 Chapter 6 Part 5 The Philosopher When the most emphatic man alive, a man unmashed in violent precision of statement, speaks with such avowed vagueness and doubt as this, it is no wonder if all his more weak-minded followers are in a mere whirlpool of uncritical and unmeaning innovation. If the superior person will be apparently criminal, the most probable result is simply that the criminal person will think himself superior. A very slight knowledge of human nature is required in the matter. If the Superman may possibly be a thief, you may bet your boots that the next thief will be a Superman. But indeed the Superman of whom I have met many have generally been more weak in the head than in the moral conduct. They have simply offered the first fancy which occupied their minds as the new morality. I fear that Shaw had a way of encouraging these follies. It is obvious from the passage I have quoted that he has no way of restraining them. The truth is that all the feeble spirits naturally live in the future because it is featureless. It is a soft job. You can make it what you like. The next age is blank, and I can paint it freely with my favorite color. It requires real courage to face the past because the past is full of facts which cannot be got over. Of men certainly wiser than we and of things done which we could not do. I know I cannot write a poem as good as Lycetus, but it is always easy to say that the particular sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry of the future. This I call the second evil influence of Shaw, that he has encouraged many to throw themselves for justification upon the shapeless and unknown. In this, though courageous himself, he has encouraged cowards, and though sincere himself has helped a mean escape. The third evil in his influence, can I think, be much more shortly dealt with. He has, to a very slight extent, but still perceptible, encouraged a kind of charlatanism of utterance among those who possess his Irish impudence without his Irish virtue. For instance, his amusing trick of self-praise is perfectly hearty in humors in him, nay it is even humble for it to confess vanity is itself humble. All that is the matter with the proud is that they will not admit that they are vain. Therefore when Shaw says that he alone is able to write such an admirable work, no. Or when Shaw says that he alone is able to write such admirable work, or that he has just utterly wiped out some celebrated opponent, I for one never feel anything offensive in the tone, but indeed only the unmistakable intonation of a friend's voice. But I have noticed among younger, harder, and much shallower men a certain disposition to ape this insolent ease and certitude, and that without any fundamental frankness or mirth, so far the influence is bad. Egoism can be learnt as a lesson, like any other ism. It is not so easy to learn an Irish accent toward a good temper. In its lower forms the thing becomes the most unmilitary trick of announcing the victory before one has gained it. When one has said those three things, one has said I think all that can be said by way of blaming Bernard Shaw. It is significant that he was never blamed for any of these things by the censor. Such censures as the attitude of that official in vows may be dismissed with a very light sort of disdain. To represent Shaw as profane or provocatively indecent is not a matter for discussion at all. It is the disgusting criminal libel upon a particularly respectable gentleman of the middle classes, of refined tastes and somewhat puritanical views. But while the negative defense of Shaw is easy, the just praise of him is almost as complex as it is necessary. And I shall devote the last few pages of this book to a triad corresponding to the last one, to the three important elements in which the work of Shaw has been good as well as great. In the first place, and quite apart from all particular theories, the world owes thanks to Bernard Shaw for having combined being intelligent with being intelligible. He has popularized philosophy, or rather he has repopularized it, for philosophy is always popular except in peculiarly corrupt and oligarchic ages like our own. We have passed the age of the demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue, or dawn, the man who has nothing to say but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper. After all, short words must mean something even if they mean filth or lies. But long words may sometimes mean literally nothing, especially if they are used, as they mostly are in modern books and magazine articles, to balance and modify each other. A plain figure four, scrawled in Shawk anywhere, must always mean something. It must always mean two plus two. But the most enormous and mysterious algebraic equation full of letters, brackets, and fractions may all cancel out at last and be equal to nothing. When a demagogue says to a mob, there is the Bank of England, why shouldn't you have some of that money? He says something which is at least as honest and intelligible as the figure four. When a writer in The Times remarks, we must raise the economic efficiency of the masses without diverting anything from those classes which represent the national prosperity and refinement, then his equation cancels out. In a literal and logical sense, his remark amounts to nothing. There are two kinds of charlatans or people called quacks today. The power of the first is that he advertises and cures. The power of the second is that though he is not learned enough to cure, he is much too learned to advertise. The former give away their dignity with a pound of tea. The latter are paid a pound of tea merely for being dignified. I think them the worst quacks of the two. Shaw is certainly of the other sort. Dickens, another man who was great enough to be a demagogue and greater than Shaw because more heartily a demagogue, puts forever the true difference between the demagogue and the mysticog in Dr. Marigold, except that we're cheap jacks and their dear jacks, I don't see any difference between us. Bernard Shaw is a great cheap jack, with plenty of patter and I dare say plenty of nonsense. But with this also, which is not wholly unimportant, with goods to sell, people accuse such a man of self-advertisement. But at least the cheap jack does advertise his wares, whereas this the don, or dear jack, advertises nothing except himself. His very silence, nay, his very sterility, are supposed to be marks of the richness of his erudition. He is too learned to teach and sometimes too wise even to talk. St. Thomas Aquinas said, in octore octoritis, but there is more than one man at Oxford a Cambridge who is considered an authority because he has never been an author. Against all this mystification, both of silence and verbosity, Shaw has been a splendid and smashing protest. He has stood up for the fact that philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through divinity and greats, but of those who pass through birth and death. Nearly all the most awful and up-true statements can be put in words of one syllable, from a child is born to a soul is damned. If the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it? About concrete matters indeed one naturally appeals to an oligarchy or select class. For information about Lapland, I go to an aristocracy of Laplanders, for the ways of rabbits to an aristocracy of naturalists, or preferably an aristocracy of poachers. But only mankind itself can bear witness to the abstract first principles of mankind, and in matters of theory I would always consult the mob. Only the mass of men, for instance, have authority to say whether life is good. Whether life is good is an especially mystical and delicate question, and, like all such questions, is asked in words of one syllable. It is also answered in words of one syllable. And Bernard Shaw, as also mankind, answers yes. This plain, pugnacious style of Shaw has greatly clarified all controversies. He has slain the polysyllable, that huge and slimy centipede which has sprawled over all the valleys of England like the lowly worm, who was slain by the ancient knight. He does not think that difficult questions will be made simpler by using difficult words about them. He has achieved the admirable work never to be mentioned without gratitude, of discussing evolution without mentioning it. The good work is, of course, more evident in the case of philosophy than any other region, because the case of philosophy was a crying one. It was really preposterous that the things most carefully reserved for the study of two or three men should actually be the things common to all men. It was absurd that certain men should be experts on the special subject of everything. But he stood for much the same spirit and style in other matters. In economics, for example, there never has been a better popular economist, one more lucid, entertaining, consistent, and essentially exact. The very comicality of his examples makes them and their arguments stick in the mind, as in the case I remember in which he said that the big shops had now to please everybody and were not entirely dependent on the lady who sails in to order for governesses and five grand pianos. He is always preaching collectivism, yet he does not very often name it. He does not talk about collectivism, but about cash, of which the populace feels a much more definite need. He talks about cheese, boots, perambulators, and how people are really to live. For him, economics really means housekeeping, as it does in the Greek. His difference from the orthodox economists like most of his differences is very different from the attacks made by the main body of socialists. The old Manchester economists are generally attacked for being too gross and material. Shaw really attacks them for not being gross or material enough. He thinks that they hide themselves behind long words, remote hypotheses, or unreal generalizations. When the orthodox economist begins with his correct and primary formula, suppose there is a man on an island. Shaw is apt to interrupt him sharply saying, there is a man in the street. The second phase of the man's really fruitful efficacy is, in a sense, the converse of this. He has improved philosophic discussions by making them more popular. But he has also improved popular amusements by making them more philosophic. And by more philosophic, I do not mean duller, but funnier. That is, more varied. All real fun is in cosmic contrasts, which involve a view of the cosmos. But I know that this second strength in Shaw is really difficult to state and must be approached by explanations and even by eliminations. Let me say at once that I think nothing of Shaw or anybody else merely for playing the daring skeptic. I do not think he has done any good or even achieved any effect simply by asking startling questions. It is possible that there have been ages so sluggish or automatic that anything that woke them up at all was a good thing. It is sufficient to be certain that ours is not such an age. We do not need waking up. Rather, we suffer from insomnia with all its results of fear and exaggeration and frightful waking dreams. The modern mind is not a donkey which wants kicking to make it go. The modern mind is more like a motor car on a lonely road, which two amateur motorists have been just clever enough to take to pieces but are not quite clever enough to put together again. Under these circumstances, kicking the car has never been found by the best experts to be effective. No one therefore does any good to our age merely by asking questions, unless he can answer the questions. Asking questions is already the fashionable and aristocratic sport which has brought most of us into the bankruptcy court. The note of our age is a note of interrogation, and the final point is so plain no skeptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon. Am I a boy? Why am I a boy? Why aren't I a chair? What is a chair? A child will sometimes ask questions of this sort for two hours, and the philosophers of Protestant Europe have asked them for two hundred years. If that were all I meant by Shaw making men more philosophic, I should put it not among his good influences, but his bad. He did do that to some extent, and so far he is bad, but there is a much bigger and better sense in which he has been a philosopher. He has brought back into English drama all the streams of facts or tenancy which are commonly called undramatic. They were there in Shakespeare's time, but they have scarcely been there since until Shaw. I mean that Shakespeare, being interested in everything, put everything into a play. If he had lately been thinking about the irony and even contradiction confronting us in self-preservation and suicide, he put it all into Hamlet. If he was annoyed by some passing boom in theatrical babies, he put that into Hamlet, too. He would put anything into Hamlet which he really thought was true from his favorite nursery ballads to his personal, and perhaps unfashionable, conviction of the Catholic purgatory. There is no fact that strikes one, I think, about Shakespeare, except the fact of how dramatic he could be, so much as the fact of how undramatic he could be. In this great sense, Shaw has brought philosophy back into drama, philosophy in the sense of a certain freedom of the mind. This is not a freedom to think what one likes, which is absurd for one can only think what one thinks. It is a freedom to think about what one likes, which is a quite different thing, and the spring of all thought. Shakespeare, in a weak moment, I think, said that all the world is a stage, but Shakespeare acted on the much finer principle that a stage is all the world. So there are, in all Bernard Shaw's plays, patches of what people would call essentially undramatic stuff, which the dramatist puts in because he is honest, and would rather prove his case than succeed with his play. Shaw has brought back into English drama that Shakespearean universality, which, if you like, you can call Shakespearean irrelevance. Perhaps a better definition than either is a habit of thinking the truth worth telling even when you meet it by accident. In Shaw's plays, one meets an incredible number of truths by accident. To be up to date is a paltry ambition, except in an almanac, and Shaw has sometimes talked this almanac philosophy. Nevertheless there is a real sense in which the phrase may be wisely used, and that is in the cases where some stereotype version of what is happening hides what is really happening from our eyes. Thus, for instance, newspapers are never up to date. The men who write leading articles are always behind the Times, because they're in a hurry. They are forced to fall back on their old-fashioned view of things. They have no time to fashion a new one. Everything that is done in a hurry is certain to be antiquated. That is why modern industrial civilization bears so curious a resemblance to barbarism. Thus, when newspapers say that The Times is a solemn, old Tory paper, they are out of date. Their talk is behind the talk in Fleet Street. Thus, when newspapers say that Christian dogmas are crumbling, they are out of date. Their talk is behind the talk in public houses. Now, in this sense, Shaw has kept in a really stirring sense up to date. He has introduced into the theatre the things that no one else had introduced into a theatre, the things in the street outside. The theatre is the sort of thing which proudly sends a handsome cab across the stage as realism, while everybody outside is whistling for motor cabs. Consider in this respect how many, and fine, have been Shaw's intrusions into the theatre with the things that were really going on. Daily papers and daily matinees were still gravely explaining how much modern war depended on gunpowder. Arms and the man explained how much modern war depends on chocolate. Every play and paper described a vicar who was a mild conservative. Candida caught hold of the modern vicar who is an advanced socialist. Numberless magazine articles and society comedies described the emancipated woman as new and wild. Only you never can tell was young enough to see that the emancipated woman is already old and respectable. Every comic paper has caricatured the uneducated upstart. Only the author of Man and Superman knew enough about the modern world to caricature the educated upstart. The man's draker who can quote Boumache, though he cannot pronounce him. This is the second reel and great work of Shaw, the letting in of the world onto the stage, as the rivers were let in upon the Aegean stable. He has led a little of the hay market into the hay market theater. He has permitted some whispers of the strand to enter the strand theater. A variety of solutions in philosophy is as silly as it is in arithmetic, but one may be justly proud of a variety of materials for a solution. After Shaw one may say there is nothing that cannot be introduced into a play if one can make it decent, amusing, and relevant. The state of a man's health, the religion of his childhood, his ear for music, or his ignorance of cookery can all be made vivid if they have anything to do with the subject. A soldier may mention the commissariat as well as the cavalry, and better still a priest may mention theology as well as religion. That is being a philosopher. That is bringing the universe on the stage. Lastly he has obliterated the mere cynic. He has been so much more cynical than anyone else for the public good that no one has dared since to be really cynical for anything smaller. The Chinese crackers of the frivolous cynics fail to excite us after the dynamite of the serious and aspiring cynic. Bernard Shaw and I, who are growing gray together, can remember an epic which many of his followers do not know. An epic of real pessimism. The years from 1885 to 1898, or like the hours of afternoon, and a rich house with large rooms, the hours before tea time. They believed in nothing except good manners, and the essence of good manners is to conceal a yawn. A yawn may be defined as the silent yell. The power which the young pessimist of that time showed in this direction would have astonished anyone but him. He yawned so wide as to swallow the world. He swallowed the world like an unpleasant pill before retiring to an eternal rest. Now the last and best glory of Shaw is that, in the circles where this creature was found, he is not. He has not been killed. I don't know exactly why. But he has actually turned into a Shaw idealist. This is no exaggeration. I meet men who, when I knew them in 1898, were just a little too lazy to destroy the universe. They are now conscious of not being quite worthy to abolish some prison regulations. This destruction and conversion seems to me the mark of something actually great. It is always great to destroy a type without destroying a man. The followers of Shaw are optimists. Some of them are so simple as even to use the word. They are sometimes rather pallid optimists, frequently very worried optimists, occasionally to tell the truth rather cross optimists. But they are not pessimists. They can exult, though they cannot laugh. He has at least withered up among them the mere pose of impossibility. Like every great teacher, he has cursed the barren fig tree. For nothing except that impossibility is really impossible. I know it is all very strange. From the height of 800 years ago, or of 800 years hence, our age must look incredibly odd. We call the 12th century ascetic. We call our own time hedonist and full of praise and pleasure. But in the ascetic age, the love of life was evident and enormous, so that it had to be restrained. In a hedonist age, pleasure has always sunk low, so that it has to be encouraged. How high the sea of human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now only know by the colossal walls that they built to keep it in bounds. How low human happiness sank in the 20th century, our children will only know by these extraordinary modern books which tell people that it is a duty to be cheerful and that life is not so bad after all. Humanity never produces optimists till it has ceased to produce happy men. It is strange to be obliged to impose a holiday like a fast and to drive men to a banquet with spears. But this shall be written of our time, that when the spirit who denies besieged the last citadel, blaspheming life itself, there were some, there was one especially, whose voice was heard and whose spear was never broken. The end of Chapter 6 The End of George Bernard Shaw