, is also the most philosophic and important. The rest of the figures, including the Philanderer himself, are in the full sense of those blasting and obliterating words, funny without being vulgar. That is funny without being of any importance to the masses of men. It is a play about a dashing and advanced Ibsen club and a squabble between the young Ibsenites and the old people who are not yet up to Ibsen. It would be hard to find a stronger example of Shaw's only essential error, modernity, which means the seeking for truth in terms of time. Only a few years have passed and already almost half the wit of the wonderful play is wasted, because it all turns on the newness of a fashion that is no longer new. Doubtless many people think the Ibsen drama a great thing, like the French classical drama. But going to the Philanderer is like going among the periwigs and rapiers and hearing that the young men are now all for racine. What makes such a work sound unreal is not the praise of Ibsen, but the praise of the novelty of Ibsen. Any advantage that Bernard Shaw had over Colonel Craven I have over Bernard Shaw. We who happen to be born last have the meaningless and paltry triumph in that meaningless and paltry war. We are the superiors by that silliest and most snobbish of all superiorities, the mere aristocracy of time. All works must become thus old and insipid, which have ever tried to be modern, which have consented to smell of time rather than of eternity. Only those who are stooped to be in advance of their time will ever find themselves behind it. But it is irritating to think what diamonds, what dazzling silver of shavi and wit, has been sunk in such an out-of-date warship. In the Philanderer there are five hundred excellent and about five magnificent things. The rattle of repartees between the doctor and the soldier about the humanity of their two trades is admirable. Or again when the colonel tells Chartres that in his young days he would have no more behaved like Chartres than he would have cheated at cards. After a pause Chartres says, you're getting old Craven and you make a virtue of it as usual. And there is an altitude of aerial tragedy in the words of Grace, who has refused the man she loves to Julia, who is marrying the man she doesn't. This is what they call a happy ending, these men. There is an acrid taste in the Philanderer, and certainly he might be considered a super-sensitive person who should find anything acrid in you never can tell. This play is the nearest approach to frank and objectless exuberance in the whole of Shaw's work. Punch, with wisdom as well as wit, said that it might as well be called not you never can tell, but you never can be Shaw. And yet if anyone will read this blazing farce and then after it any of the romantic farces such as Pickwick or even the Wrong Box, I do not think he will be disposed to erase or even to modify what I said at the beginning about the ingrained grimness and even inhumanity of Shaw's art. To take but one test, love in an extravaganza, may be a light love or a love in idleness, but it should be hearty and happy love if it is to add to the general hilarity. Such are the ludicrous but lucky love affairs of the sportsman Winkle and the maestro Jimson. In glorious collapse before her bullying lover there is something at once cold and unclean. It calls up all the modern supermen with their cruel and fishy eyes. Such farces should begin in a friendly air in a tavern. There is something very symbolic of Shaw in the fact that his farce begins in a dentist's. CHAPTER V the Dramatist The only real one out of this brilliant batch of plays in which I think that the method adopted really fails is the one called Widower's Houses. The best touch of Shaw is simply in the title. The simple substitution of widowers for widows contains almost the whole bitter and yet boisterous protest of Shaw, all his preference for undignified fact over dignified phrase, all his dislike of those subtle trends of sex or mystery which swing the logician off the straight line. We can imagine him crying, why in the name of death and conscience should it be tragic to be a widow, but comic to be a widower? But the rationalistic method is here applied quite wrong as regards the production of a drama. The most dramatic point in the affair is when the open and indecent rack renter turns on the decent young man of means and proves to him that he is equally guilty, that he also can only grind his corn by grinding the faces of the poor. But even here the point is undramatic because it is indirect. It is indirect because it is merely sociological. It may be the truth that a young man living on an unexamined income which ultimately covers a great deal of house property is as dangerous as any despot or thief, but it is a truth that you can no more put into a play than into a trial it. You can make a play out of one man robbing another man, but not out of one man robbing a million men, still less out of his robbing them unconsciously. Of the plays collected in this book I have kept Mrs. Warren's profession to the last, because, fine as it is, it is even finer and more important because of its fate which was to rouse a long and serious storm and to be vetoed by the censor of plays. I say that this drama is most important because of the quarrel that came out of it. If I were speaking of some mere artist this might be an insult, but there are high and heroic things in Bernard Shaw, and one of the highest and most heroic is this, that he certainly cares much more for a quarrel than for a play, and this quarrel about the censorship is one on which he feels so strongly that in a book embodying any sort of sympathy it would be much better to leave out Mrs. Warren than to leave out Mr. Redford. The veto was the pivot of so personal a movement by the dramatist, so very positive an assertion of his own attitude toward things, that it is only just in necessary to state what were the two essential parties to the dispute, the play, and the official who prevented the play. The play of Mrs. Warren's profession is concerned with a course mother and a cold daughter. The mother drives the ordinary and dirty trade of harlotry, the daughter does not know until the end the atrocious origin of all her comfort and refinement. The daughter, when the discovery is made, freezes up into an iceberg of contempt, which is indeed a very womanly thing to do. The mother explodes into pulverizing cynicism and practicality, which is also very womanly. The dialogue is drastic and sweeping. The daughter says the trade is loathsome. The mother answers that she loathes it herself, that every healthy person does loathe the trade by which she lives. And to be on question, the general effect of the play is that the trade is loathsome, supposing anyone to be so insensible as to require to be told of the fact. Undoubtedly the upshot is that a brother is a miserable business, and a brother will keep her a miserable woman. The whole dramatic art of Shaw is in the literal sense of the word, tragic comic. I mean that the comic part comes after the tragedy, but just as you never can tell, represents the nearest approach of Shaw to the purely comic. So Mrs. Warren's profession represents his only complete or nearly complete tragedy. There is no too penny modernism in it, as in the Philanderer. Mrs. Warren is as old as the Old Testament, for she hath cast down many wounded, gay, many strong men have been slain by her. Her house is in the gates of hell, going down into the chamber of death. Here is no subtle ethics, as in widower's houses. For even those moderns who think it noble that a woman should throw away her honor, surely cannot think it especially noble that she should sell it. Here is no lighting up by laughter, astonishment, and happy coincidence, as in you never can tell. The play is a pure tragedy, about a permanent and quite plain human problem. The problem is as plain and permanent. The tragedy is as proud and pure as in Oedipus or Macbeth. This play was presented in the ordinary way for the public performance, and was suddenly stopped by the censor of plays. The censor of plays is a small and accidental 18th century official. Like nearly all the powers which Englishmen now respect as ancient and rooted, he is very recent. The newspapers and newspapers still talk of the English aristocracy that came over with William the Conqueror. Little of our effective oligarchy is as old as the Reformation, and none of it came over with William the Conqueror. Some of the older English landlords came over with William of Orange. The rest have come by ordinary alien immigration. In the same way, we always talk of the Victorian woman, with her smelling salt-sand sentiment, as the old-fashioned woman. But she really was a quite new-fashioned woman. She considered herself and was an advance in delicacy and civilization upon the course and candid Elizabethan woman to whom we are now returning. We are never oppressed by old things. It is recent things that can really oppress. And in accordance with this principle, modern England has accepted, as if it were a part of perennial morality, a tenth-rate job of Walpole's worst days, called the censorship of the drama. Just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century parvenues to date from Hastings, just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century ladies to date from Eve, so they have supposed the eighteenth-century censorship to date from Sinai. The origin of the thing was, in truth, purely political. Its first and principal achievement was to prevent fielding from writing plays, not at all because the plays were coarse but because they criticized the government. Fielding was a free writer, but they did not resent his sexual freedom. The censor would not have ejected if he had torn away the most intimate curtains of decency or rent the last rag from the private life. What the censor disliked was his rending the curtain from public life. There is still much of that spirit in our country. There are no affairs which men seek so much to cover up as public affairs. But the thing was done somewhat more boldly and boldly in Walpole's day, and the censorship of plays has its origin, not merely in tyranny, but in a quite trifling and temporary and partisan piece of tyranny, a thing in its nature far more ephemeral, far less essential than ship-money. Perhaps its brightest moment was when the office of censor was held by that filthy writer Coleman, the Younger, and when he gravely refused a license to work by the author of our village. Few funnier notions can ever have actually been facts than this notion that the restrained tenchastity of George Coleman saved the English public from the eroticism and obscenity of Miss Mitford. Such was the play, and such was the power that stopped the play. A private man wrote it, another private man forbade it, nor was there any difference between Mr. Shaw's authority and Mr. Redford's, except that Mr. Shaw did defend his action on public grounds, and Mr. Redford did not. The dramatist had simply been suppressed by a despot, and what was worse, because it was modern, by a silent and evasive despot, a despot in hiding. People talk about the pride of tyrants, but we at the present day suffer from the modesty of tyrants, from the shyness and the shrinking secrecy of the strong. Shaw's preface to Mrs. Warren's profession was far more fit to be called a public document than the slovenly refusal of the individual official. It had more exactness, more universal application, more authority. Shaw, on Redford, was far more national and responsible than Redford on Shaw. The dramatist found in the quarrel one of the important occasions of his life, because the crisis called out something in him, which is in many ways his highest quality, righteous indignation. As a mere matter of the art of controversy, of course, he carried the war into the enemy's camp at once. He did not linger over loose excuses for license. He declared at once that the censor was licentious, while he, Bernard Shaw, was clean. He did not discuss whether a censorship ought to make the drama moral. He declared that it made the drama immoral. With a fine strategic audacity, he attacked the censor quite as much for what he permitted as for what he prevented. He charged him with encouraging all plays that attracted men to vice, and only stopping those which discouraged them from it. Nor was this attitude by any means an idle paradox. Many plays appear, as Shaw pointed out, in which the prostitute and the procurus are practically obvious, and in which they are represented as reveling in beautiful surroundings and basking in brilliant popularity. The crime of Shaw was not that he introduced the gayety girl, that had been done, with little enough decorum, in a hundred musical comedies. The crime of Shaw was that he introduced the gayety girl, but did not represent her life as all gayety. The pleasures of vice were already flaunted before the playgoers. It was the perils of vice that were carefully concealed from them. The gay adventures, the gorgeous dresses, the champagne and oysters, the diamonds and motor cars, dramatists were allowed to drag all these dazzling temptations before any silly housemaid in the gallery who was grumbling at her wages. But they were not allowed to warn her of the vulgarity and the nausea, the dreary deceptions and the blasting diseases of that life. Mrs. Warren's profession was not up to a sufficient standard of immorality. It was not spicy enough to pass the censor. The acceptable and the accepted plays were those which made the fall of a woman fashionable and fascinating for all the world as if the censor's profession were the same as Mrs. Warren's profession. Such was the angle of Shaw's energetic attack, and it is not to be denied that there was exaggeration in it, and what is so much worse omission? The argument might easily be carried too far. It might end with a sense of screaming torture in the inquisition as a corrective to the too amiable view of a clergyman in the private secretary. But the controversy is definitely worth recording, if only as an excellent example of the author's aggressive attitude and his love of turning the tables in debate. Moreover, though this point of view involves a potential overstatement, it also involves an important truth. One of the best points, urged in the course of it, was this. That though vice is punished in conventional drama, the punishment is not really impressive. Because it is not inevitable, or even possible. It does not arise out of the evil act. Years afterward Bernard Shaw urged this argument again in connection with his friend Mr. Granville Barker's play of waste, in which the woman dies from an illegal operation. When Shaw said truly enough that if she had died from poison or a pistol shot, it would have left everyone unmoved, for pistols do not in their nature follow female unchastity. Illegal operations very often do. The punishment was one which might follow the crime, not only in that case but in many cases. Here I think the whole argument might be sufficiently cleared up by saying that the objection to such things on the stage is a purely artistic objection. There is nothing wrong in talking about an illegal operation. There are plenty of occasions when it would be very wrong not to talk about it, but it may easily be just the shade too ugly for the shape of any work of art. There is nothing wrong about being sick, but if Bernard Shaw wrote a play in which all the characters express their dislike of animal food by vomiting on the stage, I think we should be justified in saying that the thing was outside not the laws of morality but the framework of civilized literature. The instinctive movement of repulsion which everyone has when hearing of the operation in waste is not an ethical repulsion at all, but it is an aesthetic repulsion and a right one. But I have only dwelt on this particular fighting phrase because it leaves us facing the ultimate characteristics which I mentioned first. Bernard Shaw cares nothing for art. In comparison with morals, literally nothing. Bernard Shaw is a Puritan, and his work is Puritan work. He has all the essentials of the old, virile, and extinct Protestant type. In his work he is as ugly as a Puritan. He is as indecent as a Puritan. He is as full of gross words and sensual facts as a sermon of the seventeenth century. To this point of his life, indeed, hardly anyone would have dreamed of calling him a Puritan. He was called sometimes an anarchist, sometimes of a fume, sometimes by the more discerning stupid people, a prig. His attitude toward current problems felt to be arresting and even indecent. I do not think that anyone thought of connecting it with the old Calvinistic morality. But Shaw, who knew better than the Shavians, was at this moment on the very eve of confessing his moral origin. The next book of plays he produced included The Devil's Disciple, Captain Brass Bounds Conversion, and Caesar and Cleopatra, actually bore the title of Plays for Puritans. The play called The Devil's Disciple has great merits, but the merits are incidental. Some of its jokes are serious and important, but its general plan can only be called a joke. Almost alone among Bernard Shaw's plays, except, of course, such things as How He Lied to Her Husband and The Admiral Bashfield, this drama does not turn on any plain pivot of ethical or philosophical conviction. The artistic idea seems to be the notion of a melodrama in which all the conventional melodramatic situations shall suddenly take unconventional turns. Just where the melodramatic clergyman would show courage, he appears to show cowardice. Just where the melodramatic sinner would confess his love, he confesses his indifference. This is a little too like the Shaw of the newspaper critics rather than the Shaw of reality. There are indeed present in the play two of the writer's principle moral conceptions. The first is the idea of a great heroic action coming in a sense from nowhere, that is, not coming from any commonplace motive, being born in the soul in naked beauty, coming with its own authority, and testifying only to itself. Shaw's agent does not act toward something but from something. The hero dies not because he desires heroism, but because he has it. So in this particular play, the Devil's disciple finds that his own nature will not permit him to put the rope around another man's neck. He has no reasons of desire, affection, or even equity. His death is a sort of divine whim. And in connection with this, the dramatist introduces another favorite moral, the objection to perpetual playing upon the motive of sex. He deliberately lures the onlooker into the net of Cupid in order to tell him with salutary decision that Cupid is not there at all. Things of melodramatic dramatists have made a man face death for the woman he loves. Shaw makes him face death for the woman he does not love, merely in order to put the woman in her place. He objects to that idolatry of sexualism which makes it the fountain of all forcible enthousiasms. He dislikes amorous drama which makes the female the only key to the male. He is feminist in politics, but anti-feminist in emotion. His key to most problems is, no shares a past lefem. As has been observed, the incidental felicities of the play are frequent and memorable, especially those connected with the character of General Burgoyne, the real, full-blooded, free-thinking 18th-century gentleman who was much too much of an aristocrat not to be a liberal. One of the best thrusts in all the Chaveon fencing matches is that which occurs when Richard Duggan, condemned to be hanged, asks rhetorically why he cannot be shot like a soldier. Now there you speak like a civilian, replies General Burgoyne. Have you formed any conception of the condition of marksmanship in the British army? Excellent, too, is the passage in which his subordinate speaks of crushing the enemy in America, and Burgoyne asks him who will crush their enemies in England. Snobbery and jabbery and incurable carelessness and sloth, and in one sentence towards the end Shaw reaches a wider and more genial comprehension of mankind than he shows anywhere else. It takes all sorts to make a world, saints as well as soldiers. If Shaw had remembered that sentence on other occasions, he would have avoided his mistake about Caesar and Brutus. It is not only true that it takes all sorts to make a world, but the world cannot succeed without its failures. Perhaps the most doubtful point in all the play is why it is a play for Puritans, except the hideous picture of a Calvinistic home is meant to destroy Puritanism, and indeed in this connection it is constantly necessary to fall back upon the facts of which I have spoken at the beginning of this brief study. It is necessary especially to remember that Shaw could, in all probability, speak of Puritanism from the inside. In that domestic circle which took him to hear Moody and Sanky, in that domestic circle which was a T-Total even when it was intoxicated, in that atmosphere and society, Shaw might even have met the monstrous mother in the devil's disciple, the horrible old woman who declares that she has hardened her heart to hate her children because the heart of man is desperately wicked. The old ghoul who has made one of her children an imbecile and the other an outcast. Such types do occur in small societies drunk with the dismal whine of Puritan determinism. It is possible that there were among Irish Calvinists, people who denied that charity was a Christian virtue. It is possible that among Puritans there were people who thought a heart was a kind of heart disease, but it is enough to make one tear one's hair, to think that a man of genius received his first impressions in so small a corner of Europe that he could for a long time suppose that this Puritanism was current among Christian men. No question, however, need not detain us, for the batch of plays contained two others about which it is easier to speak. The third play, in order in the series called Plays for Puritans, is a very charming one, Captain Brass Bounce Conversion. This also turns, as does so much of the Caesar drama, on the idea of vanity of revenge, the idea that it is too slight and silly a thing for a man to allow to occupy and corrupt his consciousness. It is not, of course, the morality that is new here but the touch of cold laughter in the core of the morality. Many saints and sages have denounced vengeance, but they treated vengeance as something too great for man. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay. Shaw treats vengeance as something too small for man, a monkey trick he ought to have outlived, a childish storm of tears which he ought to be able to control. In the story in question Captain Brass Bounce has nourished through his whole erratic existence, racketing at about all the unsavory parts of Africa a mission of private punishment which appears to him as a mission of holy justice. His mother has died in consequence of a judge's decision and brass-bound roams and schemes until the judge falls into his hands. Then a pleasant society-lady, Lady Sicily Wayne Fleet, tells him in an easy conversational undertone a rivulet of speech which ripples while she is mending his coat that he is making a fool of himself, that his wrong is irrelevant, that his vengeance is objectless, that he would be much better if he flung his morbid fancy away forever. In short she tells him he's ruining himself for the sake of ruining a total stranger. Here again we have the whole note of the Economist, the hatred of mere loss. Shaw, one might almost say, dislikes murder not so much because it wastes the life of the corpse but because it wastes the time of the murderer. If he were endeavoring to persuade one of his moonlighting fellow countrymen not to shoot his landlord, I can imagine him explaining with benevolent emphasis that it was not so much a question of losing a life as of throwing away a bullet. But indeed the Irish comparison alone suggests the doubt which wriggles in the recesses of my mind about the complete reliability of the philosophy of Lady Sicily Wayne Fleet. The complete finality of the moral of Captain Brass Bound's conversion. Of course it was very natural in an aristocrat like Lady Sicily Wayne Fleet to wish to let sleeping dogs lie, especially those whom Mr. Blatchford calls underdogs. Of course it was natural for her to wish everything to be smooth and sweet-tempered. But I have the obstinate question in the corner of my brain. Whether if a few Captain Brass Bounds did revenge themselves on judges, the quality of our judges might not materially improve. When this doubt is once off one's conscience one can lose oneself in the bottomless beatitude of Lady Sicily Wayne Fleet, one of the most living and laughing things that her maker has made. I do not know any stronger way of stating the beauty of the character than by saying that it was written especially for Ellen Terry, and that it is with Beatrice, one of the very few characters in which the dramatist can claim some part of her triumph. CHAPTER V. PART III. We may now pass to the more important of the plays. For some time Bernard Shaw would seem to have been brooding upon the soul of Julius Caesar. There must always be a strong human curiosity about the soul of Julius Caesar, and among other things about whether he had a soul. The conjunction of Shaw and Caesar has about it something smooth and inevitable, for this decisive reason. That Caesar is really the only great man of history to whom the Shaw theories apply. Caesar was a Shaw hero. Caesar was merciful without being in the least pitiful. His mercy was colder than justice. Caesar was a conqueror without being in any hearty sense a soldier. His courage was lonelier than fear. Caesar was a demagogue without being a Democrat. In the same way Bernard Shaw is a demagogue without being a Democrat. If he had tried to prove his principle from any of the other heroes or sages of mankind he would have found it much more difficult. Napoleon achieved more miraculous conquest, but during his most conquering epic he was a burning boy, suicidally in love with a woman far beyond his age. Joan of Arc achieved far more instant and incredible worldly success. But Joan of Arc achieved worldly success because she believed in another world. Nelson was a figure fully as fascinating and dramatically decisive, but Nelson was romantic. Nelson was a devoted patriot and a devoted lover. Alexander was passionate. Cromwell could shed tears. Bismarck had some suburban religion. Frederick was a poet. Charlemagne was fond of children. But Julius Caesar attracted Shaw not less by his positive than by his negative enormousness. Nobody can say with certainty that Caesar cared for anything. It is unjust to call Caesar an egoist, for there is no proof that he cared even for Caesar. He may not have been either an atheist or a pessimist, but he may have been. That is exactly the rub. He may have been an ordinary, decently good man, slightly deficient in spiritual expansiveness. On the other hand, he may have been the incarnation of paganism in the sense that Christ was the incarnation of Christianity. As Christ expressed how great a man can be humble and humane, Caesar may have expressed how great a man can be frigid and flippant. According to most legends, Antichrist was to come soon after Christ. One has only to suppose that Antichrist came shortly before Christ, and Antichrist might very well be Caesar. It is, I think, no injustice to Bernard Shaw to say that he does not attempt to make his Caesar superior, except in his naked and negative sense. There is no suggestion, as there is in the Jehovah of the Old Testament, that the very cruelty of the higher being conceals some tremendous and even tortured love. Caesar is superior to other men, not because he loves more, but because he hates less. Caesar is magnanimous, not because he is warm-hearted enough to pardon, but because he is not warm-hearted enough to avenge. There is no suggestion anywhere in the play that he is hiding any great, genial purpose or powerful tenderness towards men. In order to put this point beyond a doubt, the dramatist has introduced a soliloquy of Caesar alone with the Sphinx. There, if anywhere, he would have broken out into ultimate brotherhood or burning pity for the people. But in that scene between the Sphinx and Caesar, Caesar is as cold and lonely and as dead as the Sphinx. But whether the Shavie and Caesar is a sound ideal or no, there can be little doubt that he is a very fine reality. Law has done nothing greater as a piece of artistic creation. If the man is a little like a statue, it is a statue by a great sculptor, a statue of the best period. If his nobility is a little negative in character, it is a negative darkness of the great dome of night, not as in some new moralities the mere mystery of the coal hole. Indeed, this somewhat austere method of work is very suitable to shaw when he is serious. There is nothing gothic about his real genius. He could not build a medieval cathedral in which laughter and terror are twisted together in stone, molten by a mystical passion. He can build by way of amusement the Chinese pagoda, but when he is in earnest, only a Roman temple. He has a keen eye for truth, but he is one of those people who like, as the saying goes, to put down the truth in black and white. He is always girding and jeering at romantics and idealists because they will not put down the truth in black and white. But black and white are not the only two colors in the world. The modern man of science who writes down a fact in black and white is not more, but less accurate than the medieval monk who wrote it down in gold and scarlet, see green and turquoise. Nevertheless it is a good thing that the more austere method should exist, separately, and that some men should be especially good-edited. Bernard Shaw is especially good-edited. He is preeminently a black and white artist. And as a study in black and white, nothing could be better than this sketch of Julius Caesar. He is not so much represented as bestriding the earth like a colossus, which is indeed a rather comic attitude for a hero to stand in, but rather walking the earth with a sort of stern levity, lightly touching the planet and yet spurning it away like a stone. He walks like a winged man who has chosen to fold his wings. There is something creepy even about his kindness. It makes the men in front of him feel as if they were made of glass. The nature of the Caesarean mercy is massively suggested. Caesar dislikes a massacre, not because it is a great sin, because it is a small sin. It is felt that he classes it with the flirtation or a fit of the sulks, a senseless, temporary subjugation of man's permanent purpose by his passing and trivial feelings. He will plunge into slaughter for a great purpose just as he plunges into the sea, but to be stung into such action he deems as undignified as to be tipped off the pier. In a singularly fine passage Cleopatra, having hired assassins to stab an enemy, appeals to her wrongs as justifying her revenge, and says, If you can find one man in all Africa who says that I did wrong, I will be crucified by my own slaves. If you can find one man in all the world, replies Caesar, who can see that you did wrong, he will either conquer the world as I have done, or be crucified by it. That is the high watermark of this heathen sublimity, and we do not feel it inappropriate, or unlike Shaw, when a few minutes afterward the hero is saluted with a blaze of swords. As usually happens in the author's works, there is even more about Julius Caesar in the preface than there is in the play. But in the preface I think the portrait is less imaginative and more fanciful. He attempts to connect his somewhat chilly type of Superman with the heroes of the old fairy tales. But Shaw should not talk about the fairy tales, for he does not feel them from the inside. As I have said, on all this side of historic and domestic traditions Bernard Shaw is weak and deficient. He does not approach them as fairy tales as if he were four, but as folklore as if he were forty. And he makes a big mistake about them, which he would never have made if he had kept his birthday and hung up his stocking, and generally kept alive inside him the firelight of a home. The point is so peculiarly characteristic of Bernard Shaw, and is indeed so much of a summary of his most interesting assertion and his most interesting error, that it deserves a word by itself, though it is a word which must be remembered in connection with nearly all the other plays. His primary and defiant proposition is the Calvinistic proposition, that the elect do not earn virtue, but possess it. The goodness of a man does not consist in trying to be good, but in being good. Julius Caesar prevails over other people by possessing more virtues than they, not by having striven or suffered or bought his virtue, not because he has struggled heroically, but because he is a hero. So far Bernard Shaw is only what I have called him at the beginning. He is simply a seventeenth-century Calvinist. Caesar is not saved by works or even by faith. He is saved because he is one of the elect. Unfortunately for himself, however, Bernard Shaw went back further than the seventeenth century, and professing his opinion to be yet more antiquated, invoked the original legends of mankind. He argued that when the fairy tales gave Jack the giant killer a coat of darkness or a magic sword, it removed all credit from Jack in the common moral sense. He won as Caesar won only because he was superior. I will confess, in passing, to the conviction that Bernard Shaw in the course of his whole simple and strenuous life was never quite so near to hell as at the moment when he wrote down those words. But in this question of fairy tales, my immediate point is not how near he was to hell, but how very far off he was from fairy land. That notion about the hero with a magic sword being the Superman with a magic superiority is the caprice of a pedant. No child, boy, or man ever felt it in the story of Jack the giant killer. Obviously the moral is all the other way. Jack's fairy sword and invisible coat are clumsy expedience for enabling him to fight at all with something which is by nature stronger. They are rough, savage substitute for psychological descriptions of special valor or unwirried patience. But no one in his five wits can doubt that the idea of Jack the giant killer is exactly the opposite to Shaw's idea. If it were not a tale of effort and triumph hardly earned, it would not be called Jack the giant killer. If it were a tale of the victory of natural advantages, it would be called Giant the Jack Killer. If the teller of fairy tales had merely wanted to urge that some beings are born stronger than others, he would not have fallen back on elaborate tricks or weapons and costume for conquering and ogre. He would simply have let the ogre conquer. I will not speak of my own emotions in connection with this incredibly catish doctrine, that the strength of the strong is admirable, but not the valor of the weak. It is enough to say that I have to summon up the physical presence of Shaw, his frank gestures, kind eyes, and exquisite Irish voice, to cure me of a mere sensation of contempt. But I do not dwell upon the point for any such purpose, but merely to show how we must always be casting back to those concrete foundations with which we began. Bernard Shaw, as I have said, was never national enough to be domestic. He was never a part of his past, hence when he tries to interpret tradition he comes a terrible cropper, as in this case. Bernard Shaw, I strongly suspect, began to disbelieve in Santa Claus at a discreditively early age, and by this time Santa Claus has avenged himself by taking away the key of all the prehistoric scriptures, so that a noble and honorable artist flounders about like any German professor. Here is a whole fairy tale literature which is almost exclusively devoted to the unexpected victory of the weak over the strong, and Bernard Shaw manages to make it mean the inevitable victory of the strong over the weak, which, among other things, would not make a story at all. It comes of that mistake about not keeping his birthday. A man should always be tied to his mother's apron strings. He should always have a hold on his childhood and be ready at intervals to start anew from a childish standpoint. Theologically, the thing is best expressed by saying, you must be born again. Secularly, it is best expressed by saying, you must keep your birthday. Even if you will not be born again, at least remind yourself occasionally that you were born once. Some of the incidental wit in the Caesarean drama is excellent, though it is upon the whole less spontaneous and perfect than in the previous plays. One of its jests may be mentioned in passing, not merely to draw attention to its failure, though Shaw is brilliant enough to afford many failures, but because it is the best opportunity for mentioning one of the writer's minor notions to which he obstinately adheres. He describes the ancient Britain in Caesar's train as being exactly like a modern, respectable Englishman. As a joke for Christmas pantomime, this would be all very well, but one expects the jokes of Bernard Shaw to have some intellectual root, however fantastic the flower. And obviously all historic common sense is against the idea that dim druid people, whoever they were, who dwelt in our land before it was lit up by Rome or loaded with varied invasions, were a precise facsimile of the commercial society of Birmingham or Brighton. But it is a part of the Puritan in Bernard Shaw, a part of the taut and high strong quality of his mind, that he will never admit of any of his jokes that it was only a joke. When he has been most witty, he will passionately deny his own wit. He will say something which Voltaire might envy and then declare that he has got it all out of a blue book. And in connection with this eccentric type of self-denial, we may notice this mere detail about the ancient Britain. Someone faintly hinted that a blue Britain when first found by Caesar might not be quite like Mr. Broadbent at the touch Shaw poured forth a torrent of theory explaining that climate was the only thing that affected nationality and that whatever races came into the English or Irish climate would become like the English or Irish. Now the modern theory of race is certainly a piece of stupid materialism. It is an attempt to explain the things we are sure of, France, Scotland, Rome, Japan, by means of the things we are not sure of at all, prehistoric conjectures, Celts, Mongols, and Iberians. Of course there is a reality in race, but there is no reality in the theories of race offered by some ethnological professors. Blood perhaps is thicker than water, but brains are somewhat thicker than anything. But if there is one thing yet more thick and obscure and senseless than this theory of the omnipotence of race it is, I think, that to which Shaw has fled for refuge from it, this doctrine of the omnipotence of climate. Climate again is something, but if climate were everything, Anglo-Indians would grow more and more to look like Hindus, which is far from being the case. Something in the evil spirit of our time forces people always to pretend to have found some material and mechanical explanation. Bernard Shaw has filled all his last days with affirmations about the divinity of the non-mechanical part of man, the sacred quality in creation and choice. Yet it never seems to have occurred to him that the true key to national differentiations is the key of the will and not of the environment. It never crosses the modern mind to fancy that perhaps a people is chiefly influenced by how that people has chosen to behave. If I have to choose between race and whether I prefer race, I would rather be imprisoned and compelled by ancestors who were once alive than by mud and mists which never were. But I do not propose to be controlled by either. To me my national history is a chain of multitudinous choices. It is neither blood nor rain that has made England, but hope. The thing that all those dead men have desired. France was not France because she was made to be by the skulls of the Celts or by the son of Gaul. France was France because she chose. I have stepped on one side from the immediate subject because this is as good an instance as any as we are likely to come across of a certain almost extraneous fault which does deface the work of Bernard Shaw. It is a fault only to be mentioned when we have made the solidity of the merits quite clear. To say that Shaw is merely making game of people is demonstrably ridiculous. At least a fairly systematic philosophy can be traced through all his jokes, and one would not insist on such a unity in all the songs of Mr. Dan Leno. I have already pointed out that the genius of Shaw is really too harsh and earnest rather than too merry and irresponsible. I shall have occasion to point out later that Shaw is, in one very serious sense, the very opposite of paradoxical. In any case, if any real student of Shaw says that Shaw is only making a fool of him, we can only say of that student it is very superfluous for anyone to make a fool. But though the dramatist's jests are always serious and generally obvious, he is really affected from time to time by a certain spirit of which that climate theory is a case, a spirit that can only be called one of senseless ingenuity. I suppose it is a sort of nemesis of wit, the skidding of a wheel in the height of its speed. Perhaps it is connected with the nomadic nature of his mind. That lack of roots, this remoteness from ancient instincts and traditions, is responsible for a certain bleak and heartless extravagance of statement on certain subjects, which makes the author really unconvincing, as well as exaggerative. Sat-tires that are sagrano, jokes that are rather silly than wild, statements which even considered as lies have no symbolic relation to truth. They are exaggerations of something that does not exist. For instance, if a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkenness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by polterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startlingly and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jewelers who wanted to sell wedding rings, or again take the case of nationality and the unit of patriotism. If a man said that all boundaries between clans, kingdoms, or empires were nonsensical or nonexistent, that would be a fallacy, but a consistent and philosophical fallacy. But when Mr. Bernard Shaw says that England matters so little that the British Empire might very well give up these islands to Germany, he has not only got hold of the Sáu by the wrong year, but the wrong Sáu by the wrong year, a mythical Sáu, a Sáu that is not there at all. If Britain is unreal, the British Empire must be a thousand times more unreal. It is as if one said, I do not believe that Michael Scott ever had any existence, but I am convinced in spite of the absurd legend that he had a shadow. As has been said already, there must be some truth in every popular impression, and the impression that Shaw, the most savagely serious man of his time, is a mere music-hall artist, must have reference to such rare outbreaks as these. As a rule, his speeches are full not only of substance, but of substances, materials like pork, mahogany, lead, and leather. There is no man whose arguments cover a more Napoleonic map of detail. It is true that he jokes, but wherever he is, he has topical jokes. One might almost say family jokes. If he talks to tailors, he can allude to the last absurdity above buttons. If he talks to the soldiers, he can see the exquisite and exact humor of the last gun carriage. But when all his powerful practicality is allowed, there does run through him this erratic levity, an explosion of ineptitude. It is a queer quality in literature. It is a sort of cold extravagance, and it has made him all his enemies. End of Section 9, End of Chapter 5