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 George Bernard Shaw:a critical study, by 
 
 3 1924 013 547 744 
 
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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 
 
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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY 
 
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PREFACE 
 
 A FEW j'ears ago I was invited to break a courteous 
 lance with Mr G. K. Chesterton., Tlie ensuing experi- 
 ence — the uncomfortable feeling that one was wasting 
 ^ood blows on a display of fireworks — is instinctively 
 recalled by an invitation to discuss Mr G. B. Shaw. 
 One needs, however, little acquaintance with the 
 two to discover a large and important difference. In 
 Chesterton's work it is difficult to dissociate the wit 
 from the thought ; in Shaw the pyrotechnic element 
 is but the advertisement of a very serious and original 
 view of life, which existed before the humour, and can 
 easily be formulated apart from it. The common 
 habit of linking the names of the two humorists as 
 " birds of paradox " is unsound. Paradoxjj^ tl-Uth 
 disguised-aajiDLtEuth,; and the disguise must be some- 
 thing subtler than exaggeration and more frivolous 
 than honest error. (But most of what is regarded as | 
 paradox in Shaw's personal expressions is either a ' 
 
 strategical exaggeration of what he believes to be a ; 
 
 .... * 
 
 fact or a smcere conviction which is so unusual as to i 
 
 . . ----, i 
 
 seem insincere. / 
 
 Shaw has a set of entirely original first principles, 
 
 and these send their branching arteries through the 
 
 whole mass of his publications and pronouncements. 
 
 You find him making some puzzling statement to an 
 
viii BERNARD SHAW 
 
 interviewer or in a letter to the Press, or you hear 
 him amuse an audience with what are called Shavian 
 paradoxes, and you conclude that he is merely sustain- 
 ing the character of Jester Laiureate which the age 
 has thrust on him. In all probability he was as 
 serious as the Bishop of London. \TS[any a jester of 
 ancient times had a sharp and pehetrative wit, and 
 shook his bells only for the purpose of distracting 
 attention at the time from the deliberate. If not 
 malicious, aim of his shaft. Not otherwise would 
 his words ever have reached the ears of princes. So 
 Shaw retired from his first unsuccessful assault on the 
 ears of King Demos, to return with the cap and bells 
 and be installed with honour! Take him seriously ! 
 It is precisely a part of the Shavian entertainment, 
 which in the last ten years has added to the gaiety 
 of every civilised nation, that there are dull folk 
 who are seduced into taking him seriously. So even 
 learned critics say. 
 
 TTDoes Shaw desire us to take him seriously ? It is 
 cEaracteristic of the subtle and elusive policy of the man 
 that he is sapng what he conceives to be the most 
 serious things in the world, and trusts that they will 
 eventually be recognised as such, but does not wish 
 the majority of people to take him seriously. Other- 
 wise they would not listen to him at all. Some day, 
 when the laughter is forgotten, when the burlesque 
 has dropped out of consciousness, he trusts that the 
 idea will return and irritate, if not convince. To have 
 merely amused his generation he would regard as a 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 tragic and cri nupaLEgostitution of agreajjpcmei:. He 
 is a man of the most austere sentiments and lofty 
 ideals. No man was ever more anxious to cut deep 
 into the solid substance of life, instead of creating 
 ripples which the calm of to-morrow will obliterate. 
 Behind the laugh ter o f the familiar blue-grey eyes is 
 a stern purpose. [Even if you say that he has not 
 merely amused his generation with his wit, but has 
 by his high artistic power added to the dramatic 
 wealth of the world, he will reject your homage with 
 scorn. Art includes a moral purpose, he insists, or it 
 is as mean as pantomime. \ Art for art's sake he 
 loathes, as he loathes chilSess marriage. If it be not 
 written of him that he made a deep mark on the mind, 
 the convictions, of his time, his life will have been, 
 from his point of view, a failure. He does not utter 
 paradoxes : he is a paradox — the most moral im- 
 moraUst, the most unselfish preacher of egoism, the 
 gravest humorist, the most ascetic denouncer of the 
 ten commandments, that ever lived. He does not 
 smile at the people who take him seriously : he smiles 
 at the people who do not. 
 
 And he has to-day the right to smile. The plays 
 which most effectively convey his philosophy are 
 now performed in ten European countries besides 
 England; and throughout the United States. No other 
 English artist of our time has an international 
 audience approaching that of Bernard Shaw in size, to 
 say nothing of intellectual quality. He can use the 
 journals and magazines of half the world as his mouth- 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 pieces whenever he chooses. It may be largely, 
 though certainly it is not wholly, because he is a jester. 
 There is a deliberately shaped message in every jest, 
 and it will rankle. He does not want a Shavian 
 school : his ambition is larger than that. He wants 
 to say what he pleases to the vast world outside all 
 ^schools, and, in his way, he has succeeded. How he 
 succeeded ; what the message is that he delivers, 
 under the jingle of the bells, and how he came by it, 
 and what it is worth ; what he has done, and failed 
 to do ; and how you may distinguish a momentary 
 paradox from a reasoned conviction, it is the business 
 of this little work to relate. It is not a panegyric or 
 a biography. It is a critical interpretation of the man 
 and his message. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Making of a Rebel . . . i 
 
 II. Socialism . . . . .30 
 
 III. The Shavian Philosophy . . .58 
 
 IV. The Question of Marriage . . 92 
 V. Problems of the Family and the State . 115 
 
 VI. The Function of Art . . . 140 
 
 VII. Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant . 161 
 
 VIII. In the Lime-light . 188 
 
 IX. The Man and his Influence 225 
 
 Index .... 257 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE MAKING OF A REBEL 
 
 In one of his prefaces Shaw has turned upon the critics 
 who, having themselves estabUshed that he is nothing 
 if not original, proceed to show, with an air of learning, 
 that they have found him borrowing an idea from 
 some other writer. " Their conception," he says, 
 " of clever persons parthenogeneticaUy bringing forth 
 complete original cosmogonies by dint of sheer 
 ' brilliancy ' is part of that ignorant credulity which 
 is the despair of the honest philosopher and the 
 opportunity of the religious impostor." Minds feed 
 on their environment, just as bodies do. Lest, 
 however, he should flatter the intelligence of critics, 
 he denies the borrowing they impute to him and 
 refers them to writers of whom they had never heard. 
 This is not perversity, but a correct account of the 
 growth of his ideas. When we follow up the clues 
 he gives us, we find that he took the germs of his 
 ideas from the general intellectual atmosphere of his 
 youth, and that still earlier experiences had made him 
 particularly apt to nourish these germs. A bio- 
 graphical chapter is, therefore, an indispensable part 
 of the interpretation of those peculiarities of thought 
 and mood which have attracted so much attention, 
 and are, according to the temper of his audience, 
 a scandal or a gospel, a comedy or an enigma. 
 
 1 
 
2 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Let it be granted at once that of the quintessential 
 qualities of the man, the powers which put a personal 
 stamp on the ideas he has adopted, there is no ex- 
 planation. They are part of that original outfit 
 which we sometimes flatter ourselves we have under- 
 stood when we call it a man's hereditary endowment. 
 In Shaw's case we admit the fallacy more easily because 
 his chief gifts are just those which a careless tradition 
 ascribes to his native laiid, and we are apt to dismiss 
 them cheerfully as " racial endowment." 
 
 He was bom in Dublin on July 26th, 1856 ; and 
 one of the first illusions that a careful student must 
 abandon is the notion that this implies a birthright 
 of " Celtic wit and brilliance." American and con- 
 tinental writers may be pardoned for entertaining 
 the idea that Ireland — stricken, half-famished, de- 
 populated Ireland — bubbles with perennial wit and is 
 the richest source in the British Empire of " brilliant " 
 "writers. Perhaps even the bulk of English people 
 can hardly be expected to sacrifice so pleasant an 
 ingredient of a summer holiday as the belief in Irish 
 humour. The Englishman goes to Ireland for 
 laughter, and is determined to find some excuse for 
 it. Car-drivers and waiters do their best to live up 
 to the advertisement of their country, and the tourist 
 returns with a collection of heavy pleasantries which 
 he would disdain if he heard them from a French 
 or German mouth. The note of melancholy which is 
 sounded by so many sincere Irish writers, from Thomas 
 Moore to George Moore and the new Celtic school, 
 is unintelligible to him. He persists in thinking that 
 the hungry and desolate land sparkles with Attic 
 -wit, and that it is the most natural thing in the 
 world for an Irish writer to be brilliant. 
 
 Although Shaw has humorously encouraged the 
 
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 3 
 
 growth of legends about himself, he has more than 
 once assailed this illusion. C He is not a Celt ; in fact, 
 there are no Celts ; and, if there are any, they are " 
 not witty and brilliant. '" When people talk about 
 the Celtic race," says' Doyle in " John Bull's Other 
 Island," " I feel as if I could burn down London." 
 In the preface to the play Shaw observes that Ireland 
 was " peopled' just as England was, and its breed 
 was crossed by just the same invaders." This is 
 an exaggeration, because England was nearer to the 
 source of contamination, but the pedigree which Shaw's 
 biographer has gravely provided shows that, however 
 many Celts there may be in Ireland, the Shaws do 
 not belong to that category. In all the branches 
 which meet in the person of George Bernard Shaw 
 we have English or Scottish stocks which were trans- 
 planted to Ireland in the seventeenth century, and 
 have since carefully preserved their gentility and 
 Protestantism from the taint of marriage or brotherly 
 intercourse with the Celt. They were Orange aliens 
 in Catholic Ireland. 
 /"■"T^or does Shaw for a moment represent them as 
 La-dsill-witted English colony living amidst a sprightly 
 and witty people. In the play from which I have 
 quoted he gives a picture of '\the reaLIreland " : a 
 ■dreary picture, in which Irish wit turns out to be 
 a sluggish faculty that needs some violently humorous 
 situation to strike out of it the feeblest pleasantry. 
 Consistently with most other Irish writers, he msists 
 that the climate and the political and economic con- 
 ditions make the Irish mind dreamy and melancholy — 
 clear-headed too, he says, with decided originality, 
 but we may consider that paradox later ,„_ His own 
 middle-class Protestant world he describes as joyless 
 and depressing. One faint witticism of his father's 
 
4 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 is all that he can recall for the encouragement of those 
 biographers who think a man's wit is explained if 
 his father or mother had a glimmer of it. 
 
 As to " Celtic brilliance," one can only wonder 
 that serious literary men ever penned the phrase. 
 " Swift and Sheridan . . . Oscar Wilde and G. B. 
 Shaw," they exclaim. The blank between the names 
 is expressive. It reminds us of the extraordinary 
 barrenness of Irish letters during nearly a century 
 of exceptional stimulation. The novelist Lever alone 
 comes between Thomas Moore and George Moore. 
 Of eighty nineteenth-century writers in Gosse's 
 " Modern English Literature " three only are Irish : 
 of more than two hundred in Professor Seccombe's 
 list only a dozen are Irish, and scarcely half of these 
 have a fair sense of humour. It is only in recent 
 decades that Ireland has been well represented in 
 our literature, and one would hardly say that Yeats 
 and Synge, Dowden and Moore, Francis Thompson 
 and Lionel Johnson, sustain the legend of wit and 
 brilliance. 
 
 Shaw's endowment of wit and intellect is personal. 
 Neither race nor pedigree throws any light on it. 
 The secrets of human inheritance are stUl veiled from 
 us. We can at the most discover features of his 
 parents, his home, and his career which successively 
 movild the native endowment and inspire the cluster 
 of ideas and passions in the service of which his wit 
 has been enlisted. 
 
 His father, George Carr Shaw, came of a line of 
 Irish Protestant officials and small professional men, 
 often intermarrying with the daughters of Irish Pro- 
 testant clergymen : a line which begins in an Anglo- 
 Scottish adventurer who went from Hampshire in 
 the seventeenth century to join the colony of parasites 
 
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 5 
 
 on conquered Ireland. His successors became a crowd 
 of prolific " Irish gentlemen," living on small estates, 
 official positions, or polite professions. George Carr 
 Shaw had a sinecure in the Government service, which 
 admirably suited his indolence and incompetence. 
 In character he was the antithesis of George Bernard ; 
 he contributed to the qualities of his son only by the 
 impressiveness of his bad example and failure. It 
 is enough that he was, the son says, " in theory 
 a vehement teetotaller, but in practice often a 
 furtive drinker " ; and that, when he was pensioned 
 in 1850, and invested in a mill and corn business, he 
 failed. 
 
 Two years after he had taken up this business he 
 married Lucinda Elizabeth Gurley, who was nearly 
 twenty years younger than he. She was the daughter 
 of a Carlow gentleman, who married a second time. 
 Spirited, independent, and very young, she fled some- 
 what hastily from the stepmother to the failing 
 corn-merchant. In this ill-assorted home George 
 Bernard Shaw began his first observations of married 
 life. The father was amiable, weak, and conventional : 
 the mother was capable, self-reliant, audacious. Her 
 love of singing brought her into communication with 
 an able teacher of music, George John Vandeleur Lee, 
 a handsome man with fine Dundrearies. He con- 
 ducted operas, and practised them with Mrs Shaw. 
 When the income from the corn-business became 
 thinner, Lee set up a joint household with the Shaws, 
 and the house throbbed with music. In his early 
 teens Shaw knew many operas by heart ; and he 
 could distinguish between his mother's bold inde- 
 pendence and his father's irresolution. 
 
 The larger world — the clan, one might say— fur- 
 nished fresh material for a young philosophy of life. 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Shaws and Giurleys from Carlow and Kilkenny and 
 other places entered the domestic stage at times, and 
 gave an impression of the middle-class type. In 
 religion they were sternly and contemptuously 
 superior to the superstitions of their Catholic neigh- 
 bours ; the mother alone broke the tradition, as her 
 love of music often took her to Catholic churches. 
 In the exclusiveness of caste they were equally rigid ; 
 George Bernard must not play with the children of 
 tradespeople, and must appreciate that the Shaw 
 clan was irradiated by the splendour of a remote 
 baronet-cousin. In clothes, social ritual., and ideas 
 there was the same general obedience to the tradition 
 of gentility. It was a world of small snobs, redeemed 
 more or less by the independent young mother and 
 an heretical uncle. The young boy listened one day 
 to a domestic discussion of the raising of Lazarus. 
 The uncle disdainfully held that the miracle was 
 " a put-up job " between Christ and his friend, and, 
 after reflection, the young nephew agreed. These 
 spurts of heresy were, however, infrequent, and only 
 served to make plainer the common features of the 
 t57pical Irish Protestant gentleman of small means. 
 It was not at all a world of Puritans, as Mr Chesterton 
 has suggested, or of ascetics. It was a world of 
 small snobs, with one or two pointed examples of 
 rebellion for the encouragement of the rebelliously- 
 inclined boy. 
 
 The parents " went their own way and let me go 
 mine," says Shaw. They assumed, as a matter of 
 tradition, that he would take the impress of the 
 caste, become a respectable notary or official, and 
 provide half a dozen more little Shaws to maintain 
 the prestige and ideals of the family. Instead of this 
 he gradually nourished a loathing of the whole routine. 
 
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 7 
 
 and escaped into a world created by his imagination. 
 He fought great battles, made love to queens, and 
 gloried in tremendous adventures, as he wandered 
 about the dreary Dublin suburb. " Such insight as 
 I have in criticism," he said long afterwards, " is 
 due to the fact that I exhausted romanticism before 
 I was ten years old." A more imaginative or more 
 humane religion might have enlisted his fancy, but 
 the dreary church-going of his father's class repelled 
 him. God seemed to him to be the narrow-minded 
 patron of the small gentry of Dubhn, and heaven to 
 be a further stretch of drab gentility. He deserted 
 " the house of Satan," as he later called the bleak 
 chapel, at the age of ten, and did not enter a church 
 for twenty years afterwards. His mother was the 
 finest figure in his world, and he imbibed her spirit 
 and her love of music. 
 
 School-years arrived, with further rebellious material 
 for his philosophy of life. He learned little, left his 
 tasks to other boys when he could, and was content 
 to live near the bottom of his class. " It was the 
 most completely wasted and mischievous part of my 
 life," he says. It was probably even more mischievous 
 than he knew, when he wrote this, as a recollection 
 of it in later years would encourage his anarchist 
 ideas. You shudder, or smUe, when he says : " The 
 vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's 
 character." He might invite you to reflect what had 
 become of his school-fellows, whose characters were 
 moulded, and what had become of him, whose character 
 was allowed to grow in freedom. Here and there 
 a fellow-pupil or a master appealed to him. With 
 one youth, McNulty, who afterwards wrote novels, 
 he kept up a voluminous correspondence for years. 
 A scientifically-minded master, Chichester Bell, 
 
8 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 interested him in science, and he read Tyndall's early 
 works and (later) studied Armand Trousseau's 
 " Lectures in Clinical Medicine " : a ponderous thing 
 in five volumes, which must have sunk like a large 
 slab of lead in his artistic mind. But Bell also spoke 
 to him of Wagner, and he bought " Lohengrin " and 
 advanced in musical education. 
 
 Of education in the academic sense, therefore) he 
 had little. His school-career closed at fifteen, leaving 
 him with an ill-digested medley of elementary know- 
 ledge, a disdain of schools, and an impatience of 
 discipline. But the very failure of his masters to 
 enforce the usual training left his mental vitality free 
 to advance in congenial directions. Art was the 
 field which persistently attracted him : not literary 
 art, but music and painting. He wrote a short story, 
 but he had no literary ambition. For some years now 
 Lee had shared their home, and the boy's mind was 
 steeped in music. He also spent much time in the 
 Irish National Gallery. Bohn was at that time issuing 
 Vasari's " Lives of the Most Excellent Painters " 
 in his popular library, and the boy bought the five 
 volumes and taught himself high standards of judg- 
 ment of colour and form, with the usual independence 
 of the isolated scholar. 
 
 The father regarded his artistic interest as an 
 innocent means of employing his leisure, and when 
 George Bernard had reached the end of school-days 
 he placed him in a " very genteel office," where he 
 was to learn land-agency and earn seven shillings a 
 week. It is curious that he became an excellent and 
 industrious clerk, though his employer found it 
 necessary to forbid him to spread heresy among the 
 staff, and was at times puzzled to find the artistic 
 nature turning the sober office into an amateur opera- 
 
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 9 
 
 house. During the second year of his clerical work, 
 however, Lee went to London and the Shaw household 
 ■yvas broken up. George Carr Shaw was now in too 
 poor a position to maintain a house, and there were 
 days of trouble, which ended in Elizabeth Shaw going 
 to London, where she stUl lives. A medical man, 
 a Spiritist, showed me one day a remarkable and 
 particularly pointless drawing which a lady had 
 produced " under spirit control " : one of the usual 
 examples of elaborate nonsense which, it is said, only 
 a higher than himian intelligence could produce. 
 The " automatic " artist was Mrs Elizabeth Lucinda 
 Shaw ; but she proved a most capable and successful 
 teacher of singing, and her resolute example counted 
 for much in the education of her son. 
 
 The father and son took lodgings in Dublin, and 
 the mext few years were intolerably dull. The 
 depressing routine of the office and the cheerless home 
 chafed and irritated Shaw just at the time when he 
 was forming his first ideas — especially his first idea 
 of himself. He learned to despise the conventional 
 rules, the petty hypocrisies, the fierce unreasoned 
 convictions, the insensibility to the deeper realities 
 of life, the small amusements, the narrow creed, of 
 the middle-class in which he found himself. " Plus 
 qa change, plus c'est la mSme chose," he must have 
 said to himself, as his horizon widened. He faced 
 the awful alternatives of either plasdng the rebel in 
 this implacable caste or losing his soul by identifying 
 himself with it. Fancy George Bernard Shaw as a 
 land-agent in Sackville Street ! He concentrated on 
 music and learned the piano; though, with his 
 growing impatience of external discipline or rule, he 
 did not labour through the customary exercises. 
 
 Echoes of a challenging, free-spoken world across 
 
10 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 the sea came to encourage him. In 1874 Tyndall 
 startled Ireland, as well as England, by his famous 
 defiance of theology at Belfast, and Shaw was already 
 interested in Tyndall's work. In the next year 
 Moody and Sankey came to Dublin, and the Shaws 
 went with their class to support the missionaries. 
 Shaw has said that he was so disgusted with the pro- 
 ceedings that he wrote a letter to Public Opinion, 
 announcing the tremendous fact that, if this was 
 religion, he was an atheist. He magnifies this first 
 crime against respectability. The letter (reprinted 
 in Public Opinion, November 8th, 1907) makes no 
 attack on theology and contains no profession of 
 atheism. It merely resents the innocent trickery by 
 which crowds were secured, accuses the missionaries 
 of appealing to the wrong class of sinners, and makes 
 light of the effect of conversion. As it was not signed, 
 moreover, it cannot have created so wide a disturbance 
 among his friends as he says. However, it was a 
 sign of his growing insurgence against the pettiness 
 and dreariness of his life, and in the following year, 
 1876, he crossed to England. 
 
 The early experience had encouraged his self- 
 reliance, cjmicism, contempt of traditions, and passion 
 for sincerity, without giving him even such constructive 
 ideas as a youth might be capable of. He was now 
 to learn and embrace positive standards, but in 
 conditions which peculiarly encouraged originality, 
 disdain, self-centration, and asceticism. He ap- 
 proached London with a high opinion of himself and 
 a hope that the new metropolis was intelligent enough 
 to endorse it. Instead of this, he was to spend ten 
 years in obscure, laborious, and utterly slighted work : 
 a gifted artist, fully conscious of his gifts, living 
 in a mean lodging on sixpence a day — he once 
 
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 11 
 
 told me — and having to beg the sixpence from his 
 mother. 
 
 For nine years Shaw lived in a cheap room in grimy 
 Osnaburgh Street (no. 36), forging his literary weapon 
 with the most singular patience and the grimmest 
 determination that may be found in the lives of artists. 
 In the nine years he earned by his pen the sum of 
 six pounds, of which five were given him for writing 
 the advertisement of a patent-medicine. Yet the 
 pen laboured on, day after day, and the stream of 
 manuscript flowed out and in again with a steadiness 
 that promised to be eternal. The black frock coat 
 turned green, the fray of the cuffs had to be clipped 
 with scissors periodically, the silk hat became so shabby 
 and limp that the back had to serve as the front, 
 the trousers were cheap and baggy. Still he bent over 
 his table in the mean street and poured copy on reluctant 
 editors. One or two small periodicals admitted him, 
 and he boasts that he ruined them. There was 
 something wrong either with him or the public, and he 
 had little doubt where the wrong lay. In later years 
 an optician told him that he had " normal vision," 
 which very few people have. " Better see rightly 
 on a pound a week than squint on a mUlion," he says. 
 
 In 1879 a friend induced him to turn from art for a 
 few weeks. The Edison Telephone Company were 
 trying to establish a new invention, and Shaw some- 
 times took the place of the regular lecturer on its 
 merits. The American artisans he met in the base- 
 ment in Queen Victoria Street reappear in the Conolly 
 and Straker of his later work, but his engagement 
 was short. He returned to letters and Osnabiurgh 
 Street. His father needed his help, and a self-support- 
 ing mother could hardly be expected to nourish a 
 strapping son of twenty-three, bu,t Shaw returned to 
 
12 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 a way of life in which he would need their aid and 
 " without a blush embraced the monstrosity." The 
 good young man of normal tradition would have 
 carried parcels or blacked boots. " I did not throw 
 myself into the struggle for Hfe," Shaw says ; "I 
 threw my mother into it. I was not a staff to my 
 father's old age : I hung on to his coat tails." The 
 biographer can do no more than murmur in trite 
 language : All's well that ends well. He began to 
 write novels, and soon learned that even fiction-readers 
 were discriminating. His first story was, " with 
 merciless j5tness," entitled " Immaturity." It still 
 exists, in its worn brown-paper covering, partly 
 devoured by mice, " but even they have been unable 
 to finish it." Somewhere its author says that it is 
 " hardly a work I should be well advised in letting 
 loose whilst my livelihood depends on my credit as a 
 literary workman." Even the success in the United 
 States of its four successors has not tempted him to 
 part with it. 
 
 The four succeeding novels which he wrote in 1880 
 to 1883 will be examined presently. Meantime, while 
 he was perfecting his craft by a severe restriction to 
 writing only five pages a day and living on the maternal 
 sixpences, he came into contact with thoughtful 
 Londoners and gathered the material of his philosophy 
 of life. He preserved his passport of gentility — ^his 
 dress-suit — and while his appearance during the day 
 sank from level to level of disreputability, he could 
 cut a handsome figure at night. During the day he 
 spent solitary hours in the National Gallery or the 
 British Museum. Why trouble about money when 
 he was part owner of such treasures of literature and 
 art ? In the evening he had pleasant invitations, 
 for amateur singers liked his accompaniment ; so 
 
THE MAKING OF A REBEL IS 
 
 he says, and it is doubtless true, but one imagines 
 that he could also talk. Something of his experience 
 is, no doubt, reproduced in the opening of his second 
 novel, " The Irrational Knot," where a workman 
 with musical talent is asked to join middle-class folk 
 in giving a philanthropic concert. His biographer, 
 Dr Henderson, says that Shaw has put into the 
 philanderer Charteris a little of the mental attitude 
 induced in himself by early experience of women. 
 It suggests that the tall, sandy-haired Shaw of his 
 twenties, with fine ironic blue eyes and a caustic 
 tongue, had personal reason to frame his philosophy 
 of woman as the pursuer of man. He was, however, 
 ascetic by temperament, and his circumstances were 
 starving the little healthy sensuality he had brought 
 from Ireland. He was being forced into that peculiar 
 combination of morality in practice and immorality 
 in piinciple which distinguishes him. 
 
 This intercourse with middle-class London did more 
 than furnish the material of the fierce generalisations 
 and dramatic characters of his later work. It intro- 
 duced him into the living intellectualism of that 
 stirring age. It was the height of the period of J. S. 
 Mill, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Clifford, George Eliot : 
 a time when new ideas about religion, economics, 
 morals, politics, and everything that the early Vic- 
 torian age had definitely settled, were spreading like a 
 fever through adolescent London. Little circles gathered 
 in sitting-rooms and small halls, and defiant debates 
 were held. The Agnosticism of Huxley and Spencer 
 and Darwin was applauded, and the ethical culture 
 which the new spiritual directors of England would 
 substitute for the Christian ethic was boldly derided, 
 to their extreme concern. There was more republican- 
 ism and more anti-moralism in London in the early 
 
14 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 eighties than there is to-day. Prominent and popular 
 writers or speakers Hved, comfortably or ascetically, 
 with women to whom they were not married. 
 
 One of the most rebellious of these centres of sedition 
 was the Zetetical Society, which met in Long Acre. 
 I had occasion, in writing the life of Holyoake, to run 
 over some of its announcements and realise its terrible 
 ambitions. All the panaceas of the eighties, which 
 had succeeded the panaceas of the forties, were dis- 
 cussed in it : agnosticism, radicalism, the emancipation 
 of woman, evolution, the destruction of morality, and 
 so on. The men and women who met there were gener- 
 ally followers of J. S. Mill : the saint of rationalism, 
 the idol of women, the hope of the radicals, and the 
 discreet encourager of rebellion against sex-morality. 
 In 1879 a friend took Shaw to a meeting of this society, 
 and he found it congenial. There was a Captain 
 Wilson who denounced morals as a device of Christian- 
 ity for the enslavement of people, and a learned Scot 
 named Stuart Glennie who held that the Christian 
 ethic was a narcotic which the white races adminis- 
 tered to the coloured. The members were generally 
 opponents of Christianity, which was riddled with 
 Darwinian arrows and lacerated with Nietzschean 
 scorn (though Nietzsche was then unknown) in the 
 •debates. Social and economic questions also were 
 discussed, but on the sober lines of Mill's political 
 economy. 
 
 This atmosphere thoroughly agreed with Shaw, 
 and he joined the society at once and assisted in 
 the battering of Christian doctrines and morals. His 
 associates were well-read men and women, and he was 
 .stimulated to read. Sidney Webb was a member of 
 the group, and it was at this period that Shaw entered 
 into a life-long association with the economist. Shaw 
 
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 15 
 
 tegan to articulate his own " atheism " and other 
 heresies, but found that pubUc speaking was not with 
 him a natural art. With characteristic resolution 
 he learned to speak easily and forcibly, and struggled 
 with hi? nervousness at meeting after meeting until 
 it disappeared. 
 
 The peep into subterranean London encouraged 
 him, and he began to attend all sorts of meetings. 
 He still cultivated music and enjoyed paintings, 
 and he plodded grimly by day through his scheme of 
 novels. At night he wandered in search of open doors, 
 wherever some heresy was preached, and one evening, 
 toward the close of 1882, when he was writing " Cashel 
 Byron's Profession," he was drawn to the Memorial 
 Hall in Farringdon Street. Henry George was visiting 
 Europe, and he had been excellently advertised by 
 the authorities ; they had arrested him in Ireland a 
 few months before. That evening was critical in 
 Shaw's career. No doubt, he was bound to turn 
 sooner or later from the intellectual issues of the 
 Zetetical Society to the vast problem of poverty, but 
 it was Henry George who gave him the first fiery 
 interest in it. The eloquence and clear dogmatism 
 of the enthusiast carried him away. He bought 
 George's book and became convinced that the remedy 
 of the gravest evil in the world was exquisitely simple 
 — Henry George's single tax — and London must be 
 made to see it. All that festering mass of squalor 
 which then (and partly now) surrounded the debating 
 room in Long Acre could be abolished by an Act of 
 Parliament. 
 
 He joined the Land Reform Union, and met new 
 friends : educated middle-class men, like himself, 
 with a high-principled hostility to the unequal dis- 
 tribution of wealth and the trappings which wealthy 
 
16 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 people wore. An Eton master, J. L. Jojmes, had been, 
 arrested with Henry George, and had been forced 
 to leave Eton. Another master, Henry Salt, the 
 well-known humanitarian and writer on Shelley> 
 voluntarily retired and practised the simple life in 
 a Surrey cottage. Edward Carpenter was of the 
 group of sandal-wearers and water-drinkers. H. H. 
 Champion, now a genial guide of literary taste at the 
 Antipodes, had thrown up a commission in the army 
 to enlist in the war against poverty. Sidney Olivier 
 (now Sir Sidney, recently Governor of Jamaica — ^then 
 a civil servant), Stewart Headlam (a prominent 
 representative of the new High-Broad-Church Socialist 
 clergy), and others, were more or less connected. 
 Shaw, who had a slender knowledge of economics and 
 a large acquaintance with poverty, turned from 
 Darwinism and his other intellectual issues to the new 
 panacea, and became an ardent propagandist. 
 
 In tracing the growth of his ideas one must attach 
 great importance to these new associations. The 
 single tax would be represented, in his own peculiar 
 language, as a mere trick of the Life-Force to lead 
 him to higher things. The asceticism and htmianita- 
 rianism of the new group would make a deeper im- 
 pression. The simple abstemious habits which his 
 poverty imposed on him seem to have been made 
 easy by a personal disposition to asceticism, but they 
 Mw became a philosophy. Plain living and high 
 thmking was, literally, the ideal of the group. They 
 introdiiced Shaw to Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and 
 Shelley ; he attended a meeting of the Shelley Society, 
 and the infant society was almost shattered when a 
 dour, badly-dressed figure, with straggling sandy 
 beard and other features of the typical " wild Irish- 
 man," got up and said that he was, " like Shelley," 
 
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 17 
 
 an atheist, a Socialist, and a vegetarian. It was at 
 this period he adopted vegetarianism, the ravages 
 of which his robust constitution has admirably resisted 
 for thirty years. 
 
 Some of the most singular features of his creed 
 were fixed at this time. The Neo-Pagan of the nine- 
 teenth century generally became, like the ancient 
 Pagan, either a Stoic or an Epicurean. As the most 
 prominent character of the Stoic is a profound and 
 almost unreasoning reverence for natural moral law, 
 Shaw certainly cannot be described as a Stoic. On 
 the other hand, it was easy to persuade himself, in 
 his circumstances and with his simple tastes, that to 
 set up happiness or pleasure as the supreme aim was 
 hoggish, and this was supposed to be the essence of 
 Epicureanism. In point of fact, these simple-life 
 colonies are the nearest approach in modern times 
 to the intellectual conversations, over simple cakes 
 and water, which Epicurus loved to arrange in his 
 garden on the outskirts of Athens. The Roman 
 luxury and banquets which St Augustine taught 
 Europe to regard as " Epicurean " are the widest 
 possible departure from the ideal of the great Greek. 
 However, though there was more boisterous fun 
 among the simple-lifers than there had ever been in 
 the Epicurean garden, they persuaded themselves 
 that happiness was a by-product of a healthy life ; 
 such men as Shaw and Carpenter united what most 
 people would call the utmost license in opinions to 
 the utmost severity in practice, and a free-spoken 
 scorn of moral law to an ardent passion for justice 
 and other moral qualities. At a later date Shaw would 
 find a philosophy which would, in his opinion, bring 
 consistency into these attitudes. First he had to break 
 entirely with the rationalism of the Zetetical Society. 
 
18 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 From the later work of Henry Salt and Edward 
 Carpenter we may conclude that the new message of 
 science was already regarded with some suspicion as 
 encouraging cruelty. It talked of a bloody struggle 
 for hfe as a fundamental law of planetary existence, 
 defended vivisection and vaccination, and so on. 
 But it was the further development of his Socialist 
 feeling which completed Shaw's aversion from science 
 and put him in the peculiar and isolated position 
 which he still occupies : the position of one who is 
 opposed with equal vehemence to Christianity and 
 to Rationalism. 
 
 Socialism was at that time entering upon a new 
 phase in England. The earlier system of Robert 
 Owen, which had been called Socialism, had fallen 
 into disfavour, and Owen had died in complete 
 obscurity. The work of reform had been divided 
 among a number of special movements (Co-operation, 
 Trade Unionism, Arbitration, Education, etc.), and 
 revolutionary feeling was in abeyance, especially after 
 what were called the horrors of French Communism 
 in 1871. Now the eloquence of Ferdinand Lassalle 
 and the learning of Karl Marx were imposing a new 
 Socialism on Europe, and a number of impatient 
 middle-class Londoners were translating it into 
 English. A new panacea was discovered, and (as in 
 every previous case) this time it was the real panacea. 
 Marx's theory of surplus value had given the first 
 scientific diagnosis of social disease, it was said, and 
 his cry of a " class war " was loudly repeated over 
 Europe — very largely by men who (like Marx and 
 LassaUe) themselves belonged to the middle class. 
 
 In England these elements were chiefly gathered 
 in the Social Democratic Federation, in which middle- 
 class men like H. M. Hyndman and Belfort Bax and 
 
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 19 
 
 H. H. Champion and W. Morris joined with John 
 Burns and other rebellious working men. They 
 smiled at the enthusiasm of the followers of Henry 
 George, and the train of zeal or indignation which his 
 lectures left in England swept large numbers into 
 their Federation, where a more drastic remedy was 
 urged in more lurid language. The conversion of 
 Shaw is typical of what was happening. He went 
 to a meeting of the Social Democrats, and, at question 
 time, rose to ask why they were wasting time instead 
 of pressing the plain remedy prescribed by George. 
 He was greeted with a laugh and told to read Karl 
 Marx. Thorough in everything, he had bought and 
 studied George's book, " Progress and Poverty," at 
 the close of the lecture in the Memorial Hall ; he 
 now went to the Museum and studied Karl Marx. 
 *' Das Kapital " is one of the most impressive books 
 that can be put into the hands of a thoughtful young 
 man with plenfy of rebellious feeling and not too much 
 knowledge of economics. Its apparently rigorous 
 logic seems to provide a most solid foundation for the 
 class-war which it recommends. Shaw read and was 
 convinced. " From that hour," he says, " I became 
 a man with some business in the world." Huxley's 
 Gadarene swine, and Bradlaugh's atheism, and Mill's 
 emancipation of woman, and all the issues he had 
 debated in the Zetetical Society, seemed pale and 
 bloodless. The charm of the Socialist ideal is in 
 the simplicity of the formula and the complexity and 
 comprehensiveness of the supposed result. It was 
 fascinating to think that one bold revolution would 
 transform the face of the world for ever. 
 
 In later years Shaw said that what chiefly won and 
 inflamed him in Marx's book was the attack on the 
 middle class. He came in a few years to regard both 
 
20 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 the theory of surplus value and the cry for a class-war 
 as fallacious, but the general attack on the middle 
 class fell in with and encouraged his own mood. He 
 did not in the least share the illusion of virtuous 
 Lazarus and wicked Dives. He had already (in 1880) 
 written " The Irrational Knot," in which the artisan 
 ConoUy says to the middle-class man : — 
 
 " Although a workman, I don't look on every gentle- 
 man as a bloodsucker who seizes on the fruits of 
 my labour only to pursue a career of vice. I will even 
 admit that there are gentlemen who deserve to be 
 respected more than the workmen who have neglected 
 all their opportunities — slender as they are — of 
 cultivating themselves a little. You, on the other 
 hand, know that an honest man is the noblest work 
 of God ; that nature's gentlemen are the only real 
 gentlemen ; that kind hearts are more than coronets 
 and simple faith than Norman blood, and so forth. 
 But when your approval of these benevolent clap- 
 traps is brought to such a practical test as the marriage 
 of your sister to a workman, you see clearly enough 
 that they do not establish the suitability of personal 
 intercourse between members of different classes." 
 
 Workmen, of course, do not talk like that, but 
 Shaw did, long before he heard of Socialism. He had 
 closely observed, and lightly disdained, the American 
 workers in the employment of the Edison Telephone 
 Company ; and he had seen and disdained the ways 
 of the middle class from his earUest years. In 
 London he had found the same prejudices and stupi- 
 dities as in Dublin : social pretence, religious bigotry, 
 moral insincerity, poUtical inanity. He was in the 
 mood of Samuel Butler, his chief inspirer, whose 
 "Erewhon" had been published ten years before. 
 Karl Marx crowned the iniquity of the wealthy and 
 
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 21 
 
 the middle class for him by apparently showing 
 that they maintained all this wasteful folly by the 
 economic trick of filching the surplus value of the 
 products of labour. 
 
 I deal fully in later chapters with the development 
 of his Socialism and his philosophy and art, and 
 would merely trace here, in general terms, the relation 
 of his growth to his circumstances. It is a point on 
 which he has never been consistent. He insists in 
 1903 (" Man and Superman ") that " the bubble of 
 heredity has been pricked," meaning that the theory 
 of Weismann has triumphed, and environment has 
 nothing like the importance which the earlier theory 
 assigned to it ; and in 1904 (" John Bull's Other 
 Island ") he insists that the Irish character is wholly 
 a matter of environment. His inconsistencies, and 
 the foolish claim of some of his admirers that we 
 cannot expect a witty man to be consistent, may 
 be considered later. The fact is that his own 
 philosophy steadily grows with the changes of his 
 external circumstances. 
 
 The new Socialism brought new friends — Graham 
 Wallas, William Archer, Hubert Bland, William 
 Morris, etc. — and new activity, as will be told presently. 
 He flung himself ardently into the propaganda of 
 Socialism, and was as fierce and optimistic as the 
 rawest recruit to any extreme body. Indirectly, as 
 well as by persuading him that his earlier interests 
 were trivial in comparison with this sacred campaign, 
 this new and absorbing fervour pressed him further 
 in the direction of his peculiar philosophy of life. 
 His earlier friends, and Freethinkers like Bradlaugh 
 and Foote, were opposed to Socialism on Darwinian 
 as well as economic grounds. The free struggle of 
 individuals and survival of the fittest was said to be 
 
22 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 the supreme law of the development of living things. 
 So much the worse for Darwinism, Shaw concluded. 
 This cruel and wasteful struggle could not be an 
 essential law of life. He looked to rival theorists, who 
 were not Christians, and found a learned and congenial 
 guide in Samuel Butler, whose wit, sarcasm, and 
 disdain of conventional rules and practices very 
 strongly recommended him. Butler was just then 
 conducting the last campaign of any ability against 
 Darwinism, and Shaw certainly read and reviewed 
 his " Luck or Cunning " in 1887. He took the side 
 of Butler, contemptuously called the Darwinians 
 " materialists," and adopted the position of a bitterly 
 anti-rationalist atheist, with as profound a disdain 
 of science as an uneducated Wesleyan minister. I 
 will state the grounds of his position more fully at a 
 later stage, and wish here only to indicate the historical 
 development. If any man ever did " parthenogeneti- 
 cally bring forth a complete original cosmogony," it 
 was not Mr Shaw. 
 
 In 1885 he made the acquaintance of William Archer, 
 who persuaded him to turn from his futile novel- 
 writing to journalism. In the next phase of his life 
 he was to be devoted to art-criticism, leading by 
 accident to dramatic production, and the propagation 
 of Socialism. Meantime, some of the five novels he 
 had written between 1879 ^.nd 1883 were published, 
 and one examines them with interest for traces — such 
 traces as may be discoverable in a work of fiction — 
 of a reflection of his mental development. Champion 
 and other Socialists bought the periodical called 
 To-day and used it for propagating advanced ideas. 
 Shaw says that the editors of the many little periodicals 
 which struggled against bankruptcy at that idealist 
 period were in the habit of printing their friends' 
 
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 23 
 
 efforts at fiction and poetry, in order to ease the 
 treasury, and so he came to find a publisher at last, 
 though not payment. He gave Champion the last 
 and, presumably, best of his five manuscripts, and 
 " The Unsocial Socialist " went out to bewilder their 
 small public, in 1884. " Cashel Byron's Profession " 
 followed in 1885, and Mrs Besant pubUshed " The 
 Irrational Knot " and " Love among the Artists " in 
 Our Corner. It will, however, be better to notice the 
 works in the order of their origin. 
 
 In introducing the novels to a wider pubhc, years 
 afterwards, Shaw complained that he had " lost the 
 impudence of the apprentice without gaining the skill 
 of the master." He calls them " very green things, 
 very carefully written." Most critics agree with 
 him, though some believe that he would have become 
 famous as a novelist. It is not improbable that, 
 although dramatic talent is clearer from the start 
 than a gift for writing novels, he would have won a 
 large circle of admirers as a novelist when his con- 
 ception of work was fully developed. Fifteen years 
 ago he recommended to me as the first rule of writing : 
 " Take the utmost care that what you have to say 
 is correct, and then dash it down as frivolously as you 
 can." His earlier novels were certainly not written 
 on this recipe. What he had to say was largely in- 
 correct, and the way in which he said it was too 
 laboured. If you confine yourself to writing five 
 foUos a day, you can hardly be frivolous. Great 
 artists like Zola and Phillpotts have imposed this 
 severe restraint on themselves, but Shaw was too 
 inexperienced to conceal the labour. 
 
 He improves from year to year in this respect, 
 though even the fifth novel is, as such, very defective. 
 But a graver defect is the reflection of his lonely. 
 
24 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 brooding life and narrow experience. His power and 
 use of observation are obviously great, but his range 
 is limited. In the third novel, as he remarks, he 
 assigns his wealthy heroine a park of thirty acres, 
 imagining that this means an estate about the size 
 of the Isle of Wight. In describing such a world he 
 was " like a peasant in a drawing-room." He knows 
 little more about the workers (who are hardly noticed), 
 and his picture of the middle class is enlarged by a 
 liberal use of a brooding and malicious imagination. 
 He admits that he knew little of English life, though 
 the works were " not wholly a compound of intuition 
 and ignorance." His characters, especially women, 
 are often bloodless, theoretical constructions ; often 
 (as in his later work) very exceptional persons pressed 
 on us as types. Yet the works contain an ample pro- 
 mise of the wit, shrewd observation, caustic reflection, 
 and humorous exaggeration, and some of the paradox 
 and epigram, that distinguish his later work. 
 
 His first novel, " Immaturity," has never seen the 
 light, as I said. The second, written in 1880, was 
 called " The Irrational Knot," a study of marriage 
 in the very common form of depicting an unhappy 
 and incongruous marriage. A smart American artisan, 
 a superior Straker, attracts the affection of a young 
 lady of the upper middle class — ^by some means which 
 the novel does not make clear — and, when an inven- 
 tion enriches him, marries her. ConoUy is a mixture 
 of Bernard Shaw and the American worker he had 
 studied in Queen Victoria Street : a super-workman. 
 At times he talks pure Shavianese and acts with 
 heroic disregard of the sentimental conventions. 
 When his wife tires of his frigid bluntness, and elopes 
 with an amorous noodle, he behaves as if his errand- 
 boy had stolen twopence. He is depicted as an 
 
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 25 
 
 amateur musician who mixes with, and studies, the 
 middle class at musical evenings. Hence the story is 
 far from impersonal, and it shows the beginning of 
 Shavianism. The women pursue the men rather 
 than the men the women : the frailties of the middle- 
 class paterfamilias are scathingly accentuated : parents 
 and children are on the worst possible terms : and the 
 scorn of unreality and convention includes a disdain 
 of the current standard of sex-relations. His favourite 
 woman-character, Nelly M'Quinch, an admirable in- 
 tellectual automaton, observes that the actress who 
 will not marry the man she lives with is a woman 
 of good sense and that the married ladies are really 
 prostitutes. 
 
 Shaw has himself mentioned the name of Ibsen in 
 connection with this story. He knew nothing of 
 Ibsen at the time, and sees in the work (in terms of 
 his later philosophy) " a revolt of the Life-Force 
 against ready-made morality." He regards the book 
 as "a fiction of the first order " on account of 
 its original morality. " No man who shuts his eyes 
 and opens his mouth when religion and morality are 
 offered to him on a long spoon can share the same 
 Parnassian bench with those who make an original 
 contribution to religion and morality, were it only a 
 criticism." We will consider that standard of art 
 later. But the comparison, in any sense, with " A 
 Doll's House " is not happy. The heroine Marian is 
 never in anything like the condition of Nora, and, 
 instead of a psychic revolution, we have a familiar 
 type of weak elopement. Hence we cannot follow 
 Shaw when he says : "I seriously suggest that ' The 
 Irrational Knot ' may be regarded as an early attempt 
 on the part of the Life-Force to write a ' Doll's House ' 
 in English by the instrumentality of a very immature 
 
26 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 writer aged twenty-four." It is Ibsenist only in the 
 general scorn of unreality, romance, and conventional 
 standards. The structure is loose, the conversation 
 often stilted and unreal, the humour slender ; but at 
 times it approaches the later Shavian level of smart 
 conversation, and the latter part of it is powerful, 
 and often dramatic. 
 
 The other novels need not be so fully considered. 
 While, in the course of 1881, the carrier was hawking 
 his brown-paper parcel between his house and the 
 publishers, he was writing " Love among the Artists," 
 which he calls " a novel with a purpose." He thinks 
 he " had a notion of illustrating the difference between 
 that enthusiasm for the fine arts which people gather 
 from reading about them and the genuine artistic 
 faculty which cannot help creating, interpreting, or 
 at least unaffectedly enjojdng music and pictures." 
 This, however, is clearly a secondary motive. It is 
 an ironic depictment of life, as he saw it. ConoUy 
 returns — as if the preceding novel had gone through 
 ten editions, and the British public demanded more 
 of his hero — ^but the chief character, Owen Jack, is 
 a man with the same characters preposterously ex- 
 aggerated, so that the author may describe life in even 
 more caustic terms. He is a delightful and impossible 
 ruffian ; and the heroine is equally delightful and im- 
 possible in her placid intellectuality — an early Vivie 
 Warren. The letter in which she accepts an offer 
 of marriage might relate to the purchase of a sewing- 
 machine. There is the same discord in family-life 
 and the same scorn of the middle class and its con- 
 ventions. The Shavian John Bull is fully born : 
 before Shaw really knows John Bull. 
 
 In " Cashel Byron's Profession " the novelist seems 
 to feel that this assault on society will not do, and he 
 
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 27 
 
 wanders into a world of pure fantasy. A new motive 
 is a ridicule of British ideas of sport and hero-worship, 
 but the general aim is to amuse by a burlesque associa- 
 tion of prize-fighters, wealthy ladies, Zulus, and other 
 incongruities. The imaginative feat is stupendous. 
 The novel, however, came back with the usual re- 
 gularity from the publishers, and the author drudged 
 on with almost inhuman indifference. When this 
 story did appear, in 1886, R. L. Stevenson spoke of 
 it as " mad and deliriously delightful," and seems to 
 have regarded its author as a literary portent. The 
 women-characters amazed him. 
 
 In 1883, while publishers' readers were puzzling 
 over Cashel B5Ton — assuredly one of the most des- 
 perate enigmas ever hurled at them — Shaw began 
 his last novel, " The Unsocial Socalist." It is fantastic 
 unreal, ironical, and witty. It opens with an attempt 
 to master the psychology of the school-girl, and 
 makes a gentleman disguise himself as a labourer to 
 escape a wife from whom he is slightly estranged 
 and an ill-gotten fortune. There is too much manu- 
 facture in his characters : too much Shavian machinery, 
 and too little blood. Shaw admitted long afterwards 
 that he had misdescribed the English middle class, 
 to which almost all his characters belong ; they were 
 worse than he suspected. In reality, he was beginning 
 the work of his life : exaggeration on principle. 
 
 " The Unsocial Socialist " seems to me inferior 
 to the earlier stories, but it was the first to see the 
 light. Champion wanted cheap copy for To-day, and 
 the title, the Socialistic seasoning, and the attack 
 on the middle class, commended the book to him; 
 It first drew attention to Shaw's ability. William' 
 Morris read it in its monthly instalments and liked it. 
 Archer " reviewed it prominently," and Stevenson 
 
28 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 and Henley praised it. The Saturday Review declared 
 it to be " the novel of the age." By that time, 
 however, Shaw had retired in despair from the field 
 of fiction and begun journalism. His other novels 
 were successively published, and friends, or the friends 
 of friends, applauded, but there does not seem to have 
 been any grave danger that, as Shaw said later, 
 " some adventurous publisher might have ruined 
 him " by drawing him on to a successful career in 
 fiction. Even in the height of Shaw's fame the novels 
 did not circulate much in England. In the United 
 States they have been widely read, in pirated editions, 
 and many years afterwards Shaw was amused to find 
 that the volume at the head of a periodical list of 
 book-sales in America was " The Unsocial Socialist." 
 
 The chief interest of the novels is that they show 
 how far Shaw's characteristic ideas had developed 
 by 1880. The education in rebellion, which I have 
 described, had done its work. He was already a rebel 
 against his class, his creed, his whole inherited equip- 
 ment of rules and standards. There is explosive 
 defiance in his earliest characters, those characters 
 in whom he obviously puts part of himself. They 
 talk like members of the Zetetical Society, which he 
 was then frequenting. In the middle of the period 
 Henry George and Karl Marx invade him, and 
 stUl further embitter him against the middle class and 
 its complacent novelists, dramatists, and poets. 
 Life seemed to him an inexpressibly wrong thing, 
 a problem of fiery urgency, yet they talk and behave 
 as if the opening of a public park was a restoration 
 of the garden of Eden. He becomes an Anarchist, 
 as we shall see. Associates like Belfort Bax and Stuart 
 Glennie, and writers like Butler, give him a philo- 
 sophic creed of rebellion, and his scorn of conventions 
 
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 29 
 
 is formulated as a superior conviction. With his 
 disdain of science and rationahsm he, breaks the last 
 S5mipathetic link with the optimism of the time, and 
 becomes the arch-rebel of London. But he must 
 first sharpen his pen by years of critical work, come 
 into closer touch with reality by Socialistic activity, 
 and make firmer the philosophic foundations of his 
 denials and beliefs. These things must be examined 
 in order before we approach his second period of 
 literary production. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 His struggle for a complete alteration of the economic 
 order will probably be described by Shaw, when he 
 sums up his life's work, as his greatest service to his 
 generation. He has, as we shall see, wavered in his 
 appreciation of this work, and he has quarrelled with 
 his earlier Socialist colleagues. But he to-day insists 
 that this is the fundamental aim of his life, and he 
 demands a change of so drastic a character that 
 moderate Socialists smile at his enthusiasm. The 
 work is certainly the central fact of his career, and it 
 is necessary to examine his opinions on this side before 
 any others. 
 
 I have described his introduction to Socialism : his 
 association with the followers of Henry George and 
 the disturbance of his first phase by the reading 
 of Karl Marx. This was at the end of 1882. During 
 the following year the tall, pale figure, with piercing, 
 blue-grey eyes and straggling sandy beard, dressed in 
 a loose brown suit and woollen shirt, was very famiUar 
 in the parks and at other meetings. He mixed with 
 the Social Democrats, and helped them to blast the 
 existing order of society. WhUe he debated the 
 question of joining them, and becoming a colleague 
 of Hyndman, Bums, and Belfort Bax, the Fabian 
 Society was founded. A group of educated men used 
 to meet at Chelsea in the rooms of Professor Thomas 
 Davidson. Their specific for the regeneration of 
 
SOCIALISM 31 
 
 society was ethical self-cultivation, stimulated by 
 occasional meetings at which they read papers to each 
 other on virtue and culture, with " natural reUgion " 
 as a common base. F. Podmore, E. R. Pease, H. H. 
 Champion, H. Bland, and other acquaintances of 
 Shaw belonged to this select body, and it was not long 
 before they demanded more drastic action on the 
 world than merely punishing it by their virtuous 
 example. Socialistic feeling was spreading in London. 
 Podmore, and Pease, in particular, pressed for less 
 academic work, and in 1884 they formed a new society 
 within the narrow bounds of " The Fellowship of the 
 New Life." Frank Podmore, always shrewd and 
 penetrating, suggested the name of " The Fabian 
 Society," because it ought to follow the waiting 
 policy of old Fabius Cunctator. Into this promising 
 society the more vigorous reformers went, and the 
 " Fellowship " died. You find fragments of it to-day 
 in ethical societies at Croydon and New York and 
 elsewhere. 
 
 During the summer of 1884 the little Fabian group 
 met occasionally at Pease's rooms in Osnaburgh Street, 
 near Shaw's lodging, and he looked in. They had just 
 published the first Fabian Tract (" Why are the many 
 poor ? "), with a vigorous denunciation of " the 
 swindle of competition." Shaw found its members 
 more congenial company than the fiery working men 
 of the Social Democratic Federation, and in September 
 he joined. There was no difference in policy, and 
 little in strength of language at that time, between 
 the two bodies, but the Fabians were middle-class : 
 emancipated middle-class. As Shaw wrote the second 
 and third Tracts for the Society, we have an excellent 
 indication of his frame of mind. Tract 2 was a 
 two-page " Manifesto," containing Shaw's new creed 
 
32 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 in a series of Shavian propositions. Three may be 
 quoted : 
 
 " That a life-interest in the Land and Capital of the 
 nation is the birthright of every individual. . . . 
 
 " That the State should compete with private 
 individuals — especially with parents — ^in providing 
 happy homes for children, so that every child may 
 have a refuge from the tyranny or neglect of its 
 natural custodians. 
 
 " That ^the established Government has no more 
 right to call itself the State than the smoke of London 
 has to call itself the weather." 
 
 We recognise Shaw more clearly than in the novels ; 
 the Anarchism of the third proposition is all that he 
 has outgrown. The Fabians had a formidable re- 
 cruit in the impatient Irishman. His second leaflet 
 (Tract 3) is an ironical "Warning to provident land- 
 lords and capitalists." Socialism is spreading, and 
 they will do well to disarm it by passing reform- 
 measures. But the Fabians had not yet made clear 
 plans of reform in their own mind, as Tract 4 shows. 
 It is a compound paper; one half by the German 
 CoUectivist Bebel, and one by an Anarchist. It says 
 that "English Socialism is not yet Anarchist or 
 CoUectivist ; not yet definite enough in point of policy 
 to be classified " ; an amazing situation, seeing the 
 vast difference between the two schemes. 
 
 Shaw himself was at that time, and for some years, 
 an Anarchist, or, as it was then said, an Anarchist- 
 Socialist. The two schools agreed in a virulent 
 denunciation of capitalism and existing government, 
 so remained together as long as they could agree. 
 But the Anarchist denies the need of any central 
 government, and is politically nearer to Herbert 
 Spencer than to the Socialist. Remember Anatole 
 
SOCIALISM 33 
 
 France's genial and ironic description of the future 
 in " Sur la pierre blanche." He describes the realisa- 
 tion of the Socialist ideal, which he shares. Most 
 Socialist writers represent this realisation as the noon- 
 day of peace and tranquil happiness, but Anatole 
 France adds to the picture a group of angry Anarchists 
 throwing bombs at the Socialist institutions. Shaw's 
 general attitude, and his weakness in political economic 
 science, disposed him to Anarchism. He was a friend 
 of Mrs Wilson, an impetuous lady-member who spread 
 " a sort of influenza of Anarchism " in the Fabian 
 Society. He addressed Anarchist meetings off Totten- 
 ham Court Road : not of philosophical Anarchists, 
 but men of business, as one of them had a bomb 
 in his pocket throughout one of Shaw's lectures, 
 and blew himself up, involuntarily, in Greenwich 
 Park next day.^ As a rule they were innocent enough 
 except in speaking of marriage. Henry Seymour, 
 at whose house I met groups of them, reprinted in 
 1889 a paper by Shaw, which he had published in 
 The Anarchist (at what date I cannot ascertain). 
 It was called " Anarchism versus State-Socialism." 
 It makes a violent assault on Collectivism, and pleads 
 for the abolition of all authority. 
 
 In his antagonism to moral and educational authority j 
 Shaw remains an Anarchist, and, as we shall see, his \ 
 economic ideal differs from that of most Socialists, 
 while he detests and disdains Democracy. But the 
 deeper study of economics on which he entered, and 
 the association with men like Sidney Webb, caused 
 him to abandon his crude early position. In 1883 
 and 1884 Socialism was a fermenting mass of rebellion, 
 with little more definite conviction than the fiery 
 
 ' In another place Shaw says that the lecturer was Herbert 
 Surrows. 
 
34 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 belief that the rich robbed the workers and the Govern- 
 ment existed to enable them to do so. By peaceful 
 means if possible, by violent means if necessary, 
 they were going to " break up society," empty the 
 House of Commons and Buckingham Palace, and 
 declare the new era inaugurated. They were not 
 sure if money would be needed at all in the new in- 
 dustrial order. They believed that the change was 
 imminent and easy. Some of them fixed the revolution 
 for 1889, the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille ; 
 Shaw himself told a questioner that it would take only 
 about a fortnight to get Socialism into working order. 
 It was the heroic age. 
 
 Gradually, albler and cooler men were drawn into 
 the Fabian Society. Shaw introduced Webb, and 
 (Sir) Sidney Olivier and Graham Wallas followed. 
 Webb's influence is seen in the issue of the fourth 
 Tract. Strong language gives place to an imposing 
 mass of statistics and other facts. Pease, Podmore, 
 and Bland were already members. They slowly 
 passed out of the effervescent stage, or rid the Society 
 of its effervescent members, and " contracted that 
 habit of freely laughing at ourselves which has always 
 distinguished us, and which has saved us from be- 
 coming hampered by the gushing enthusiasts who 
 mistake their own emotions for public movements." 
 They learned also to chaff their opponents, instead of 
 telling them what they really thought of them, and 
 began to cough down any member of the circle who 
 indulged in rhetoric. The purification of the Society 
 was tempestuous. After one meeting Anderton's 
 Hotel, not the most sedate establishment in London, 
 was closed against them. But the Anarchists at 
 length departed, in a whirlwind of heated rhetoric, 
 and Shaw ended this phase of his social philosophy 
 
SOCIALISM 35 
 
 by writing, in 1891, a Tract on " The Impossibilities 1 
 of Anarchism." He declares that neither Indi-\ 
 vidualism nor Collectivism must be applied with 
 absolute rigour, but he severely criticises the Anarchist 
 position as to economic order and central government. 
 
 His temporary attraction to the Anarchist ideal 
 is not unintelligible. Owing to the predominance of 
 strong sentiment over economic knowledge at the 
 time among the Socialists, the attitude was not un- 
 common. Contact with the more cultivated and 
 disciplined members of the Fabian Society, and the 
 serious study of economics which they initiated, led 
 to the discovery that the great gospel of the Evangelist 
 Marx was unsound and to a sharp severance from his 
 English followers. 
 
 The disillusion began in 1884, when Shaw and his 
 associates were startled by the publication in To-day 
 of a severe criticism of Marx's theory of surplus value 
 by Philip Wicksteed, the eminent Unitarian. Pro- 
 fessor Jevons had recently carried economic science 
 in England beyond its ancient limits, and Wicksteed 
 employed his theories to show that Marx's char- 
 acteristic doctrine was unsound. The Socialists were 
 disturbed, and, when no other would venture to reply 
 to Wicksteed, Shaw drew his pen in defence of their 
 evangelist. His reply was unsound and unsatis- 
 factory, and, with his usual determination to go to 
 the root of things, he approached the study of Jevons. 
 When he found the pages of Jevons bristling with 
 algebraic symbols, like a wall protected from invading 
 boys by bits of broken glass, he even attempted to 
 recover and piece together the fragments of algebra 
 which remained from his school-days. He, and 
 Webb, Olivier, and Wallas now entered upon a sober 
 study of economic and social questions, and schooled 
 
36 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 themselves into that disciplined and restrained temper 
 which became characteristic of their Society. 
 
 They first formed the Hampstead Historic Club, 
 which met once a fortnight for discussion and mutual 
 instruction. For several years Shaw attended its 
 meetings. At that time unconventionalism in dress 
 and habit was a common feature of the Fabians 
 — except of Hubert Bland, who was incurably 
 respectable — and Shaw's poverty put him at no dis- 
 advantage. Every alternate week the little group 
 assembled, each being professor in turn, and at least 
 some glimpse was obtained of the mass of economic 
 and historical science which ought to be made the 
 real basis of their work. It is really in this period 
 that Shaw lost the last trace of romanticism. He also 
 attended meetings of the Shakespeare Society, the 
 Browning Society, the Shelley Society, and other 
 bodies, and, from 1883 onward, addressed many 
 Socialist meetings. In 1884, moreover, he joined a 
 more learned circle for the study of economics, which 
 included experts like Alfred Marshall, Edgeworth, and 
 Foxwell. This group, which afterwards developed in- 
 to the Royal Economic Society, discussed the science 
 in the anaemic academic way, entirely ignoring 
 moral or sentimental aspects of the industrial order, 
 and must have had a deep influence on Shaw. He 
 attended its informal meetings for several years. 
 
 This severe discipline in the later 'eighties gradually 
 drew Shi-w away from Anarchists, " impossibilists," 
 and " futile enthusiasts." He began to regard Social- \ 
 ism as a business-proposition, not to be obscured \ 
 by sentimental and Utopian considerations. It is not j 
 entirely a peculiarity of temperament which has 
 given so distinctive a form to his social creed ; indeed 
 we shall find his warmer temperament sometimes 
 
SOCIALISM 37 
 
 breaking through the restrictions imposed by his 
 intellectual discipline. In any case, it is very im- 
 portant to have these historical facts in mind in 
 appreciating his views. 
 
 The " futile enthusiasts," on their side, soon gave 
 the Fabians occasion to stand aloof from them. In 
 1885 the Social Democrats took money from the 
 Conservatives to enable them to run parliamentary 
 candidates against the Liberals, and the little Fabian 
 Society, then consisting of forty members, censured 
 them. There was still no sharp severance, however, 
 and in the grave troubles of 1886 and 1887 the Fabians 
 feebly echoed the lurid language of the Socialist and 
 Labour orators. It was a time of bad trade and 
 deep distress. The large army of the unemployed 
 tramped about London with menacing banners, 
 broke windows, and poured out volcanic rhetoric in 
 Trafalgar Square, until the famous police-charge on 
 " Bloody Sunday " (November 13th, 1887) and the 
 return of prosperity swept away all fears and hopes 
 of a revolution. Champion departed for Australia, 
 Burns slowly cultivated prudence, and the Fabians 
 took up a hostile attitude toward Hyndman and the 
 remaining Social Democrats and Anarchists. 
 
 It is not quite accurate to say that Shaw finally 
 abandoned co-operation with the Social Democrats 
 in 1887, as we find (Alderman) W. Sanders asking 
 him in 1889 to be parliamentary candidate of the 
 Federation at Battersea ; and Shaw pleads that lack 
 of means only forbids him to accept the invitation. 
 But in 1887 he had written in the National Reformer 
 (Bradlaugh's weekly journal) a series of critical 
 articles on Karl Marx, in which he used all his new 
 Jevonian economics to destroy the illusion of surplus 
 value, and he emphatically rejected the idea of a 
 
38 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 class war. He had found that, in discussion, " the 
 Marxian theory was always snapping in his hand," 
 while the jtheory_of Jevqns ^ood every test. As 
 " surplus value " and " the class war " are the sacred 
 shibboleths of the Social Democrats, these articles 
 aroused their hostility, and H. M. Hyndman became 
 a life-long antagonist of Shaw. The theory of surplus 
 value Shaw regarded as an academic fallacy, and it 
 is not necessary to consider his criticism of it ; but 
 the " class war " he considered a most mischievous 
 blunder. In point of historical fact, it is middle-class 
 men who have won the greater part of the reforms 
 for the manual workers during the nineteenth century, 
 and, from the industrial point of view, it is unsound 
 and very harmful to attempt to draw a line between 
 manual and professional workers. The real line of 
 demarcation runs, from the point of view of the 
 industrial reformer, diagonally across the middle 
 class : it runs between workers and idlers, and is 
 independent of class. Advanced labour movements 
 have been greatly retarded in England, in comparison 
 with the continent, by their proneness to rebuff middle- 
 class S3mipatliisers. 
 
 These circumstances conspired to make the Fabian 
 Society, of which Shaw became the leader — he would, 
 of course, say that, if there were any leaders, he was 
 co-leader with Webb— the intellectual and middle- 
 class wing of the Sociahst movement. But we need 
 not follow in detail the story of the Society, which 
 Shaw has told so well in Tract 41. In 1888 the 
 Fabians adopted the policy of permeating the Liberal 
 Party. They helped to secure a majority of Pro- 
 gressives on the first London County Council. They 
 captured the new Radical paper, the Star, " by a 
 stage-army stratagem," and tempted other Radical 
 
Socialism ^9 
 
 editors to borrow the elements of its success. They 
 lured prominent politicians to address them, and 
 " butchered them to make a Fabian holiday." They 
 earned respect as economists, and Shaw read a Socialist 
 paper to the Economic Section of the British Associa- 
 tion at Bath (1888). Shaw, Webb, and Olivier be- 
 came a " sort of Fabian Three Musketeers," or " the 
 recognised swashbucklers of advanced economics." 
 They smote friend and foe with equal gaiety. A 
 couple of articles by Shaw in To-day (1888) poked 
 terrible fun at " My Friend Fitzthunder," the re- 
 volutionary Socialist, and the great continental 
 leaders were ridiculed for their 'rhetorical and delusive 
 public oratory. Never before was war for a sacred 
 issue conducted with such humanity ; and certainly 
 never before did a hundred men and women, with 
 half a dozen able leaders, do more work and cause 
 greater consternation. The activity of the three 
 thousand Fabians to-day is a very pale reminiscence 
 of the activity of those hundred Fabians of 1888-1889. 
 In this connection a word should be added before 
 I conclude the historical account of Shaw's Socialist 
 views. In 1906 I was privately urged to join the 
 Society in order to support Mr H. G. Wells in a 
 demand for a renewal of the " live policy," in opposi- 
 tion to the " dead hand " of the aging leaders. I did 
 not think it graceful to enter at such a crisis. Mr 
 Wells, who lost the battle, has recently said {Labour 
 Leader, October 19th, 1903) that he pressed for a 
 recognition of the endowment of motherhood, and 
 left the Society in disgust when he saw how every- 
 thing was sacrificed to the " vanity " of Mr and Mrs 
 S. Webb. Prominent and neutral Fabians told me 
 at the time that Wells fought the conservative in- 
 fluence of Shaw as vehemently as that of Sidney and 
 
40 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Beatrice Webb. His plea for larger and more vigorous 
 action was chiefly defeated by Shaw. 
 
 This was the historical development of Shaw's 
 position. Of the vast amount of work he did in the 
 next ten years it is almost superfluous to speak. 
 Until 1888, when he became musical critic, he lectured 
 many times a week, and after 1888 lectured on most 
 Sundays in the winter. As he had begun to make 
 a small income by journalism in 1885, he refused to 
 take any fee for his lectures. His attitude was often 
 puzzling. About the beginning of the century he 
 wrote a short and indifferent paper for a small weekly, 
 which I was sub-editing, and received a fee of three 
 guineas ; which was treble the fee paid to any other 
 in the history of the journal. His language, in refus- 
 ing the cheque, was withering ; even worse was his 
 language about the poor sub-editor, who had been 
 directed to cut three lines — of not the slightest im- 
 portance — out of his paper in order to fit the page. 
 It was, however, his firm rule not to accept money for 
 propagandist work, and through all the vicissitudes 
 of his financial experience he has expended his best 
 powers on what he conceived to be the best service of 
 his fellows without payment and with a fine indifference 
 to the alienation of the public. 
 
 In 1897 he completed his education in the realities 
 of life by becoming a Vestryman and Councillor of 
 the St Pancras Borough Council. The Fabiaas-Jiad 
 concentrated on the stimulation of municipal life, 
 and Shaw entered the Council, by co-option. For 
 six years he paid the closest attention to his work, 
 and his experience reacted on his opinions. The 
 municipal machinery seemed to him the most suitable 
 for carrying out the industrial reform he desired, and 
 he was encouraged to restrict the function of State- 
 
SOCIALISM 41 
 
 government. On this experience and the reflections 
 it inspired he pubUshed his chief SociaUst work, 
 " The Common Sense of Municipal Trading," which 
 we will examine presently. It was issued on the 
 eve of the municipal election of 1904, at which Shaw 
 was a candidate, and its large suggestion of municipal 
 work, with proportionate " debt " (in the popular 
 sense), alarmed the electors and helped his opponents. 
 But his scorn of tact and reserve was equally re- 
 sponsible. The education question was being fiercely 
 discussed, and he shocked the extreme Nonconformists 
 by his apparent concessions to the Church. He 
 further inflamed them by dragging Voltaire into the 
 electoral discussion ; but it is not clear whether he 
 said that they held the same ideas as Voltaire or (as 
 is more likely) that Voltaire and he were the only 
 two really religious men who ever lived. 
 
 For the last twenty years there has been little 
 variation in his views, though there has been some 
 vacillation, some change of emphasis, some distraction 
 by more modern ideas of reform. Briefly, he is a 
 JS ocialist of the most extreme type in the sense that 
 he demands absolute equaJity of income in the social 
 "commonwealth ; if exceptions were to be admitted, 
 hiTwouid be disposed to grant the dustman more than 
 the Attorney-General. The child is Joinherit_aJixed 
 income from_the State, and the State is to see that, 
 in mature years^ltls earned. In this Shaw goes far 
 beyond his own associates and enters the company 
 of the most extreme " enthusiasts." But he promptly 
 differs from the extremists. He s corns demo cracy, 
 restricts central government to the task of federating 
 the municipalities, regards the idea of a revolution 
 as melodramatic nonsense, and believes that if the 
 enthusiasts could foresee the finished social common- 
 
42 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 wealth they would abandon their enthusiasm for it. 
 He is not at all sure that every industry will be 
 socialised, and is fairly clear that some (letters, for 
 instance) will not. He is still to a large extent an 
 Anarchist-Socialist, and his whole creed is bent into 
 characteristic and peculiar directions by his claim 
 that happiness is far from being the end,.jaf„ man- 
 Few Socialists agree with his version of the creed, 
 as a whole. But his position will be best understood 
 by an examination, in chronological order, of a few 
 of his chief expositions of his beliefs. 
 
 The paper which he read to the British Association 
 at Bath in 1886 was published some years afterwards 
 in " Fabian Essays in Socialism." It is, in my opinion, 
 the best statement of his creed, though he has in a 
 few points advanced beyond it. It is titled " The 
 Transition to Social Democracy," and opens with an 
 historical account of the conversion of the narrow 
 and ordered system of the Middle Ages into the vast 
 industrial chaos of to-day. It is this chaos which the 
 new economy would alter by socialising economic 
 rent. It would " transfer rent and interest to the 
 State, not in one lump sum, but by instalments " ; 
 a process which is being actually performed by income 
 tax, death duties, Education and Factory Acts, and 
 so on. The success of the Post Office encourages this 
 experiment, whUe the frightful example of the appro- 
 priation of economic rent by individuals, as London 
 grows and the leases " fall into the maw of the land- 
 lord," warns us of its necessity. On the other hand, 
 it is useless for the State to appropriate the unearned 
 income, which amounts to ^500,000,000 a year in 
 England, unless it is prepared to invest it in pro- 
 ductive enterprise. 
 
 The present deadlock, which is due to the injustice 
 
SOCIALISM 43 
 
 of the unearned income and the inability of the State 
 to use it, must be terminated by a slow and experi- 
 mental, but vast, extension of municipal industry. 
 The workers have little to gain by their Trade Unions ; 
 even in the matter of raising wages they have been 
 but a fly on the wheel. The community must socialise 
 industry through jtihg.. municipal 'mE^Rmefy. '■'The 
 ground-landlord must be the milch-cow." With the 
 appropriated economic rent (or " unearned increment" 
 of ground-value, as it is popularly put) the munici- 
 pality must take up one industry after another, and 
 private employers will have to grant better conditions 
 in order to retain their employees — until the formidable 
 competition of the municipal employer annihilates 
 them. With evident reluctance he grants that 
 officials may be paid higher salaries than ordinary 
 workers, but he trusts that the extension of real 
 education will abolish this need by supplying a larger 
 nuinBer of capable men. He sketches a concurrent 
 reform of other branches of national, and of inter- 
 national, life, and bitterly regrets that this slow reform 
 is all that can be urged. " Let me in conclusion," 
 he says, " disavow all admiration for this inevitable, 
 but sordid, slow, reluctant, cowardly path to justice." 
 The revolutionary type of Socialism is more inspiring, 
 as it promises the immediate abolition of squalor and 
 poverty, but it is unhappily impracticable. 
 
 In reintroducing this essay to " the ordinary respect- 
 able Englishman " — the class assailed by the Fabians 
 — Shaw rejoices in the progress that has been made. 
 The extreme Socialists have been cast aside ; they 
 are " romantic amateurs " and " represent nobody 
 but their silly selves." [The onlooker, in every 
 country, receives a shock when he listens to the 
 language which the " comrades " in the various 
 
44 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 branches of the millennium use toward each other.] 
 On the other hand, Shaw says, " there is nobody left 
 in the camp of our enemies except the ignorant, the 
 politically imbecile, the corruptly interested, and 
 the retinue of broken, drunken, reckless mercenaries 
 who are always ready to undertake a campaign of 
 slander against the opponents of any vested interest 
 which has a bountiful secret service fund." This is 
 Mr Shaw's idea of " chaffing " his opponents. One 
 prefers the sobriety of the earlier essay, and it is of 
 importance in showing the growth of his opinions. 
 Practically all Socialists wotdd, while leaving industry 
 to the gradual extension of municipal activity, transfer 
 the land, the mines, and the means of transit to the 
 State. Shaw's anarchist contempt of " authority " 
 and disdain of parliamentary democracy restrict the 
 action of the State. At the same time one sees that 
 he is being driven to take up the extreme position of 
 equality of income. To say that education will alter 
 the inequality of ability is a fallacy : the more gifted 
 will rise still higher, and wiU always be a small minority. 
 On the other hand, to say that there is in England an 
 unearned income of £500,000,000 is equally mis- 
 leading. A large amount of it represents income on 
 capital which was earned and saved. One feels 
 that Shaw will override his hesitation and demand 
 equality, as he soon did. 
 
 It is not necessary to analyse here his debate with 
 Mr Foote in the eight hours' question in 1891. The 
 issue does not affect his general system. Foote was 
 a much more skilful debater, but the historical and 
 economic learning was all on Shaw's side. To the 
 audience the debate must have been inconclusive. 
 
 He returned to the main theme in his " Common 1 
 Sense 'of Municipal Trading " (1894). In opposition! 
 
SOCIALISM 45 
 
 to the stress he had laid on municipal activity, critics 
 were everywhere urging its failure and ineptitude. 
 Fortified by his years of experience as a Borough 
 Councillor, Shaw boldly attacked them and produced 
 his most important economic work. It is a clever 
 appeal to the middle-class ratepayer, who was being 
 scared by the appalling cartoons which were now be- 
 ginning to deface London at every municipal election. 
 Shaw depicts Mr Smith as being in a lamentable 
 position from which Socialism alone can extricate 
 him : the rich man empties one of his pockets to pay 
 rent, the poor man empties the other to pay for 
 education, insurance, poor relief, etc. The most 
 serious point is, however, his c ontention that jnunici- 
 palities can raise capital more cheaply, and enlist 
 abifity more easily, than private companies. He 
 does not plead for a rigid scheme of municipalisation ; 
 some things may be done better by private enterprise. 
 Shaw has always avoided doctrinaire rigidity as well 
 as Utopian Jorecasts. But he pleads that, when you 
 take account of the indirect and moral profit as well 
 as the direct and material, the municipality is the 
 best employer. 
 
 There is, perhaps, in Socialist literature no subtler 
 analysis of the advantage claimed for municipal 
 service as contrasted with companies or " predatory 
 capitalistic collectivism " (trusts). Take the drink 
 traffic. Who, in admiring the brewer's profits, counts 
 the cost to the community of the ravages of drunken- 
 ness ? Who reflects, in studying the balance-sheet 
 of a dock-company, that the municipality has to 
 maintain a hospital and a poor-house close at hand 
 on account of its operations ? Who notices, in ex- 
 amining the municipal balance-sheet, what an indirect 
 cost to the community it has saved by its sanitary 
 
46 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 operations ? And so on. Shaw concludes that, in 
 order to undertake housing, the municipality must 
 own the land ; and that the various municipal bodies 
 must be co-ordinated in a national Socialist scheme. 
 
 In 1896 he wrote for a foreign journal an article 
 on " The Illusions of Socialism," which is republished 
 in " Forecasts of the coming century " : a volume 
 of Socialist essays edited by Edward Carpenter. This 
 extraordinary essay is, one of the most pointed ex- 
 pressions of the purely personal features of Shaw's 
 creed : one of those utterances which tempt even 
 the Socialist to regard him as either eccentric or not 
 serious, when he is both consistent and profoundly 
 serious. Such expressions cannot be wholly under- 
 stood until we have considered his entire attitude 
 toward life, which, in its mysticism and asceticism — 
 s ocial as well as personal asceticism — ^makes his 
 Socialist outlook very singular. 
 
 The enormous success of modern Socialism, especially 
 on the continent, is due to its promise and depictment 
 of a golden age. The revolutionary Socialist would 
 inaugurate it by an Act of Parliament, at the cost of 
 a pennyworth of parchment and ink ; the_eygluti0n- 
 ary Socialist may grant that its realisation will take 
 centuries. But they are agreed that the consequent 
 state of things will be the millennium ; a complete 
 transformation of human life. Thoughtful Socialist 
 leaders often smile at this childlike dream, but it is 
 the great attraction and inspiration of the movement, 
 and few dare publicly assail it. Since he outgrew 
 his early illusions, Shaw has never flinched from 
 disparaging this dream. However mistaken he may 
 be at times, however violent and unjust toward those 
 who differ from him, his opponents will hardly refuse 
 to recognize his unwavering truth and outspokenness. 
 
SOCIALISM 47 
 
 In this essay he hits hard at the " illusions " of the 
 majority of his own followers. Few of them will \ 
 find consolation in his assurance that illusions are 
 " the mainspring of human activity," and that " there 
 can no more be an illusion without a reality than a 
 shadow without an object." It is not this prosy 
 nucleus of reform, which he calls a reality, but this 
 broad iridescent fringe, which he calls the halo of 
 illusion, that fires the millions of European Socialists. 
 Yet " Socialism, as it appears to ninety-nine out of 
 every hundred of the ardent young Socialists who will 
 read this book is an illusion " ; which is a hard sajdng, 
 not only for the ardent young men, but for the nine 
 other Socialist writers who contribute to the volume. 
 It is a good thing to aim at a millennium, but, if these 
 young men foresaw the social commonwealth in its 
 realisation, they would " despise and loathe it as a 
 miserably prosaic bourgeois development and exten- 
 sion of the respectability of to-day." And Shaw had 
 always said that respectability was the essential evil 
 to attack. 
 
 The ingenious speculation which he goes on to offer 
 does not redeem his bluntness. Like every other 
 new reform. Socialism must be dramatised before it 
 is taught as a science. It " must be hidden under a 
 veil of illusions embroidered with promises, and pro- 
 vided with a simple mental handle for the grasp of the 
 common mind." The capitalist must be the villain 
 of the piece, and the worker the virtuous hero : the 
 capitalist system is hell, the Socialist order will be 
 heaven. " Socialism wins its disciples by presenting 
 civilisation to them as a popular melodrama, or as 
 a Pilgrim's Progress through trial and combat against 
 the powers of evil to the bar of poetic justice with 
 with paradise beyond." This will seem to most 
 
48 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 people a deadly attack on Socialism, but Shaw is 
 tolerant. He asks only the abandonment of " the 
 cruder illusions," such as representing their opponents 
 as fools or fiends : the one practice of which he 
 himself is persistently guilty. Moreover, one of the 
 chief intellectual roots of SociaUsm, Marx's theory, 
 is " erroneous and obsolete," but Jevons, who anni- 
 hilates it, is beyond the intelligence of Socialists. 
 And, finally, the idea that all industries and pro- 
 fessions must be socialised is the idea of " fanatics." 
 
 Such pronouncements made Shaw as puzzling to a 
 large proportion of his friends as to the general public. 
 There is, in point of fact, nothing strained or para- 
 doxical about them ; except the unconscious humour 
 of recommending Socialists to drop the practice of 
 flaying their opponents. It was the one " illusion " 
 they ever learned of Shaw. But many Socialists — 
 especially if they are not writers or orators, or if they 
 speak in private — argue that the gain by a realisation 
 of their scheme will be immeasurably less than most 
 Socialists believe. Shaw was merely giving a good 
 example of sincerity in sa3dng so. 
 
 In 1901 he returned to the lighter vein, in his 
 " Socialism for Millionaires." The efforts of Rhodes 
 and Carnegie to get rid of their burden of gold attracted 
 his sympathy. " The millionaire class, a small but 
 growing one, into which any of us may be flung to- 
 morrow by the accidents of commerce, is perhaps the 
 most neglected in the community." He offers advice. 
 They cannot devise means of spending millions on 
 themselves : they must not debauch the workers by 
 charity or waste their money in philanthropy. He 
 admonishes Mr Carnegie with the fate of Ruskin, 
 who gave to Sheffield a museum which " it does not 
 want and would cheerfully sell for a fortnight's holiday. 
 
SOCIALISM 4d 
 
 with free beer, if it could." After this the millionaire- 
 pupil must be surprised to hear Shaw lay down as 
 the fundamental rule : " Never give the public any- 
 thing they want : give them something they ought 
 to want and don't." But possibly few millionaires 
 were really embarrassed by reading the tract. 
 
 It is probable that it was rather the Socialists who 
 were embarrassed by Shaw's scintillating progress 
 during the first decade of this century. The gay fling 
 at their illusions troubled them, and they wondered 
 what would be the next phase of his development. 
 At length, in the zenith of his influence, in the most 
 powerful and widely-read of all his works, he seemed 
 to desert them. In 1903 he published " Man and 
 Superman," and the popularity of that brilliant play, 
 especially in the United States, sent thousands to 
 the book in expectation of the customary long preface. 
 In this case there was not only a lengthy introduction ; 
 the play was followed by a " Revolutionist's Hand- 
 book " and by a whole arsenal of explosive epigrams 
 which seemed calculated to blast every human belief 
 and institution. They will be considered later from a 
 broader point of view, but as they include a far more 
 serious attack on " the illusions of Socialism," they 
 must be noticed here. 
 
 The chief feature of the preface is a fierce tirade 
 against democracy and scorn of the notion that it 
 leads to progress. The preface is cast in the form 
 of a letter to A. B. Walkley, his earlier Radical 
 associate, and Shaw talks to him, with the freedom 
 of the fireside, about the hallucinations of their youth. 
 Democracy is " the last refuge of cheap misgovern- 
 ment." He outdoes the scorn of Carlyle's " Latter- 
 day Pamphlets," and complacently quotes Burke 
 about a nation " under the hoofs of the swinish 
 
50 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 multitude." He invites Walkley to recall Demos in 
 the theatre. " What our voters are in the pit and 
 gallery," he says, " they are alsoin the polling booth " : 
 full of stupidity and illusions. After winning the 
 franchise from the plutocrats, they return the same 
 plutocrats to power, and entrust the political 
 machinery to " a mob of grown-up Eton boys " just 
 at the time when its new and larger functions make it 
 supremely important. If we had a perfect constitu- 
 tion, the ruling caste " would interpret it into mere 
 fashionable folly or canting charity." He returns 
 to the point in the " Revolutionist's Handbook." 
 The Radical faith in universal suffrage " withers the 
 moment it is exposed to practical trial." Switzerland, 
 Australia, Canada, France, the United States — he 
 sweeps aside every instance. We muddle through 
 " like an elephant in a jungle." The people wiU 
 have a leader who " holds popiilar convictions with 
 prodigious energy," and will not lend an ear to the 
 " frail meliorist," unless he " happens by accident 
 to have the specific artistic talent of the mountebank 
 as well." 
 
 This is by no means new in Shaw. He always dis- 
 dained democracy, the hope of orthodox Liberal and 
 Labour men, who thought it sufficed without economic 
 changes. But there is an entirely new note in the 
 preface and the Handbook. He now finds that the 
 question of the unequal distribution of wealth is not 
 very important, because it " does not threaten the 
 existence of the race, but only the individual happiness 
 of its units." One would imagine that Shaw is begin- 
 ning to reflect that all his early zeal for an equitable 
 distribution of wealth is not very consistent in an 
 anti-moralist, anti-sentimentalist, anti-idealist, and 
 anti-hedonist. But we remember that he is also an 
 
_ SOCIALISM 51 
 
 anti-rationalist, and need not give a rational ground 
 for his enthusiasm. 
 
 The new motive is really seen in his concern about 
 " the existence of the race." He labours hard to 
 prove that we are rapidly going to the dogs. Progress 
 is an illusion, education a total failure, idealism 
 bankrupt. He invites Walkley to smile at these 
 enthusiasms of their youth. We are going backward 
 in spite of them all. [I postpone until a later chapter 
 the examination of his evidence of this.] You can't 
 make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Socialism is 
 quite right when it says that, if we would do certain 
 things, all would be well ; but we won't do them. 
 The nation is too feeble and stupid to listen. With 
 such an audience both the Fabian and the revolutionary 
 Socialist are " fundamentally futile." If we brought 
 about a revolution, " the dog would return to its 
 vomit " : witness France and the United States. 
 " Man will return to his idols and his cupidities, in 
 spite of all ' movements ' and all revolutions, until 
 his nature is changed." " And so," he concludes, 
 " we arrive at the end of the Socialist's dream of the 
 socialisation of the means of production and ex- 
 change." Positivists, Ethicists, and all other idealists, 
 are just as futile. " The only fundamental and ' 
 possible Socialism is the socialisation of the selective 
 breeding of man. . . . We must eliminate the Jahoo, 
 or his vote will wreck the Commonwealth." 
 
 In the last phrases you have the key to this remark- 
 able aberration from a life-ideal. The old love has 
 been discarded for a moment in favour of Mile. 
 Eugenics, the latest attraction in the world of re- 
 form. I will consider later how Shaw's philosophy 
 inclined him to accept this new panacea, and what 
 dark brooding over the faults of our age led him tp 
 
 ;1 
 
5^ BERNARD SHAW 
 
 i the conviction that the superman must be bred, not 
 I evolved out of the present generation. It is enough 
 \ for the moment that in 1903 he thrust his Socialism 
 j aside, and thought that he had found a shorter cut 
 ,• to the promised land. The question may be raised 
 whether the " Revolutionist's Handbook," in which 
 this is more plainly stated, is not really part of the 
 drama : whether its exaggerations should not rather 
 be regarded as the opinions of John Tanner than of 
 Bernard Shaw. That Tanner in the play is Shaw — 
 at first the actor deliberately made up as Shaw — we 
 all know, but may not the dramatist's licence and 
 impersonality count for something ? Unfortunately, 
 the preface, though it does not explicitly mention 
 Socialism, says the same things. It describes de- 
 mocracy, education, and progress as illusions, and 
 I insists that the task before us is the breeding of the 
 / new man, or superman. It is in the preface, too, that 
 Shaw slights the problem of poverty because it "does 
 not threaten the existence of the race." There is no 
 doubt that in 1903 Shaw's Socialist faith was under 
 a cloud. 
 
 -j 'And within two years it came out into the sunshine 
 \ once more. He holds strongly to the eugenic ideal 
 \ to-day, but he now regards Socialism as a necessary 
 , j preliminary to eugenics. The return of the pendulum 
 / lis plainly seen in "Major Barbara," which he pub- 
 lished in 1905. The play itself is not so much a study 
 of the Salvation Army or of the problem of tainted 
 money — the public naturally seized the obvious points 
 — as a characteristic sermon on the virtues of money 
 , and the vices of poverty. Shaw has entirely changed 
 ihis mind again about the importance of the unequal 
 Idistribution of wealth. The preface loudly asserts 
 \that poverty is " the greatest of evils and the worst 
 
SOCIALISM 53 
 
 of crimes." It is singular how many of Shaw's ex- 
 pressions seem to be faithful echoes of the thunder 
 of Carlyle's " Latter-day Pamphlets," which so deeply 
 shocked Radicals ; but, of course, the underlying 
 principle is different. Carlyle regarded the poor 
 man as an individual criminal, as responsible for his 
 poverty as a thief or a liar is for his delinquency r 
 Shaw takes a social view. " Security, the chief pre-) 
 tence of civilisation, cannot exist where the worst of 
 dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's 
 head." It is the main source of filth, disease, crime, 
 and incompetence, and we are stupid to tolerate it. 
 
 It would be an improvement on the present order 
 to abolish the penal laws against burglary and make 
 poverty a crime. Seriously, he suggests, we ought 
 to pay every man a salary and " see that he earns it." 
 As to the colossal task of " seeing that he earns it," 
 Shaw merely throws out hints at a lethal chamber. 
 Many would agree ; but, when you have chloroformed 
 the entirely inept and lazy, there remains a gradation 
 of ineptitude and laziness that would paralyse the 
 efforts of an industrial police. The interesting thirif 
 is that Shaw is returning to the position that equality 
 of income is the first reform. One would almost 
 fancy that his asceticism is relenting, he insists so 
 much on money. " Thanks to our political imbecility 
 and personal cowardice (fruits of poverty both), the 
 best imitation of a good life now procurable is life 
 on an independent income." And again : " The 
 universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact 
 in our civilisation, the one sound spot in our social 
 conscience. It represents health, strength, honour, 
 generosity, and beauty as conspicuously and un- 
 deniably as the want of it represents illness, weakness, 
 disgrace, meanness, and ugliness," 
 
54 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 So tVip Snn^^ig^" irlpal — Shaw disdains ideals and is 
 bursting with them — was re conciled with the Eug enic 
 ideal, and a peaceful menage d trots set up. Two 
 indications will suffice to show how this has become 
 Shaw's, final and u nwavering c reed. They are oral 
 declarations, and therefore more valuable, because 
 Shaw had not time to think out an exaggerated or 
 humorous form of expression. 
 
 One is found in a series of articles in the Labour 
 Leader (March 31st, 1911, and following) by the editor, 
 A. Fenner Brockway. Shaw was catechised, over 
 the fireside, by a group of Socialists, and — he told the 
 truth. The Independent Labour Party, to which 
 they belonged, is — some may need to be informed — 
 intermediate between the Fabians and the extreme 
 Socialists : much nearer, in fact, to the Fabian 
 moderation. Shaw bluntly told his hearers that 
 the moderate proposals of Fabians and members of 
 the I.L.P. are not Socialism at all. He means by 
 Socialism just what the man in the street conceives 
 it to be : " A-system of -society-where.^all -the income 
 of the country is to be divided up in exactly equal 
 proportions." Whereon the Socialist editor observes : 
 " We gasped ! " Only extreme Socialists dream of 
 this rigid equality. Mr Brockway is, in fact, puzzled 
 by Shaw's " sudden zeal for equality," but I have 
 shown that he had long entertained it. 
 
 By a simple sum in arithmetic Shaw made his 
 picture alluring. " Suppose the national income is 
 divided by the number of the population, and you 
 find the result is £500." Very many of us will be 
 prepared to consider the equalisation of income if it 
 means that every man, woman, and child will receive 
 ;f5oo a year. Indeed, what with the asphyxiation of 
 incorrigible idlers and the conversion of unproductive 
 
SOCIALISM 55 
 
 workers into productive, the figure ought to rise still 
 higher. I imagine myself and wife and four children 
 drawing £700 a year each from the national ex- 
 chequer, and am quite willing to depose millionaires 
 to attain that result. But I find, on comparing the 
 number of the population (40,000,000) and the annual 
 national income (£2,000,000,000) that the result 
 would be only £50 per year.^ 
 
 Shaw gives t hree reason s why the nation al-income 
 ought to.be equally divided. ^^Fj^ the possession 
 of equal money by all is the only way of securing 
 that the needs of all shall be met before any luxuries 
 are produced ; secondly, there will be no real demo- 
 cratic government until wealth is equal (a state- 
 ment which scarcely harmonises with experience in 
 Australasia) ; thirdly, the eugenic reform cannot be 
 carried out wHle there are inequalities of wealth 
 and caste. This equalisation is to be secured in the 
 way we have already seen : by the gradual extension 
 of municipal industry and ownership, the State being 
 only the contralisation of the municipalities. Not 
 only are mothers and all women to be endowed, but 
 the drunkard and the blackguard, the child and even 
 the baby, are to have their £50 a year. " The moment 
 you are born you should have £50 a year " : and not 
 more in your prime. Then the State must see that 
 you earn it. This is quite simple, Mr Shaw now finds. 
 You put each individual on trial every five years, and, 
 if he or she has not produced as much as he or 
 
 ' In the next article Mr Brockway gives the figure as ;£50 a year, 
 and one may think the earlier figure a misprint. I do not think so. 
 Fifty pounds a year is too ludicrous an ideal to hold out, and Shaw 
 clearly and emphatically (as we shall see) insists that the income is 
 to be divided between the total population — men, women, and 
 children. His zeal for equality largely rested on a statistical mis- 
 take. 
 
56 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 she has consumed, off with him or her to the lethal 
 chamber. 
 
 After reading this remarkable account of his views, 
 even Socialists observed that Shaw could not expect 
 them to take him seriously. But he was — I will not 
 insist on the five years and the lethal chamber 
 too rigorously — in deep earnest. One distinguished 
 Socialist iremarked to me a year or two ago, in con- 
 versation, that Shaw was showing signs of age. This 
 also is wrong. I heard him speak at the City Temple 
 recently (October 30th, 1913), and precisely the same 
 creed" was unfolded, syllable for syllable, with the 
 gravest emphasis and with every indication that this 
 mental energy is still magnificent and his judgment 
 cold and clear as ever. He was speaking on " Christian 
 Economics." The Christianity of it I examine later : 
 the economic was the same as in 19 11. /'Ev ery child 
 was to come into a birthright of an equal portion of 
 the national income. Only in this way could we 
 secure a full supply of necessaries before luxuries, a 
 proper administration of justice, and the free practice 
 of eugenics. He scouted the idea that political 
 democracy or economic collectivism implied any 
 moral progress (in the broadest sense) : he drew from 
 his ascetic and mystic principles the conclusion that 
 man's duty js„.ta develop .bis spiritual gowers : and, 
 after~outraging their religious feelings and settings 
 forth ideals with which hardly a soul in the room 
 agreed, he was boisterously cheered by fifteen hundred 
 City Templars. It was a fine tribute — to the man. 
 
 It is hardly necessary in the end to summarise or 
 criticise Shaw's Socialism, as I stated its characteristic 
 features at the outset. He agrees with Jhe_ex±reme 
 Socialists in demanding equality of income, but differs 
 violently from them in estimating the effect of this 
 
SOCIALISM 57 
 
 and the way to attain it, and heaps contempt on their 
 rhetoric and their economic science. He agrees with 
 the moderate ^jjcialists in believing that the process 
 of socialisation will be gradual and_businesslike, and 
 possibly not complete, but disdains them because they 
 will not embrace equality of income— in the babe and 
 the man, the defective and the inventor — and because 
 they trust education and democratic government. 
 And in his gsceticand^rrational^ conception Q.f . the 
 base of^gsialism he finds himself in agreement only 
 with a few mystically-minded Socialists hke Mr Webb. 
 These things have, for the last twenty years, prevented 
 Socialists from deriving as much advantage from the 
 adherence of so powerful a writer as they had hoped 
 to do. The only work of his which they urge — and it 
 has had a very small circulation for a work of the size — 
 is his " Common Sense of Municipal Trading." It is 
 his fierce critical work which they generally applaud. 
 One hears it said at times that he is dangerous to his 
 friends because he is whimsical, paradoxical, irres- 
 ponsible in his utterances. This is incorrect. He is 
 by no means a model of consistency from year to year, 
 but he is generally serious and consistent, though he 
 may wave a red flag of exaggeration to draw the bull. 
 The truth is that his fundamental creed, his deeper 
 view of life, is peculiar, and must be carefully studied 
 before we approach the bewildering and pyrotechnic 
 discharge of criticisms and affirmations which splutters 
 in the life of England during his period of dramatic 
 production. We have already seen how his economic 
 reasoning is complicated by mystic considerations and 
 ascetic sentiments. You cannot even understand his 
 Socialism until you understand these other elements 
 which have given it a peculiarly personal form. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Mr Shaw's principal biographer observes that, 
 although he does not claim to be great, he does claim 
 to be a philosopher. That is, perhaps, one of the 
 unkindest disservices which Dr Henderson has 
 rendered to his subject. I am, of course, not thinking 
 of academic philosophy, of which no one would 
 expect Shaw to have any knowledge. But even if 
 the word be taken in its broader sense, as a title 
 accorded to any man who has endeavoured to syste- 
 matise his particular views of life by tracing all happen- 
 ings to a fundamental reality, it is unwise to apply it 
 to Mr Shaw. He has a theory of life, in the compre- 
 hensive and fundamental sense, but it is hardly deep 
 enough, or sufficiently grounded on positive knowledge, 
 to merit the high title of a philosophy. It is an inteb 
 lectual attitude in the development of which personal 
 sjTnpathies and antipathies have counted for much 
 more than a scrutiny of realities ; and it is an attitude 
 which, as a natural consequence, takes no account of 
 the progress of knowledge, and is already in large 
 part antiquated. 
 
 ( Yet it is essential to study what is called Shaw's 
 philosophy, if one would understand his position on 
 the detailed problems of life. A man's philosophy 
 or creed has frequeqtly no relation to his practical 
 attitude. Huxley affected to believe that we have no 
 confident knowledge of the existence of a material 
 
 58 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 59 
 
 universe, yet he is to many — not unnaturally — the 
 arch-materialist of the nineteenth century. Rocke- 
 feller professes a deep admiration for the Sermon on 
 the Mount. Many people believe implicitly that 
 they are going to heaven, yet make heroic efforts to 
 remain out of it as long as possible. Shaw is too 
 virile and candid for this. His philoso phy actively_ 
 sh apes his view sj^especially 'his ethical views, iroml 
 wHich the most distinctive and audacious of his^ 
 opinions are derived. Indeed, in the last ten years\^ 
 this philosophy has grown larger and more dogmatic 
 in his mind, and nearly every utterance is at once 
 related to it. We have already seen how even his 
 ideas of social reform are modified by mystic considera^ 
 tions of which we had to defer the explanation. We 
 shall see that his characteristic ideas about morality 
 also are grounded on this deeper theory of life. In this 
 he believes that he improves upon Nietzsche and Ibsen. 
 Perhaps it will be well to give at once an outline of 
 his philosophy. In describing it as " antiquated " 
 I did not mean that Shaw was clinging in comparative 
 loneliness to one of those ancient wrecks which float 
 in the current of thought. As far as the first principle 
 of his creed goes, he is in high company. A brilliant 
 French philosopher, Professor Bergson, has recently 
 brought it into discussion again throughout the 
 civilised world. Sir Oliver Lodge has defended it for 
 two decades ; and, what is more important to those 
 who know anything about the subject, Professor A. 
 Thompson, and Principal Lloyd Morgan, and a group 
 of able biologists and embryologists on the continent, 
 defend it. Except Bergson, however, whose philos- 
 ophy is nearest in substance to that accepted by 
 Shaw, these scientific men would reject ' the rather 
 poetical form in which Shaw conceives the " Life- 
 
60 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Force," and certainly not one of them would sanction 
 for a moment Sha w's oppos ition to Darwinism. I 
 do not think there is onesaenHSCTnarrorpEIosopher 
 in Europe or the United States — except, in some 
 measure, the Rev. Professor Henslow — ^who would 
 endorse Shaw's philosophy on this point ; and you 
 must share Shaw's disdain of authority to be in- 
 different to that fact. 
 
 There are, according to the Shavian philosophy, 
 two fnr irlampntal realitifg : ijiatter and-, the Life- 
 Force;_ Matter is, or may be, eternal. At a point in 
 time (as far as our planet is concerned) the other 
 and spiritual reality, the Life-Force, pervades matter 
 and begins to build its atoms into simple living things, 
 which it animates. Then comes the long story of 
 the. evolution. .ollife, the ascent from level to level of 
 organisation. Some (materialists) hold that this 
 upward procession was due to the struggle of living 
 things and the changes in their surroundings : some 
 (theists) believe that it was directed by a supreme 
 intelligence; and some (vitalists) contend thatJJikLife- 
 Force advanced, unconsciously but by natiyeimpulse, 
 in Certain definite directions. In adopting the latter 
 view Shaw is still in respectable company, though when 
 he goes on to deny the struggle for hfe and survival 
 of the fittest, he stands alone. Then comes the im- 
 portant practical and religious bearing of this creed. 
 It gives Shaw a religion because he is prepared tojcdl 
 the_Life^orce God, and thinks it may yet' become 
 omniscient and omnipotent. It gives him a basis for 
 his ethic, and so colours his whole outlook, because 
 it identifies his will with the Life-Force— identifies 
 God and man — and justifies his scorn of external rules 
 I and authorities. It justifies his disdain of reason and 
 |jrationalism, because it makes will or impulse the 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 61 
 
 primary and true expression of the supreme force. 
 It rationalises his beUef in the Superman — to say 
 nothing of his conception of woman, the artist, and 
 other particular t5^es — by showing that this ever- 
 , advancing power must go on to a still higher level ; 
 and it explains his deliberate asceticism, since man's 
 highest work is.tQ co-operate -with„tha' LwULdI God " — 
 the Life-Force. 
 
 His philosophy is , therefore, no academic speculation, 
 but a vitaL.m rl-QL£y.f;rv im.RQctani-apimonhe_has 
 ex pres sed. If a man or woman affects tobe^a'SKavIaji 
 and"3i§C&rds this philosophy, his or her creed is super- 
 ficial and disjointed. It is the mainspring in Andrevi 
 Undershaft and John Tanner, in Major Barbara an^ 
 Ann Whitefield, and scores of other characters at 
 whom we have lightly laughed. The Shavian creed, 
 in so far as it is constructive, falls to pieces if you 
 reject this theoretical bond. 
 
 In order to understand how Shaw came to adopt 
 this theory of the Life-Force we must return for a 
 moment to his history. He landed on this shoal 
 by trying to steer between Scylla and Charybdis, 
 between Christianity and Rationalism. I have 
 already described this in general terms. At an early 
 age he rejects his religious beliefs and embraces the 
 spirit of the Zetetical Society. Then, mainly on 
 account of the supposed social implications of Dar- 
 winism, he sees a whirlpool in Rationalism and backs 
 away from it. He then discovers the theory of 
 Samuel Butler, who explains the universe without 
 either Christianity or Darwinism, and puts an un- 
 conscious mind or life-force in nature. Later he 
 finds that Schopenhauer has made an impressive 
 philosophy of this idea of a great impulse or will 
 pushing upward in nature, and he sees its moral 
 
62 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 implications. We may examine these stages, or 
 phases, of his creed more closely. 
 
 We saw that in the 'eighties he called himself an 
 " atheist," and joined in fierce assaults on Christianity 
 at the Zetetical Society. Captain Wilson used to 
 call it " Crosstianity," and Shaw speaks of this 
 years afterwards, in his " Quintessence of Ibsenism," 
 as an " apt name." Though he has ceased to call 
 himself an atheist, and begun to call himself a theist, 
 he has not in the least modified his antagonishi to 
 Christian theology. In 1896, in his essay " On 
 going to Church" (Savoy), he merely recommends 
 people to go at a time when there is no service, and 
 he ends a remarkable and flippant confession of faith 
 with the words : " And I regard St Athanasius 
 as an irreligious fool — that is, in the only serious 
 sense of the word, a damned fool." In the preface 
 to " Man and Superman " and the " Handbook " 
 he is just as hostile : " Christianity means nothing 
 to the masses but a sensational public execution," 
 and " We have relapsed into disputes about trans- 
 substantiation at the very moment when the discovery 
 of the wide prevalence of theophagy as a tribal custom 
 has deprived us of the last excuse for believing that 
 our official rites differ in essentials from those of bar- 
 barians." In the preface to " Major Barbara " (1905) 
 he repeats this : " Popular Christianity has for its 
 emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a sanguinary 
 execution after torture, and for its central mystery an 
 insane vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation." 
 
 His association with the City Temple and its liberal 
 preacher in recent years has led some to think that 
 he was moderating his antagonism to Christianity, 
 and some of the abler writers on him, like Julius Bab 
 and Dr Henderson, call him a Protestant or Neo- 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 63 
 
 Protestant. He has himself used the phrase, but 
 it is wholly misleading. In 1908 he wrote to the 
 Freethinker (November ist) to deny that there was 
 any material approach to Christianity in his develop- 
 ment. " I loathe," he said, " the mess of mean 
 superstitions and misunderstood prophecies which is 
 still rammed down the throats of the children of this 
 country under the name of Christianity as contempt- 
 uously as ever." All that has happened is that, whUe 
 he used to regard the Christ of the Gospels as wholly 
 fictitious and impossible, Mr R. J. Campbell has 
 made the figure plausible, in the human sense. The 
 Christian God is still to him what he described in 
 his reply to Nordau in 1895 : " a frightfully jealous 
 and vindictive old gentleman sitting on a throne above 
 the clouds," and " heaven is a sort of bliss which 
 would bore any active person to a second death." 
 
 His relation to the liberal form of Christianity which 
 is taught at the City Temple was well shown on a 
 recent occasion, to which I have already referred. 
 Speaking from the pulpit of Dr Parker on " Christian 
 Economics," and premising that he " did not profess to 
 be a Christian," he laid down the conditions of an en- 
 tente ; and they were peremptorily re j ected by Mr Camp- 
 beU.i Christ, he said, was the first and last Christian ; 
 the question was whether they should restore his teach- 
 ing — it was a matter of complete indifference to him 
 whether it was real or mythical — and whether Mr 
 Shaw could co-operate with them. To make that 
 possible they must surrender, not only hell and 
 heaven, which he notoriously derides, but every 
 pretence of a doctrine of atonement. Vindictive 
 
 * The proceedings of this remarkable meetiag, on October 30, 
 191 3, were not accurately reported. I write from the notes which 
 I took at the time. 
 
64 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 punishment is one of the things he most abhors in 
 life, and he will not have the central doctrine of the 
 Christian scheme — fall and expiation — in any form. 
 Mr Campbell said at the close that in this they em- 
 phatically dissented from Mr Shaw. 
 
 But it seemed to me that Mr Campbell's emphatic 
 
 dissent was really due to a deeper and more chilling 
 
 heresy on the part of Mr Shaw, which it was indiscreet 
 
 to recall to the audience. He had insisted on the 
 
 " immanence " of God. New theologians and amateur 
 
 theologians are fond of imagining that in this they 
 
 rise superior to the " old theology," whereas every 
 
 great theologian of the Middle Ages, and all other 
 
 ages, taught the immanence of God. The real issue 
 
 is whether you identify God with the spirit of man. 
 
 Now even Mr Campbell believes that God was a 
 
 supreme, intelligent Being before man appeared, 
 
 \ and Mr Shaw holds the opposite : God is the Life- 
 
 , i Force which, as far as we know, has reached its high- 
 
 \\ water mark in man. 
 
 J And from this he drew a conclusion which sent a 
 I shiver throughout the crowded chapel. A friend 
 ; had, he said, recently died and gone to heaven. [All 
 ! the youths and maidens who had come to hear Shavian 
 \ jokes leaned forward with beaming expectancy at 
 \ this solitary promise of humour.] To St Peter, at 
 ; the gate, he explained that he wanted to have a 
 i word with the Almighty. When Peter demurred, 
 ! and the man insisted, Paul, Moses, and other ancients 
 \ were summoned to a council. [The smile slowly 
 , disappeared, and the hundreds of Christian faces. 
 i became graver and graver.] They decided that the 
 man had a right to " see " God, and conducted him 
 ; across the golden streets to a sort of cathedral, where 
 ;'• a melancholy old man " sat on a gorgeous throne 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 65 
 
 above the altar. The man was advancing toward 
 him, when Peter drew him back. " We have," he 
 whispered, " granted you your right to see God, 
 but you cannot speak to him because — ^between 
 ourselves — God has gone mad." And on the awed 
 silence of the vast audience broke the cold and relent- 
 less assurance of the lecturer : " That is what is 
 wrong with the world : the God in us has gone mad." 
 
 It seems not only an interesting point in itself to 
 make clear Bernard Shaw's attitude on religion, but 
 that attitude has a most important bearing on his 
 ethical and even social opinions. This will appear 
 later, and I will briefly sum up his hostility to the 
 prevailing creed. He is drastically opposed to it, 
 even in its most liberal forms. He scorns even the 
 new-theology notion that God was alienated from 
 man and a reconciliation was needed. He disdains 
 the belief in personal immortality — " I neither believe 
 in it nor desire it," he says — and has heavily cari- 
 catured heaven and hell (in " Man and Superman "). 
 He thinks the notion of a Superior Being creating, or 
 directing the evolution of, inferior beings, especially 
 by a process of cruelty, " a horrible old idea." His 
 God is merely the Life-Force which has at length 
 reached consciousness in the brain of man, will one 
 day be the Superman, and may eventually be some- 
 thing higher. A two-edged sword lies between Shaw 
 and the Christian Church. 
 
 And the next point in the interpretation of his 
 creed is that he is equally alienated from Rational- 
 ism. In the letter to the Freethinker which I have 
 previously quoted he says, after expressing his con- 
 tempt of Christianity : " But I am contemptuously 
 and implacably anti-rationalist and anti-materialist." 
 Throughout the whole of his writings you find a scorn 
 
66 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 of " the revival of tribal soothsaying and idolatrous 
 rites which H\«ley called science and mistook for an 
 advance on the Pentateuch." Rationalism is a 
 system of " syllogism-worship with rites of human 
 sacrifice." Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, etc., are the 
 most mischievous seducers of mankind since Torque- 
 mada, and their doctrine of evolution is the most de- 
 vastating influence that has ever fallen on human 
 thought. 
 
 The way in which Shaw reaches this singular 
 position — singular in an anti-Christian — is instructive. 
 We first find a strong and clear expression of it in his 
 "Quintessence of Ibsenism " (1891). He finds in 
 Ibsen, or reads into Ibsen, traces of " how well he 
 knew the crushing weight with which the sordid cares 
 of the ordinary struggle for money and respectability 
 fell on the world when the romance of the creeds was 
 discredited, and progress seemed for the moment to 
 mean, not the growth of the spirit of man, but^an effect 
 of the survival of the fittest brought about by the 
 destruction of the unfit, all the most frightful examples 
 of this systematic destruction being thrust into the 
 utmost prominence by those who were fighting the 
 Church with Mill's favourite dialectical weapon, the 
 incompatibility of divine omnipotence with divine 
 benevolence " (p. 59). As Shaw observes soon after- 
 wards that Ibsen never " saw through " natural 
 selection, we may take this as a piece of pure Shavian- 
 ism read into Ibsen. The essay is, in fact, one of 
 Shaw's most careful pieces of work and puts very 
 clearly his position in 1890. He not only opposes 
 natural selection, but rejects the very principle of 
 Rationalism — ^the supremacy of reason in matters of 
 opinion — and may almost be said to have anticipated 
 Bergson in substituting instinct for reason. Rational- 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 67 
 
 ism discards tradition, and then finds " a creative 
 dynamic power " in reason : a description of reason 
 which is certainly not used by Rationalists. They 
 do, however, take reason as a guide in the investiga- 
 tion of reality, and Mr Shaw thinks theologians may 
 justly retort that " perhaps the conclusions of an 
 Ecumenical Council of learned and skilled Churchmen 
 might be more trustworthy than the first crop of 
 cheap syllogisms excogitated by a handful of raw 
 Rationalists in their sects of ' Freethinkers ' and 
 ' Secularists ' and ' Positivists ' and ' Dont Knowists ' 
 {Agnostics)." 
 
 To speak of the brilliant array of historians (from 
 Gibbon to Bury), of philosophers (from Hume to 
 Bosanquet), and of scientists (from Darwin to Haeckel) 
 — at least half of the ablest men of the last century 
 and a half — as " a handful of raw Rationalists," and 
 ask us to bow rather to the proceedings of the Vatican 
 Council or a Church Congress, is merely to show that 
 Mr Shaw occasionally does succeed in substituting 
 impulse for intelligence. We suspect a prejudice, /i 
 and already in 1890 we find it acknowledged. " No ['•. 
 sooner," he says, " has the Rationalist triumphed 
 over the theologian than he forthwith sets up as 
 binding on all men the duty of acting logically with 
 the object of securing the greatest good of the greatest 
 number, with the result that he is presently landed 
 in Vivisection, Contagious Diseases Acts, dynamite 
 conspiracies, and other grotesque but strictly reason- 
 able abominations." This completes his case against 
 Rationalism, and, as his biographers usually slur over 
 -the fundamental principles of his creed and leave his 
 opinions disjointed and eccentric, I will examine it 
 point by point. 
 I ,The first point in his aversion from Rationalism 
 
68 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 seems to have been the conviction that evolution by 
 natural selection (or Darwinism) is an inadequate 
 explanation of the facts of life-development. He is 
 fond of defining natural selection as (to quote the 
 preface to " The Doctor's Dilemma ") " that method 
 of evolution which has neither sense nor purpose 
 nor life nor anything human, much less godlike, in 
 it (meaning no selection at all, but mere dead accident 
 or luck)." There are still a few biologists who hold 
 that natural selection does not suffice unless you add 
 that the principle of life was definitely directed. But 
 Shaw is almost alone against the biological world in 
 denying natural selection altogether. As he knows 
 nothing about biology, we need pay no serious atten- 
 tion to this. He has made the same mistake as 
 Carlyle and Tolstoi, and paid the same price for it. 
 He is, in point of fact, merely repeating the criticisms 
 which Samuel Butler brought against Darwinism 
 forty years ago. Of the vast evidence accumulated 
 by biology in the last forty years he knows nothing. 
 
 I may add that his Life-Force is hardly commend- 
 able as an alternative hypothesis, quite apart from 
 the fact that the great majority of physiologists deny 
 its existence. It is supposed to be unconscious, until 
 iit attains consciousness in man, yet to have a purpose 
 ^nd to direct matter ; and, when it reaches conscious- 
 |iess in man, it shows a thousand contradictory pur- 
 poses and no common element. Let me contrast the 
 two ways of explaining things. In Shaw's view 
 woman pursues man, instead of man wooing woman. 
 This is, he says, because the Life-Force has embodied 
 in her its "purpose" of fertility and reproduction. 
 We puzzle hopelessly over these purposes of a vague, 
 impersonal, unconscious force, and ask what natural 
 selection would make of the same phenomenon. The 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 69 
 
 l)iologist would point out, in terms of natural selection, 
 that if ten in a hundred women are more active in 
 seeking husbands than the other ninety, they will be 
 the more likely to marry, and breed more than the 
 passive and retiring ninety ; and that, if the process 
 goes on long enough, the pursuing woman will be the 
 selected type. This is checked, however, by a silly 
 convention among civilised people that woman must 
 be coy and passive, and the natural woman has to 
 proceed somewhat hypocritically (like Ann Whitefield) . 
 On the other hand, the economic dependence of 
 woman on man encourages her to seek a husband, and 
 not wait to be sought, and so we get the state of things 
 on which Mr Shaw philosophises. I venture to think 
 ihat the only disadvantage of this " materialistic " 
 explanation is that it is rational and intelligible. 
 
 On this purely biological point, however, we may 
 ■entirely ignore Shaw's opinion. It is only a faint 
 -echo of the antiquated difficulties of Samuel Butler. 
 We may also pass lightly over an attempt that he 
 makes sometimes, which Dr Henderson has taken 
 seriously, to assail Darwinism directly. The fact, 
 he says, that " natural selection only accounted for 
 progress at all on the hypothesis of a continuous 
 increase in the severity of the conditions of existence 
 — that is, on an assumption of just the reverse of 
 what was actually taking place — appears to have 
 escaped Ibsen as completely as it escaped Professor 
 Huxley himself." There is no such implication in 
 Darwinism. The fact that during the greater part 
 ■of the story of life on earth struggle was the great 
 condition of progress does not mean in the least that 
 it will continue. This fallacy (much used by anti- 
 Socialists) has been exploded scores of times. The 
 increasing function of human intelligence and emotion 
 
70 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 is to reduce the struggle. Dr Wallace has shown that 
 evolution by social co-operation has been frequent 
 among the higher animals, and what we call artificial 
 selection, by which we now produce new species in aa 
 infinitely shorter time than nature could do, absolutely 
 does away with the severe struggle which characterised, 
 unconscious nature. The difficulty is purely imaginary. 
 So Shaw is mUes astray when he says that " this, 
 gloomy fortress of pessimism and materialism " has- 
 been demolished " with ridiculous ease " by the 
 working class. The fortress never existed, except in 
 the imagination of people who did not know biology 
 but wrote very dogmatically about it. 
 
 This obstinacy of Mr Shaw in clinging to ancient 
 formulae while the world marches on — ^the deadliest 
 of sins from his point of view — ^requires a further 
 explanation. We may agree with Ibsen that the 
 minority is generally right and the majority generally- 
 wrong. But that is before the battle. When -the 
 fight is over, there is apt to be a minority still holding 
 the old views out of sheer obstinacy or lack of know- 
 ledge, and that minority is worse than a majority. 
 In this case Mr Shaw lingers among the small minority 
 of the reactionary and the prejudiced. His only 
 companions are Jesuit writers and uncultivated 
 Methodists : the types he usually regards as too low 
 even for him to stoop to attack. There is, of course, 
 some reason for his obstinacy. 
 
 The chief reason is that the scientific men whose 
 authority in their own department he derides are 
 generally utilitarians and defend vivisection and 
 meat-eating. There is no necessary connection 
 between Darwinism (or materialism) and vivisection, 
 but biologists are more apt than poets or theologians, 
 to seek justification of a scientific practice. IngersolL 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHH^OSOPHY 71 
 
 was a stern opponent of vivisection, as many Rationa- 
 lists are to-day. Physiologists like Huxley, however, 
 are naturally more prone than clerg3mien to vindicate 
 vivisection, and Shaw pours a broadside of scorn into 
 them. Darwinians are " a mob of futile cowards " to 
 a great extent [Freethinker, Nov. ist, 1908) : Huxley 
 and Tyndall were mere popularisers of Darwin and 
 Helmholtz : George Eliot's novels contain " the 
 sweepings of a Pentonyille omnibus." And so on. 
 The great part that Rationalists have played in the 
 reform-movements of the nineteenth century (notably 
 in gaining that liberty which Mr Shaw enjoys) is 
 completely ignored. They dared to think that vivi- 
 section served the interest of mankind, or that man 
 had a right to derive profit from the sufferings of 
 animals. 
 
 We will come to vivisection later. For the moment 
 it is the general utilitarian principle, on which many 
 Rationalists defend vivisection, that Shaw scornfully 
 rejects. In this he partly follows his ascetic tempera- 
 ment, accentuated by the ascetic conditions of his 
 early manhood, and partly builds on his mystic theory 
 of the Life-Force. As a matter of fact. Rationalists 
 are by no means all utilitarians, and the theory has 
 no necessary connection with Darwinism. We may, 
 however, now dismiss the subject of science and 
 Darwinism. On a few fallacious grounds, and because 
 scientific men generally defend vivisection and vaccina- 
 tion and meat-eating, Mr Shaw chooses to remain an 
 anti-Darwinian in the year 1913. A peculiar position 
 for the arch-enemy of prejudice and conservatism. 
 But it must be understood that this is no idle specula- 
 tion on his part ; his opposition to science and Dar- 
 winism is an essential element of his philosophy and 
 a persistent note in his work. 
 
72 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Butler, and his own feeling that Darwinism was 
 opposed to Socialism, induced him to take up this 
 critical attitude. Some acquaintance with Schopen- 
 hauer completed his development. Again we find 
 it fully stated in the " Quintessence of Ibsenism," 
 which he wrote in 1890. He finds that the vague 
 Life-Force has already been erected into a philosophy 
 by Schopenhauer under the name of " Will " : the 
 great eternal reality behind all phenomena. This 
 was merely an exaggerated reaction on Hegel's 
 philosophy, which taught that " Reason " was the 
 supreme reality. Modern thought discards both. 
 In fact, we no longer believe in will and reason as 
 separate " faculties," or any faculties at all, and 
 these speculations are only interesting historically. 
 But Shaw combines the antiquated authority of 
 Schopenhauer with the antiquated authority of 
 Butler : makes a twisted lash for the shoiilders of 
 the Rationalist — who smiles. Schopenhauer's " Will " 
 has less life in it to-day than Hegel's " Reason." We 
 know will and reason only as different aspects of 
 man's mental life, and each has its own province : 
 reason perceives, and will directs the executive 
 machinery. To make will take the place of reason 
 is like attempting to use a dynamo as a search-light. 
 Mr Shaw never does this in practice, of course, any 
 more than Bergson or Schopenhauer. 
 
 But Schopenhauer's theory gives him his last 
 Aveapon against Rationalism, and a means of inter- 
 preting Wagner and Ibsen (two great Rationalists). 
 The will is " the prime motor," the " motive force," 
 and so on. No Rationalist ever doubted it. So we 
 must cast aside " rational rules of conduct " as well 
 as theological : which does not follow in the least, 
 and neither Ibsen nor Wagner nor Shaw has acted 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 73 
 
 thus. In his Saturday Review articles (1895) we find 
 him saying : " In all the life that has energy enough 
 to be interesting to me, subjective volition, passion, 
 will, make intellect the merest tool." It is strange 
 ihat Shaw's readers and dramatic audiences complain 
 that he is over-intellectual, a cold reasoning machine. 
 Schopenhauer has shown, he says, that " the intellect 
 by itself is a mere dead piece of brain-machinery, and 
 our ethical and moral systems merely the pierced 
 •cards you stick into it when you want it to play a 
 certain tune." Here you have the quintessence of 
 Shaw's psychological confusion. Ibsen, at least, would 
 talk differently ; he would say that the ethical systems 
 are the dead product of other people's brains, and the 
 right thing is to use your own brain on your problems. 
 Assert your will, by all means, but reason out your 
 -position first. To talk of deposing reason in favour 
 •of will is not merely to give bad advice, which Shaw 
 liimself never follows : it is to talk of impossibilities. 
 Reason and will are the same mental energy in two 
 •different aspects. We call the mind " reason " in 
 so far as it is cognitive, and " will " in so far as it is 
 conative, and to confuse the two is simply playing 
 with words. What Ibsen certainly means, and Shaw 
 really does, is to press people to consult their own 
 reason and act on their own will, not on the reason 
 and will of others, whether living authorities or 
 fossilised rules ; though Ibsen, and even Shaw at 
 times, as we shall see, take rational account of the 
 •effect on others of our actions. In any case, will and 
 •sentiment, which are the motive forces of conduct, 
 cannot stir until the intelligence sets them in motion, 
 ■or lights the way. 
 
 We need hardly notice other anti-rational argu- 
 anents of Mr Shaw. The fact that some things 
 
74 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 (consciousness, for instance) remain obscure after all 
 our research only proves that they are very complex. 
 What light does " will " throw on them ? It i& 
 equally idle to attempt to draw a moral from Voltaire's, 
 joke to the poor poet who excused his bad verses on 
 the ground that one must live : "I don't see the 
 need." Shaw says that, when Rationalism destroyed 
 the romance of heaven, yet found itself unable to 
 improve earth for the majority, it ought to hav& 
 agreed with Schopenhauer that it was desirable to 
 put an end to the scheme of things. Because they 
 would not agree to die, Shaw says, they abandoned 
 reason for mysticism. On the contrary, the doctrine- 
 of evolution gave them every reason to believe that 
 the world will improve, and there are few great Ration- 
 alists who have not helped in the work of betterment. 
 Even Huxley fought generously for the education of 
 the masses. Mill fought heroically. And if Mr Shaw 
 quarrels with the narrowness of their ideals, we may 
 remind him that the overwhelming majority of Socialist 
 workers outside of England are Rationalists and 
 dissent emphatically from his opinions. 
 
 In thus steering clear of Scylla and Charybdis,. 
 Christianity and Rationalism, Mr Shaw went straight 
 for a shoal.i He became a mystic of an unusual 
 type. The Life-Force, the vague agency whick 
 entered into matter and pushes upward through it 
 in an advancing series of organisms, is the central 
 reality. Ages ago it built up the matter of the earth, 
 into microbes. It animates the fly and the flea, 
 the mussel and the man, to-day. Through humaa 
 
 1 Curiously enough, the day after I had written this, the papers- 
 announced that the commander of an Italian warship had, in 
 steering between Scylla and Charybdis, run on the reef beyond at a. 
 rate of twenty knots an hour. 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 75 
 
 development it is ascending to greater heights. Next 
 it will shine in the brain of the Superman ; it will go 
 on until it becomes the mind of an archangel : it may 
 eventually attain omniscience and omnipotence. It is 
 God in the making. Let me make a few observations 
 on this before I show how it is the basis of Shaw's 
 ethic. 
 
 In earlier times men believed that there were two 
 fundamental realities, matter and spirit. Modem 
 criticism threw doubt on this clear opposition, but 
 just at that time scientists began to talk of " forces " 
 or " energies " in nature. Men like Butler found 
 this idea of " force " very convenient ; it seemed 
 quite scientific to imagine a " vital force," or Life- 
 Force, as the mainspring of evolution. At that 
 point Mr Shaw embraced it. Butler was just the 
 kind of writer to attract him : brilliant, rebellious, 
 ironical, paradoxical, scornful of conventions, morals, 
 and religion. It is interesting that in Butler's 
 " Erewhon " (published in 1872), a paradoxical satire 
 of civilisation, we find poverty regarded as a crime, 
 money lauded as a power, moral values slighted, the 
 administration of justice caricatured, the relations of 
 parents and children represented as bad, Darwinism 
 derided, and all sorts of Shavian ideas. I do not 
 suggest that Shaw borrowed these ideas, but that 
 they warmly recommended Butler to him ; and we 
 know that he read Butler before he wrote the " Quin- 
 tessence of Ibsenism," at least.^ 
 
 Since 1880, however, science has moved. It has 
 established Darwinism beyond question and made 
 the Life-Force very questionable. A physicist like 
 Sir Oliver Lodge woidd tell Shaw that " force " is 
 
 1 But Butler's novel, " The Way of All Flesh," to which Shaw 
 refers, was not published until 1903. 
 
76 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 not a reality at all, but an abstraction, a mere expres- 
 •sion for certain aspects of matter. Shaw may say that 
 he is not wedded to the word " force " — though 
 so far he has taken no notice whatever of Sir Oliver 
 Lodge's criticisms, and does not seem to be aware 
 of their existence — but believes in a vital something. 
 Seeing that he knows nothing of biology, and that 
 such a belief can only be of value when it is a serious 
 ■deduction from the facts, we are not much impressed ; 
 but there is a further point. This " vital something " 
 in the organism has been under sharp discussion 
 among biologists for thirty years, and the over- 
 whelming majority of them reject it. Mr Shaw's 
 position becomes still feebler. That comes of pre- 
 ferring an Ecumenical Council to " a handful of raw 
 Rationalists " ; or, more correctly, preferring one 
 somewhat ancient Rationalist (Samuel Butler) to a 
 thousand. 
 
 I But when we go on to consider the future of the 
 I Life-Force, which justifies Mr Shaw in calling it God, 
 jthe polite critic is embarrassed. No doubt, judging 
 jby progress in the past and the pace of progress to-day, 
 onan will become superman ; but the archangelic 
 intelligence and the omniscience are the wildest of 
 iancies. Barring cosmic accident, men should find 
 this globe habitable stiU for millions of years, and 
 will advance to a degree of intelligence, refinement, 
 :and social order of which we have no conception. 
 But the last term is quite clear in science. Life will 
 be frozen off the surface of this planet, and the line 
 <)f advance will be broken, to begin again on some 
 jother globe. Still worse is Mr Shaw's idea that, if 
 fnan chokes the spirit of progress by his prejudices and 
 indolence, the Life-Force will make its ascent through 
 ■^ome other branch of the animal world, and supersede 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 7T 
 
 • 
 
 man. " Something may come out of a bush," I 
 have heard him say — " a super-snake or something " — 
 and stride beyond man. This is a serious deduction 
 from his philosophy ; and a final reductio ad absurdum 
 of it. So reckless a feat of imagination shows only 
 how far he is from a knowledge of the facts of life 
 on which he speculates. 
 
 I think it is important to investigate in this way the 
 ultimate foundation of Shaw's beliefs and denials,, 
 because we shall now see that his philosophy of life, 
 in the human sense, is directly built on it. You find 
 it, in the end, supporting nearly every one of his 
 constructive proposals. Let us see how he proceeds, 
 in his approach to human problems. 
 
 What is the aim of life ? By what test shall we know 
 if we are making progress ? Leaving out of account 
 the older religious standards, modern thought generally 
 says : The spread of happiness on earth, the lessening 
 of misery and suffering, is the proper aim of man, and 
 he must measure his progress by his advance in that 
 direction. Shaw stands almost alone among Socialist 
 writers in denying this. Happiness for yourself is a. 
 low ideal : happiness for others a false ideal. " Look 
 life straight in the face,-' he says in " The Sanity of 
 Art," " and see in it, not the fulfilment of a moral 
 law or of the deductions of reason, but the satisfactioa 
 of a passion in us of which we can give no rational 
 account whatever." The mysticism of the idea is- 
 baffling, and we get little assistance from his authori- 
 tative biographer, who thus defines his position i 
 " Life is realised only as activity that satisfies the will : 
 that is, as self-assertion. Every extension or inten- 
 sification of activity is an increase of Ufe. Quality 
 and quantity of activity measure the value of life." 
 
 One would say, at first, that Shaw, like every other 
 
78 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 thinker, merely makes a universal standard of his 
 personal taste. The Stoic thinks the aim of life is for 
 all to be virtuous : the Epicurean, for all to be happy : 
 the Catholic, for all to be orthodox and proper : the 
 artist, for all to have refined sentiments : and so on. 
 Shaw likes work, and so says the aim of life is for all 
 to be active. One might very well submit to him that 
 the same Life-Force has inspired these other apostles 
 with their various and contradictory life-aims, and 
 one has no proof that its message is correct in his 
 own case alone. His " divine spark " (as he some- 
 times calls it) tells him to be ascetic and hard-working : 
 mine tells me to be epicurean, whenever possible, and 
 hard-working : and my friend's vital force impels 
 him to be epicurean and idle. Clearly, the subjective 
 standard fails altogether. I like Browning's gospel 
 of work, but want to know what I must work for. 
 We must study the effects of our activity. In his 
 earlier " Quintessence of Ibsenism " Shaw had said : 
 " Conduct must justify itself by its effect upon 
 happiness, and not by its conformity to any rule or 
 ideal." It seems a pity that Shaw discarded that 
 fine maxim in favour of a mysticism that few can 
 understand and still less accept. I do not say that he 
 then adopted utilitarian morality : it was rather 
 utilitarian immorality. But at least it was intelligible. 
 The last word I have heard him say is that " we 
 must develop our spiritual powers." No doubt he 
 means our intelligence, will, taste, and finer senti- 
 ment. Materialists are just as eager to develop these 
 as spiritualists — ^it really does not matter twopence 
 what their nature is, seeing that we can develop them 
 — ^but an age like ours receives no commands without 
 reasons for them. The assurance that the cosmic 
 will or purpose, as formulated in Mr Shaw's mind. 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 79 
 
 ■demands it, will hardly suf&ce. In fact, Mr Shaw is 
 happily inconsistent. He has really been working all 
 his life to reduce squalor, suffering, and ignorance, 
 and promote happiness. Remember the fine speech 
 of the " mad " priest (the representative of Shaw) in 
 J' John Bull's Other Island " : 
 
 " This world, sir, is very clearly a place of torment 
 and penance, a place where the fool flourishes and the 
 ^ood and wise are hated and persecuted, a place where 
 men and women torture one another in the name 
 of love ; where children are scomrged and enslaved 
 in the name of parental duty and education ; where 
 the weak in body are poisoned and mutilated in the 
 name of healing, and the weak in character are put to 
 the horrible torture of imprisonment, not for hours, 
 but for years, in the name of justice." 
 - That is Shaw's great indictment of our age : it 
 causes so much suffering. That indictment rings with 
 the throb of scorn through the whole of his work, 
 proclaiming to the world every year of his life his 
 deep and passionate hatred of all that causes pain, 
 revealing that intensely human heart which some 
 have foolishly denied. His whole life has been a noble 
 struggle against what he believed to be injustice, 
 brutality, stupidity, and aU that causes remediable 
 suffering. He is as vxilgar a utilitarian as John Stuart 
 Mill or Robert Owen. But his ascetic temper and, 
 especially, his pedantic philosophy have concealed 
 him from himself. 
 
 I have said that, although he is a utilitarian, he 
 is not a utilitarian moralist, but a utilitarian im- 
 moralist. This brings us to the next article of his 
 creed : the duty of the individual. His reply is that 
 a man or a woman must ignore duty altogether. 
 In the " Quintessence of Ibsenism " he first clearly 
 
80 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 formulated this. Most people have rejected the notion 
 of a man's duty to God, with the priest as assessor ; 
 they must now reject the notion of a man's duty to 
 his neighbour, with society as assessor, and at the 
 most recognise a man's duty to himself, assessed 
 by himself. " The golden rule is that there is no golden 
 rule." The Superman is " going to empty out a good 
 deal of respectable morality like so much dirty water 
 and replace it by new and strange customs, shedding, 
 old obligations and accepting new and heavier ones." 
 Man is God — the Life-Force. His will is the cosmic 
 will and the standard of action. The man who asserts 
 his will is heroic, approaches the Superman. We have 
 not abandoned the old God to bow to Society. Written 
 codes must go, and there is no moral authority over 
 a man ; even parents and teachers must not dictate 
 to children. 
 
 As Shaw unfolded this horrid-sounding dream of 
 moral anarchy, people shrugged their shoulders and 
 said that it was borrowed from Nietzsche. " When- 
 ever," he says, " my view strikes the critics as being 
 at all outside the range of, say, an ordinary suburban 
 churchwarden, they conclude that I am echoing 
 Schopenhauer, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Strindberg, Tolstoi, 
 or some other heresiarch in nothern or eastern Europe." 
 Shaw borrowed nothing of Nietzsche, at least. In 
 fact, it is curious how their language coincides at 
 times when we remember that Nietzsche based his 
 system essentially on Darwinism, which Shaw despises. 
 But he had not even heard of Nietzsche when he wrote 
 the " Quintessence of Ibsenism." It was in the old 
 Zetetical Society days, when he heard Captain Wilson 
 and Stuart Glennie, and talked with Belfort Bax, that 
 he became a moral rebel. This moral rebellion was 
 strengthened by Butler and Ibsen, and based on 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 81 
 
 Shaw's philosophy. It is very important to under- 
 stand it aright, as it is misconceived by enemies and 
 put in practice by emancipated admirers. It will be 
 remembered that a criminal once pleaded Shaw's 
 philosophy in court. I have myself been told by 
 young men, after giving a very plain lecture on the 
 ethic of Goethe's " Faust " : "I don't believe in your 
 sex-morality. I follow Bernard Shaw." 
 
 His biographers usually observe, almost apologeti- 
 cally, that Shaw is really on the side of the angels. 
 " Nothing in the whole world is so far from Shaw as 
 moral indifferentism," says Julius Bab ; but ordinary 
 moral rules do not meet his moral needs. Dr 
 Henderson remarks that he is " fundamentally an 
 ethicist." As he loathes Ethicists, who are generally 
 Rationalists, this is mis-leading. In the preface to 
 " The Irrational Knot " he says that if the mob can be 
 persuaded to adopt his doctrine of equal incomes 
 " the sluggards who are content to be wealthy without 
 working and the dastards who are content to work 
 without being wealthy, together with all the pseudo- 
 moralists and ethicists and cowardice-mongers gener- 
 ally, would be exterminated without shrift. ' ' One may 
 say that a man who does not practise what he preaches 
 exposes himself to misunderstanding. Has Shaw 
 not always been a pattern of all the virtues, except 
 those " seven deadly virtues " which he recommends 
 to others ? That is just the paradox. He has been 
 entirely faithful to his philosophy, yet has been a 
 model citizen, a living rebuke to suburban church- 
 wardens ; nay, he has bored and irritated many of us 
 ethicists by his saintly example and his frowns at our 
 tobacco, our beer, and our beef. 
 
 The truth is that he is so naturally and imshakably 
 virtuous that he does not appreciate the need of moral 
 
82 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 rules. He smiles, as an archangel would, at the 
 decalogue : or as Ruskin or Pater would smile at 
 rules of grammar or style. He then notices that the 
 I current moral rules are made the pretext or excuse 
 for a vast amount of cruelty. Children are tortured 
 into compliance with them by stupid teachers and 
 i parents : clergymen and other professionally pious 
 people stoop to lying and h5rpocrisy : women who 
 ' transgress them are driven to suicide or murder : and 
 ; a very large amount of really brutal conduct is con- 
 doned because it does not fall literally under the ban 
 of the commandments. After Ibsen, Shaw is the most 
 acute and penetrating observer of this side of life. 
 He further notices that these moral rules are ancient 
 formulae, tinged with ancient superstitions and tabus, 
 not growing with the growth of man's mind and social 
 life. And, finally, he feels that the life-spirit in 
 himself dictates a nobler conduct than these rules 
 engender in his neighbours, and he places his rebellion 
 on a philosophic basis. Scorn rules : assert your 
 own will. 
 
 The academic element in this position need not be 
 
 considered at length. Shaw is an anarchist by 
 
 temperament and experience : a man who does not 
 
 l' need discipline and rules, and smiles at their effect on 
 
 i others. This agrees with the philosophy into which 
 
 : his rejection of Christianity on the one hand and of 
 
 \ Rationalism on the other has driven him. Trust the 
 
 ! life-spirit in you. Moral rules, moreover, are inteUec- 
 
 \ tual summaries, and will, not intellect, is the supreme 
 
 ' reality. At the best, moral rules are the formulation 
 
 of some other person's will (say, the will of Christ), 
 
 and the Life-Force has moved on since the days of 
 
 ancient Judaea. Recent versions of moral rules are 
 
 due to the " Rationalist-MercantiUst," or utilitarian. 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 83 
 
 theory of life, which he rejects altogether, as a theory : 
 we shall see that he comes back to it in detail. There 
 is no need to add to the criticisms I have already 
 passed on this philosophy. I need only point out 
 again the utter unsoundness of his psychology. He 
 ■does not follow his own " will," but his judgment. 
 Ibsen, into whom he reads his own bad psychology 
 is clear enough about this. It is only when the 
 intellect dictates your course that you pit your will 
 against that of society (like Dr Stockmann in "An 
 Enemy of the People"). Reason takes precedence. 
 We do not say that it is the superior or more 
 fundamental thing ; any more than man is superior 
 to woman. It happens to be reason's function to 
 formulate conduct, and the will's to achieve it. 
 
 From this confusion we get Shaw's mistaken view 
 of the nature of moral principles. He says in " The 
 Sanity of Art," for instance : " Abstract principles 
 of conduct break down in practice because kindness 
 and truth and justice are not duties founded on 
 abstract principles external to man, but human passions 
 which have, in their time, conflicted with higher 
 passions as well as with lower ones." Kindness is a 
 sentiment, of course, and there is a passion for truth 
 and justice. Kindness is, in fact, often a natural 
 •quality apart altogether from reason : as in the ladies 
 who are kind to professional tramps and beggars. 
 But the bulk of us are not naturally kind, especially 
 in Mr Shaw's estimate of us, and we have to be reasoned 
 into a cultivation of our scanty native endowment. 
 Truthfulness and justice, on the other hand, are 
 abstract principles, rules of social conduct. If they 
 were merely subjective feelings, present in one and 
 absent from another, Shaw would have no right to 
 attempt to impose his taste on others. When he talks to 
 
84 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 the people who sweat labour, or own brothels or squalid 
 houses, or manufacture cannon, they have a right, 
 on his own theory, to shrug their shoulders and tell 
 him that tastes diiier. The Life-Force tells Rudyard 
 Kipling one thing, Gabriele d'Annunzio another, and 
 Shaw another. Why is Shaw's version of its will, 
 infallible ? You are forced to consult reason and 
 objective standards. 
 
 Indeed Shaw, like Ibsen, does consult objective 
 tests, and turns utilitarian. Why should a man not 
 lie if he is so disposed ? Because, says Shaw (" Quin- 
 tessence of Ibsenism ") " the liar's punishment is 
 that he cannot believe anyone else." Add that he 
 will find it very inconvenient to be known as a liar, 
 since no one can believe him, and you have the utili- 
 tarian principle in its perfection. There are vices 
 which, like poisons, are medicinal in small doses and 
 pernicious in the lump. In defending his " Arms 
 and the Man " against critics who have called his 
 heroine a minx and a liar, he says, rejecting their 
 moral categories : "I have nothing to do with that : 
 the only moral question for me is, does she do good 
 or harm ? " As a matter of fact, she saves a man's 
 life. It is the utilitarian principle making an ex- 
 ception of the rule. Remember how Charles Reade 
 makes his heroine, for a good purpose, " lie with the 
 sweetness of a Madonna " ; and how that other 
 woidd-be anti-utilitarian, Maeterlinck, makes a woman 
 jdeld to a man's desire in order to save a city — and 
 the only objection our precious dramatic censor saw 
 to it was that she did it in her nightdress ! 
 
 Shaw is constantly admitting this test, and certainly 
 J. S. Mill would have supported him in claiming that 
 utility, in the highest sense, demands exceptions to, 
 or even the abolition of, some of the conventional 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 85 
 
 rules of morality. A final quotation, from the preface 
 to " The Irrational Knot," will suffice to close the 
 subject. Shaw says : " To all writers of the first 
 order these rules, and the need for them produced by 
 the moral and intellectual incompetence of the ordinary 
 human animal, aire no more invariably beneficial and 
 respectable than the sunlight which ripens the wheat 
 in Sussex and leaves the desert deadly in Sahara, 
 making the cheeks of the ploughman's child rosy in 
 Ihe morning and striking the ploughman brainsick or 
 dead in the afternoon." Quite so : morality must 
 be tested by the utilitarian principle as well as im- 
 morality. In point of fact, all this defiance is really 
 related only to one line of the moral code — sex-morality 
 — and we shall see in the next chapter that utilitari- 
 anism is not rigid on that point. When you put aside 
 his confused psychology and mystic philosophy, 
 Shaw turns out to be a utilitarian. 
 
 This is further seen when nervous people point out 
 to him the probable consequences, individual and 
 social, of young people adopting his theory of moral 
 anarchy. He does not say : " Damn the conse- 
 •quehces." He says that your fears are groundless. 
 When you press him into this corner, you find that, 
 in spite of all his withering indictments of our genera- 
 tion, he believes that " a really evil " man or woman 
 is as rare as a genius. Men steal, and women prostitute 
 themselves, from economic pressure. He is more 
 optimistic than many of us " cowardice-mongers," 
 for we know that (as Mrs Gallichan has shown in 
 her " Truth about Woman ") prostitution is not 
 generally due to economic pressure, or theft to poverty. 
 There may be " temporary excesses," he admits, if 
 the principle of following one's own impulses were 
 generally adopted, but the emancipated young lady 
 
86 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 will generally find, to her surprise, that " the indis- 
 pensable qualification for a wicked life is not freedom, 
 but wickedness." In the various cases that have 
 come under my own observation the emancipated 
 young lady has easily found the " wickedness," but 
 has paid a heavy price for it ; as we shall presently 
 find Shaw saying. 
 
 In his " Sanity of Art " Shaw deals at some length 
 with this point. Incidentally, let me notice how the 
 whole controversy is almost always narrowed down 
 to an attack on rules of sex-morality. We will give 
 this point special consideration later, but must take 
 it here as a general consideration of morality and duty. 
 He has two not very consistent lines of defence. At 
 one point he urges that, in plain English, young 
 people will bum their fingers by plajdng with fire and 
 learn wisdom. " At the best," he says to the would-be 
 rebel, " you will find that your passions, if you really 
 and honestly let them all loose impartially, will disci- 
 pline you with a severity which your conventional 
 friends, abandoning themselves to the mechanical 
 routine of fashion, could not stand for a day. " " Plenty 
 of young women have tried the experiment," he says, 
 and in a few years they found themselves " plunged 
 into duties, responsibilities, and sacrifices from which 
 they were glad to retreat to the life of an ordinary 
 respectable woman." He almost holds the fear of 
 hell over them. At least he talks just the utilitarian- 
 morality language which Goethe and Swinburne talked 
 in their sober old age. The utilitarian would merely 
 ask : If this is experience, why not formulate the gist 
 of it in moral rules and impart it to the young in time — 
 with explanations ? And Shaw quite agrees. Laws 
 are necessary, a set of rules is "an overwhelming 
 convenience," because so few have the leisure or 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 87 
 
 ability to formulate their own standards. We must 
 take them as rules of etiquette, choosing the best 
 available, as one chooses a typewriter. 
 
 But Shaw seems to reflect afterwards that, in sasdng 
 that mankind will learn sobriety by its headaches, 
 and so prompting the obvious suggestion that it would 
 be better to learn it by the headaches of other people 
 (which is the essence of morality), he is getting far 
 away from his philosophy. He returns to his belief 
 in the goodness of man. It is a fiction that we are 
 bursting with a set of diabolical impulses known as 
 " passions." " The ingrained habit of thinking of 
 the propensities of which we are ashamed as ' our 
 passions,' and our shame of them and our propensities 
 to noble conduct as a negative and inhibitory depart- 
 ment called generally our conscience, leads us to 
 conclude that to accept the guidance of our passions 
 is to plunge recklessly into the insupportable tedium 
 of what is called a life of pleasure." It is a pity that 
 we have to differ from Shaw in his rare moments of 
 appreciation of us, but his last phrase gives him 
 away. He is judging the mass by his own ascetic 
 and sober temperament. He only succeeds in getting 
 back to his philosophy by a sophistication of life. 
 If he could some Saturday night constrain himself to 
 explore London — dip into a few hundred pubs and 
 music-halls and slums and dark open spaces, and so 
 on — he would speak differently. In any case, his 
 ethic is clear. If you have no passions, follow them. 
 If you are an ascetic, follow your impulses : if you 
 are a voluptuary, follow them at your miserable 
 peril. The chief defect of this riile of conduct 
 seems to me that it is too ascetic. An inter- 
 mediate position, with self-discipline or morality, 
 seems happier. 
 
88 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 I conclude that Shaw has weakened the whole 
 structure of his ideas by giving it a very disputable 
 scientific foundation. He has adopted a position 
 which no one without a wide command of biological 
 science can even discuss, which is now almost deserted 
 by biologists as the science advances in knowledge, 
 and which cannot derive the least real support from 
 pre-scientific speculations like those of Schopenhauer. 
 His position is utterly indefensible when he pits himself 
 against the whole scientific world on a scientific issue 
 such as natural selection, of which he knows very little. 
 He further worsens it by rel3dng on a psychological 
 confusion to attack rationalism, while really attempt- 
 ing to justify by reason every opinion he expresses. 
 He is thus led into confusion and inconsistency in 
 stating the fundamental principle of his practical 
 creed, his ethic, fiercely assailing utilitarianism and 
 constantly falling back on it. Hence the paradox 
 and contradiction of much of his teaching. It is not 
 due to " Celtic brilliance," or the license of genius, 
 or an impatience of pedantry. It is due to philosophis- 
 ing on life without a knowledge of the facts, to pedantry 
 in forcing common-sense opinions into conformity 
 with his supposed philosophy, to obstinacy in adher- 
 ing to an ancient error, and to the common mistake 
 of framing a general theory on an exceptional tempera- 
 ment. And the confusion is worse confounded by 
 allowing sympathies and antipatliies to have a share 
 in shaping his intellectual position. 
 
 I have already shown how this unsound philosophy 
 pours into and influences Shaw's most practical and 
 detailed opinions on constructive matters. We have 
 now to see this in connection with the important and 
 engrossing subjects of marriage, sex-morals, women, 
 children, and eugenics. But I should like first to 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 89 
 
 deal with another general consideration, his persistent 
 scorn of idealists. 
 
 Shaw is one of the most ardent idealists of his 
 generation. This is not a paradox, or an assurance 
 that he hides a warm heart under a cynical exterior, 
 or anything of that kind. He is an idealist in the 
 literal and ordinary sense of the word. He flays us 
 because he sees how much better we might be. His 
 Superman is an ideal : his Super-State is an ideal : 
 the Shavian woman, the Shavian artisan, the Shavian 
 municipal nursery — all are ideals. The ideal is merely 
 a, conception of a possible better type than the actual. 
 It is utopianism, or the conception of an impossible 
 better type, which Shaw rejects. Yet he never loses 
 an opportunity to have a shy at the ideaUst. Part 
 -of his paradox and whimsicality, we are told. It is 
 nothing of the kind. 
 
 It is, naturally, in the " Quintessence of Ibsenism " 
 ihat he deals most clearly with the subject. He 
 interprets the whole series of Ibsen's plays as attacks 
 on the idealist, and we have nowhere a better instance 
 ■of that weakness of his strong intelligence which I 
 have already discussed. An ideal, he says, is a mask 
 "which we put on an ugly fact. On death we put the 
 mask of immortality : on the family we put the mask 
 •of a fictitious harmony and blessedness. Almost 
 immediately he defines the ideal, in very different 
 terms, as " an image of what we would fain have in the 
 place " of the ugly fact, which is the true and ordinary 
 meaning of the word. It is a fiction, of course ; and 
 it is perfectly true that we often " idealise " facts 
 (especially the family) by insisting that the reality 
 is already the ideal. This is the source of the whole 
 ■confusion. An idealist is to him at first the man who 
 puts his mask on reality and says that it is actually fair 
 
90 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 to look upon, and he goes on, by a natural but lament- 
 able error, to attack all men who hold ideals before 
 us or themselves. 
 
 He makes this clearer by taking marriage. Of a. 
 thousand married persons he imagines seven hundred, 
 content with their condition, and two hundred and 
 ninety-nine dissatisfied. The malcontents dare not 
 murmur against the sacred institution in face of so- 
 solid a majority, and they therefore put a mask 
 on their experience and laud marriage to the skies. 
 These are what he calls idealists. For the moment 
 we need not ask whether unhappily married people 
 really do this. It is enough that this is what Shaw 
 means by idealists : properly, idealisers or optimists. 
 Then comes the one strong man in the thousand, the 
 Ibsen or Shaw or Brieux, who tears the mask front 
 marriage and exposes the facts. He is the Realist ; 
 and none are more bitter against him — for some 
 inscrutable reason — than the people whom he would 
 benefit, the idealists. If Shaw always meant by 
 ideedists, in his strictures, these men who put a false 
 gloss on reality, there would be no harm done beyond 
 a confusion of words. But he does not ; nor does 
 Ibsen. If Peer Gynt, and Julian, and Helmer are 
 all to be called idealists, it is only by a grave confusion. 
 Taking a fiction for a fact is one thing : trying to sub- 
 stitute a fiction or ideal for a fact (say, Socialism for 
 the actual economic order) is a totally different thing. 
 Shaw is too apt to sweep both into the particular 
 rubbish-heap which he calls idealism, especially if 
 the other man's ideals differ from his. Every true 
 realist (in Shaw's sense) is an idealist (in the ordinary 
 sense). He exposes ugly facts only in order to have 
 their ugliness removed, or a better state of things set 
 up, even if he has not himself a conception of what will 
 
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 91 
 
 be substituted. That one idealist differs from another, 
 and that some idealists are fanatical, and that new- 
 ideals must arise as the mind of man grows, are not 
 reasons for impugning idealism. It is important 
 to remember this confusion when Shaw butts stormily 
 at " idealists." 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 
 
 The eighteenth century questioned the divine right 
 of kings : the nineteenth century questioned the 
 divine right of priests : the twentieth century questions 
 the divine right of moralists. So the epigrammatist 
 might sum up three centuries of rebellion. The 
 divine right of kings has disappeared : the divine 
 right of priests is disappearing. Will the authority 
 of the moralist be placed in the tomb along with 
 that of these more ancient paedagogues ? The re- 
 bellion against it gathers strength. Ibsen and Bjom- 
 son, Hauptmann and Sudermann, D'Annunzio and 
 Galdos, Brieux and A. France, Shaw and so many 
 others in England, are a formidable general staff, with 
 a large army behind them. In every great city of 
 Europe and America the dramas and novels of these 
 distinguished artists now find ample support. After 
 a century of feverish effort to disentangle morals from 
 theology and re-assure nervous folk, it is claimed that 
 the one depended essentially on the other and must 
 perish with it. 
 
 In examining impartially this third revolt, as every 
 serious man and woman will, one soon sees that, as I 
 said, it is in the main a revolt against one only of the 
 ten commandments. The great artists I have enumer- 
 ated, as well as Zola, Maupassant, Swinburne, Meredith 
 and other earlier artists, do not applaud dishonesty, 
 h57pocrisy, injustice, lying, cruelty, or meanness. On 
 
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 93 
 
 the contrary, they do more than all the bishops in 
 Europe to promote honesty, sincerity, justice, truth- 
 fulness, kindliness, and honour. A Nietzsche or a 
 Shaw may trumpet sonorous indictments of morality 
 in general, but we take little notice of these. They 
 are doctrinaire statements, deductions from meta- 
 physical principles which, when he finds other men 
 indulging in them, Shaw calls " parlour games." He 
 lashes his generation, not because it is moral, but 
 because it professes high principles and does not live 
 them. He tells a man that he has no duty whatever 
 except to himself, and, if the man then proceeds to 
 vivisect, or to sweat the worker, or to exploit a lower 
 race, because he will profit by it, Shaw makes his hair 
 stand on end with the fury of his invectives. The 
 general attack on morality is a feint, so to say, to 
 cover a concentrated attack on a particular point ; 
 but as moralists have a way of considering this point 
 (sex-morals) as the ethical citadel, the confusion is 
 not unnatural. 
 
 Properly speaking, the attack on the received 
 standard of sex-relations is not an attack on morality. 
 It is a controversy as to whether this standard has 
 a legitimate place in the moral code. Most of us 
 have discarded the idea that morality is an eternal 
 truth, as Plato thought, intued by the human mind, 
 and unalterable. The European moral code has 
 changed considerably in five hundred years, and has 
 had to Sacrifice many illusions. Humility was once 
 thought the greatest of virtues : suicide the deadliest 
 of crimes : cruelty to animals a matter of moral in- 
 difference, St Augustine and other early authorities 
 would not condemn a man for having a concubine in 
 certain circumstances : the Bishop of London, who 
 probably does not know this, would put him in the 
 
94 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 stocks if he had the power. There is room for con- 
 sideration of the matter, without falling into con- 
 vulsions of moral indignation. 
 
 Now the most characteristic and generally interest- 
 ing feature of Shaw's revolt, and the one most scantily 
 treated by his biographers, is his position in regard 
 to woman and the family. Here also he touches one 
 of the great themes of our age : one on which, in view 
 of the changes which are proceeding, it is most im- 
 portant to have clear ideas. I therefore make no 
 apology for devoting a special section of this essay 
 to his opinions on problems of marriage and the 
 family. 
 
 As contradictory statements may be extracted 
 from Shaw's works on this important subject, it is 
 advisable to put a few of them in their chronological 
 order, exhibiting the development of his opinions. 
 We saw how the experience of his early years would 
 dispose him to criticise the family-arrangement, and 
 how the intellectual environment of his twenties was 
 saturated with moral rebellion. J. S. Mill himself 
 was by no means ethicedly orthodox in regard to 
 marriage, and the bold example of George Eliot 
 and others encouraged heretics to discuss the subject 
 with freedom. In the Socialist world, also, there is 
 much heterodoxy, especially on the continent. Hence 
 when, in 1890, Shaw penned the first grave statement 
 of his social beliefs (in " The Quintessence of Ibsen- 
 ism "), he had already come to the conclusion that 
 marriage was " a conventional arrangement, legally 
 enforced." As he more plainly puts it : " When the 
 social organism becomes bent on civilisation, it has to 
 force marriage and family-life on the individual, because 
 it can perpetuate itself in no other way whilst love 
 is still known only in fitfvil glimpses." It is accord- 
 
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 95 
 
 ingly decorated with ideals (fictions) for the attraction 
 of the young, and they in turn, after a period of weary 
 •disillusion, give the same fallacious representation of 
 it to the children whom they would find it expensive 
 ■to support indefinitely. 
 
 The great theme of the later dramas is already 
 .given, and it is related to Shaw's general ethic. He 
 follows Ibsen, as interpreted by himself. The woman 
 must come out of her doll's house, and assert her will. 
 No one has any duty : a duty to oneself, the only 
 imaginable duty, is cancelled because the debtor and 
 creditor are one. " Unless a wofnan repudiates her 
 womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, 
 to society, to the law, to everyone but herself, she 
 cannot emancipate herself." He sketches the actual 
 procedure. Economic pressure, or curiosity — " When 
 ■one is young," says Charteris, " one marries out of 
 jnere curiosity, just to see what it is like " — or tradition 
 disposes the girl to thoughts of marriage. The tender, 
 •devoted fluttering about her of the young man before 
 Tnarriage seals her decision, and she marries. Then 
 ■comes disillusion : the man mysteriously (for she 
 inows nothing of sex-psychology) cools, the domestic 
 atmosphere is acrid and irritating, the sweetest hours 
 are outside the home. For a time she finds consola- 
 tion in children, but the relations of parents and 
 igrown children are, in Shaw's opinion, generally bad. 
 And in the end she idealises marriage for them, and 
 wearily maintains the system. Shaw advises her to 
 xebel against these sermons on duty and self-sacrifice, 
 but is not clear what the alternative is ; except that, 
 .as I have explained, he plays with Blake's idea of 
 ^' temporary excesses " leading to moderation. 
 
 Then come the Pleasant and Unpleasant Plays, 
 "which enforce the same lesson. The women generally 
 
96 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 force marriage on the men and then expiate their 
 error in the sacrifices that are demanded of them (as 
 in " Candida ") and the irritations of domestic inter- 
 course. Here and there (Sylvia Craven, Vivie Warren, 
 etc.) are suggestions of the self-willed, cool, Ibsenite 
 woman. But on the whole Shaw is anti-feminist, and 
 not disposed to help them out of the domestic mess 
 which he caricatures. He said years afterwards that 
 Belfort Bax (a stem anti-feminist) had taught him 
 to adopt a " homoist attitude " — the name is bad, 
 but the meaning is clear — and shown him how public 
 opinion and legislation were " corrupted by feminist 
 sentiment." 
 
 Hence, while volcanic rhetoric about womens' 
 wrongs was pouring about him, Shaw kept cool, if 
 not critical. In the preface to the plays he says, 
 after showing that husbands are dull-witted enough, 
 although they are not confined to the home : " The 
 women, who have not even the city to educate them, 
 are much worse ; they are positively unfit for civilised 
 intercourse — ^graceless, ignorant, narrow-minded to 
 a quite appalling degree." He loathes " the beautiful 
 English home " — for which, we boast, there is no word 
 in any other language ; just as there are no swear- 
 words in Japanese. " The normal English way of 
 spending an evening," he says, " is to sit in separate 
 families in separate houses, each person silently 
 occupied with a book, a paper, or a game of halma, 
 cut off equally from the blessings of society and of 
 solitude." I may add, as a side-light on his position, 
 that he accuses professional men of " using their 
 highest faculties to belie their real sentiments," and 
 says : " a sin compared to which that of a woman 
 who sells the use of her person for a few hours is too 
 venial to be worth mentioning." 
 
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 97 
 
 Up to the end of the century, therefore, he con- 
 demned marriage unsparingly, quite ignoring sexual 
 moral standards, but recommended no alternative. 
 I remember being puzzled, not knowing his opinions 
 accurately at the time, by hearing him express strong 
 approval during the first representation in London 
 of Brieux's play " Les Hannetons." It mercilessly 
 condemned the French alternative to marriage, the 
 mistress. The key to his position was his personal 
 asceticism. " Sex is a necessary and healthy in- 
 stinct," he says in the preface to Brieux's plays. It 
 sounds like a concession on the part of a tolerably 
 liberal Puritan divine : it is next door to calling sex 
 a necessary evil. In this Shaw differs from every 
 other moral rebel in Europe. It is, of course, stupid 
 to say that they demand emancipation for the sake of 
 indulgence, but they are moderate Epicureans. Shaw 
 despises Epicureanism, and loathes " voluptuousness " 
 and sensualism. One of the reasons for his attack 
 on marriage is, and always was, that it encourages 
 indulgence. He cannot, he says, imagine two people 
 sleeping together night after night and not being in- 
 temperate. " Marriage is popular because it com- 
 bines the maximum of temptation with the maximum 
 of opportunity." He almost believes in original sin, 
 and is altogether too chaste and sober to legislate 
 about marriage for ordinary mortals. 
 
 Hence, as he is also quite indifferent to providing 
 " food for cannon," he refuses to frame theories for 
 voluptuaries. Go and burn your fingers, he says in 
 effect. This transpires quite clearly in his next 
 serious pronouncement, the preface and appendix to , 
 " Man and Superman." In the preface he applies his 
 philosophy to woman. The Life-Force seeks a con- 
 sciousness of itself in the man of genius, and incarnates 
 
98 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 its purpose of fertility in woman. What this means 
 for art we will consider later, but it explains why 
 woman is the hunter. Most observers of life would 
 deny that woman is the pursuer to any great extent, 
 but the situation is, as I have' previously explained, 
 complex. There is no reason except an idle tradition 
 why woman should not seek or propose marriage as 
 candidly as man. Healthy, sensuous women, and 
 l^women in economic dependence, chafe under the 
 tradition, and evade it stealthily. There is no need 
 to make their attitude a matter of psychology : it is 
 artificial. It is a plain effect of natural selection 
 checked by convention. We need not bring in a Life- 
 Force to explain it. 
 
 But in the " Revolutionist's Handbook " the theory 
 drives Shaw to some remarkable conclusions. He 
 notices the fall of the birth-rate. The cry of " race- 
 suicide " would not have moved him a few years 
 earlier, but he is now a Eugenist. He sees the class in 
 which the Life-Force is best developed bent on frus- 
 trating its purpose of fecundity and retarding the 
 appearance of the Superman. I defer for a moment 
 the general question of Malthusianism, and refer to 
 'these passages only as illustrations of Shaw's attitude 
 toward sex-pleasure. He has a mighty scorn for the 
 man or woman " in whom the instinct of fertiUty 
 has faded into a mere itching for pleasure." His only 
 I consolation is that " the modern devices for combining 
 I pleasure with sterility . . . enable these persons to 
 ' weed themselves out of the race, a process already 
 vigorously at work." This is, he frankly admits, a 
 process of natural selection, resulting in the survival 
 of " the self-controlled "—really, the ascetic. He 
 even hints that the higher example of the bees and 
 wasps, which delegate these undesirable functions to 
 
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 99 
 
 a small caste, may yet be adopted in human 
 society ! 
 
 There are Shavians who will protest against one 
 taking as an organic part of a serious philosophy such 
 occasional remarks as this, but it is, in point of fact, 
 a deduction from Shaw's principles, and it is most 
 material to understand those principles. He com- 
 bines the most licentious theoretical immorality with 
 an almost patristic disdain of the flesh. When one 
 reads his dark surmises about the conduct of married 
 people, and his scathing censures of the people who 
 would enjoy intercourse for its own sake, without a 
 high redeeming purpose of propagating the race, one 
 imagines an early Christian hermit in the desert. He 
 is in that respect the lineal successor of Tertullian and 
 St Jerome. Nothing is more delicious than the 
 concern of well-meaning but ill-informed ladies at the 
 moral anarchism which they find breaking out at 
 times in Shaw's plays. They imagine him a more 
 dangerous Swinburne (whom he detests), encouraging 
 our wayward youth in the cultivation of the world, 
 the flesh (especially the flesh), and the devil. He, 
 meanwhile, looks on the ways of these respectable 
 married ladies themselves with the disdain of an 
 anchorite. He is too contemptuous of " love " to 
 be concerned about schemes of " free love." 
 
 On the other hand, his new zeal for Eugenics forces 
 him to think out his position in regard to marriage 
 more clearly. The present family-arrangement is in 
 the way of the breeding of a better race. A man 
 and woman who might be ideal parents — ^he cuts the 
 Eugenic knot by suggesting a man of fine physique 
 and a woman of fine mind — might find it quite im- 
 possible to live together even for a limited period. 
 Pr Henderson, who skates rapidly over this part of 
 
100 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 his subject, says that " there is no evidence to show 
 that he is one whit more Puritanical than George 
 Meredith, who advocates marriages limited to a speci- 
 fied time." I am not sure what " Puritanical " means 
 when it is applied to that genial Epicurean, George 
 Meredith, but Shaw is at once nearer to Puritanism 
 in his opinion of the flesh and nearer to Shelley in 
 his treatment of tradition. Meredith advocates 
 homes and temporary marriages : Shaw regards the 
 home as an abomination and would not, apparently, 
 agree to marriage for a single night. The Superman 
 must be created scientifically. I need hardly say 
 that he is by no means anxious to put an end to all 
 fine sentiment between men and women, but he 
 dissociates it from sexual feeling, which is voluptuous. 
 Marriage must cease to be the rule, and become a 
 mere concession to peculiar people. The Superman 
 may " allow the matrimoniomaniacs to continue, 
 but on condition that there is no conjugation " ; a 
 condition which seems to imply the sterilisation of the 
 I married. Breeding is to be a serious sociological 
 function. . . . One had better refrain from following 
 the idea in detail. 
 
 This curt and clear repudiation of marriage on the 
 part of an ascetic and happily married man could not 
 close the subject, and Shaw faced it more resolutely 
 in 1908. The play " Getting Married " is a symposium 
 on marriage. From the complaints and proposals of 
 the quaint group of characters one must not draw 
 conclusions as to Shaw's views, except that the dialogue 
 is plainly intended to decry the home and marriage, 
 but there is the usual hundred-page preface. In this 
 he discusses, with considerable candour, every aspect 
 of the institution. 
 He begins by stating his intention to stop all this 
 
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 101 
 
 nonsense of emancipated young people about' 
 marriage and free love. He does not know in the 
 least why they have given him a reputation for 
 " advanced ideas." Our actual marriage-law is " in- 
 human and unreasonable to the point of downright 
 abomination," but free unions, or nominal marriages 
 in which the partners hold themselves free " to sip 
 every flower and change every hour," are worse. 
 Except in the case of people who pretend that they 
 are really married, or of Bohemians who have no 
 position to lose, " an open~ violation of the marriage 
 laws means either downright ruin or such incon- 
 veniences and disablement as a prudent man or 
 woman would get married ten times over rather than 
 face." " Whenever there is question of setting up a 
 joint domestic establishment, involving questions of 
 children or property, marriage is in effect compulsory 
 on all normal people." Where there is not such 
 an intention, " clandestine irregularities are neither 
 dignified nor safe nor comfortable, which at once 
 rules them out for normal decent people." 
 
 This is easily understood from what we have alreadyl 
 seen. Shaw does not attack free unions on moral \ 
 grounds, but because they are at the best mere volup- 
 tuousness and at the worst dreadful nuisances. 
 Marriage must be reformed, not abolished. The 
 acute attack of Eugenics in 1903, which led him to 
 put Socialism, education, marriage, and all other 
 reforms aside, has abated. He turns upon the de- 
 fenders of marriage (like Frederic Harrison) in a 
 disconcerting way. They say they fear the Ucense 
 which would follow a relaxation of the marriage-laws. 
 Shaw tells them that he is attacking marriage precisely 
 on account of the license and sensuality it encourages. 
 He robs them of the title of Puritan : barely leaves 
 
102 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 them the name of Mrs Grundy. They say that the 
 beautiful EngHsh home is threatened. He riddles 
 it with charges : heaps up all the bickering, child- 
 bullying, hypocrisy, social pretence, and thousand 
 and one disorders of the EngUsh home. He scourges 
 Dickens and the home idealisers mercilessly. " The 
 people who talk and write as if the highest attainable 
 state is that of a family stewing in love continuously 
 from the cradle to the grave can hardly have given 
 five minutes' serious consideration to so outrageous 
 a proposition." The " love " with which they start 
 the home is a " transient and exhausting " thing, 
 and in later years the situation is only relieved by 
 the husband keeping out of the wife's way, at business, 
 for the greater part of the day and the wife sending the 
 children to school. And if you tell him of homes in 
 which love survives all these trials, he says it is an 
 " enervating happiness " and must be abolished. 
 But this rarely happens. Marriage is breaking under 
 the weight of its own burdens. Why do such countries 
 as France, the moment they shake off clerical control, 
 pass from indissoluble marriage to the opposite 
 extreme ? Young people should be informed that 
 " what they call love is an appetite," which will fade 
 as soon as it is satisfied, and they should not be 
 allowed to make vows of fidelity under its transient 
 spell. Then we will have less of this trickery on the 
 part of mothers, slavery on the part of wives, and 
 boorishness on the part of husbands. 
 
 But what is the alternative ? Even now Shaw will 
 not be quite explicit. The divorce-law must, of course, 
 be reformed ; we have at present " the worst civil- 
 marriage law in the world." It gives divorce on 
 the least important ground, adultery. People talk 
 too much about " infideUty " and the extension of 
 
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 103 
 
 equal right in that respect to women ; a woman may 
 be intolerably miserable with a faithful man and 
 quite happy with an unfaithful husband. Divorce 
 should be as cheap and easy and free as marriage, 
 and then — if his Socialist ideal is simultaneously 
 adopted — there will be no more bachelors and no 
 more prostitutes. Even if one party alone wants 
 divorce, it must be granted. It is no worse for the 
 other party than to have a proposal of marriage 
 rejected. " The one question that should never 
 be put to a petitioner for divorce is, Why ? " But 
 more than this is needed. What about the surplus 
 women, since one sex outnumbers the other ? " There 
 is no way at all out of the present system of condemn- 
 ing the superfluous women to barrenness except by 
 legitimising the children of women who are not married 
 to the father." What about professional and other 
 women who find it repugnant or trying to share rooms 
 with a man ? " Why should the taking of a husband 
 be imposed on these women as the price of their 
 right to maternity ? I am quite unable to answer 
 that question." 
 ^..-^Elis ideal is now plain. The old tradition of a 
 common home in which man, wife, and children will 
 make a pretence of " stewing in love " for thirty or 
 forty years is to him the sorriest fiction. Better make 
 an end of it altogether and live in separate rooms, in 
 large communal residences, with occasional conjuga- 
 tion for the sole purpose of parentage. As, however, 
 this austere prospect does not appeal to most 
 people, and they will not see the abominations which 
 Mr Shaw, observing from the distant desert, says he 
 perceives in their homes, we must have a civil registrar 
 of divorces as well as of marriages. Let the wife or 
 husband, or both, give due notice that they wish to 
 
104. BERNARD SHAW 
 
 cancel the contract and open another at any time they 
 will. But this would mainly encourage love as a 
 luxury, not as a serious sociological function, and 
 men and women must be encouraged to abandon 
 the tradition altogether, live their own lives, and 
 provide the State with new citizens by a free choice of 
 eugenic partners. There must be no moral or legal 
 stricture whatever on such intercourse. In the end, 
 when a super-race is bred, capable of enjo3n[ng a comedy 
 or a s5miphony, but incapable of stooping to the 
 enjoyment of a glass of wine or an act of love, there 
 will only be a Darby and Joan left here and there to 
 remind men of the beautiful English home. Marriage, 
 dissoluble or indissoluble, will disappear. 
 
 Before I examine the grounds of this position more 
 closely, let me forestall an unjust impression which 
 may be given by this account of his views to those 
 who do not know Shaw. To conceive him as a sour 
 or dour or misogynous crank would be as far from 
 the truth as to imagine him eager to usher in a period 
 of license or sensuality. He is a man of the most 
 generous and jolly disposition, happily wedded to a 
 woman of fine character, high and sane intelligence, 
 and charming personality. His home-life is one of 
 genial sentiment and pervasive gaiety, as all witness 
 who have had occasion to enter it. One must always 
 hesitate to identify the words of any character of a 
 drama with the sentiments of the dramatist, but I 
 would quote here, and set against the foregoing ex- 
 tracts, the following passage from " Getting Married." 
 In the midst of one of those burlesque scenes with 
 which Shaw reheves the strain of his serious dialogue, 
 Mrs George, a quaint type of woman who embodies a 
 part of Shaw, goes into a trance and says : 
 " When you loved me, I gave you the whole sun 
 
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 105 
 
 and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single 
 moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of 
 your arms, and the volume of all the seas in one 
 impulse of your soul. A moment only : but was it 
 not enough ? Were you not paid then for all the rest 
 of your struggle on earth ? Must I mend your clothes 
 and sweep your floors as well ? Was it not enough ? 
 I paid the price without bargaining ; I bore the children 
 without flinching ; was that a reason for heaping 
 fresh burdens on me ? I carried the child in my arms ; 
 must I carry the father too ? When I opened the gates 
 of paradise, were you blind ? was it nothing to you ? 
 When all the stars sang in your ears, and all the winds 
 swept you into the heart of heaven, were you deaf ? were 
 you dull ? was I no more to you than a bone to a dog ? 
 Was it not enough ? We spent eternity together ; 
 and you ask me for a little life-time more." 
 
 This fine passage is, of course, an argument for 
 Shaw's ideal of occasional intercourse, instead of co- 
 habitation, but it must make us hesitate to put too 
 prosy a complexion on his eugenic proposal. It must 
 be set against the frigid and often repellent air of 
 many of the remarks he makes in his own name. 
 
 Yet Shaw is an ascetic, and this asceticism and 
 his mystic philosophy prevent many from following 
 his ideas. I say ascetic rather than Puritan (which 
 Mr Chesterton prefers), because Puritanism implies 
 a religious and moral disdain or dread of pleasure 
 (even art-pleasure), and of this there is not a particle 
 in Shaw. One might discover a trace of Platonist 
 feeling— the feeUng that the body is a very inferior 
 and antagonistic thing to the spirit — but it is a matter 
 of character rather than philosophy. There never was 
 such another ascetic. These anaemic anti-epicureans 
 have often framed most profound and most splendidly 
 
106 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 futile systems of thought, but none of them ever 
 before gave the world a rich and sparkling stream of 
 comedies, with interludes of burlesque. The simple 
 fact is, that for sense-pleasure he has, like Epicurus 
 (to whom he is far nearer than to Plato, little as he 
 thinks it), a very restricted range of receptiveness. 
 He can enjoy his vegetarian dinners, he can dress in 
 fine things (without starch), and for music, painting, 
 and sculpture he has an ample and fine appetite. 
 That is far from Puritanism. But he has no vivid 
 pleasure except in luxuries which appeal, not merely 
 to sense, but to intellect, imagination, and artistic 
 feeling ; and, as " pleasure " is commonly taken on 
 the sensuous plane, he angrily rejects " voluptuous- 
 ness " and says " happiness " is a mean ideal. He 
 will not see that the only occasion on which he may 
 justly impugn the tastes of others is when a man 
 enjoys pleasure to the detriment of his mind, taste, 
 or character. That is the position of all the other 
 great artists who rebel against sex-morals in some 
 measure, but Shaw has an a priori principle. Nature 
 gave us a palate for the definite purpose of securing 
 the maintenance of the body : therefore to take 
 advantage of it to enjoy a bottle of wine is abuse. 
 Nature gave us the sex-thrill for the purpose of securing 
 the reproduction of the body : therefore to enjoy it in 
 itself, frustrating its purpose, is abuse. He forgets that 
 nature did not develop the human ear for the enjoy- 
 ment of symphonies, or the human eye in order to 
 appreciate Rodin ; and that he has not told us why 
 we must renounce the authority of Society and set 
 up that of the Life-Force. 
 
 Next to this perverse metaphysic of sensuous 
 pleasure, the chief weakness of Shaw's position is his 
 exaggeration of the defects of the home. He knows 
 
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 107 
 
 that he is exaggerating. " The way to get at the 
 merits of a case," he has said, " is not to listen to tlie 
 fool who imagines himself impartial, but to get it 
 argued with reckless bias for and against." When 
 he gives you, in " Fanny's First Play," the rather 
 brutal spectacle of a refined young lady squaring up 
 like a virago, in a moment of excitement, pinning a 
 young man to the table, and bashing his face with the 
 savagery of a gorilla, he hardly expects you to think 
 that this is, in his opinion, a not uncommon episode 
 of middle-class life. Perhaps this is an extreme 
 and extremely unfortunate example of his method, 
 especially as even the realism of the stage has its 
 limits and the audience is not quite clear whether it 
 is fun or brutality. But a dozen episodes in the same 
 play might be taken : the persistent snarl of Gilbey 
 (which would paralyse any ordinary cheesemonger in 
 three months), the blatant stare at the footman who 
 turns out to be a duke's brother, the rabid vulgarity 
 of Knox asking him whether he is legitimate, and so 
 on. How much finer and more effective is the exquisite 
 conception of the weeping Mrs Knox, who insists that 
 happiness must be internal. One wonders whether 
 this kind of exaggeration does not defeat its own 
 purpose ; but that is a question for later consideration. 
 Shaw has to contradict the pretty fictions of domestic 
 novelists like Dickens, and, on his principle of contro- 
 versy, he passes to the other extreme. 
 
 The general question of the efficacy of exaggeration 
 must be deferred.. Here we want to know whether 
 Shaw really finds the English home incurably de- 
 moralising. There is no doubt, from his essays and 
 prefaces, that he does. He admits that evidence for 
 his generalisations is difficult to gather and delicate 
 to use, but he insists that the relations of parents 
 
108 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 to each other and to their children are generally bad, 
 irritating, and prejudicial to character. We must 
 allow for the element of theory in this, but even here 
 we must recognise that Shaw is largely right. An 
 incalculable mischief is done by deliberately encourag- 
 ing, or not moderating, young people's romantic 
 idea of the feeling which precedes marriage. The 
 source of it, suffusing the whole being, is very largely 
 desire and expectation, and when this is sated there 
 "will be reaction. The judicious attitude toward each 
 other comes after, instead of before, the life-contract. 
 That is the first element of the romance of marriage 
 which he assails, and the root of grave evils. Yet 
 novelists and dramatists conspire to maintain the 
 romance, and parents, whose economic condition 
 usually compels them to look forward to " settling " 
 their daughters, dare not disturb it. 
 
 On other counts most people will soberly agree 
 that Shaw, even in his essays, heavily exaggerates. 
 Probably most of the middle-class people who laugh 
 at his plays have far more experience of this than a 
 man in Shaw's exceptional position can have, and they 
 are neither so stupid nor so disingenuous as he imagines. 
 It is second-rate artists, rather than the people who 
 marry, who romajiticise marriage. Of late years 
 there has been a very free and vigorous discussion, 
 quite outside of Ibsenist circles, of the " lottery " of 
 marriage. It would take a clever statistician to tell 
 us, on the available data — and it is well for writers 
 on both sides to recognise the ridiculously loose 
 character of the data — whether marriage is a failure 
 or no. You may say that the truth lies somewhere 
 between Dickens and Shaw, or that Dickens describes 
 one extreme and Shaw the other, but at least most 
 people will grant that his indictment has grave 
 
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 109 
 
 foundations. His chief tactical mistake is to confine 
 himself to the middle class and satirise it out of re- 
 cognition. In all classes the home-life, though it is 
 brightened by hours and days which Shaw ignores, 
 though it is honoured by honest tears when the daughter 
 passes from it to marriage and the child or parent passes 
 into the silence, imposes a strain on character, is, in 
 a lamentable proportion of cases, a focus of irritation, 
 bickering, discourtesy, and selfishness, and is often 
 made an excuse for brutality of which the parent or 
 child would not be guilty in relations with strangers. 
 
 In his remedy of easy and cheap divorce also Shaw 
 reflects the feeling of most people who are not com- 
 pelled to take into account a religious doctrine of in- 
 dissoluble marriage. His scorn of the liberal com- 
 promise of enlarging the grounds of divorce is an 
 anticipation of the future and a deduction from the 
 experience of several other civilised nations. Each 
 new ground of divorce liberates some tens of thou- 
 sands of sufferers, but the radical source of misery — 
 the plain fact that thousands discover that it is 
 impossible to live in such intimate association with 
 dignity and happiness — is left by this liberal com- 
 promise to poison the life of the community. As 
 long as this is permitted, the new novel and the new 
 drama will riddle and ridicule the life of the home. 
 
 More interesting is Shaw's plea for the freedom of 
 the surplus women and the women (now numerous, 
 and increasing in number) who find it repugnant to 
 their taste or feeling to live intimately with a man. 
 This is not a point for argument with those who 
 accept Christian morals. They shudder and pass 
 on. But in such a city as London, where six out of 
 seven refuse to hear sermons, it is a point for frank 
 consideration. There is, and always has been, a 
 
110 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 vast amount of unmarried commerce, and there is 
 much looseness of conception on the point among 
 non-Christian moralists. This is probably one of the 
 reasons why Shaw speaks of ethicists as " cowardice- 
 mongers," though the chief reason is that they do 
 not, as a body, rebuke vivisectors and imperialist 
 misadventures. 
 
 The principle which Shaw offers will probably be 
 accepted only by an infinitesimal minority, for two 
 reasons. First, it is a direct conclusion from his 
 Life-Force, which is supposed to arm with supreme 
 authority the will of the individual ; secondly, 
 because he would grant liberty only for the purpose 
 of procreation. I have sufficiently discussed both 
 points. One meets people who profess to follow 
 Shaw in the matter, yet do not believe in his Life- 
 Force and do not accept his asceticism. It is, there- 
 fore, probable that in this Shaw is merely enforcing 
 the teaching of the utilitarian moralists or, if you 
 like, immoralists. A moral law must not entail 
 misery or privation, unless some grave interest of the 
 community enforces it ; any law which departs from 
 this standard is not a moral law. It is on this ground 
 that most of Shaw's artist-colleagues demand greater 
 sexual freedom. The laws of justice, honour, and 
 humanity forbid indiscriminate looseness. But a 
 transcendental ideal like chastity, with no basis in 
 social needs, is on a different footing ; and, in cases 
 where no injustice, dishonour of contract, or suffering 
 is entailed, chastity remains an assthetic standard 
 which some may respect and others not. Shaw puts 
 himself out of joint with the artists and thinkers with 
 whom he is usually associated in this connection by 
 measuring values according to his ascetic temper and 
 mystic philosophy. He rejects the greater part of 
 
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 111 
 
 the liberty they claim and the ground on which they 
 claim it. It is quite other writers whom the English 
 Puritan should dread on the subject of " free love." 
 
 Deferring Eugenics and Malthusianism to the next 
 chapter, and ignoring what the Superman will do 
 with the lingering " matrimoniomaniacs," we may 
 close with a word about Shaw's attitude toward 
 woman. We have found him avowing himself a 
 " homoist," or anti-feminist, with a reference to 
 Belfort Bax. But there is a wide stretch of sentiment 
 between the attitude toward woman of Belfort Bax 
 (in his " Outspoken Essays," for instance) and that 
 of Mr Shaw. Comparatively, Shaw has written very 
 little about woman, and he leaves us to gather his 
 sentiments precariously from his women-characters. 
 I have quoted the passage, written about the end 
 of the last century, in which he describes middle-class 
 women as " graceless, ignorant, narrow-minded to a 
 quite appalling degree." The development of his 
 views does not tend to make him appreciative. He 
 takes the Life-Force and its purposes very seriously, 
 and believes that its " purpose of fecundity " is in- 
 carnated in woman ; though an unphilosophic observer 
 would surmise that it is even more intensely incarnated 
 in man, who has more pronounced sexual feelings. 
 "This speculation redeems woman in some measure, 
 as it justifies what Shaw regards as her habitual 
 pursuit of man ; and he would probably grant that the 
 petty fibbing and hypocrisy with which he supposes 
 her to cloak this pursuit are venial results of man's 
 own hypocrisy in maintaining that she must be coy 
 ._and retiring. 
 
 But, as we shall see particularly in the next chapter, 
 this view of woman really embitters Shaw. In the 
 class to which he belongs, the middle class, the women 
 
112 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 now fall into two categories : the religious, whose 
 character he may respect but whose prejudices he 
 deplores, and the more or less heretical. In this 
 latter category the practice of Malthusianism is now 
 general, and Shaw is sternly and violently opposed to 
 it. Such women not only rebel against the purposes 
 of the Life-Force (" the will of God "), not only delay 
 the coming of the super-race, but they do this, he 
 says, from voluptuousness, which he detests. We 
 shall presently see the language with which he lashes 
 such women, yet they are the women who, in other 
 respects, are the one class in which he has hope. It 
 is not strange that he has had no personal message to 
 the women of his generation, in spite of the acute 
 urgency of their problems, and made no serious 
 contribution to the psychology of sex. He merely 
 repeats Ibsen's injunction to rebel against duty and 
 sacrifice, and enfeebles the injunction by his ex- 
 planations and his metaphysic. 
 
 When we turn to the dramas we seem at first com- 
 pelled to abandon this position entirely and regard 
 him as a most penetrating observer and theorist. 
 But even some of his best admirers have not an 
 unqualified estimate of his women. Huneker puts it 
 in his strong American : " While you wonder at the 
 strength of their souls, you do not miss the size of 
 their feet." I do not quote critics of the hostile 
 school, whose language is violent, and cannot here 
 examine his feminine characters in detail. Glance 
 at them as they successively step out of his artistic 
 imagination. Blanche Sartorius — silly, hypocritical, 
 almost brutal : Julia and Sylvia Craven — foolish and 
 blatant ; Grace Cuthbertson — the refined and sensible 
 foil to the preceding : Mrs Warren, a coarse and 
 realistic prostitute, and Vivie, an unreal, mechanically. 
 
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 113 
 
 constructed girl : Raina — romantic and hypocritical : 
 Candida — strong and charming and improbable : 
 Napoleon's lady — wholly admirable because she is 
 Ellen Terry : Mrs Crampton — firm, sane, and real : 
 Gloria Crampton — stiff, mendacious, unlovely : Dolly 
 Crampton — delightful and impossible. And so on. 
 You have every type, precisely limned, real and un- 
 real, but with academic additions to the psychology 
 of most of the real characters. Acute observation 
 no one will question, but the policy of caricature and 
 the belief in the Life-Force moderate the value of it 
 in very many cases. 
 
 But it is impossible to do justice here to his dramatic 
 creativeness, and where justice is not done injustice 
 results. Shaw would probably claim to have made 
 a most penetrating analysis of the real motives of 
 women ; he says that what they and the ordinary 
 psychologist call their motives are only excuses. It 
 is true that he is a penetrating observer, but un- 
 fortunate that he is also a theorist. The motive- 
 springs in his characters have too often been put 
 there by himself, and then he artlessly calls us to see 
 what he has discovered. 
 
 ""-Mis ideal woman, a Super-woman, is too vague. 
 He does not believe in ideals, and so his idealism has 
 to express itself in unguarded moments. The woman 
 of the future must be free, economically and morally, 
 absolute mistress of herself, of sufficiently strong and 
 developed intelligence to repel all illusions, indifferent 
 to sex-pleasure but submissive to sex-burdens (her 
 one obedience) . But what will she be emotionally ? 
 That is the great question, and Shaw evades it. You. 
 cannot draw a conclusion from his dramatic types ; 
 they are necessarily varied and conflicting. He 
 would say that he has nothing to do with the future ; 
 
 H 
 
114 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 he is not a Bellamy. But people who are unable to 
 trust his Life-Force (which " has gone mad " in us), 
 and feel that the Ufe of to-day is fashioning the life 
 of to-morrow, must have a pattern or ideal to guide 
 them. Some women found it in his Candida — and 
 he promptly wrote a farce about the " Candida- 
 maniacs." It is not Mephistophelean laughter, but 
 a philosophy out of accord with reality. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 PROBLEMS OF THE FAMILY AND THE STATE 
 
 On various occasions we have found the normal 
 development of Mr Shaw's opinions violently dis- 
 located by a recent ardour for Eugenics. We saw 
 how, for a time, even his Socialist zeal was almost 
 absorbed by the new passion : how the progressive 
 moderation of his early anti-feminism was checked 
 by a discovery that middle-class women, of the best 
 type, were sinning against the commands of the Life- 
 Force : how his general philosophy was contorted 
 into some strange conclusions on encountering this 
 new ideal. It is now time to examine his Eugenic 
 theory and proposals. They have come to occupy 
 a commanding place in his mind during the last 
 decade, and the story of their development is interest- 
 ing and characteristic. 
 
 The first announcement of his thoroughgoing 
 adherence to the new reform is in the preface to 
 " Man and Superman." The first appeal of Eugenics 
 to the modern imagination has an impressive, scientific 
 quality. We have discarded natural selection in 
 breeding our most valuable horses, dogs, fowl, fruits, 
 and flowers. We select the breeders or the seeds, 
 and create a new and finer type with a rapidity and 
 economy that make the procedure of nature seem 
 stupid, wasteful, and old-fashioned. Burbank does 
 not throw a handful of seeds on a cultivated plot, 
 and let them struggle for survival. He chooses the 
 
 us 
 
116 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 parent-seeds, with excellent result. But the breeding 
 of our most valuable animal, man, we leave to the 
 cruel and wasteful method of nature. We fling a 
 thousand babies, born of haphazard mating, into the 
 civic arena, and tell them to fight it out. Grave 
 writers like B. Kidd say that we must do this, because 
 nature does it, and, of course, a " natural law " (at 
 which scientists now smile) is a dreadful thing to 
 ignore. These " laws of nature " have played a 
 remarkable part in modern culture. They are not 
 laws at all, but simple summaries of hitherto observed 
 facts, yet certain philosophers bluffed theologians out 
 of their belief in miracles by parading these " eternal 
 iron laws," and sociologists would bluff us out of our 
 schemes of reform by the use of the same bogey. The 
 Eugenist points out that " artificial selection " is as 
 natural as " natural selection," and much wiser and 
 less costly. Hence the wide disposition to consider 
 schemes of breeding superior humans. 
 
 This scientific appeal of Eugenics is hardly noticed 
 by Shaw. A careful consideration of it would not 
 harmonise with his views about science and selection. 
 It is unfortunate that the Eugenic argument which 
 appeals to him is an unsound argument. " The 
 bubble of heredity has been pricked," he says ; mean- 
 ing that science has now rejected the old belief 
 that a modification of the individual brain or body 
 (acquired modification) could be transmitted to off- 
 spring. If this were so — if acquired modifications 
 were certainly not inherited, as he says — the education 
 and improvement of each generation would die with 
 it, and the work would have to begin entirely afresh 
 in each generation. All the increased fineness of 
 brain which education might give a man or woman 
 would disappear with that particular body. Hence 
 
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 117 
 
 it would be far wiser and more economical to breed 
 a slightly better brain and body in each generation ; 
 it is stupid to go on breeding ineducable brains and 
 coarse or ugly bodies. We must prevent the con- 
 tinuance of bad stocks (negative Eugenics), and 
 concentrate on the cultivation of good stocks (positive 
 Eugenics). Then, in a few generations, the teacher 
 and social reformer will have far finer material to 
 handle, and man will rapidly rise toward the super- 
 human stage. 
 
 It is, as I said, unfortunate that there is a flaw in 
 this argument. Science has not pricked the bubble 
 of heredity. It is a point of very serious controversy 
 in science to-day whether acquired modifications are 
 or are not transmitted. In England it happens that 
 the majority of biologists and embryologists are on 
 the negative side, and probably Mr Shaw has seen 
 some misleading dogmatic statement on that side. 
 But Sir William Turner, Professor Bastian, and others 
 are on the affirmative side, and on the Continent and 
 in the United States the old view has very formidable 
 champions. It is a grave mistake for certain Eugenists 
 to build on disputed theories of heredity, such as 
 Weismannism or Mendelism (both exceedingly dis- 
 puted), and it is just this mistake which Shaw has 
 endorsed. 
 
 His real reason is his very pessimistic estimate of 
 our generation, and this is worth examining. We saw 
 in an earlier chapter how he appeals to Mr A. B. 
 Walkley to admit that democracy, education, and all 
 the " illusions " of their youth have failed ; and how, 
 in the " Handbook " he adds Socialism, Ethicism, 
 etc., to the illusions, and insists that we are making 
 no progress whatever. It is all " goose-cackle " to 
 talk about progress. He dips into history to prove 
 
118 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 it. Was England any better under the Puritans 
 than under Laud ? Is republican France, with its 
 Panama and Dreyfus, any better than imperial France 
 was ? Is the United States, with its trusts and 
 millionaires, improved ? This precious nineteenth 
 century (he says in the preface to " Three Plays by 
 Brieux "), which " regarded itself as the summit of 
 civilisation " and " talked of the past as a cruel 
 gloom that had been dispelled for ever by the railway 
 and the electric telegraph," was stripped of its masks 
 by Marx and Zola and Ibsen and Strindberg, and 
 " revealed itself as, on the whole, perhaps the most 
 villainous page of recorded human history." We 
 are actually degenerating, instead of advancing. 
 Our boasted factory and penal legislation, and housing, 
 and so forth, are merely things that money has done, 
 not outcomes and proofs of character and statesman- 
 ship. On the other scale he heaps the Boer War, the 
 mutilation of the Mahdi's body, the expedition to 
 Peking, Denshawi, our jails, our lawyers, our doctors, 
 our teachers, our divines, our foie gras, our furs and 
 feathers, and so on. The world is " a den of wild 
 animals " and " will not bear thinking of to those 
 who know what it is." 
 
 He warms to the work and goes further into history. 
 Our conduct and codes are no improvement on those 
 of Rome and Athens. Is the modern chauffeur greater 
 than the old chariot-driver, or the modern Prime 
 Minister greater than Csesar ? In the notes to 
 " Csesar and Cleopatra " he says that " the world 
 presents, on the whole, a rather less dignified appear- 
 ance in Ibsen's ' Enemy of the People ' [a piece of 
 constructive pessimism] than in Plato's Republic " 
 [a piece of wholly imaginary utopianism]. We see 
 no progress in the whole historical period ; except 
 
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 119 
 
 in engineering, which has given us the smoke of 
 London and Sheffield. In short, the command over 
 the forces of nature has not been accompanied by an 
 increased command over self, which he takes as the 
 test of progress. In all the changes which have 
 chequered the history of Europe during the last 2000 
 years, we have not even got back to the mark reached 
 by the older civilisations. A certain point has been 
 attained in the development of each historical civilisa- 
 tion, and we have not passed it, if we have reached it, 
 in modern times ; and even this point was only " a 
 pinnacle above an abyss of squalor." 
 
 Shaw denies that he is a pessimist. When Max 
 Nordau intimidated Europe and America with his 
 pessimistic " Degeneration " in 1895, it was Shaw 
 who made the most spirited defence of the nineteenth 
 century. In the artistic movements which Nordau 
 took to be symptoms of semle decay Shaw saw indi- 
 cations of healthy and vigorous youth. A few years 
 later he penned the scathing indictments of " Man 
 and Superman." This is not pessimism, he says, 
 because he has a firm faith in the future — a confidence 
 in the Life-Force. He is a meliorist. But, whatever 
 we call his mood, there is hardly another distinguished 
 writer in the world to-day who would endorse his 
 estimate of contemporary life. And since this 
 estimate is the direct cause of his stress in Eugenics, 
 and indeed darkens the serious elements of all his 
 recent work, it merits consideration. It is a good 
 opportunity to test his bad opinion of us. 
 
 We want a plainer test of progress than " increased 
 command over self," and Shaw would agree to test 
 it by our success in diminishing prejudice, cruelty, 
 injustice, coarseness, and dishonesty. In these 
 respects I would, on behalf of our age, challenge 
 
120 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 comparison with any age that has been recorded in the 
 story of man. One is inclined to dismiss Mr Shaw's 
 opinion that we are deteriorating, and that the 
 nineteenth century is " the most villainous page of 
 recorded human history," with one simple remark. 
 If George Bernard Shaw had lived five hundred years 
 ago, he would have been burned at the stake or boiled 
 in oil ; if he had lived one hundred years ago, he 
 would have been sent to Botany Bay, or hounded 
 from country to country like Paine, or driven insane 
 (as many were) in an English jail. In our age he is 
 respected throughout Europe and the United States, 
 and can make £10,000 in one year by libelling us in 
 his amusing way. He will not study or reflect what 
 England was only a hundred years ago, or France 
 under Louis XVIII. , or the American Colony under 
 the witch-hunting Puritans. London a century ago 
 (we have a detailed account by the head of the police 
 at the time, as well as many serious social studies) 
 had, to a population of one million, far more prostitutes 
 than it has to-day ; and it reeked with crime, drunken- 
 ness, duelling, coarse and cruel pastimes, dense 
 prejudices, tyranny, political corruption, and squalor 
 to an extent of which our experience gives us no idea. 
 Each point can be amply established. The treatment 
 of child-workers was brutal in the extreme, adult 
 workers were fearfully overstrained and brutalised, 
 the homes of the poor were hovels of inconceivable 
 squalor, women were grossly wronged, and so on. 
 And the abatement of these evils is due solely to 
 humanitarian, and very largely Rationalist, workers, 
 forming and building upon an improved general 
 sentiment. When you compare things, you must 
 know both terms of the comparison. If the Boer 
 War had been a hundred years ago, what would 
 
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 121 
 
 have been the number and the fate of the Pro- 
 Boers ? 
 
 In his larger historical comparison Mr Shaw seems 
 to have an imperfect knowledge of ancient civilisations 
 and an imperfect grasp of the course of history. No 
 one but a religious apologist would suggest that 
 medieval Europe was an improvement on ancient 
 Europe, and that the present indicated continuous 
 progress. We have been slowly advancing for seven 
 hundred years, but in the preceding seven hundred 
 Europe had receded enormously. There has not been 
 continuous progress, and in many respects the nine- 
 teenth century merely climbed back to the position 
 whence Athens and Rome had been dislodged. But 
 one has only to reflect on the slavery and the hem- 
 lock-cup of Athens, and the slavery, the gladiators, 
 and the imperial corruption of Rome, to see that 
 we have now gone far beyond them. Mankind has 
 got into its stride at last. There is no possibility 
 now of barbarism overthrowing civilisation as it 
 formerly did. It is not true that civilisation keeps 
 rising to a point and ebbing again. It reaches a 
 higher water-mark in each great civilisation, and is 
 far above them all to-day, with no sign of receding 
 again. ~^ 
 
 The actual evils, stupidities, and crimes that linger 
 in our civilisation should be, not merely admitted, 
 but burned into the consciousness of every man and 
 woman. That is the great and enduring work of 
 Shaw. His exaggerations and the feebleness of his 
 historical comparisons do not matter. The serious 
 student of his works must realise these exaggerations 
 and errors, but, when we have set them aside, his 
 indictment of our age rests on very serious evidence. 
 There is no need to go into it here, as it will be apparent 
 
122 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 in the study of his dramas. It is well to give a warning, 
 however. Juvenal's famous indictment of Rome is 
 not only less reliable as to fact than many imagine, 
 but it confuses matters of taste and plain defects ; it 
 reviles the age because women have taken to letters, 
 and so on. In the same way, much of Shaw's indict- 
 ment of our age is based on personal standards or 
 disputable tests. We shall see a few instances 
 presently. 
 
 Stud5dng these defects of our age, therefore, and 
 wrongly convinced that we are making no progress, 
 Shaw tells us to abandon education and other remedies, 
 and breed a new race. Most people are now agreed 
 that negative Eugenic proposals are sound, but the 
 positive proposals are vague and meagre, and we look 
 to a fearless thinker like Shaw to improve them. 
 He says that marriage is in the way, and must go. 
 " Being cowards, we defeat natural selection under 
 cover of philanthropy ; being sluggards, we neglect 
 artificial selection under cover of delicacy and 
 morality." Certainly the man who thinks that 
 marriage is in the way and will not say so is a coward ; 
 and there are many. It is probable, Shaw says, that 
 the best children will be born of parents who differ 
 from each other so much that they could not com- 
 fortably live together. It is at least not improbable, 
 though we need as yet a closer study of the importance 
 to offspring of real and deep sympathy between the 
 parents. 
 
 As to the method of carrying out the reform, Shaw 
 thinks it premature to speculate. It may be done by 
 the State, or by " a private company or a chartered 
 company for the improvement of human live stock." 
 We cannot help feeling some concern, at this vague 
 prospect, lest certain really fine and sound human 
 
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 123 
 
 sentiments are not in danger of disappearing. How- 
 ever, the more practical question is : What qualities 
 are you going to choose in your breeders ? I need 
 not go into the serious difficiilties which arise from 
 the great uncertainty of human inheritance, but we 
 do require some suggestion of a " pattern " or " speci- 
 fication." Shaw admits that he has none. " What 
 is really important in man is the part of him that 
 we do not yet understand " : which makes breeding 
 difficult. We know what we want, and how to get it, 
 in cattle and sheep. At one point, as I have said, 
 Shaw suggests mating a man of fine physique with a 
 woman of fine mind. But what is a fine mind ? 
 An Ibsenite type, or an Epicurean type, or a religious 
 type, or a new type ? Imagine even a committee 
 of Fabians — say, Mrs Shaw (rationalist), Mrs Webb 
 (mystic), Mr Shaw (Shavian), Stanton Coit (emotional 
 ethicist), and so on — trying to settle it. 
 
 The culmination of Shaw's reflections on this subject 
 admirably shows how his philosophy is no idle specu- 
 lation, but the most dominant element in his mind. 
 In the interview which was published in the Labour 
 Leader (March 31st, 1911) Shaw says that we must 
 trust " the power behind evolution working with the 
 purpose of introducing something better." It is 
 difficult to imagine such a power, and more difficult 
 to credit it with purposes or know them, but we 
 Jiave discussed that. Shaw hints that we have some 
 guidance in the phenomenon which is popularly known 
 as " falling in love."' Had this idea not already been 
 published, I should have hesitated to reproduce his 
 remarks on this point at the City Temple in October 
 1913, although I committed them to writing at the 
 jtime.yHe repeated that "falling in love" was an 
 initmctive direction of the " divine spark " within 
 
124 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 us, and the safest clue to the problem of breeding the 
 Superman. He enlarged on it at length, and insisted, 
 literally, that when two people spontaneously " fall 
 in love " the Eugenist has his cue. Most of us have 
 seen much " falling in love," on long sea-voyages,, 
 holidays, etc., and smiled at the purblind and undis- 
 criminating passion, the flutter over a curl, a curve, 
 or a moustache which superficially adorned a base 
 or feeble character. And Mr Shaw's last word on the 
 most treasured gospel of his later years is to entrust 
 the fortunes of the race to this. 
 
 Partly from his zeal for Eugenics and partly from his 
 scorn of voluptuousness, Mr Shaw has taken up a 
 very definite attitude on another actual and important 
 problem of the family : the question of the artificial 
 restriction of births. He began to attack Malthu- 
 sianism in " Man and Superman," one aphorism of 
 which is : " The most revolutionary invention of the 
 XIX century was the artificial sterilisation of 
 marriage." He was already a Eugenist, contemplat- 
 ing with concern the prolific breeding of the unfit and 
 the scanty breeding of the fit ; and he saw that the 
 restriction is due largely to a desire of greater comfort, 
 and involves sexual commerce for the sake of pleasure 
 only. He returns to the subject in his preface to 
 " Three Plays of Brieux," and combines the language 
 of a St Jerome with the language of a Dr Saleeby. 
 
 This new practice has made marriage a " charter 
 of libertinage and slavery," often masking " the 
 coarsest libertinage." By its means " childless 
 marriage became available to male voluptuaries as 
 the cheapest way of keeping a mistress and to female 
 ones as the most convenient and respectable way of 
 being kept in idle luxury by a man." He grudgingly 
 admits that the expectations of better health and 
 
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 125 
 
 comfort to mother and children " have no doubt been 
 fulfilled in some cases " ; a piece of his inevitable 
 exaggeration, as this advantage is bound to arise in 
 almost every case, and is one of the chief reasons for 
 the practice. But it should be freely, defiantly stated 
 that the desire of greater comfort for father, mother, 
 and children is undoubtedly the main consideration. 
 Of this no defence is needed, since few take Shaw's 
 Stoic opinion of sensuous pleasure seriously, and need 
 not until it can be shown that the practice, while 
 beneficial to the individual, is harmful to some higher 
 interest. 
 
 Shaw cannot show this by appealing to a " duty 
 to Society," since he recognises no such duty ; he 
 cannot plead that national defence is endangered, 
 for he loathes militarism ; and he will certainly not 
 plead that the industrial world requires a maintenance 
 of the birth-rate. At one moment he tries a desperate 
 expedient. A man may prevent his wife from be- 
 coming a mother, and this would be "a position 
 intolerable to a woman of honour as distinguished 
 from a frank voluptuary." If this is a correct 
 antithesis, " women of honour " must be rare in the 
 intellectual world in which Mr Shaw moves ; but 
 the case is not serious. There is no complaint, worth 
 speaking of, against men in that respect ; and a 
 reformed divorce-law would soon settle such a case. 
 In the main Shaw falls back on his philosophy. I 
 trust no one will impatiently exclaim that I am 
 constantly dragging in his philosophy. I do not 
 drag it in ; it is there, and to study Shaw and ignore 
 it is to gather together a heap of disjointed and con- 
 tradictory opinions for which you must plead the 
 license of genius or the whimsicality of the humorist. 
 Malthusianism frustrates the purpose of the Life- 
 
126 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Force, retards the arrival of a super-race, and en- 
 courages voluptuousness. The bourgeois is a coward 
 and a selfish epicure, practising it in secret and getting 
 " terrified " when Brieux brings it to light on the 
 stage. No doubt there are many who make a foolish 
 secret of a practice which has excellent humanitarian 
 grounds and is now co-extensive with civilisation ; 
 there are also many who heartily applaud any effort 
 to bring it to wider notice. However, Mr Shaw seems 
 to think that the bourgeois — he lets the bourgeoise 
 down rather gently — must be intimidated from doing 
 it, but he leaves us in some doubt as to the manner 
 and the purpose of intimidating him. " Both his 
 pruderies and his terrors must give way before the 
 absolute necessity for re-examining the foundations 
 of our social structure after the shock they have 
 received from the discovery of artificial sterilisation." 
 His case is clearly undeveloped, and is little more 
 than a reiteration of his ascetic standard of life. 
 Many who would applaud his attitude on this point 
 forget that, on his principle, childless married couples 
 must never have intercourse, and all married people 
 must restrict themselves to the actual production of 
 children : a heavy blow at most anti-Malthusians and 
 a code of life for semi-angels. 
 
 The next step in Shaw's social creed should be a 
 suggestion of a new relation of the State or munici- 
 pality to babies. The home i s to disappear. He is, 
 unfortunately, inattentive to this, probably feeling 
 that it is a problem of the future. In the " Quin- 
 tessence of Ibsenism " he incidentally speaks of a 
 time when " the State will not depend on the private 
 nursery." He, no doubt, agrees in a general way 
 with other Socialist writers who advocate municipal 
 nursing or maternity homes, and municipal nurseries. 
 
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 127 
 
 Professional or trained officials will care for every 
 child. But here there would be question of a 
 lengthy, slow, and experimental evolution, and he 
 wisely refrains from schemes. 
 
 To the school he is more attentive. He, as usual, 
 refuses to dangle before the eyes of enthusiasts pretty 
 pictures of the ultimate state of society and its schools. 
 One must gather his opinion, in so far as he has an 
 opinion, from his views on Socialism and marriage. 
 The child is to have its share of the national income 
 allotted at birth, and the municipality must be a 
 guardian or trustee. His views suggest, dimly, large 
 rural colleges all over England, where the youth of 
 the nation will be reared and taught without the 
 friction of the small domestic sphere. This would, 
 however, be an exercise in Utopian construction, and 
 Shaw refuses to indulge. He is at least safer in 
 criticism than construction, and he turns on our 
 actual schools with heavy irony. The teachers are 
 mercilessly flayed. " He who can, does : he who^" 
 cannot, teaches," says John Tanner. In the preface^ 
 to " Getting Married " he contrasts the excellence of 
 nun-teachers, with whom he seems to be little ac- 
 quainted, with " our comparatively ruffianly element- 
 ary, teachers." 
 
 One feels that he has in mind little more than the 
 schools of Dublin in the sixties, just as in speaking of 
 science he stops at the eighties. A good deal of his 
 criticism is disarmed by more recent educational 
 practice. It may be true that " feeding a boy on 
 books exclusively is like feeding a man on gin," but 
 there are few modern schools which do it. Manual 
 training, nature-study, visits to museums and civic 
 and other institutions, are now general. Shaw, of 
 course, wants more. " The schoolboy who uses his 
 
128 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Homer to throw at his fellow's head makes perhaps 
 the safest and most rational use of him." In the 
 case of that particular book, or any classic, many 
 teachers would agree, but one fears that Shaw means 
 any book in school use. He says, more plainly : 
 " What we call education and culture is for the most 
 part nothing but the substitution of reading for 
 experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious 
 for the contemporary real," and in another place : 
 " The world shown us in books, whether the books be 
 confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in 
 political orations, or in philosophical systems, is not 
 the main world at all ; it is only the self-consciousness 
 of certain abnormal people who have the specific 
 artistic talent and temperament." There is, at all 
 events, very little self-consciousness in the writers of 
 school-books, and it is difficult to see how the child 
 is to learn history, letters, geography, and most of 
 the things a child should learn, without books. But 
 the general sentiment, that education should make 
 a much more varied appeal to the child's mind than 
 the printed page, is entirely sound and has been 
 admirably realised in modern schools. 
 
 The most violent of Shaw's aphorisms about educa- 
 tion refer to moral training. " Do not give your 
 children moral and religious instruction," he says, 
 " unless you are quite sure they will not take it 
 seriously." In fact : " The vilest abortionist is he 
 who attempts to mould a child's character." More 
 than one recent social writer agrees that at least direct 
 moral instruction is not desirable, but Mr Shaw is 
 reljdng on general principles which few would 
 accept. He is misled, in the first place, by dogmatic 
 Eugenists like Karl Pearson, who advocate a new 
 sort of Calvinism in which " zygotes " take the place 
 
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 129 
 
 of grace and the devil. They say that in the germ 
 of the child there are from the start the " zygotes " 
 of good and of bad qualities, and all the education in 
 the world will not alter them. This is not only a 
 mischievous substitution of a disputed theory for the 
 accepted teaching of science, but it is done in defiance 
 of fact. Experience and history amply show the 
 power of ideas (gospels, social idealisms, etc.) to alter 
 character. But Mr Shaw, with his antipathy to 
 culture, has a peculiar way of reading history, and, 
 as he is not more closely acquainted with science, he 
 is easily caught by some cheap scientific dogmatism 
 which suits his views. 
 
 His general theory of morality compels him to 
 resent the moral training of children. He conceives 
 what people call their moral code as an expression of 
 the will of the ancient Hebrew priests, or of a more 
 recent Hebrew prophet, or of Society ; and he resents 
 the enforcing of any such will on the individual's 
 will. We have already seen that he makes certain 
 admissions which should have modified his view. He 
 warns young folk that they will burn their fingers if 
 they play with fire ; he warns the liar that he will 
 find lying unprofitable in the end ; and so on. In 
 this he affects an indifference to the moral aspect of 
 these things, but he is really playing the moralist, 
 or preaching " RationaUst-Mercantilist " morality. 
 
 When the new conception of morals spread in the 
 nineteenth century, moralists were eager to prove 
 that there was something of the thunder of Jehovah 
 in conscience still : something of the awful mystery 
 of the stmimit of Sinai. They invented " categorical 
 imperatives," and " moral intuitions," and " will of 
 Society," and all sorts of bogies. Mill enthusiastically 
 said that he would burn in hell for all eternity rather 
 
130 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 than tell a lie at the supposed bidding of the Almighty. 
 I would not : assuming that I preferred the company 
 of such an Almighty for all eternity. All this early 
 melodrama is disappearing. Moral law is not a 
 command of Society. It is a summary of the ex- 
 perience of the men and women who have constituted 
 Society for thousands of years. " Thou shalt not 
 lie" — I omit police laws like "Thou shalt not steal " 
 — means : " Lie if you like, but you'll pay for it." 
 In its finest and most serious conception moral law 
 means that, since you live in a social body and breathe 
 its atmosphere, you will be wise to avoid doing to 
 others what you do not wish them to do to you. 
 Christ formulated the utihtarian principle ; and then 
 spoiled it by telling a man to love his neighbour as 
 himself, which no man ever did or ever will do, except 
 for a heavenly reward. 
 
 If, then, moral law is only a record of human ex- 
 perience during ten thousand years of civilisation, it 
 is the most essential part of the training of children 
 to impart it to them, without thunder and lightning. 
 The child is a natural thief, liar, and brawler : to 
 speak of children in real life, not in pretty stories. 
 It is not original sin, but original innocence. To 
 scold or bully children for these things, until they 
 have been made to understand them, is stupid ; and 
 merely to tell them that they must not do them, or 
 that someone said a few thouand years ago that they 
 must not, leaves their mental mechanism in a very 
 unsatisfactory condition. So far Shaw is fully justi- 
 fied. But it is difficult to see why a child should in 
 all cases be allowed to learn by experience that fire 
 burns or intemperance makes you sick. If the child 
 is an unyielding sceptic (which is a very good thing), 
 it must try the experiment ; but most children can be 
 
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 131 
 
 induced to take your reasonable assurance that fire 
 burns. You could make a complete and reasonable moral 
 code from the exigencies of life in the playground. 
 
 Some men and women remain children, or retain 
 the dominant impulses of children, throughout life, 
 and make the core of our criminal class. Our treat- 
 ment of these is regarded by Shaw as one of the 
 greatest sins of our civilisation. In the preface to 
 " Major Barbara," especially, he inveighs against 
 imprisonment. " When a man wants to murder a 
 tiger," he says, " he calls it sport ; when the tiger 
 wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The dis- 
 tinction between Crime and Justice is no greater." 
 He makes his meaning plainer by supposing that a 
 burglar has stolen his wife's diamonds. " I am ex- 
 pected," he says, " to steal ten years of his life, tortur- 
 ing him all the time." He knows, of course, that the 
 vindictive idea of the punishment of criminals has 
 been abandoned. They are not now " punished " 
 ior their sins against society, except by some of the 
 more stupid and reactionary of our judges (like the 
 one who recently sentenced a young man to four 
 months' imprisonment for being vulgar in his attacks 
 on religion). They are treated with severity in the 
 hope that people may be deterred from crime by fear 
 of the consequences. He will not accept this as 
 justification : " The net result suggested by the 
 police statistics is that we inflict atrocious injuries 
 on the burglars we catch in order to make the rest 
 take effectual precautions against detection ; so 
 that, instead of saving om: wives' diamonds from 
 burglary, we only greatly decrease our chances of 
 «ver getting them back, and increase our chances of 
 being shot by the robber if we are unlucky enough 
 io disturb him at his work." 
 
132 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 The prison-question is one of the most perplexing 
 of the many problems which himianitarian sentiment 
 forces on us : one of the hundred controversies — ^let 
 it be said incidentally — which redeem our age from 
 Mr Shaw's vituperation and lift our civilisation beyond 
 any other that ever existed. There has been an 
 enormous advance toward humanity in the treatment 
 of prisoners during the last hundred years. Even 
 judges are becoming human. I recently saw a judge 
 hand to the jurymen at the end of the day permits 
 to inspect the jail, saying : " Gentlemen, go and see 
 the place to which you send criminals." But the 
 way to proceed is far from clear. Lombroso admitted, 
 shortly before his death, that the comparative human- 
 isation of the penal system has led to an increase of 
 crime. No doubt a persistent determination to use 
 the medicinal principle as far as possible and to dis- 
 criminate between isolated outbreaks and habitual 
 maladies will eventually find a way. We ask, how- 
 ever, what suggestions Mr Shaw has to make, since 
 his language implies that we are sinning against a 
 plain duty. 
 
 He is evidently as much embarrassed as any of us, 
 for he simply throws out one of those fantastic sug- 
 gestions which no one can consider seriously. One 
 might as well advocate the practice of Erewhon, where 
 the prosecution was directed against the man who 
 suffered himself to be swindled or burgled. At one 
 moment Mr Shaw presses " humane and hygienic 
 measures," regarding crime as we regard chicken-pox. 
 Economic reform and serious education will, no 
 doubt, diminish the amount of crime, but it is surely 
 apparent by this time that we have in every com- 
 munity a body of abnormal men and women who 
 would rather steal than work, or who have, in general. 
 
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 133 
 
 criminal impulses which are dangerously strong. 
 Shaw says : "It would be far more sensible to put 
 up with their vices, as we put up with their illnesses, 
 until they give more trouble than they are worth, at 
 which point we should, with many apologies and 
 professions of sympathy, and some generosity in 
 complying with their last wishes, place them in the 
 lethal chamber and get rid of them." Many of us 
 would subscribe cheerfully to the establishment of a 
 municipal lethal chamber, or human dust-destructor. 
 The sound part of the community has to bear an 
 intolerable burden of physical, mental, and moral 
 incurables. But it is precisely the treatment of 
 curable criminals and the discrimination of incurables 
 on which we want guidance. Shaw's proposal is not 
 serious. He is an expert in the art of vituperation, 
 and thinks we shoiold be content with his valuable 
 services in that very necessary department. 
 
 He is often compared to Nietzsche, or said to have 
 borrowed from Nietzsche. His treatment of crime 
 illustrates at once his approach to and departure from 
 the German moral anarchist. Nietzsche has had no 
 influence whatever on him, and the coincidence of 
 their opinions at times should not mislead us. The 
 man who fancies that Shaw must have borrowed his 
 anti-moral ideas from Nietzsche must be strangely 
 ignorant of the wide spread of such ideas in Europe. 
 Where they seem to coincide is in their apparent 
 rejection, on principle, of all moral principles. We 
 saw, however, that Shaw really respects every virtue 
 except chastity (which is one of his most conspicuous 
 personal adornments), and that the philosophic basis 
 of his rebellion is quite different from that of Nietzsche. 
 This is easily seen on taking any special problem. 
 Shaw does not advocate the whip for our women-folk. 
 
134 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 and is not only not opposed to humanitarianism, but 
 is full of the most vehement and boisterous tenderness 
 for animals as well as men. Nietzsche would have 
 used stronger language about Shaw's ascetic, vege- 
 tarian, anti-sport, anti-militarist, and generally anaemic 
 Superman than about the Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 Shaw, on the other hand, says of Nietzsche : " Never 
 was there a deafer, blinder, socially and politically 
 inepter academician " (" Dramatic Opinions," review 
 of "Nietzsche contra Wagner"). Nietzsche was so 
 full of perverse admiration of the process of natural 
 selection that he glorified the criminal ; Shaw would 
 tread him out of existence, like a beetle, and does not 
 even believe in natural selection. 
 
 It would be impossible, and is unnecessary, to run 
 over all the particular social problems on which Shaw 
 has touched. I have selected those on which he has 
 expressed himself with some fulness, presumably 
 after serious reflection. One must not press the 
 extreme tendrils of his social reasoning. He is 
 opposed to futurism in sociology, and, if he allows 
 his soaring imagination to reach out to a constructive 
 idea at times, he may express it as a wild and stimulat- 
 ing suggestion rather than a reasoned proposition. 
 His gift is criticism, and we ought not to undervalue 
 it. It is an absurd mistake to say that any man can 
 criticise, but few construct. On the contrary, few 
 have the penetration, candour, fearlessness, and in- 
 difference to respectability which are needed for 
 useful criticism. The real weakness of Shaw is that, 
 quite apart from his deliberate policy of exaggeration, 
 he has microscopic (not normal) vision for our faults 
 and is blind to our virtues ; and he is too fond of 
 comparing us with earlier generations with which 
 he is very scantily acquainted. 
 
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 185 
 
 There is just one other question of a moral or social 
 nature which should be discussed here, since he has 
 dealt with it so often and so forcibly. I mean the 
 question of vivisection. His scorn of us for our sport 
 (humane sport), our beer, our tobacco, our beef, our 
 musical comedies, our starched shirts, and our semi- 
 detached villas, is too much a matter of taste to be 
 discussed here ; while his opposition to militarism, 
 vaccination, and other disputed institutions has no 
 distinctive element. But the question of vivisection 
 has always had a very important place in his mind. 
 Our toleration of vivisection is, to him, one of the 
 typical symptoms of our brutality or denseness, and 
 his brooding over it has carried him to strange lengths. 
 
 He began (as far as his current works are concerned) 
 to attack vivisection in the Saturday Review in 1896. 
 From that point he has gone on to denounce Dar- 
 winians, Rationalists, and other " cowardice-mongers " 
 for supporting it — though they do not support it in 
 any higher proportion than other men — until, in the 
 lengthy preface to " The Doctor's Dilemma," he has 
 raked the whole medical profession with a broadside 
 of invective. An examination of the points of this 
 preface will suffice for our purpose. 
 
 He opens with a general fusilade on the profession, 
 which is "a murderous absurdity." The surgeon 
 has not greater personal honour than other men, yet 
 we trust his discretion entirely in the matter of 
 operations ; he even allows rich people to tempt him 
 to cut out their appendage, so that they may pose as 
 martyrs, and he does not tell them how " the anaes- 
 thetic " has to be paid for by weeks of illness. The 
 medical men are " no more scientific than tailors," 
 and they encourage " imaginary invalids," and go on 
 injecting superfluous drugs for the sake of payment. 
 
136 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Bacteriology, with its " frenzy about microbes," 
 has only increased our burden and the doctor's guile. 
 Inoculation is merely another device of theirs to 
 fleece us. The question of vaccination has " nothing 
 to do with science," and is not affected by statistics. 
 The fact is that the medical men conspire to maintain 
 it in their own interest. 
 
 To this heated, impetuous, and comprehensive 
 impeachment a doctor would, if he could keep eool, 
 reply that no doubt there is the same proportion of 
 men of inferior character in the medical as in other 
 professions, but he would like something more definite 
 than Mr Shaw's assurance before he admits the high 
 proportion of villainy which Shaw suggests. The 
 mere outsider will be apt to say that Mr Shaw's re- 
 marks on anaesthetics, which have spared an incalcul- 
 able amount of suffering and saved myriads of lives, 
 do not dispose us to listen to him. In the end Shaw 
 gives high praise to medical men for their well-known 
 devotion, relief of the poor, and so on ; which leaves 
 us in considerable uncertainty as to whether virtue 
 or vice is more common in the profession. The doctors 
 and surgeons who are in touch with the surplus funds of 
 the wealthy are a very small proportion of the whole. 
 
 Then he begins his chief dissertation on vivisection 
 Why the profession as a whole supports it is "a 
 mystery." There are a few prominent medical men 
 who " bring a rush of despairing patients to their 
 doors by professing in letters to the newspapers to 
 have learnt from vivisection how to cure certain 
 diseases," Very few ; and he might have added 
 the medical press quickly exposes them if their claim 
 is not sound. The majority have no interest in 
 vivisection, but have motives for defending it. The 
 first motive is much the same as that of the Zulu 
 
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 137 
 
 medicine-man. " The wickedness and stupidities 
 of our medicine-men are rooted in superstitions that 
 have no more to do with science than the traditional 
 ceremony of christening an ironclad has to do with 
 the effectiveness of an ironclad." They mystify us 
 merely in order to keep us in awe of their art. How 
 Mr Shaw, with no knowledge of physiology or 
 pathology, penetrated the secret he does not tell us. 
 
 The second and higher motive is the desire of 
 knowledge. But he cannot leave so fairly respectable 
 a motive as this without adulteration, and therefore, 
 as all human beings are cruel, he suggests that the 
 " curiosity " of the vivisector is far from pure. 
 Once, at an Anti-Vivisection meeting, he found himself 
 surrounded by men who hunted foxes and women 
 who wore furs and feathers, and he had the bad taste 
 to talk to them about cruelty to animals (without 
 anaesthetics, one may add). Hence, he says, " those 
 who accuse vivisectors of indulging the well-known 
 passion for cruelty under the cloak of research are 
 putting forward a strictly scientific psychological 
 hypothesis, which is also simple, human, obvious, and 
 probable." I know no more appalling instance of 
 controversial injustice. It would be as fair to suggest 
 that, in his scarification of the poor middle-class, 
 Shaw is " indulging the well-known passion for 
 cruelty." When the doctors plead that they use 
 anaesthetics, we must not be too ready to believe 
 them. " It is hardly to be expected that a man who 
 does not hesitate to vivisect for the sake of science will 
 hesitate to lie about it afterwards." Such excesses re- 
 strict Shaw's usefulness, and permit us to take his other 
 indictments of professions or classes with discretion. 
 
 There are two serious points in the controversy 
 about vivisection. The first is : Has the practice of 
 
138 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 vivisection promoted the skill of the surgeon or 
 doctor and benefited mankind ? Shaw disdains to 
 discuss this, because his answer to the second question 
 overrules it. The second question is : Are men 
 justified in deriving advantage from the sufferings of 
 animals ? To this he thunders a negative reply. 
 One can hardly help reflecting that if we have no 
 duties to our fellow-men, we can scarcely recognise 
 duties to rats and dogs ; but we need not take advant- 
 age of his academic professions. The passion which 
 seethes in this indictment, the wish to see men rid of 
 the last shade of cruelty, commands our admiration. 
 But in his heat he states the problem unfairly. There 
 are really three questions. Are scientific men justi- 
 fied in causing pain to animals out of mere curiosity, 
 if any do ? To that the answer is obvious. Are 
 scientific men justified in experimenting on animals, 
 for the advance of medical science, when the animals 
 are rendered unconscious ? Most people will find it 
 possible to answer that. But are scientific men justi- 
 fied in experimenting on animals, for the advance- 
 ment of medicine or surgery, when they must cause 
 pain ? Opinions will differ, though there may be 
 detestation of cruelty on both sides. An important 
 element of the problem is the fact that a rat's or a 
 dog's consciousness of pain is as far removed from a 
 man's as a rat's or a dog's intelligence is removed 
 from that of a man. That is a truism, never 
 noticed by Mr Shaw, who thinks that the vivi- 
 sector might operate on men. In any case, his 
 confused, heated, and unjust indictment does not 
 help the judicious inquirer. " Compassion is the 
 fellow-feeling of the unsound," he says in " The 
 Revolutionist's Handbook." We need not go so far 
 as that either. 
 
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 139 
 
 In the end he returns to the profession. The 
 advance of sanitation, etc., have reduced disease, 
 and the doctors have stolen the credit for it. They 
 take advantage of the stupidity of the public, and 
 keep up a fiction of their infallibility. And so on. 
 He advocates the gradual municipaJisation of the 
 profession. " Until the medical profession becomes 
 a body of men trained and paid by the country to 
 keep the country in health it will remain what it is at 
 present : a conspiracy to exploit popular credulity 
 and human suffering." This (the latter phrase) is 
 said seriously, not by way of playful exaggeration. 
 Private practitioners would not be abolished, but 
 for a time stimulate by their competition the municipal 
 Health Officers. The reasonable and discussable 
 suggestions are lost in a torrent of angry rhetoric 
 and too facile generalisation. 
 
 These opinions, and the general principles in which 
 they find inspiration, are the serious framework of 
 Shaw's dramas. Nothing is further from his mind 
 than the entertainment, as an entertainment, of the 
 British public. The next chapter, which deals with 
 his conception of art, will make this clear. Those, 
 therefore, who would pay serious attention to Shaw 
 and his work need to consider these opinions closely. 
 He does not wish to take a place in his generation 
 merely for the brilliance of his dramatic construction, 
 the wit and epigram of his dialogue, or any merely 
 artistic features, in the ordinary sense. The artist 
 who is content with such triumphs is, in his opinion, 
 the brother of the prostitute. He is an apostle. I 
 have therefore presented and commented upon his 
 gospel at length, and now need only describe his 
 idea of the artist's function before we approach the 
 long series of his dramatic works. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE FUNCTION OF ART 
 
 Throughout the long examination of Shaw's personal 
 utterances, as distinguished from the more or less 
 impersonal utterances of his characters, which we 
 have now made, we have found him defying morality 
 with the vigour of a rejuvenated Faust, yet lashing 
 the immorality of his generation with the fervour of 
 a Savonarola. He derides Ethicists for their ethics, 
 and then flays them for their weakness of character. 
 He sweeps idealists from his path and then gives us 
 pages of ardent idealism. This apparent paradox 
 is even more striking when we have to classify him 
 as an artist. Gabriele d'Annunzio is, perhaps, the 
 nearest of living artists to him in rebellion against 
 moral codes ; but Shaw disdains so much the work 
 of that " princely artist, of magnificent sensuality " 
 that he never mentions him. Tolstoi was, in his 
 ethical expressions, farther removed from Shaw than 
 any other artist in Europe, yet he would pfobably 
 claim the closest kinship with Tolstoi. 
 
 I have sufficiently explained this apparent paradox. 
 It is partly due to his tactical exaggerations, and 
 partly to the artificiality of his first principles. As 
 he has not the least fear that the average bourgeois 
 will take him seriously and follow his own impulses, 
 which Shaw constantly describes as beastly, he feels 
 safe in declaring a general war on morals, duties, 
 ideals, and codes of behaviour. It is the trumpet to 
 
 140 
 
THE FUNCTION OF ART 141 
 
 call the crowd ; and it is also an academic conclusion 
 from his principles. When the crowd gathers, he 
 explains that he wishes to impose on them a burden 
 of duties, reforms, sacrifices, and discipline which 
 would ruin a monastic body. The Life-Force scorns 
 their written moral codes ; and then the Life-Force 
 produces from its own bosom a portentous enlarge- 
 ment of the same moral code which outrages the 
 personal liberty of the suburban churchwarden. We 
 are therefore quite prepared for a stringent conception 
 of the function of art. " Happiness and Beauty are 
 by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of Happiness 
 and Beauty." So Shaw comes to scorn the musical 
 comedy idea of art, and approaches the grim figure 
 of Leo Tolstoi. 
 
 We have seen Shaw's early initiation to art. His 
 boyhood years were spent in an atmosphere vibrant 
 with music, and his leisure hours in the picture-gallery. 
 Reaching London, he feasts on greater music and 
 greater pictures, and devotes himself heroically to 
 literary art. In 1885 William Archer secured for him 
 the place of picture critic on the Pall Mall Gazette. 
 Except that he joined in the defence of the new Im- 
 pressionist School, which seemed to him to be " the 
 outcome of heightened attention and quickened 
 consciousness on the part of the artists," his work 
 does not call for examination. He soon learned that 
 freshness, opposition, and apparent flippancy were 
 needed to attract. " The critic adds the privileges 
 of the court- jester to those of the confessor. . . . 
 It was as Punch that I emerged from obscurity. 
 All I had to do was to open my normal eyes, and with 
 my utmost literary skill put the case exactly as it 
 struck me, or describe the thing exactly as I saw it, 
 to be applauded as the most humorously extravagant 
 
142 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 paradoxer in London." He was still forging his 
 weapon. But behind all the light play he felt that he 
 must have a firm grip of facts. He has always been 
 much deeper in art than in philosophy. Style, as an 
 aesthetic quality, he calls " a parlour game." " Effec- 
 tiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style." 
 
 For three years he visited every exhibition in 
 London, and, as these were the days of his most 
 assiduous lecturing, without fee, he found that the 
 work was very heavy and the reward light. In 1888 
 Mr T. P. O'Connor founded the Star, and the Fabians, 
 who were pervading everything, pervaded it. Shaw 
 became " Corno di Bassetto," the musical critic of 
 the new evening paper, with Clement Shorter, Richard 
 Le Gallienne, and A. B. Walkley as colleagues. 
 The work seemed like " the leisure of a Persian cat 
 after the labour of a cockney cab horse," and it took 
 him to the theatre as well as the concert-room. He 
 now had occasion to make his conception of art 
 precise and firm. In judging painters you cannot 
 speak much of moral purpose : in commenting on 
 operas you confront the issue. It was the period of 
 the Wagner controversy, and Shaw adopted Wagner 
 and found reasons for doing so. But it is better to 
 complete first the outline of his career. 
 
 In 1890 he wrote his " Quintessence of Ibsenism," 
 and became known as an enthusiast of the new type 
 of drama. In the same year he took the position of 
 musical critic to the World, and wrote criticisms in 
 other papers, such as Henley's Scot's Observer. His 
 indifference to traditions and his passion for reality 
 and sincerity gave his criticism a distinctive character, 
 and the Italian opera and the academic musicians 
 were vehemently attacked. In 1894, however, he 
 retired from the staff of the World, and in the follow- 
 
THE FUNCTION OF ART 143 
 
 ing year he began his Uvely and well-known period as 
 dramatic critic to the Saturday Review. He had 
 already written his first four plays, and in that year 
 he published his " Perfect Wagnerite " and " Sanity 
 of Art." He had now an original and very emphatic 
 conception of the function of art, and the " G. B. S. " 
 column of the Saturday Review became one of the 
 chief features of the journal. 
 
 When he resigned his position on the Saturday 
 Review in 1898, he recommended me to ask for it. 
 To my objection that, having just emerged from a 
 very inartistic monastery, I knew nothing about 
 art, he said : " That does not matter in the least." 
 One has only to look over his articles, republished in 
 his " Dramatic Opinions," to see how much it mattered. 
 It became a counsel in critical circles that when you 
 wished to attack " G. B. S." you must be very sure of 
 your case. His conception of art had become a 
 dogma, almost a religious belief, and the dramatic 
 production of Europe during those three years is 
 reviewed with the ease of conviction and a mastery 
 of technique. Popular idols were treated with little 
 courtesy, often with violence — when Hall Caine, for 
 instance, appeared. Irving and Sarah Bernhardt 
 and Rostand were treated like school-children ; 
 Sardou, Pinero, Barrie, and nearly all the most 
 appreciated playwrights, were sternly denounced. 
 Shakespeare was dissected and belaboured every few 
 months, and some of the most unpopular dramatists 
 in Europe were pressed on the public. 
 
 The root of Shaw's doctrine of art was, of course, 
 his asceticism. If beauty and happiness and enter- 
 tainment are by-products, every artist is perverse 
 who makes them his chief aim. Art for art's sake is 
 a truism to most artists : to Shaw it is the prostitution 
 
JL44 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 of a great power. " For art's sake alone," he says, 
 " I would not face the toil of writing a single sentence." 
 Incidental entertainment, a sugar-coating to the 
 sociological pill, is an amiable concession to a childlike 
 public, but a comedy without a purpose is a mean 
 thing and a mere depictment of life in drama or 
 tragedy, without a serious thought in the mind of the 
 pla5rwright, is an abuse of the theatre. Moreover, 
 the popular playwright never did depict life. He 
 gave us " stage combinations of Tappertitian romance 
 with the police intelligence." His work was a constant 
 love-story, but never told the true story of love. He 
 made the stage an instrument of sensuousness, a 
 flatterer of romance and illusion, a soporific for the 
 intelligence, a tickler of jaded nerves. 
 
 " Artist-philosophers are the only sort of artists 
 I take quite seriously," he said. He enumerated 
 Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth, Turner, Goethe, Shelley, 
 Schoperihauer, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoi, and 
 Nietzsche. As for such popular idols as Shakespeare 
 and Dickens, " in all their fictions there is no leading 
 thought or inspiration for which any man could con- 
 ceivably risk the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much 
 less his life." It will surprise many to hear Dickens 
 classed as an artist without a high aim, but it is really 
 the romance and artificiality of Dickens which irritate 
 him. Shakespeare I consider later. " Art," he says 
 (in " The Sanity of Art "), " should refine our sense 
 of character and conduct, of justice and sympathy, 
 greatly heightening our self-knowledge, self-control, 
 precision of action, and considerateness, and making 
 us intolerant of baseness, cruelty, injustice, and in- 
 tellectual superficiality or vulgarity." The moral 
 code has clearly gone out of the window to return 
 through the door. 
 
THE FUNCTION OF ART 145 
 
 But there is a deeper root to his conception of art 
 than asceticism of temperament. He applies his meta- 
 physic to the artist, and finds in him the embodiment 
 of a special purpose of the Life-Force. It seeks 
 consciousness of its purpose in the great artist, just 
 as it embodies its fecundity in woman. Hence the 
 different attitude of great and lesser artists toward 
 woman ; while the latter are absorbed in the charm 
 of her " illusory beauty," the former instinctively 
 fear her, moved by an antagonistic purpose. When 
 genius and woman meet there is a tragic clash, but 
 high art is produced, contrary to the general opinion, 
 by " people who are free from the otherwise universal 
 dominion of the tyranny of sex," and art is really 
 " the only department in which sex is a superseded 
 and secondary power, with its consciousness so con- 
 fused and its purpose so perverted, that its ideas are 
 mere fantasy to common men." Such a reflection 
 may naturally arise in defending the art of Tolstoi or 
 Ibsen or Strindb'erg or Nietzsche, but how far, or how 
 little, is it verified in the general history of art ? 
 Mr Shaw, the arch-foe of all academicians, is too fond 
 of basing statements on a theoretical speculation 
 rather than on a patient examination of facts. Great 
 artists rise above their fellows in the informing of 
 their work by an intellectual element, which makes 
 them something more than ministers to the aesthetic 
 or the voluptuary, but they are not generally those 
 types of genius in whom the purpose of the race is 
 most clearly formulated, and not generally antagon- 
 istic to woman. 
 
 But the list of twelve great artists in two hundred 
 years, which I have already quoted from Shaw, is 
 commentary enough on his attitude. He detests 
 the amorism and feminism of so much art, because 
 
146 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 art is to him the supreme power in life, and love and 
 pleasure are things too mean and petty to absorb it. 
 Art must serve greater purposes. Shaw credits him- 
 self with " the specific talent of the mountebank," 
 but disdains to use it merely for earning coppers. 
 He must use it to gather a crowd round the barrel 
 from which he preaches social righteousness. So each 
 great artist must use this specific talent, his particular 
 skill in combining sounds or colours or words. In 
 this feeling he set out to review the artists of his 
 time, and of previous times, and at last became 
 bimself a creative artist. It is useful to see how he 
 applies his principles to others before we examine 
 his own work. 
 
 His criticisms of Shakespeare are amongst the 
 most characteristic and least understood part of his 
 work. A few audacious phrases such as " greater 
 than Shakespeare," which are merely part of his 
 policy of vigorous or exaggerated expression, are 
 isolated from his essays and give a wrong impression. 
 In the main, he defends two propositions. The work 
 of Shakespeare is very uneven, and much of it is 
 thoroughly bad ; to the substance of that proposition 
 most serious students of Shakespeare assent. His 
 second theme is that Shakespeare was an inferior 
 artist because he was not a moralist and philosopher ; 
 and in that he does not so much oppose the current 
 artistic appreciation of Shakespeare's best work as 
 propose a new and generally rejected standard of 
 judgment. 
 
 One can gather from his pages quite an anthology 
 of eulogies of Shakespeare. " Twelfth Night " and 
 " A Midsummer Night's Dream " are " the crown 
 jewels of dramatic poetry," while " no man will ever 
 write a better tragedy than ' Lear.' " " Othello " is 
 
THE FUNCTION OF ART 147 
 
 ■" magnificent," and " there is no greater tragedy 
 than ' Macbeth '." It is the theatre-manager (who 
 " regards art as a quaint and costly ring in the nose 
 ■of Nature"), and the learned commentator (who looks 
 in Shakespeare for " propositions advanced by an 
 ■eminent lecturer from the Midlands ") that spoil 
 Shakespeare for us. When you read him, you find 
 that he is " unsurpassed as poet, story-teller, character 
 -draughtsman, humorist, and rhetorician." In a letter 
 to Tchertkoff on Tolstoi's opinion of Shakespeare 
 (in which he might have smitten Countolatry as well 
 as Bardolatry) he speaks of "his prodigious literary 
 power, his fun, his mimicry, and the endearing quali- 
 ties which have earned him the title of ' the gentle 
 Shakespeare.' " In the preface to Brieux he talks 
 •of " the great dramatists of the world from Euripides 
 and Aristophanes to Shakespeare and Moliere." In 
 " Dramatic Opinions " he says : "As far as sonority, 
 imagery, wit, himiour, energy of imagination, power 
 •over language, and a whimsically keen eye for idio- 
 syncrasies can make a dramatist, Shakespeare was 
 the king of dramatists " ; which is not far from 
 Bardolatry. 
 
 But mingled with these eulogies are more violent 
 ■criticisms than Voltaire or Tolstoi ever wrote. 
 " Cymbeline," the much-admired, is " for the most 
 part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, 
 in parts abominably written, throughout intel- 
 lectually vulgar, and, judged in point of thought by 
 modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offen- 
 sive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance." 
 Shakespeare " took his characters from the common 
 stockpot of melodramatic plots, so that Hamlet has 
 to be stim\ilated by the prejudices of a policeman 
 and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger." 
 
148 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 There is not a sentence put in Caesar's mouth that is 
 " worthy of an average Tammany boss." Strip 
 Shakespeare of his beauty of sound and his " miracles 
 of expression," and you find only " a platitude 
 that even an American professor of ethics would 
 blush to offer to his disciples." — nothing but " cant- 
 ing, snivelling, hypocritical unctuousness." He tells 
 Tchertkoff that he has done his best to open the 
 eyes of England to " the emptiness of Shakespeare's 
 philosophy, to the superficiality and secondhandness of 
 his morality, to his weakness and incoherence as a 
 thinker, to his snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his 
 ignorance, his disqualifications of all sorts for the 
 philosophic eminence claimed for him." " There are 
 moments," he wrote in the heat of the campaign, in 
 the Saturday Review, " when one asks despairingly, 
 why our stage should ever have been cursed with 
 this ' immortal ' pilferer of other men's stories and 
 ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his un- 
 bearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the 
 subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against 
 which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt, his 
 incredible unsuggestiveness, his sententious combina- 
 tion of ready reflection with complete intellectual 
 sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting 
 out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience 
 except when he solemnly says something so trans- 
 cendently platitudinous that his more humble-minded 
 hearers cannot bring themselves to believe that so 
 great a man really meant to talk like their grand- 
 mothers." 
 
 That is the indictment. It should be added that 
 the prosecuting counsel admits extenuating circum- 
 stances : the influence of a bad education and bad 
 companions. The Ehzabethan pubHc wanted patriotic 
 
THE FUNCTION OF ART 149 
 
 bombast, blood, romance, elevation of dukes and 
 ridicule of clowns ; and the Elizabethan poets and 
 dramatists give it. Incidentally, one wonders why 
 Shaw forgets this when he argues that there has been 
 no progress ; there is now a large public for Ibsen 
 and Shaw, and a very large public for Pinero, Jones, 
 and Barrie. However, Shakespeare was born into 
 this medieval world and followed its customs and its 
 " ruffianly pedants." He admits (in the preface to 
 " The Admirable Bashville ") that Shakespeare was 
 too great to follow them servilely. He adopted their 
 " rigmarole " and made it the vehicle of " a new order 
 of thought." But " the rigmarole could not stand 
 the strain, and Shakespeare's style ended in a chaos 
 of half-shattered old forms, half-emancipated new 
 ones, with occasional bursts of prose-eloquence on 
 the one hand, occasional delicious echoes of the 
 rigmarole, mostly from Calibans and masque person- 
 ages, on the other, with, alas ! a great deal of filling 
 up with formulary blank verse which had no purpose 
 except to save the author's time and thought." 
 
 Allowing for the fact that Shaw deliberately adopts 
 the pleading manner of Sergeant Buzfuz, we have 
 here a serious critical study. Shaw knew Shakespeare 
 well from beginning to end, long before he became 
 a dramatic critic. He admits enough to justify 
 sober Bardolatry, and has a good case against com- 
 mentators whom the difficulty of finding something 
 new to say has driven into admiration of Shakespeare's 
 depth and subtlety. He does not do justice to what 
 he curtly dismisses as " magic of words " and " com- 
 mand of imagery," for these things are the essence 
 of poetry, and in them Shakespeare is supreme. But 
 he admits them, and adds wit, eloquence, and superb 
 power in telling a story or depicting a character. 
 
150 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 His " pilfering " is not a serious fault, for Shaw has- 
 admittedly pilfered much. One has a public right to 
 steal a badly told story and tell it well. Many of his- 
 other defects are manufactured by judging Shake- 
 speare by " modern intellectual standards," and 
 expecting a man to be superior to snobbery and pre- 
 judice in Elizabethan England. A thinker might, 
 to some extent ; but Shakespeare was an artist. 
 
 There is the gist of the whole controversy. Shaw 
 says that a man cannot be a great artist without 
 being a thinker. Otherwise he is a showman, putting 
 " the human pig " before us very vividly but unable 
 to penetrate the real, internal principles of action. 
 " Description is not philosophy, and comedy neither 
 compromises the author nor reveals him." The 
 controversy is hopeless because it turns on a matter 
 of taste. Should the artist be a moralist or socio- 
 logist ? A sincere artist like Eden Phillpotts flatly 
 denies it. Art has a function which is not the function 
 of the moralist, and it implies a contempt of art as 
 such to say that it is of no value unless it be used for 
 moralising. It is the eternal battle of the Stoic and 
 the Epicurean, the Puritan and the Cavalier ; with 
 the added piquancy that here the Stoic and Puritan 
 is the great denier of duty and idealism. In short, 
 it is a philosophy based on a temperament and must 
 appeal in vain to men of a different temperament. 
 Shaw says that Bunyan and Ibsen were greater 
 artists than Shakespeare, and in the same sense un- 
 doubtedly regards his art as superior to that of 
 Shakespeare. We can easily admit that Bunyan, 
 Ibsen, and Shaw are greater moralists, yet retain 
 our " worship " of Shakespeare. The orily serious 
 points are, first, whether Shaw has not greatly exagger- 
 ated in declaring Shakespeare incapable of analysing 
 
THE FUNCTION OF ART 151 
 
 motives : and, secondly, whether he has not com- 
 pletely missed the moral evolution, or growth of 
 purpose, which is traceable in Shakespeare's plays. 
 
 The exaggeration is in this case more intelligible 
 than usual. Shaw, as a dramatic critic, was waging 
 war on behalf of certain modern artists whom the 
 other critics and the public rejected. There had 
 been a struggle over Whistler ; there was a struggle 
 over Wagner and Ibsen ; later came Rodin, Strauss, 
 and Brieux, knocking in vain at the doors of the 
 academy. Shaw championed them all, and he had 
 the exquisite pleasure of seeing them triumph. Think 
 of the effect in confirming his philosophy of art ! 
 The admirers of Brahms and Shakespeare and Pinero 
 had to admit that their standards were wrong, he said. 
 In any case, while the fight lasted he belaboured 
 their idols with language which to-day looks ex- 
 cessive, and which he has since admitted to be 
 excessive. 
 
 His defence of Wagner need not be considered at 
 length. He felt that Wagner was a genius, a supreme 
 artist in his sense of the word, and he contemptuously 
 went for the academicians who complained that his 
 technique was against the rules. The " laws " of 
 art are, like laws of nature or moral laws, summaries 
 of the customary procedure, and Shaw was not the 
 man to see genius enslaved by them. In the course 
 of his campaign, however, he elaborated a deeper 
 theory, which is chiefly set forth in his " Sanity of 
 Art." Nordau had quoted impressionism, Wagnerism, 
 and many other modern artistic movements among 
 the symptoms of European degeneration. The in- 
 sinuation was, in part, that the anarchy or rebellion 
 against authority which revealed itself in these move- 
 ments was an indication of disease, of febrility and 
 
152 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 madness. An American Anarchist editor, therefore, 
 B. Tucker, invited Shaw to reply in his journal, and 
 the article was afterwards published as " The Sanity 
 of Art." 
 
 Ignoring the question of consistency with his 
 general disdain of modern times, Shaw made a more 
 vigorous and effective reply to Nordau than any 
 optimist in Europe. He appeared as a " young 
 European," vindicating the strength and promise of 
 his generation against the laudator temforis acti. 
 He acknowledged that each of these pioneering 
 artistic movements had been followed by a wave of 
 weak imitation and discrediting excess, but the 
 movements themselves showed how the spirit of man 
 was gaining strength. In explanation of Wagnerism 
 he pointed out that music might be either merely 
 decorative or dramatic. The first is the ordinary 
 professional idea of music, the music of Brahms and 
 the French and Italian opera : " a graceful symmetrical 
 sound-pattern that exists solely for the sake of its 
 own grace and symmetry." Art for art's sake, .in 
 other words, which Shaw disdained. But it was 
 conceivable to use music " to heighten the expression 
 of human emotion," and the distinctive modern 
 movement, corresponding to the new dramatic move- 
 ment, is the realisation of this aim. Mozart began 
 the reform by a composition of both decorative and 
 dramatic music, and Wagner " completed the emanci- 
 pation of the dramatic musician from the laws of 
 pattern-designing." Wagner was a " tone-poet," and 
 " wanted his symphonic poems to express emotions 
 and their development." Conventional musicians 
 insisted in judging them by the laws of " sound- 
 patterns," and the pubhc had been trained in a feeling 
 for sound rather than for drama, so that Wagner was 
 
THE FUNCTION OF ART 153 
 
 simply regarded as bringing chaos into the musical 
 worid. 
 
 This was written in 1895, yet it sounds like an 
 answer in advance to the later controversy as to 
 whether Shaw's plays were plays. After so many 
 similar struggles, in which the initial prejudice was 
 generally defeated, Shaw can hardly avoid being 
 encouraged in his view of authority. He returned 
 to the subject in 1898, and wrote " The Perfect 
 Wagnerite." Here he does what he had scolded the 
 Shakespeare commentators for doing ; he finds in 
 Wagner " propositions advanced by a learned lecturer 
 from Germany." That Wagner, in the " Ring," is 
 consciously alluding to the religious and social 
 struggles of modern times is clear, but Shaw's minute 
 and Socialistic interpretation of his symbolism reads 
 like a commentary on " Revelations " or " Faust." 
 Probably the romantic element in Wagner, which 
 Shaw should have condemned but does not notice, 
 did more to reconcile the British public than Shaw's 
 defence. It is, however, now ancient history, and 
 he can look back with satisfaction on his champion- 
 ship of the rights of genius. On the broader issue 
 he can hardly be satisfied. He assailed the " de- 
 corative " musicians on the ground that they were the 
 ministers of " voluptuaries," and the voluptuaries now 
 enjoy Wagner as sensuously as they enjoy Gounod, 
 and ignore his gospel, or are ignorant that he 
 has one. 
 
 In the preface to his " Dramatic Opinions " Shaw 
 admits that in these old Saturday Review articles he 
 was at times unjust and exaggerated. The theatre 
 of his time refused admission to Ibsen, and so he 
 " laid siege to the theatre." He urged that Pinero 
 was " no interpreter of character," but an " adroit 
 
154 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 describer of people as the ordinary man sees and 
 judges them." Barrie, he said, had " no eye for 
 character " ; he " makes a pretty character as a 
 milUner makes a bonnet, by matching materials." 
 As to Hall Caine, he cruelly asked : " Who is Hall 
 Caine ? " By the time he wrote this he had himself 
 put scores of characters on the stage, and critics were 
 complaining that his psychology of character and 
 motive was utterly false and artificial. Instead of 
 basing his theory on facts, he based his facts on 
 theory : a theory of the comprehensive wicked- 
 ness of mankind. This we shall see later. For the 
 moment we must recall that his harsh judgments on 
 contemporary dramatists were partly due to his 
 championship of Ibsen. Clement Scott and most of 
 the other leading critics talked of Ibsen's obscenity, 
 brutality, dullness, ignorance of art, and defiance of 
 dramatic propriety. Shaw, as usual, belaboured 
 their idols in defence of his own. 
 
 His relation to Ibsen is less close than is generally 
 supposed. In the preface to " Major Barbara " he 
 says that he knew nothing about Ibsen " until years 
 after the Shavian Anschauung was already unequi- 
 vocably declared." In point of fact, the first un- 
 equivocal declaration of the Shavian philosophy is in 
 " The Quintessence of Ibsenism," for the writing of 
 which he studied the whole series of Ibsen's dramas. 
 At what earlier date he first read Ibsen it is impossible 
 to say, but in 1889, when he was a colleague of Walkley 
 on the Star, the " Doll's House " was produced in 
 London, and a furious controversy followed. In the 
 following year he gave for the Fabians the series of 
 lectures on Ibsen which were afterwards collected in 
 the book. There is, therefore, much better reason 
 to connect his name with that of Ibsen than with 
 
THE FUNCTION OF ART 155 
 
 those of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, neither of 
 whom he seems to have studied. 
 
 But instead of taking his philosophy from Ibsen 
 he reads his own ideas into the Scandinavian dramatist. 
 He analyses the series of plays and learns from them 
 that " the real slavery of to-day is a slavery to ideals 
 of virtue " and that the proper rebellion of to-day is 
 the rebellion against duty. To this conclusion he 
 had himself come in his old Zetetical Society days, 
 but he does some violence to Ibsen in making him a 
 complete Shavian. In Shaw's exposition of the 
 dramas Ibsen attacks the idealist as " a dangerous 
 animal " in each production. We saw that this 
 result is reached by confounding illusions and ideals, 
 and by stressing the evils which result from false 
 or obsolete ideals or from the fanatical sacrifice of 
 others for one's ideals. Ibsen is by no means always 
 attacking some type of idealist. He is pleading for 
 flexibility in one's conception of duty as opposed to 
 the theoretical rigour of conventional laws, for vitality 
 and freshness as opposed to ancient codes. Take the 
 " Doll's House," in which Shaw represents Helmer 
 as an idealist and Nora as a woman who sees through 
 his illusions. It is sheer abuse of words to call Helmer 
 an ideaUst, and the whole change in Nora is a piece 
 of dramatic fiction resulting from a convergence of 
 incidents which happens only on the stage. It is 
 useful to convey Ibsen's feminist gospel, which is not 
 so much a rebellion against duty as the preaching of 
 a higher duty. Take " An Enemy of the People," 
 in which Shaw sees an attack on political idealism. 
 The only idealist in the play is Dr Stockmann, whom 
 Ibsen assuredly does not attack ; while the selfish 
 and miserable crowd whom Stockmann defies are as 
 far from idealism as a gang of pickpockets. 
 
156 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 In the end Shaw observes that an act must be 
 judged, according to Ibsen, by its effect upon happi- 
 ness and not by a pre-existing rule or authority. It 
 is true that he explains this " happiness " as con- 
 sisting in the fulfilment of one's will, and so makes 
 Ibsen accept " the impulse to^yard greater freedom 
 as sufficient ground for the repudiation of any custom- 
 ary duty,"' but this is reading Shavianism into Ibsen. 
 The great work of Ibsen's life was to expose the misery 
 that is caused by narrow and antiquated views and 
 by the failure of most people to conform to their own 
 highest principles. You reduce life to an absurdity 
 if you say that Dr Stockmann in " An Enemy of the 
 People " should have yielded to his opponents. 
 Neither Ibsen nor Shaw would approve of a medical 
 man co-operating, for the sake of gain, with a gang of 
 of&cials and share-holders to maintain a dangerous 
 fraud on the community. But if you applaud Stock- 
 mann' s defiance on the ground that he is asserting 
 his own will, it is only because his will happens to 
 coincide with principles of honour and idealism. 
 The lower characters are just as true to the principle, 
 in itself, of asserting their own will. Ibsen scourges 
 the world, not for not following its will, but because 
 its will is not sound and moral. 
 
 We must make the inevitable exception in the case 
 of the moral control of sex-relations. Here, un- 
 doubtedly, Ibsen denies the authority or rigour of 
 the accepted code. Whether he would accept Shaw's 
 version of his idea, that it depends entirely on circum- 
 stances whether a woman be chaste or not, may be 
 doubted. He is far nearer to J. S. Mill than to Shaw : 
 he is an evolutionist and utilitarian. Shaw says that 
 Rationalists applaud Ibsen in spite of his individual- 
 istic defiance of their ethic. But Mill and many 
 
THE FUNCTION OF ART 157 
 
 another Rationalist would agree with Ibsen that 
 there was no rigid law of chastity. I do not mean 
 merely that in such a problem as that proposed by 
 Maeterlinck, where a woman may save the lives and 
 homes of a whole community by yielding to the hostile 
 commander, she should certainly do so. The fact is 
 that sex-morality is ' in process of reinterpretation ; 
 it needs to be rid of its transcendental and ascetic 
 elements before any utilitarian can logically accept it. 
 Ibsen was in this a perfectly logical utilitarian, and 
 there is no need whatever to import mysticism into 
 his philosophy. But it would be difficult to name 
 any other supposed moral command against which 
 Ibsen urged or palhated rebellion. We saw, in fact, 
 that Shaw is in the same position. He pitches the 
 whole of ethics out of the window, but reintroduces 
 every part of it except the old conception of chastity. 
 The great battle is very largely a sham fight. 
 
 Even in regard to philosophy, therefore, there is a 
 great difference between Shaw and Ibsen, and cer- 
 tainly there is no question of Shaw having taken 
 inspiration from the older dramatist. There is much 
 the same difference in regard to dramatic form. It 
 did not need the example of Ibsen to dispose Shaw 
 to produce dramas with a purpose ; he could not 
 have produced anything else. In the actual pro- 
 duction he differs enormously from Ibsen. The great 
 Scandinavian falls in the line of the world's most 
 powerful dramatists ; he lets the incidents and char- 
 acters convey a message for the reader or spectator 
 to gather. The ribs on which he has put artistic 
 flesh do not stick out, as in Shaw's dramas ; there 
 are no sociological disquisitions or intellectual debates. 
 In fact, Shaw severely blames Ibsen for following 
 the conventional rules of play- writing. "I prefer 
 
158 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 my own plays to his in some respects," he says. 
 Ibsen is apt to crown his picture of drab or unhappy 
 life with a murder or a suicide. Shaw thinks the play 
 would be " sadder and more convincing " if those 
 were omitted, because " the tragedy of modern life is 
 -that nothing happens, and that the resultant dullness 
 does not kill." In any case, he regards " endings," 
 happy or unhappy, to stories as conventional, and 
 -will not have them. Ibsen might say that art is not 
 photography, and that, if you would compress a life 
 or a tragedy into a three hours' performance, you 
 must use conventions. 
 
 The fundamental difference between the dramas 
 ■of Ibsen and Shaw is that Ibsen's are almost totally 
 devoid of conscious himiour, while Shaw's would 
 never have found a wide public but for their wit and 
 fun and epigram. To the general public Shaw's 
 plays are comedies ; Ibsen's are very grim tragedies. 
 Shaw's gospel can be overlooked, and no doubt gener- 
 ally is overlooked. Press and public classify his 
 ■dramas, as they appear, as dull or Shavian, and their 
 iate is determined. I sat recently on a platform 
 irom which Dr Brandes lectured, with Shaw in the 
 <:hair. Eighty per cent, of the crowded audience had 
 come to hear a witty speech from Mr Shaw, and then 
 listen with painful resignation and perplexity to a 
 learned dissertation on Nietzsche ; and the press, 
 next day, gave a verbatim report of Mr Shaw's speech 
 and condensed Dr Brandes into a few lines. Ibsen 
 ■commands attention by his dramatic qualities alone. 
 I am not, of course, contending that tragedy is 
 superior to comedy, but showing that there is hardly 
 a parallel between the two artists. 
 
 The last European dramatist whose cause in 
 England Shaw has espoused is Brieux, who is much 
 
THE FUNCTION OF ART 159 
 
 closer to himself. Shaw declares him to be the 
 greatest dramatist in Europe (" west of Russia " — 
 Tolstoi was then alive) since the death of Ibsen, and 
 ■" incomparably the greatest writer France has pro- 
 duced since Voltaire." Such an estimate is, of course, 
 inspired by his peculiar conception of art. Not the 
 presentment of life on the stage or in fiction, but the 
 interpretation of life, is " the highest function that 
 man can perform." It is now admitted, even in 
 France, that Brieux is an able dramatist, but Shaw 
 is not judging him on artistic standards. He applauds 
 him as " a ruthless revealer of hidden truths and a 
 mighty destroyer of idols." Brieux is less patently 
 propagandist than Shaw, and dramatically less con- 
 ventional than Ibsen. But he puts on the stage 
 scenes and characters which suggest problems 
 (marriage, Malthusianism, etc.) to the audience, and 
 he is almost as merciless as Shaw in depicting the 
 middle-class home. Here is the mess you are in, he 
 seems to say : find your way out of it. To do this 
 with the technical skill of the dramatist is Shaw's 
 conception of great art. 
 
 I therefore bring to a close this lengthy analysis 
 of his ideas, and approach his dramas. They are not 
 merely pervaded by his philosophy, but, as we now 
 see, it is his conviction that they must embody his 
 views. Archer once greatly annoyed him by con- 
 tending that he was an artist on the ground that an 
 artist is " a purveyor of pleasure." Whether his 
 dramas or comedies have done much more than purvey 
 pleasure cannot be examined here, but they cannot 
 be understood unless it is realised that he despises 
 such a conception of art. His supreme function is 
 to tell the English people what he thinks of them. 
 He pretends that his view is valuable because he has 
 
160 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 normal eyes, but it is more helpful to notice that he 
 has an abnormal temperament and an abnormal 
 philosophy. In the artist it is the temperament that 
 sees, not the eye ; and when, the temperament is 
 encouraged by being elevated into a philosophy, the 
 artist is apt to be very emphatic. This is what Shaw 
 has done. He has the rare temperament of an ascetic 
 rebel, a painfully moral immoralist, an anaemic artist, 
 a most orderly anarchist. He differs from everybody, 
 and, while proclaiming the supremacy of the individual 
 will, woiild erect his own standard of life into a moral 
 code of the most stringent nature for his fellows. 
 He justifies this by imagining a Life-Force which 
 only attains clear consciousness in the man of genius. 
 So he formulates its commands and purposes — ^be- 
 comes a moral legislator (for you must not follow 
 your will if it differs from his) — and soundly rates 
 his fellows for not living up to them. That is " the 
 Shavian Anschauung." 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 
 
 Shaw has told the story of his dramaturgic beginning 
 with a candour which has pleased his critics. In 
 1885, the year in which he turned from the writing of 
 futile novels to the criticism of paintings, he and 
 WiUiam Archer conceived a grandiose idea of a new 
 and very much plainer " Rheingold." They were 
 both Socialists and Wagnerites. Why not use the 
 dramatic art of Wagner to draw attention to specific 
 social problems ? The two young men probably 
 found many things when they began to collaborate, 
 but it is enough that they found they had not the art 
 of a Wagner. Two acts were written, and were laid 
 aside. From pictures Shaw wandered to music, 
 and from music to drama. Meantime 'he had become 
 keenly interested in the Independent Theatre Society, 
 which was putting on the stage in London plays which 
 the ordinary manager would not produce : plays 
 which were too correct artistically or too incorrect 
 morally — people were a little- confused — for the 
 general public. These plays, in which Shaw naturally 
 took the deepest interest, ran for several years without 
 any English pla3rwright contributing to the repertory. 
 So in 1892 Shaw announced that he would redeem 
 the honour of the United Kingdom, and he looked 
 up the dusty manuscript of his Socialist drama. 
 
 Critics declare, in effect, that the genuine drama 
 is born, not made. The dramatic artist must be im- 
 
 , 161 
 
162 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 pelled by his nature, or native art, to produce a drama. 
 He must supply his own wants, not the wants of cir- 
 cumstances. From that day to this, therefore, there 
 has been a heated discussion of the question : Are 
 Shaw's plays plays ? They have, in cases, been 
 described by competent critics as dramatic master- 
 pieces ; and they have been described by equally 
 competent critics as clever intellectual constructions 
 which, as Cyril Maude says, show how the author 
 would have succeeded in any other walk of life. 
 Perhaps Shaw himself gives the best answer. In the 
 " Induction " to " Fanny's First Play " the critic 
 implores her not to claim that such things are plays. 
 " No, they are not plays," she laughs, as if she were 
 soothing a child ; and she plainly means : " Not in 
 your sense of the word." The remarkable thing is 
 that Shaw did not years ago, or from the start, refuse 
 to call them plays, and flagellate any person who did. 
 If, he might have said, you mean by a play a piece of 
 art for art's sake, or entertaiimient's sake, or money's 
 sake, please give my work a different name. He 
 did not do this, because he wanted to show how plays 
 should be written and were not. 
 
 The discussion of such a question is futile in itself, 
 but it serves to bring out the peculiarities of Shaw's 
 dramatic productions. He frames four principal 
 canons of procedure. First, and above all, the 
 dramatist must have a serious purpose. All round 
 him people were flocking nightly to musical comedies, 
 sensational melodramas, drawing-room plays, and 
 all the other devices for enabling them to enjoy their 
 own emotions for a few hours. Whether or no enter- 
 tainment has a legitimate place in life, Shaw was not 
 going to provide entertainment alone. The stage 
 must be an improvement on the pulpit. The preacher 
 
PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 163 
 
 points back to ancient Judaea : the dramatist must 
 usher in the dawning Ught of the new age. " Dis- 
 cernible at first only by the eyes of the man of genius, 
 it must be focussed by him on the speculum of a 
 work of art, and flashed back from that into the eyes 
 of the common man. Nay, the artist himself has 
 no other way of making himself conscious of the ray : 
 it is by a blind instinct that he keeps on building up 
 his masterpieces until their pinnacles catch the glint 
 of the unrisen sun." So he speaks even of his first 
 series of plays. But this first and most imperious 
 canon follows from what we have already seen, and 
 we need not enlarge on it. 
 
 The second canon, which is almost peculiar to Shaw 
 and is the chief cause of the discussion whether he is 
 or is not a dramatist, is that he will appeal to the 
 intellect. A great dramatist appeals to the intellect 
 indirectly, by exhibiting scenes and conduct from 
 which the spectator wiU draw a moral. An American 
 writer has claimed that Shaw does this, but he has 
 too little belief in the intelligence of playgoers to 
 leave his message implicit. This is particularly 
 apparent in his earlier dramas, but to the very end 
 some of his characters give little lectures to the 
 audience and the dialogue is largely argumentative. 
 One cannot help noticing, in passing, how little con- 
 sistent all this is with his academic theory of the 
 priority of will and the unimportance of reason. 
 Whenever he has to deal with humanity in the flesh, 
 he appeals to the intellect : the will may be trusted 
 to follow. The chief point is, however, that he is 
 attempting a new form of drama. It would be 
 ridiculous to compare him with ordinary dramatists. 
 He is rather in the line of Aristophanes and Moliere, 
 who wrote comedies of character with a purpose. 
 
164 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 But his naked intellectuaJism carries him far away 
 even from these. They aim at provoking sentiment 
 (in the traditional conception of drama) about things 
 which are known to the audience. Shaw aims at 
 convincing them intellectually of things they do not 
 know, or they dispute. The thesis is not hidden. 
 Hamon, in his recent and able analysis of Shaw's 
 plays (" Le Moliere du xx™° Si^cle "), has difficulty 
 at this point. One wonders how Shaw likes his con- 
 tention that Shaw is an " absolute artist " because 
 he is a " great dispenser of pleasure." So is a pros- 
 titute, Shaw would say. 
 
 Which brings us to the third canon ; that wit and 
 pimiour and fun and burlesque must be lavishly 
 tused to sugar-coat the moral or sociological pill. " By 
 laughter only can you destroy evil without malice, 
 and affirm good fellowship without mawkishness," he 
 says. That is rather what he would call, if he were 
 analysing another person, an excuse masquerading 
 as a motive. He has not been particularly scrupulous 
 to avoid malice in attacking evil, and not been con- 
 spicuous for the affirmation of good-fellowship. The 
 truth is that he found by early lecturing experience 
 that the man who can make a crowd laugh gets a 
 crowd. You can tell the general public almost any- 
 thing if you tickle its ribs in the telling ; whether it 
 pays much attention to your serious advice is another 
 matter. To this day large audiences gather to hear 
 Mr Shaw ridictile England and Englishmen. They 
 have heard the joke hundreds of times, but as long 
 as he can put a little variation into it, another little 
 facet on it, they will enjoy it ; and they have not the 
 least idea that Shaw can seriously mean what he 
 says when, of the type of men and women whom, he 
 would call useful, England produces twenty to each 
 
PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 165 
 
 one born in Scotland, and a hundred to each one born 
 in Ireland. However, the jester was always privileged, 
 and, as Shaw had very unpleasant things to say, he put 
 on the cap and bells, and exploited his humorous vein 
 to the last ounce. He discovered that he was a genius 
 in humour and dedicated it to the service of his god. 
 The fourth canon is realism. His antithesis of 
 realism and idealism is wrong. Illusions are not 
 ideals, and a passion for justice is not realism. He 
 is a realist in the sense of the new dramatic school ; 
 you must put slices of life on the stage, not new 
 combinations of old stage-plots and property-char- 
 acters. It was his chief formal criticism of the exist- 
 ing drama that it did not reflect real life, as it pre- 
 tended to do. It encouraged people to think that 
 the excuses for their conduct were their real motives ; 
 it omitted altogether the " significant " (the un- 
 pleasant and censurable) facts of life ; it created 
 false pathos and ended in a sterile riot of emotion 
 which left no trace after a night's sleep ; it either 
 dealt with characters and scenes remote from the 
 experience of the audience or, if it put the audience 
 themselves on the stage, it represented them as very 
 good fellows. Shaw thought that they were very 
 bad fellows, and it was his duty to tell them so. It 
 was intolerable to have the bourgeoisie meeting night 
 after night in darkened chambers to have its senses 
 tickled and its good opinion of itself enhanced. They ~ 
 must be reminded how dreadfully unhappy their 
 homes were, by what shady means they raised the 
 money to go to the theatre, what slums and brothels 
 lay off the track of their wanderings, and so on. 
 Instead of feeding their sensuousness he would let his 
 blows " fall on human noses for the good of human 
 souls." 
 
166 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 And this fourth canon of dramatic art, which was 
 to make Shaw the colleague of Ibsen, was his undoing. 
 He has too much imagination for realism. It is one 
 of his peculiar ideas that he prefers photography to 
 painting, but he scarcely ever photographs life in 
 his drama. He is not merely an artist, but an im- 
 pressionist, and he receives his impression of life on 
 anything but a true mirror. He calls himself a 
 " meliorist," and one wonders whether he does not 
 mean by meliorism simply a belief that the world 
 could be vastly better than it is. J. Huneker says 
 that he dramatises like a vestryman ; he sees all the 
 drains that need repairing but does not see the pleasant 
 and good things. It would be strange if it were other- 
 wise in view of his extraordinary isolation in opinions, 
 his peculiarly ascetic estimate of emotion and sensuous- 
 ness, and his intensely personal standards of living. 
 If he put real life on the stage, people would not be 
 moved. There are not likely to be many owners of 
 slum-property, or shareholders in brothels, or manu- 
 facturers of guns, amongst his audience. Let him 
 put the audience themselves on, as they are, and they 
 will not regard themselves as a bad lot on the whole. 
 Shaw is determined that they shall think themselves 
 a bad lot, so he exaggerates and caricatures. He 
 has done what he accuses the " idealists " of doing : 
 he has put a mask on reality, but not a pretty mask. 
 
 You see this at once when you compare the opinions 
 of a dozen competent critics in regard to his characters. 
 Are they true to life ? You find such an extraordinary 
 diversity of views that you wonder whether the 
 writers are living in isolation from human society. 
 Mr Desmond M'Carthy thinks that Shaw's women are 
 " astonishingly real " ; Mr Walkley says that they 
 are detestable automata, with no flesh and blood ; 
 
PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 167 
 
 M. Huneker tells us to look at their feet ; M. Hamon 
 says that they are more real than the reality ; 
 Mr A. Symons says that they are clockwork-figures ; 
 Dr Henderson says that they are quite natural in the 
 sense that natural people would act as they do. I 
 need not quote unfriendly critics. His men are 
 similarly disputed. Huneker thinks the Shavian 
 man " a curious combination of blackguard, philos- 
 opher, bounder, artist, and comedian " ; M. Hamon 
 thinks his men are correct class-types drawn " a la 
 Holbein " ; and so on. Some hold that he has 
 the keenest eye for idiosyncrasies in real character 
 since Shakespeare ; some hold that he is the greatest 
 caricaturist since Moliere. 
 
 But one generally finds that the defender of Shaw's 
 realism in character presently makes some reserve 
 or other. M. Hamon, for instance, the most patient 
 analyist, if somewhat obsessed by the comparison 
 with Moliere, admits in the end that Shaw's characters 
 do not properly correspond to real people. Shaw 
 professes to have improved on nature by laying bare 
 in his characters the real motives of action, which 
 are concealed in actual life. The truth is that he 
 has imputed motives, to a very large extent, which 
 do not exist. There are a few cases in which he has 
 scored over his critics. When he introduced a very 
 unromantic soldier in " Arms and the Man," and the 
 critics raged, he proved that he had a fairly large 
 literature of military biography to support him. 
 Such cases are exceptional ; the soldier is one of the 
 most natural characters in the world to attract a 
 romantic estimate. As a rule, he imputes mean 
 motives more freely than we find them in real life, 
 or intellectual motives (especially to women) which 
 are very rare. At one time he improves a character 
 
168 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 in order to show us how people ought to think ; at 
 another time he degrades a character in order to 
 convince us how very necessary it is to breed a new 
 race and not waste time tinkering with such inferior 
 stuff. Yet he often puts live and plausible characters 
 on the stage, and any generalisation about his char- 
 acters is bound to be inaccurate. He generally ex- 
 aggerates, constructs, or enhances ; and he has himself 
 admitted that a good deal of machinery will be found 
 in some of his best characters at the post-mortem 
 examination. 
 
 He further departs from his canon of realism, and 
 from ordinary stage-practice, by reducing action, or 
 making it farcical and disjointed, and exaggerating 
 dialogue. But a critic would waste his time in dis- 
 cussing how far in such matters Shaw departs from 
 the recognised rules — that is to say, practices — of the 
 theatre. He does not pretend to follow them. He 
 is using the theatre for his own purpose, and the 
 critics and the public may call the performance what 
 they will. In fact, here again it is quite unsafe to 
 generalise. Such a play as " Getting Married " is a 
 debate on marriage set in a slight and fantastic 
 dramatic frame : such a play as " The Shewing-up of 
 Blanco Posnet " is an exaggerated melodrama, carry- 
 ing conventional action to extremes ; and you have 
 all shades between the two. As a rule, it may be said, 
 he reUes on conversation and has little artistic feeling 
 for the rest. 
 
 He has been severely criticised for his treatment 
 of emotion, and it can hardly be said that in this he 
 Is a realist. You may fairly argue that people conceal 
 their motives, but the expression of emotion is usually 
 spontaneous. Shaw's conception of emotion seems 
 to be more or less that of an explosive : it is either 
 
PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 169 
 
 dead or very much alive. He exaggerates violent 
 emotion, and lets it out on very little provocation ; 
 and he largely ignores normal emotion. It chiefly 
 appears in people losing their tempers. One has to 
 remember that on the stage and in the novel the treat- 
 ment of emotion is false, romantic, and unctuous to 
 an appalling extent, and Shaw began his work with 
 a fierce hostility to this. Not having a normally 
 emotional character — which does not in the least 
 mean that he has no emotions — he passed to the 
 other extreme. There is plenty of emotion in his 
 plays, but it is not copied from life, and it is too often 
 an emotion at which we are invited to laugh : the 
 middle-class man's sense of outrage when a convention 
 is broken, the middle-class man's bad temper at 
 home, the middle-class man's patriotism, cupidity, 
 and so on. 
 
 The weakness is seen most clearly in Shaw's treat- 
 ment of love. Here lay his greatest grievance against 
 the existing drama. It depicted love-making as 
 persistently as if it were either the most amusing 
 thing in the world or the most serious ; and, according 
 to Shaw, it never gave a true picture of love-making. 
 But he was himself totally unfitted to put love on 
 the stage. He blamed dramatists for making love 
 voluptuous, yet held that it was in reality voluptuous, 
 and ought not to be. He analysed " falling in love " 
 as, partly sensual desire, partly pretence, and partly 
 a result of illusions ; and in the end he recognised in it 
 one of the gravest communications of his Life-Force. 
 His love-making is compounded of malicious observa- 
 tion and metaphysical theory. Nearly all his admirers 
 admit that it is a failure. Imagination is a poor 
 substitute for experience in matters of passion, but 
 intellect is still feebler. The conventional drama is 
 
170 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 far nearer to life than he is in passion. In fact, it 
 would be a painful reflection on his Life-Force to 
 take seriously such falling in love as he describes in 
 the great majority of his plays. 
 
 But I repeat that there is more risk than profit in 
 generalising about Shaw's plays and characters. The 
 characters he has created are remarkable for their 
 variety, and most of them are individualised with a 
 gift of precise drawing which naturally gives many 
 the illusion of reality. His plots and themes also are 
 remarkable for diversity and range of imagination, 
 and cannot intelligibly be discussed except in detail. 
 It is often said that he intellectually traces the channels 
 along which the sentiment and action must run, but 
 he delights in laying traps for critics who make these 
 general statements. He sometimes adopts every 
 device of the ordinary playwright ; sometimes even 
 caricatures his own manner. Beyond the few general 
 features I have indicated, therefore, and a few technical 
 peculiarities (such as his refusal to divide an act into 
 scenes) which need not be discussed, it is unprofitable 
 to deal with his works as a whole, and we may briefly 
 review them. 
 
 The origin of the first, " Widowers' Houses," has 
 already been described. It was written to supply a 
 defect in the repertory of Mr Grein and the Independent 
 Theatre ; it was intended to be a drama without 
 romance, and with a sociological purpose. The par- 
 ticular theme is, as is well known, the discovery by 
 the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, who travel 
 in luxury and flirt for occupation, that their comfort 
 and leisure are based on dishonourable profit ; in this 
 case, on the ownership of slums. Shaw described it 
 afterwards as a realistic exposure, in dramatic form, 
 of slum-ownership, municipal jobbery, and the callous- 
 
PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 171 
 
 ness of the middle-class in deriving comfortable 
 incomes from such things. His Socialistic admirers 
 loudly applauded the " exposure " ; the critics and 
 artistic pubUc loudly condemned the art ; and the 
 general public indignantly repudiated the whole 
 business. William Archer, who had co-operated in 
 the earlier (and better) part, said that it proved the 
 power of Shaw's brain and the futility of his dramatic 
 ambition ; the characters had whey, instead of blood, 
 in their veins. 
 
 That there was far too much theme and far 
 too little art is almost universally acknowledged ; , 
 Dr Henderson alone sees in it a masterpiece spoiled 
 by social zeal. This was inevitable at the time. The 
 play was in part an election-manifesto, on behalf of 
 the Progressives of the London County Council, and 
 Shaw's dramatic faculty was very immature. It was 
 as offensively propagandist as a temperance-play or 
 an early Christian tragedy written by a clergyman. 
 But there were graver faults than the over-prominence 
 of its social gospel, and these are of greater interest. 
 It is hardly likely that there were any slum-owners 
 in the stalls, and not very likely that there were any 
 in the theatre who were ignorant of the existence of 
 slum-property. What was resented, and is the more 
 serious defect, is that from beginning to end the play 
 was an offensive caricature of the middle-class. To 
 judge from the data in Booth's " Life and Labour in 
 London," such property is so rare — ^was so rare 
 twenty years ago — that a Sartorius must have been 
 too isolated a type for dramatic representation. 
 Shaw made the moral more comprehensive by de- 
 picting the whole of his characters as brutally selfish. 
 All his men are cads, and the one woman, Blanche 
 Sartorius, is rather a beast. 
 
172 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 The first act, which holds dramatic promise, is 
 spoiled by the appearance at once of the now familiar 
 Shavian motifs : woman pursuing man, ludicrous 
 snobbery, tainted incomes, etc. It is caricature, not 
 realism. The second act is dramatically intolerable : 
 almost devoid of incident, full of prosy didactic 
 speeches, fuller still of the villainy and callousness of 
 the middle class. The third act is not much better. 
 Of wit there is none, as no Shavian hero is introduced ; 
 and the humour is slight and infrequent, except for 
 those who would enjoy the caricature. The play 
 was a dramatic failure, quite apart from the prejudices 
 of a London audience. It was withdrawn after the 
 second performance, and no amount of later en- 
 thusiasm for Shaw has recalled it to life. 
 
 One must read with some reserve Shaw's assurance 
 that he " at once became infamous as a dramatist." 
 He was little known at the time, and the brief incident 
 only gave him a momentary interest as a Socialist 
 who would be a dramatist and could not. Shaw 
 thought differently ; and indeed the general verdict 
 was undiscriminating, for there are good features in 
 the play. He at once set to work on another drama, 
 and in the following year (1893) produced " The 
 Philanderers." 
 
 In this he completely suspends his purpose of 
 composing sociological drama. He had been accused 
 of imitating Ibsen, and he replied with a caricature of 
 Ibsenism as many young people conceived it and 
 older people dreaded it. He afterwards said that 
 his purpose was to expose " the grotesque sexual 
 compacts made between men and women under 
 marriage laws which represent to some of us a political 
 necessity (especially for other people), to some a 
 divine ordinance, to some a romantic ideal, to some 
 
PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 173 
 
 a domestic profession for women, and to some that 
 worst of blundering abominations, an institution 
 which society has outgrown but not modified, and 
 which ' advanced ' individuals are therefore forced 
 to evade." This is scarcely an accurate description, 
 as there is little attack on marriage in the play. It 
 is a play with the not very serious purpose of making 
 fun of women who fancy themselves emancipated 
 Ibsenists and elderly men (including Clement Scott) 
 who regard the spreading cult with horror : a topical 
 light comedy, as the Ibsen controversy was then at 
 its height. The plot is again extremely slender, but 
 the dialogue is greatly improved and has occasional 
 sparkles of the coming wit and paradox. The play 
 exists, in fact, for the sake of the dialogue, and char- 
 acters of a higher intellectual type are introduced 
 than in the preceding play. Charteris, the philanderer, 
 is a very finished construction, but too obviously a 
 construction : a Shaw with his psychological outfit 
 modified to fit the piece. The Ibsenite sisters, Julia 
 and Sylvia Craven, are crude and fantastic, but the 
 older men are only touched lightly with the brush of 
 Shavian caricature. Grace Cuthbertson, the more 
 or less womanly woman, is the only pleasant figure, 
 the only character with normal good sense. 
 
 The play is, in fact, only interesting as an advance 
 in the direction of the amusing dialogue which was 
 to be his later forte. There is some fine irony and 
 much acute observation ; though this material of 
 observation seems to be used in making characters 
 precisely in the way Shaw had ascribed to Sir J. M. 
 Barrie. But the element of satire and caricature is 
 too heavy. The medical man, Dr Paramore, is loaded 
 with Shaw's disdain of the profession, and the Ibsen 
 Club and all its members are so consistently ridiculed 
 
174 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 that admirers of Ibsen thought Shaw had fallen away 
 from the cult. He clearly turned from Ibsen as a 
 distant model to Moliere as a distant model, and 
 again missed his aim by lack of restraint and subtlety. 
 The comedy failed as completely as " Widowers' 
 Houses." Grein politely discovered that it was 
 beyond the capacity of his players, and the theatres 
 which were supposed to have actors capable of 
 doing justice to it would not entertain it. It was 
 merely produced in order to secure the theatrical 
 rights, and it remains to this day, in spite of an attempt 
 to revive it, almost unknown on the stage. 
 
 Shaw had written five novels in succession despite 
 the disdainful reception of his manuscripts, and two 
 theatrical failures were not Hkely to daunt him. He 
 returned to the didactic model, and in the same year 
 (1893) completed " Mrs Warren's Profession." Now 
 for the first time he began to hear serious encourage- 
 ment. Archer thought it impracticable for the stage, 
 but " intellectually and dramatically one of the most 
 remarkable plays of the age," and other critics were 
 now convinced that Shaw was a coming dramatist. 
 The sociological theme did not overshadow the dramatic 
 elements so completely as in " Widowers' Houses," 
 the dialogue was nearer human conversation than 
 in " The Philanderer," and the action was carried 
 at times to the pitch of melodrama. The characters 
 were precise, piquant, and varied, and there were 
 emotional crises of real human interest. Critics 
 chiefly blamed it because even the tragic parts were 
 sometimes marred by bits of levity which bordered 
 on farce, but this could hardly be ascribed to a defect 
 of artistic feeling. Shaw felt the central tragedy of 
 the play keenly enough, but beUeved that fun should 
 be introduced in and out of season to captivate the 
 
PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 175 
 
 British public. The result is certainly incongruous, 
 and, at times, artistically repellent. 
 
 More conservative critics and the public condemned 
 or ignored it on the ground that prostitution and 
 brothel-keeping were not a fit subject for the theatre. 
 On that p6int one can only say that you are not com- 
 pelled to go to a theatre, as you are compelled to go 
 to church, and those who dislike the text or its treat- 
 ment may stay away. It is a more serious defect 
 that the text of the play is unsound. In a reply 
 which Shaw made to some stringent criticisms that 
 were passed on it, in the United States he said that 
 his object was to burn in the fact that " you cannot 
 cheapen women in the market for industrial purposes 
 without cheapening them for other purposes as well." 
 It is, however, not a fact that women are generally 
 driven to prostitution by economic conditions ; they 
 take to it, as a rule, because they like it and are blind 
 to the squalid future of so many, or because, like 
 picking pockets, it is easier than disciplined work 
 for eight hours a day. Hence the attack on the 
 conditions of female labour is enfeebled, and the 
 right to assert one's will to prosper in circumstances 
 which are adverse to morality is not sustained. The 
 second act is drowned in argument and speech-making 
 on the subject, starting from this unsound principle. 
 And the second argument of the play, the tainted- 
 money theme, miscarries altogether. Instead of 
 putting on the stage the type of character whom we 
 know from police-proceedings to be involved in these 
 things, Shaw defiantly introduces an English baronet. 
 He weakens his case by such improbabilities. 
 
 In the characterisation also he weakens his case, 
 didactically, by his customary excess. M. Hamon 
 contends that Shaw's male characters are correct as 
 
176 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 class-types. One may trust that the audiences 
 which have greatly applauded " Mrs Warren's Pro- 
 fession " in many continental cities — ^it was recently 
 (November 1913) received with great enthusiasm at 
 Venice — do not share this impression. Mrs Warren 
 herself is, as Shaw claims, " a genial and fairly pre- 
 sentable old blackguard of a woman " : quite plausible 
 but necessarily an imagined creature. Her daughter, 
 Vivie, is described by Walkley as "an insufferable 
 little Girton prig," and by Huneker as " a chilly, 
 waspish prig." It may be said that the situation in 
 which she is placed, by discovering that her mother 
 has made a lady of her out of brothel-proceeds, would 
 tend to bring out that character in a strong and 
 straight girl. But she is undoubtedly metallic and 
 unlikely. The comparison with Ibsen's Nora, which 
 is sometimes made, is not justified. Nora's com- 
 plete transformation is not wholly plausible, but she 
 is far more human than Vivie Warren. One can just 
 conceive her as a fine character put in circumstances 
 which are too much for her, and for her creator. 
 
 The men-characters are as far from being typical as 
 they could be. There is a baronet who is associated 
 in business with Mrs Warren, and is, even apart from 
 that freak of imagination, the kind of brute who 
 would be tolerated only in the lowest sporting circles ; 
 and the other principal male is a clergyman who 
 retains after middle age, in a coimtry vicarage, his 
 youthful taste for drink and looseness. The other 
 male is a stock Shavian character : highly respect- 
 able and unintelligent. Shaw is again laughing at the 
 middle class, by means of caricature. You cannot 
 dispute a dramatist's right to do that, but you may 
 very justly protest when he says that such a play is 
 nearer to real life than the plays of Pinero or Barrie. 
 
PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 177 
 
 The play was barred in England on account of its 
 theme, and the Independent Theatre lost hope of 
 finding a representative of the new drama in Shaw. 
 It has been privately performed. Ten years after- 
 wards, when Shaw became popular in the United 
 States, " Mrs Warren's Profession " was presented 
 in New York, and was stopped by the authorities on 
 the ground of immorality. The legal proceedings 
 ended in acquittal, but the press played the censor 
 severely wherever it was performed. In Kansas 
 City the actress who took the part of Mrs Warren 
 was prosecuted for indecency. Shaw made a vigorous 
 defence of it, especially when one of the New York 
 journals which had denounced him was convicted 
 of inserting advertisements of loose houses. Such 
 experiences confirmed his charge of hypocrisy. The 
 play has had a good run at Berlin, Paris, Rome, and 
 other capitals. After the recent first performance 
 at Venice the actors were called before the curtain 
 sixteen times ! 
 
 Undaunted by the complete failure of the three 
 plays and the defection of Mr Grein, but encouraged 
 by many assm^ances that he had at last found his 
 dramatic talent, Shaw immediately set to work on 
 a fourth. He now entirely deserted sociology, em- 
 braced most of the conventions of dramatic pro- 
 duction, and wrote one of his first successful plays, 
 "Arms and the Man" (1894). The serious purpose 
 was an exposure of ideals (illusions) in regard to 
 warfare and soldiers, and it was possible to attain 
 this by a comedy of action and character without 
 any long speeches or argumentative discussion. The 
 scene is placed in Bulgaria, and the mouthpiece of 
 Shaw is a delightfully blunt and pjosaic Swiss soldier, 
 Bluntschli, who makes short work of the Bulgarian 
 
 M 
 
178 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 maiden's illusions. The musical comedy " The 
 Chocolate Soldier," which was founded on it, has 
 made the plot and characters familiar. The critics 
 who came to criticise made fun of his Bulgaria and 
 his prosy soldier, but Shaw was able to make a very 
 substantial defence. Whether there are many officers' 
 daughters of the age and intelligence of Raina who 
 take their ideas from romantic melodrama,* and 
 whether there are many officers in active service as 
 broody and mock-heroic as her lover Saranoff, may 
 be doubted. Bluntschli, the practical, unromantic 
 officer, would be a probable enough figure to most 
 people. 
 
 In any case, there were no serious social problems 
 sticking out of the play, and the action ran smoothly 
 and humorously. As the characters were Bulgarians, 
 the British public were quite reconciled to the little 
 hypocrisies, frauds, prejudices, etc., which Shaw 
 ascribed to them. The play passed as an amusing 
 comedy without a moral. Mr Walkley admitted that 
 Shaw had at last written " a play." Shaw referred 
 afterwards to its " much-paragraphed brilliancy," 
 but the general feeling is merely that it is a good 
 comedy, from the playgoer's point of view, weakened 
 in the scond act by an intellectual purpose and ex- 
 aggeration of character to serve that purpose. It 
 ran for twelve weeks, not to crowded houses, in 
 London, and has been fairly popular in the United 
 States, where Richard Mansfield adopted it. 
 
 It was so far successfid, however, that Shaw now 
 received invitations from theatrical managers. They 
 wanted comedy, but Shaw had no idea of going further 
 in the direction of hiunouring the public. He had 
 just passed some time at Florence, where the religious 
 art gave a definite direction to his imagination. 
 
PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 179 
 
 " Religion was alive again " in England, he con- 
 sidered. His Socialist work brought him into contact 
 with that singular development among the Anglican 
 clergy, the High-Broad-Church-Socialist clergyman ; 
 and the artist catching the rays of the new age 
 (according to his theory, which I have already 
 described) woiild serve as dramatic antagonist. To 
 the " clear, bold, sure, sensible, benevolent, salutarily 
 shortsighted Christian Socialist idealism " he would 
 oppose " the higher, but vaguer, timider vision and 
 the incoherent, mischievous, and even ridiculous 
 unpracticalness " of the artist. The Christian 
 Socialist had hardened into dogma : his liberal 
 religion was clearly defined and his social idealism 
 firm. Shaw regarded nothing as final, and would 
 confront the cheerful dogmatist with the vague, 
 disturbing half-vision of something beyond. This 
 was the germ of his famous " Candida." It was not 
 built round the figure of Candida, but the need to 
 make a refined dramatic conflict of that type in- 
 telligible to the general pubhc soon led him to invent 
 her. The dogmatist and the artist should quarrel, 
 not over doctrine, but over a woman ; and the woman 
 must suit the atmosphere. But Shaw fell in love so 
 much with her that the higher conflict is almost lost 
 in the experiences of Candida, who knows nothing 
 about it. 
 The story was necessarily simple, ^ ^andida is the 
 ■Jm stling. cheerful, self-sacrifir ingr wifpnFTJu. liiiiiinTTii ~1t 
 ch^^^3n^^^^roAed-Rw=;;JaffieauJ!fa3m£!MQrdl:__ 
 It is the domestic hte ot a very Dusy7 popular, earnest, ^ 
 plausible urban vicarage. Morell breezily acknow- 
 ledges how everything depends on Candida, but ihas - 
 no deep apprpciat innof the w ay^" whic h bhc i^duificig l^ 
 hei jjAViJ :::pg555sSYliaL-^ Qprvirp cj him andhis 
 
180 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 They pick up a stray young poet and intro- 
 duce him into the home. Under their purblind eyes 
 he falls violently in love with Candida, tells his host 
 that she is too good for him, and proposes that she 
 shall be asked to choose between them. A very 
 dramatic conception, but, as the light of the new age 
 does not often break in that form on the poet's mind, 
 somewhat strained. The interest is psychological. 
 You study how the emotional machinery of Morell 
 and Marchbanks and Candida reacts on this singular 
 situation. It is no use criticising Shaw's solution, 
 for he has invented a situation which real people 
 never have to confront ; that is, in practice, very 
 often his idea of realism. Candida adopts the con- 
 ventional solution, for unconventional reasons : 
 Marchbanks goes out into his world of shadows and 
 fitful gleams : Morell learns that there is such a thing 
 as personality as well as ministry. That is the story. 
 Curates and secretaries are thrown in to fill the bill, 
 and there is a very dense and vulgar con tractor , 
 Candida's father, who seems to be a symbol of the 
 utter obtliseness of the man in the street to all such 
 finer conflicts. As such Burgess is a failure, because 
 the obtuseness is overdone, and the fun of his vulgarity 
 offends the tense artistic feeling which is aroused. 
 When the poet speaks of " horror " in the deepest 
 artistic sense, it is scarcely amusing to hear the con- 
 tractor warn him against the results of drinking. 
 
 Hamon, one of the best judges, says that this is 
 Shaw's finest play, and he is probably right. All 
 admit that it is one of the finest dramas he has written. 
 Up to the point of the crisis it is a very realistic 
 picture of the kind of life with which it deals, and 
 Morell is drawn to life, without the least caricature. 
 There is little argument, no propagandist elbow 
 
PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 181 
 
 sticking out from the dramatic coat, and no heavy 
 satire of the folly of everyman. As the crisis ap- 
 proaches, the play becomes heavily charged with 
 emotion, and the audience is roused to a keen objective 
 interest. Yet the play was rejected in London, and 
 not presented there until 1904, when American 
 enthusiasm had induced London to reconsider the 
 matter. Probably managers disliked Shaw's relapse 
 from comedy to Ibsenism ; probably also the crisis 
 of the play was regarded as too artificial and the 
 solution a paradox. Marchbanks is, in fact, an 
 £esthetic prig, unhealthy and unbalanced, and the 
 only defect in Morell is his toleration of the youth. 
 C andida is a fin e and powerful rnnrrptinn. hnt nnt 
 ~ ^^ariy^consistent. She has marvellous intelligence, 
 yet lets ■EIie~SeeLhing young poet sit at her feet with 
 his head on her knees. She suppresses herself in the_ 
 service nf ths p arjr>nJ^TTrr~ t ri fi _ \m4-V . 
 
 a&teunds-tt S"by ^oiessiiig as complete an indifference. 
 -4&-mOTal-iSles-as- Mfri-Wtiffeii'T~~ 
 
 ■^== — Ah,^ James, now. little you under standme^j__to 
 .--talk-ot your confidfeilce in my gooaness and pmatg 4 
 lwwnd_gi-VE=caerarDOTti-^e-poor^KTigen^ as wiilmgly 
 "-^i awTlO a - t)t;ggai-dylug. . o f c o ld - , - 
 
 as I woSH^Si 
 i{=iiiSe--were-4tothi jas,.£laedto-rest-r^^^^^ 
 trust_i.n_my love for you, James^_foiLJi£JJiat-weirt-t- 
 
 phrases 
 
 ryT^iffl^for yoursermQi 
 
 ~~ — it 4sr3iot=-fr-7riiesBonwhether such a woman is 
 plausible in her environment — a dramatist may go 
 as far away from reality as he chooses, even when he 
 professes realism.— but whether she is consistent. 
 Huneker says that "al l iii e mihap p y"* Wiwa-tit Ne w~ 
 York turned out to hear and applaud that " shawl 
 speech." The concluaon must have puzzled them. 
 
182 
 
 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 After a number of very dramatic and impossible 
 scenes between Morell and Marchbanks, the play 
 culminates in Candida coldly choosing between them. 
 She is, of course, not such a fool as to go off with a 
 bundle of ragged nerves like Marchbanks. Her 
 dismissal of him is, however, rather cold-blooded (she 
 cannot see herself at fifty with a husband of thirty- 
 five),, ^nd her choice o f Morell is put g p altmic;Ta — 
 S he a sks Tjeij ^faa 
 — ^3icSss~fDr the weaker. 
 
 lej wo ne eds her 
 Morell. 
 
 " oIL_clunking_himselt mistaken m a woman who cSti (J 
 prefer '"this gr^iy~1ool^-paTa:di8er-'— as Sha. w"~gft'er- y 
 wards said.- .J!i/IoFd:l-"aii'd~Can^iaar return 
 routine; — ^ -^^^^^^^^= — ' — ■ 
 
 =^==^^33?^ aiih is,' of course^ ^:e ~eomm^end~tliB~woman 
 who is mistress and... pr-oprietress of herself , and decry 
 the husbaTrd:"V7ftolakeS~lier-serv4ce-fa]:.^ranted. One 
 feels that, dramatically, he has inociilated tts dose 
 of Ibsenism into the wrong woman, and not been able 
 to make her consistent. No doubt he wanted to 
 show that an " emancipated " woman is not necessarily 
 a Julia or Sylvia Craven, and may be quite sweet 
 and domesticated. It is a piece of profound or very 
 clever artificial psychology. "It is," Shaw says, 
 " just this freedom from emotional slop, this unerring 
 wisdom on the domestic plane, that makes her so 
 completely mistress of the situation." She is as 
 coldly reasonable as Vivie Warren, yet very obtuse 
 to the condition of the young poet until the pmrpose 
 of the dramatist is served ; s he is scorpfnl r»f Hnty 
 
 ^jm t clings to Mnre lL-h« "r - miTl i r need s hf;r_ Yet she 
 is the finest woman Shaw ever conceived, and the 
 whole impossible situation is so charged with dramatic 
 feeling, and so ably elaborated, that the play is, as 
 Archer said, " something very like a masterpiece." 
 
PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 183 
 
 At the time it was still-born. Theatrical managers 
 found it impossible. It was only in 1904, long after it 
 had been published, that New York discovered its 
 greatness, and London grudgingly patronised it. By 
 that time it was better known in Germany, where it 
 was performed to crowded houses and greeted by 
 distinguished critics like George Brandes. 
 
 The next play was " The Man of Destiny " : a 
 dramatic dialogue between Napoleon Bonaparte and 
 Ellen Terry. It was written for the American actor 
 Richard Mansfield, who did not appreciate it, and 
 it has found very little favour "with actors. Too 
 long for a sketch and too restricted for a play, it 
 remains an excellent piece of dramatic literature 
 marred by Shaw's iconoclastic perversity. In order 
 to rebuke hero-worshippers Shaw lets Napoleon trail 
 his long hair in his soup, and he cannot overlook so 
 good an opportunity to rail at England, even if it 
 involves anachronisms. " There is nothing so bad 
 or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing 
 it ; but you will never find an Englishman in the 
 wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights 
 you on patriotic principles ; he robs you on business 
 principles ; he enslaves you on imperial principles." 
 The voice is the voice of G. B. Shaw. The lady, who 
 is said to be built on Ellen Terry, is admirable, and 
 the long dialogue is very skilfully varied. 
 
 It was Shaw's first attempt to make history human. 
 The drama and the historical novel generally assume 
 that men and women of other times were so different 
 from us that it is an anachronism not to make them 
 speak a stilted and unnatural language. Shaw, as 
 he so frequently does, went to the opposite extreme. 
 He concluded, on principle and without much historical 
 reading, that man is just the same in a Roman toga 
 
184 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 as a medieval uniform or a modern frock-coat. " The 
 man who writes about himself and his own time is the 
 only man who writes about all people and about all 
 time." Hence, as Professor Rogers says, his Caesar 
 and Napoleon " are simply on a large scale what 
 we may see any day in a successful ward politician." 
 This exaggeration, however, is more apparent in his 
 later historical plays. Napoleon is near enough to 
 our time to be fairly construed in modern terms, and 
 Shaw by no means ignores the historical facts ; his 
 chief fault is that he adds to them. 
 
 " The Man of Destiny " failed, like nearly all its 
 predecessors, but the memory of " Arms and the 
 Man " still lingered, and the excellence of " Candida " 
 was discussed. Shaw was believed to have dramatic 
 or comedic resources, and managers were interested. 
 Mr Cyril Maude gives us in his " Haymarket Theatre " 
 (pp. 2II-6) an amusing, if uncomplimentary, account 
 of Shaw's ways at the time and of the appearance 
 of his next play. 
 
 Mr Maude heard in 1895 that Shaw had written a 
 brilliant play (" Candida ") and was engaged upon 
 another. He asked to see it. Shaw told him that it 
 would not suit him, but he would write one for the 
 Haymarket : " which," says Mr Maude, " I protest 
 I never asked him to do." He says that Shaw then 
 took a chair for the season in Regent's Park and 
 wrote his next play, under the public eye, in the 
 little pocket-books he used for the purpose. It was 
 finished in 1897, when Shaw amazed the manager 
 by emptjdng his pockets on to his desk of these little 
 note-books. The play was " You Never Can Tell," 
 and Mr Maude protests that, though he did not Uke 
 it, he was persuaded by friends to put it in rehearsal. 
 As soon as Shaw came, dressed in a suit which " no 
 
PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 185 
 
 self-respecting carpenter " would wear (probably a 
 good brown Jaeger suit), to see the rehearsals, the 
 trouble began. " From the first the author showed 
 the perversity of his disposition and his utter want of 
 practical knowledge of the stage." Actors resigned, 
 and the atmosphere was such that " any author with 
 the slightest decency of feeling would have withdrawn 
 in the face of rebuffs so pointed as these." Shaw 
 placidly continued, and, as the narrative proceeds, 
 he becomes a " demon," a " veritable Svengali," 
 torturing them with his " satanic attitude." The 
 final collapse Mr Maude attributes to their emotion 
 on seeing Shaw appear in a new suit. He withdrew 
 the play, and no other manager wovild accept it ; 
 though years afterwards it had a most successful run 
 in London and elsewhere, appearing on the boards 
 of the Court Theatre no less than 149 times. 
 
 In Mr Maude's prejudiced version we have an inter- 
 esting glimpse of Shaw in mid-career. He was then 
 making a comfortable income, about five hundred 
 pounds a year, by journalism, and his dress and ways 
 must be ascribed to unconventionality. He dis- 
 dained starched linen and starched manners. His 
 dramatic work was done out of love of the work 
 (mainly in leisure hours, or when travelling), and in 
 order to give the theatre a new standard. People 
 wanted comedy and fashionable dresses, and he 
 would show the way to do this kind of thing. But, 
 he says, " I overdid it " and found on rehearsal that 
 the comedy was impracticable. It was not at all 
 impracticable, as later experience showed, but Shaw 
 was not tactful. 
 
 " You Never Can Tell " is one of the most spirited 
 comedies that he has written, though it offends a 
 Uttle by its extremes. Shaw's pessimistic estimate 
 
186 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 of the relations of married people to each other and 
 to their children pervades the whole play, yet, on 
 the other hand, the humorous element often rises, 
 or descends, to boisterous fun. The father, Mr 
 Clandon, is a pathetic figure, and his elder daughter 
 has been too obviously fitted up with the Life-Force, 
 and its purpose of fecundity, as a Shavian main-spring. 
 But the brisk movement, a model comedy-waiter and 
 his hilarious lawyer-son, and the quaintest and 
 funniest pair of twins ever imagined, raise the piece 
 repeatedly to the pitch of farce. It is a successful 
 light comedy, with some original characters, but an 
 occasional exhibition of the cloven hoof of Shaw's 
 philosophy. 
 
 London would not have the play, and so the first 
 period of Shaw's dramatic productiveness came to 
 a close. Of the seven plays one only had been a 
 slight theatrical success : six were complete failures 
 from the point of view of representation. He had 
 tried drama and tragedy, comedy and farce, sociology 
 and psychology and history, with almost equal un- 
 success. In spite of the high praise which some 
 leading critics gave to one or other play, there was 
 something in Shaw which the public did not like. 
 He did not blame the managers. Their business was 
 to cater to " perfectly commonplace people," and he 
 would not do it ; their customers did not come to be 
 criticised, and Shaw " made war " on them. It is 
 not the whole explanation, since most of these plays 
 have not been successful even in the later years when 
 other plays of his, with the strongest intellectual bias, 
 drew large audiences. He was not quite honest with 
 himself, and therefore not just to the public. He 
 was really not " substituting natural history for 
 conventional ethics and romantic logic." He was 
 
PLAYS, PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT 187 
 
 caricaturing life and pretending that it was realism. 
 To make this tolerable he needed a long training in 
 the use of humour and more concession to dramatic 
 usage. 
 
 For the time he despaired of reaching the public 
 through the theatre and resolved to write literary 
 drama. Publishers had been unwilling to bring out 
 his plays. No one read plays ; there was too much 
 of the algebra of stage-directions about them, and too 
 little of the life which actors and actresses put into 
 them. At last a publisher was found for the first 
 seven plays, and they were issued under the now 
 well-known title, " Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant." 
 He stretched the terms a little in placing the first 
 three plays in the second category and describing the 
 other four as " pleasant." They appeared in 1898, 
 with the lengthy preface which he now proposed to 
 prefix to his plays as " a first aid to critics." He 
 declared that, at least as long as the theatre remained 
 purely commercial, he would write plays to be read, 
 and make them intelligible and vivid to readers. 
 From that came his habit of omitting the more 
 technical stage-directions, including miniature- 
 sketches of the characters, and even inserting state- 
 ments or asking questions about them which had 
 no relation to the stage. These things, however, 
 developed slowly and gradually. In point of fact, 
 he had already written another play which had little 
 chance of being appreciated except on the stage, and 
 with this he opens the little series of " Plays for 
 Puritans" and the longer series of his mature 
 productions. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 IN THE LIME-LIGHT 
 
 The next three dramas which Shaw wrote were 
 called by him " Plays for Puritans." By a Puritan 
 he means a man who resents the use of art as " the 
 instrument of a systematic idolatry of sensuousness." 
 He had now spent several years in criticising plays, 
 and one of his most general objections to the existing 
 drama was its incessant pre-occupation with love, 
 or, as he said, with a false and romanticised erotism. 
 Love was neither so dominating nor so maudlin in 
 real life as it was generally represented to be on the 
 stage, and Shaw would write truer dramas. Critics 
 might have retorted that he had not yet written a 
 play in which the love-theme was not conspicuous, 
 and we may add that he has scarcely yet succeeded 
 in doing this. They were, however, content to reply 
 that he only succeeded in avoiding the usual emotional 
 effect — whether or no it is a naughty encouragement 
 of sensuousness — by making his love-scenes blood- 
 less and unreal. It is a question for lovers to decide. 
 It is at least clear that Shaw did not abandon the 
 love-theme, and, if he made, any alteration in his 
 procedure beyond the smoother workmanship which 
 came of experience, it was in approaching nearer to 
 stage-traditions. 
 
 In his next play, " The Devil's Disciple," he took 
 an amusing revenge on the critics who scolded him 
 for dramatic heterodoxy. He wrote a melodrama, 
 
 1B8 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 189 
 
 combining in it some of the oldest and most sensational 
 incidents of that blood-curdling variety of stage- 
 performance. I would rather say that he was amusing 
 himself than that he was seriously burlesquing the 
 melodrama. At all periods of his career he has 
 enjoyed jokes of this kind, and has probably after- 
 wards enjoyed the penetration of his disciples in 
 finding grave underlying motives. In the preface to 
 the published play he does poke fun at American 
 writers who discovered brilliantly original work in 
 his combination of stock-situations : the hero donning 
 the coat of a wanted man in order to enable him to 
 escape, the heroine falling in love with the scapegrace 
 and vainly attempting to reveal his identity, the 
 reprieve at the foot of the scaffold, and so on. Most 
 of it, after the promising and original first act, was 
 familiar enough. 
 
 At the most he might claim that he had humanised 
 melodrama as he had earlier humanised comedy and 
 would later humanise history. His success may be 
 measured by thecomplete unintelligibility of his hero's 
 conduct to the general public. His hero saves the 
 life, and takes the place, of a minister, who is wanted 
 by the soldiers during the American rebellion. Is it 
 because he loves the minister's wife, who clearly falls 
 in love with him ? The actors felt that this alone 
 would make the play plausible and human, and Dick, 
 on the stage, furtively kissed the heroine's hair while 
 saying that he did not love her. Shaw vehemently 
 resented this : Dick had had no motive whatever. 
 Does the rescuer of a drowning man excogitate a 
 motive ? But there is no analogy between an act 
 which it would be generally regarded as sheer cowardice 
 to omit and an act which it would generally be re- 
 garded as sheer folly to do without a motive. The 
 
190 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 ordinary romantic melodramatist, in making Dick 
 love the minister's wife, would be nearer to real life. 
 
 The play is a conventional red-hot melodrama, 
 full of sensational incidents, involving a large variety 
 of finely-drawn characters. The first act, in a harsh 
 and sour Puritan home of New Hampshire, where the 
 acid religiosity has driven the elder son to the service 
 of the devil, is instinct with truth and dramatic feeling. 
 The second act, in the accused minister's house, fails 
 to impress on account of the lack of- motive. The 
 third act, among the military, too plainly introduces 
 Shaw's opinions of military men ; he has a plausible 
 mouthpiece in dare-devil Dick. Amusing satire and 
 heavy caricature and fragments of emotional intensity 
 are mingled with something like recklessness. In 
 the tensest crisis of the play, when a moment's delay 
 saves the life of Dick, General Burgoyne fUppantly 
 observes : "I should never dream of hanging any 
 gentleman by an American clock." Of serious under- 
 current one can only recognise a plea for the devil as 
 against the sour and hypocritical Puritan, and an 
 intention of ridiculing militarism. But these are inci- 
 dental rather than essential, and " The Devil's 
 Disciple " must be taken as an extremely able satire 
 of the melodrama, restrained for the most part but 
 freakishly ignoring its own artistic requirements in 
 others. 
 
 In " Caesar and Cleopatra " (1898) Shaw set out to 
 correct Shakespeare and the pundits of historical 
 science. As far as the interpretation of character 
 goes he deliberately challenged comparison with 
 Shakespeare and confidently claimed superiority. 
 Few would claim that Shakespeare gives us a valuable 
 or interesting analysis of Caesar's character, or deny 
 that he has squeezed the ancient story into the frame 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 191 
 
 of seventeenth-century drama. Shaw detested the 
 theatrical sublimity of Shakespeare's endings. Nature 
 is not moral, and practises no poetic justice, so that 
 it is not sound art at the close to " cover your eyes 
 with the undertaker's handkerchief, duly onioned 
 with some pathetic phrase." Caesar must be pre- 
 sented as a human being, and simply pass on to the 
 next chapter of his life, as human beings generally 
 do when the particular episode is ended. Cleopatra 
 also must be described as human. Not only dramatists, 
 and novelists like Sir Rider Haggard, have thought it 
 necessary to give a special and conventional psychic 
 outfit to people of an earlier age, but historical scholars 
 equally fail to humanise their figures. 
 
 But Shaw has passed to the other extreme, and 
 met theory by theory. His theory is that human 
 nature is just the same in all climes and all ages, and 
 you must ascribe to Csesar and Cleopatra such 
 characters as they would bear to-day. His Caesar is 
 a soldier-statesman who might have been trained at 
 Eton, and his Cleopatra is a bad-tempered little 
 English girl out of one of Mrs Bland's stories. Caesar 
 soliloquises at tiresome length, a la G. B. Shaw, on 
 the loneliness of a superman in such a world as ours : 
 Cleopatra, a pert little girl, invites him to sit on the 
 Sphinx with her, as it is " quite cosy," and is told 
 that she ought to be in bed. The humanising con- 
 sists, not in substituting for the stilted English of 
 conventional historical drama or novel a speech 
 which will take account of the different shades of 
 character detected by historians, but in simply making 
 the characters talk as EngUsh characters would in 
 the circumstances. Sometimes the conception varies, 
 and Caesar appears as a quaint combination of an 
 ancient Roman and a modern Socialist with some 
 
192 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 sense of humour. The suggestion of the development 
 of Cleopatra's character, which the last act introduces, 
 is merely fantastic, and is quite out of accord with 
 the opinions of recent students. But Shaw cares as 
 little about historical scholarship as he does about 
 science. Human nature is always the same ; there 
 has been no progress since the beginning of history. 
 Such an opinion, to be of any value at all, ought to be 
 based on a vast knowledge of history, and we know 
 that it is not. It is one of the Shavian dogmas, and 
 " Caesar and Cleopatra " is an outcome of it. 
 
 Hence, though the departure from the unnatural 
 forms and conventions of historical fiction is refresh- 
 ing, we cannot regard " Caesar and Cleopatra " as a 
 serious historical play. As if he wished to prevent 
 us from doing so, Shaw inserts deliberate anachronisms 
 and very modern jokes whenever his freakish imagina- 
 tion suggests them. Except in scenery and a few 
 other external details, the shock of characters might 
 occur anywhere. Indeed, the chief novelty of the 
 play, the introduction of Cleopatra in her childhood, 
 rather reduces the dramatic quality by making the 
 conflict of characters very unequal. In spite, there- 
 fore, of some excellent scenes, of the humanisation of 
 Caesar, and of the piquancy of the little British- 
 Egyptian princess, the play has not been well received, 
 and it had to wait a number of years for even a 
 moderate appreciation. It is too serious in substance 
 for the lighter public, and too funny and fantastic for 
 the serious. Of its cleverness, within those limits, 
 there can hardly be two opinions. 
 
 " Captain Brassbound's Conversion " (1899) is the 
 last of the " Plays for Puritans." The title which 
 Shaw gave to the three plays, when he published 
 them in 1900, is one of those playful irrelevances of 
 
IN THE LIME-UGHT 19S 
 
 which he is often guilty. They do not in the least 
 exhibit a design to write serious drama for play- 
 goers who — ^if there are any — resent the amorousness 
 and sense-stimulation of the ordinary play. Each of 
 the three has, more or less, the nature of caricature ; 
 not caricature of real character, as in the early plays, 
 but of dramatic character. In " Captain Brassr 
 bound " Shaw returns to melodrama, and once more 
 luxuriates in the swift movement and sensational 
 incident and sharply-drawn character which delight 
 a music-hall audience. The story is well known. 
 Sir Howard Hallam and his sister-in-law, Lady Cicely 
 Waynfiete, wish to visit the interior of Morocco : 
 Captain Brassbound, a thoroughly romantic smuggler, 
 and his crew escort them ; Brassbound is secretly the 
 nephew of Howard, and nurses a deadly grievance ; 
 he plots to deliver the party to a wild Moorish chief, 
 but a convenient American gun-boat rescues them, 
 and the curtain falls on the time-honoured spectacle 
 of justice and reconciliation. 
 
 Beyond a slight and incidental fling at British 
 ideals of the administration of justice, the play has 
 no serious purpose. It was, in fact, written for Ellen 
 Terry, who is the model of Lady Cicely Waynflete. 
 Not even here is Shaw serious, for one can hardly 
 imagine Ellen Terry crediting every blackguard she 
 meets with a beautiful face and a really gentlemanly 
 soul, and disarming brigands and sheiks by saying 
 sweetly, " How do you do ? " Perhaps there is a 
 half-purpose of showing, on Tolstoian principles, 
 how gentleness succeeds where justice fails, but, 
 as the effect of her amiable stupidity would have been 
 very different in real life, it is useless to seek such a 
 purpose. The whole thing is a fantasia : it is melo- 
 drama smiling at itself. It lacks even the little 
 
194 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 serious element of the preceding " Puritan " plays, 
 and must be estimated by its entertaining qualities, 
 which are conspicuous. In later years it ran for 
 thre^ months at the Court Theatre. As a literary 
 play its interest is comparatively small, and the reader 
 p exasperated by the attempt to express with phonetic 
 accuracy the speech of a Cockney rascal of Brass- 
 bound's crew. 
 
 The long interval between " Captain Brassbound " 
 and " Man and Superman " was relieved only by the 
 pubhcation of the short and fantastic sketch "The 
 Admirable Bashville " (1901). Someone in America 
 proposed to dramatise Shaw's prize-fighting novel, 
 " Cashel Byron's Profession," and to prevent an 
 outrage he roughly dramatised it himself. It is 
 an amusing and negligible extravagance : a joke in 
 pompous blank verse wildly alternating with very 
 vernacular speech. Some of the lines are actually 
 , taken from the Elizabethan poets, and Shaw affected 
 to believe that no one could discriminate between his 
 own blank verse and theirs. It is good reading for 
 an idle hour. 
 
 By the beginning of 1903 Shaw had written ten 
 plays, and had had in the theatre only one modest 
 success. Ten years of amazing industry, experi- 
 ments in every variety of drama and comedy, had 
 left the general public callous or disdainful. He has 
 spoken of the way in which the G. B. S. of the Saturday 
 Review prepared the way for, and even impudently 
 (he says) heralded the genius of, George Bernard 
 Shaw the dramatist. All this is humorous exaggera- 
 tion. One may be a paragon of dramatic or literary 
 criticism without having any respectable skill in 
 production. It was chiefly Shaw's Socialism and 
 general criticism of life which secured for him a 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 195 
 
 relatively small public, in whose praises a friendly 
 critic like Archer occasionally joined. He was now 
 past the age at which dramatists usually gain the 
 public ear — ^he was in his forty-eighth year — and it 
 looked as though his appeal would be permanently 
 confined to the narrow public of the readers of his 
 printed plays. Outside England he was little known, 
 except to Socialists ; and the continental Socialists, 
 as a rule, were embittered against him by his attacks 
 on them and their " illusions." It must have occurred 
 to his friends that he had, from the point of view of 
 influence, made a grave mistake in deserting the 
 platform and the press to begin his long and futile 
 assault upon the theatre. 
 
 But the year 1903 witnessed a remarkable change 
 in his position. In that year his plays began to be 
 performed before Austrian and German audiences, 
 and to receive the high praise of great critics like 
 Brandes, and the story of his success in the United 
 States opened. Londoners learned with astonish- 
 ment that the plays they rejected were being regarded 
 as international art, and, for all his supposed disdain 
 of the foreigner, the Englishman has no more effective 
 stimulus than foreign appreciation of his writers or 
 artists. In the same year Shaw published " Man 
 and Superman," and critics could no longer question 
 his abUity, however much they might resent his 
 dramatic forms. 
 
 " Man and Superman " represents not only the 
 culmination of his artistic skill, but that important 
 stage in the development of his opinions which I 
 have described in a previous chapter. The Eugenic 
 movement was making progress in England, and 
 Shaw yielded to its fascination. His increasingly 
 pessimistic estimate of his generation was suddenly 
 
196 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 relieved by the discovery that there was no need 
 to drill it with education, and evangelise it with 
 Socialism, before any progress could be made. It 
 would be much wiser and more economical to take 
 the better specimens and let them breed the new 
 generation : as to the others, he threw out dark hints 
 at lethal chambers, sterilisation, and so on. The 
 failure of education and Socialist propaganda now 
 disturbed him little. That was not the real purpose 
 of the Life-Force. It was going to annihilate this 
 generation, as it annihilated the reptiles of old, and 
 create a new species, the Superman. He approached 
 his new task, therefore, in a more philosophic mood 
 than ever. His play might be performed ; he would 
 not overload it with philosophy. But it would need 
 "a pit of philosophers " to appreciate it, and he 
 must appeal to readers. Hence the predominantly 
 literary form of the new work, with its prodigious 
 preface and its lengthy interlude and its fiery appendix. 
 Certainly Shaw has never done a more brilliant piece 
 of literary work. 
 
 I have examined the opinions expressed in the 
 preface and appendix, and need only consider here 
 what light they throw on the drama. Walkley had 
 suggested that he should write a Don Juan play. 
 Instead of rejecting what most people would regard as 
 an unalterably erotic subject, Shaw reflected on it 
 and found in it a most ingenious method of presenting 
 his own ascetic philosophy. Professor Masson, once 
 described Goethe's Mephistopheles as a logical develop- 
 ment of Milton's Satan after a century or two of • 
 ^experience in tempting men. Why not give Don 
 'Juan the benefit of experience and show him con- 
 ' verted to asceticism, and very much bored by the 
 attentions or intentions of women ? Dr Henderson 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 197 
 
 says, apparently on Shaw's authority, that John 
 Tanner, or Don Juan Tenorio in the twentieth century, 
 is not Shaw, but H. M. Hyndman, his old Socialist 
 opponent. There is much more of Shaw than of 
 Hyndman in him, and Mr Granville Barker made 
 the character an exact reproduction of Shaw. In 
 sentiment, at least, he is Shaw, especially in the Inter- 
 lude in Hell and the " Revolutionist's Handbook." 
 
 The love-episode, on which the play is built, is 
 purely artificial. It is love-making seen through 
 Shaw's academic spectacles. Ann Whitefield makes 
 love to Tanner because she must : the Life-Force, 
 which is as inexorable as the Fate of the Greek 
 tragedians, is incarnated in her. The dramatic 
 conflict is not merely the conflict of a girl's whim 
 and a man's aversion from marriage. Behind this 
 petty struggle Shaw sees the cosmic struggle of the 
 two incarnations of the Life-Force, as he conceives 
 it. It seeks self-consciousness in the genius and 
 makes him egotistic ; it impels wonian to life-giving, 
 and, when the two meet, we have the most dramatic 
 conflict in the world. But the Life-Force, or cosmic 
 Will, being one, it makes the woman persistently 
 hunt the man until he yields. This is the underlying 
 philosophy, or, as Shaw afterwards said, the religion 
 of the play. In the preface to the popular edition 
 he observes that Natural Selection is dead on the one 
 hand, and " garden-of-Edenism " on the other. 
 A new Bible is needed, and he, " with later lights of 
 science to guide " him, makes this contribution to it, 
 and allows the public to purchase it for a few pence 
 on that account. 
 
 Happily — because one cannot take the obscuring 
 of his philosophy as a very serious loss — this new 
 gospel is effectively concealed by the dramatic 
 
198 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 trimming with which Shaw proposed to adorn it. It is 
 fairly safe to say that not one in a thousand of the 
 audiences who have enjoyed the play, especially in 
 the United States, has the dimmest perception of its 
 moral. The only serious didactic element they see in 
 it is a suggestion that marriage is not a necessary 
 condition to maternity ; I have seen ladies stalk 
 indignantly from the theatre when Tanner propounds 
 this gospel. Of the cosmic conflict of purposes they 
 have no suspicion, and Ann's pursuit of Tanner, 
 which all regard as a singularly perverse taste on her 
 part, is deemed an unconventional suggestion that a 
 woman has as much right to do the hunting as the 
 man, or as a libel on the actual life of women. The 
 play is merely taken as a comedy. Tanner's wit, 
 irony, and paradox are artistically set against the 
 muddle-headed fussiness of Shaw's typical middle- 
 class father (Ramsden) and the muddle-headed 
 romance of Shaw's typical middle-class young man. 
 A chauffeur with supermannic coolness and im- 
 pudence (Straker), a couple of stagey Americans, 
 and a fantastic group of brigands, help to obscure 
 the new religion. Ann Whitefield's ingenuous per- 
 sistence and conscientious mendacity are, as I said, 
 merely regarded as part of Shaw's irrepressible 
 tendency to caricature ; and her conventional mother 
 and Octavius's conventional sister merely enhance 
 the artistic effect. It is a comedy of romantic love- 
 making, as far as action goes, without romantic 
 sentiment : eked out by the minor comedy of the 
 collapse of a middle-class family at a supposed moral 
 transgression and an entirely burlesque scene among 
 brigands. 
 
 "The comedy itself, as it is presented on the stage, 
 is not a masterpiece. Archer thought it " primitive 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 199 
 
 in invention and second-rate in execution." Huneker 
 would only allow " for the sake of argument " that 
 it was a play. Hamon thinks it " a splendid philo- 
 sophic piece," but is clearly referring to the written 
 play. If we set aside the very original Interlude in 
 Hell, which is always omitted, the plot is slender 
 and the course of the play never quickened into really 
 dramatic moments. As in the case of so many of 
 Shaw's plays, the best rule for the playgoer is : Enjoy 
 and be thankful, and do not attempt to analyse and 
 classify. You can only classify what the author 
 has previously classified, and Shaw does not follow 
 the rules. It is a comedy, entertaining enough to 
 obscure its own philosophy. We roar at Tanner's 
 quips and paradoxes and dread of marriage, without 
 the least thought of his being a genius with a mission. 
 We enjoy Ann's evasions and subterfuges and fibs, 
 and do not care twopence about the Life-Force in 
 her. She is by no means " everywoman," as Shaw 
 said, and by no means his " most gorgeous creation," 
 as he claims. She is a very ordinary young lady 
 credited with an unnatural desire to wed (not a love 
 of) Tanner, and forced by her conventional sur- 
 roundings to conceal it and play the hypocrite. As 
 to Tanner's long speeches, we have to forgive them 
 when Shaw (by the mouth of Ann) laughs at himself 
 for them ; and the long dialogues are too witty and 
 funny to quarrel with. 
 
 So the comedy has had a well-deserved success on 
 the stage — ^it was presented 176 times at the Court 
 Theatre, and I beUeve that its royalties brought 
 him in one year, especially from the United States, 
 more than ten thousand pounds — ^but its philosophy 
 is reserved for the faithful few who read the book, 
 and its religion remains with its founder. The 
 
200 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 published work — preface, play, interlude, and 
 appendix — ^is one of the most serious and finished 
 presentments of Shaw's views. It is not fortunate 
 for him that it embodies a phase of development of 
 which he soon saw the error. But we have siifficiently 
 discussed all this. The Interlude in Hell alone calls 
 for special consideration. 
 
 Under the stars of the Sierra Nevada John Tanner 
 dreams himself back into the shape of Don Juan 
 Tenorio, Ann into the shape of Doiia Ana de UUoa ; 
 and they gather with Ann's father and the devil in 
 the underworld to discuss life. Hell is too comfort- 
 able, too sensuous, for the new Don Juan. The 
 devil presides over a genial, art-loving colony of sober 
 Epicureans, and lures men away from the chilly 
 heights of heaven. They consider Don Juan a 
 " social failure," a man wth no " soul," and press 
 him to leave them and go to heaven. He is " bored " 
 in hell, and those who are happy in it are the really 
 wicked. " Hell, in short, is a place where you have 
 nothing to do but amuse yourself " ; in heaven " you 
 live and work." The devil left heaven because he 
 was bored there, and founded the rival colony for the 
 tranquil enjoyment of love, beauty, art, and senti- 
 ment, to which all are migrating from heaven. Only 
 the few who love " the work of helping Life in its 
 struggle upward " remain in heaven. 
 
 The fantastic and intellectually brilliant scene is, 
 in other words, a naked presentment of the philosophy 
 of life which is veiled in the drama itself. Hell is a 
 temperament : the Epicurean temperament which 
 Shaw despises. He rarely uses the word Epicurean, 
 because, probably, people wrongly take it to imply 
 an unrestrained indulgence in sense-pleasure. It is, 
 on the contrary, the feeling that work is only a healthy 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 201 
 
 condition of earning enjoyment (sensuous awi spiritual) : 
 that the supreme ideal of men is to eliminate misery 
 from the earth and promote tranquil happiness. This 
 is a mean and despicable aim — it is hell — to the new 
 Don Juan, John Tanner, or Bernard Shaw. Your 
 highest ideal is to co-operate austerely with the Life- 
 Force, and even Ana, or Ann Whitefield, is converted 
 to a belief in this Superman, and sets out in search 
 of a father for him. If a persistent Rationalist asks 
 why in the name of creation he should adopt this 
 bloodless and joyless philosophy of life, Shaw makes 
 a concession to his weakness for " reasons." If men 
 do not co-operate with the Life-Force, it will cast 
 them aside, as it cast aside the Mesozoic reptiles, and 
 will incarnate its highest aspirations in some other 
 creature. So healthy, sensuous women must pursue 
 brainy men and pin them, despite their wriggling 
 and hatred of sex, to the matrimonial board. We 
 exist for the sake of the next generation ; we must 
 exchange the Christian God or the Epicurean ideal 
 for this bleak Calvinistic Life-Force. That is the 
 key of the parable of " Man and Superman." As a 
 comedy, with the parable omitted, it is very popular 
 and entertaining and clever : as a serious literary 
 and philosophical whole it is brilliant and futile and 
 unpopular. People pick out of it the scraps which 
 suit them : the denial of progress, the scorn of 
 democracy, the praise of eugenics, the indictment of 
 England, the denial of moral law, and so on. But 
 of a Shavian cult, in Shaw's deepest sense, there is 
 no trace. 
 
 The tremendous ability of " Man and Superman " 
 and the echoes of recognition abroad disposed the 
 English public to welcome the work of Shaw, if he 
 would moderate his satire and conceal his philosophy. 
 
202 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 In his next play, " John Bull's Other Island " (1904), 
 he met the public, and there was a reconciliation which 
 gave him his place as a dramatist in the English 
 theatre. Most people, knowing Shaw's unlimited 
 capacity for abusing England, would have expected 
 that, in dealing with the relations of England and 
 Ireland, he would outdo a member of the Clan-na- 
 Gael in denouncing England's record in the sister 
 isle. Instead of this he represented the co-operation 
 of the two nations as mutually usefuT" IHshmeh 
 might' put it that he was so eager to stand upright 
 between the contending parties that he fell back- 
 ward. Most certainly English people were more 
 pleased with his typical Englishman than the Irish 
 were pleased with his " real Ireland." Possibly this 
 was because he wrote the play for the Irish Literary 
 Theatre. It is — ^if the way of putting it be not too 
 Hibernian — Shaw's custom to hit the man who is 
 present, not the man who is absent. 
 l~Ti was a fine, conciliatory play, very able in char- 
 /acterisation if very loose in plan, so surprisingly 
 'moderate in its satire of England that people almost 
 hailed Shaw as a Pro-Saxon. He conceives an 
 engineering partnership of an Englishman, Broad- 
 bent, with an Irishman, Doyle, in London. The 
 business prospers because the men's qualities are 
 mutually corrective. In Broadbent (or England, as 
 partner in the Imperial firm) were " the strength, 
 satisfaction, social confidence, and cheerful bumptious- 
 ness that money, comfort, and good feeding bring 
 to all healthy people." In Doyle we find " the 
 freedom from illusion, the power of facing facts, the 
 nervous industry, the sharpened wits, the sensitive 
 pride of the imaginative man who has fought his way 
 up through social persecution and poverty." Broad- 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT SOS 
 
 bent quite overshadows his partner in the play, and 
 it is not surprising — though Shaw affected to be 
 surprised — that EngHsh audiences were flattered. 
 He takes Broadbent on business to Ireland, and pur- 
 ports to show us the real Ireland. As I said in the 
 first chapter, it is not a flattering picture. " Celtic 
 wit " is shown to be a poor mjrth. There is only one 
 really JnteUigent and^xleaxrJaeadfid. man. on- tEE stage, 
 arid he is regarded by his neighbours as " the mad 
 priest:" The heroine, if one may so describe her, is 
 a"go63T;ype, but she can scarcely be called distinctively 
 Irish. The whole atmosphere gives a feeling of 
 pettiness, slovenliness, heavy gaiety, and mischievous 
 ignorance. There is really no " plot." It is a group 
 of characters in relation with Broadbent, and, for all 
 his defects, the Englishman overtops them. Shaw 
 would probably not admit that he is superior to Doyle, 
 but- that is one's impression. 
 
 ["Naturally, the Irish Literary Society found that 
 pits actors were not competent to perform the piece 
 — the second play of Shaw's rejected on that curious 
 ground — and Vedrenne and Barker put it on the stage 
 at the Royal Court Theatre. The Irish question was 
 under discussion at the time, and the play easily got 
 attention. It greatly pleased English audiences, 
 rather to Shaw's disgust, and ran for 121 nights at 
 the Court. Prominent politicians were seen enjoying 
 it, and the King commanded a performance. It is 
 one of the ironies of Shaw's life that a play in which 
 he seemed to flatter England won for him at last the 
 ear of London. Certainly the play in itself, as a play, 
 was not calculated to do this. It has nothing like 
 the humour of some of his earlier comedies, and it 
 can scarcely be called a drama. Walkley called it 
 an amusing " farrago." It was an interesting pre- 
 
204 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 sentment of a group of finely drawn characters, with 
 a moral ; and the moral was that England was by no 
 means the villain of the Irish tragedy, as Irislimeir 
 thought. ~ 
 
 fin the preface to the published play Shaw sought 
 tj> modify the impression he had given. He meant 
 Broadbent to represent that " hysterical, nonsense- 
 crammed, fact-proof, truth-terrified, unballasted 
 sport of all the bogey panics and all the silly en- 
 thusiasms that now calls itself ' God's Englishman.' " 
 He represented the Irishman as " clear-headed, sane, 
 hardily callous to the boyish sentimentalities, sus- 
 ceptibilities, and credulities that make the English- 
 man the dupe of every charlatan and the idolater of 
 every numbskull." He_x£rtainly did not ..^.ucceed 
 in his design, and it is not without significance that 
 he adds"! " I like Englishmen much better than 
 Irishmen " : though he undoes the compUment, with 
 his usual perversity, by sajdng afterwards : "It 
 takes an Irishman years of residence in England to 
 respect a blockhead. , An Enghshman will not respect 
 or like anyone else."\ 
 
 I venture to say"that the psychology of this play 
 is as wrong as the philosophy of its predecessor. It 
 is an excellent example of my contention that Shaw 
 is farther from realism than the dramatists he con- 
 demns, and that his characters are not at all typical, 
 as Hamon contends. We may put aside as feeble 
 jokes the suggestions that the Englishman of to-day 
 calls himself " God's Enghshman " and will respect 
 none but a blockhead. The quintessential point of 
 Shaw's racial psychology is that the Englishman is 
 " muddle-headed," and the Irishman is " clear- 
 headed." He does not admit, of course, that there 
 is a Celtic race and an Anglo-Saxon race. But it 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 205 
 
 comes to the same thing when he says that there 
 is "an Irish climate which will stamp an immigrant 
 more deeply and durably in two years, apparently, 
 than the English climate will in two hundred." In 
 point of fact, he assigns psychological racial characters 
 more sharply than believers in race generally do ; 
 and it is not uninteresting to remark that his view 
 of the action of environment here is out of joint with 
 Ills theory of heredity. The Englishman has the 
 virtues of money — strength, confidence, etc. — to 
 redeem his muddle-headedness and illusions, and his 
 prosperity enables him to tolerate leaders who 
 " muddle through " imperial afEairs. The Irishman 
 has been schooled to reality and clearness of mind. 
 I have spent half my life in intimate association with 
 Irishmen, of various classes, and emphatically deny 
 that they are clearer-headed and less duped by illusions 
 than the English. Shaw is not relying on observation 
 at all, but is complacently building on the foolish 
 proverb about EngUshmen " muddling through."' 
 If the Boer War is quoted, one may confidently 
 challenge comparison of our whole statesmanship, 
 on internal or external affairs, with that of Germany, 
 France, or Italy ; whUe the whole history of Ireland 
 is against the claim that the Irish are clear-headed 
 and free from illusions. Shaw would probably class 
 himself as Irish in intellectual temperament. It 
 must seem to many that the vagaries of his philosophy 
 and the delightful extravagances of his comedies 
 hardly confirm his estimate. 
 
 In the preface to this play Shaw glances at the 
 religious and political problem of Ireland. For the 
 Catholic clergy he has no more tenderness than 
 George Moore. He severely condemns their rapacity 
 and their efforts to restrict the culture of the laity 
 
206 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 But, like most Irishmen who belong to neither religious 
 camp, he believes that Home Rule will lead to a 
 curtailment of the power of the clergy. The Pro- 
 testants will co-operate with the growing Catholic 
 resentment of the despotism of the priests, and check 
 it. English officials in Ireland form a Mutual Admira- 
 tion Society. The Irish Protestant does not belong 
 to the Society, though he profits by it, and he will 
 not be pained at the disappearance of the Castle. 
 The Church will seek advantages from an Irish 
 Parliament, and the reaction in the country will be 
 such that you will find " To Hell with the Pope " 
 chalked on the walls of southern Catholic towns. 
 From the broader point of view the gain wUl be 
 important. Ireland, with its perennial dwelling 
 on the conquest, is like a man with a broken arm ; 
 you must set it before he will do any good. At 
 present " Nationalism stands between Ireland and 
 the light of the world," inspiring futile oratory and 
 bitter dissension. ' Responsible self-government ....wilL-. 
 deflate the windbags, ,„.,__^^ 
 
 '"' "Tfie simultaneous success of " Man and Superman " 
 and " John Bull's Other Island " was enhanced by 
 the appearance in 1905 of " Major Barbara." This 
 play has not been nearly so successful as its pre- 
 decessors, though Julius Bab thinks it Shaw's finest 
 dramatic work. One can hardly agree to that 
 ■estimate ; without, however, endorsing the severe 
 -criticisms of Archer and Walkley and other English 
 critics. It shows a return to the didactic model of 
 " Widowers' Houses " and " Mrs Warren." The 
 moral — the evils of poverty and the opportunity of 
 wealth — is by no means hidden away under a sugar- 
 coat, yet it does not stand out in blatantly propa- 
 .^andist speeches and it is of such a general nature 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 207 
 
 that few could demur to it. There is a secondary 
 theme, the question whether tainted money may be 
 used for high causes, but it is not important in the 
 play. Some saw in it also an attack on the Salvation 
 Army, which Shaw repudiates, and Julius Bab's high 
 praise of it is based on the theory that it represents a 
 dramatic struggle of antagonistic influences for the soul 
 of Barbara. The latter theme seems to be an incidental 
 dramatic element in the rather straggling story. 
 
 The main purpose is the praise of money and the 
 denunciation of poverty. In the preface to " Man 
 and Superman," only two years before, Shaw had 
 said that the attack on poverty did not matter much, 
 as it only interfered with the happiness of the in- 
 dividual, not the purpose of the Life-Force. Now 
 he returns to Socialism and denounces poverty as 
 the root of all evU. He does this by the quaint 
 expedient of virtually extolling Andrew Undershaft, 
 a manufacturer of explosives, which Shaw loathes as 
 cordially as he loathes beer or brothels. Instead of 
 caricaturing Undershaft, a middle-class man living 
 on tainted money, he presents him as quite an amiable 
 and admirable embodiment of the Life-Force. 
 Through Undershaft he denounces poverty as " the 
 worst of all crimes." " All the other crimes," he 
 says, " are virtues beside it ; all the other dishonours 
 are chivalry itself by comparison." Through Under- 
 shaft' s mildly cynical mouth he pours disdain on the 
 Salvation Army and its futile tinkering with poverty, 
 and announces that the seven deadly sins are not 
 impurity, etc., but " food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, 
 respectability, and children," and a man must redeem 
 his soul by making money. Shaw would almost 
 make poverty the one crime which the police are to 
 detect and punish, he says. 
 
208 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 He secures the dramatic conflict in a fantastic 
 way. Undershaft's daughter Barbara, the grand- 
 daughter of an earl, is a major in the Salvation Army. 
 That brings us near the limits of plausibility, but 
 Shaw, the realist, pushes us deliberately beyond. 
 Barbara has a learned Greek scholar for a lover, and 
 induces him to masquerade as a drummer in the Army. 
 She speaks of him as her " bloke," and mingles piety 
 and levity and slang in a way which shows how 
 appallingly superficial was Shaw's study of his material 
 in real life. " When I die," she says in the end, " let 
 God be in my debt, not I in his ; and let me forgive 
 him as becomes a woman of my rank." That is a 
 piece of pure Shavian paganism (man's relation to 
 the Life-Force) put into the mouth of a woman of 
 such deep Christian sentiments that she can belong 
 to the West End and live in the East. But all the 
 characters are more or less freakish. Shaw's pretence 
 of realism and anti-romance is genially left on the 
 shelf. He writes of a world which is real enough, 
 but utterly refuses to put real characters in it. Most 
 of them are not even human. Cusins, the lover- 
 scholar who plays the drum, is a wild and entertaining 
 bit of fantasy. 
 
 The play amused by its extravagance and its smart 
 dialogue. It is quite impossible to regard it seriously 
 as a dramatic struggle over a soul, or as a social gospel. 
 The end, in fact, is as fantastic as the middle. Barbara, 
 who has left the Army because it receives tainted 
 money, returns to it with the gospel of St Andrew 
 Undershaft. No more futile working among starve- 
 lings. Her learned lover becomes a partner in the 
 explosive business, and she is to spend her ardour in 
 the salvation of the well-fed artisans. The burden 
 of the play was a paradox, rather than an offensive 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 20& 
 
 gospel, to the British pubUc. They were quite ready 
 to agree that Undershaft was justified in making a 
 fortune by manufacturing explosives, and that the 
 Salvation Army were justified in taking contributions 
 from such men and from brewers. It was a novelty 
 to find that Shaw, apparently, did not want to take 
 away Undershaft' s money and divide it among the 
 protegees of the Salvation Army, and to have him 
 caricaturing the poor instead of the middle class. 
 One needs a close acquaintance with Shaw's views 
 to understand that any serious idea underlies this 
 fantastic play. Happily, the public knew very little 
 of Shaw's serious views, and they enjoyed the fantasia 
 for its fun and wit and paradox. It did not, how- 
 ever, run half as long as its predecessor at the Court 
 Theatre. 
 
 One or two little plays of no importance followed 
 " Major Barbara." " Passion, Poison, and Putre- 
 faction " was a slight farcical sketch written for the 
 benefit performance at Regent's Park in aid of the 
 funds of the Actors' Orphanage in 1905. It is not 
 included in Shaw's pubUshed works. About the same 
 time a short piece was needed to help out the bill 
 in New York, where Daly was presenting " The Man 
 of Destiny," and Shaw made a malicious thrust at 
 the " Candidamaniacs." In the previous year New 
 York audiences had enthused over Candida ; New 
 York women shed tears over her beautiful soul, and 
 New York journalists tried hard to settle whether 
 she was a heroine of virtue or a thoroughly bad 
 woman. Shaw discomfited onie-half of his admirers 
 by declaring that she was a woman with no moral 
 principle whatever, and he then turned on the senti- 
 mentalists, who forgave or admired her immorality, 
 with a satirical sketch — a satire of their Candida — 
 
no BERNARD SHAW 
 
 entitled " How He Lied to Her Husband." The 
 romantic heroine fancies herself a Candida, and has an 
 admirer. The way in which he lied to her husband, 
 at the lady's request, is exceedingly amusing, but 
 the situation and characters are purely satirical. A 
 tliird and still slighter dramatic sketch, " The Inter- 
 lude at the Playhouse," was written in the following 
 year for the opening of that theatre. 
 
 Since that period of belated success Shaw has written 
 one or more plays every year, and they still come 
 from his fertile and versatile pen. In 1906 appeared 
 " The Doctor's Dilemma." From the point of view 
 of theatrical representation it is far inferior to its 
 immediate predecessors and has had less success. 
 Shaw had chosen a dangerous theme and was unable 
 to keep within artistic bounds. We saw in an earlier 
 chapter what he thinks of the medical profession. 
 The shadow of his great bugbear, Huxley — Rationalist, 
 Utilitarian, and Vivisector — seems to lie over the 
 whole of the profession which he adorned, and under 
 that shadow Shaw imagines surgeons cutting out 
 appendages, doctors dosing patients, and professors 
 torturing animals, with the feelings of schoolboys 
 or savages. He decided, on hearing some gossip 
 about an experiment at a hospital, to turn it into a 
 drama and satirise the doctors. 
 
 Contrary to his usual practice, he makes the first 
 act utterly undramatic and heavily satirical. A 
 medical man has been knighted and his more dis=' 
 tinguished colleagues come to congratulate him. It 
 is a tract in dramatic form : a rather ponderous 
 exposure of their supposed quackeries and jealousies. 
 The second act introduces the dilemma, and promises 
 a very dramatic development. Sir Colenso Ridgeon, 
 who has discovered a treatment of tuberculosis, has 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 211 
 
 Toom for only one more patient at his hospital. A 
 pretty woman calls and induces him to take her 
 husband, a consumptive artist ; but it turns out 
 that the artist is a worthless and unscrupulous man, 
 and there is a very worthy and needy medical man, a 
 friend of theirs, who requires treatment. Which is 
 it to be ? Are they — the whole group of doctors 
 discuss the dilemma — to prefer the good pictures of 
 Dubedat to good men like Dr Blenkinsop ? At first 
 it seems that the doctors act admirably, and the 
 artist abominably. They let Dubedat (he in order 
 to save the life of Blenkinsop. But Shaw was not 
 •disposed to set the British public admiring the medical 
 profession, and he complicates their motives. 
 
 No doubt it is more artistic or dramatic to com- 
 plicate the motives, but Shaw's aim was not artistic. 
 He wanted to lower the character of his medical men, 
 as well as to expose their charlatanry. The latter 
 purpose he attains by supposing that in private 
 conversation they freely admit it to each other. He 
 has, however, so poor an opinion of medical men 
 (generally), especially in the higher rank of the pro- 
 fession, that he seems to think nothing too gross or 
 implausible to attribute to them. His four heads 
 of the profession take the keenest interest in, and 
 spend hours with, the utterly unscrupulous artist, 
 not so much because he paints well as because he has 
 a pretty wife. It is not, of course, impossible that 
 three leading doctors should fall in love with the wife, 
 and prospective widow, of an obscure artist, but the 
 measure of intelligence which Shaw gives Mrs Dubedat 
 •does not make it plausible. They have themselves 
 either weak intelligence or weak character. The 
 particular case of Sir Colenso Ridgeon is worse. He 
 .acknowledges to the widow, when Dubedat dies, that 
 
212 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 he was " so idiotic about her " that he let the man die 
 in order that he might marry her. In reality he did 
 more than this. He gave a dose of his specific cure 
 for tuberculosis to the brother physician who took 
 charge of Dubedat (and who also hoped to marry the 
 widow, and, apparently, eventually did), knowing 
 that it would be misapplied and the patient's death 
 would be greatly accelerated. He killed the man, in 
 effect, to marry the widow for her good looks. His 
 plea that he saved her from a scoundrel makes no 
 difference to the issue, and only disgusts her. It may 
 be urged that a dramatist has as much right to make 
 an individual doctor stoop to crime and folly as any 
 other character. But it is another matter to involve 
 three or four of the heads of the profession, and, as 
 the whole published work is a virulent tract against 
 the profession, one sees that the aim was not artistic 
 and the effect is disagreeable. Whether or no we 
 agree that an artist should have a purpose, the artistic 
 feeling is a totally different thing from social or 
 humanitarian enthusiasm, and is often disturbed 
 by it. 
 
 Shaw, like Ibsen, is often amused at the interpreta- 
 tion of his work by disciples, as happened again in 
 this case. Dubedat was a scoundrel. He lied, stole, 
 deceived his wife and everybody else, and laughed 
 at the notion of a moral limitation of his thirst for 
 pleasure. Since Shaw preached the invalidity of 
 moral law as a control of the individual will, and 
 made Dubedat speak of himself as " a disciple of 
 Bernard Shaw," many supposed that he approved 
 the artist's conduct. He ridicules the idea in his 
 preface to " The Sanity of Art." He does not believe 
 in granting license to genius, he says. It is true that 
 the Superman will bring with him a new code of 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 213 
 
 conduct, but. it is very dif&cult to say "how much 
 ■selfishness we ought to stand from a gifted person for 
 the sake of his gifts." This is really an evasion of the 
 issue, and it exposes a weakness of Shaw's theory of 
 ethics. The question is not whether we ought to 
 tolerate the thefts and lies and grossness of a gifted 
 artist ; most people will not have much difficulty in 
 deciding that issue. The real question is whether 
 there is any " ought " for Dubedat himself. On 
 Shaw's theory there is not. He acts on his own 
 consciousness of the impulse of the Life-Force. If his 
 interpretation differs from yours, you have no authority 
 to condemn him unless you appeal to social considera- 
 tions, or moral law. 
 
 " Getting Married " (1908) is a dramatic conversa- 
 tion on the subject of marriage and divorce. Shaw 
 had in all his plays refused to follow the custom of 
 dividing acts into scenes. Now the whole play 
 constitutes a single scene or act, and nearly the whole 
 interest centres in the characters and their views. 
 It is less academic than such a description suggests, 
 as there is a good deal of action implied in the 
 conversation and in the end the scene resolves itself 
 into something like farce; but it is a peculiar type 
 of " play." In efEect it is a symposium on marriage, 
 the participants being a genial old bishop, his wife 
 and her sister (both of liberal views), a philosophic 
 greengrocer and his transcendentalist wife, and various 
 middle-class young ladies and gentlemen who stroll 
 into the scene. The wit of the dialogue, the idio- 
 syncrasy of the characters, and the exaggerated 
 humour of much of the episode, make it entertaining, 
 but it is in essence a treatise on marriage by a group 
 of people who know a good deal about it. 
 
 AH Shaw's objections to marriage appear, some- 
 
214 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 times in the most amusingly incongruous spokesmen. 
 The bishop's sister-in-law is the type of woman who- 
 genially declines to be bored with the life-long com- 
 panionship of a man, yet would like to have a child : 
 a character finely and admiringly drawn, one of the 
 best and most natural " ladies " (apart from the 
 implausibility of her episcopal status) in Shaw's 
 gallery of women. The bishop's wife confesses to 
 polyandric impulses, and, to the horror of the prim 
 general who represents old-fashioned sentiment, the 
 bishop smiles. The greengrocer tells the bishop's 
 wife (who listens as genially as if the episcopal palace 
 were an Ibsen club) how his wife's excessive fitness 
 for domestic life makes home impossible for him, and 
 the wife, a weird and wonderful creation, falls into 
 trances and discourses of love in a way that is unique 
 in Shaw's works. I have quoted one of her utterances 
 in the chapter on marriage. The bishop's brother 
 has had a divorce by collusion, and his daughter 
 languidly hesitates to go to church on the wedding- 
 morn. In the end they try to frame a new scheme of 
 marriage, and have to abandon it as a sort of problem 
 of squaring the circle. It is a novel and witty attack 
 on marriage in a thin dramatic dress ; it is also futile, 
 because the situation is unreal. 
 
 The banned play, "The Showing Up of Blanco 
 Posnet," followed in the year 1909. Shaw returned 
 to his melodramatic experiments and wrote, in form, 
 a crude and fiery story of life in the Wild West. In 
 the preface Shaw declares that it is " really a religious 
 tract in dramatic form " ; in fact, he gives to the play 
 the sub-title : " A Sermon in crude melodrama." 
 It is a short one-act play, designed, apparently, like 
 " The Devil's Disciple," to show that impulses to 
 good action are found in what are conventionally 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 215 
 
 regarded as the most debased characters and are by 
 no means confined to characters who have a complete 
 stock of good principles. Blanco is a drunken wastrel 
 who discovers his brother converted to pious ways 
 and enjoying a high local repute as Elder Daniels. 
 The Elder secretly receives him, but refuses to pay 
 money which he virtually owes, and Blanco makes 
 off in the early morning with a horse. The horse, 
 however, had been borrowed from the sheriff, and 
 Blanco is brought to the rough court on the lethal 
 charge of horse-stealing, where a prostitute, whom 
 he insults, swears away his life. At the last moment 
 a woman forces her way in and declares that she 
 stole the horse, and one gathers from his incoherent 
 ravings and her story that he gave her the horse, 
 though the pursuers were after him, to ride to the 
 doctor with a sick child. The child died on the way 
 and she returns to save Blanco. Even the prostitute 
 is so overcome that she withdraws and acknowledges 
 her perjury, and the curtain falls — Shaw is quite 
 determined to have a love-scene — on the matrimonial 
 alliance of the wastrel and the harlot. 
 
 The moral, which is very obviously fitted into the 
 story for the reader to discover, is that good impiilses 
 come from an internal principle, not from moral 
 maxims. " If," says Shaw, " our silly censorship 
 would permit its performance, it might possibly help 
 to set right-side-up the perverted conscience and 
 reinvigorate the starved self-respect of our consider- 
 able class of loose-lived playgoers whose point of 
 honour is to deride all official and conventional 
 sermons." One can hardly imagine it touching the 
 heart of this type of playgoer ; at the most, it might 
 draw a few facile tears from the typical melodrama- 
 audience. It is powerfully written, but the scene is 
 
216 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 too remote from our iexperience for us to test its 
 truth, and one cannot help feeling that Shaw has made 
 his vicious characters act virtuously merely to prove 
 his theory ; that it is not a legitimate deduction 
 from life, but an interested construction of characters 
 out of material borrowed from Bret Harte's stories. 
 The group of drabs, sluts, and drunkards which fills 
 the scene is unpleasant, and one finds it very difficult 
 to distinguish between the influence of whisky and 
 the influence of the Life-Force in Blanco's hysterical 
 behaviour. The humour of the piece is slender, and 
 is too apt to be expressed in such passages as this 
 speech of the hypocritical Elder to his brother : "I 
 tell you, Blanco, what keeps America to-day the 
 purest of the nations is that when she's not working 
 she's too drunk to hear the voice of the tempter." 
 Americans do not regard it as a piece of accurate 
 realism, and the purpose is too thin and unconvincing 
 to redeem the play. 
 
 It had, however, no opportunity to reach the loose- 
 lived playgoer. Blanco holds a crude version of 
 Shaw's theology, mixed with delirimn tremens, and 
 he talks of God thwarting him in a way which 
 shocked the censor. " He [God] always has a trick 
 up his sleeve. . . . He's a sly one. He's a mean 
 one." It was certainly ludicrous of the censor to 
 pass all the real coarseness which the theme involved 
 in the play, and run his pencil through such passages 
 as these. Shaw rightly declined to alter them and 
 the play was banned. It was afterwards performed 
 in Dublin, but in 1909 and 1913 the censor repeated 
 his objections to the play, and it has not appeared 
 in England. The folly of the censure gave Shaw a 
 long-desired opportunity, and the published volume 
 contains thirty pages of play and a hundred pages of 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 217 
 
 vigorous attack on the Censorship. He tells at 
 length the story of how he scared the Joint Committee 
 on the Censorship, and how its members avoided his 
 evidence. One finds some extenuation for their 
 conduct on learning that the paper he wished to 
 submit to them, or force on them, consisted of fifty 
 pages of thoroughly Shavian discussion of the nature 
 of immorality and the function of the drama. The 
 immoral act is " not necessarily sinful," he says, but 
 is " whatever is contrary to established manners and 
 customs." His very forcible and crushing indictment 
 of the Censorship should be read by all who have a 
 lingering respect for that institution, but it cannot 
 be discussed here. 
 
 Instead of being intimidated by the thunder, the 
 censor proceeded in the following year (1910) to 
 condemn Shaw's next play, " Press Cuttings," on 
 even more frivolous grounds. It is an amusing 
 little extravaganza or burlesque. The Prime Minister, 
 Balsquith, dresses as a suffragette and chains himself 
 to the scraper at General Mitchener's door. It is the 
 only way in which he can elude the suffragette 
 pickets in Downing Street and reach the general. 
 The conversation that follows is mainly intended to 
 expose the incompetence and nervousness of • our 
 military men and the corruption of our political 
 leaders. The censor protested that personalities 
 could not be permitted on the stage, and the names 
 were mockingly changed to Johnson and Bones. 
 Shaw says that he had no intention of caricaturing 
 Mr Asquith and Lord Kitchener, but no one who has 
 read the sketch will think that the censor was unduly 
 suspicious, however foolish it may be to object to 
 pleasantries of the kind. 
 
 Two other unimportant sketches followed in 1910. 
 
218 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 " The Dark Lady of the Sonnets " was a slight piece 
 in one act, with four characters, written for the 
 matinee in aid of the funds of a National Theatre. 
 Its playful liberties with Shakespeare, who was 
 impersonated by Mr Granville Barker, were resented 
 by many critics. " Misalliance : a Debate in One 
 Sitting," is described by Mr Baughan as " a repetition 
 of ■ Getting Married ' without its wit, observation, 
 and humanity." It was produced at the Duke of 
 York's Theatre in February, and failed to please. A 
 romantic tradesman and a distinguished administrator, 
 with their families, discuss every topic of Shavian 
 interest, until the rather tedious debate is interrupted 
 (or quickened) by the arrival, in an aeroplane, of a 
 kind of John Tanner and an athletic Polish lady of 
 advanced views. Very entertaining talk and some 
 love-making follow, and the episode ends with the 
 rather farcical introduction of an ofhce-boy who 
 demands of the merchant satisfaction for his mother's 
 " shame." The witty dialogue and grotesque incident 
 failed to make the piece acceptable, and it was quickly 
 abandoned. 
 
 In 191 1 Shaw produced the last of his comedies, to 
 date, which has had a conspicuous success. " Fanny's 
 First Play " held the theatre from April 191 1 until 
 the middle of December 1912, almost a record run, 
 and is still popular. The story will be fresh in the 
 mind of the reader. A young lady who has just 
 finished her studies at Cambridge, where she became 
 infected with Fabianism, writes a play, and, without 
 acknowledging the authorship, induces her old-world 
 father to give a private representation of it and ask 
 the leading London critics to judge it. Her play is 
 a thoroughly Shavian presentment of a middle-class 
 suburban home ; in fact, the whole piece is a satire 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 219 
 
 of the English home, framed in a satire of the English 
 dramatic critic. 
 
 The ingenious supposition that the play has been 
 written by an inexpert girl may seem to disarm the 
 critic in advance. Its excellences may be ascribed 
 to Shaw and its crudities described as the work of 
 Fanny, or an attempt to do as she would. We need 
 not, however, be intimidated ; though certainly it is 
 one of the cleverest pranks that Shaw has played with 
 the critics. But the features to which one may take 
 exception are so thoroughly Shavian, and the whole 
 comedy is so skilfully wrought, that we may leave 
 the imaginary Fanny out of account. 
 
 The play is a medley of impossibilities and im- 
 plausibilities, laden with a satire so obviously exagger- 
 ated that no one's withers are wrung, and brightened 
 by some qviaint and most amusing characters. Mrs 
 Gilbey just enters the sphere of possibility as a middle- 
 class mother with an original sense of humour, and 
 her son Bobby might pass as Every-young-man ; but 
 when Bobby entertains a " daughter of joy " in his 
 father's house, with the connivance of a butler, who 
 is the disguised brother of a duke, and Mrs Gilbey 
 smiles on the relation and blesses the ultimate union, 
 we are swept far away from the world of reality. 
 Margaret Knox, a girl whom Bobby discards in 
 favour of his giddy and vulgar little friend, seems to 
 have cost her author some pains, but is hardly suc- 
 cessful. The Life-Force winds her up to such a 
 pitch at a religious meeting that she picks up a casual 
 foreigner and rushes to a dance at a questionable 
 establishment, where she is arrested for assaulting 
 the police. She comes out of jail a reformed person : 
 deaf to her pious mother's exhortations, and deter- 
 mined to enjoy life in her own way. The critical 
 
220 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 explanation which she has with her reUgious mother 
 imposes a strain to which neither the dramatist nor 
 the actress seems equal — the implausible cannot be 
 made seriously plausible-^and I confess that I turned 
 away with some disgust, as others did, when the 
 fine-natured girl was, in the third act, represented 
 as using her fists on Bobby's face (after very little 
 provocation) with the savagery, of a drunken slut. 
 
 The whole piece, amusing, original, and deservedly 
 popular as it is, teems with these gross improbabilities, 
 and they are inserted, whether or no you conceive 
 them as concessions to Fanny's crudeness, for the 
 purpose of vituperating the suburban English home. 
 GUbey snarls like a caged animal during two and 
 three quarter acts, and is only restored to a genial, 
 wine-loving mood by the bad example of his son. 
 Knox is a kind of father whom you might possibly 
 find, after an arduous search, in a city of seven million 
 people, but it is doubtful whether even such a man, 
 if you found him, would ask the brother of a duke, 
 bluntly and publicly, if he were legitimate. The two 
 mothers are entirely charming and unreal : one a 
 lacrimose pietist, who breathes into her moist handker- 
 chief every few minutes that the source of happiness 
 is internal, and the other a placid, bovine, stupid, 
 good-natured old nonentity. All of them behave, 
 when the butler discloses his aristocratic birth, like 
 a compartment-fuU of half-intoxicated East-enders 
 returning from Southend. And the heavy satire 
 is crowned when, at the close, four of the leading 
 English dramatic critics are represented as undecided 
 whether the play was written by Pinero, Granville 
 Barker, Bernard Shaw, or a gushing young schoolgirl. 
 
 " Fanny's First Play " is, apart from its abounding 
 humour and technical excellence, a compendium of 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 221 
 
 Shaw's charges against the middle class ; and it is 
 a good illustration of his failure to enforce them. 
 From beginning to end it rails at English ignorance, 
 stupidity, prejudice, stodginess, hypocrisy, snobbery, 
 brutality, and domestic dreariness. Lest the moral of 
 it be not plain to all, Shaw lets his Frenchman deliver 
 a ten-minutes' speech on the stupidity and other 
 defects of his countrymen, and his auditors on the 
 stage are all supposed to be too dense to suspect 
 that he is describing them. The caricature evidently 
 defeated its purpose, and passed as entertainment — 
 as one of Mr Shaw's delightful inventions — ^with the 
 crowded audiences. The playgoers probably had 
 little suspicion, as a rule, that the homes of Gilbey 
 and Knox were supposed to be more or less faithful 
 reproductions of their homes in Bayswater or Syden- 
 ham ; nor can one say that this was due to density 
 so much as to their superior knowledge of their own 
 estabhshments. At the most, a man here and there 
 may have imagined that he was enjoying the laugh 
 at his neighbour's expense, and no doubt there was 
 a core of resolute Shavians applauding the realism of 
 the piece. It succeeded so well, however, because it 
 was good fun and very clever imaginary portraiture, 
 and one was not tempted to take any of it seriously. 
 
 In the following year, 1912, was written " Androcles 
 and the Lion," and the controversy about Mr Shaw's 
 purpose in writing it has hardly yet subsided. Men 
 with some public reputation for rehgious penetration, 
 like Sir OUver Lodge, declare that the play is "pro- 
 foundly religious," whereas prominent clergymen 
 denounced it as thoroughly irreligious. Apparently 
 Shaw wished to commend the early Christians, but 
 could not resist the temptation to humanise them, 
 and this did not please their professional admirers. 
 
222 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 One of the condemned Christians falls in love with 
 a Roman soldier; another makes so vigorous and 
 skilful a struggle for life that the remainder — much 
 to their relief, seemingly — are saved. One alone has 
 to face the lion, and from the remarkable behaviour 
 of the martyr and the stage-animal we gather that 
 they are the old friends of our nursery days, Androcles 
 and the Lion. The tragedy merges into comedy, 
 and the thoughtful part of the audience is left in 
 doubt as to whether Mr Shaw admired or disdains 
 the mart3T:s. We find the key in his earlier historical 
 plays. He is humanising the romantic figures of 
 early Christian tradition. Beyond that his only clear 
 purpose is to oppose the theoretical peacefulness 
 of early Christianity to the militarism of ancient 
 Rome and modern Christendom. As a more or 
 less serious attempt to urge the gospel of peace it 
 can have had little influence, and you can hardly 
 humanise historical characters by substituting prosy 
 fiction for romantic fiction. It is an interesting 
 suggestion ; but it will hardly be doubted that it was 
 the somewhat incongruous element of comedy which 
 kept the play on the boards for two months or so. 
 
 Three of Shaw's shorter sketches were also written 
 in 1912. " Overruled " is described by Mr Baughan 
 as " a poor little piece of Shavian dialectics." It is 
 the real sequel to, or continuation of, " Getting 
 Married." It formed a triple bill, with short plays 
 by Pinero and Barrie, at the Duke of York's Theatre 
 in October (1912), and survived only a few nights. 
 Two married couples exchange partners and discuss 
 the muddle, which ensues, until the dinner-gong puts 
 an end to the discussion. Except that current ideas 
 of sex-ethic are ridiculed, one does not gather any 
 ■definite lesson from the conversation, or " demonstra. 
 
IN THE LIME-LIGHT 223 
 
 tion." Shaw's mind is poised between the untruth 
 of monogamy and the inconvenience of polygamy. 
 The play was at first entitled " Trespassers will be 
 Prosecuted," as it is still called in some reference- 
 books, but Shaw found that there was already a play 
 with that name. The third 1912 play was " Pyg- 
 malion," but this, up to the present, has only been 
 performed in Germany and published in that country. 
 
 Though these plays had been slight and unsuccess- 
 ful, the older plays kept Shaw well in the front rank 
 of English dramatists during 1912. " You Never 
 Can Tell " was revived with considerable success, 
 and "Captain Brassbound's Conversion" had a 
 moderate run, while " Fanny's First Play " continued 
 to attract crowds. Shaw had meantime returned 
 to his congenial task of humanising history, and his 
 next play was " Great Catherine," a moderate success 
 at the Vaudeville. Faithful to his principle of follow- 
 ing his artistic impulse rather than rules, Shaw has 
 in this case — and for the first time — divided the piece 
 into scenes. A single act or episode divided into 
 four scenes, each very short, cannot do more than 
 give, in Shaw's words, " a thumbnail sketch of Russian 
 court life in the eighteenth century" ; as the third 
 scene is dull and superfluous, moreover, the play 
 becomes a very slight sketch. 
 
 Historically, the piece is " founded on fact," but 
 the dramatist builds a good deal of fiction on his 
 facts. Mr Norman M'Kinnel makes Prince Patiomkin 
 a very plausible and amusing blackguard, but the 
 portrait of Catherine, for the sake of which the sketch 
 was presumably written, is not very convincing. 
 Her features are so well known that Shaw could not 
 fail to reproduce them, though it is singular that, 
 ■with so very definite a personality to reproduce, his 
 
224 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 character has not all the idiosyncrasy and sharpness 
 of outline which he usually gives so effectively. Miss 
 Gertrude Kingston hardly improves matters by 
 making Catherine, for some occult reason, speak 
 English with a foreign accent. It is not supposed, 
 since even the Cossacks speak fluent English, that 
 she is really attempting to talk to her English visitor 
 in English. One fancies that Miss Kingston is trjdng 
 to give the character more individuality. In other 
 historical plays Shaw has aimed at humanising the 
 characters by the simple process of modernising them. 
 Human nature, he insists, is the same in all ages. 
 One could not apply that principle too rigorously 
 to Catherine the Great without erasing her most 
 prominent traits, and the only effect of Shaw's partial 
 application of it is the partial blurring of the very 
 definite personality of Catherine. 
 
 One suspects that Shaw's more geniune aim was 
 to have another fling at " God's Englishman." An 
 eighteenth-century officer of the British army visits 
 the Russian court. On his poor head are heaped all 
 Shaw's prejudices or exaggerations. Although he 
 is described as a Bachelor of Arts — and any English 
 officer who would take such a degree in the eighteenth 
 century would be exceptionally intellectual — and 
 a stickler for etiquette, he falls into convulsions of 
 laughter on hearing the name Popoff, chides Catherine 
 the Great for being unwomanly, and commits the 
 hundred atrocities that only " Shaw's Englishman " 
 can commit. As usual, the caricature is so heavy 
 that the English audience enjoys it. We have come 
 to regard it as the leit-motiv of the Shavian comedy, 
 and do not grudge it. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 
 
 It will now be apparent why a detailed study of 
 Shaw's opinions and their growth must precede any 
 appreciation of his dramas. Essays on the dramas 
 themselves, apart from Shaw's philosophy, generally 
 lead either to fantastic interpretations of his occult 
 meaning or bewildered speculation as to when he 
 is serious and when not. There is a common notion 
 that Shaw takes pleasure in advancing eccentric 
 statements with an air of profound seriousness and 
 then smiling at the critics who take them seriously. 
 This is, as a rule, a complete misconception of the 
 man. There are occasions when he flings out a 
 paradoxical statement for the mere purpose of catching 
 attention, as the showman displays his gorgeous 
 pictures at the fair, but in most of the cases where 
 his less-informed admirers take him to be fooling he 
 is quite serious. 
 
 Years ago, when I was less acquainted with his 
 peculiar set of first principles, I ventured, in review- 
 ing an essay of his on modern science, to suggest 
 that his alternate paragraphs ought to be labelled 
 " serious " or " humorous," for the guidance of the 
 innocent reader. I see to-day that the whole of his 
 statements in that essay, outrageous as some of them 
 were, were logical deductions from his deepest con- 
 victions. Again, in recent times I have seen large 
 audiences regard as an exquisite joke his suggestion 
 
 225 
 
226 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 fthat the next monarch of the earth may not be a 
 Superman at all, but " a Supersnake or something." 
 He is, however, perfectly serious. His impatience 
 of science has prevented him from mastering its 
 teaching patiently and accurately, and he contends 
 that there are facts in the past story of life in this 
 planet which justify him in thinking that the Life- 
 ^^ Force may come to sterility in the human branch of 
 jthe animal world, or, in a kind of disgust, transfer 
 |ts higher purpose to some other branch and make 
 at supersede man. Other audiences, even Socialist 
 (audiences, smile at his contention that the State 
 ought to settle an income at birth on each individual ; 
 that we ought to examine periodically if each man 
 and woman has earned this income, and politely make 
 an end of those who have failed to do so ; that we 
 ought to give a long rope to criminals and merely 
 tighten the noose when they go too far ; and so on. 
 Yet in these and a score of other equally eccentric 
 opinions Mr Shaw is by no means imitating the 
 .deliberate paradoxes of Samuel Butler. They are 
 ideas which arise logically from his principles, or 
 attacks on other people's principles, and he has advo- 
 cated them consistently for a number of years. 
 Sc These opinions form the framework of his dramatic 
 /constructions, the steel frame, as it were, hidden 
 beneath the decorative exterior. He began his career 
 as an evangelist, setting forth his naked gospel in 
 blunt and incisive speech or explicit pamphlets. 
 Circumstances led him to realise the great potentialities 
 of the stage for putting ideas or sentiments into the 
 mind of people, and he decided to employ the dramatic 
 form. As time went on he learned to moderate the 
 dose of social physic in his productions, and to develop 
 more and more the comedic element which chiefly 
 
THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 227 
 
 secured him an audience. People, as someone once 
 said, learned to expect from Bernard Shaw the opposite 
 of what they expected of him. He could make them 
 applaud his originality even when he put before them 
 a hotch-potch of stale melodramatic situations ; and 
 in point of fact he was original in this. It is waste 
 of time to discuss whether his plays are plays. He 
 invented, if you like, a new way of emplojdng the 
 theatre and the player's art, and, as it was entertaining, 
 the public applauded. That does not imply eitheij] 
 failure to reach the current dramatic standard (af 
 which he never aimed) or the genius to transcend iti| 
 It implies originality, which is one of the elements o» 
 genius. 
 
 On the other hand, the critic may justly com- 
 plain that he has not made good by his own example 
 the strictures which he passed on contemporary 
 dramatists. We may ignore his censure of artists 
 (writers and composers of dramatic comedy, for 
 instance) whose aim is solely to amuse. The Life- 
 Force must be compelled, like every other modern 
 employer, to be satisfied with an eight-hour service, 
 and leave men and women some time for relaxation. 
 It is a sound and admirable function to supply amuse- 
 ment which is consonant vvith good taste. We may 
 also pass over his contention that the artist must 
 have an idea to propound or defend, and that his 
 morality must not be " second-hand." The latter 
 objection, indeed, is foolish. When the new morality 
 is accepted, if it ever is accepted, even the advanced 
 artist will merely repeat it at second hand. Moreover, 
 the artist who uses his gifts for seriously enforcing 
 the old morality may be as genuine and laudable as 
 the artist who regards it as obsolete. But there is, 
 in point of fact, no apparent reason why art should 
 
228 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 include a purpose at all. One might, indeed, say 
 that art cannot include a purpose. It may be used 
 for an ulterior purpose, but it remains a complete and 
 distinct human gift in itself, whether it be so used 
 or no. Here, however, we touch an irreconcilable 
 opposition, because the conflicting views are founded 
 on conflicting tastes or temperaments. There is no 
 neutral or universal principle on which you can con- 
 tend that an artist may not be content with his 
 ministry as artist. It is only an individual asceticism 
 which can challenge his position. 
 
 But Shaw's more persistent and urgent criticism 
 during his few years of service on the Saturday Review 
 was that the modern drama was romantic and unreal. 
 The review we have made of his plays shows that he 
 completely failed to reform the stage in this direction. 
 He brought forward the model of Ibsen, and challenged 
 all others by comparison. Even in Ibsen he found 
 -one element of untruth or unreality. A tragic ending 
 was no more true to life than the happy ending of the 
 conventional drama or novel ; life goes on, as a rule, 
 and does not suddenly end in a peal of wedding-bells 
 or a suicide. In this single respect Shaw is more 
 ■realistic than the others. He is by no means always 
 scrupulous in adhering to his principle. In " The 
 Doctor's DUemma " Dubedat dies and the widow 
 marries again. " Fanny's First Play," " Man and 
 Superman," " Getting Married," and many other 
 plays, end in quite a matrimonial epidemic. 
 " Candida " and half the other plays come to an 
 artistic and psychological conclusion ; they have a 
 much more definite conclusion than, say, Ibsen's 
 " Doll's House " or " Enemy of the People." The 
 truth is that the stage has requirements as well as 
 conventions. To say that you must put on it a slice 
 
THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 229 
 
 -of real life, just as it is, is an arbitrary principle. A 
 -story is not a picture ; it has action, and it is more 
 •congenial both to the artist and the audience to 
 have the action more or less completed, instead of ; 
 broken off. j 1 
 
 All dramatic rules are really conventions, because 
 drama is an imaginative construction. You may 
 lake as your convention that the stage shall simply 
 mirror life, or you may decide to use the agents and 
 ■experiences of life in some other way. Shaw deciSML 
 twenty years ago, that the stage was to reflect real life] 
 and ran amok amongst our dramatists with thai 
 idea in his hand. Then he turned to preaching J^y 
 •example, and there never was a baser desertion of 
 principle. He has given us, in his twenty-nine plays, 
 a wonderfully varied gallery of characters, nearly all 
 very definite and different, yet very few of them 
 belong to the world of reality. The great majority of 
 them are creatures of his fertile and original imagina-j 
 tion. A large proportion of them could not hve, or 
 -certainly never did live, in the flesh ; and, where theyj 
 may be in their fundamental traits conceived asi 
 portraits of living persons, we find him almost always 
 making a liberal use of the photographer's art of 
 " touching up." In his portraits he is generally as 
 little realistic as Aubrey Beardsley ; but he prefers, 
 as a rule, to make his characters himself. 
 
 We have seen this sufficiently in our review of his 
 plays. From the first (in "Widowers' Houses") 
 he constructs his villains — and they are all villains — 
 as arbitrarily as Dickens did. In " The Philan- 
 •derers " he puts a real person, Clement Scott, amongst 
 his artificial characters, but the secret would never 
 have been penetrated if he had not revealed it. In 
 ■" Mrs Warren's Profession " he is even more arbitrary. 
 
230 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 and he diverges further and further from realism. 
 I am not thinking merely of the impossible butlers 
 who enliven " You Never Can Tell " or " Fanny's- 
 First Play." His middle-class parent is always a 
 caricature, and his women are rarely like the women 
 one meets in those particular situations. When a 
 class is odious to him, on general principles, he gives 
 its representative in his dramas a touch of the tar- 
 brush. When a man or woman is to exemplify a 
 Shavian theory he puts an additional spring in his 
 or her composition. He calls this bringing to light 
 the real inner motives of their actions, which they 
 and their favourite dramatists conspire to conceal ; 
 and his admirers repeat that his characters are real 
 people dissected. In point of fact he is a fantasist : 
 the hardest reality is as supple as indiarubber to his 
 imagination : human material is plasticine which he 
 ijUQulds as he wills. It is half the charm of his plays. 
 He hadset out, in particular, to correct the current 
 dramatic treatment of the love-theme, and in this 
 again he failed, or, rather, ignored the device on his 
 banner. There was too much love-making on the 
 stage and it was unreal. In his first three plays his 
 characters made love quite as conspicuously as, and. 
 less really than, in any contemporary drama, and 
 there are few of his plays in which they have not 
 continued to do it. The only exceptions are, I think, 
 " Captain Brassbound's Conversion " and " Caesar 
 and Cleopatra " ; the latter play comes as near 
 amorousness as the disparity of age permits, and in 
 the former the disparity of characters absolutely 
 forbids it. In all the other plays the love-theme is 
 prominent ; in some it ends in quite an orgie of 
 marriages. 
 
 It may be suggested that he has retained the love- 
 
THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 231 
 
 theme in order to treat it more realistically. In fact, 
 one of the admiring writers on Shaw thinks that the 
 love-making of Ann Whitefield and John Tanner 
 (which is an outrageous piece of theorising) and of 
 Valentine and Gloria in " You Never Can Tell " 
 (which is almost as bad) is " superb " in its " mystic 
 and inner truth." The contention is that Shaw lays 
 bare the psychology of lovers instead of merely 
 describing their outward caresses. On the contrary, 
 he denies the caresses altogether, though he will 
 hardly maintan that they are confined to the stage 
 and are not found in real life. In how many of 
 Shaw's thirty plays do lovers caress each other ? 
 He conceives their real love-making as an economic 
 calculation or mystic impulse which drives the woman 
 to the man, who is almost always more or less bored 
 and indifferent. He is not giving us psychology at 
 all, but a fantastic theory of a very simple and common 
 occurrence. He is not a " professor of natural 
 psychology," as he claims ; he is nearly as far re- 
 moved from it, on this point, as Immanuel Kant. 
 Probably Eugene in " Candida " is the only character 
 in his plays who is really in love, and Eugene is too 
 morbid and unnatural in other respects to be a model 
 of real life. 
 
 Sha^ had -perceived. ±wo trutlis,.„whieh -bremade^^ 
 the basis of his " psychology." On the one hand, ) 
 there is much 'calculation in love-making among real > 
 persons ; on the other hand,^ there Js. much romantic-'^ 
 decoration of love-making in fiction. But he has , 
 made-i±e~ mistake of generalising these experiences 
 and maintaining that they are the rule rather than the 
 exception. His power of observation was thwarted 
 by his habitually low estimate of human nature and 
 his asceticism. He is quite right in contending that 
 
232 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 love is not the lofty, spiritual element which some 
 romantic writers represent it to be ; neither is it the 
 frigid and inartistic approach of the sexes which he 
 represents it to be. But because he has a disdain 
 of the sensuous enjoyment which most lovers, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, experience in it, and thinks 
 the approach of the sexes only a preliminary of the 
 grave function of creating the Superman, he has 
 wholly failed to teach contemporary dramatists 
 realism. The average musical comedy is in this 
 respect nearer to life than his malicious dissection or 
 imagination of motives. 
 
 Has he succeeded in his more important aim of 
 using dramatic art for educational purposes ? One 
 may confidently say that he has not succeeded to 
 any great extent. The early plays, in which the 
 audience could not possibly miss the lesson, have 
 been rarely presented on the stage, and in the literary 
 form they are confined to a relatively small group of 
 readers who are mostly of advanced views. Shaw 
 scolds the public severely, or lightly rails at it, because 
 it will not patronise plays which provoke thought. 
 There is much truth in his charge, but the public 
 might justly bring a counter-charge. He has chosen 
 to put the evil in an exaggerated and unreal form, 
 or in so exceptional a form that it lies beyond the 
 experience or control of most people. The docile 
 disciple ought, after witnessing " Widowers' Houses," 
 to find out such men as Sartorius in real life and pay 
 critical attention to them. He will, however, probably 
 be unable to find any such person ; certainly not 
 one in ten thousand of the middle-class young ladies 
 he meets on the Rhine or at the theatre has been 
 educated and fed on the rents from squalid slums. 
 Similarly, the convert to Shaw's gospel would have 
 
THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 233 
 
 to wait many generations before he would meet an 
 English baronet who derived his income from con- 
 tinental brothels, or a Girton girl whose mother was 
 a prostitute. SliaHL_bfilieves-~~tliat_a. ..problein._will 
 attiastmore attention if it be stated in violent or 
 parado3acariorTnr~'TKeJTate of his earlief'pTays'shows 
 thatras'isTioFuiriialufal, this is not generally correct. 
 " Mrs Warren's Profession " has not opened the eyes 
 of multitudes to the " white-slave traffic." Its 
 readers are, for the most part, men and women of 
 social enthusiasm who already know and resent it. 
 A recent debate in Parliament, and its echoes in the 
 press, caught the attention of ten thousand people 
 for every one who read Shaw ; nor, when the occasion 
 arose, was there any disposition to suppress the 
 discussion. 
 
 The contrast of the success of Dickens shows us 
 a special reason for Shaw's failure in these explicit 
 problem-plays. Dickens, apparently, committed the 
 same fault of incarnating the evil he attacked in 
 such obviously exaggerated characters as Squeers, 
 Ralph Copperfield, Jingle, Sergeant Buzfuz, etc. 
 Yet few resented his use of the art of fiction for social 
 reform, and he had a mighty influence in preparing 
 the public demand for reform. One important reason 
 ■why he succeeded where Shaw failed was that he did 
 not alienate the sympathy of the middle class to 
 which he appealed ; he did not suggest that his 
 villains were typical representatives of it, and did 
 not caricature it as a whole. Shaw, on the other 
 hand, frames lus3iays in such sweeping and_a^^ 
 geQeralTsaEons .about iJas. middle class,^ and makes its 
 representatives. .so .consistently stupid and. "uhfiist, 
 that you must.regard his characters either asramuang 
 iictions or unfpxtuuate libels. 
 
234 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Dickens did not announce that his purpose was 
 to show how the comfort of the middle class was 
 based on tainted incomes — on abominable schools, 
 or usury, or parasitism. He suggested that certain 
 men who were a disgrace to the middle class did these 
 things, and the general public were quite ready to 
 denounce a Squeers or a Copperfield or a Mulberry 
 Hawk. Shaw professed to attack the middle class, 
 and they resented the suggestion that any large 
 proportion of them lived on incomes derived from 
 slums or loose houses. As far as these things transpire, 
 the owners of such places are men and women whom 
 you do not meet in hotel-gardens on the Rhine or 
 in rural vicarages. Similarly, in " The Doctor's 
 Dilemma," the suggestion of inferior character is too 
 comprehensive ; the context of the published drama 
 shows that it is an attack on a class. In " Fanny's 
 First Play " it is too plainly implied that these drawing- 
 room and dining-room scenes, with their eternal 
 snarls and groans, only relieved by concertina-per- 
 formances in the butler's pantry with an hilarious 
 street-girl, represent daily life in an English home. 
 The balance is not restored, as it is in Dickens, by 
 the introduction of estimable members of the class. 
 
 These are Shaw's most directly propagandist plays, 
 and it is not surprising that, as such, they failed. In 
 most of the plays the philosophy is so implicit that 
 I it has generally needed a subtle controversy and an 
 jauthoritative declaration by the author to make it 
 jclear. The general public has enjoyed the play and 
 taken no interest in the subsequent discussion of 
 motives. " Man and Superman," for instance, has 
 no moral for the theatrical audience. They know 
 nothing of the Life-Force which impels Ann to hunt 
 1 Tanner and makes Tanner reluctant to marry her. 
 
THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 235 
 
 To them Tanner is an eccentric bachelor, and Ann a 
 young lady of disputable taste ; even the impossible 
 fainting-scene at the close, when Ann keeps her 
 failing heart alive until she is assured that Tanner 
 has not repudiated her lie, merely amuses by its very 
 extravagance. " Candida " is, to the general public, 
 a study of an imaginary temperament in imaginary 
 circumstances ; as long as Candida acts as a British 
 matron ought to act we overlook the suggestion 
 that she was quite prepared to do otherwise if she 
 preferred it. Many, in fact, believed that Shaw had 
 been converted to a respectable view of duty, and 
 were greatly disturbed. " Major Barbara " is, to 
 the same general public, a trite recommendation of 
 the value of money. " John BuirsOt h er Is land ", 
 is j ^graceful vindi cation of th e En glishman's beneScent 
 activity_^ Jn JKfand! The great majority of the 
 comedies which have found any coiiSiderablfe favour 
 ■convey no lesson at all, except to the zealous few 
 who knew it beforehand. 
 
 '""It™"seems, therefore, not impossible to attempt 
 some estimate of the influence of Shaw's dramatic 
 work. The fact that one London theatre gave five 
 hundred performances of a few of his plays in three 
 years shows that he has at last reached a large circle. 
 Possibly it would not be unjust to say that this great 
 success has not been sustained. Recently I noticed 
 that a suburban theatre was hardly one-third filled 
 at a performance of " Fanny's First Play," and a 
 little later I found " Man and Superman " being 
 performed to almost empty houses in a large provincial 
 city, and " Great Catherine," even with the help of Mr 
 Jerome's bright play, facing a half-empty house. 
 However that may be, an analysis of his audiences 
 would show that the overwhelming majority do not 
 
236 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 regard his plays as problem-plays, and are very vague 
 about his ideas. They know only, as a rule, that he 
 is a Socialist and has very perverse views about 
 marriage. On this point they are more tolerant than 
 Shaw imagines. One can see a reference to himself 
 in Lady Britomart Undershaft's words to her son : 
 " I should not have minded his merely doing wrong 
 things : we are none of us perfect. But your father 
 didn't exactly do wrong tMngs : he said them and 
 thought them : that was what was so dreadful." 
 The general public has become genially indifferent to 
 Ms heresieSj as longiaO,e^pjffinesT;he "^ 
 tion~orthem^to_the.^r£kcesJ^ which the^ 
 
 do~lnot read. They like Shaw as a humorist7a"wit, 
 a paradoxist, a creator of uncommon and clearly 
 defined characters and refreshing situations. One 
 does not hear of many conversions to his views in 
 the thea>tre. Fiction is fiction : sociology deals with 
 facts^-^When you attempt to blend them the reader 
 /orliearer will, according to his preconceptions, regard 
 N^jthe whole as fact or reject the whole as fiction. 
 
 TThe— serious nucleus of Shaw's followers consists 
 of Socialists, Rationalists, Ethicists, Humanitarians, 
 and contingents from other advanced movements. 
 In each of these cases the admiration is sectional and 
 restricted. Socialists greatly admire his " Municipal 
 Trading " and generally smUe at his equality of 
 income for babies. Rationalists and Ethicists applaud 
 his anti-Christian utterances and smile at his strictures 
 on themselves. Anti-vivisectors, anti-vaccinators, 
 anti-militarists, vegetarians, teetotallers, etc., speak 
 admiringly of him as " one of us," and shudder at 
 his blasphemies and his disdain of marriage. Con- 
 gregationalists are proud of his patronage and shocked 
 at nine-tenths of his opinions. What the real extent 
 
THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 237 
 
 of his influence is in this heterogeneous and conflicting 
 body it would be difficult to say. One is tempted to 
 say that he is applauded because he agrees with them 
 rather than that he is regarded as a master. 
 
 You have to distingmsh between his critical and 
 his constructive ideas. On the critical side he has 
 abundant followers and a very real influence. There 
 was never yet, except in ages when the discontented 
 could be burned at the stake, a thoroughly self- 
 satisfied generation. It is an essential condition of 
 progress, and, the more rapid progress becomes, the 
 more surely the critical consciousness of the few will 
 outstrip it. We are so intensely and widely critical 
 to-day precisely because of that vast mental and 
 moral advance in the nineteenth century which Mr 
 Shaw denies. We are capable of higher ideals and 
 less docile to tradition. People who look darkly on 
 ancient or modern civilisations often forget that you 
 may measure the excellence of a generation by the 
 abominable things it says about itself. It has ideals — 
 not ancient illusions, but visions of fairer things — 
 and is impatient. 
 
 Shaw is himself one of the best vindications of our 
 age against his strictures. It inspired him, and 
 found him a pulpit from which he might read his 
 ' ' Lamentations. " In the preface to " Maj or Barbara ' ' 
 he^ays : 
 
 " That is what is wrong with the world at present. 
 It scraps its obsolete steam-engines and dynamos ; but 
 it wont scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities 
 and its old religions and its old political constitutions. 
 What's the result ? In machinery it does very well ; 
 but in morals and religion and politics it is working 
 at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year." 
 
 It is precisely one of the most hopeful features of 
 
238 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 our age that so many are sa3dng, or listening to, these 
 things : for the first time in sixteen hundred years. 
 You could not say or listen to these things before, 
 because everybody was convinced that, while man 
 made engines, the gods made religions and moralities 
 and political constitutions. This broad and penetrat- 
 ing culture of our time which we call science, which 
 Shaw despises, has taught us that man made the 
 religions and moralities and political constitutions 
 as well as the engines, and it has restored our mastery 
 of them. 
 
 The distinctive thing in our age is, not that we 
 do not demand a reform of traditions as well as 
 machinery, but that there is so tremendous and 
 world-wide a demand for reform. A recent German 
 work which violently demands a reform of religious 
 traditions has sold three-quarters of a million copies 
 in England and Germany, and circulates in twenty 
 languages. The demand for a reform of moral 
 traditions is less conspicuous because, as I showed, 
 it is paradoxical and confusing. Men like Shaw who 
 breathe dreadful threats against morality turn out 
 to be amongst our most austere moralists. In sex- 
 morals alone is there a clear issue, and the demand 
 for greater freedom and reform in this direction may 
 be measured by the vast influence of the writers who 
 advocate it in every country in Europe. For a 
 hundred years a high proportion of the poets, drama- 
 tists, and novelists of Europe have openly advocated 
 alteration of the sex-standard in morals, and their 
 influence has been, and is, enormous. While, as to 
 our political constitutions, it is only Shaw's pessi- 
 mistic estimate of democracy which prevents him 
 from seeing how they have been revolutionised in 
 the last hundred years. 
 
THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 239 
 
 There might be a danger in telling our contempor- 
 aries that we are proceeding in this revision of our 
 traditions far faster than men ever proceeded before, 
 but Shaw's pessimism does not seem to be part of a 
 deliberate policy. He is so impatient and impetuous 
 that he will not study the historical facts, or calmly 
 apprsiise such as are within his knowledge. It is 
 part of his usefulness. Only a white-hot man can 
 make others white-hot. But it is interesting to 
 reflect that his incandescence is largely due to false 
 estimates. I have in an earlier chapter shown that 
 this is the case generally in his appreciation of modern 
 England, or modern times. To point out the evils of 
 our time you do not need to study history, but Shaw 
 wants to say a great deal more than this. He wants 
 to bully us into believing that we have made no 
 progress at all ; even that we are getting " nearer 
 bankruptcy every year." In this he shows a hardy 
 indifference to an exact determination of the facts ; 
 but there are always Englishmen who think the new 
 patriotism is to libel your country, and he is applauded 
 without discrimination. 
 
 It is the same with his assault on the middle class. 
 He does not, of course, confine his criticism to that 
 class, and hold up the manual workers as their virtu- 
 ous victims. In a recent pronouncement, a preface 
 to Brietix's " Woman on Her Own," he expresses 
 much the same feeling as he had done forty years 
 before. " Brieux," he says, with evident approval, 
 " sho^s you the worldng man as selfish, foul-mouthed, 
 ill-behaved, and violent, objecting far more to the 
 woman's capacity, orderliness, and industry than to 
 her weaknesses ; jealous of her attempts to do without 
 him, and afraid of being dominated by her in industry, 
 where he cannot resort to his fists, as he often does in 
 
240 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 his home." The working man would probably resent 
 this description of his attitude as warmly as the 
 middle class would resent Shaw's description of their 
 characters and domestic life. It betrays Shaw's 
 proneness to describe a man only by his defects : it 
 ignores the fact that the workers form the only political 
 party which has given general support to the women 
 for whose gratification Shaw wrote these words, that 
 recent efforts of women Trade Unionists to improve 
 their condition have had the support of male Trade 
 Unionists, and that the real root of the jealousy, such 
 as it is, is the already overcrowded condition of the 
 labour market and the willingness of women to accept 
 low wages. 
 
 The same partiaUty and injustice are found in 
 Shaw's attack on the middle class. It is not wholly 
 clear why an opponent or disdainer of democracy 
 should blame the middle class for capturing the 
 democratic machinery. They might plead that they 
 were guarding the State from the inherent risks of an 
 uneducated democracy. If it be objected that certain 
 middle-class cliques have cornered the administration, 
 one may ask, as Carlyle might have been asked when 
 he thundered against democracy's statesmen seventy 
 years ago, where the alternatives are. Carlyle hesi- 
 tatingly suggested Robert Burns : Shaw is content 
 with general railing at the existing ruling class. I 
 have, however, pointed out that in this he is doing 
 little more than building on the foolish legend that 
 English statesmen " muddle through " everything. 
 Here it is only necessary to add that he displays a 
 complete insensibility to all that the middle class has 
 done for the workers during the last ninety years. 
 During the earlier half of that time nearly every 
 advance in the direction of general education, en- 
 
THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 241 
 
 franchisement, and reform, all over Europe, was 
 initiated and chiefly won by the middle class. Shaw 
 himself has, in fact, relied all his life on the middle 
 class to adopt and enforce his ideas of reform, and 
 has had comparatively little influence with the manual 
 
 workers. . 
 
 It is very diffictilt to make allowance for his ex- 
 aggerations and discover how far he has had an' 
 influence in fostering resentment of real grievances. 
 If we set aside his purely artistic gifts and his immense 
 popularity as a humorist and fantasist — set them 
 aside only because he would not wish to be judged 
 by the possession of these gifts, but by his use of 
 them — ^we are compelled to classify him, in so far as 
 he has been and is a power, as a critic. With violence, 
 exaggeration, satire, persiflage, libel, scorn, and 
 laughter he has drawn our attention to the problems 
 which stiU confront us. The home, for instance, is 
 a problem, and a grave problem ; and there has been 
 too common a practice of concealing its disorders 
 under romantic perversions. Shaw has done more, 
 perhaps, than any other artist of our time to make 
 thoughtful people realise the need of reform. The 
 homes he has put before us on the stage are unreal, 
 and the majority of folk laugh when they return to 
 the reality of their comfortable firesides, but every 
 candid and sincere student of social matters knows 
 that there are large numbers of homes in which 
 the heavy strain of life-long companionship leads 
 to discourtesy, surliness, and hypocritical pretence 
 of harmony ; many homes, indeed, in which the 
 romantic ideal has completely failed and the relations 
 of parents to each other and to the children are 
 lamentable. Ampler facilities for divorce will remedy 
 much of this, but we are too apt to reconcile our- 
 
242 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 selves to a burden, especially if it does not fall on our 
 own shoulders, once it has been lightened. Some 
 future generation will provide for those who are unfit 
 for, or reluctant to venture upon, life-long intimacy, 
 and will see in Shaw one of the most outspoken 
 pioneers of reform in an age when such a reform was 
 still widely unpopular. 
 
 Similarly, his caricatures and exaggerations have 
 begotten a resentment of much of the lighter hypocrisy 
 of domestic life ; the costly and petty snobbishness, 
 the pretences of display beyond one's means, the 
 vanity which expresses itself in magazines of furniture 
 or troops of servants, the stubborn retention of ancient 
 points of view in a new age, the sheep-like docihty 
 to fashions set by our grandfathers, the impermea- 
 bility to new ideas apart from trade and engineering, 
 the false standards of judgment — a score of really 
 foolish, yet widespread, habits which hinder reform 
 and prolong the life of illusions and disorders. A 
 generation which makes little effort to break these 
 traditions, and which bears with equanimity the 
 burden of militarism, crime, disease, and squalid 
 poverty, must expect the salutary lash of its prophets. 
 If they call us a " brood of vipers," we may remember 
 that it is the way of prophets. The filament of 
 carbon in the electric circuit cannot give light without 
 a violent rise of its temperatiu-e. Shaw's fund of 
 humour and volatility of imagination enabled him 
 to spend this heat in amusing caricature. But, when 
 the laugh is over, many — ^it would be hard to say how 
 many— have reflected on the critical truth in the 
 caricature. 
 
 -^ That he has done more than shake us, and make us 
 think, it would be bold to claim. His constructive 
 suggestions have not had much influence : certainly 
 
THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 243 
 
 beyond his service in spreading middle-class or Fabian 
 Socialism. At times he seems content to think that 
 he has done critical work. " Construction," he says, 
 ■" cumbers the ground with institutions made by busy- 
 bodies. Destruction clears it, and gives us breathing 
 space and liberty." Once I observed to a Mend of 
 Shaw's that I appreciated him as a vigorous poker 
 of the mental fire of our generation. " That," he 
 repUed, " is all that Shaw claims to be." Certainly 
 it is as useful a work as one can do. People need 
 to be unsettled before they will candidly examine a 
 constructive ideal. 
 
 But no man with imagination can restrict himself 
 to destructive work. We do not scrap our steam- 
 engines, to use Shaw's illustration, until we have a 
 design of better : we do not part with moralities and 
 polities, whatever we do as to religions (which are 
 statements about another world), until we find and 
 approve a new pattern. The alternative to war is 
 plain, but what is the alternative to marriage ? 
 Crime and poverty are repellent diseases of the social 
 body, but what is the remedy ? In fact, you cannot 
 definitely criticise current habits and institutions, 
 unless you have in mind alternative habits and 
 institutions ; you cannot lash people for their inert- 
 ness if you know no more than they how to act. So 
 Shaw was bound to be constructive, and his whole 
 literary and dramatic output is informed by a positive 
 philosophy. 
 
 Here I venture to say that he has failed. His 
 facility of imagination ruined him. He is not a cold 
 intellectual machine, but a very warm and rich 
 imaginative mechanism. In point of fact, few adopt 
 even the single conclusions which he regards as im- 
 portant, and hardly any adopt all of them. Aiming 
 
244 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 at stimulation, and desiring the assertion of personality, 
 he is not likely to be disappointed that there is no 
 Shavian school, making a creed of the body of opinions 
 of the master. But the several ideas which he has 
 adopted or conceived have not had a much better fate. 
 In the main idea of his philosophy — ^if one give 
 \ this title by courtesy to the collection of his opinions — 
 lihe^elief that^iiffcZorce-is-woridng-japKard Jthrough 
 the organic world, he is by no means isolated^ because 
 he is~^yJno means original. It is a very old contro- 
 versy in science -and philosophy, and has been recently 
 revived in an acute form. This revival is not in the 
 smallest degree due to Mr Shaw. Inexpert people 
 may take some notice of Sir Oliver Lodge or of Pro- 
 fessor Bergson, who are popularising Vitalism, but 
 it is not even they who have given real life to the old 
 controversy. It is because a group of able scientists 
 on the continent (Driesch, Reinke, etc), and a few 
 prominent scientists in Britain (Thomson, Geddes, 
 etc.), have recently put forward a new defence of it. 
 One can discover easily how little influence Shaw 
 has had in the revival (to some extent) of Vitalism. 
 His distinctiyeodca^is that_thisXifeJEQrceJias^pur- 
 
 IJgOs^"^and that, if man will not co-operate withTor 
 caffy^out, the designs which it inspires in the brains 
 of our abler thinkers, the human race will be super- 
 seded and some " lower animal " made the monarch 
 '©fcthe earth. The known facts of development justify 
 us in saying that this is an absurdity, and people 
 only smile at Mr Shaw's foreboding. In fact, if the 
 purposes of the Life-Force are only known as they 
 appear in the minds of men, you get at once such a 
 confusion of designs (in the minds of different prophets) 
 that humanity might well despair of even finding the 
 right road. 
 
THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE M6 
 
 Mr Shaw naturally assumes that the particidar con- 
 ■ception of life which has grown in his mind is the 
 message of the Life-Force. In this, of course, there 
 is no element of conceit. No man has a right to 
 press opinions unless he is convinced they are true. 
 Each of us is, to ourselves, the unique temple of 
 truth. What it is relevant to notice here is that 
 Shaw is again in a very isolated position. In effect, 
 we are divided into three classes. Some think happi- 
 ness in the next world the supreme ideal : some think 
 happiness in this world : and the majority are content 
 with happiness in both. Shaw is almost contra 
 mundum, a new Baptist in the wilds of Hertfordshire, 
 in proclaiming that happiness is not the ideal at all. 
 He is, it is true, not consistent ; the position is psycho- 
 logically impossible. The living machinery has been 
 evolved on the lines of seeking comfort and avoiding 
 pain, and it cannot undo the work of miUions of years 
 in an hour of perverse philosophy. Consider Shaw's 
 most splendid revelation of his personality : 
 
 " This is the true joy in life, the being used for a 
 purpose recognised by yourself as a mighty one ; 
 the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown 
 on the scrap-heap ; the being a force of Nature 
 instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and 
 grievances complaining that the world will not devote 
 itself to making you happy." 
 
 Andrew Undershaft — ^in this connection Bernard 
 Shaw — found his " joy " in strenuous work, in preach- 
 ing the gospel, in living on locusts and wild honey. 
 He advises others to seek " joy " where he has found 
 it. It is Browning's gospel of work : it is William 
 Watson's praise of 
 
 " The deeper transport and the mightier thrill 
 Than comes of commerce with mortality." 
 
246 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 But it is, in the end, a recommendation that you 
 will find happiness in this high work. Moreover, it 
 is a gospel for a few, not for the many ; and even the 
 few do not find it necessary to embrace asceticism 
 as a condition of doing much work. 
 
 On the face of it, Shaw's hostility to hedonism puts 
 him in helpless opposition to the most powerful 
 current of modern life. His reasons for this opposi- 
 tion are too frail and mystical, or too personal, to 
 weigh with more than a very few. Claiming to be the 
 most modern of modernists, the most drastic rebel 
 against traditions, he repeats venerable old puritanical 
 phrases about " lust " and " sterile pleasure," and he 
 depreciates sensuousness with the zest of a Neo- 
 Platonist or a monk of the Thebaid. Most charac- 
 teristic of all is the application of his principles to the 
 relations of men and women. After marching so far 
 in the company of the mystics and ascetics, he turns 
 round and derides their virtue of chastity, and insists 
 that a woman shall have children when she wills, 
 ■without blessing of Church or State. When this 
 heresy is in danger of attracting " free lovers " to his- 
 standard, he tells them to go, if they are so weak and 
 sensual, and burn their fingers with their free love. 
 Most of those who are in general agreement with him 
 — ^Socialists and Rationalists — enter respectably into 
 matrimony, but decline to burden their homes and 
 overcrowd their professions by bringing babies into 
 the world every year. Shaw's flail descends on them 
 with more vigour than ever. It is the last and most 
 damnable transgression to cohabit for pleasure ; 
 and it is one of the distinguishing features of the world 
 to which Shaw belongs. Only a few of the more 
 eccentric advocates of the simple hfe can follow his 
 elusive reasoning, while from the body of devout 
 
THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 247 
 
 Christians, who would agree with his conclusion, he 
 cuts himself off with the intimidating sword of blas- 
 phemy. Many women to-day would agree with him 
 that they have as much right as men to deliberately 
 seek and attract partners, but they are not prepared 
 to admit that this is merely because they are the 
 passive instruments of an imperious Life-Force ; 
 many men would agree that they are reluctant to 
 marry, but they do not attribute the reluctance to 
 some inner craving to mirror the purposes of the 
 cosmic will. Shaw, in a word, stands almost alone 
 in his more distinctive opinions. 
 
 Constructively, it is in the Socialist field alone that 
 he has laboured with some success. Eugenists do 
 not show a very marked delight at his adoption of 
 their creed, since he at once gives it an expression 
 that is not calculated to attract the general public. 
 Anti-Vivisectionists are proud of his company and 
 thrilled by his power of vituperation, but he goes too 
 far for them. The recent agitation against the public 
 exhibition of trained animals has sought his support 
 (December 1913), but he has only made their work 
 seem foolish by declaring that it does not matter two 
 pins whether the animals were trained by means of 
 cruelty or not. Advocates of the endowment of 
 motherhood boast of his support, but they have to 
 conceal the fact that he equally advocates the endow- 
 ment of babies and burglars. Even in his Socialism, 
 we saw, he outsoars Bellamy himself, and makes 
 ardent working-class Socialists " gasp." They put 
 to his credit only the work of his early manhood, 
 and the influence he has had in building up the 
 Fabian Society. 
 
 It seems, then, that in tracing his influence we 
 must acknowledge that he has been a brilliant failure 
 
248 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 as a constructive thinker and must count him only 
 as a wholesome stimulating and thought-provoking 
 agency in the life of his time. He challenges 
 everjrthing, satirises everybody, tilts at virtue and 
 vice with equal vigour, mocks at every 'ism (even 
 Shavianism) that any man or woman ventures to set 
 up. He despises sweet reasonableness as a method of 
 propaganda. Reformers of that type are the salt of 
 the earth ; it needs pepper as well. Sneezing is a 
 healthy exercise for sluggish brains. The method 
 has its defects. If you tell an average body of. men 
 and women that their homes are dreary bear-gardens, 
 hung with curtains of hypocrisy, that their country 
 is one of the silliest and most criminal under the sun, 
 and that their age has not even reached the mark 
 of previous civilisations, they are apt to conclude, 
 on examining the facts, not that there is some serious 
 truth in what you say, but that lying is your peculiar 
 form of humour. It is predominantly as a humorist 
 that Shaw has found a public. His biographers 
 greatly exaggerate his serious influence. But there 
 are many now in every audience that gathers to hear 
 him speak, or to witness his latest comedy, who catch 
 the general lesson of bold, independent thinking and 
 distrust of tradition. In enlarging this proportion of 
 the general public, in breaking down the prejudice 
 against the problem-play, and in his influence on the 
 younger school of living dramatists, one finds his 
 greatest service. 
 
 It cannot be denied, however, that it is as an 
 artist, in the sense of the word which he resents, that 
 he has won world-wide recognition. In lecturing 
 on the prophets of modern Europe at the Antipodes 
 I have found thoughtful audiences roused to peculiar 
 attention when I came to speak of Shaw ; and it is 
 
THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 249 
 
 the same in the United States, where his plays have 
 had a great success. On the continent his success 
 has been slow in coming, as in England, but he is 
 now known throughout Europe as one of the first 
 dramatic artists of this country. I may borrow 
 from the works of Hamon and JuUus Bab a brief 
 account of his European triumph. 
 
 Shaw became known to a few in Germany by a 
 -translation of the " Fabian Essays " in 1897. In the 
 previous year, however, he had bitterly offended 
 German Socialists by bis criticism of their leaders, and, 
 as his early dramas were failures in England, he 
 remained little known for a number of years. In 
 1902 William Archer enlisted the interest of the 
 Viennese dramatist Trebitsch, who translated into 
 German " Candida," " Arms and the Man," and 
 "' The Devil's Disciple." The last of these plays was 
 produced at Vienna, and its peculiar art led to some 
 discussion. The other plays followed, and " Candida " 
 was performed at Dresden in the same year (1903), 
 and at Berlin, by a distinguished company, in 1904. 
 George Brandes, the famous critic and Rationalist, 
 fought for the recognition of Shaw's dramatic ability, 
 and the " Young Germans " loudly applauded what 
 ■seemed to be the Nietzschean element in his work. 
 Just at that time, moreover, came announcements 
 of his definitive success in England and the United 
 States, where Arnold Daly and Richard Mansfield 
 presented him to crowded houses throughout 1903 
 and 1904. His success in Germany was, however, far 
 from assured, and the plays that were presented in 
 1905 and 1906, especially " Caesar and Cleopatra," 
 were severely criticised. In 1907 " Mrs Warren's 
 Profession," " The Philanderers," and " The Doctor's 
 Dilemma " were produced, and the German public 
 
250 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 was gradually won. Shaw had the advantage in 
 Germany of being sharply dissociated from the 
 Socialists. The " Vorwarts " renewed the quarrel 
 about his criticisms of Socialists, and Shaw made a 
 virulent and lengthy reply in the Berliner Tageblatt. 
 The thunder of the Socialist organ would, if anything, 
 recommend Shaw to the ordinary play-going public. 
 In any case, he is now received with deep respect and 
 delight in the chief cities of Austria and Germany. 
 
 From the Germanic lands his fame soon spread 
 over the continent, though he is only now winning 
 recognition in the Latin countries. By 1907 he was 
 well known in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, where 
 the relation to Ibsen was appreciated, in Holland 
 and Poland, and at St Petersburg. Hamon says that 
 of seventeen of Shaw's plays which were known on 
 the continent by the end of 1912, sixteen were played 
 in the Scandinavian and Germanic countries, ten in 
 the Slav countries, and only two in the Latin countries. 
 France, whose artistic repute Shaw has always de- 
 rided, was very slow to appreciate him. In M. and 
 Mme. Hamon, two French Socialists, he has found 
 devoted and sympathetic interpreters, and Hamon 
 has laboured hard to induce the French to see in Shaw 
 " the Moliere of the twentieth centiiry." He has. 
 not as yet had the success he desires, though the 
 public which Brieux has created in France should 
 be of use. " Candida " had been played at Brussels 
 with great success in 1907, and in the spring of 1908 
 it was presented at Paris. It failed, and little more 
 was heard of Shaw until 1912, when " Mrs Warren's- 
 Profession" was played, with a more satisfactory 
 result. It secured seventy performances. The 
 Hamons are now engaged in translating the whole 
 series of plays, but the French theatre is still coy. 
 
THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 251 
 
 It is curious that one of the plays which has been 
 most warmly received on the continent should be 
 " Mrs Warren's Profession." It has been presented 
 nearly a hundred times in Berlin and in St Petersburg, 
 seventy times in Paris, and several times in Spain 
 and Italy. One of the latest advices, of Shavian 
 interest, is that it, on November 19th, " scored a 
 tremendous success " on its first performance in 
 Venice, and was acclaimed as "a great drama of 
 social life." This success, it is true, had been pre- 
 pared by the indiscretion of the Venetian puritans, 
 who placarded the city with a warning that it was 
 unfit for respectable people. It has, however, had 
 a remarkable success on the continent, where, as is, 
 well known, public opinion does not, on the whole, 
 take a very dark view of that particular profession. 
 A cynic might suggest that it is the caricature of 
 English character which recommends it to foreigners, 
 but the success seems to be partly due to its Socialistic 
 theory, that economic inequalities drive women to 
 prostitution, and partly (or mainly) to its dramatic 
 qualities. There, as in England and America, Shaw 
 is appreciated — ^beyond the nucleus of serious social 
 thinkers — as a master of humour, a brilliant writer of 
 dialogue, an original and piquant creator of character, 
 and a vividly imaginative inventor of situations. 
 
 Whatever be the real extent of his influence in either 
 stimulating or shaping the thought of his generation, 
 he can look back with such pride as his asceticism 
 will permit on his artistic triumph. More than thirty 
 years ago he set out to win the ear of the British 
 public. Twenty years later there can have been few 
 who believed in his prospect of success, and certainly 
 none who could foresee that within another ten years 
 his plays would be translated into many tongues and 
 
252 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 his name would be familiar from St Petersburg to 
 California. In his darkest hours he made no con- 
 cession ; the Englishman was a stubborn, stupid, 
 vicious mule, and it was Shaw's business in life to 
 tell him so. That lesson is inculcated from the first 
 act of " Widowers' Houses " to the last phrase of 
 " Great Catherine." When people began to regard 
 the famiUar dogma as a joke, and think any form 
 of Shavian entertainment incomplete without it, he 
 wrote long prefaces and gave many interviews to 
 prove that he really meant what he said. Yet he 
 has lived to see the public flock to every new play 
 he announces, and he must know that, apart from 
 popular political orators, there is not a speaker in 
 England who attracts more eager crowds. 
 
 It is a great and deserved triumph. From the 
 dingy rooms and hopeless labour of Osnaburgh Street 
 he has passed to the higher artistic fellowship of the 
 world. From the journalistic defence of Ibsen and 
 Tolstoi he has gone on to surpass the one in popularity 
 and the other in real influence. And he remains the 
 same fearless, outspoken, uncompromising critic, and 
 genial, generous, and helpful personality, as he was 
 thirty years ago. Of his private generosity no man 
 can tell, nor would he like any man to tell. His 
 public generosity is notorious. Few movements with 
 which he has any sympathy do not receive his aid as 
 generously as in his early manhood, and even move- 
 ments with which he has no sympathy are cheerfully 
 assisted when they approach a task which interests 
 him. Wealth and honour have not corroded his iron 
 character. Whoever wielded a lance beside him in 
 the grim fights of thirty years ago is stiU publicly 
 
 saluted as " my friend " ; whoever, in his opinion, 
 
 shirked the fight to which his principles pledged him 
 
THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 25S 
 
 is bitterly condemned. His town-house, in Adelphi 
 Terrace, and his country house, near Letchworth, are 
 centres of insurgent sentiment, yet full of gaiety and 
 good-fellowship when his old companions in arms or 
 his new European colleagues gather about him. 
 
 He is still, in his fifty-seventh year, in the prime of 
 life. The reddish beard and hair have turned a 
 brownish grey, which makes him look less fiery and 
 pugnacious, and his strong face and piercing blue-grey 
 eyes seem to have changed with his strategy ; they 
 laugh, even when he scolds, except at moments when 
 some supposed deeper guilt of our age stirs him to 
 anger. His tall and fairly broad figure stands quite 
 erect, a little stiff, the hands clasped behind his back 
 or impulsively thrust out in some inartistic gesture. 
 His strong, fluent, rather metallic voice, still clearly 
 bearing an Irish accent, rolls easily through the largest 
 building. He knows no tricks of modulation, but 
 has a naturally pleasing delivery ; he disdains all 
 rules of elocution or deliberate rhetoric, but his eyes 
 smile at his jokes, and his voice grows stern and his 
 figure rigid as he tells the facts which he thinks it 
 proper to denounce. He dresses, on the platform, in 
 a closely buttoned dark jacket-suit, and hates to lay 
 aside his fine woollen shirts for starched armour. 
 But he knows that England has adopted him as a 
 humorist, and he genially gratifies the crowd before 
 him, especially by retailing his repertory jokes 
 about the EngUshman ; in which he is not 
 punctilious about accuracy. I sat beside him on a 
 platform some time ago when he was in this mood. 
 He spoke of early associates who had led him to 
 truth : " not Enghshmen, of course," he said, men- 
 tioning Stuart Glennie. The audience gave the usual 
 laugh, but in my mind were the names of Captain 
 
254 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Wilson and other Englishmen of the Zetetic Society, 
 which he suppressed, to say nothing of Samuel Butler. 
 In private he is not the perennial fount of wit 
 which many suppose. You might talk to him for 
 hours and not discover that he was one of the masters 
 of humour. He does not bubble with spontaneous 
 wit like, for instance, H. G. Wells ; though in the 
 company of his intimate friends he loves boisterous 
 joking and telling perverse or exaggerated stories 
 against them or himself. He lives, of course, simply, 
 soberly, and strenuously. " Man," he still says, " is 
 the ordy animal which esteems itself rich in proportion 
 to the number and voracity of its parasites " ; and he 
 will have nothing superfluous or ostentatious about 
 him. Since 1898 he has had a companion of his fine 
 and simple tastes in Mrs Shaw, whose character is 
 delineated with great charm and admiration, for 
 those who are aware of it, in a well-known recent 
 novel. 
 
 He likes England and the English, for all their 
 faults. " I should never have done anything without 
 you," says Doyle to Broadbent in " John Bull's Other 
 Island," " although I never stop wondering at that 
 blessed old head of yours, with all its ideas in water- 
 tight compartments." In the preface he so far for- 
 gets his analysis of English and Irish character as to 
 say that England taught him to know reaUties. He 
 has never known realities. He has Uved in a world 
 of imagination and prejudice, and, if to that we owe 
 the amusing series of his plays, it has perverted his 
 philosophy of life. One cannot say that he would be 
 happier if he were a realist, for he is a happy man, 
 ' but he might have avoided much pessimism and had 
 \ a deeper influence. He knows no languages but 
 "French and a little German, disdains science and 
 
THE MAN AND HIS INFLUENCE 255 
 
 seems to read older history only for the specific pur- 
 pose of some composition, and is a biassed observer. 
 These things have restricted the truth and added 
 to the piquancy and vigour of his message. However 
 we may judge that, he has set a noble example of the 
 dedication of great gifts to what he believed to the 
 highest service of man ; he has been an honest man 
 in a world where reticence, or even cowardice, is too 
 often the condition of success ; and the work he has 
 already done, and will, it is hoped, do for one or two 
 decades yet, entitle him to have the words of Under- 
 shaft set against his name in the book of life. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Admirable Bashville, the, 194 
 Agnosticism, 13, 67 
 Aim of life, the, 77, 245 
 Anarchism, Shaw's early, 32, 33, 
 
 35 
 Androdes and the Lion, 221-2 
 Animals, cruelty to, 138 
 Archer, William, 21, 22, 27, 141, 
 
 161, 171, 199, 249 
 Arms and the Man, l6y, lyj-S 
 Art, Shaw's view of, 140-60, 162 
 Artist, the, and the Life-Force, 145 
 Asceticism of G. B. Shaw, 81, 82, 
 
 87. 97. 105 
 Augustine, St, on concubines, 93 
 
 Bab, Julius, 62, 206, 249 
 
 Barker, Mr Granville, 197, 203 
 
 Bax, Belfort, 18, 30 
 
 Bell, Chichester, 7, 8 
 
 Bergson, Professor, 59, 72 
 
 Blake, 95 
 
 Bland, Hubert, 21, 34, 36 
 
 Bloody Sunday, 37 
 
 Bluntschli, 177, 178 
 
 Brahms, 152 
 
 Brandes, Dr G., 158, 249 
 
 Brieux, 97, 126, 158-60, 239 
 
 British Association, paper to the, 
 
 42 
 Broadbent, 202 
 Brockway, A. F., 54 
 Browning, 78, 245 
 Bunyan, Shaw on, 150 
 Burns, John, 30, 37 
 Butler, Samuel, 20, 22, 61, 75 
 
 Cissar and Cleopatra, igo- 1 
 
 ' pbelLj he Rev. R. T.,-&3 , 64 
 
 [ 14. 179-84, 20p ) 
 shaw s dramatic art, 102 
 Captain BrassbouncCs Conversion, 
 
 192-4 
 Carlyle, 50, 53, 240 
 
 Carnegie, Mr, 48 
 
 Carpenter, Edward, 16, 17, 46 
 
 Cashel Byron's Profession, 15, 23, 
 26, 194 
 
 Celts, 3 
 
 Censor, the dramatic, 216-7 
 
 Champion, H. H., 19, 22, 37 
 
 Characters, Shaw's, 167, 168 
 
 Charteris, 13 
 
 Children, Shaw on the training of, 
 127-31 
 
 Chocolate Soldier, the, 178 
 
 Christianity, Shaw's view of, 61-5 
 
 City Temple, the, 56, 63, 123 
 
 Cleopatra, 190- 1 
 
 Clerk, G. B. Shaw as a, 8 
 
 Common Sense of Municipal Trad- 
 ing, the, 41, 44 
 
 Conolly, 24 
 
 Corno di Bassetto, 142 
 
 Court Theatre, the, 199, 203 
 
 Craven, Julia, 173 
 
 Crime, Shaw on the treatment of, 
 
 131 
 Criticism, use of, 237, 241, 243 
 Crosstianity, 62 
 Cusins, 208 
 
 Cuthbertson, Grace, 173 
 Cymbeline, 147 
 
 D'Annunzio, Gabriei.e, 92, 140 
 Dark Lady of the Sonnets, the, 218 
 Darwinism, 22, 68-70 
 Davidson, Thomas, 30 
 Democracy, Shaw on, 49, 50 
 Devils Disciple, the, l88-go 
 Dickens, Shaw and, 107, 108, 233 
 Divorce, 102, 103, 109 
 Doctor' s Dilemma, the, 13S, 210-3,. 
 
 234 
 DoUs House, the, 154, 15$ 
 Don Juan, 200 
 Dowden, 4 
 Doyle, 202 
 
 267 
 
258 
 
 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Dramatic Opinions, 143, 147, IS3 
 Dresden, Shaw at, 249 
 Dubedat, 211, 212 
 
 Edison Telephone Company, 
 
 work with the, II 
 Education, Shaw on, 127, 128, 
 
 129-31 
 Eliot, George, 71, 94 
 Elizabethans, the, 148, 149 
 Emotion, Shaw and, 163, 164, 16S, 
 
 169 
 Ettemy of the People, 156, 157 
 Englishman, Shaw on the, 202, 
 
 204, 20s, 253 
 Epicureanism, 17, 78, 97 
 Equalisation of wealth, Shaw on 
 
 the, 54, ss 
 Erewhon, 75 
 Ethicism, 80 
 Eugenics, 51, 113-24 
 
 Fabian Essays in Socialism, 42 
 Fabian Society, the, 31-57 
 Fabian Tracts, 31, 32 
 Fanny's First Play, 107, 162, 218- 
 
 21, 234 • 
 Fellowship of the New Life, the, 31 
 Feminism, 96 
 Foote, Mr, 44 
 France, Anatole, 33, 140 
 France, Shaw in, 250 
 Free-love, 99, loi 
 Freethinker, the, 63, 65 
 
 George, Henry, 15, 19 
 Germany, Shaw in, 249, 25 1 
 Getting Married, 100, 104, 127, 
 
 168, 213-4 
 Glennie, Stuart, 14 
 God, Shaw's conception of, 60, 64, 
 
 76, 216 
 Great Catherine, 223-4 
 Grein, Mr, 170, 174 
 
 Hamon, M., 167, 17s, 250 
 
 Hampstead Historic Club, the, 36 
 
 Haymarket Theatre, the, 184-5 
 
 Headlam, the Rev. Stewart, 16 
 
 Hedonism, 77, 246 
 
 Hegel, 72 
 
 Hell, interlude in, 200-2 
 
 Henderson, Dr, 58, 69, 99, 171, 
 
 197 
 Henley, 28, 142 
 Heredity, 2, 21, 1 16-7 
 History, Shaw on, 118 
 Home, Shaw on the, 96, 103, 104 
 Home Rule, Shaw on, 206 
 How he Lied to her Husband, 209-10 
 Huneker, Mr, 112, 166, 167 
 Huxley, T. H., 58, 71, 74 
 Hyndman, H. M., 18, 30, 38, 197 
 
 Ibsen, 25, 66, 73, 83, 90, 95, 
 
 154-S, 173 
 Idealism, Shaw on, 89, 166 
 Illusions of Socialism, the, 46 
 Imagination, Shaw's vivid, 166 
 Immanence, doctrine of, 64 
 Immaturity, 12, 24 
 Independent Labour Party, the, 54 
 Independent Theatre Society, the, 
 
 161, 170 
 Inteliectualism of Shaw, 163 
 Interlude at the Playhouse, the, 2IO 
 Ireland, Shaw on, 202-6 
 Ireland, supposefl humour of, 2-4 
 Irish Literary Theatre, the, 202, 
 
 203 
 Irrational ICtiot, the, 13, 19, 22, 
 
 24, 8r, 85 
 Italy, Shaw in, 251 
 
 Jack, Owen, 26 
 
 Jevons, Professor, 35, 38, 48 
 
 John Bull's Other Island, 3, 78, 
 
 202-6, 235 
 Johnson, Lionel, 4 
 Joynes, J. L., 16 
 
 Kapiial, Da^, 19 
 
 Kingston, Miss Gertrude, 224 
 
 Knox, Margaret, 219 
 
 Labour Leaiier, the, 54, 123 
 
 Land Reform Union, the, 15 
 
 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 18 
 
 Laws of nature, Ii6 
 
 Lazarus, the raising of, 6 
 
 Lee, G. J. V., 5 
 
 Lis Hannelons, 97 
 
 Lever, 4 
 
 Life-Force, the, 59, 60, 75-80, 244 
 
 Lodge, Sir Oliver, 59, 75 
 
INDEX 
 
 259 
 
 Lombroso, Professor, 132 
 London, Shaw comes to, 10 
 Love among the Artists, 23, 26 
 Love, in Shaw's dramas, 169, 228, 
 
 230 
 Lying, Shaw on, 84 
 
 Maeterlinck, M., 84, 157 
 Major Barbara, 52, 62, 206-9, ^35, 
 
 237 
 Malthusianism, 9S, 124-9 
 Man of Destiny, the, 183-4 
 Man and Superman, 49, 62, 97, 
 
 I9S-202, 234 
 Mansfield, Richard, 178 
 Marchbanks, Eugene, 180-3 
 Marriage, Shaw on, 92-112 
 Marshall, Alfred, 36 
 Marx, Karl, i8, 19, 21, 35, 36 
 Maude, Mr Cyril, 162, 184-5 
 M'Carthy, Desmond, 166 
 M'Nulty, 7 
 M'Quinch, Nelly, 25 
 Medical j^rofession, Shaw on the, 
 
 I3S-7 
 Meliorism, 119 
 Mendelism, 117 
 Meredith, George, 100 
 Middle class, Shaw on the, 233-5, 
 
 239 
 Mill, J. S., 13, i4> 66, 79 
 Misalliance, 218 
 Moliere, Shaw and, 167, 174 
 Moody and Sankey, 10 
 Moore, George, 2, 4, 205 
 Moore, Thomas, 2, 4 
 Morality, Shaw's view of, 79-91, 92, 
 
 129-31 
 Moral training of children, the, 
 
 128-31 
 Morell, the Rev. J. M., 179-84 
 Morris, W., 19, 21, 27 
 Mozart, 152 
 Mrs Warren's profession, 174-7? 
 
 Music, Shaw's early love of, 5, 8, 
 9 
 
 Napoleon, Shaw on. 183 
 National Reformer, the, 37 
 Nietzsche, Shaw and, 80, 133, 158 
 Nordau, Max, 119, »S> 
 Novels of G. B. Shaw, 12, 23-8 
 
 O'Connor, MrT. P., 142 
 Olivier, Sidney, 16, 34, 39 
 Overruled, 222 
 Owen, Robert, iS, 79 
 
 Painting, early studies of, 8 
 Pall Mall Gazitte, the, 141 
 Paradox, apparent, in Shaw, 225, 
 
 226 
 Paramore, Dr, 173 
 Passion, Poison, and Putrefaction, 
 
 209 
 Pearson, Karl, 128 
 Pease, E. R., 31, 34 
 Perfect Wagiterile, the, 153 
 Pessimism of G. B. Shaw, 117, 118, 
 
 119, 121,236-40 
 Philanderers, the, \T1-^ 
 Phillpotts, Eden, 23 
 Platonism in Shaw, 105 
 Plays for Puritans, 188 
 Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, 
 
 187 
 Podmore, F., 31, 34 
 Poverty, Shaw on, 50, 52, 53 
 Press Cuttings, 217 
 Progress, Shaw on, 118-21, 237-8 
 Prostitution, 85, 233 
 Protestant, Shaw as a, 62 
 j Psychology, Shaw on, 73, 231 
 I Public Opinion, 10 
 I Puritanism, Shaw and, 105 
 I Py^^malion, 223 
 
 Quintessence of Ibsenism, the, 66, 
 72, 78, 80, 94, 126, 154 
 
 Rationalism, Shaw's hostility to, 
 
 65-75. 135 „ 
 Reade, Charles, 84 
 Realism in Shaw's plays, 165, 228- 
 
 230 
 Religion, early experience of, 7, 10, 
 
 13 
 Religion, mature views of, 61-5 
 Rroottitionisfs Handbook, 49, 50, 
 
 52, 62, 98, 196 
 Ridgeon, Sir Colenso, 212 
 Roman Catholicism, Shaw on, 205 6 
 Romanticism, 228, 229 
 Royal Economic Society, the, 36 
 Russia, Shaw in, 250 
 
260 
 
 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Salt, Henry, i6, i8 
 
 Salvation Army, the, 207 
 
 Sanders, W., 37 
 
 Sanity of Art, the, 83, 86, 151 
 
 Saturday Review, the, 28, 143 
 
 Savoy, the, 62 
 
 Seccombe, Professor, 4 
 
 Sentiment in drama, 163, 164, 168 
 
 Seymour, Henry, 33 
 
 School, G. B. Shaw at, 7, 8 
 
 Schopenhauer, 62, 72, 74 
 
 Scofs Observer, the, 142 
 
 Scott, Clement, 154, 173 
 
 Shakespeare, Shaw on, 146-51 
 
 Shaw, Elizabeth Lucinda, 5, 9, 12 
 
 Shaw, George Bernard — 
 
 Birth, 2 ; nationality, 2-3 ; 
 parents, 4, 5 ; schooling, 7 ; as 
 clerk, 8 ; goes to London, 10 ; 
 writes novels, 11, 24-9 ; poverty, 
 12; appearance, 13, i6; joins 
 Zetetical Society, 14 ; becomes 
 Socialist, 15, 18-20 ; joins Fabians 
 31; abandons Anarchism, 36; 
 Socialist views, 40-57 ; philosophy 
 of life, 59^1 ; hostility to Chris- 
 tianity, 62-65 ; hostihty to Ration- 
 alism, 65-77 ; relation to Samuel 
 Butler, 75 ; ascetic ideals, 77-80 ; 
 criticises morality, 80-91 ; views 
 on marriage, 93-110 ; views on 
 woman, 11 1-4; adopts Eugenics, 
 115-24; opposes Malthusianism, 
 124-26; views on education, 127- 
 30; on crime, 131-4; on vivi- 
 section, 135-6; on art, 140-6; 
 becomes journalist, 141-2; views 
 on Shakespeare, 146-51 ; on 
 Wagner, 151-4; on Ibsen, 154-8; 
 on Brieux, 158-9 ; becomes drama- 
 tist, 161 ; dramatic ideal, 162-70; 
 Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, 
 170-87 ; Plays for Puritans, 188- 
 194; "Man and Superman," 
 195-202; "John Bull's Other 
 Island," 202-6 ; " Major Barbara," 
 206-9; "The Doctor's Dilemma," 
 210-13; "Getting Married," 
 213-14; "The Showing up of 
 Blanco Posnet," 214-6;" "Press 
 Cuttings," 217; "Fanny's First 
 Play," 218-21; "Androcles," 
 221-2; "Great Catherine." 223- 
 
 224 ; success and failure, 225-35 > 
 
 influence, 235-48 ; success abroad, 
 
 249-51 
 Shaw, Mrs G. B., 104, 123, 254 
 Shaw, George Carr, 5, 9, 12 
 Shelley, Shaw and, 16 
 Showing up of Blanco Posnet, the, 
 
 214-6 
 Social Democratic Federation, the, 
 
 18. 31. 37 
 Socialism, 15, 18, 19, 21, 30-57 
 Socialism for Millionaires, 48 
 Star, the, 38, 143 
 St Pancras Council, Shaw on, 40 
 Straker, 198 
 Superman, the, 78, 80 
 Synge, 4 
 
 Tanner, John, 197, 199, 201 
 
 Tchertkoff, letter to, 147, 148 
 
 Terry, Ellen, 183, 193 
 
 Thompson, Francis, 4 
 
 To-day, 22, 27, 35 
 
 Tolstoi, 140, 146 
 
 Trade Unions, 43 
 
 Trebitsch, 249 
 
 Trespassers will be Prosecuted, 223 
 
 Trousseau, Armand, 8 
 
 Tyndall, Professor, 8, 10 
 
 Undbrshaft, Andrew, 207, 245 
 United States, Shaw in the, 177, 
 
 178, 19s. '99. 209, 249 
 Unsocial Socialist, the, 23, 27 
 Utilitarianism, 78-80, 82, 85, no 
 
 Vaccination, 136 
 Vasari, 8 
 Vegetarianism, 17 
 Vestryman, Shaw as a, 40 
 Vienna, Shaw at, 249 
 Vivisection, 71, 135-9 
 Voltaire, 41 
 Vorwdrts, the, 250 
 
 Wagner, Shaw's defence of, 142, 
 
 151-4 
 Walkley, A. B., 49, 50, 117, 142, 
 
 166 
 Wallas, Graham, 21, 34 
 Way of all Flesh, the, 78 
 Waynflete, Lady Cicely, 193 
 Webb, Beatrice, 40 
 
INDEX 
 
 261 
 
 Webb, Sidney, 14, 33, 39 
 
 Weismannism, 117 
 
 Wells, H. G., 39 
 
 Whitefield, Ann, 197, 198, 201 
 
 Wicksteed, Philip, 35 
 
 Widowet's Houses, 170-2, 174 
 
 Wilde, Oscar, 4 
 
 Wilson, Captain, 14, 62 
 
 Wilson, Mrs, 33 
 
 Wit in Shaw's dramas, 164, 225 
 
 Woman, Shaw's attitude towards, 
 
 94-8, 1 1 1-4, 166 
 Workers, Shaw on the, 239 
 World, the, 142 
 
 Yeats, 4 
 You Never Can 7 ell, 185-6 
 
 Zetetical Society, the, 14, 19, 62 
 
rniNTED BV 
 
 TUNNBULL ASD SPEAKS, 
 
 EDINBURGH 
 

 
 ^lu