Cbiss P Rrus> lidok ' r z Pki;si;NTi:i) iiy SHAW GEORGE versus BERNARD SHAW GEORGE versus BERNARD by J. P. HACKETT NEW YORK SHEED & WARD MCMXXXVII PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN TO HELEN CONTENTS PAGE PROLOGUE ...... I The Land of lands — the Shaws come to Ireland. CHAPTER I . . . . . -13 G.B.S. — his writings — his quality as provoker — his com- mentators — his value — his *' mistakes " — his creed the key to the puzzle. CHAPTER n ...... 27 Shaw's way of believing — belief about and belief in — belief in the Derby — Creative Evolution — the Life Force at work through the ages — popularity of Life Force reli- gions — Shaw tries to be true to the Life Force — why does he do it ? Who is Shaw ? CHAPTER in . . . . . .46 The Kilkenny Shaws — spacious days by the Suir — Dublin in the 'sixties — young George Bernard in the midst of it — in the midst of the artists — in his home — in Science versus Religion — in himself — he goes to Torca Hill — he makes a choice — Tyndall backs him up — the young rationalist and Moody and Sankey. CHAPTER IV ...... 75 1876, he goes to London — excitements in England and Europe in the 'seventies — Shaw ignores them — 1879, he writes a novel — he can't get a publisher — 1880, he writes another novel — he is still hard up — he takes to Samuel Butler and the life cell — he gives up rationalism and backs art and artists — he backs Socialism to save artists from starvation — the Fabian Society. vu CONTENTS CHAPTER V . . . . . -103 1882, he finds out that he is a communist — the New Politics and the New Protestantism — Karl Marx — Shaw studies economics and algebra — he meets Sidney Webb — the Fabian Society, or the New Politics in action — he preaches from the street corner — his quality as Art critic — he studies Ibsen — 1892, he finds out that he is a playwright. CHAPTER VI . . . . . 136 His Plays — the New Protestantism in action — its slaves and its gods — Shaw preaches and prophesies for it — 1902, he explodes in Man and Superman — his subsequent work for the Life Force and the religion of the twentieth century — St. Joan — difficulties of a New Protestant. CHAPTER VII . . . . . .167 Free thinkers and free thinking — Spencer and Shaw, the amateur theologians — the biologists refuse to face facts — Science is partitioned — the old dogma and the new one — the new prophet borrows from the old faith — he kicks reason out the front door — he wrestles mightily to keep her out and let her in — the Life Force runs amuck in Europe — Heartbreak Bus. CHAPTER VIII . . . . . .196 Shavian contradictoriness — a natural consequence of his creed — his way with words — Shaw's emotion-driven thinking — the man and the child — George and Bernard at odds with one another---splendid Bernard ! PROLOGUE " When I say that I am an Irishman I mean that I was born in Ireland, and that my native language is the English of Swift and not the unspeakable jargon of the mid-XIX century London newspapers. My extraction is the extraction of most Englishmen : that is, I have no trace in me of the commercially imported North Spanish strain that passes for aboriginal Irish : I am a genuine typical Irishman of the Danish, Norman, Cromwellian, and (of course) Scotch invasions." {Pre- faces by Bernard Shaw, p. 440.) Off the north-west coast of Europe lie two islands. One stretches out, challenging, angular and mas- culine, from France up into the northern seas. The other rests, demure, compact, feminine, turn- ing an impassive poll to its neighbour and a face full of charm and variety towards the western ocean ; geographically it is staged as a land of withdrawal and mystery, easily exploited by writing men as a place of haunting shadows, melancholy unfulfil- ment, and vague wearying dreams ; but it was not so from the beginning, a thousand years before the Celtic twilight had dawned in France and Eng- land the singing of the Irish poets was full of vitality and a sense of joy and security which triumphs SHAW over time and almost over literal translation into English : Summer has come healthy and free, Whence the brown wood is bent to the ground ; The slender nimble deer leap, And the path of seals is smooth. The cuckoo sings gentle music. Whence there is smooth peaceful calm ; Gentle birds skip upon the hill, And swift grey stags. or again : The lowing of heifers in summer. Brightest of seasons. Not bitter toilsome over the fertile plain, Delightful, smooth ! The voice of the wind against the branchy wood Upon the deep blue sky. Falls of the river, the note of the swan, Delicious music ! It was an attractive spot for poets and for land- owners. Over great plains, limestone underground and soft moisture-laden breezes overhead made pasture on which cattle fattened visibly from day to day ; in the broken ground in the hills the grass grew rich between the rocks and the sheep grew sleek and thick-coated ; on every hand were brim- ming rivers and sheltered, fish-laden lakes. To have ten acres of such land was to be secure, to have a hundred was to be important, to control five thousand was to be a great chief. In course of SHAW time landowners and poets combined to devise rules for living and fighting and passing on property. These rules — called the Brehon code — were different from those in operation in the larger island, so different indeed, that their reactions have bewildered the feudal-minded from 1 170 to this very day. There were many visitors to the smaller island even before that date. Scandinavian younger sons were being crowded out at home, and this pleasant resort of natural harbours opening on rich lands drew them strongly. Raids broadened out into invasions and, in the ninth and tenth cen- turies, the Danish sea-coast settlements were estab- lished. Later on more businesslike Norman inva- sions from Wales were sponsored by English kings, backed by feudal organisation. At first there was fierce opposition, with organised archery beating the battle-axe all along the line, but after a few generations more friendly feelings developed for very natural reasons. The Norman barons studied the Brehon code, and the further they moved inland the fainter became their feudalism. Kings were exacting — hard to please — uncertain ; and in this new country the law for chiefs with a well- armed following was delightful. There were other attractions ; the Irish girls were charming, the salmon fishing marvellous and the hunting simply magnificent. Alliances were made, inter- marriages were contracted, and before the Nor- man conquest was finished the Irishwomen had won, 3 SHAW The young de Burghs and Butlers and Fitz- geralds were running round in homespun kilts playing native games and chattering Gaelic, and hearing from their mothers and attendants songs and stories which stirred curious feelings in their hearts. In Dublin and its neighbourhood it was well understood how much the Irish girls were to blame for the continued failure to establish English law and order, and in one of the recurrent periods of resolute government it was resolved that " an Englishman marrying an Irish wife shall be half hanged, disembowelled alive, mutilated, a,nd forfeit his est ate, ^^ From about this time — fourteenth century — the land-lording business in Ireland entered on a new phase, in which battle-axes and sudden raids figured less and less, and statutes and lawyers more and more. Under the new rules the key phrase was, " he must forfeit his estate." In those days there were no coal mines — ^no banks — no Stock Exchange — no way at all by which a man could live easy except by owning land. In England every acre was ear-marked, and into Dubhn poured a steady stream of new English, of land-hungry governors, attorneys, soldiers of fortune, and men miscel- laneously on the make. There were many ways of securing the desired property, but by far the most effective and per- manent was the legal method of finding some pro- perty owner guilty of treason, disposing of him in SHAW prison or otherwise, and taking possession of the forfeited estate ; it was usually best to pick on one of the old English who had bagged some good land in the last generation. During the Wars of the Roses, with allegiance divided and fortunes varying, this method was practised in a limited way, but it was a century or more before it could be organised on a sound basis. Then, with the Reformation in progress, with Elizabeth on the warpath, with Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond, a Catholic, and Butler, Earl of Ormond, a Protestant, and with fanaticism and greed raging together, the new English got their chance at last. They took it eagerly, but the " forfeit-his-estate '* axe was now swinging so widely and falling so rapidly that the land market was glutted ; Dublin deputies and their friends could no longer absorb all the ter- ritory taken over ; even when Sir Walter Raleigh got 42,000 acres, Edmund Spenser 12,000, and others in proportion, there was still so much to spare that it was peddled in London at twopence an acre. Henceforward the marketing of Irish land became a serious business of state, carried on in a strict and orderly manner with all the weight of English law behind it. Governors continued to feather their nests in a quiet way, but the private enterprise stage was really over. The Plantations were beginning. The driving forces behind the great Plantation of Ireland — the Gromwellian Hell-or-Gonnaught SHAW Plantation — came from afar, even from Spain and Geneva. From 1550 onward a great flood of silver had poured into Cadiz, and from there into the currency-hungry cities of Europe as fast as Philip of Spain could pay for war supplies and ships. By 1600 the financiers, the manufacturers, and the traders of Western Europe had the silver and Spain had the memory of the Armada ; the new middle class was coming to the fore and getting its first taste of power. While the silver was spreading from Spain, something else less tangible was spreading from Geneva. Jean Calvin, with his genius for pre- cision and organisation, was forging a new creed and a new code, offering sanctity and certainty to pious Protestants dazed by Lutheran somersaults. It offered also two attractive by-products — self- righteousness and a perfectly disciplined militia — to the new middle class. The burgesses loved the new code, with its exact prescription of conduct and even of dress, its insistence on honesty, thrift and unceasing devotion to business in all waking hours of all working days, and its rule that savings must not be spent light-heartedly on fine arts, games and general jollification, but turned back into development and increased production. They reached out on all sides, buying and controlling greater and wider interests, till, in Holland and France, Calvinistic organisations were strong as Fascist States. 6 SHAW In England — bound closely to Holland in Eliza- beth's time — the tides of silver and Calvinism rose together. Royalty, on a fixed income, was desper- ately hard up ; between 1570 and 1648 prices trebled, and Charles I, facing the steepest part of the rise, found himself also facing the grim task of making ends meet by taxing the new-rich Puritans. They didn't like it : they were making money hand over fist on a rising market ; they com- manded the services of men and their sense of power was growing ; they hadn't a cent to spare for anything but goods . . . besides, was it not sinful to contribute to the support of a cavalier court and a state church almost popish ? The royal exchequer was in a parlous condition when some genius hit on a plan for replenishing it and at the same time fulfilling so many other pur- poses that its wizardry makes the head reel. The most dazzling Wall Street coups are bungling crudi- ties compared with this great scheme for selling Ireland : it promised to yield over a million pounds — to wipe out the King's enemies — to settle the Irish problem — and above all to give the rich merchants of the towns a promising lock-up security with prospects of capital appreciation, or alterna- tively to provide them with enough fertile Irish soil to make them landed gentry in a country where their humble forbears were unknown ; and it did not cost the vendors a penny. The plan was absolutely legal. It was called SHAW " Charles I, An. i6, Chap. XXXIII, a.d. 1640— An Act for the speedy and effectuall reducing of the Rebells in his Majestie's Kingdom of Ireland to their due obedience to his Majestic and the Crowne of England," and it provided for the sale of 2,500,000 acres of Irish land in small lots at about ten shillings an acre freehold. The money so raised was to be used to finance an armed expedition into Ireland. The General and officers were to be nominated and controlled by a committee representing the subscribers and members of Parliament. The scheme worked and the money rolled in : John Pim, Esq., a member of ye House ;^6oo Oliver Cromwell, Esq., a member of ye House ..... £300 Thomas Pargiter, grocer . . . ^100 Thomas Viner, of London, goldsmith ^^'soo Isaacke Jurin, of London, weaver . ;^ioo Richard Wade, of London, carpenter £6,100 and so on by hundreds and thousands. But curi- ously enough — and this is where the New Yorker takes off" his hat to the Englishman — the private army, when equipped, instead of going to fight the King's enemies in Ireland, turned into an English rebel army, fighting Charles at Edgehill. That was in 1642. It was 1649 before Cromwell was able to dispose of the King, but the subscribers and their parliamentary backers had not lost sight of the main 8 SHAW issue, and immediately after the execution he was sent off to quell the Irish and secure the land for the bondholders. The Gromwellian invasion opened strongly at Drogheda, and in a short time the English Republic had command of all strategic points, and it only remained to clear the existing population from their farms and estates. Far more than 2,500,000 acres were now required, for Commonwealth funds were exhausted, and it had been decided to pay the soldiers in debentures, backed by good, rich Irish soil. The clearing was a problem. If the property- owning population had been all Irish, it would have been simple enough ; or even if they had been mixed Irish and English and all CathoHc, it would have been easy to devise some religious test which would oust them ; but they were mixed Irish-English- CathoHc-Protestant, and there was nothing for it but to hold the fortified centres and starve them off. So on July ist, 1651, the Commissioners of Ireland were found securing special supplies for the Army — " swords, pikes, powder horns . . . scythes, sickles, reaphooks, whetstones, rubstones . . . and Bibles." They were just in time for that year's harvest. The crops were cut down before they ripened, and by 1652 organised famine was in full swing and the landholders were beginning to disappear. But the process of starvation was too slow, and in 1653 the Commissioners had to try and rush things by making an order that all those who could 9 SHAW not secure from a court of Cromwellian judges set up at Athlone a decree of " Constant good affection to the Commonwealth " must transplant themselves to Connaught. This was effective — it ruled out all Irish and nearly all English owners — for even the most far-seeing Protestants had been inclined to back the King. The importation of Bibles for the army of occupa- tion seems curious till it becomes clear that Ireland was looked on as the Promised Land, and the Bible as a charter from heaven plus title-deeds. (Arch- bishop Ussher was still living ; he had fixed the date of Creation at 4004 b.c, and any Cromwellian who didn't believe that was excommunicated, i.e., he got no land.) The Commissioners who had been charged under the Act of 1640 to distribute land were of the elect. A record of the times (dated November 9th, 1653) describes them as " over- whelmed with a sense of their difficulties and of their own unworthiness for so great a service . . . they therefore fasted and enjoined the same thing on all Christian friends in Ireland, and invited the commanders and officers of the army to join them in lifting up prayers with strong crying and tears to Him to whom nothing is too hard, that His servants whom He had called forth in this day to act in their great transactions might be made faithful and carried on by His own outstretched arm against all opposition and difficulty to do what was pleasing in His sight," and later, on May 31st, 10 SHAW 1654, they write : " We are somewhat in a confused posture yet, with our transplantation, many are gone but many others play ' loath to depart.' And many are dispensed with, as particularly one whole town, Cashel, towards which we had no great obligation upon us. But the Lord who is a jealous God, and more knowing of, as well as jealous against, their iniquity than we are, by a fire on 23rd inst. hath burned down the whole town in a little more than a quarter of an hour, except some few houses that a few English lived in, which were wonderfully preserved, being in the midst of the town, and the houses round each burnt to the ground, yet they preserved." About the same time the officers of Dublin, Carlow, Wexford and Kilkenny wrote to the Lord Deputy — " the first purpose of transplantation is to prevent those of natural principles becoming one with these Irish as well in affinity as idolatry as many thousands did who came over in Queen Elizabeth's time, many of which have had a deep hand in all the late murders and massacres. And shall we join in affinity with the people of these abominations ? Would not the Lord be angry with us till he consumes us, having said, ' The land which you go to possess is an unclean land, because of the filthiness of the people that dwell therein. Ye shall not give your sons to their daughters, nor take their daughters to your sons,' as it is in Ezra ix. II, 12, 14. 'Nay, ye shall surely root them out II SHAW before you lest they cause you to forsake the Lord your God ' (Deut. vii. 23, 4, 16)." The officers got their way, and young WilHam Spenser, grandson of Edmund, and all the rest had to get out to Gonnaught or elsewhere to make room for the cavalrymen. Among them was a Colonel Ponsonby. Such was the Gromwellian invasion. While the officers were bargaining over their booty, young William Shaw was learning to ride a horse in Hamp- shire, practising sword-play, reading his Bible and otherwise preparing for his trip to Ireland. He came into action in 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne, where Ponsonby-Shaw cavalry helped to establish the other William on the throne of England and incidentally bind the Shaws and Ponsonbys in enduring friendship when they settled down, safe under the Protestant succession, in that lovely estate in south Kilkenny, where the soft-turfed lands slope down so gently to the deep-flowing River Suir. [J^ote. — The above account of the Great Planta- tion has been summarised from Prendergast's Gromwellian Settlement of Ireland, which is a careful account of the facts with references to all original documents,] 12 CHAPTER I In 1878 a young man of twenty- two, with a capital of sixpence invested in cheap white paper, began to write. By 1890 he was sending out screeches with his pen which were echoing through London and aggravating everyone. By 1900 he was pouring out plays of a pecuHar, intimate, effervescent quahty which drew large audiences and made them laugh in a strange, uneasy way. By 19 10 the spend- ing public had decided that though he was a very curious fellow and though no one could possibly agree with him about Socialism and all that, he must be quite respectable, because he was making money without being put in jail. Soon, the plain white paper with the fine neat writing was fluttering round the world — magically turning into thousands and thousands of crisp clean banknotes. To-day there is no man alive more certain of an audience. He has the front page of the world's Press freely at his disposal and he can go anywhere and fill a hall to the brim at a moment's notice with spectators and listeners, eager to see him and hear him mocking them and their ways of living in a clear, mellow, pleasant voice. He does not get publicity, he is publicity. Haifa century ago people 13 SHAW found him and his opinions unbearable. Thirty years ago earnest young men eager for the HmeHght tried omniscience and inconoclasm — thinking they were using his methods — and wondered at the lack of results. Just before the war his fame as a great jester was growing steadily, though some occa- sionally tried to flick him away with a phrase as though he were a troublesome insect. During the war he was in disgrace with the public, but after it he rose into general favour like a rocket. The chocolate soldier was no longer a joke, and it was found that many of his jests had been earnest. He was labelled " prophet," and his views began to be accepted as recklessly as they had been rejected in pre-war times. To-day, he is pointed to proudly by Britons who believe he is English, as the greatest living dramatist, and claimed eagerly by others who think he is Irish, as a sample of the genius which sprouts so readily on their native soil. He is accepted as a great man who is in some special way different from other men. It is not that he is a great dramatist, or a great speaker, or a great Socialist, or a great critic, or even that he is a combination of all four. A man could be all these and yet miss that capacity to arouse curiosity and expectancy in all classes on a world-wide scale which is George Bernard Shaw's special prerogative. In some mysterious way he provokes people he has never seen to write books about him. They want to tell the world what a great man he is, or 14 SHAW that he is not such a great man, or how he inspired them, or how they discovered him. The book is, of course, the authorised biography by Archibald Henderson, an American professor of mathematics. It is a model of industry, a meticulous record of Shaw's progress on every field, with a wealth of annotation ; it is a most carefully written volume, indispensable for reference, but it tells far more about the author than about his subject. Other commentaries, with one exception, have the same mirror-hke quality. They vary in key from Hen- derson's ecstatic tome to the offensive and defensive work by Frank Harris ; but when they have finished, the picture of Shaw is stiff and patchy, and the human quahties of the writer pulse through every chapter, particularly in those places where he describes how he corrected, or advised, or dis- agreed with his hero, with the excited and tri- umphant air of the child at the Zoo telling how he slapped the elephant. Harris was up in arms all the time : " Our chief difference is that Shaw wanted to be a man of action while I actually was." ..." So he isn't as great as he himself supposes." He went on Hke that till it was almost pathetic. Only once did he provoke his subject to retort ; Shaw was hke Harris, and most other men, on one point : he could not stand being called a prude, and was prepared to go to great lengths to show that the epithet was undeserved. The study of Shaw written by Chesterton in 1905 15 SHAW was the exception. Its insight was uncanny, even if he did write Hke a Newfoundland dog pretending to be a kitten. It is impossible not to have sym- pathy with that exasperated reader who printed " beautifully written bunkum " on the title page of the copy of Chesterton's Shaw which still cir- culates in a Dublin library ; so it must have seemed to thousands, but the bunkum has turned out to be an appreciation of Shaw as a sincere thinker and a great dramatist, in days when opinion was divided between " brazen thruster " and " gifted clown " ; and the penetrating analysis of the man and his outlook with which it ends continues to-day to attest the soundness of the criticism and the con- sistency of the outlook. It was, of course, impos- sible for Chesterton to do justice to Shaw ; his mountainous generosity of spirit and his absurd English tolerance stood in his way at every turn ; here where weakness showed, the chance of a fine malicious twist of phrase was missed, and there where impish glee over individual inconsistency was called for, there was nothing but outrageous laughter at the way men are bound together in universal frailty. Fair and free as is this study of Shaw, it does not do anything to solve the mystery of the quality which induces Englishmen, Russians, Americans, Japanese, and Germans, to offer common worship at the shrine of Shaw and to pour gold into his lap. Like other mysteries of the kind, like Chaplin's charming twisted smile and Shake- i6 SHAW speare's word-music, it is without formula and its effects cannot be communicated at second-hand any more than the manner of it can be successfully used by imitators. It must be tasted at the source. Those who wish to know about Shaw must read Shaw ; and even those who can't stand him should read him for the exhilaration of thinking of the things they would like to do to him. He caters for all tastes. Politicians and diplomats will find him full of meat. Preachers who feel themselves getting stale will rise from his writings with words trembling on their lips. Mothers will find his phrases excel- lent material with which to quell rebellious daughters, and rebellious daughters will find him their best backer. Burglars will follow him with zest tempered with horror at his views on private property. Murderers will want to get back to work when they find him coming their way : If I had the opportunity of conversing with the ghost of an executed murderer, I have no doubt he would begin to tell me eagerly about his trial, with the names of the distinguished ladies and gentlemen who honoured him with their presence on that occasion, and then about his execution. All of which would bore me r exceedingly. I should say, " My dear sir : such manufactured ceremonies do not interest me in the least. I know how a man is tried, and how he is hanged. I should have had you killed in a much less disgusting, hypocritical, S. j^ c SHAW and unfriendly manner if the matter had been in my hands. What I want to know about is the murder. How did you feel when you com- mitted it? Why did you do it? What did you say to yourself about it? If, like most murderers, you had not been hanged, would you have committed other murders ? Did you really disHke the victim, or did you want his money, or did you murder a person whom you did not disHke, and from whose death you had nothing to gain, merely for the sake of murdering ? If so, can you describe the charm to me ? Does it come upon you periodically ; or is it chronic ? Has curiosity anything to do with it? " I would ply him with all manner of questions to find out what murder is really like ; and I should not be satisfied until I had realised that I, too, might commit a murder, or else that there is some specific quality present in a murderer and lacking in me. And, if so, what that quaHty is. {Prefaces, Funny, isn't it ? It looks Hke sheer Hght-hearted, inconsequent, comic writing. It is diflicult to beHeve that he was intensely in earnest, and bent only on making his case in the most pungent pos- sible way for the particular method of dramatic presentation with which he was concerned at the moment he was writing. The person who is curious about Shaw — and who 18 SHAW can fail to be curious about a man who, early in his teens, decided to be honest with himself about himself and about the world as he saw it, and was able to keep it up in private for nearly seventy years, and in pubHc for half a century without being massacred ? — the person who is curious about Shaw must study him in the original. He may hate his assurance and damn his impudence, but he will not be able to deny his steadfastness of purpose and heroic honesty of thought and expression, however much he may disUke the creed which has the writer in its grip. In days to come, when Universities become less like highly exclusive clubs with labelled rooms and channelled ritual, someone may be inspired to suggest the award of a G.B.S. degree for students who take an interest in living men and women rather than in extracts of Hterature or preserved science. With the half hundredweight, or so, of Shaw's pubhshed writings to start with, it should be easy to organise the course of studies. Set lectures would be prohibited, and a candidate for the degree would have to spend half his time in and about libraries, classrooms and common-rooms, as the fancy moved him, and the other half at municipal council meetings, trade union gatherings, plays, concerts, churches, hospitals, factories, business men's lunch-rooms, and so on ; for at least one month he would have to work as temporary clerk in a Civil Service office. He would be required after 19 S HAW three years to show that he had a first-hand know- ledge of Shaw's views and of the activities of those places he had seen ; and he would then be turned loose and at any subsequent date — up to fifty years later — he would receive the G.B.S. degree if he were able to : (i) Give a clear statement of his belief. (2) Give a clear description of his normal daily behaviour. (3) Show that there was some reasonable con- nection between (i) and (2). It would do Universities no end of good to get off the beaten track. They cannot go on for ever with their compartmented classics and history from authorised text-books ; or can they ? At any rate, here at their hand is a man who has tried a great practical experiment with himself, and got mixed up with the affairs which will be history in a hundred years' time, and who has most care- fully and accurately recorded his observations and conclusions. He is as usable in his own way as a high-power microscope or explosive, and the process which goes on in his pages is as exciting as a steeple- chase. Unofficially and outside institutional walls he has been in use as a handbook, a moral support, a warning, an excuse, a stimulus, a guide. He is a wonderful educator with the great and unusual value that he has nothing specific to teach ; nothing seems to irritate him more than to be told by his disciples that they are doing or thinking just what 20 SHAW he says, or that they have fixed up their domestic affairs in accordance with his precepts. They miss his main point when they take over one of his sen- tences and bury themselves aHve in it. His formula has always been that formulation for others is not only impertinent but impossible, and if people are silly enough to swallow any of his prescriptions without criticism, they can only blame them- selves for the results. Accordingly, he pursues his prophetic way like one of those modern high-speed grindstones, guaranteed to knock some sparks out of the hardest material. He ranges widely enough to offer every man a test bench, where he can sit down with his thought in its crude state and grind his opinions into usable shape by holding them up against this impossible high-velocity Shaw. Re- moval of all loose parts and soft spots is guaranteed. The range of his researches and the varying play of his interests are irritating at first. People don't like being switched from religion to Blackpool, thence to suicide, back to plays and books, out to Florence Nightingale and away to the South Pole while reading half a page of printed matter [Pre- faces, p. 341). They like a man who sticks to his last, and these flickering changes bewilder them as the sudden and incomprehensible changes on the screen bewilder the stranger who enters a cinema after the show has started. If he has the patience to wait and sit through the picture again, bewilder- ment will vanish and the jerks which formerly 21 SHAW annoyed may delight him ; but who is going back to 1856 (or 1690) to sit through Shaw ? It is easier to scold him patronisingly for not settling down to be a straight dramatist, or to regret that a man with his splendid knowledge of psychology, or medical practice, or phonetics, or housing, or diplo- macy, does not enrich the world by spending his whole time in one of these fields instead of dropping a bomb into it as he flies past. Still his admirers could put up with his respect for their omnivorous- ness if he stopped there and conformed to their wish that he should occupy a particular kind of pedestal in each field of activity. His failure to satisfy them in this way is his chief offence. They are serious-minded people, and they know and feel the intensity of his seriousness about those things in which they are interested, but they simply cannot stand the inconsequence which is always lurking behind his great moments. Or, rather, they suspect and fear its presence ; and they earnestly long to remake him in their own image and likeness, and continually appeal to him in agonised tones not to spoil his noblest efforts with irreverent and irresponsible anti-climax. One of them, Mr. Gollis, after showing his hand with the gambit, " When I was a jellyfish I thought as a jellyfish, but now that I am a man I think as a man," and offering incense in the approved manner, goes on to chide, reprove, and scold his hero for his inconsistency and his bedevilment of 22 SHAW his choicest work. He at first complains of the incompatibihty of Man and Superman with Back to Methuselah, but he has not much justification here, for never did one work grow more logically out of another than the play of 192 1 out of the philosophy of 1902. Later, however, he makes home thrusts : he finds something curious in the last act of Major Barbara, when Shaw, by a sudden leap into farce, " seems to do his utmost to prevent the audience, or an impatient reader, from following Under- shaft's extremely diflScult line of argument ; " he is just as sound when he revolts against the anti- cHmax to the shooting of Napoleon, in Back to Methuselah, and accuses Shaw of sinking into " low comedy and vulgar farce ; " and he is in a majority of a million when he writhes at the St, John epilogue. But then, when he is on the trail of something really interesting, when he is a man holding in his hand three interlocking clues to the solution of his mysti- fication, he drops them and turns jellyfish with : ** Whenever we are allowed to lose ourselves in some particularly fine passage we are always in danger of being rudely jerked back to earth by some paltry joke," and again with : " Why these comic kicks ? . . . They ravage their way into the loftiest passages, laying waste the exalted theme." The worshippers want their Shaw cut up into uniform lengths and laid out on a slab, but he refuses to be embalmed. In truth, he is alive and kicking, and some of the " comic kicks " are far more worthy 23 SHAW of careful examination than the ballyhoo passages which any literary hack can turn out with a little practice. His disciples sigh and feel that these paltry jokes are mistakes, instead of facts which must be reckoned with in any serious consideration of Shaw. The history of science is littered with just such " mistakes " — facts that will not fit a pet theory, or clash with some cramped assumption absorbed as final truth at the age of ten and made the bedrock of the beliefs of a lifetime. Sometimes it looks as though a motherly Nature scattered abnormalities around, knowing that man was so full of himself he would never notice anything till he barked his shins on it. And then instead of being grateful he grumbles and mutters about " Nature's mistakes." Uranus was supposed to be misbehaving himself as a planet till someone had the sense to see that the " mistakes " were his frantic efforts to introduce Neptune. Radium tried again and again to attract men's attention by outraging all elemental conventions. Bernard Shaw, obviously at heart a dear, sensitive, charitable gentleman, behaves like a word-fed rotary machine- gun, and instead of getting the attention such a phenomenon deserves, he is greeted — first with shouts of Ruffian ! Scoundrel ! — then with roars of laughter — and finally with rounds of applause, mixed with the scoldings of those who have looked into the depths of his mind and longed to put it to rights. 24 SHAW These are the comments of men. Women have not said so much about him, but what they do say is very much to the point. Three gifted women have summed him up in a single word, and each of the words is worth noting. Mrs. Patrick Campbell, rejoicing in early memories of the circus, gave him one look and said, "Joey." Mrs. Beatrice Webb, gathering her Shaw statistics together in one careful syllable, labelled him " Sprite." And Ellen Terry, with insight passing all analysis, went straight to the heart of the matter and called him " Bernie." Why all this contradiction and mystery? It can't be helped ; that's how all good stories begin, and the Shaw story is one of the best. He has told it all in his writings, but it is a difficult story to follow, partly because it is a long story, partly because he has tried to force the whole truth into a home-made creed, and partly because even the best of trumpets cannot blow itself effectively. The key to the story is his creed and the vigour with which he practises it. For he has a definite belief about the world and his place in it, and he lives his behef. He doesn't merely live up to it or turn to it on special occasions with a shamefaced awkward- ness or keep it in the background as a fire-escape ; he fills his life with it, in fact the core of it is that his creed and his life are as nearly one as he can make them. The creed is odd, but there is no doubt about the sincerity of his faith or the works with 25 SHAW which he backs it ; mountains have been moved, and even shaken till their rocks rattled, by the grip and impact of the ideas spread on that plain white paper in such fine neat writing. He has never tried to conceal this creed, and never wavered from it. From the Quintessence of Ibsenism, in 1890, to the preface to Back to Methuselah, in 1921, and on to the Black Girl, in 1932, he has continued to describe it and preach it in general and particular terms, in fact he has really never done anything else but write about it and its ramifications. For the sake of knowing what Shaw is driving at, and understanding those things which puzzle his admirers and even himself, it is worth while taking a good square look at this Life Force religion of his, and tracing it to its source. Impertinence ? Nonsense ! Religion may be a private affair in some cases, but the Life Force religion, which Shaw has preached around the world, and which is breaking out in such curious forms in Europe at present, is everybody's business. 26 CHAPTER II This is the story of Shaw's creed as it looks from the outside. It is set out here because it is by far the most important thing about him. It is the key to his conduct. The case to be made is — that a man who had a real belief in the tale of creation to be told in this chapter, and accepted the logical con- sequences of that belief, would behave as Shaw behaves ; and there is also the stranger case to be made — that a man driven by an intense love for truth, and a great respect for facts, to be dubious about the tale, would also behave as Shaw behaves. He would be a master of anti-chmax. This is all very mysterious, and it is right that it should be so, for at the back of it all is a real mystery — the mystery of being human — in which you and I and Shaw are all equally concerned, and for which let it be freely admitted no explanation is offered. All that is offered is a sorting out of the facts in the hope that some enlightenment will follow. Now this sorting out, particularly when it concerns itself with another man's creed, is far from being a simple matter. It is essential that the creed be stated accurately and at the same time in such a way that one can have sympathy with Shaw's 27 SHAW championship of it ; the reader must both under- stand it and see it somewhat as Shaw sees it, other- wise the promised key will be missing ; but he must first be warned of two difficulties which crop up at this point. The first is the obvious difficulty of prejudice which always arises when an outsider is stating the creed of an insider. Even when the outsider is trying to be a Christian, he is just as liable to error as the next man. The zoologist impaling butterffies in a case, even with the best will in the world, is liable to bruise something ; if he is a very expert zoologist with a pet theory, he is sure to make a special collection of butterflies to tally with it ; in his regard for scientific truth he may even snip the wings from any butterfly which dares to conflict with his theory, or twist some poor creature into an unnatural shape to demonstrate his ingenuity. The history of science is as deeply littered as the history of religion with cases of the strange behaviour of men who, above all things, wanted their own way. The outsider usually wants to discredit the creed which confficts with his own, and it will always be found that his tendency to distort truth is directly proportional to the weakness of his own position. Shaw, for instance, tries to make a place for his own doctrine by suggesting that Christians believe : that the world was made in the year 4004 B.C. ; that damnation means an eternity of blazing 28 SHAW brimstone ; that the Immaculate Conception means that sex is sinful and that Christ was parthenogenetically brought forth by a virgin descended in Hke manner from a line of virgins right back to Eve ; that the Trinity is an anthro- pomorphic monster with three heads which are yet only one head ; that in Rome the bread and wine on the altar become flesh and blood, and in England, in a still more mystical manner, they do and they do not ; that the Bible is an infallible scientific manual, an accurate his- torical chronicle and a complete guide to conduct ; that we may lie and cheat and murder and then wash ourselves innocent in the blood of the lamb on Sunday at the cost of a credo and a penny in the plate, and so on and so forth. And then goes on to make his real point : Civihsation cannot be saved by people not only crude enough to believe these things, but irreligious enough to believe that such a belief constitutes a religion. The education of chil- dren cannot safely be left in their hands. If dwindling sects like the Church of England, the Church of Rome, the Greek Church, and the rest, persist in trying to cramp the human mind within the limits of these grotesque per- versions of natural truths and poetic meta- phors, then they must be ruthlessly banished from the schools until they either perish in 29 SHAW general contempt, or discover the soul that is hidden in every dogma. {Prefaces^ p. 517.) This illustrates the difficulty perfectly. When so scrupulous and fair-minded a professional prophet cannot keep straight in dealing with a creed alien to his own, it is well for the amateur to be wary lest he, too, only succeed in adding to the sum of human ignorance and confusion. The process of skinning the believer — of separating him from that which is part of himself — must be preceded by study and undertaken with caution, if anything more than a few valueless mutilated scraps of his belief are to be secured. The second difficulty is that creeds have gone out of fashion and that words like " belief and " faith " are losing their meaning. So many certainties have been disturbed of late that people are beginning to put their trust in the belief that belief is not to be trusted. It is hard to make clear the significance of a real creed to those who are turning their believing faculty inside out and using it to doubt with. It is easy enough to describe Shaw's creed, or at least to set out the basis of it, but it is necessary also to show something of what it means to him, to convey some impression of the intensity with which he holds it. Many men have views on evolution, and the Life Force, similar to Shaw's, but they do not make them a personal matter ; they believe about evolution, he believes in it ; they think it is something which happened 30 S H A W millions of years ago and has nothing to do with them ; he thinks it is something which is happening to-day and has everything to do with him, that it is him, and he is it, and that together they are life. But perhaps this is not making matters any easier and it may be better to seek some common ground to show what is here meant by belief. Take the Derby at Epsom. Even in the upper reaches of the Amazon and the inner recesses of China, the English Derby is common property ; every man knows that it is a race for the best three- year-olds in the world, or if he doesn't, tries to pretend that he does. He is ashamed, and rightly ashamed, of not knowing such a splendid and reputable fact. There is simply no doubt about the Derby. Some people have more intimate know- ledge than others, and can say off-hand that Wragg won on Blenheim in 1930, others think that a Derby winner should have a good chance in the Grand National ; but these little contrasts only help us to enjoy our certainty ; they don't alter the fact or our belief about it, or our readiness to get together over it. On the contrary those who are strangers to Epsom and know but little are always anxious to be put in touch with those who know something, and those who have information are always de- lighted to share it abroad. Here is genuine belief. The creed, if you like, is primitive, and has but one article, but see how the belief remains equally certain through all degrees of intensity and how 31 SHAW minor misconceptions have no effect either on the reahty of the event or the vaHdity of belief in it. But, some may object, this state of certainty is not behef at all but mere knowledge based on direct experience, such as science gives. They would have more than a little difficulty in applying this objection to the Australian who always backs the favourite, or to the enthusiast, born in 1887, who believes that Hermit won in grand style in 1867. And even if the sceptic could prove his point and show that the mundane belief that there is such a race as the Derby is not a belief at all, he would still have to face the task of demolishing the other deeper belief connected with this race. It is a wonderful belief which has nothing to do with the restricted realm of science. Behind the fact, behind the event, is a faith which transcends experience and which, in a sense, precedes and materialises the event. The sceptic, if he is ignorant of horse-racing, will unfortunately not see this ; to him the whole affair may even seem a sordid matter of money and horses. He will not see that a belief in something quite intangible is at work behind the scenes, brushing aside doubt, triumphing over a million difficulties, bringing men of all parties together, and making them at home with one another. Men, for a little while, have a real belief in honour. The Derby is what it is because so many people want to see and share in an honest race, and because they believe that here at least the 32 SHAW men are giving the horses a chance. Out of this spontaneous act of belief is born the glory of that day at Epsom. Now there are some people who believe that this race takes place, but who never saw it and would not cross the road to see it ; this belief is to them only a belief about the Derby, it is a seed perishing annually on stony soil. But consider the others : think of the man who loves horses and the sim- mering life of great crowds ; who has never missed that Epsom meeting since he was a boy ; who looks forward to it from year to year ; who talks, reads, dreams and lives in a horse world " of risk and trust and speculation and daring ; " whose highest ambition is to breed, own, train, and lead in a Derby winner. He believes in the Derby and partakes of it in a way which no mere half-crown- each-way partaker understands ; he is no more certain than anyone else that the event is real and will recur annually, but the quality of his belief is different and is not to be conveyed by any word picture of the crowds, the horses and the race, however accurate and detailed. It is a real belief. Real beliefs, strangely enough, are not a guarantee of the truth of what is believed ; they seem to wind themselves about fictions and myths as easily as about facts and truth, but their effect is always the same : " They create, as the case may be, heroes and saints, great leaders, statesmen, preachers and 33 SHAW reformers, the pioneers in discovery in science, visionaries, fanatics, knight-errants, demagogues and adventurers," and also, Newman might have added, great racing men and great dramatists. But whatever the type, the first step towards knowing the man is to discover the outhnes of his creed. The creed of the Life Force as outHned by Shaw has scarcely any outlines. His version of Creative Evolution is somewhat different from Bergson's whose particular speciality it is . They seem to have arrived at certain similar points of view independently, and each has brought them to a focus in his own way. Shaw was first in the field, with a multitude of facts and instances, launching his campaign for the new religion, in concrete form, from every angle of human interest. Bergson came later, with close- knit argument and his ingenious idea about time, and more cautiously put very much the same story into abstract form. He began with a goddess called la duree, threw in one of those strange philosophic gods called " an infinity of shooting out " and made them jointly responsible for everything, literally every thing. It is all very ingenious. La duree in particular is a fascinating creature, but she does not appear in Shaw's version of Creative Evolution, nor does he seem to realise how necessary she is, nor the difficulties which evolutionary theories get into when their authors neglect to put some curb on the time which they lose so recklessly to produce man 34 SHAW and the amceba. Bergson knew all about that ; but Shaw was shy of abstract thought, he liked real things — real people — real happenings — on every page, and he left time to look after itself The idea of Creative Evolution is based, in the first place, on the facts put forward, from time to time, in favour of the theory of the gradual evolu- tion of species. It is not concerned with, or, at best, only gives a chilly nod to, other facts having to do with the gradual evolution of the whole universe. Its date of emergence is about 1859, when The Origin of Species was published by Charles Darwin, and when for the first time the theory of evolution was dealt with in a thorough and scientific manner. There had been plenty of isolated, half-hearted attempts to launch evolutionary theories in former years and centuries, but this W2is the first thoughtful, well-planned, comprehensive attempt. Darwin was a scientist of the old school. He said in effect : ** Here's what happens and here's why it happens," and left it open to anyone to check both statements. He was certainly elated by the all-round neatness of his theory, and the way all his facts fitted in, but he never lost his head about it. He knew that whatever success he had gained in explaining " How is a hen ? " he was as far off as ever from the answer to " Why is a hen ? " Intrepid admirers found no difficulty about such questions, and, sheltered behind the reputations of real scientists, they started off to produce the first scientific journ- 35 SHAW alism — all about molecules and mammals and the sheer inevitability of everything. Between the straight science of Darwin and this popular science, there slowly developed other growths fostered by those who wished to save something of value from the mechanists and hammer the new hypothesis into a religion. One of these growths was inspired, taken in hand, nourished, trimmed and tended by a succession of men — Butler, Ibsen, Wells for awhile, Bergson and the rest — so that it grew and grew like Jack's beanstalk. But the fairy story is upside down, the hero is up in the topmost branch, playing solitaire, and the ogre is down below tangled in the roots. To find these roots go back five thousand years — and then a million years — and then back over aeons and eras — back and back till you are dazed and floundering in the mists of time, and can imagine dimly only one formless meaningless Thing which is not time or space, but is somehow entangled in them, which has no parts but only potentiality, which has no quality whatever, but is itself mean- ingless unceasing Action. This Thing is the Ulti- mate Mystery, the meaning of all things reduced to the very lowest term. It cannot be described, but can be pictured dimly, in those far-off stretches of time, from the results of its experiments, as " a seething omnipotent unordered force " — " a whirling vortex of meaningless energy " — " an infinity of aimless shooting out." Blend with this first shadowy 36 SHAW impressionistic glimpse of origins an idea of terrific striving power ; there must be no values, no evil, no good, nothing except infinite, restless Power ; but do not confuse this Power with the mechanical power then being born in the first cataclysmic delivery of flying particles which were to be atoms, nor yet identify it with the vital power which appeared later on this earth, as the basic force surged wildly in the atoms it had created by chance. This basic Force lies behind, and is the unwitting cause of those minor powers ; it is not apart from them, but, blindly asserting itself, is embedded and enwrapped in its own assertions. So the first tiny cell, trembling into life on this planet, was just a chance experiment which neither knew, nor was known by, the Life Force. Neither it nor its successors knew, as they rose into life and motion with time and faded away into death, that they did so but to maintain this blind experimenting Force which pushed this way and that ; sometimes failing and coming to a full stop, but always thrust- ing out in new directions, moving along other branches, up and up and up ; undying, as it passed from parent to child, and spurred, through its sensitive appetites, each fresh dwelling to build up the new habits, which were to become new func- tions, in the budding cells of fresh generations. So, in the beginning of the era of living things, con- fusion reigned, as the surviving inventions battled with new creations, as the old experiments of 37 SHAW Floods and Frosts, so successful in the formative ages, wiped out the new ones of Plants and Animals, and as great Beasts preyed on one another, driven by the blind Force which surged within them, and emerged as the Will-to-Live. Here is no chance mechanism, but a positive Vital Force " willing " the things which help it to survive. The herbage- cropping quadruped, starving in drought, is driven by some inner urge to satisfy his hunger with foliage which his ancestors ignored, and so survives in conditions which destroyed them. Centuries later, a descendant, finding the foliage beyond his reach, uses the same will-to-live and purposefully up- stretches with all his might to reach the higher branches. He and his offspring may perish, but, sooner or later in the line, the neck-producing cells co-ordinate under the creating impulse, passed down from the pioneer, and the long-necked giraffe is born. Thus Life moves on trying — willing — learning in its several units, till at last by many striving coinci- dences self-consciousness, reason and imagination blend, and man emerges. For thousands of years he too stumbles on, carrying with him traces of the spent forces of other ages at war with these newer and nobler efforts of the Life Force ; lower instincts from the past fight wildly against the uplifting thoughts of the present ; from time to time the Life Force produces outstanding men, to whom some idea is all-in-all, who give themselves 38 SHAW to it unstintingly, and in so doing Towards the end of the nineteenth century, some such men — ^hitherto acting blindly — ^become dimly conscious of a Great Purpose. Here and there through Europe and America appear individuals who realise that the race is greater than the person, and that it is being held back in its upward struggle by those who cling in blind, static superstition to outworn creeds, fixed standards, and tribal ritual. These New Men, in their consciousness of the upward and onward thrust of evolution and of the part they are called on to play, are the true heirs of the ages. They are akin to the artist-prophets of former years, but with a difference. They know that they are sports. They know vaguely the mean- ing of themselves. They know that they are the very apex of achievement to date, that only through them — through their inspiration and effort — can the Life Force achieve greater consciousness of itself and reach that perfection which is eternally its goal. This is the basis of Shaw's creed, and the founda- tion of his philosophy. It is but the barest outline of an outhne of the new story of Creation, and only the shadowy hint of a hint of the underlying process. It is admittedly defective owing to the difficulty of describing the activities of that which has no attributes — a task to which it must be admitted Shaw has unstintingly devoted himself The story has been found attractive. The cultured classes 39 SHAW had garbled versions of it in 1880, and nearly everyone has it to-day. There is in every day's news, in scientific journals, in all the best-sellers, and in the very latest religions, every evidence of its growing popularity. This account of Creative Evolution at work through the Ages is, then, only a poor but honest attempt to make a preface to the Preface to Back to Methuselah, to which the reader is advised to go if he wishes to know what Shaw's creed is really like. Or he can go to Bergson and find : " Life is the effort made by energy to become free. It uses the powers and properties of matter, storing itself up and releasing itself in free action and in so doing becoming ever more free. It first institutes movement in matter, and this movement having resolved itself into the solar system, among other things, life hits by a lucky chance on the chlorophyllian function as a means of storing up energy and releasing it in spurts and bursts of ' creative- ness.' The impetus of life is finite, it has been given once for all, and must work its own way. It is a slow stumbling worker ever trying and failing and trying again." Or to Rosenberg and read : " A new sense of life which is conscious however of being rooted in the primitive past, pushes to the surface, and takes form ; a new view of life is born and begins to demand 40 SHAW an account of ancient forms, sacred usages, and traditional values." Or he may get the idea purged and refined in the editorial pages o^ Nature (December 7th, 1935) : " Science has not only emancipated human thought from the bondage of traditional authority, but also, through the concept of evolution onward and upward, has provided mankind with a new philosophy of life." If he is curious enough to go further, he will find that Bergson, as becomes a philosopher, pursues his way calmly, moulding his creation into shape with pleasing, flowing words, but ever standing apart from it ; while Rosenberg jumps into the arena and spreads the Life Force story among a million readers in the Myth of the 20th Century, impetuously telling the tale of a new cell activity which is welding with great blows of the Nordic hammer all plastic German souls into one great race soul, and subordinating the individual to the state ; to the dismay of Nature's editor, who, in the upthrusting of the Life Force in England, has just discerned the emancipation of human thought from the shackles of authority. But this search through the modes in which the Life Force is expressing itself to-day leads only through confusion into boredom, and it is better to stick to Shaw, who never bores, however much he may confuse. The other prophets are unbearably dull as they go on and on ; he somehow manages to say things which sound the same, but have a curious 41 SHAW freedom and elasticity of their own, as though he were standing despair on its head, and making it wave its legs in hope. He braces himself against the same base as the others, he shoots his arrows from the same citadel of modified Lamarck-Darwinism but he is different. He seems to have faith in what he is saying. The rest of them believe the Life Force story with about as much energy as they believe that the weather is going to be wet ; they are careful not to allow belief to become mixed up with behaviour. Shaw, on the other hand, seems at an early stage to have accepted this story of creation, or something like it, then to have said to himself : " Where do I come in ? " and to have seen that words alone could not answer that question. He gave his assent to the story, but instead of treating that as the end of the matter — going out and getting a good job as a journalist, and settling down to vegetate in com- fort — he made his assent only the beginning, and with wild, indomitable logic, tried to conform his thoughts, words and actions to it. The *' good job " was to him not living at all. Life was not a set of operations to be carried out according to rules laid down by London editors or even by the English upper classes. Life was he — Bernard Shaw — a man, alive, in a wonderful, ever-active world. But, so far as he could see, the sign-posts marked " This way to heaven " were all pointing in different directions. Way back about 1880 or earlier he 42 SHAW must have become aware of bewilderment and taken as a headline " Follow conscience for all you're worth." And then the fun began. It is an exciting headline for any man, but the tumult is usually a private matter ; in this case, with George Bernard Shaw hanging on to it for grim life, the results became a public spectacle for the world. No other prophet of Creative Evolution has risked the attempt to merge into one the cosmic story and the personal story. In his case the results have been given such labels as novels, pamphlets, plays, prefaces and letters, essays and tomfooleries, but such listing breaks up their unity and hides their meaning. From the early letters to Public Opinion in 1875, to the latest play in 1936, these writings are the scientific record of an extraordinary experiment in one-man living. Sometimes the microscope is turned inwards, and sometimes outwards, but always the observations are made with the utmost care, and most faithfully recorded. This does not look like science because there is no laboratory, no mathematics, no chloro- formed kitten under a bell jar ; but any man who records his experiences accurately and honestly is a real scientist, and perhaps a poet as well. Shaw is a wonder as a first-hand observer and honest recorder, and his works are the results, disguised as plays and so on, covering an immense variety of experience. When he wants to say just what he feels and thinks about the particular specimen under 43 SHAW observation, he writes a preface ; when he wants to hold up to the public a variety of other views plus his own, he writes a play. He ranges over every- thing freely, that is, freely within the limits of his creed. Other men write poems, plays and pam- phlets in accordance with some prescribed formula, and get results fit for immediate embalming ; or else they write with absolute freedom, and get sentences which don't parse, written with words which aren't in the dictionary ; they try to get the Inner Light to do all the work, including the thinking. Shaw is prepared to say anything whatever, and to stand by the Inner Light through thick and thin, but he likes the practical record of his inspiration to stand to reason. His allegiance to reason is vigorously denied by large property owners, who can see nothing but madness in a well-to-do man saying that Russians are respectable, but he is really terribly reasonable in all secondary matters. There's only one author like him — a man who began with a page full of axioms and wrote books and books out of them — Euclid is inexorable. The man who accepts Euclid's axioms is done for, he must swallow every last bit of every single book to the last Q.E.D. His only chance is to say at the very beginning, " That last axiom looks crazy to me." The point is that Shaw is true to his creed. It would have made things simpler for everyone if he had put his axioms on the first page like his great rationaHst predecessor. That is why they are set 44 SHAW out here at an early stage in the form of an account of creation, which can be examined at leisure. If Shaw is right about that he is right about every- thing else. Meanwhile, a lot of other questions arise. How did he come to believe such a story ? Why did he throw overboard an extraordinary story about a whale, and then take up with a tall tale about a giraffe ? What have evolutionary theories to do with play writing ? What difference does a man's belief make to his day's work ? Surely it's all a publicity ramp ? What has conscience got to do with it ? What's the use of bothering about begin- nings ? What does Shaw know about them ? Who is Shaw ? 45 CHAPTER III He is one of the Kilkenny-Dublin Shaws, friends of the great Ponsonbys. Sir John Ponsonby, a hard- headed firm-fisted north-of-England man, first came to Ireland with Cromwell as colonel in a cavalry regiment. He had all the qualities as soldier, business man, administrator and diplomatist neces- sary for acquiring lands during the Commonwealth, and holding them under the Restoration. The property passed to his son, Sir Henry, who, not being very sure of his ground under the Stuarts, backed William at the Battle of the Boyne, and established his position. His brother and heir. Sir William, finally consolidated the family fortunes, and ad- vanced into the Irish nobility, gaining the titles of Viscount Duncannon and Baron Bessborough. This process of advancement was not accom- plished without loyal and willing help from Captain William Shaw of Hampshire, who came over and did his bit in Sir Henry's regiment at the Battle of the Boyne, and thereafter settled down in the shelter of the Bessborough estate on the southern border of County Kilkenny. The partnership, so happily begun in 1690, continued in the following genera- tions and the Shaws and Ponsonbys remained, 46 SHAW during the next century, in close and loyal association in those pleasant lands north of the Suir, where the salmon-fishing and fox-hunting were so fine, and where the rich wines of the South could be rolled cask by cask from the deck of the Portuguese lugger up to the very door. Those were wonderful days for the Shaws, in the early eighteenth century, with the woods of Kilkenny behind them, the sun slanting across the shadowy Gomeraghs down on the wide sweep of the river in front, the rich land giving its store for all their needs and a powerful patron over all. The savour of them dwells in the pages of Somerville and Ross — descendants of another of Cromwell's officers, Colonel Bushe, who made his home in the next pleasant valley a few miles away — as they write of their great-grandfather, Charles Kendal Bushe : " Kilkenny is a warm comfortable county, of wide, rich pastures and wooded demesnes and stately houses, with a big blue river running swift and strong through its heart, the River Nore, that has salmon to be caught that match the river in speed and strength. Mountains it has not, but there are hills that make a purple margin for its landscapes, and above all the other counties, it has trees, calm and superb, with perfection undisturbed by such wind as south-west Ireland knows. Kilfane and Kil- murray march together, and their boundary line is buried in trees. Splendid oaks, serene 47 SHAW in unhindered growth ; chestnuts, that when I first saw Kilmurray were deep seas of green, with their myriad pale flowers Kke lamps reflected in troubled water : and beyond all other trees were the beeches, great domes of purple, some of them, but most were of the delicate shimmering green that is the lovely coming-out dress in which they meet the summer, and in their shade the wild bluebells were spreading like blue air between the grey trunks. " Charles, who never missed a chance of getting on a horse, had gone for a morning ride. He had ridden into Kilmurray and galloped round the park. The lake that, so long ago, he had himself helped to plan and enlarge, was brimming. He jumped the little stream that fed it, and looked long at the reflection in the lake of the house he was born in " {An Incor- ruptible Irishman, p. 208). It was splendid for the young men of those days to belong to such a county and to know that so many acres of it belonged to them ; but marriages were early, and there were children by the dozen, and in a few generations there was room only for the eldest, and younger sons began to be forced out, into military service and into the growing towns. Numbers of young Shaws had to leave the land, and branch out into respectable professions each genera- tion. Two of these branches are full of interest. 48 SHAW The first springs from Robert Shaw, a fifth son, who left the old home in the 1 760's, and became a very capable Accountant-General of the Post Office. His son Robert, born 1774, married an heiress in 1796 and by 1800 was showing his quality both in Parliament and in the comparatively new and interesting business of banking. He voted against the Union, when a vote on the other side was said to be worth anything from £30,000 to an earldom, and he steered his business through the financial straits of the early nineteenth century with such credit and profit that it became the basis of the Royal Bank of Ireland in 1 836. He was made baronet in 1 82 1 . It is pleasant for those who see in the victory at the Boyne the beginnings of modern civilisation, to visualise young Captain William Shaw, on a white horse, charging the stricken enemy behind Sir Henry Ponsonby ; then to see them together later, so comfortably settled in their sylvan retreat ; then to see young Sir Robert standing, with four stalwart Ponsonbys, against the corruption of the Union ; and finally to find the old partnership commemorated generation after generation in Ponsonby Shaw (born 1784), sheriff and banker, Ponsonby Shaw (born 1 810), lieutenant-colonel in the Madras army, and Ponsonby Shaw (born 1846) major in the late 95th Foot. The other branch springs from Bernard Shaw, a third son, first cousin of the baronet, who left the old home in the 1 790's, became a kind of lawyer- 49 SHAW cum-broker, married a rector's daughter in 1802, and died in 1826, leaving behind an indomitable wife and fourteen children. How she managed to bring them up, as Henderson says : " in an unshaken and unshakable consciousness of their aristocracy," is one of the mysteries of those times, but it may be guessed that the banker-baronet, who provided a house for them in Terenure, was continuously helpful. Her third son, George Carr Shaw, married Lucinda Gurly in 1852, and settled down modestly at 3 Synge Street, Dublin. At this house on July 26th, 1856, there was delivered that tender protoplasmic mass of curious, dim, Shaw-Gurly memories, enHvened by that entity incredibly new and free, which was to be called George Bernard and was to open self-con- scious, observant eyes on the DubHn of the 'sixties. A visitor to the Ireland of to-day will not find it difficult to reconstruct that Dublin. No. 3 Synge Street is now No. 33, and remains its box-like, yellow-bricked, basement-kitchened, granite-coped, bijou-Georgian self, the model of thousands built for genteel and not too well-to-do Dubliners, over a century ago. Behind the house the Grand Canal opened out into the Portobello Basin, from which the south city drew its drinking water, and on which the " Fly-boats " had rested a few years before, after their breathless dash up from Kildare at nine miles an hour, to discharge their passengers at the door of the Portobello Hotel. In 1850 William 50 SHAW Dargan was changing all that. He was building railways from the provinces to Dublin, and making a reputation for himself as a captain of industry, and the wealthiest man in Ireland. It was the age of Exhibitions ; eleven miles of stands of " all that was wonderful and exquisite " at the Crystal Palace were exciting the public mind, disturbing old conventions, stimulating new wants, rocketting industrialism, and making Ruskin and Morris wild. Fashionable Ireland wished to be in the swim, and Dargan, eager to help, was backing the first of the Dublin Exhibitons on Leinster Lawn in 1853. Dublin society was delighted, and supported it in the elegant, carefree, complimentary-ticket kind of way that has brought tears to the eyes of the guarantors of so many enterprises in that city, and in those days cost Dargan ^26,000. Within easy reach of Synge Street, in a house on Stephens Green, Cardinal Newman was planning a beautiful church and dreaming of a Cathohc University while he looked out at the great open space, so suitable for his purpose, which lay between him and the newly built Harcourt Street Railway Station. But the idea of University materialises slowly, and while he thought and wrote, two young men named Guinness, to whom ^{^26,000 was but petty cash, were looking at the site and making much faster progress with their idea of its suitability for exhibition purposes. It was taken over, a great hall was built, and in it were housed the Great 51 SHAW Dublin Exhibitions of 1865 and 1872. The stands were interesting. The gas engine, telephone, and electric light were still unknown, but electro magnets had had their day, and city people were in a position to yawn politely when their country cousins chattered excitedly before models of the electric telegraph and the wonderful electric clock. Scientists had done wonders, but engineers and business men had not yet caught up, and so far there was little but rather clumsy dynamos to be seen. Still there was the wonderful sewing machine just beginning to come on the market in quantity, and a new material called rubber with amusing properties. A grey powder — Portland Cement — was being boosted as the building material of the future, to the uncon- cealed amusement of the brickmakers and quarry owners. There were great stands of Staffordshire pottery and rows and rows of chimney pieces in fine ironmongery and " a splendid array of gas fittings including gazaliers of various patterns, brackets and all the elegant modes of dispensing artificial light in society." But nothing could surpass the thrill of the steam engine, with its whirling flywheel, and the maze of machines that could be made to dance attendance on it. It was old in the 'seventies, but still new. Even yet, there is something about that smooth flux of power under finger-tip control, which fascinates people as they watch the easy, powerful 52 SHAW pulse of the piston rod, and the curious baby- like sparring of the eccentrics. But in 1872 ! To think that never before in the history of the world had a locomotive been . . . and to be alive along with it ! To have been born into a horse-world, and to see the modern miracle of the railways spread out to take command of it ! Kipling was not yet under way, but the ideas he was to mould into poetry were already elusively dancing in the crowded aisles in those Exhibition years. Young George Bernard Shaw seems to have been unmoved by the great shows going on so near him, as family ups and downs moved him first to a larger house. No. I Hatch Street, and then to lodgings in 61 Harcourt Street. At sixteen he was delving into books and music and more incHned to look ques- tioningly at the throngs passing down Earlsfort Terrace, then to go into raptures over " electro copies of great antique vases " or " work-boxes of mother of pearl." From his birth his home had been an unusual one, in which good music was as common as bread and butter, and used as freely and naturally. His mother had a lovely voice, and the aunt who had otherwise brought her up with such Puritan caution and rigour had recklessly given her an excellent musical education. She joined forces with a gifted music teacher, George Vandaleur Lee, and in No. i Hatch Street, Gounod, Verdi and Donizetti were as much at home as Tom, Dick and Harry in the ordinary household. 53 SHAW Shaw learnt music without consciousness of learning, as a child in a pleasant home learns good manners. His taste was nourished from the begin- ning, and the sensitiveness of his ear developed as naturally as the strength of his limbs. In due time came conscious knowledge, and the delight in widening it, ordering it, and making it at home which everyone who has ever gathered anything from stamps to stars can understand and share in a slight way. Clear understanding is not so easy, for there is something close and intimate here which rebels against analysis and is not easily amenable to reason ; see how music-minded people begin their discussions so courteously and end by just " going on " at one another. It will not do, then, to be too clever and psycho-analytical and lazy, and find the whole future springing from the over-develop- ment of one particular faculty, the encouragement of intense and unbalanced sensibilities, and the growth of a form of expression to give them an outlet when capacity for musical composition and performance was lacking. That would be pure speculative eyewash, and would rule out all the pleasant, human, interesting influences which con- tributed to the startling appearance, in London of the 'eighties, of a young man who not only knew what was wrong with the world, but also knew what to do about it. Still, the influence of music was fundamental ; the part it played is evident at every turn, in the trend of his thoughts, in his career and 54 SHAW in his writings. The great composers were his earliest teachers, and their operas were his fairy tales, and from the beginning, there was a gulf between the boy to whom music was a native language to an inner ear, and the other boys to whom it was so much sound. It was a gulf which was to grow with every development of that sensitive discriminating ear, and to make him forever something of a stranger to the rest of us, to whom music is at best a pleasant noise which we can stand for a couple of hours at a time for culture's sake. The story of those days will be found in the preface to his first novel. Immaturity. The preface was written forty years after the novel, and gains in pungency what it loses in the ill-balanced emphasis of a man of sixty-five writing of his youth. He seems to have mixed Httle with others of his age, and to have passed from childhood to manhood without that intermediate stage in which the male measures himself against other boys, and makes some essential adjustments during a period of physical destructiveness and general devilment. When other boys, in pairs and gangs, were breaking windows, laws and everything else that stood in their small ways, he was reading and following up with delight the antics of those wonderful figures which troop so readily into any young imagination which invites them. Reading and music went hand in hand to give material and impetus to the events of his dream worlds, and the great dramas 55 SHAW going on around him seem to have been almost ignored. He was busy playing with the wonderful works men had created for his delight. It mattered not whether they were in words or music — the two flowed so easily in his mind that he scarce needed to distinguish them. Shelley must have come early. He had been in Dublin in the Ufetime of Shaw's parents, enthroned in a balcony in O'Connell Street distributing pamphlets on world reform to the passers-by ; he was real, and his story was vivid, to cultured Dublin of the 'seventies ; and his message brimming in sense and sound, was an intoxicating draught for young George Bernard. Poets and composers were his heroes, and his interest spread from them to the others, who created in colour and stone, and sent him in his teens wandering round the Dublin Art Galleries. It is small wonder he cared little for engines and mechanical things from factories, or for the mass activities of men. Only the individual — the crafts- man — could produce this thing called beauty which stirred him so mysteriously and set him apart from the world which was making its first wild gropings towards mass production. He had no interest in the struggle between iron and steel, in which Henry Bessemer had just scored such a victory, nor could he get excited about the difference between basic and phosphoric ores, which was the essence of romance to the Gilchrists. He did not care in the least about the lack of standardisation in the 56 S H A W engineering industry' ; he probably never e\-en heard of WhiUvorth nor of the efforts he was making to get British manufacturers to reaHse the value of exact measurement and precise standards. But this is scarcely surprising ; neither he. nor anyone but a few far-seeing business men. reaHsed the close connection between \Vhit\vorth's teaching and the possibility' of turning out guns and ammunition more rapidly than men could fire them off. The Crimean and American wars had just fizzled out on old slow-going traditional Hues, and Germany was beginning to demonstrate the superiority- of the new mode in which rapid movement was backed by equally rapid munition output, but to Shaw-among-the-artists the Franco-Prussia war was an event on the ven- margin of conscious- ness. Neither he, nor his family, nor any of their class, noticed the greater conflict going on nearer home. It was a new form of the long-lasting Anglo-Irish struggle in which the opposing forces were now landlords and tenants. There had been a terrifying engagement in the 'forties, in which the mortalitv^ of the tenants and their families reached 900,000. The landlords called this '* The Great Famine " and continued to press for rent, complaining of the disaffection and ingratitude of the lower classes, and calHng occasional casualties which occurred among themselves '' dastardly murders." The Times of 1872 speaks for them : 57 SHAW The Imperial legislature should endeavour to govern each individual section of the immense population under its sway, as those composing it would wish to govern themselves, supposing them to be sufficiently enhghtened to wish well. . . . Ireland is now governed as nearly as possible ... as we might suppose Ireland to govern herself were she in her right mind. This did not raise even a smile in the Shaw house- hold. George Carr Shaw had an acute and mis- chievous sense of humour, but anything touching the prestige of the class to which he belonged, was sacred. He looked on the wretched Irish as a separate species, and did his utmost to save his son from contact with them. The very existence of the Ponsonby-Shaw class hung on this conviction of their superiority to the mere Irish ; it was often combined with kindness and consideration of the quality sometimes shown to domestic animals : see, in the novels of Lover and Lever, how benignly the culture and elegance of the quality contrasts with the crudity and credulity of the native ; their faith in the eternal propriety of this contrast was about all that remained of the Puritan doctrines of former days, and their religion consisted mainly of some good social habits turning about a belief that the elect were always well-dressed and lived in well-kept houses. They lived on the assurance that a rather irritable God, who was displeased with the Irish for their loyalty to his predecessor, 58 SHAW had presented their forefathers with the Bible as a legal instrument entitling them to hold all the best land and best jobs in the country. They brought up their families carefully under a code consisting of some of the solid old virtues merged in a wonderful mixture of pious practices, family customs, prejudices and conventions, all firmly bonded into a sense of their own impeccability and superiority. They had a general feeling that the existence of their God could be proved from the Bible, and they accepted the Ussher chronology and Milton's lion with his hairy mane and clay tail, as absolute and final truth ; they were very close to their ancestors of the seventeenth century. Shaw's parents had been moulded in their youth by some such upbringing and teaching into the standard pattern, but ideas abroad in the 'sixties and unfortunate events in their own lives, upset them. His father was a kindly, weakly man, who had been given a start in Hfe by influential friends, but he was incapable of settling down seriously to hard work in the flour-milling business. He was probably obsessed with the notion that a Kilkenny Shaw should not have to work — even in Wholesale. All his Hfe he was dogged by complexes. He wanted to drink, but believed that drinking was sinful and ruined so many promising parties by beginning to lament his miserable condition just when everyone else was getting into good form, that he was finally dropped socially. The man was 59 SHAW overwhelmed by the Puritan on the drink question, but he would not take a beating ; he popped up in another field and revenged himself. When the Puritan threatened George Carr with specially picked texts about the elect and the damned, he pointed to The Origin of Species in 1 859, and The Antiquity of Man in 1863, and put his fingers to his nose. Still, he was never very sure of himself, and compromised by earnestly teaching his son to respect the Bible and at the same time encouraging his ribald young efforts at higher criticism with uproarious laughter. Mrs. Shaw was made of sterner stuff. Her son says : " Her character reacted so strongly against her strict and loveless training, that churchgoing was completely dropped in our family before I was ten years old " {Prefaces, p. 633). She never seems to have taken any further interest in the severe teach- ings of her Calvinistic aunt, or to have been impelled to teach her son anything but love for the music in which she immersed herself when she became disappointed with her husband's feebleness, and disgusted with his morose conviviality. It is prob- able that George Carr's high and mighty attitude about the Shaws and their great connections bred in her a satirical outlook on men and their ways, which she unconsciously passed on to her son. She was a woman of strong personality and decisive character, and she must have exercised a multitude of influences of this kind, but she seems to have 60 SHAW felt little responsibility towards him, and generally to have left him to his own resources. There was no one at No. i Hatch Street to treat him as a boy looking out on a new and surprising world, or as a small person with some right to an intelligible explanation of why he had been invited into it. It was a house of grown-ups, who passed on their adult viewpoints to him, as if he were a little replica of themselves, and he was left to struggle as best he could to make sense of his father's divided counsels, his mother's cool detachment, his uncle William's waverings between piety and bathing beauties, his uncle Walter's brilliant blas- phemies, and the way in which a group of be- whiskered men could argue for hours on the pos- sibility of miracles, after starting with the assump- tion that they couldn't happen. They made no allowance for the fierce logic of childhood which was for some reason working in a more uncom- promising way than usual in their midst, as young George Bernard strove to arrange the sensations which were pouring in upon him, so that the real world would be orderly and beautiful like the dream worlds of his imagination. He was at last taking an interest in something outside himself. This Religion versus Science controversy which was spreading like wildfire in England and reflected in so many discussions in his home, made instant appeal to him. It was a dispute full of mighty drama and human interest, alive with the vigour of the great 6i SHAW personalities involved, and as he listened to the faint echoes of it which reached Dublin, and eagerly read the latest proofs that the world was more than 6,000 years old, he easily made his decision. He would be a champion of this fresh, vivid, certain knowledge against the shams and crudities of reli- gion. He had no experience of science, and the only religion of which he had inside knowledge was the one his family had turned down before he was ten, but he was full of that glorious assurance which has never left him. • He saw clearly facts and common sense on one side, and delusion and hypocrisy on the other, and made his choice, scarcely knowing at first that it was a choice. This matter of choice was strange. He had known about it vaguely for years, but about this time — say 1870 — his knowledge opened out into wonderful discovery. He found out that he was alone in a new and exciting way — as though George Bernard was floating off on his own, and had his eye on young Shaw. He found that he was something apart from his mother, father, uncles, aunts, and the Shaw tradition ; that he need not think as they thought, nor do as they did, nor even do as he did yesterday. He was not only new — he was free, and not only free to think, but to make a choice this way or that and to act. Just here there was a strangeness, for the wonderful intangible freedom had a direction and in some indescribable way it was found possible to act for, and to act against. 62 SHAW He was free and not free at the same time. He was in some way responsible, in some way required to act reasonably. He was not allowed to have all the fun of thinking and coming to conclusions without acting on them. He could, of course, turn them down if he liked, but it would make him uncom- fortable ; on the other hand, if he brought his con- clusions out into the open by action, there was this indescribable feeling of lightness, freedom, and power. George Bernard had discovered his conscience. Conscience was at a discount in those days. In Germany it had just been analysed as a compound of fear, superstition, prejudice, vanity, and custom. In England it was argued that it was only a spasm of the diaphragm like a sneeze or a cough, or else held to be a by-product of the social process still of value among primitive peoples, but no longer so necessary at home, owing to the British Constitu- tion, the Bank of England, and the Police. In Dalkey, Ireland, a boy was ignoring all this modern teaching, and beginning to experiment on himself; he had discovered his conscience, and was getting ready to back it against the world. Every year the Shaws sought relief from the heat, the dust, and the flat, flat flatness of South Dublin City, in a summer holiday at Dalkey. Synge Street and Hatch Street lie low within the curve of the canal, encased in dull brick fronts and dreadful iron-railed basements. The district is still a favourite gathering place for the mild mists 63 SHAW of the city, and by some trick of the atmosphere or the landscape, the horizon on dull days seems to lie at arm's length. Heaven and earth are flat- tened out. The very sky seems to rise out of the ground, and to press down on tree-tops and roofs like a great grey cover. By the canal, the stimulus of Mozart and the colour and movement of the Arabian Nights could only be matched by scenery of the imagination. At Dalkey it was different. To know the difference you must make a pilgrimage to Synge Street, walk along Heytesbury Street to Bride Street, look at Molyneux Church where Shaw received weekly instruction for a time, and then cut across through the slums to Stephens Green and Leeson Street. After that tour of a two-dimensional world, take a swift run to Dalkey — only eight miles away — and climb Torca Hill. Torca Cottage, where the Shaws used to stay, is still there, but new buildings and new walls make it more difficult now to wander at will about the summit. For the rest, there is no change since Druid and Danish days in the wonders of land, sea, and sky, that lie so lavishly around. From morning till night in those long summer days, a boy was able at last to open his eyes and see something that was in keeping with that incessant imperious demand for beauty and more beauty ; for beauty that would sweep and surge on, and yet be unchanged ; that would match his leaping imagination and yet stun it into breathless helplessness. . . . 64 SHAW The mail-boat harbour lies like a child's toy below. On the west of the hill are the two great quarries which built it. There is a spot above the rocky precipice at the end of one of them — a nice dangerous ledge that a boy would love. The wind comes brushing along the green quarry floor, meets the granite face, and pours wildly, escapingly, over that ledge, full of deep, soft, untiring music and a song of one word. The briar, the whitethorn, and the gorse that have somehow managed to find a home in the granite, dance wildly in the whirling eddies, and the hawkbit tosses hundreds of golden heads about, deliriously and yet deliciously in time with the slow beat of that throbbing word. Sweeping round the shoulder of Kilmashogue comes the wind, with all the richness gathered in the heather lands and cornfields of Kildare, to toss it up to the sky over Torca Head, and pour it down in wild abandonment over Killiney Bay. It is the busiest wind in the world, searching, sweeping, grooming, tidying every inch of that cliff face. Under the great booming organ note, there is the tenderest bustling hissing as it works on tendrils, twigs and leaves ; colour, sound and movement are one ; softness, wantonness, warmth, blend into speed and energy that mocks the anchored granite. Heady stuflf for a boy fresh from Shelley and brick- bounded streets ! Fifty yards away on the south slope he could sit on the soft turf in the shelter of a great sparkling 65 SHAW boulder and watch the sea spreading in grey-green lights and shadows to its twenty-mile horizon. The wind's music softens to the very borders of silence, and a murmur of surf breaking comes up from the white lacy frill that wavers along the miles of pebbly beach to Bray. Everything down there moves with a curious slow deliberation, as if by careful arrangement. The seagulls hang like the lightest of floating feathers, and the waves move on slowly to their appointed places, the lazy whiteness creeps monotonously up and down Kil- liney Strand, holding the eye, numbing the mind, and gripping the heart with despairing delight. That soft unceasing caress of land and waters is alive with some secret, telling it openly again and again, and yet hiding it maddeningly behind the changes which leave it ever new and unchanged. But the wind and the sea and the lovely sweep up from the strand across the vale of Shanganagh to the mountains beyond are all suddenly for- gotten playthings. Reaching down to those moun- tain tops is a sky which is like no other sky. It rises in great billowing grey rain-clouds over War Hill and races round the Bay in enormous curving shadows to change its mood to mighty piled-up snowy masses beyond Howth, and die away at last in soft pale lavender tones over Balbriggan. It is not one, but many skies, stormy and calm, cloudy and clear, endlessly blending into one another. The hill-top is in the midst of an airy 66 SHAW sea alive with stirring light, and full of bewildering variety, against that serenity of eternal blue. In the evening all that contrasting beauty intensifies and focuses about the dull furnace glow over the western plain ; behind Howth the towering masses of the day have disappeared, and a motherly sky is putting a sleepy land to bed with fold on fold of cloud, so lazily, so expertly, spread out. Above, a few scattered patches of silver-grey are tiredly trying a few last cloud measures in the dimmer and dimmer light. Down below, wandering among the gorse, young Bernard in his teens was embarking on his great venture on some such night as this. It might have happened anywhere, and it is possible that those pure, soaring, spacious skies had nothing whatever to do with it, but suddenly he was taking stock of himself, and finding, to his discomfort, that he was thoroughly two-faced. It was out on Torca Hill in the dusk of a summer's evening, when colour had gone from the sky, and a few slight stars were out, that young George Bernard suddenly found himself taking stock of Shaw, and urging him to mend his ways. He had become conscious, at last, that old habits did not tally with new thoughts, and he suddenly decided he wasn't going to have it. Something was forcing him to be honest and he was facing the issue with a primitive simplicity unknown to the Shaws, who always asked : " What would the Ponsonbys think ? " He was taking up his 67 " . SHAW Stand on completely new ground with the query : " What's the good thing to do ? " The Science- Religion controversy which was going on about him with such intensity had suddenly become a personal issue ; he was aware at last that he had made a choice, and he was bringing his conscience to bear on it as easily and naturally as a bird flies when it is time for it to fly. He was saying in so many words : " Truth is good — religion is a sham — therefore religious practices are evil," and there and then he decided he must give up his prayers. It was a bit of a wrench, for he was fond of his night prayers, and made a feature of them in his own picturesque way, but he could not go on with them. They were magic, mockery, a bad habit, and he must give them up. Many a boy would have compromised and slowed off by degrees, but there was something unrelentingly scrupulous about this lad which made thought and action one, and there and then he turned his back on the God of his fathers. Lest there be any mistake in this descrip- tion of a crucial decision and the manner of it, here is his own story : I continued these pious habits long after the conventional compulsion to attend church and Sunday School had ceased, and I no longer regarded such customs as having anything to do with an emancipated spirit like mine. But one evening as I was wandering in the furze bushes on Torca Hill in the dusk, I suddenly 68 SHAW asked myself why I went on repeating my prayer every night, when, as I put it, I did not believe in it. Being thus brought to book by my intellectual conscience, I felt obliged in common honesty to refrain from superstitious practices ; and that night for the first time since I could speak, I did not say my prayers {Prefaces,^. ^Z3)' There never was a more logical man. He began with that fateful syllogism on Torca Hill, and from that day to this he has never ceased trying to fit himself into it ; even when he dropped materialism, which he did years afterwards, as promptly and scrupulously as he dropped his prayers, he tried to make a religion which would square with it — a religion without rules or practices. It is hard for the average decent Englishman to realise the artificiality of the conventions which held together the one-sided civilisation of Protestant Ireland in the 'seventies, and the stunning eflfect of the new truths which Haeckel, Spencer, Huxley and Tyndall v/ere preaching with such intensity and ability. But it is easy for everyone to delight in the fresh impetuous vigour with which young George Bernard began to use his natural gifts, trying to bring some order into the queer world into which he had been landed. He was proud of his new knowledge of himself, and delighted in the freedom and sense of power which it gave. This wonderful self-consciousness and exercise of his rational appetite 69 SHAW opened a new world, and he found himself looking curiously at others in the light of it, and embarking on discussions to find out what their worlds were like. The orthodoxy of his acquaintances rested on peculiar foundations, and as he probed, in arguments at the office and elsewhere, loss of temper on their part and increasing conviction on his, easily followed. He became more and more cool and certain, as they became hotter and more abusive, and he began to observe human behaviour with an increasingly critical eye. Out of his discovery of himself there slowly grew the further discovery that most men lived on their habits and prejudices, and didn't like being asked " Why ? '* From his point of view they were hardly alive at all, for " Why " and " Why not " were the very food of his life. He began to suspect all conventions, and found himself looking at people and events as though he had come from another planet and was seeing them for the first time. He had a clerical position in an estate office in Molesworth Street, where he carried out his duties punctiliously, instructed his fellow clerks in musical matters, and got a reputation as an atheist. In the early seventies he was living at 6i Harcourt Street, where his father had moved when the family broke up and his mother went to London. Outside the office he gave much time to music and science ; music he studied by listening and playing, but his knowledge of science was unfortunately gained 70 SHAW from books. He had no notion of what he was letting himself in for, nor of his complete helplessness in the hands of any scientific writer with a good style and a pet theory ; there were some wonderful expositors in those days, and Tyndall, who was at the British Association meeting in Belfast in 1874, was one of the best ; his presidential address was disturbing to many, but thrilling to his young admirer in Dublin. It went like this : " The mild light of Science breaking in upon the minds of the youth of Ireland is a surer check to any spiritual tyranny which might threaten this island than the laws of princes and the swords of emperors," and like this : "In matter we discern the promise and the potentiality of all terrestial life. The doctrine of evolution derives man in his totality from the interaction of organism and environment through countless ages past." It is hard to believe now that this balanced phrasing was spell-binding in 1874, and that its confident tone carried conviction to millions. But in those days atoms were ultimates. It was useless to try to peer beyond them, for they were hard and unchanging — like billiard balls — banking up the farthest frontiers of knowledge with an impenetrable wall ; and anyhow, peering was unnecessary, for, with a limited selection of atoms, a few simple laws and an aeon or two, it was possible to show that everything came about quite naturally. In controversy with an obstinate oppo- nent the atoms could always be backed up by 71 SHAW " immutable, inexorable laws," with good effect. Billiards was said to be a sinful game, and it was pleasant for boys to be able to get a reputation for wickedness and at the same time have a secret conviction that they were being virtuous, and learning about the Unknowable every time they brought off a clever cannon. Young Bernard was far too serious-minded and hard-up a boy to waste his time at billiards, but he was giving much thought to cause and effect, hard facts, and the problem of finding rational explanations for all human behaviour ; his satirical feeling against the respect- able classes was growing and he was spoiling for a chance to show what was in him. He got it when Moody and Sankey visited Dublin, and he felt called to give some rational comment on revivalism. His letter on this matter has fortunately been rescued by Mr. Henderson from the copy of Public Opinion, dated April 3rd, 1875. " Sir, " In reply to your correspondent 'J. R. D.,' as to the effect of the ' wave of evangelism,' I beg to offer the following observations on the late ' revival ' in Dublin, of which I was a witness. " As the enormous audiences drawn to the evangelistic services have been referred to as a proof of their efficacy, I will enumerate some of the motives which induced many persons to go. It will be seen that they were not of a religious, but a secular, not to say profane, character. 72 SHAW " Predominant was the curiosity excited by the great reputation of the evangelists, and the stories widely circulated, of the summary annihilation by epilepsy and otherwise of sceptics who had openly proclaimed their doubts of Mr. Moody's divine mission. " Another motive exhibits a peculiar side of human nature. The services took place in the Exhibition Building, the entry to which was connected in the public mind with the expendi- ture of a certain sum of money. But Messrs. Moody and Sankey opened the building ' for nothing,' and the novelty, combined with the curiosity, made the attraction irresistible. " I mention these influences particularly as I believe they have hitherto been almost ignored. The audiences were, as a rule, respectable ; and as Mr. Moody's orations were characterised by an excess of vehement assertion and a total absence of logic, respectable audiences were precisely those which were least likely to derive any benefit from them. "It is to the rough, to the outcast of the streets, that such ' awakenings ' should be addressed, and those members of the aristocracy who by their presence tend to raise the meetings above the sphere of such outcasts are merely diverting the evangelistic vein into channels where it is wasted, its place being already supplied, and as, in the dull routine of hard 73 SHAW work, novelty has a special attraction for the poor, I think it would be well for clergymen, who are nothing if not conspicuous, to render themselves so, in this instance, by their absence. " The unreasoning mind of the people is too apt to connect a white tie with a dreary church service, capped by a sermon of platitudes, and is more likely to appreciate ' the gift of the gab ' — ^the possession of which by Mr. Moody nobody will deny — than that of the Apostolic Succession, which he lacks. " Respecting the effect of the revival on individuals I may mention that it has a tendency to make them highly objectionable members of society, and induces their unconverted friends to desire a speedy reaction, which either soon takes place or the revived one relapses slowly into his previous benighted condition as the effect fades, and although many young men have been snatched from careers of dissipation by Mr. Moody's exhortations, it remains doubtful whether the change is not merely in the nature of the excitement rather than in the moral nature of the individual. Hoping that these remarks may elucidate further opinions on the subject. " I remain. Sir, yours, etc., " S." His age was just eighteen years and eight months. 74 CHAPTER IV The writer of that letter was clearly not the stuff that elderly estate clerks are made from, and it is not surprising to find him dropping his job in the following year and going to live with his mother and sister in London. He was ill at ease in Dublin in more ways than one. He had probably missed his mother's company, her music and her clear- headed common sense more than he realised ; he didn't like office work, and he wanted to escape before it closed about him permanently as a means of livelihood ; he was a very conscientious young Atheist trying to reconcile a sincere behef that he was entirely due to molecules and immutable law, with a keen sense of humour, and it was difficult for him to find congenial company. He probably didn't know quite what he wanted. The story that he went to London to become a writer, because London is the hub of the world in which the English language is used, seems thin, and it is likely that he was as mixed in his motives for actions as a young man of twenty generally is, and made the break mainly because he wanted something to happen, and knew that it wouldn't, so long as he remained in Dublin. 75 SHAW He had entered the land office at the age of fifteen as an office boy, and carried out duties of increasing responsibility for four and a half years, to the com- plete satisfaction of his employer. He was in a position to learn much about land, money and credit, but the transactions of commerce didn't interest him any more than the swiftly-changing political drama going on about him. An acre of land and its meaning in terms of potatoes or fodder had no significance for him, rent was just something difficult to collect, and money just a row of figures in a ledger. His work was so much grind pains- takingly done, and outside of it there was art — music, pictures, books — to stir and delight his ardent young mind, and give him more and more food for speculation about men and women, and their gifts, activities and relationships to one another. He was an efficient clerk with no more interest in the machine he was helping to operate than the average motorist has in cam design. He didn't even know it was a machine, though he was uncon- sciously gaining exact experience of it, and storing up at first hand the knowledge which was to be unleashed with such stark effect in Widowers^ Houses. He didn't know that he was a child trying to live in a world of commerce and investment which had no use for new life. London in 1876 was the very centre of that world. Enterprises of every kind converged there in search of credit, and spread out in practical form over the 76 SHAW seas of the world. Iron ships, barely known in 1850, were steaming everywhere, speeding up interchanges, cutting costs and multiplying profits. England was building them, manning them, coaling them, and filHng them with the cargoes of manu- factured goods for which those countries which had managed to line their pockets with London loans, were crying out. Investments abroad rose from £230,000,000 in 1850 to j(^i, 200,000,000 in 1875. To the Forsytes of those days it seemed that all the ages of the world were but a preparation for this great age of Victoria, and that at last in their life- time, mankind, with England well in the van, had arrived at a suitable resting-place, fair and level, after the painful upward struggle of centuries. Some of the highbrow Forsytes could even look back in the light of the new knowledge, over dim stretches of millions of years, and breathe grateful acknow- ledgments to the amoeba, the first fish, and the last superlative monkey for their various contributions to this wonderful condition of assured prosperity and established security. They easily passed to the stage of looking on their possessions and institutions as the final fruit of the evolutionary effort of the ages, and strove with every domestic and political nerve to establish themselves permanently in their thickly draped, heavily furnished, tremendously solid homes. Young Soames Forsyte was taught the doctrine of property by the very canopy on his cradle, and the way his uncles spoke to their wives. 77 SHAW The Prime Minister, Disraeli, who understood London business men even better than he under- stood the Queen, was giving them every help that could be expected from a practical politician. His shrewdness about the Suez Canal had brought him great prestige. Bankers, shipping companies, eastern traders, and the great investing pubHc loved him, and the London Press was solidly behind him. But he had to be friendly with Turkey, and the position became very involved when Achmet Aga was decorated by the Sultan for burning twelve hundred Christians ahve in a church. Gladstone " came back" with a pamphlet, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, which was bought up at once through the country, but coldly received in the House of Commons, where all those with even a remote financial interest in the East thought the time for action inopportune. Domestic affairs in the Balkans were the topic of the day, and subjects like housing conditions in Lancashire were never even mentioned ; everyone knew the meaning of bashi-bazouk, but the meaning of back- to-back houses was only known to landlords and building con- tractors. Atrocities abroad were more exciting than rickets at home, and Turkey held the centre of the stage till suddenly, in 1878, the Glasgow Bank failed for ;f 6,000,000 and bankruptcy and unemployment spread over the whole country in the great slump of 1879. The eyes of England came back from the ends of the earth ; the Forsytes and their factory 78 SHAW managers, hard driven by even harder driven bank managers, said : " Business as usual," and made ends meet by discharging surplus employees, cutting wages and extending hours, and the " lower classes " saved the country's credit by tightening their belts and living on the edge of starvation for a year. But their marvellous good nature was badly strained, and some patient murmurs were rising ; they were rather confused and illiterate murmurs, for the population had risen from sixteen to twenty-four millions in twenty-five years, and there was no money left for schools and teachers when 3(^970,000,000 had been spent abroad. The murmurs from below might have died away, or been choked out, had they not been joined by some terrific roars from above, from men neither patient nor illiterate ; Ruskin's outpourings were beginning to tell, Morris was getting so wild at the growing ughness about him that he could think of nothing but blowing it all up in one glorious explo- sion, Marx had written a book half full of terrible indisputable facts about industrialism, which a few men were beginning to read. But the polite world paid little attention to these people. In 1880 Gladstone was back in the saddle. He wanted to do something to help the " lower classes" ; they were so patient and good-natured, and it was a shame to see so many of them starving and diseased. But he didn't get a chance to attend to England. In Ireland the polite world had been 79 SHAW trying to keep the fashionable pace set in London without having any foreign orders for cotton goods, coal or locomotives to help them, and the *' lower classes " had lost their good nature and were beginning to shoot ; worse still, Irish members were beginning to be guilty of grave indecorum in the House of Commons. Parnell was coming into power. He had entered the House in 1875 in the same cool, appraising way that Shaw entered London a year later ; he had seen Joe Biggar obstructing public business in a villainous way ; he had heard him say, "Butt's a fool. He's too gentlemanly. We are all too gentlemanly," and he had immediately agreed with Biggar. Public opinion was shocked — a quiver of horror ran round the Stock Exchange — London editors exchanged significant looks — a young man had come into the English House of Parliament for the first time, and was not impressed. In five years Butt had gone under, saying, " I am not in favour of a policy of exasperation," and Parnell, rising to leadership on the wings of that policy, was making the Irish question hum. Since 1850 tenants had been making mild protests against starvation. Their leaders had begun by saying " Property has its duties as well as its rights," and been rebuked by an English peer for preaching Communism. They continued to go on in this cautious, good-humoured way till, in 1878, Michael Davitt, a man from Mayo who had been given 80 SHAW years for reflection in Dartmoor Gaol, came out with a slogan that settled the whole question. Once he stood up at Irishtown in 1879 ^-nd said, " The land for the people," the game was up. Everyone knows what happened next, and it is all another story. The important point here is that while the stage was being set during the period 187 6- 1880 for the Imperialist, Labour, Irish and Socialist struggles which followed, young Shaw, at the very centre of affairs, took no real interest in it. The political situations at home and abroad were full of dramatic tension, and were a common topic in all circles, the newspapers of the time were full of them ; yet — in these four years, between the ages of twenty and twenty-four — he ignored public affairs. It wasn't that he didn't notice them : he noticed everything. Nor that he was preoccupied with efforts to earn his living : the only thing he feared was that some influential friend might lure him into a job. Nor that he was busy looking after his mother and sister : emotional domesticities were unknown in the Shaw home. Nor that he was seeing life with some of the lads : he had no money, and, anyhow, could he have stood their company and they his ? No, he took no interest in the worlds of business or politics, not because of minor distrac- tions, but because he was preoccupied with some- thing vastly more impressive and exciting than the magnificence of Gladstone or the manoeuvres of 81 ^ SHAW Bismarck. He was wondering what he would do about George Bernard Shaw. The fellow was a tremendous responsibility. Every baby knows that he is important. He is born with that conviction and carries it with him till such time as it is harnessed, or enslaved, or deformed by matter-of-fact elders with an eye to the main chance, or by murderous mass output educational systems designed to mould him to a particular pattern and produce a social unit which will not ask questions or " cause trouble." George Bernard had not been properly moulded, and that primary intuition had not been blotted out or obscured by some small-scale political or financial ambition. It roamed all over the place, and though occasionally toying with the notion of outclassing Michael Angelo, it preferred not to be tied down by any limitations. He was, in fact, George Bernard and Company, Unlimited, and the Company was stupendous. Bunyan was jostling Michael Angelo, Huxley and Helmholtz were crowding on top of Shakespeare and Beethoven, Dickens and Wagner were trying to make themselves at home, Shelley had come to stay. At first it was enough to be entertained and to soar off on the wings of each of them in turn ; he and the artist and the delights unfolded were one. But later these men and the wonders they made became elusive, at one moment he possessed them, and they him, and the next they were apart and remote, outside of him and inaccessible. More puzzling still, he him- 82 SHAW self Split up, he could read and roam with Al Raschid and at the same time look back curiously from Baghdad at the boy in Hatch Street turning over the pages with such eager intensity ; he used to wonder which was which. He had found that he could get outside and look at himself; he could think about his thoughts. He suddenly knew piercingly that he was himself, that in all time there had never been anything like him. He knew he was new ; the intuition had come out into the open, he had been right all along, he was indeed something marvellous . . . like every other boy. They all know it at times, but he knew it more steadily and keenly than most, and he would not let that glorious vision fade ; with him it became every day fresher and more enthralling. He was wildly curious and gradually began to turn himself into that miraculous microscope in which he was at once the observer, the instrument, and the specimen. Usually George sat stiff, serious, intense at the eyepiece, and Bernard lay on the slide kicking up his heels ; he was always amused at George's attempts to get clear definition and finality. George was the organiser and looked down soberly, saying : "If you don't mind your step, you can't see where you are going," and the other tumbled about on his back chuckling : " If you don't look up you can't see at all." He knew he was important with a simplicity of knowing which defies all trite and laborious analysis. 83 SHAW The conviction was not wrapped up in any particular aim or accomplishment like climbing Everest or sinking all ten-foot putts. It would have been just as intense had he been alone in his shirt on a raft in mid-ocean. It was no matter of assessment, depending upon some particular power ; it didn't mean that he was more important than anyone else, it had nothing to do with outside things or people, it was sheer primal certainty. He was as sure of it as he was puzzled by it, and as determined to express it openly in some way as he was conscious of his absurd limitations. Linked with his conviction, almost identical with it, there was that intense sensitive scrupulousness. He would not do routine clerical work because it was a waste of himself, yet when he was trapped into a job he performed his duties most punctiliously lest he take wages which were not fully due to him. He must preserve his identity, his sense of himself, his freedom, at all costs, and to this end he scrutinised all his actions, pouncing unmercifully on all unworthy motives, and trying with all the earnestness of his twenty-one pure and fervent years to be a perfectly rational being. He was for ever trying to see what it was all about, and particularly what he was for. It had seemed clearer in Dublin as he graduated amid the concerts, the bookstalls, the picture galleries and the skies of Torca Hill. Now, taking his post-graduate course in the reading-room of the British Museum, in the London parks and galleries, and in various musical 84 SHAW drawing-rooms, he became less assured, but no less determined to use himself mightily in some way. That was what all those great ones had done, and he wanted to be like them, or rather — for imitation was anathema — to do something which would make him of their company. He didn't want to be like anyone but George Bernard Shaw, who was now, after a year or two in London, getting restless because nothing was being done about him. He was chock-full of booklearning, miscellaneous sensa- tions, and wild fancies ; of theories about music, painting, and literature ; and he was simmering with the excitements of his microscopic research on him- self and others. There was nothing for it but to write a book. At worst it would give George and Bernard some regular occupation and an outlet, and keep them from wrecking their prim Shaw-Gurly home. The book was finished in 1 879. It is a remarkable work of 140,000 words, every one of them selected with the greatest care and neatly fitted in place ; on every page is stamped this impression of sentences deliberately chosen word by word to etch a special shade of meaning, and marshalled as carefully as the figures in a ledger. After an opening reminiscent of Dickens, he settles down to work in a way com- pletely his own ; he writes to no model, he has, in his sweet innocence or insolent independence, no publisher or pubhc in view ; he is not writing a novel for sale ; he is making a work of art. It is an amazing book. It is like a picture in which the 85 SHAW artist worked from top to bottom, putting in every object he had ever seen with faithful skill ; or like the first lesson given by a new teacher who covers the session's syllabus in a single hour. It is full of himself at his most threefold, eagerly filling the stage, cautiously prompting from the wings and critically scoffing from the stalls. He ranges every- where, producing a curious impression of time running backwards in a sort of inverted condensed recapitulation, with the theme of Major Barbara dimly appearing and Jack Tanner struggling for utterance. It is quite unreadable in the ordinary way, for nothing happens, and the characters slip in and out of focus all the time ; but it is full of interest, for it tells what George Bernard Shaw was thinking about in 1878. He brings characters on and off, for the sole purpose of reviewing his interests, discussing his problems and lecturing on his conclusions ; they deliver themselves in mighty conversational mouth- fuls two pages at a time (he must have loved pouring out his opinions like this from the day he learnt to handle a pen). He covers every ordinary human interest — sex, art, and religion predominating ; science is treated with what might almost be described as deference, and it would appear that the doctrine of the man from the molecule has been accepted as basic truth beyond discussion. He launches out early with an attack on evangelicalism : " there arose a young man, earnest and proud of his 86 SHAW oratory, who offered up a long prayer in the course of which he suggested such modifications in the laws of nature as would bring the arrangement of the uni- verse into conformity with his own tenets," and there- after sallies on similar lines dot the pages. Towards the end there is a study of a neurotic convert to Catholicism ; the attack on revealed religion is naively made against a weak and tottering opposition and it is clear that he is trying to deal fairly with some typical supporters of a fast vanishing supersti- tion. His manner with the types he introduces is olympian, he presents them with the urbane detach- ment and serene amusement of a Chinese philos- opher ; there is not a trace of arrogance, not a single spiteful reference, as he sets his pious people on their feet and puts them through their pre-determined paces ; he respects the individuality of his cardboard creations ever at their feeblest. There are solid slabs of discussion on literature, painting and music, which have nothing to do with the story and throw it out of balance with weight of unexpected expert knowledge. Music is alv/ays touched with a sure hand, and there is a studiously speculative interest in painting with some leaning towards Italian Primitives. For the rest, it is evident that the bookshelves of the British Museum were being ransacked daily for light on the heretics, critics, and querists of the past. Some of the discussions between the principals, Robert Smith and Harriet Russell, are less concerned with their 87 SHAW affairs than with the author's latest dip into Rousseau or La Rochefoucauld. Robert and Harriet are real people in a peculiar way. They move through imaginary scenes and situations with the stiffness of mechanical toys, but every now and then there is a spurt of vitality. Robert stands out clearly and contradictorily, at once puzzled and confident, lost in self-consciousness and acutely observant. It is the picture of a very young genius painted by himself, which will live as long as Man and Superman. Harriet is a mystery woman ; Robert is restless, but she barely moves ; every time she speaks, someone is flattened out. As the Scotch dressmaker of the story, she is hopeless, but as a series of oracular protests against males and their ways, she is very much alive. Listen to her sizing up Robert : " You are clever enough to argue for all you do, and I fear that is all the good your cleverness will ever be to you." It sounds very much like Mrs. Shaw's voice here and again in the wonderful sum- ming up at the end : " You are not a boy ; and you are not grown-up. Some day you will get away from your books and come to know the world and get properly set. But just now there is no doing any- thing with you. You are just a bad case of imma- turity." Robert replies from his heart : "I never could feel grown-up ; and I believe you were born grown-up. I am afraid I am incurable." The trouble about Robert was that no one ever called him Bob, he was at once too young and too 88 SHAW old, and he would ask such queer questions ; even when he was courting, his curiosity got the better of him. " Are you fond of dressmaking? " asked Smith, wishing to discover how far she had the feeHng of an artist about her work. The courtship naturally failed, and later on, when the flirtation with the Irish girl fizzled out, he " v/ent his way enjoying the prospect of a long respite from further love- making, and very far from realising the ineptitude with which he had conducted it." It is all very well to smile at this now and say, *' Good old G.B.S.," but imagine the reactions of the first forty publishers to whom Immaturity was offered, as they tried to make some sense out of this dexterous double-crossing. They may have been interested in the strange Irish stew, but they had their market to think about, and they knew with the certainty of British business men of the seventies, that the public did not want mutton, horns and hoofs on the one dish. It was bad enough to have several different kinds of lovemaking in a book, and to poke fun at all of them, but there was worse : beneath the most ordinary incidents in the most sedate places there was a continuous play of sly stabs and jeers at a social stratification which every English writer of the day accepted as his frame of reference. It was not that these writers were dull or timid, or particularly pious. Swinburne's whipped cream lyrics were making the under- graduates dizzy, Meredith was writing The Egoist, 89 SHAW and R. L. S. was travelling with a donkey in the Cevennes in 1878 ; Arnold and Tennyson were sleek enough perhaps, but Garlyle and Butler were not ; Hardy, Eliot, Trollope, and Reade were writing at the top of their form ; there was plenty of variety and plenty of criticism, subtle and otherwise, and all kinds of authors, including Ouida and Mayne Reid, could find a market, on one condition. They must always make dukes talk like dukes, and coachmen behave like coachmen. They might, and did, make earls fall in love with dressmakers, but the dress- maker must know her place. The earl might be brutal or beneficent, but not in one book and under the same name. Every character had to be true to type and the types to be clearly defined ; literary matter had to have a firm British background to be marketable. Even Erewhon (1872) and The Egoist (1879) filled this bill. For the strength of Butler's satire came in the first place from his intensely English classical education, and Meredith hid his onslaught under cover of the English landscape, spacious parks, cherry blossoms and fine wine. It was all very well for a finished craftsman to pass oflf one anomaly decked out with the usual furnishings, and surrounded by footmen and fashion- able figures, but it was another thing for an unknown to oflfer the publishers a book full of Sir Willoughbys in the raw. There was a good market for moralising, however awkward, or for ingenious impiety, or for almost any kind of writing on artistic matters, but 90 SHAW there was none for a novel in which introspection and motive analysis played about the actions of every single character and made tatters of the story. Shaw couldn't see the play for the actors. He couldn't allow his people to take a step without calling attention to the muscle contraction which made it possible, and he would turn aside from their clothes and carriages on the slightest excuse, to skin them alive and probe for nerves. He did not know how to use his gift with moderation, and his book was like nothing on earth. He scarcely understood how strange and vaguely disturbing was this dissecting-room style. He had known all along that it was an extraordinary thing to be alive, but he was only beginning to find that it was mighty awkward as well — for he did not seem to fit. There were so many lovely things to feel and so many delightful things to think about, but no one else seemed to bother with them, or even to notice they were there. The others seemed to be like him — they had bodies and faces, and two feet and so on — but inside they were diflferent. They had ears, for instance, and they couldn't hear. Music hardly seemed to affect them at all, and they were able to tolerate dreadful performances and even to murmur lying appreciations of them. It was difficult to make any kind of contact with these people, for when asked some perfectly simple ques- tion about themselves, they were offended and turned away, or else looked at him as if he had said some- 91 SHAW thing indecent. He spoke English, yet he was unable to get into communication with them. There was some kind of a rush going on, which was deeply concerned with food and clothes, shops and ships, shares and banks. He was no dreamer (he says he was, but don't mind him), he saw the use of all these things as clearly as you do, but he was perfectly sure that they were not what he wanted. As he said to his friend Harriet, " Suppose you enjoy yourself more in keeping out of the rush than scramb- ling in it ? " Robert Smith was always putting up questions like that — not as concealed assertions but as genuine " Why nots " demanding sensible answers — and the questions cut across the very core of the conventions which held the 1870's together. He was asking them not as a philosopher or sociologist, but as a matter of immediate and intimate interest to his author, who wanted to know what he was for, and whether there was any reason why he should do one thing more than another. If he enjoyed watching, why should he work? If he enjoyed one particular kind of activity, why should he undertake another ? He must have been told by everyone, " Because there's no money in it," but that was no use. He wasn't asking " Where is money ? " but " Why are men ? " There must be some reason for them — or was life unreasonable ? He was prepared to consider that, for purposes of argument, but privately this was the one point on which Bernard was obstinate and intolerant. On 92 SHAW everything else he had an open mind, but, by God, if the world wasn't reasonable it had better look out. He would lick it into shape if he had to do it single- handed. That German might try to get people to lie down and die, but this young sprig of an Irish- man was going to stand up and live ; he wouldn't say die while grass grew or water ran. Immaturity was rejected unanimously, but that didn't matter. He was twenty-three and able to see through everything and everybody. There was a fascination about writing ; he enjoyed creating characters, giving them their heads for a few pages, and then taking them apart. The writing of his first book had only whetted his appetite. It had taught him many things ; among others that he could not make a novel by following his fancy all over the place. He must get some central idea and stick to it. His second novel. The Irrational Knot, was the result. It is a study of mating and marriage seen through the eyes of a two-fisted Irish- American named Edward Connolly. The shy, tentative Smith with his Peter Pannish charm vanishes, and this new hero comes on, with his jaw set, to study the manoeuvres of Man and Woman in three modes. He starts one hundred per cent materialist, telling all the other characters one by one where they get off. The book is like the first in its isolation of individuals from one another and from a background. Every- one is considered by himself and on his own merits. There are no principles, only pictures of people 93 SHAW and events. There is a central theme but no central theory. And there is far too much micro- scope. Connolly knows too much. Even his creator can't stand such a god-almighty man for four hundred pages, and gets a woman to give him a trimming about page 250. Towards the end he softens mysteriously, and the downright deter- minism begins to curl up at the edges. He begins to murmur to himself, " I am for the fullest attainable life," and to have his doubts about " Liberty." George Bernard had got tired of rationalistic analysis and snapshotting. It did not get him anywhere. It gave him a sense of power for a time, and it was fun to drop Connolly into the middle of an 1880 drawing-room and watch him blow up, but that was not enough. He was no farther forward after writing two books. He had tried the discursive method with Bernard in the lead, and he had tried the crowbar method with George throwing his weight about, but neither satisfied him. He felt as important as ever, but he couldn't get started. His conscience would not let him settle down to work and help to support his mother and sister. He had turned matters over thoroughly in 300,000 carefully written words ; he had read nearly all the books in the British Museum, and he had observed people in and out of doors with the greatest attention ; and he asked himself why they were all going on like this after umpteen million years. It was incredible, it was madden- 94 S H A W ingly mysterious, it was wildly funny — for they were all so concerned about trifles — so carried off their feet with their love-fancies. He saw through all those. They were just a trick which kept the show going on, and what was the use of keeping it going if it didn't mean anything. Perhaps the German was right. No, to hell with him ! Life was for good, it must be for beauty too. There was a clue here, dim and elusive, but worth following. And when he saw anything worth following he followed it promptly and for all he was worth. Music, painting, poetry, were the best things. They were permanent beauty caught and crystal- lised out of life. They were the only thing worth while. So his next book was Love among the Artists. There is no need to follow him through it to Cashel Byron's Profession, written in 1882, and on to The Unsocial Socialist, his last attempt at novel writing, completed in 1883; for after 1881 genuine free thinking slackened, and the outlines of the new creed began to appear. He went on writing all this time apparently without the slightest hope of publication. He began Immaturity about 1877 and finished his fifth book in 1883. Nearly a million words and not one carelessly written sentence ! It was a wonderful apprenticeship. It was no mere mechanical training, but an orgie of furious thinking, at least up to 1883. After that there was no more speculative thought but only more and more furious propaganda. 95 SHAW From this time Art was his rehgion, and Shelley was its prophet. He had that " intuitive per- ception of the underlying analogies, the secret subterranean passages between matter and soul '* which transcend scientific thinking. Men like him — Blake, Goethe, and the rest — could pluck out rich glowing meanings from the heart of labouring Nature and create new truth. Man's destiny was to go upward from plane to plane of knowledge through greater and greater appreciation of beauty. And the great ones of the world were the creative artists who could hew out fresh models from this amorphous world which was surging aimlessly at the mercy of itself and had only man to rely on for further progress. Some such ideas had been floating in the upper intellectual airs of Europe for a century. They had drifted north from France, and come to earth in the German universities. Soon they were spreading out to fire young imaginations and fuse themselves into the work of the artists of all coun- tries. Wagner was caught by them. There had been a riot in Paris in 1 86 1 over Tannhduser — ^for the professional critics made trouble at first — but 1876 saw the Ring at Bayreuth and in 1880 the new operas were startling and fascinating listeners by the thousand. He was winning everywhere, and his theories, his genius and his themes swept young Shaw off his feet and whirled him into the twentieth century waving the banner of Creative Evolution. But not quite. It will not do to rush things like 96 SHAW this. Perhaps in another thousand years, when the half century 1880 to 1930 looks like a passing hour, it may be possible to compress Wagner and Shaw into a sentence or two, and see clearly how much of the thought of nineteenth-century England was made in Germany. Just now it is enough to know that this new drama with its blend of sound, words, movement and scene, into one harmonic whole, was a revelation to the young listener tuned to perfection for appreciation of just such a display. It was clear that art was all-important, and that artists were the salt of the earth, but that was not enough. Shaw never had much use for generalities. He needed something definite, concrete, and per- sonal, and it was here that Samuel Butler and the life cell came in. Butler was a man who had been in and out of the Church of England as Shaw had been in and out of the Church of Ireland, except that Butler had been in longer and deeper. Like Shaw too, he had a devouring passion for order and honour, and was intensely sensitive to the oddities of human conduct. He was full of the evolutionary spirit of the times, and was being tripped up at every point by the non-negotiability of the results of a classical education, just as Shaw was being harassed by his failure to sell his artistic knowledge. He had gone to New Zealand to try to make a living, and he had come home to try to teach the English people how to live. He was not satisfied with Darwin ; he felt that man could not 97 SHAW live on rocks alone, however rich their record, and he wanted to prove this to the pubhc. He had a remarkable gift of expressing himself in clean, lean English. When he sighted hypocrisy he was swift and ruthless as a greyhound. Butler was fascinated by the life cell. Lenses had improved, and the foundations of cytology were being laid in Germany. In 1861 the cell was defined as " a small mass of protoplasm endowed with the attributes of life." That was fine ; delight greeted the discovery that there were two simple ultimates from which the inorganic and organic worlds were built up. The millions of years of the geologists and the billions of miles of the astronomers had been hard to bear, but now that it was known that everything was made from such teeny-weeny bits, everyone was reassured. The only thing that remained was to find a formula for the cell. It was here that Butler jibbed, for he didn't want it to have a formula ; he loved the simple cell, and its way of dividing up and yet remaining itself, so that it seemed to live for ever. He read more and more about it, and seemed to see clearly how the cell by striving, developed itself and passed these developments to its offspring. He became its champion, and defended it against all comers. The cell was, in its own way, an individual, and must not be treated as a tiny machine. It had a will and a memory ; otherwise how could it adapt itself so well to outside changes, and pass on good habits to its children. That 98 S H AW Will was the essence of life. It was a Sacred Mystery ; and Butler rapped the knuckles of every pawing materialist that tried to lay a hand on it. Further- more, this elemental unit of life had learned to assemble itself in masses, some of which had charm- ing habits, like a rose-bush, and others shocking habits, like a tiger. Further up the scale came Homer and further still Handel. The cell, with its urge and its wonderful assembly of habits, had made man that man might create higher and still higher forms of beauty, and the emotions and sense of importance which man felt rising within him were the cell's message to him from the past, and its own mystic urge towards the future. Butler's teaching was the link which Shaw needed to bind together what he saw without and felt within. But he did not take over Butler or Wagner without question, any more than he took over Herder or Goethe or Schopenhauer without looking them coolly in the eye as who should say, "I'm Bernard Shaw from Dublin, and this is the year 1882. If I can't improve on you, I have no cellular tissue." If there was anything worthwhile in this cell business (and Bernard had his doubts) , and in this warning within to take himself seriously, it was that he must not rest content with what others had done, but jump right into the middle of things and act. The world must be made fit for artists to work in. There was no use writing novels, or composing operas, or making beautiful things, when the world 99 SHAW did its best to starve those who made them. He had real fellow-feeling with Wagner and Butler here, for his fourth novel came back from the publishers just as regularly as the others. But he didn't weep over himself. In fact, by this time it looks as though he had almost lost sight of himself in his concern for Art and the Artists who were to come. When after about five years in London he began to take an active interest in the social organisation about him, he found that he was not the only one who objected to its petrified stratification, and that from all angles men and women were coming together to fight. They did not know what they were up against, or how to tackle it, and they were making the wildest attacks on people and things without any plan whatever. Bradlaugh was one focus ; Hyndman was another ; he had met Marx, swallowed him whole, and produced a pamphlet called England for All in 1881. William Morris didn't have to read anything ; he wasn't like the bookworms, he was a manual worker, and he knew without reading. He just knew. He didn't require statistics or philosophy to tell him that England was in a mess. He was a simple man and he wanted a simple cure like a huge hose or a big bomb. There were others linked with Hyndman and Morris in the Democratic Federation in 1883, and all were in perfect agreement about everything, except what they wanted and the way to get it. In no time at all there was a fine old split, lOQ SHAW and Morris budded oflf in a separate Socialist League. By 1884 English Socialism was going ahead wildly in all directions, and proving nothing except that it was very difficult to get a group of free-thinking Englishmen to work together for any length of time, for any purpose whatever. The intellectuals had tried to combine with the miners and dockers to make a way of escape from ugliness and starvation, and they found themselves getting on one another's nerves. Even the arrange- ment of meetings and the selection of speakers gave trouble. Fresh young newcomers were eager to pick holes in any policy that was more than a month old, and were confident that the better a man was dressed the greater and wiser he was. Later on Shaw said, " the combination of the petulant rich man with the ignorant poor one is perhaps the most des- perately unworkable on the political chessboard." It is easy to see this in retrospect. The remarkable thing is that he could see it at the time, and threw in his lot from the very beginning with the first group to become eflfective and to force the pace. He was a live member of the Fabian Society from its formation in 1 884. He came into the middle of that struggling, milling mass of uplifters — a raw youth without a particle of experience of politics, committee work or propaganda — saw clearly what was wrong, and steered himself straight into the best position for the purpose he had in view. It was a triumph for the habit of meditation, observation, and more lOI SHAW meditation. He had lived in seclusion for years ; he had fastened on two points, one an assumption and the other an intuition ; and henceforward he followed them wherever they led him with Euclidean rationahty and Cromwellian zeal. For eight years the world had tried to flatten him out, and had then suddenly turned and handed him the Fabian Society — a toy for his delight. 102 CHAPTER V He had been in the wilderness for six years — there is no more desolate place in the world than London for a sensitive young man who doesn't like it and won't give in. Till 1882 he never questioned the permanence of the social structure about him, not even when he was poking his fingers through its ribs. He girded against the aesthetic ignorance of the rich, but he accepted them as he accepted bad weather. He saw that money could always be made by certain cunning activities, but it did not seem that this could be changed any more than that the Thames could be made to run uphill. Some men were greedy and got rich as bladders filled, others weren't money-tight and stayed poor as sieves leaked, and that was all there was to it. The forces which produced riches and poverty were all part of a regardless and unalterable environment. One day — September 5th, 1882 — his curiosity brought him to hear Henry George lecturing on Land and Rent, and he suddenly saw past the people into the system about him. He saw, of course, in his own way. That is to say, in a very simple, fiercely analytical, terrifically honest way. And he reacted as usual by immediate action. He had been 103 SHAW seeing through people for years, now he suddenly saw through the system. It was as though a vision had suddenly appeared in a bank of fog — or rather as if the world of men and property had turned into a sketch-book, in which all the pictures told the same jerky little story : All wealth from land, All rent from wealth, Property is theft. The tenant works but doesn't own, The landlord owns but doesn't work, Property is theft. The more the men, The less the land. The richer the landlord, The poorer the rest, Property is theft. He had been ill at ease in the City, but he had assumed that London was inevitable and that he had no choice between going on being unhappy, or selling himself cheap and joining in the scramble. Now he found that London was not a natural product, but an artificial institution — in fact, a den of thieves. He had been right all along in holding out against it. His intuition has not misled him. His confusions and uncertainties were suddenly resolved by this new analysis ; all his dislikes and longings, all his experiences in the Dublin estate office suddenly coalesced about the phrase " Property is theft," and London blazed in a new and lurid 104 SHAW light. It was the core of a lying world. His ill-ease disappeared in a flash before the idea that the environment could be changed. He was filled with tingling conviction. It was right to fight. It was characteristic of him to realise that all his knowledge was useless till he knew more of economics. He came away from that Progress and Poverty meeting, and settled down to read Marx and study economics, as an ambitious artist studies anatomy. It is well to note here that this sudden change of activity was no abnormal break, but a perfectly natural branching off from the stem of his main interest. But it will be easier to make the events of the next period clear if he is seen as a sort of super-skater cutting on a mighty scale two loops which look separate at first but are finally seen to form a single expert figure eight. One loop was the New Politics and the other the New Protes- tantism. One was centred in the Fabian Society and the other in the Theatre. They spread out in ever-increasing sweeps, encircling the world from Moscow to Mexico, and New York to London. Each is interesting in itself, but puzzUng without the other. Points of inflexion don't interest whole- time socialists or playgoers, and to them he always appears to be going oflf at a tangent when he is really linking his double roles with the smoothest dexterity. The two roles must be examined separately and at some length and when this is done, as in the pages 105 SHAW which follow, it will be clear why the laughs some- times stop in the stalls and start in the gallery. Reading Capital was slow work. There was no English edition, and young Shaw had to plough through the French version, following that amazing argument as best he could. Even in English it is not easy to read Marx but there are compensations. His argument piles up layer on layer and the reader has at first the despairing sensation of being crushed under sheer weight of word-jugglery ; and then suddenly he is revived by a word-picture so crisp and vigorous that he feels the book would have been an even greater success as an anti-capitalistic tract if the attempts at logic had been left out. Marx is like A. A. Milne's cricketing postman who had two deliveries — one in the morning with correspondence, and the other in the afternoon with leg breaks. Take this, for instance : In order to discover how the elementary expression of the value of a commodity lies hidden in the value relation of two commodities, we must in the first place consider the latter entirely apart from its quantitative aspect. The usual mode of procedure is generally the reverse, and in the value relation nothing is seen but the proportion between definite quantities of two different sorts of commodities that are considered equal to one another. It is apt to be forgotten that the magnitudes of diflferent things can be compared quantitatively only when these magni- io6 SHAW tudes are expressed in terms of the same unit. It is only as expressions of such a unit that they are of the same denomination and therefore commensurable. and compare it with : One fine morning in the year 1836, Nassau W. Senior, who may be called the bel esprit of English economists, well known alike for his economical " science " and his beautiful style, was summoned from Oxford to Man- chester to learn in the latter place the political economy that he taught in the former. The manufacturers elected him as their champion, not only against the newly passed Factory Act, but against the more menacing ten hours agitation. With their usual practical acuteness, they had found out that the learned Professor " wanted a good deal of finishing," and it was this discovery that caused them to write for him. or read this : The price form, however, is not only com- patible with the possibility of a quantitative incongruity between magnitude of value and price, i.e., between the former and its expression in money, but it may also conceal a qualitative inconsistency, so much so, that although money is nothing but the value form of commodities, price ceases altogether to express value. and then this : 107 SHAW The new machine-hands are exclusively girls and young women. With the help of mechanical force they destroy the monopoly which male labour had of the heavier work, and they drive off from the lighter work numbers of old women and very young children. The overpowering competition crushes the weakest of the manual labourers. The fearful increase in death from starvation during the last ten years in London runs parallel with the extension of machine sewing. and try to imagine what the first volume of Capital is like. Marx couldn't touch a general idea without doing five pages of German minuet about it, but when he got a fact, he was like a smith at an anvil. Shaw, as will be seen, was not impressed by the minuets, but he must have been delighted with Nassau W. Senior's trip to Manchester. Also he probably liked the scientific flavour of: the body as an organic whole is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscope nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. But in bourgeois society, the commodity form of the product of labour — or the value form of the commodity — is the economic cell form. Which brings Marx into line with Butler. But — and this is a most remarkable " but " — he didn't swallow the labour theory of value like Hyndman and the io8 SHAW rest. Marx had managed to stamp it into them by arguments so abstruse and HegeHan that it seemed blasphemous to question them. He knew the value of slogans, and when, after two hundred repetitions of the words " surplus value," he said, " capital is congealed labour," they all repeated it reverently after him. Shaw never minded a little breezy blasphemy in a good cause, and in due time he said Marx was wrong. He presented his case against the labour theory of value jocularly at first in the hope of provoking a discussion which would clear the air. To his astonishment, he found that the English Socialist leaders could not refute his criticism, and worse, could not even see that their failure to do so would be fatal in the long run. Their eyes were fixed partly on particular abuses, partly on Marx, and partly on themselves. They had no time to waste on theories. He was different ; he hated being fooled as much as he hated fooling himself, and he set out single-handed to find a theory of value which would stand up to facts. He soon found himself in strange and difficult country, but nothing could stop him. He was heroic. Even when, on his search for new light on " value " he found Jevons reducing it to j = f{x) and y.dx = du, he was unstaggered. He bought a text-book and started a new study. He had never cared about algebra ; in his schooldays it had seemed to him a treacherous subject which 109 SHAW enticed the student away from the solid ground of concrete fact, from real numbers of miles and pints and shillings to a region of terrible uncertainty where a might be anything and x was unknown. He was all for clear-cut issues, numerical relation- ships and tangible classifications. When someone said ax^ -{- bx -\- c =^ o, he suspected trickery ; He couldn't stand the man who furtively slips V — I into an equation as a poacher slips a ferret into a rabbit hole. He was badly fitted to deal with problems involving functions and rates, but he went after them in that wholehearted magnificent way which was the glory of his youth. The diflferentials defeated him, but there was something attractive about the Jevons theory, and he struggled on till he had absorbed enough of it to satisfy him. The relative merits of different value theories do not matter here ; it is only his way with them that is to be noted — his realisation of the need for sound foundation, and his willingness to undertake any kind of gruelling work to try and find them. The people about him seemed to be content to have at their disposal two such lovely words for platform purposes as " bourgeoisie " and " proletariat," and did not understand his passion for getting down to the roots. Shaw saw from the beginning the need for going back to first principles, and his own difficulties with them taught him something of the complexity of economics. They also showed him what his role in the struggle no SHAW was to be. He saw on one side a mass of well- meaning ignorance, and, on the other, a mass of unconscious stupidity, and he decided that he must brush up both, and introduce them. He must be a teacher. He knew, as no other SociaHst did, how much there was to learn, and he was full of that restless energy which had driven him out of Dublin and through five unpublished novels. He knew that he must learn, and here again he showed that genius and common sense are insepar- able. For there are two ways of getting knowledge ; one is to dig it out with much toil, and the other is to find a friend who has done the digging. The friend in this case was Sidney Webb, whose fortune it was in those days to be in the very chart-room of state finance, and whose faculties were such that he could do all the digging needed without getting his hands blistered. In fact, he enjoyed it, and could cover as much ground in a week with pleasure as other men might slave over painfully and unpro- fitably for a year. He knew all about dividends, companies, costing, capital appreciation, unearned incomes, property valuation, and rent, in a way no ordinary member of the public understands ; he knew them as a washerwoman knows a shirt, he knew them inside out — he was in the Income Tax office. He was one of the brightest young men in the best civil service in the world ; he probably first got his eye on assessment returns in the mass about 1879, and by 1881, when he was transferred III S K A W to the Colonial Office, the most intimate and curious transactions of the property-owning and business world of London were an open book to him. Sidney Webb had scarcely begun hearing financial confessions when Shaw first saw him. It was at a small meeting of the sort attended by earnest young men in the eighties, and the proceedings must have been dull enough. The ordinary audience noticed that one of the speakers was more convincing than the others but Shaw noticed the same thing in his own special way. He noticed that Webb knew exactly what he was talking about, that he held in reserve a mighty mass of knowledge, that he picked out just what he required, packed it up in a neat sentence, and discharged it to produce exactly the effect he desired. He had no use for oratory, he simply stated his case in a neat, impersonal, efficient, unemotional way ; he was clear-headed, he was full of facts, he was sincere ; he was irresistible to the young Irishman who had been searching London for a sensible man for six years. Webb's way of approach to the problem of poverty had been via history— John Stuart Mill — and more history, parti- cularly the history of England. He knew it complete with footnotes. He could say offhand — " the Cor- poration of London actually carried on the business of fire insurance from 1681 to 1683 " — to the discom- fort of City men who tried to show that his ideas were new-fangled and impractical. His civil service work on top of his reading had made history alive 112 SHAW for him. He saw the events of the past in terms of social groupings, grab, political rivalry, and ignorant attempts at regulation. He saw in his experience from day to day the raw material for the history of the future, and he was searching for some way to make that history neater than the history of the past. Shaw knew from the first that Webb was his man. Whether Webb knew Shaw's value is doubtful. He had reached a dignified position in the Colonial Office by 1882, and he was really very English. It is most unlikely that he would have been attracted by a man with a brogue who was a walking indiscre- tion. Did Shaw put on a silk hat and an upper- class manner, and talk like a higher executive officer, or did he dance off like a will-o'-the-wisp spirit of democracy, drawing the other after him in sober steps with his uncanny, coaxing piping or what ? It is better that the truth should not be known — it's more fun to keep on guessing. Anyhow, the Fabian Society was the result. They entered as members, but in a few years the society belonged to them. Webb's knowledge and policy dominated it. He had made a synthesis of Mill, evolution and his reading of history. He saw England — the British Constitution — the British Isles — the British Empire — as a mighty growth within which was quickening with the centuries the great Spirit of Democracy. He saw the spirit emerging with time into definite forms, heedless of the interests of individual leaders and political parties. He felt 113 ' SHAW that there was a Great Purpose to be served and that in the nineteenth century the rulers of the State should make themselves conscious of it, and act in accordance with " the great sweep of social tenden- cies," instead of struggling in petty rivalry and stupid ambition. He saw how states and cities had by degrees and almost unwittingly taken over one service and industry after another — the management of the Church, the details of public worship, the building of ships and houses, the provision of gasworks, and upkeep of roads and bridges. He saw how this communisation had spread to the colonies and how the central authorities there had built railways and theatres and become dealers in guano and quinine. He saw all these things, and a thousand others, with that vividness which comes from direct experience. He learnt from his books what had happened, and he knew from his daily work what was happening. He saw how the State gathered its income, and how, in recent years, it had been forced to dip deeper and deeper into the pockets of the rich to provide better facilities for the population as a whole. He saw, moreover, how interdependent were all public and private activities and tastes, and knew how the sheep- men of New Zealand swore as the ladies of London changed from flannel to crepe de chine. He saw that the British Empire had become by degrees a huge co-operative business without knowing it. He had a vision of underlying meanings and ultimate 114 SHAW purposes, and on one occasion he even said : *' the life of the community transcends that of its individual members," but generally he was patient and practical, and looked for ways and means rather than for beginnings and ends. The big Co-op. — the British Empire — seemed to him hopelessly disorganised, owing to the stupidity of the political leaders who were "so near to the individual events, that they were blind to the onward sweep of the column,'* and owing still more to the greed and laziness of the capitalists and landlords who lived by respectable forms of slavery and robbery. He wanted others to see the truth as he saw it, but he realised that it was only those of higher intellectual gifts that were capable of seeing the Social Organism as a whole, and devoting themselves to its service. The rest must be taught carefully and gradually, and the Fabians must learn in order to teach. There must be a science of society as there were sciences of stars, rocks, and plants, and man must set himself to make it, as those other sciences were made, by collecting, grouping, classi- fying and summarising social facts, till at last the laws which governed it would be as familiar as the laws of motion. This was the long view for those, who, like himself, had the faith and patience to undertake weary statistical work which might not bear full fruit for centuries. But there was also immediate work to be done and every statutory authority could do its share. Each council and 115 SHAW corporation had powers ready for use in the general social good, if only it could be persuaded to use them. If Socialists could be elected on these bodies and to Parliament, so much the better. But if not, then Conservatives, Liberals, and Independents were to be approached and persuaded to do something communistic. That word need not be used, but they could be urged to put up a pump, aboHsh a toll bridge, build a library, or, best of all, become landlords on a grand scale with huge housing schemes. Fabians must not be snobs ; it must not be beneath them to persuade a duke to attend the House of Lords to vote for a national drainage scheme, which would improve the value of his land. The duke would generally be bright enough to see that this was a Desirable Improvement, even if he could not foresee that his son might have to sell the improved land to the State for public parks, owing to heavy death duties and higher income tax which would be imposed to pay for the drainage. It took four or five years of discussion and experiment to work out this policy of steady pressure and penetra- tion, but eventually it became the basis of all Fabian activity. Slowly, gradually, inevitably, that was how the Life Force has created the world, and man must conform. He must take for his motto " the inevitability of gradualness," and learn to serve. In the Fabian Society Webb had the science, but it was Shaw that had the punch and his colleagues were quick to realise it. He must at first have ii6 SHAW seemed a very odd person to William Clarke from Cambridge and Graham Wallas from Oxford. His tutors had been of a type scarcely known at either place, and his special branch of research had not been of late looked on kindly by those in charge of English Universities. But he was in congenial company and his charm was irresistible ; his power of incisive analysis of human conduct was a magnet to minds running in conventional English grooves. Webb could take a Department of State apart, as a watch- maker opens a watch ; and he could show how it was wound up every year by the Ministry of Finance, how some parts worked, and others were ornamental. But Shaw could take a man apart and show with vivid wit the curious underground passages linking his wishes, words and actions. He had developed his natural gift by years of meditation and novel writing, and after a short period of intimacy with Sidney Webb and the other economists, with whom his interests brought him in contact, he was ready for political action. He had the true missionary spirit, and he began by preaching. The reactions following that first revelation by Henry George never left him, and he was prepared to do anything to spread the light which burned so brightly within him. He under- stood better than any other Fabian how to spread it ; he knew the plain man, and knew that he could only appeal to hirn in the simplest terms with concrete instances and short, crisp sentences. His 117 SHAW own difficulties in mastering economic principles helped him here. To make things clear to himself, he thought in terms of real fields and real men. He didn't care about slippery thinking-counters like " commodities," he preferred to deal with cabbages, barley, furniture and fire-irons. So it was that when he could get even a dozen people gathered together in the street, all the farmers' sons, car- penters and blacksmiths understood exactly what he was saying ; he presented his case in a form which they could take home with them. He was a won- derful teacher. He was full of his subject and a master of language ; he had a voice like gold, and knew exactly how to use it. He had found out at last what to do with George Bernard Shaw, and he was doing it with his whole heart and his whole mind, and with all his faculties. His musical ear, his wit, his richly stored imagination, were all pressed into service in the most wonderful exhibition of public speaking ever staged as a free show in London. He was launched on his life's work at last after that long stretch of solitude and rejection ; how he must have enjoyed himself in the next twenty years as he spoke and wrote and raged to advance the cause of Socialism ! The precision, the gusto, the extra- vagance, the sheer whirlwind energy of those early onslaughts on the existing organisation of society saturate his first Fabian Essays, written in 1888. They were published with others in 1889, with a warning preface that — " There are at present 118 SHAW no authoritative teachers of Socialism. The essayists make no claim to be more than communicative learners," but that must have been just Webb's fun. On September 7th, 1888, Shaw was telling the British Association members at Bath that " the militant organisation of the working classes and general insurrection — remains the only finally possible alter- native to the Social Democratic Programme which I have sketched to-day." But, sure as he was of himself and of the programme, there was one thing that bothered him. In those days a refined anarchism was fashionable. Prince Kropotkin had made it respectable in Europe and it flourished in cultured quarters in Boston, Mass. Anarchists were inclined to flutter jealously on the borders of socialistic organisations. They could not come in, because combination was against their principles, and they daren't stay out, because the Socialists claimed to be the leading champions of freedom and the modern champions of the rights of man. No self-respecting anarchist could tolerate such a claim from men who were sinking their individuality in a communistic pool, and oflTering themselves up trussed and gagged to a State idol called the Social Organism. Pure and high- spirited anarchists joined with the social democrats in calling down fire from heaven on slum landlords. Stock Exchange sharks, and all the sweaters and grinders of the poor, but when Webb and Go. tried to persuade them to get together and do something, 119 SHAW they rose up in all their outraged, individual divinity, and refused to submit to the discipline involved in any form of association whatever. It was a real difficulty. Webb wanted Justice, the others wanted Liberty, and the gods wouldn't kiss. The logicians said that there was nothing for it but to build two temples and put one god in each, but Shaw would have none of this. He understood both sides only too well, for George was all for Social Democracy, and Bernard knew that the anarchists were right. In fact, it was because he realised, better than anyone about him, the difficulties in which an honourable man lands himself when he makes private judgment the final court of appeal, that he became a special pleader against the ultra-individualists. He saw that this was no new dispute and that the rival high priests would multiply and destroy one another. He saw that socialistic solidarity must be preserved at all costs in face of the common enemy if any constructive work was to be done, and he spent much precious time in those early struggling years of the Fabian Society trying to keep the high-minded from being hasty. His lecture-essay on the " Impossibilities of Anarchism " is a masterpiece. He doesn't quite dodge the issue, but takes care not to face it long enough to start trouble. He gives a page or so to principles, and then in a masterly way brings the trouble-makers down to practical things — economic measures — ways and means — brass tacks. He per- 120 S H A \V suades them to come off their high horses and take a look at things like bread, farms, houses, and income tax ; in ten pages he has them spellbound with the simplicity and inevitability of Fabianism ; in twenty he has them agreeing that " there is no natural liberty but only natural law remorselessly enforced," and that the only hope of salvation from the eternal tyranny of Nature lies in the establish- ment of Social Democracy. And finally he manages to convey the impression that the most earnest anarchist in his audience is a lukewarm stick-in-the- mud, that Bakunin and the bomb-throwers are mere babes in thirst for destruction and hatred of the tyranny of authority, compared with G. B. Shaw. You can almost hear the splintering explosions and see the twisted bodies as he speaks of the policemen and the soldiers, the parsons and the plutocrats, of the existing system. Yet there is not a word of encouragement for Anarchism, nor a sentence of incitement, in that bloodthirsty peroration which sent the Kropotkin disciples home with an uneasy feeling that Fabianism was perhaps a very subtle and advanced form of anarchism. He was not, as will be seen, quite comfortable in his own mind about the problem raised, but he was so sweetly reasonable and generally outrageous that all budding anarchists danced to his piping, and followed him down the Fabian lane. He was from the beginning the practical clarifier and conciliator. Webb's idea of slow, resistless, 121 SHAW social action like the weathering of rocks or the growing of grass appealed to him immensely. It was in keeping with the ancient tradition of the landed Shaws of Kilkenny, and yet in touch with the latest scientific thought — or what was called the Modern Spirit. There was a wonderful sense of power in seeing the world making itself, in watching it grow, and knowing that one was called to lend a hand. He felt that few had such vision, as he saw men stumbling about confusedly, and using their vital forces in quarrelling instead of co-operating. It was his mission in the political field to be a mediator as well as a teacher, and to show the means by which all could work together to create a better world. Such uppish convictions would have ruined him had he taken them altogether seriously. He accepted them — but with considerable amusement. Beneath his absorption with socialism and his Fabian associations, he remained always the observer — the recorder — the artist-comedian. He was the most loyal of colleagues, but he couldn't help seeing that his fellow socialists were men and women before they were anything else ; they had many childish ways, and it was necessary to use a good deal of tact to get them to work together. In some ways during the twenty years from 1 884-1 904 he was like a very capable mother of a large and troublesome family, chaflfing and coaxing to get the day's work done, and not afraid to do some spanking when necessary. 122 SHAW He was a grand worker and he finished up that score of breathless years as Vestryman and Borough Councillor for St. Pancras for the term 1 897-1 903. He took his share of the load wherever he found it, and he practised his preaching in the council chamber and committee room for a full term. It seems an anti-climax for the boy novelist and the flaming orator to settle down to that dreary grind of public business with minutes, resolutions and manoeuvres about officials' salaries taking up so much valuable time, but he went through it like an apprentice learning a useful trade, and his later writings are full of the ballast of the knowledge of local government and the machinery of adminis- tration gained in those six municipal years. He was wildly busy in other fields all this time. He was writing startling plays at a furious rate with one hand, and superlative dramatic criticism for the Saturday Review with the other ; he was having the plays published, rehearsed and produced ; he was getting married ; he was furiously engaged in every form of socialistic activity that a super-charged ingenuity could devise ; and in his spare time he was learning to ride the bicycle. There had been bicycles before, but this was the " safety," and it was making a stir that no one born after 1 890 can understand. How can it be described to a generation that tries a motor cycle, a speedboat, a sports car and a monoplane before it is twenty, and then looks round wearily for something newer 123 SHAW and faster. They didn't get bored so quickly in the 'nineties. Magazines were full of stories of the new swift method of travel. H. G. Wells made a romance about a cycling clerk. Any young woman could get a name for being an advanced thinker or a shameless hussy by riding a bicycle in public ; correct young men averted their eyes as she passed. Sunday cycling was a sin. Tempers were lost and families disrupted about " bloomers " — called " rational costume " in honour of Herbert Spencer. It is hard to believe that there are still millions of men and women in England who lived through all this and whose hearts thrill to the tune of Daisy Bell ; and harder still to believe that Shaw at forty was only just getting expert at ripping downhill on his first bike, with his feet stuck on the fork rests and the pedals whirling madly beneath him. He was able to buy his own bicycles by 1896. He began, as a journalist, to help his mother and sister to keep a roof over their heads, about 1885. He never seems to have realised his possibilities in this field till friends like William Archer and Annie Besant, not deceived by his air of being a young man of independent means, who wore frayed cuffs as a fad, inveigled him into it. Once launched on the staff of the World in 1886 he knew that journalistic criticism of art and artists was his natural trade. From 1886 to 1898 he was reviewer and art critic to the Pall Mall Gazette, World, Star and Saturday Review in succession ; that is, he was supposed to 124 SHAW write from week to week something about a book, picture, exhibition, concert or play of public interest at the moment. That was how critics earned their living ; they wrote carefully arranged bits of praise and depreciation of certain features of the work presented to them, and let it go at that. Above all things they avoided personal feeling, or any suggestion that the writer, painter, singer or actor was a human being. Artists were supposed to turn out their work as a lathe turns out a bolt, and certain approved standards were applied like calipers to determine its quality. Ruskin, for instance, had decided the features which a painting must have to make it a good picture, and all that the art critic had to do was to learn the rules and go ahead with his column week by week. Shaw changed all that — almost single-handed. He knew music, pictures, books, as a good groom knows horses. He didn't have to poke about for rules. His knowledge was sure, intimate, part of himself He poured out criticism as a practised hostess pours out tea. He had grown up with those things, loved them, studied them, and he didn't have to speak about art, work, and workers, in a hushed voice with strange, stiff words. Even the newest work — if it had any good in it — was familiar in hundreds of old, everyday, interesting ways. He had only to read books or look at pictures, or listen to music, and then say what he thought about 125 SHAW them as plainly, as clearly as he could. It was very readable, fresh, chatty, easy-going criticism, but it was most irregular. There was no special vocabu- lary used, no prescribed rules, and an awful tendency to drag the artist into the open and take off some of his fashionable well-creased clothes. Shaw seemed to want to get away from mannerisms, materials, and the particular work in hand, and down to the man, and what he thought, felt, had to say for himself. When he found an artist copying or turning out stuff mechanically, or putting himself in front of the music, he put down his pen and took up a tomahawk. It was great fun, and it looked so easy that imitators came into the field at once, with disastrous results. Readers thought it was a great joke : " That fellow Shaw — the Socialist, you know — is writing about music. He doesn't know a thing about it, but he's fearfully funny. Last week he actually criticised Paderewski — said his playing was hard on the audience, but harder on Schumann — Imagine ! " There was not at first much evidence of any particular theory about art. He had served the proper apprenticeship for his position, and, like a good plumber or cook or accountant, he was able to take the normal features in his stride and concen- trate on the unusual. It is just this economy of effort, this sense of penetrating and exact observation carried out with the greatest ease, which gives those early criticisms their wonderful quality. You feel that he is prepared even to this day to stand over 126 SHAW every word he said. He did not make up a criticism, but rather set free a flood of expression, which still tingles with his delight in writing it, and his convic- tion that what he had to say was worth saying. It was his mission in the artistic field to attack bad work, to help the artist, to teach the public what to look for, to make them thoroughly ashamed of themselves where necessary, and to give praise where it was due. He managed to do all this with- out being an insufferable prig, by some magic of his own, and a mock comedy treatment which it is quite impossible to describe : As to the singing, there was a tenor who was compendiously announced as " Signor Rawner, who has created so great a sensation in Italy," and who is undoubtedly capable of making an indelible mark anywhere. I listened expectantly for Deserto sulla terra, knowing that if the sensationist were a fine artist, his inter- pretation of its musical character would surround it with illusion, making it come from among the trees in the moonlight, soft, distant, melancholy, haunting ; whereas, if he were the common or Saflfron Hill Manrico, he would at once display his quality by a stentorian performance in the wing, putting all his muscle and wind into a final B flat (substituted for G), and storming London with that one wrong note alone. My suspense was short. Signor Rawner, knowing nothing about the musical character of the 127 SHAW serenade, but feeling quite sure about the B fiat, staked his all on it ; and a stupendous yell it was. It is said that he can sing D ; and though he mercifully refrained from actually doing so, I have not myself the smallest doubt that he could sing high F in the same fashion if he only tried hard enough {Music in London, Vol. I, p. 8). He was always like that when artists threw the piece out of focus, to show off a speciality, and the more famous the artist the harder he hit. Listen to this about Bernhardt : Take, for example, the end of the third act of this Princesse Lointaine which she selects as her opportunity for one of those displays of vehe- mence which are expected from her as part of the conventional Bernhardt exhibition. It is pure rant and nothing else. When once she begins to tear through her lines at the utmost pitch of her voice, she shows no further sense of what she is saying, and is unable to recover herself when in the final speech the feeling changes. As her physical endurance threatens to fail, she tears along the faster, and finally rushes off the stage in a forced frenzy. I do not deny that there is something very exciting in a blind whirlwind of roaring energy. I have seen working-class audiences spring to their feet and cheer madly for three minutes at it. But then the artist was Mr. John Burns who can give 128 SHAW Madame Bernhardt a start of several miles at that particular sort of effect, and beat her easily. And I am bound to say, injustice to Mr. Burns, that I have never seen him bring down the curtain in this fashion until the play was really over, or substitute the peroration for the business part of the speech, whereas Madame Bernhardt does deliberately substitute rant for the business of the play. {Our Theatre in the 'Nineties, Vol. I, p. i68.) There is more in this than meets the eye. He was standing up for the rights of the dramatist and for intelligent acting, but that was not all. He was not satisfied with his special mission as art critic, and long before 1895, when that passage was written, he had laid out his plan of campaign for bringing the theatre into line with the evolutionary thought of the day and making the stage a pulpit for modern prophets. He had published The Quintessence of Ibsenism in 1890 ; his first play. Widowers' Houses, was performed in 1892 ; and he was on his way to public favour with the production of Arms and the Man in 1894. Everything was working out accord- ing to plan, and he was using his position as a critic to obtain a hearing for true artists who grew plays instead of constructing them. It was all fair and square, as open and above board as that criticism of Bernhardt. He wanted actors to do something more than give a perform-ance and he spurred them on, in a way all his own, to make the very best of s. J 29 K SHAW their powers. But over and above that, he wanted them to fit and dovetail into a poHcy which had the same relation to the Great Purpose on the dramatic front as Fabianism in the political front. He wanted more of Ibsen's plays in London. The Social Organism was struggling on many fronts, using all kinds of men as weapons for its Purpose. Some knew what was afoot and were willing to serve, and in the front rank of these was Ibsen. He was a wholehearted believer in the poet as creator, not in any dependent or subordinate creat- ing capacity, but as the very fount and origin of the beauty he brought into existence. It was life, of course, which worked within him, but life was something incapable of any rational explanation whatever. To Ibsen and Shaw it was a blind force dependent upon artists of honour for intelligible outlet and advance. A poet lent himself to life, and life did the rest. Ibsen used to be able to feel a play growing inside him like an embryo till in the end it quickened, kicked and burst out. He had one about every two years. The first of them to come to London was A DolVs House. It was presented in 1889, and then came the Ibsen-row. There had just been a Wagner-row, but that had been a very select affair for musical critics. This new one was anybody's fight. The man in the street doesn't easily get worked up about music, but he gets wildly excited over discussions about the domestic affairs which Ibsen was using 130 SHAW as material for his plays. He dramatised everyday situations with wonderful skill and insight, and yet allowed his characters to behave shockingly with a word of reproof. Women were unwomanly, and got away with it, and men were heroic and did not get away with it. There was the dickens of a row with people taking sides, writing letters, and calling names all over the place. There were disputes about stagecraft, children, religion, duty — about anything rather than the philosophy behind the plays. That, however, was what took Shaw's fancy from the beginning, and his Quintessence of Ibsenism was the result. Wagner had broken new ground, and conquered in music, and now Ibsen was coming with a new and wonderful message in drama. The world was changing, man was becoming conscious of his destiny, old institutions were crumbling, the dawn of the twentieth century was at hand, outworn moralities and cramping creeds must go, and all the rest of it. Shaw didn't lose his head about progress so badly as some of the others who wrote like this, but he believed in the message. He saw the theatre as the church of the new century and threw himself into the campaign for the New Drama and the New Morality with the same terrific energy and concen- tration that he had already shown in the cause of Socialism. The Quintessence of Ibsenism is the keel of his dramatic career. In it he laid down the thesis and argument for all that followed, as firmly and definitely 131 SHAW as he knew how. The argument was developed as a side issue in A Perfect Wagnerite (1898), thrown into dramatic form in Man and Superman (1902) and followed up with i's dotted and t's crossed in Back to Methuselah (192 1). Whatever Shaw is, he is not erratic. He is the most carefully conscientious and consistent artist that ever lived. He may contradict himself, but he never wavers. In fact, from 1890, his philosophic career is dreadfully dull, so finally did he settle everything then and so exactly did he follow the regulations he prescribed. It is true that these are mighty queer and that his opinions and actions will look in turn blatant, nonsensical, extravagant, blasphemous, quixotic, and every other adjective of the kind, to anyone who tries to measure him by normally accepted standards — either those of the Christian or those of the commercial world. He lives in a world of his own, and his behaviour in it is correct to a degree which may well send cold shivers down the back of any happy-go-lucky sinner who dares turn a purely intellectual search- light on his own daily conduct. The Ibsen ruction. Creative Evolution, the New Protestantism and the uprise of the artist prophets, all began with a fresh attempt to get a good answer to the question " What's a baby ? " The Middle Ages had it that he was something wonderful. Then came the Reformers, saying that Natural Instincts were Filthy and Babies a Bad Lot. This was too horrible for the average man, and the religious 132 SHAW history of Europe for the next four centuries is the story of the ways in which he tried to solve the question without going back to 1274. It did not bother him so much while he was poor, but when the Industrial Revolution made him rich and respectable and he had more scope for sinfulness, his private life became full of problems about women and children. Ibsen took some of the strange situations which he saw about him and touched them up with a poetic hand into problem plays. Situations, real and terrible enough in life, were turned into cases, the new dramatic and literary art was launched, and a new answer given to the question about the baby. The poets were out to rescue him from the agnostics and the super-Darwinists. The former were getting a reputation for wisdom by saying that they knew nothing, and that a baby was an Unfathomable Mystery ; the others said that a baby was built like a machine and that, given a free hand with lancets and chloroform in an orphanage, they could find out what made it tick. However crazy the Creative Evolutionists look to-day, it must always be remembered that they were at first a rescue party out to save the children from the ultra-rationaHsts. They had learnt — God knows how — that a baby was something fresh and delightful, and they wanted to protect him and give him a chance to reahse himself They rehed upon Evolu- tion and they thought that any new child might be the bearer of a message which would carry man a 133 SHAW further stage upward towards the Ultimate Purpose. His impulses must not be cramped by the credulities and customs of a bygone age — particularly of the age of reason. Old habits and old institutions were useful for children who had not the vitaHty to make their instincts imperious, but the exceptional infant must not be shackled by them. His impulses — his will to live — were all-important, and his impulse toward greater freedom was sufficient ground for the repudiation of any duty however sacred which conflicted with it. This was the New Protestantism in a nutshell. Men like Ibsen and Shaw did not find the new religion as simple and delightful as it looked to their youthful disciples. For the child as he grew up had not only an impulse to realise himself, but another impulse to make the reahsation reasonable. The exposure of ways in which he fooled himself in efforts to reconcile the tv/o forces with one another and with existing conventions was the main- spring of the new drama. Some men were terribly reasonable and produced rigid irrevocable plays, others were full of imagination and wilfulness and produced irresponsible, wandering plays. In Brand and Peer Gynt the men were on a grand scale ; they were heroes all-of-a-piece, who clung to their ideals to the end. Later, Ibsen made plays with small- scale people fooHng themselves in conventional ways, and arranged his action to show the gradual breaking down of the ideals which had upheld them. The 134 SHAW discovery that plays could be made by this unmask- ing process had an effect on Shaw similar to his earlier discovery that fortunes could be made by rent collection. Henry George taught him that he had been a communist all along, and now Ibsen showed him that he had been a modern dramatist from the day of his letter to Public Opinion. Immaturity, The Irrational Knot, and the rest, were really plays which had taken the wrong turning. Their author was, in fact, the world's champion unmasker, but it had never occurred to him to make dramatic capital out of his talent. He had made an attempt to collaborate with William Archer in writing a play in 1885 j Archer was to supply the plot and Shaw the dialogue, but the Shaw dialogue ate up all the Archer plot in the first act, and the partnership was dissolved. Seven years later, stimulated by Ibsen, he completed Widowers' Houses, which, like an ugly duckUng, pushed itself in amongst The Private Secretary, Haddon Hall, The Guardsman, The Silent Battle, Dorothy ^ and the rest af the legitimate brood on December gth, 1892. 135 CHAPTER VI In a fairy-tale world the ugly duckling gets a bad time because it is different. In the newspaper world conditions are reversed, and the thing that's different gets the magazine page. A motor-car manufacturer doesn't mind the public telHng funny stories about his product if he knows the car will go. In fact, the wilder the stories are the better he likes them — publicity value being directly proportional to wildness. Shaw knew, as he watched that first performance of Widowers' Houses in December, 1892, that he could make plays that would go. The critics didn't think he could, nor did the public, and they continued to say so violently for days, to his great delight. It didn't cost him a penny, and everyone was being taught to say Shaw's a Socialist and Shaw's a Showman, and to look forward pleasantly to some sort of fireworks every time the name was mentioned. Widowers' Houses irritated the public thoroughly. It pretended to be a play when it was really a dose of medicine. It contrasted violently with the standard play devised to amuse the audience, massage their emotions slightly, and send them home sleepy and comforted. The popular play of 1890 was, in fact, 136 SHAW very much like the popular film of to-day ; it was con- structed so that it could be understood without any mental exertion. The theatre was a place where people were entertained by being soothed. Shaw proposed to entertain them by making them think. He had been doing a lot of thinking since 1866 and he wanted to give everyone the benefit of it. Since 1882 the thinking had been running in a deep economic groove, and when he tried to materialise it dramatically, the effects were shocking. The audience came to see a play and got the gist of the Fabian Essay on Rent, wrapped up in the chatter of nice people staying at the best hotels. There was nothing gloomy about the scenes : all had their share of bright lights, luxury and pretty dresses, and there was nothing false about the story : blue books were brought on the stage to certify the facts — but the play was horribly unsettling. Many a decent man with a few snug investments went to it, and was bothered for days afterwards trying to find out where Shaw was wrong. It was not so easy. It took him a few years to find out that play- writing of that sort was useless if he wanted to be an artist with a public. And he wanted that just as much as he wanted to set the world right. In fact, the two wants are from the Creative Evolution point of view indistinguishable, being in essence nothing but the result of a sudden effort of the Life Force at Synge Street, Dublin, in 1856. But this merging and new mysticism is confusing to non- 137 SHAW initiates, and for the moment it is better to consider him as a very keen young man anxious to have his plays produced, and showing great practical intelli- gence in the way he went about it. He had always liked the theatre, and when he found that he could write plays that were playable, he began to study it with the greatest care from the playwright's point of view. After The Philanderer and Mrs. Warren's Profession, he knew that he could not get far by holding the microscope up to Nature, making people uncomfortable, and giving actors and actresses more than they could do. There were only a certain number of actors in London and a certain number of ways in which each of them could act. If Shaw wanted them to dance to his piping, he must make music to which they could dance. The plays of the 1894- 1900 period are the result. His adaptability was amazing. He wrote plays to suit a public, to suit a theatre, to suit one actor, to suit a pair of actors, but above all, to suit himself. From the very beginning he knew what he was after, and it did not turn him from his purposes in the least to have to turn out gay nonsense like Tou Never Can Tell, or sob-stuff like Candida. Beneath these cloaks George Shaw moved steadily and patiently about his business. He was a Fabian and knew that gradual action could be as effective in the theatre as in the committee-room — remember that he was busy with Casar and Cleopatra as he went to and fro, attending to the parochial affairs of St. 138 SHAW Pancras in 1898. He couldn't spring his ideas too suddenly on the pubhc. He set them out boldly for the elect in his prefaces, but it was necessary to wean the people slowly and patiently. Infiltration was the best poHcy, and in Candida (1894), The DeviVs Disciple (1897) and Man and Superman (1903) — or for that matter in any succession of his plays during the pre-war period — it can be seen at work. It can be seen even more clearly in his Dramatic Criticism in the Saturday Review from 1895 to 1898 when he worked week by week trying to get the public to bring their minds to the theatre with them, the actors to take some interest in the parts they were playing and people generally to see life as he saw it. In 1892 a dignified imperialistic news- paper tried to squash him with : " Mr. Shaw wishes to utter a tirade against certain abuses ; he thinks the theatre is a suitable pulpit for his utterances." That was exactly what he did wish and think, and he didn't mind who knew it. As he said himself a few years later : I am not an ordinary playwright. I am a specialist in immoral and heretical plays. My reputation has been gained by my persistent struggle to force the public to reconsider its morals. In particular, I regard much current morality as to economic and sexual relations as disastrously wrong ; and I regard certain doctrines of the Christian religion as under- stood in England to-day with abhorrence. I 139 SHAW write plays with the dehberate object of convert- ing the nation to my opinion on these matters. I have no other effectual incentive to write plays, as I am not dependent on the theatre for my livelihood. If I were prevented from producing immoral and heretical plays I should cease to write for the theatre, and propagate my views from the platform and through books. {Prefaces, p. 408.) In the 'nineties he was dividing his time equally between the political and dramatic roles, and his purpose had not quite crystallised out in this clear- cut, implacable form. He expressed it from time to time in various ways, but his statements were received with nods and becks and wreathed smiles by a delighted public, who insisted on believing that this living lump of dynamite was a droll fellow, who was cashing in on his quality as a jester in a normal business-like way. Many a prophet would have despaired at such a slight. Instead, Shaw turned it into an asset ; he took the popular belief that he was a clown, as a magic cloak, under which he had a special licence to go anywhere and say anything. Any intelligent government would have had him and his like locked up ; but it was the day of art for art's sake, and Cabinet Ministers would have laughed at the suggestion that plays had anything to do with social upheavals. He was wonderful. However disreputable his doctrine, it is impossible to watch his work in these 140 SHAW years without wanting to get up and cheer — or is it only the untutored Irishman who wants to shout " Up, Man, though you burst the British Empire," at the sight of him backing his conscience against the world of rent and big business ? He was far too wise to go out trying to start an open conspiracy. He was a soloist and he knew it ; and he was also a good deal of a child full of his own importance, going about — like Stevenson's boy with the dark lantern under his coat — full of tremors and anticipations. If you don't see him and love him like this you will never know him or understand his plays. It seems fantastic to say that an intensely serious social worker and a child playing at nursery tricks was one man, but he himself— or any reputable scientist — will tell you that the closer you get to facts the more fantastic they appear. Take these extracts from his letter to Ellen Terry (January 27th, 1897) : In this world, you must know all points of view, and take one and stick to it. In taking your side, don't trouble about its being the right side — north is no righter or wronger than south — but be sure that it is really yours, and then back it for all you are worth. And never stagnate. Life is a constant becoming, all stages leading to the beginning of others. . . . The theatre is my battering ram as much as the platform or the press . . . my capers are part of a bigger design than you think. Shakespeare 141 SHAW is to me, one of the towers of the Bastille and down he must come. . . . Never mind your young families ; omelettes were not made without breaking eggs, and I hate families. . . . What I say to-day everybody will say to-morrow. There is the boy with his finger on his lips, his cloak and his conspiratorial air, full of cryptic sayings and dark hints of inside knowledge, playing at revolution and conquest with the most deadly earnestness. There is no real right side. That is the essence of his faith and his preaching. In the Life Force there is no stable truth. To man in his little day there seems a passing permanence, a transient stability, a flattening out, on which Life seems to pause in its course, and which he calls truth. To linger on one of these facets, to cling to it, is to become imbedded in the past and to petrify. Life moves ever onward, and to move with it is to live . . . " 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." ..." Try how wicked you can be ; it is precisely the same experiment as trying how good you can be." ..." There is no law so independent of circumstances that the time never comes for breaking it." So in The Sanity of Art (republished in book form ten years later), he continues to oflfer unweary- 142 SHAW ing witness to the intuitions which well up within him. Here is the New Protestantism at greater length : The Life Force is blind. It shoots out in all directions, but has a preference for none. It forms instruments but has no plan for them. Man is aware of its surging energy through his instincts, and through the most powerful of them is made to maintain the chain of vital energy with an annual quota of young life. Each of these little ones comes bearing with him millions of memories and messages from the past, but also some potentiality of his own, which is a special and sacred gift from the Life Force. He feels this gift as his very self. It is his inner citadel. He will stake everything to preserve it. Beside it, even his own life is nothing. He will not hand it over to any mortal man or to any earthly power. The Protestant enshrines the gift in a private tabernacle ; he abhors Rome and the confessional, because of his conviction that they threaten it. But Shaw could see that an organised Protestant religion was a contradiction in terms — an inconsequent copy of the Catholic Church — and he concluded that the religion of the twentieth century — the religion of the Modern Spirit — must rest on some less institutional recognition of that tabernacle. The New Protes- tantism must be founded on inward adoration of one's own private judgment and outward toleration 143 SHAW of all men. Thus would the Life Force be given full scope ; thus would the artist be stimulated to his highest pitch of activity and at the same time freed from external restraints to self-expression. But there was one danger, there was one deadly enemy of the Life Force ; there was one intolerable person — the man who said that there were laws prescribed for men. The man who said that there were in the world rules valid at all times and in all places, must be eliminated ; he was the enemy of evolutionary advancement, and the institutions which he created on the basis of these rules were prisons for the children of the future. An institution may be good for a time, for one year or a thousand years, but life moves on, and sooner or later some child is born with a potentiality which conflicts with the rules. The Life Force has no design, but is always trying, and each child is an experiment. He (or she, for the Life Force has no sex partiaHties) arrives ready stamped by some instantaneous impulse of the Time Spirit. The child who is to carry the torch of life onward and upward arrives earmarked for some special activity. He is predestinate. He must conform. To fulfil his destiny to perfection he must " find the point of view which is really his, and then back it for all he is worth." He seems to himself to have freedom, but this is an illusion ; he is not really free till he is doing the work for which he has been stamped out. He must stick to his cell. He cannot find his 144 SHAW point of view by any rule or law outside of his own nature or by any established convention or by any imitation of others. There is no help to be had from outside. He can only find it by trial and error. His inmost wish is his guide, and that course of action which he can follow without qualms or doubts, and above all without shame or excuses, is for him the true way. It may be what others call murder, or cruelty, or adultery, or theft, or blasphemy, but these names must not deter if the sacred mentor within tells him to march fearlessly ahead. If the Life Force has not modelled him for a thief, then he will be downhearted in his thieving. If he is not meant to be a Don Juan, he will be uneasy in the love-nest. The experiment of being as wicked as he can must be abandoned, if it is not honestly successful. And it is just the same with experiments in being good. The boy who sets out to be a model to the community, and finds his pious practices a sham, and his week-day work a slavery, is being warned by the Life Force that he is in the wrong shop. The man who goes regularly to the Rotary Club, notwithstanding the spiritual nausea which rises up within him at the luncheon table, is ignoring sacred promptings. The wild impulse that comes over him at times to roar " To hell with Service," may be an inspiration direct from the Life Force. He cannot tell till he responds to it, till he tries. The trial may ruin him socially and financially, but if it brings him a sense of release — of refreshment 145 SHAW — of new life — then he knows that, come weal, come woe, he has committed a noble blasphemy. Thus the Life Force taps out potentiality inspira- tion and at random . . . tinker — tailor — soldier — sailor — rich man — poor man — beggarman — thief ... it pays no attention to parents or environment. The " rich man " urge may tap an attic in the slums, and the " poor man " urge a palace nursery. Then, if the urges are strong, that is, if the children " have the vitality to make their instincts imperious,*" the slum child rises to the palace and the other shakes the gold dust from his feet and goes out into the wilderness alone. It is the same with the soldier and the thief. A boy is born in Corsica with a love for power, and forty years later Napoleon is dominating Europe. Another boy is born in New York keen on easy money, and forty years later there is a rumpus on Wall Street and a new pleasure yacht sailing down the Hudson. These are the boys that matter. The rest, the weakhngs, with their half-hearted wishes and feeble struggling activities, are Life Force failures, so much waste product, so much material for the master minds to turn into factory workers, clerks, journalists, economic experts, political props or anything else that may be required for the purpose in hand. They are, above all, copyists and imitators, and they love to be led. This great group live on the rules laid down in the past, and on the standard conventions of the day. From them they make up the mental 146 SHAW pictures which they call their worlds. When circumstances collect a large number of them with similar pictures into one place, it is called a suburb or perhaps a very exclusive club. But these waste products — these slaves — are not all alike. The first and commonest type is the hard-headed Philistine who gets through life pleasantly enough, because his nature and experience so closely match the picture he has selected, that he is barely conscious of his own existence. The second is the one hundred per cent idealist, who skips lightly over awkward facts, or, without qualms, twists them to fit his picture ; he has just as good a time as the first, in fact better, because his struggle with the facts make him proudly conscious of his picture and his relation to it ; he is righteous and he knows it. The third is the unfortunate who is partly conscious that his picture does not match reality, and his life is misery, or rather, he goes up and down in a sea of uncertainty, hysterically glad when facts fit, and distraught when they don't. Sometimes one of these unhappy ones sees, in a flash of inspiration, that part of his picture is wrong and that it is better to alter it than to fiddle with the facts ; sometimes even, the flash is so brilliant that it shows up the entire picture, releases him from the slave group and sets him free to move among the gods. The gods are of two kinds. The first — the Class I god — is he who delivers the vital message unsullied, i.e.y untouched by the intellect. He is not troubled 147 SHAW about rational behaviour, but works from day to day in perfect intimacy with the Life Force, relying on instinct and intuition. He is always ready with reasons if questioned, but makes them up to suit the occasion, and the querist. He goes after what he wants with absolute conviction and decides after- wards, if at all, why he wanted it. The Class II god is he who looks the facts of life fixedly in the face and sees that they sort out into a process of Creative Evolution. He is an ultra-rationalist, but his picture has none of the rigid fixity of the slave pictures. He knows that the reason for everything is that there is no reason for anything. His picture of reality is a moving picture to match the ever-changing world. It has neither form nor design — the deadly dogmatic prisons of the past — but shows in dim shimmering tones the Life Force striving to become conscious of itself. This is its great purpose — the purpose which holds together all pre-history, outline history and actual history. It is manifest through all human activity in man's pursuit of knowledge, particularly in those quests in which intuition outdistanced reason and gave birth to some great synthesis or enduring work of art. Class II god is almost a new species. For him the difficulties of the past are wiped out. There are no problems of evil and pain, for it is clear that the Life Force working at random to fulfil its purpose must make mistakes, and that many things must go wrong before all comes right. There need be no 148 SHAW anxiety about death and judgment, for there is but one world which is creating itself. Death, in fact, is only a rather interesting dodge by which the Life Force frees men from their self-importance when they have served its purpose. If they have served it well the manifold results of their good actions will be carried forward through the ages into everlasting communes. This is the meaning of life everlasting, this is the new revelation, so potent that since the beginning of the century new converts to Creative Evolution have been eagerly tearing away masks and showing their glowing, shimmering picture to all those fit to receive the message. There were few fit for it in the 'nineties. In 1898 Shaw wrote in The Perfect Wagnerite : The majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive, and no serious progress will be made until we address our- selves earnestly and scientifically to the task of producing trustworthy human material for society. In short, it is necessary to breed a race of men in whom the life-giving impulses predominate before the New Protestantism becomes politically practicable. That was the serious side of the business. But there was another side which must be viewed and considered although it is indescribable and presents an insoluble problem. Shaw's teaching and his plan of campaign are plain as a pikestaff, but there is an element 149 SHAW running through it all which is a perpetual mystery. When he had laid down his creed and drawn the obvious conclusions from it in the most dogmatic and final fashion, the whole thing sometimes seemed to strike him as a tremendous joke. This was a point of view which his disciples were never able to under- stand. It annoyed them. Earnest Creative Evolu- tionists following him reverently and earnestly were suddenly brought up with a jolt against a peculiarly turned phrase which made them fear he had been pulling their legs all the time. He seemed to be able to have faith in his religion and at the same time view with amusement the possibility that it was all a hoax. He seemed at times to kick over the elaborate edifice he had so laboriously built — to throw science and scientists to the winds — to wrap a cloak of humility protectively about him, with a twist like — " Perhaps the world is all a joke — but even so, it is evidently our job to make it a good joke." He wound up a letter to Tolstoy with some words like those in 1910, but Russia and Ireland are far apart ; Tolstoy was busy making a religion of his own, with all laughs left out, and he only replied sadly : "I received a painful impression from the concluding words of your letter.'* These sudden steps from certainty are discon- certing to his disciples ; but they are the very breath of life to the old-fashioned fellow, rather muddled at the mystery of the world in which he finds himself, and glad to get confirmation for his impression 150 SHAW that it is all very puzzling and that the best he can do is to plug along hopefully in his own way, and give new gods a wide berth. When Shaw comes across any such man he seems to face right about from all his theories, and say : " It's rough going, old man, and we seem a bit off the track, but it's a great thing to feel we're all in the same blooming bus." This, at any rate, is the savour which rises from those touches of human sympathy that flash out in delicious asides through the action of his plays, particularly among the minor characters. He is at home with everyone, and even when he is going all out to mobilise humanity to march ahead with him under the banner of Creative Evolution, he is turning his head to shout after those going steadfastly in the opposite direction — Stick to it, boys, you're just as right as I am. There is no use making much of this anomaly, just yet, lest he retort, " But isn't this what I have been protesting against for fifty years? You are trying to work me out like an equation. I am not a sum. I'm alive." All his dramatic work has to do with the slaves and gods and their pictures, but there is no prescrip- tion. There may be only one Glass II god as in Arms and the Man, or one Glass I god as in St. Joan or there may be one of each as in Man and Superma and The Millionairess. And even the gods are liable to show slavish traits at times, and the slaves to give a gleam of god-like quality. He makes a play 151 SHAW by taking a group of ordinary individuals — Class I and Class II slaves — and turning them inside out. It is all done wittily, kindly, thoroughly, sometimes with the assistance of a Class II god and sometimes — but what's the use of trying to take that wonderful process apart when it is there to be revelled in at the source, for two shillings a copy. It is surprising value for money ; why, to watch him getting a play going and plunging his audience into the thick of the story before the curtain is up ten seconds is worth every penny of it. He was studying the theatre and its possibilities as a revolutionary agency with the greatest interest, in the closing years of the century. For during those years his faith in the possibilities of social reform through political action was slowly dwindling. He was turning against Social Democracy as he found it in the flesh. He was testing his ideal of the 'eighties against the facts, and finding them wanting. The paragraph quoted above from The Perfect Wagnerite shows how his thoughts were tending, and they came to a focus in Man a?id Superman in 1902. It was a wonderful play. It was three plays — it was a dozen plays — or maybe a hundred. It was a good straight comedy, it was a domestic drama, it was a sporting play about a motor-race, it was a mystery play, it was a play about a baby, it was a play for any audience. It is impossible to describe the effect of that startHng, compact, subtle attack 152 SHAW on basic convention and tradition ; it is impossible in these hard-boiled, thick-skinned days to convey- any impression of the tremors which ran through the theatre when the play was first presented in London (1905) and later in the provinces. The omission of the third act didn't matter, for its essentials saturated the others, and though no one could understand what Shaw was driving at, the sheer intensity of his thought made itself felt. Even if the meaning was hidden, it was evident he was saying something that was all the world to him, and saying it with remarkable emphasis. He was. He was summing up the results of twenty years' experience as a reformer, confessing failure of the old method, and trying for a new one. He looked back and said that reforms were useless till man had reformed himself, and looked forward and said that man couldn't reform himself till the Life Force had reformed him. He cleared the decks of everything else in a single sweep — or rather in a series of them called a Preface, a Philosophy, and a Revolutionist's Handbook. He did it with that magnifi- cent openness and thoroughness which is the joy and despair of his biographers — for it gives them the fullest inside information about him, and yet when they try to present it to the public, they find that it was ail so much better in the original. So here are some extracts from The Revolutionist's Handbook to show the turning-point that had been reached : 153 SHAW A Revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order and try another . . . And yet Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny : they have only shifted it to another shoulder. Are we then to repudiate Fabian methods and return to those of the barricader, or adopt those of the dynamitard and the assassin ? On the contrary, we are to recognise that both are fundamentally futile. We must therefore frankly give up the notion that Man as he exists is capable of net progress. There will always be an illusion of progress, because wherever we are conscious of an evil we remedy it, and therefore always seem to ourselves to be progressing, forgetting that most of the evils we see are the effects, finally become acute, of long-unnoticed retrogressions ; that our compromising remedies seldom fully recover the lost ground ; above all, that on the lines along which we are degenerating, good has become evil in our eyes, and is being undone in the name of progress precisely as evil is undone and replaced by good in the lines along which we are evolving. This indeed is the Illusion of Illusions ; for it gives us infallible 154 SHAW and appalling assurance that if our political ruin is to come, it will be effected by ardent reformers and supported by enthusiastic patriots as a series of necessary steps in our progress. Our only hope, then, is in evolution. Wc must replace the man by the superman. The cry for the Superman did not begin with Nietzsche, nor will it end with his vogue. But it has always been silenced by the same question : what kind of person is this Superman to be? What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not yet understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die. We are therefore driven to the conclusion that when we have carried selection as far as we can by rejecting from the list of eligible parents all persons who are uninteresting, unpromising, or blemished with- out any set-off, we shall still have to trust to the guidance of fancy {alias Voice of Nature) , both in the breeders and the parents, for that superiority in the unconscious self which will be the true characteristic of the Superman. 155 SHAW As to the method, what can be said as yet except that where there is a will, there is a way ? If there be no will, we are lost. That is a possibility for our crazy little empire, if not for the universe ; and as such possibilities are not to be entertained without despair, we must, whilst we survive, proceed on the assumption that we have still energy enough to not only will to live, but to will to live better. There is no public enthusiast alive of twenty years' practical democratic experience who believes in the political adequacy of the elec- torate or of the bodies it elects. The overthrow of the aristocrat has created the necessity for the Superman. The Revolutionist's Handbook is full of meat for to-day's eating. The Quintessence of Ibsenism had anticipated the new psychology with its introverts and inhibitions ; and Shaw had followed it up by showing that excellent psychological research could be done in parks and restaurants or any place where there were men and women not too much on guard ; the results were so interesting, and had such general application, that when he put them into plays they went down as well in Japan as in London. Now, on the basis of small-scale experiments in social and political work, he was reaching even more tremendous conclusions. Nearly thirty years before 156 SHAW Mussolini had noticed the " putrescent corpse of Liberty," it was being neatly laid out on a slab in the Handbook. Three years before the first paper on Relativity was read, Shaw had nailed up his thesis that man was a relative animal. Only the other day Sir James Jeans wrote : " It was left for twentieth- century physicists under the lead of Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg to discover how large a subjective tinge entered into the nineteenth-century description of nature." Tinge ! Shaw entered the twentieth century shouting at the top of his voice that man was sunk to the eyebrows in subjectivity. He said bluntly that man always thought he was moving forward, but was in truth incapable of knowing whether he was or not. He actually called for a conference of enlightened persons to discuss what was to be done about breeding a superior type of man as the only way out of the tail-chasing mess ; at least Jack Tanner did so in his Revolutionist'' s Handbook. And then there was that incomparable first act, with Roebuck Ramsden, the modern thinker, backed by the bust of Spencer and the enlarged photograph of Huxley, saying : *' Let me tell you I was an advanced man before you were born," and Tanner's mischievous, maddening retort : " I knew it was a long time ago." How the audience roared with delight at that conflict of dignity and impudence — without a notion that it was watching the first onslaught of the tvv^entieth century on the nineteenth, of the relativists on the determinists. 157 SHAW And how they enjoyed its development a few seconds later : Tanner : . . . Cultivate a little impudence, Ramsden, and you will become quite a remark- able man. Ramsden : I have no Tanner : You have no desire for that sort of notoriety. Bless you, I knew that answer would come out as well as I know that a box of matches will come out of an automatic machine when I put a penny in the slot. . . . It was scandalously unfair, of course, to bring the poor old rationalist on the stage with his hands tied behind his back, and let the Life Force hit him in the face ; still that is what happens when a dramatist grows plays, instead of writing them to fit a framework. But no other plays grow like these, in which the Life Force slap-stick plays round at such a rate that it lays out even the Life Force prophet. There is no more deadly punch in this play than its final word : Ann (looking at him with fond pride and caressing his arm) : Never mind her, dear. Go on talking. Tanner : Talking ! ( Universal laughter,) And the final curtain comes down on an audience once again a little bewildered and dizzy. *' What does he mean ? ' Talking ' — Is he making fun of us after all ? " They could not be certain. And still less could 158 SHAW they see that his whole point was that there was no certainty. There was a possibiUty that Man was lost, but that was not a thing to be told to a crowd of people, out for an evening's entertainment. It was enough to give them a hint and cover it up in " Universal laughter," but the facts were faced frankly enough in the Handbook. Society was failing to make itself. Man was not yet up to the mark. Democracy in practice was a failure. The New Protestantism would not become politically practicable till the Life Force had shot forth a new race of men. Meanwhile, the pioneers must labour as inspiration dictated. Inspiration came from the instincts — the impulses — the will. Reliance on reason had been fatal, and rationalism was slowly freezing over the natural outlets of the human spirit. The will must come first. Jack Tanner puts it neatly in his Handbook, " The man who listens to Reason is lost. Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her,'* as who should say, " Vernuft ist der Teufel's hochstc Hure." The New Protestantism rests on the divine right of private intuition. Reason, which at once rises in revolt against a religion which would make her play second fiddle, must be kept sternly in check. She has her uses in the practical domain, but the new prophets will not allow her to approach the inner sanctum where Truth lies in the arms of the Life Force. 159 S H A W Shaw quite openly looked on himself as a New Prophet. It was clear to him that it was so, and there was no need to be coy about it. The terrific self-assertiveness which sprang from this presump- tion kept him in constant hot water, but he didn't mind — not even when it chilled and he was told in icy tones that his behaviour was " bad form." It must be remembered that this was in the Edwardian period. Difficulties about Africa had been settled to the satisfaction of the statesmen of Europe ; the Empire was bigger and better than ever ; sofas were going out, and Chesterfields were coming in ; silks were getting softer and carpets thicker ; the Forsytes had weathered the storms of the 'eighties, and all round capital appreciation was in sight. Only those who belong to the bicycle age can understand what the phrase " bad form " meant in that England. It was the whole ten commandments in two words, and Shaw's " What is bad form to-day will be good form to-morrow" was as blasphemous as it was incomprehensible. He was beginning to practise his religion in real earnest by giving the most vehement and most public utterance he could of the truth that was in him. Yet never was there a more considerate prophet. He almost eflfaces himself to give other prophets a chance. There is no paradox here, but only that strict logic which he always uses in practical matters. His religion demands that he must not only put forward his views with the utmost vigour, but i6o SHAW also that he encourage others to do likewise. Emphatic statement is essential, but tolerance must march along with it or even ahead of it. All opinions, all art, all activities, so long as they are honest, are equally valuable, till time sorts out one from the others to build on it. So, a Life Force prophet must beware of behttlement. There is always the possibility that he may be a mistake, and the other fellow the truth bearer. This is a hard saying, but it is one that Shaw lives up to with the most bewildering humiHty : it is impossible to find clear proof of this in his own works, but all young writers who have met him bear witness to it. He seems to go out of his way to help those who differ from him, though not without an occasional mischievous twitch or two to test how firmly they sit on the saddle. He wants artists to have absolute freedom of expression even when he is wild with them. In 1892, seeing Ellen Terry engaged in some trivial part, he wrote : " I was furious. If I had been a god and had created her powers for her, I should have interrupted the performance with thunder, and asked in a fearful voice why she was wasting the sacred fire of which I had made her the trustee. But I knew she had made her powers herself and could be called to account by nobody for the use she made of them." He went ahead with great gusto after he had nailed his colours to the mast in 1 903 . He claimed freedom 161 SHAW for himself and for everyone else, and then set out to precipitate discussion on the proper regulation of this freedom in the best interests of the Life Force. What he really wanted was a nicely regulated Anarchism called Communism, but there is no use taunting him with this. He is well aware that his real problem is to know how much nonsense to stand from a superman before rounding on him. He not only worked for the Life Force, but worked with it ; or rather it worked with him. He doesn't write plays — he grows them — he lives in the mind and heart of each of his characters in turn, and while that character is speaking, he and Shaw are, in a way, one person. Other artists have done the same thing, but not so thoroughly ; there is usually a real man to be found behind the play figures. In Shaw's plays there is only the Life Force aiming at nothing in particular, and everything in general. Or rather aiming at having the new religion accepted and everything that stands in its way rejected. The teaching is always well wrapped up — actors and audience get what they like — there are plenty of laughs and interesting situations ; but these things are only secondary to the main purpose of getting people to revise their views about marriage, punish- ment, criticism, history, politics and reHgion ; Shaw wanted them to look at things in the Life Force way instead of in the Christian way ; for the progress of the reforms he desired was being barred in all directions, by convictions based on Christian dogma. 162 SHAW It is not suggested for a moment that Shaw altogether scorned Christianity. He pointed out that Christ was a Life Force failure, but he always esteemed certain aspects of Christian teaching and frequently spoke highly of its social value. His pages are sprinkled with acknowledgments like : " I see no way out of the world's misery but the way that would have been found by Christ's will, if he had undertaken the work of a modern practical statesman " {Prefaces^ p. 525). What he objected to, was the way in which people held on to the beliefs of A.D. 190 in the year 1900. He found these beliefs embedded in the social body, hidden and tenacious as the steel mesh in a great arch ; he saw that they were the real obstacle to reforms which he con- sidered essential ; and he made no bones about attacking them. From Major Barbara (1905) to Ths Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1935) he has waged a steady campaign against them, preaching his alternative creed of life for life's sake. But no one took him seriously. The Great War came and went and he hardly even changed his stance. People scarcely noticed Androcles and the Lion or its Preface. The play was a great success, for everyone liked to see a lion chase an emperor all over the place ; but it was not so easy to see that the play was a serious attempt to show the Life Force in action. Later, when Back to Methuselah was pro- duced and published with labelled diagrams of his creed in every scene and page, people only yawned. 163 SHAW Then came the palpitating Life Force thriller, St. Joan. In London this was supposed to be a Christian play, because of the title, but there is a lack of internal evidence. The Joan of the play is a little like Lavinia who wasn't much of a Christian either — Androcles was worth ten of her. Joan is nothing but the physical receptacle of the Life Force striving onward and upward. As a Christian she lets the play down completely. Why, at the crucial point of the final act — the tearing up of her recanta- tion — she makes a farce of the whole magnificent trial scene by talking like a second-rate nature poet, ** if only I could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy forest, and the blessed, blessed church bells that send my angel voice floating to me on the wind." Why, the minute any Inquisitor, who knew his business, heard that line, he'd have boxed the little impostor's ears and told her to get home to blazes and stop wasting his time. It doesn't need the Epilogue to ruin the play as a Christian epic. He explains it all in the Prologue. Joan is a temporary materialisation of the Life Force endowed with an excessive evolutionary appetite. She is morally indistinguishable from the competent richy- bichy Epifania — the MilHonairess. Each of them " has the vitality to make her instincts imperious." Each of them is an irrational appetite going after what it wants. Joan's actions look *' higher," but 164 SHAW in a Life Force world that is only a relative impres- sion. In fact, Epifania, with her business sense, her energy and her talent for cutting out superfluous parts in the process of production, may yet come to be honoured as a superior type of female. Already the Joans who believe in God are being liquidated, and the Epifanias who believe in Efficiency promoted to executive positions in the new anti-Christian states. This, of course, is horrible. But there is no use in running away from facts when they are unpleasant, or from hard thinking when it leads to curious conclu- sions. When a man starts with an impersonal Force enmeshed in matter, he winds up — if he is honest — with a pulpy world churned up by puppets who know neither good nor evil, nor anything but their own darkened wills. No more need be said here of the playwright and the New Protestantism. It has now plenty of devotees and Shaw touches truth when he calls himself " the iconographer of the religion of my time." He has been its champion, but no one sees better its fatal weakness — its insoluble problem. He tries unceasingly for a solution. He tried in the Preface on Bosses (1935) but he got no further than in the Preface to the Sanity of Art (1907) when he wrote : I know no harder practical question than how much selfishness one ought to stand from a gifted person for the sake of his gifts, or on the 165 SHAW chance of his being right in the long run. The Superman will certainly come like a thief in the night, and be shot at accordingly ; but we cannot leave our property wholly undefended on that account. On the other hand, we cannot ask the Superman simply to add a higher set of virtues to current respectable morals ; for he is undoubtedly going to empty a good deal of respectable morality out like so much dirty water, and replace it by new and strange customs, shedding old obligations, and accepting new and heavier ones. Every step of his progress must horrify conventional people ; and if it were possible for even the most superior man to march ahead all the time, every pioneer of the march towards the Superman would be crucified . You never can tell — with Supermen. 1 66 CHAPTER VII Shaw is right. It is impossible in the dark cul-de-sac of Creative Evolution to know what to do about Supermen, Superwomen and Bosses generally. In that half-lit gloom, a man never can tell who's who, or even what's what. But why should he remain there ? Why should he stay amid the topsy-turvy jigsaw if he claims to be a freethinker ? Why should freethinkers cling to outworn dogmas which tie them down ? Surely their datum should be Freedom, and not the dogma of the Propagation of Species wrapped up in some odds and ends stolen from the Christian wardrobe. Who will write that great book — Fun among the Freethinkers ? Professor Bury might have turned it out a few years ago, but he missed his chance. He took the freethinkers seriously, and wrote A History of Free Thought, 600 b.c.-a.d. 1912, instead. He set out valiantly to be the champion of thought, but that, as Shaw saw long ago, is a very slippery business. Many a man sets out bravely to blow thought's trumpet, and winds up sadly on his own horn ; but even that is better than falling in at the tail end of an Orange procession as Bury did. He meant well, but he only succeeded in showing how 167 SHAW elegantly a man of vast learning could say *' To hell with the Pope," and how evenly he could match the steady thump of the Belfast drum as he swung from " the lurid policy of coercion which the Christian Church adopted " to "a velocity which would have seemed diabolical to the slaves of the medieval Church. He simply ate the spiritual food which Gibbon offered in an uncritical mood. The freethinkers have failed thought. They don't think hard enough or freely enough, and they can't keep straight. They go off on sidelines of their own, scofhng at their pet antipathies or else trying to make a new religion out of their pet fancies. Take Herbert Spencer, one of the best of the old brigade. He went his way trying to scatter the mists and get down to something solid . He quarried back through time and space in the regular way, till he could get no further, and then said that beyond lay the Unknowable. He decided reasonably enough that there was no use trying to get any information about a God that was unknowable, and then followed this up, not so reasonably, with " therefore theology is a self-destructive science." And then he began to set out First Principles, showing conclusively that the Unknowable was in general orderly and beneficent, and in particular that It had the best interests of the English upper middle classes at heart; It disliked militarism and doted on industrialism ; It was, in fact, rather like Herbert Spencer. All this went on chapter after chapter, and the cry 1 68 SHAW was taken up by Ramsden and the rest of them without even a smile ; till Shaw came along in a gale of laughter, and single-handed set out to free the public mind from the bondage of Spencer and Tyndall, and others less gifted, who were busily scuttling the ship of thought under the impression that they were sailing it towards the Great Awaken- ing. But then, instead of being content with his obvious job of mental masseur — instead of letting that magnificent analytic gift rip into all the fakes of the age to our dismay and delight — instead of sticking to the things he could do so well — he took up theology and went headlong down the same trap as Herbert Spencer. With no capacity for abstract generalisa- tion, with a knowledge of science only surpassed in superficiality by his knowledge of Christianity, with the eagerness and innocence of a child, he plunged into a reformation campaign on behalf of a growing synthetic God called the Life Force. It might just as well be called Shaw. It is incalculable, it seeks beauty and truth, it works by trial and error, it makes mistakes and it is not in the least ashamed of being inconsistent. In the exercise of these attri- butes it has produced an irrational universe which it ignores in its preoccupation with a speck called the earth where it fluked into self-consciousness {via the giraflfe) , and where, after a series of unsuc- cessful eflforts at social organisation, it has been greatly encouraged by the success of its most recent experiment in Russia. 169 SHAW What chance has thought of freedom once it gets tangled up in this maze of home-made theology ? What is the use of throwing out water, however dirty, to drink from a spring befouled at its very source by a Power impersonal but purposeful ? And how can thought keep calm and collected when it looks facts starkly in the face, and finds that the said Power, with all eternity to experiment in, has only within human memory managed to replace buttons by zip fasteners ? Yet this Power — this Life Force — is the datum of the outstanding nineteenth-twentieth century freethinker. He claims that his creed is based on science, and has spent a lifetime trying to get people to found their institutions on " a genuinely scientific natural history" (Prefaces^ p. 703). He wants sound ideas to " survive and be added to the body of ascertained knowledge we call Science " {Prefaces, p. 6 1 3) . There is evidently a frightful mess somewhere. Free thinking, which should be a glorious, uncramped, out-thrust of the mind, has, for evolution worshippers, become a sort of mental debauchery on a Life Force treadmill. A modern freethinker is about as free as a freewheel, it moves about a fixed centre and turns only in one way — away from facts, away from common sense, away from reality. There is one sound idea which has now survived for nearly a century and shows every sign of surviving for ever ; but those who adore the Life Force reject it. It was " added to the body of ascertained 170 SHAW knowledge we call science " before Shaw was born, and has slowly but surely gained such a commanding position that all old laws acknowledge it or perish, and all new laws bow to it before admission. The ordinary man knows this law so well that he doesn't notice it. He relies on it to make things hot or keep them cool just as he relies on the law of gravitation to keep things in place when he uses a paperweight. Engineers find the idea infinitely reliable and call it the second law of thermodynamics, but this need not disturb the layman. He knows, just as well as any engineer, that the sitting-room fire will go out if he doesn't put on coal, and that his coffee gets cooler as he reads his morning paper ; even if he uses a thermos jug or a radium quilted cosy, he isn't fool enough to think that he can keep his coffee warm for ever. He may know that he could heat the coffee by stirring it, but, if he does, he also knows that he would be fighting a losing battle. The engineer says that the universe tends towards thermal equilibrium, or, if he wants to be frank, that material energy is fizzling out. We are living in a world where things get colder and colder. This straightforward summing up is as good a way as another of regarding the most reliable and inexorable of scientific laws ; it is the next thing to omnipotent ; it governs all actions connected with food, clothing and shelter ; every ship, every train, every motor-car, every aeroplane, depends upon it from minute to minute and day to day. 171 SHAW And it is perfectly dependable ; it seems a nuisance to those who are trying to keep the soup warm, but they must remember that they could never have warmed the soup at all if the kitchen stove had not been willing to get cooler, and let them also remember that what they lose on the soup they make up on the ices. Everyone believes in the second law of thermodynamics whether he knows it or not ; he is as sure of it as he is that the sun will rise to-morrow morning, and continue to part with some of its heat to keep him alive ; it is the most certain of all the laws of science ; all pheno- mena move smoothly to its bidding, nowhere has a single event been found to conflict with it, all movement, all energy, all warmth, all physical life, is in its keeping ; it has a right to rule the domain of science which no sensible man can question. To thrust it aside is to thrust science aside, but to acknowledge it is to ruin evolution as a religion. There is here an obvious dilemma, but it does not seem to worry either the Communists or the Racialists or even British biologists who face both ways for the Advancement of Science. Neither Russians nor Germans nor the others seem to be so fully aware of the dilemma as Shaw, but he, as will be seen in the next chapter, appears to be able to face both ways with comparative comfort. The evolution worshippers try to evade the law by refusing to admit facts and be ruled by reason. They argue that it is not right to apply universally 172 SHAW the conclusions reached from laboratory experiments or from observations limited to the surface of the earth. This would be fair enough if they stuck to their guns. But they daren't. They argue this in one breath and in the next they extol Galileo and Newton for jumping to conclusions about the universe from observations on a pendulum and a falling apple. And then after a few jibes at the ecclesiastics who tried to obscure the work of Galileo they come back and do their little best to obscure the splendid work of Kelvin. They object to the conclusion that the universe requires a real God to keep it going, because it is derived from manoeuvres with a gas engine, a thermometer, a jug of water, a balance and some weights ; and yet at the same time they are working with a foot rule, a few fossils, some pigeons and a dozen sliced guinea pigs to demonstrate the existence of an eternal evolutionary God enmeshed in matter and for ever at the mercy of its unintelligence. They miss the ever-growing glory of Kelvin's synthesis as it spreads out from the laboratory, calmly taking all natural facts in its stride, and smoothly ordering every phenomena it meets. And they patch and twist Darwin's theory into an unrecognisable complexity as they feverishly try to make it fit the new knowledge which daily threatens to wreck the version they repaired only yesterday. They want things both ways, but they must eventually face facts and common sense, which unite to say that things are cooling down, 173 SHAW that the material world is dying ; that, if this law be not accepted as universally applicable, science has no authority even in its chosen sphere, and there is no ascertained knowledge, no evolution, no truth, no beauty, nothing but Man — as Ampere said — drowning helplessly in his own spit. On the other hand, if the law be accepted it is possible to find room for freedom, love, order and all other things Man cares for, there is even room for evolutionary theories, but evolutionary dogmas, evolutionary rehgions, and the Life Force God must go. All this was as well established in 1851 as it is to-day. But the scientific journalists, and even some of the scientists, were so busy with Lamarck, Darwin, Huxley and Haeckel, that they ignored the other great team — Carnot, Clausius, Joule and Kelvin. It was easier to learn to spell " proto- plasm " and " metabolism," and later, even " maso- chism," than to grasp the principles of physics. In 1887 Kelvin wrote : " I had the great pleasure for many years, beginning just forty years ago, of making experiments along with Joule, which led to some important results in the theory of thermodynamics. This is indeed one of the most valuable recollections of my life, and is indeed as valuable a recollection as I can conceive in the possession of any man interested in science," but people carefully ignored science when it affirmed the necessity for a Creator as the new physical synthesis did. They could not get enough of it 174 SHAW a few years later, when the new biological synthesis affirmed the opposite. Business was good, Man- chester—Joule's town — was getting ahead, there were fortunes to be made in ships and railways ; to the twinkling amusement of the stars, and the tumultuous laughter of the sun, men fell down in adoration before the steam engine, and up rose a mighty chorus : O Perfectly Reversible, We're very far from Thee. Lead on Thy slaves coercible To Great Efficiencee. Gathered about rocks and fossils and the internal organs of rabbits there were other groups of wor- shippers, rapidly growing unbalanced by the wonders unfolded to them, and forgetting that if science is not one, it is nothing. Word spread out, not so much from them as from their literary hangers- on, that Nature made itself, that miracles couldn't happen, and that the world was getting better and better. But there was no publicity at all for the other scientists, who, sticking closely to facts and straight thinking, were showing in the clearest possible way that material things couldn't create themselves, that Nature itself was a miracle, and that the world was slowly and surely running down. Science, smiling like the Cheshire cat, offered its devotees two vehicles. One was marked " Going Up " — a ramshackle conveyance with some essential links missing. The other was solid as a rock and 175 SHAW had everything spick and span, but was marked " Going Down." The joke was obvious enough ; but it had also hidden depths, for all the tools needed to start Bus No. i and keep it running were manu- factured and stored on Bus No. 2. There was a tremendous rush for the first Bus. Social Democrats, Anarchists, Marxists, Psycho- analysts, Uplifters, Lords and Ladies, Tired Business Men, Novelists, Dramatists and Poets offering paeans to the Life Force, all clambered aboard and started off at full speed. At least, the wheels began to go round at a great rate. Bus No. 2 was unpopular, for apart from the disconcerting sign, it contained only one non -upholstered compartment marked " For Hard Thinkers Only." Still it was boarded by a few audacious spirits — Michael Faraday dropped in for a little while to say good-bye to Clerk Maxwell ; Gregor Mendel Worked away by himself in a quiet corner. . . . The first Bus rattled away like mad till somewhere between the discovery of radium, in 1898, and the Treaty of Versailles, in 19 19, there were a series of smashes, and the passengers were finally thrown out, to find that the Bus hadn't budged an inch, and that Science, gradually vanishing and smiling more widely than ever, was offering them a new con- traption like a merry-go-round. The signs Up and Down were also vanishing, and a new sign — Going as you Please — was coming into view. The new roundabout was called Relativity, and there 176 SHAW were all sorts of seats in it, except Right seats. Passengers could think anything at all, provided they thought as they pleased, and didn't trouble too much about the real common-sense world. Thought was too hard a mistress. That was the core of the trouble. Man deserted her and sought more pliant and accommodating partners. He lured the lissom Intuition from her natural home, and went dancing with her towards the mountain- top . . . and suddenly found himself alone with the wild-eyed infant, Contradiction, clinging to him like a young octopus. Science split first into two, and then into ten thousand parts. The intelligentsia switched from " Every man his own priest " to " Every man his own scientist," and Metaphysical Vitalism was born. It works like this. The M.V. takes his stand on his favourite facts, and appeals for public support as a metabiological scientist and modern thinker. In due time an opponent collects enough conflicting facts to make mincemeat of the new thought, and just as he is doing this in a perfectly decent and rational way, he finds that the M.V. has bolted from reason and reality to his inner intuitional tabernacle, and is calling out in a voice charged with emotion : (i) that he is full of exultant resigna- tion, or (2 a) that he is proudly defiant of the tramp- ling march of unconscious power, or (2b) Down with Aristotle, or (3) Do let us be nice to one another, or (4) Down through the ages intolerance 177 SHAW has ever dug the grave of truth, or (5) Wretch ! Viper ! ! Muck raker !!!... There are as many defences against facts as there are Metaphysical VitaHsts, but they are all aHke in their flight from reason, and their appeal to emotion. Shaw's counter to Kelvin was a song and dance to the tune — Away with Melancholy, trust the Life Force. {Pen Portraits and Reviews ^ p. 165.) The old science was founded on faith in the uniformity of Nature, or in other words, the dogma of the GOODNESS OF God. The new science of Bus No. I started from the dogma of the Propagation of Species. The trouble did not begin there either, for the split in science was brewing from the time when real faith began to evaporate, and Newton began to turn Unitarian because he couldn't find an equation for the Trinity. The drying-up process was slow, and science was able to live on the savings of the past while it advanced by leaps and bounds towards the twentieth century. Then the really mad part of the story started. Scientific laws had been gradually removed from their natural founda- tion and based on the notion that all events were entirely " caused " by other events. A Scotchman had pointed out that this was nothing but a hunch, and scientists, rather flummoxed and unwilHng to retrace their steps, had to dignify the hunch by giving it names like " vital intuition " and " inex- pugnable belief" Science, running away from metaphysics, continued its headlong charge faster 178 SHAW and faster, but now a little bit like a horse on roller skates. Not only were the laws lifted from their natural resting-place, but — here the story gets madder still — the book-bred brigade, that had learnt a few of the laws by heart, began to use them as pickaxes to remove the foundations altogether. They spread abroad the new faith that a real Creator was unnecessary, and that an imaginary Creator, trampling and blundering along, was the only God fit for the modern mind. The old idea of a God that saves men was discarded for the new one of men that save God. The inner circle began " disencumbering Christianity from the accretions which deform it,'* and " redistilling the eternal spirit of religion." Even genuine scientists became affected, and some are now to be found patting Nature reproachfully on the head and telling her that she is not very Efficient. For instance (see JVaturCy June i6th, 1934, p. 897) : The protection for the embryos is admirable, but almost over-ingenious since the object in view — the propagation of the species — is some- what defeated when so many good seedlings must eventually perish. This is science of the twentieth century ; the facts are admitted but they are " defeating the object in view." An old-fashioned scientist would have said, " We must alter our opinion about the object in view," and an ordinary man with normal common 179 SHAW sense would say that Nature is on her knees to him, begging him, beseeching him, to notice that she is a prodigal mother ; that she does everything on a lavish, magnificent scale ; that she hates " efficiency" ; that she throws the very energy of the sun wildly in all directions into space, so that the one tiny morsel on which man is born may be nourished and give forth wheat, coal, and everything he needs in reckless abundance. This view may be only a provisional hypothesis, but it fits the facts ; it is the normal view which a man would take if he hadn't received a modern secular-sectarian education, and if he got a chance to look at the phenomena about him sensibly, but it is no longer scientific because everything must be trimmed to fit the dogma of the Propagation of Species. Common sense is no longer of any use. Nature is defeating the object she has in view ! She is, in fact, " bad form," but now that this has been pointed out in a great scientific journal. Nature will presumably have to mend her ways and be governed as nearly as possible as we might suppose her to govern herself were she in her right mind. It is not easy for an evolution-obsessed generation to see that Christianity is all of a piece, and that it is impossible to get ahead by taking over the parts of it that attract, combining them with the latest scientific news, and calling the result the religion of the twentieth century. Shaw can't see it even yet. He said in 1910 : 180 SHAW To me God does not yet exist ; but there is a creative force constantly struggling to evolve an executive organ of god-like knowledge and power. ... To my mind unless we conceive God as engaged in a continual struggle to surpass himself— as striving at every birth to make a better man than before — we are conceiving nothing better than an omnipotent snob. (Letter to Count Tolstoy, quoted in Henderson's Bernard Shaw, p. 529.) and he was still at it by proxy in 1932 : *^ My own beUef is that he is not all he sets up to be. He's not properly made and finished yet. There's somethin' in us that's dhrivin' at him, and somethin' out of us that's dhrivin' at him, that's certain ; and the only other thing that's certain is that the somethin' makes plenty of mistakes in thryin' to get there. ..." Nothing would ever persuade him that God w^as anything more solid and satisfactory than an eternal, but as yet unfulfilled, purpose. {Adventures of Black Girl, p. 55.) This may be very convincing to men over fifty, but children want to know why they should care about a Force which doesn't care about them, and why they should trust a God that is still experi- menting with matter and still making mistakes — earthquakes, for instance — after having had all eternity to practise in. Why should a boy of spirit make himself the slave of a deity who may have a 181 SHAW cosmic sneeze any day, and send the solar system to smithereens (see Chapter X, *' Exploding Stars '* in any modern Astronomy) . The God of Creative Evolution can't stand on its own legs one minute before any sensible boy's curiosity. The God of Creative Evolution crumples up daily and Shaw has had to borrow from Christianity all along the line, the wherewithal to prop up his deity and make it presentable. He launched the Life Force in the first place by taking the first and last articles of the Apostles' Creed and thinning them down into forms which couldn't possibly startle anyone. Then he brought old-fashioned words and phrases into the evolu- tionary swim with such word-play as — " Conscience is the most powerful of all the instincts, and the love of God is the most powerful of all the passions " {The Christian Commonwealth, July 20th, 191 o). Later he dressed up his deity in scraps torn from St. Paul and St. Thomas Aquinas ; as in the Epilogue to Back to Methuselah when Lilith tells how Man and Woman : Press on to the goal of redemption from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force. Only the year before last (1935) he borrowed the Day of Judgment ; but the most audacious borrow- ing of all was done when he kidnapped St. Joan to exploit her as a sample of supercharged Life Force 182 SHAW groping its way towards " higher things '* . . . and yet, in a sense, it may also be said that St. Joan borrowed Shaw to write a play in her honour and in justice to her age — but she let him write the Preface and the Epilogue himself ! Here again is that elusiveness, that duality, which evades analysis. He borrows, but he gives back . . . and then takes away again. He raises his hands in reverence, and puts his fingers to his nose in a single gesture. He bases his religion on science, and then makes his science a laughing-stock by grouping phenomena into ** facts " and " mistakes." He travels with the crowd on Bus No. i, and yet he is not of it. He is a freethinker, but he does not delude himself like the other passengers that he is ruled by reason. When he falls back on his emotional hunch and says. Trust the Life Force, he is not, like others, beating a retreat, but re-entrench- ing himself at his starting-point. He knows that the others are fooling themselves by finding reasons for what they have already decided to believe or disbelieve ; and his mischievous sallies on this point fill them with speechless indignation. Shaw began by kicking reason out of the front door and then he rushed to the back door to let her in. He can't get on without her, but he likes to pretend he can by admitting her under new names, like " conscience " and " self-control." He wrestles mightily and unceasingly with her, moving so swiftly that no one has ever been able 183 SHAW to label him " This side up." An unwary opponent once tried to get the better of him with " But, Mr. Shaw, you speak Hke two separate persons," and was dumbfounded by the reply, " Why only two ? " He has never abandoned the stand he took up in the Quintessence of Ibsenism, where he argued that " the will " has the first word and the last word, and that reason is only so much mechanism for subordinate uses. " Only the other day our highest boast was that we were reasonable human beings. To-day we laugh at that conceit and see ourselves as wilful creatures." That was when he was thirty- three. At thirty-nine he was still able to write, on p. 323 in The Sanity of Art, " life is the satisfaction of a passion in us of which we can give no rational account whatever," and " the setting up of reason above will is a damnable error," but this was after he had hobbled the will on p. 321 with: "The moral evolution of the social individual is from submission and obedience as economisers of effort and responsibility, and safeguards against panic and incontinence, to wilfulness and self-assertion made safe by reason and self-control," and " With- out high gifts of reason and self-control, that is, without common sense, no man dares yet trust himself out of the school of authority." In 192 1 after the Hang-the-Kaiser election and the Treaty of Versailles, he put on still heavier hobbles with : 184 SHAW THE GREATEST OF THESE IS SELF-CONTROL As there is no place in Darwinism for free will, or any other sort of will, the Neo-Dar- winists held that there is no such thing as self- control. Yet self-control is just the one quality of survival value which circumstantial selection must invariably and inevitably develop in the long run. . . . What is self-control ? It is nothing but a highly developed vital sense, dominating and regulating the mere appetites. To overlook the very existence of this supreme sense ; to miss the obvious inference that it is the quahty that distinguishes the fittest to survive ; to omit, in short, the highest moral claim of Evolutionary Selection : all this, which the Neo-Darwinians did in the name of Natural Selection, showed the most pitiable want of mastery of their own subject, the dullest lack of observation of the forces upon which Natural Selection works. {Prefaces, p. 504.) The wrestling match never ceases. In the last passage, reason seems to be winning hands down, but one never can tell with Shaw. She may be winded any minute by a jab like " Conscience is the most powerful of all the instincts," or paralysed by a sudden twist like " We still have the silly habit of talking or thinking as if intellect were a mechanical process and not a passion." It is impossible to follow the ups and downs of this contest, for, as can be seen, and as will be shown more clearly in the next 185 SHAW chapter, he makes his own meanings for words as he goes along. The " will " appears to be sometimes an undefinable mystery, sometimes one of the sensitive appetites, sometimes intuition, sometimes what people call the heart, but never the rational appetite. This being so, he is on firm ground when he says that the setting up of reason over " will " is a damnable error. It certainly is. It has been responsible for most of the heresies which have afflicted Christendom ; the rest being due to the diaboHcal error of setting up " will " over reason. Shaw is the only man of note who has ever been able to take a hand in both heresies simultaneously, or at least on alternate days, and it must make him feel like a lot of different persons — but two is enough. He is perfectly reasonable about everything but reason, and a great freethinker about everything but thought ; still, she will beat him in the end and grind to dust everything in him that does not pass fairly through her mill. Some minds may be temporarily paralysed by the strain of trying to assess all human faculties in terms of " survival value," but this fashion will pass. Or, if it does not, and if men will not be taught by common sense and reason that Bus No. i never brings its passengers anywhere, they will inevitably find themselves being taught by the brutal and primitive process of trial and error. 1 9 1 4- 1 9 1 8 was only a trial in a tea-cup ; the next event, for which preparations are now being so feverishly made in Europe, wiU be an error on a 186 SHAW new scale — a mighty smash if it comes off— but such smashes are all in the day's work for the Life Force. For the Life Force Bus is still on the road. It has been amalgamated with the Merry-go-round, and become a Phantom Bus for Materialistic Mystics. Within it, survival- value is the only value, and trial-and-error the only test of truth. It is curious that Shaw should be so absolutely wrong and yet so relatively right ; it is as though he had been born aboard that Bus and, in his indomitable efforts to make it into a true home for men, had revealed its absurdity. What passengers it carries ! Some try to travel with it, keeping one foot on the running board and the other on solid ground ; some, in priestly robes, try to Christianise the Bus with one hand while they Modernise their churches with the other ; some try to grab the wheel and drive anywhere, just for the sake of driving ; some try, humourlessly, to drive onward and upward ; some try to collect the guns and keep order ; but the vast majority say " we've only one life to live " and make for the seats with the most luscious looking-uphols- tery. Shaw, the playwright, has had his eye on the whole unwicked-unholy cargo of them for fifty years, and has given us a wonderful picture of the antics of one elegant group as they flirt and fiddle in a cosy corner. It is called Heartbreak Home. It is curious, too, to see how some of his dreams have come true. The Supermen have arrived and 187 SHAW every step of their progress is horrifying conventional people, respectable morality has been emptied out and replaced by new and strange customs, marriage has been modernised, kings have been kicked out, old obligations have been shed. It is, as Shaw said in 1897, impossible to make omelettes without breaking eggs, but since then eggs have been smashed by the million all over Europe and where are the omelettes ? In Russia ? In Germany ? Or perhaps in Spain ? It is easy to see the Life Force at work in its own peculiar way on these fronts, and there are plenty of crushed shells on its track, but what has it brought forth that a free man with hope in his heart cares to eat ? It is worth considering some of these terrible attempts at omelette-making. It is difficult to get reliable information from Russia but it may be assumed that M. Andre Gide, who has been studying conditions there, would not be easily misled nor willing to make things appear worse than they are. It is well to remember here, that Shaw and Webb see in the Russian experiment the partial reaUsation of their dearest hopes of the 'eighties, and the practical demonstration of the value of their Life Force (or Social Organism) teaching. Webb has recently written a book to show how splendidly the Communist experiment is progressing, and Shaw puts on his most beautifully tinted spectacles when he writes of the wonderful work of the Soviets : " Now Russia has shot ahead of all the Powers in 188 SHAW combining an intense public activity with an exten- sion of popular initiative and individual freedom beyond the power of workers under Liberal Capital- ism ever to conceive " (G.B.S. in G. K's Weekly^ March 21st, 1935). M. Gide, summing up in 1937 what he actually observed in Russia, says that nowhere in the world is " the spirit less free, more humiliated, more terrorised, more enslaved." Or take the facts and judge for yourself. Read the Preface to The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles and see how a man who all his life has fought for humanity against cruelty and bestiality can allow the Life Force belief to steel his heart and cloud his mind, as he writes to defend Russian terrorism and excuse mass butcheries. And then read some reliable report of the recent execution of the group of outstanding army officers and try to assess the value of this latest outburst of egg-breaking. Is it a glorious demonstration of the advance of the human spirit or is it something fiendish ? Is the Soviet chorus of demanding the death of the " poisonous pygmies " and calling for " a cur's death for curs " a dignified accompaniment to the administration of justice ? Is the outpouring of the Bolshevist poet laureate Biedny : " We are ashamed of the mothers who bred such dirty dogs. These curs have poked their muzzles into the Fascist food trough " — and all the rest of it, likely to raise the standard of Russian literature ? These are points on which the normal man is just as 189 SHAW competent to give a useful opinion as any literary genius. And, even on the " survival-value " theory, it is the normal man who will in the long run decide whether the omelettes are eatable. The way of the Life Force in Germany is not so very different. The rulers there use internment camps instead of explosive bullets, but they are equally insistent on replacing the Trinity by the State, and, to that end, are waging a strong cam- paign to smash ancient beliefs and produce a national sentiment which is simply the New Protes- tantism in a politically practicable form. In Russia and Spain the Life Force works in a rough-and- ready, slaughter-house way but in cultured Germany it is necessary to garnish the omelettes a little, and, when serving them, to use some of the religious phraseology to which the people are accustomed. Listen to Herr Hitler's speech of March, 1936 : My German compatriots, there is very much which we have to make good before our own history and before our Lord God. Once His grace was upon us ; and we were not worthy to keep it. Providence withdrew its protection from us, and our people were put down, put down deeper perhaps than any people before. In this dire need we learned to pray once more. We learned to respect one another : we believed again in the virtues of a people : we tried again to be better. So there arose a new community, and this people of 190 SHAW to-day can no more be compared with the people that lies behind us. This is the usual attempt of the New Protestant to draw a cheque on the Christian account by- presenting the credentials of" grace " and " prayer " and even a " Lord God." Behind it there is nothing but a pantheistic vagueness, a weird racial Power, the Life Force over again — this time wearing a German mask, and making ingratiating overtures to the Aryan race with promises of bigger and better omelettes. Let Russia or France or England or the prisoners in the internment camp stand in the way of this emerging God at their peril. It knows nothing but the German State and cares for nothing but its interests. In England the line of division between the New Protestantism and the Old is becoming more and more blurred. The new religion is making headway in a peacefully penetrative way and so far there has been no open conflict between the omelette makers and the traditionalists who hold so tena. ciously to the old beliefs. But last year the world was started by a spectacular challenge from the Life Force to the most ancient of EngHsh institutions. It did not look Hke that, in fact it seemed to be quite a romance and not at all like a threat from the new culture to the old ; but the Life Force has many masks, and always accommodates itself to national sentiment ; in England it is known as the Modern Spirit. 191 SHAW This statement may seem strange. It may be argued that the Russian Life Force is savage and the German Life Force arrogant, and that neither has anything in common with this well-mannered Modern Spirit which moves so easily in the best circles and is so well dressed and respectable. Of course it is. Where could more highly respectable citizens be found than the Englishmen who launched the evolutionary doctrines which cut at the very root of the beliefs on which all lasting British institutions are based ? Or, if nineteenth-century writers are supposed to be out of date, take the views of a modern young Englishman who is neither savage nor arrogant. It is just a standard sample of what hundreds of other honest intelligent young English- men with literary gifts and no observable critical faculty, are repeating like children repeating a lesson : "In the last two centuries with ever increasing acceleration this natural rhythm, this static conception of life have been breaking down. . . . The old agricultural-religious basis is crumbling away, a totally new sort of life is coming into being through a profound revolution, in which the World War was no more than a bloody and reactionary episode. Most of our standards and beliefs and institutions seem obsolete." It is impossible not to sympathise with him as he tries to fight his way out of the mess into which three centuries of twisted thinking have landed him, but there is no use pretending that this sample of the Modern Spirit 192 SHAW is anything but plain continental Life Force, or, if preferred, a redistillation of the Metaphysical Vitalism of Bdick to Methuselah. It is old-fashioned evolution dope not very different from that served out by Rosenberg and Hitler, as may be seen by comparing it with the quotations on pages 40 and 190. It is the old Life Force story over again, warmed up with the energy of youth and crisped into neat paragraphs in John 0' London's Weekly (June i ith, 1937) . The story is always the same — the old beliefs are no longer any use, the old law is no longer binding, the man of to-day is not as the man of yesterday, a new species is being created — and how can a young fellow resist when a spell-binding leader, or a wonderful Inner Voice, tells him that his children are going to be gods ? This is always the promise in that well-worn story, but it never comes off ; the children are always slaves ; and if those who still have faith in the old beliefs and the old law do not stand by them and fight for them, the new species of enslaved men will be created in England as surely as in Russia or in Germany. They will not notice the process. It will be presented to them as a wider and larger life — " life '* being pictured as some type of omelette attractive to the national palate. The Inner Light will be deflected and dimmed and brought down to shine on some scheme of social organisation, or production, or credit reform, or education, or armament, which, however stupid or unreal, can usually be made to 193 "" SHAW look attractive for a time in that wonderful glow. " If our political ruin is to come it will be effected by ardent reformers and supported by enthusiastic patriots as a series of necessary steps in our progress." Isn't Shaw wonderful ? The Revolutionist's Handbook is even more up-to-date to-day than it was in 1902. The slaves don't know they are slaves ; in Russia the Sovieteers believe that they are escaping capital- istic exploitation, in Germany the Nazis walk with a firm step and their chins up. Do they feel cramped and confined ? Not a bit of it ; they smile at England's effete condition, and its fumbling efforts to keep the shabby idol of democracy in repair. And on the " concept of evolution onward and upward " are they not right ? By what authority does the Englishman, full of the Modern Spirit, discarding the rules he doesn't like, condemn the foreigner, full of the Life Force, for scrapping the rules which don't suit him ? On what basis do they settle any dispute which arises between them ? And what is to prevent the Life Force from tearing Europe to pieces to find out which of it is right ? But perhaps this is going a little too far. The Englishman is a strange person. He is fond of fancy beliefs in theory, but in practice he likes to stand by the old formulae which have stood so well by him. It makes him feel Modern to have some divorce laws on his statute book, just as it makes him feel broad-minded to have a few bawdy stories his repertoire. But when it comes to action it is 194 SHAW different. He values the formulae, even when he doesn't understand them, and he has Httle use for those who don't stand by them. Perhaps some day he will try to find out where the formulae came from, and be surprised to learn that they are " rationali- sations of experience firmly keyed to reality." And he will learn, too, that the Commonwealth based on big business and the big stick is a sham, and that the only enduring common wealth of man comes from common sense and common creed. And when that day comes ; when the pioneers of knowledge regain their faith and their sense of reality, and Science is again one ; when all that remains of the glamorous reHgion of Creative Evolution is buried under the dull respectability of a solidly entrenched hypothesis ; and when the Life Force under a new name is playing hell with a new generation of intelligentsia ; some day, sooner or later, the clarity of vision which went to the making of those plays and prefaces will get its due, and they may yet stand as a permanent record of the period of the evolutionary nightmare, when so many lived in a world of muddled emotionalism labelled mysticism, and self-splurges labelled creative activity; a world of magnificent, meaningless enthusiasms, and splendid, blind generosities ; a world with a welcome for everything but reality, and tolerance for everything but plain, hard thinking — the world of Heartbreak Bus. 195 CHAPTER VIII It will be clear now why Life Force worshippers are in difficulties, and why some of them are deserting science and others are trying to twist reahty into shapes which will suit their brand of modern rehgion or mathematics. They have various ways of dealing with the contradictions and confusions which came into the open when they turned their backs on Kelvin, but none has dealt with the problem so simply as Shaw. He adopts shock tactics which have so far dumbfounded his opponents. He doesn't dodge the contradictions ; he accepts them, and is not in the least afraid to contradict himself in pubHc. It is on just this point that his followers chide him, and say peevishly that he is deserting them when they are really deserting him. They agree to bow down to Irrational Power, and yet they baulk at the first inconsistency they meet. Inconsistencies are really Life Force trade marks, and the bold way in which they show up in Shaw's work must delight the heart of any reasonable man. They are like the anomaHes in a really good detective story — they all check out in the end against the central anomaly. The Napoleon scene in Back to Methuselah and the Epilogue in St, Joan, and such other pieces 196 SHAW of anti-climax are essential to the plays that contain them. The Life Force philosophy reduces every situation to absurdity, and Shaw has to abandon argument and let the characters behave wildly so that under cover of farce he may get back to sanity. Minor absurdities are required to balance the main absurdity. Millions take shelter from facts behind the comfortable-looking behef in eternal evolution, and then sheepishly refuse to recognise the curious consequences in which they become involved. Shaw gathers the oddities to himself, and with innocent audacity makes play out of them. He hugs his contradictions and magically turns them into an international reputation for anti-climax. He assumes that there is no truth and then spends his life hunting for it. He teaches that instit^itions cramp the human spirit, and then tries to build up institutions which will free it. He says God doesn't yet exist and then sends out a Black Girl to search for him. He says that his religion is based on science and then disowns science. He says he has found the true religion and says that there is no true religion. Why, only the other day, in a Broadcast to Schools, he scoffed at the precept that men should love their enemies and the next minute he was advising the pupils to treat those they disHked as they would their best friends ( The Listener^ June 23rd, 1937). It is these clashes with himself that provoke people into writing books about him and his views. Mrs. 197 SHAW Le Mesurier was so exasperated by The Intelligent Woman^s Guide to Socialism that she sat down and wrote The Socialist Woman's Guide to Intelligence. She says : , j^ His book has provoked me past silence. ' K I have put before my readers as clearly as I % & could some of the flaws, fallacies and incon- sistencies with which it seems to me to bristle. Ul It is amazing that even an ordinarily clever man, much less one with a super-brain like ^ Mr. Shaw's, should have perpetrated seriously some of the remarks he has allowed himself to make. She should have remembered his own warning that " even the cleverest man will believe what he wishes to believe, in spite of all the facts and all the text- books in the world." She spends 200 pages in showing up his various changes of front, with scrupulous quotation and reference, but in the end she seems to grow weary of the hopelessness of her task : If the book is picked up at random and a few pages read here and there, it makes stimu- lating and provocative reading. But when a serious attempt is made to follow a consistent argument from one chapter to another, the trail is blurred and all seems vague and confused. . . . Mr. Shaw leaps from theme to theme with bewildering rapidity, and one is left baffled, as after watching the zigzag path of flashes of 198 SHAW lightning across a dark sky, with an impression of dazzKng brilHance but no sense of direction. . . . One thing is certain, and that is, that whatever has been written about the book here or elsewhere, is, in a sense, bound to be wrong ! Because, however accurately Mr. Shaw may have been quoted and summarised, an indus- trious reader is sure to be able to delve into some recess of this mine of words and discover that he has also said something quite different. Then listen to Mr. John Strachey in the Spectator, November 6th, 1936 : Mr. Shaw is wrong. He is wrong, not because he disagrees with me, but because he disagrees with every other instructed Socialist and Communist who has ever written on the subject. Of course, Mr. Shaw was at liberty to redefine the words in a new sense, if he had explained that this was what he was doing. But he has never done this, and has thus caused very considerable confusion. Or take Father Leslie Walker, S.J. He has been reading The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God, and Shaw's jumpiness about words bothers him. He finds that " science," for instance, has two meanings : science 1 = a spring of purest water, sciences = a source polluted and dangerous, and, like Mrs. Le Mesurier, he is a Httle dazed to find an eminent man contradicting himself with such 199 SHAW energy. He is puzzled and as he says in his Prologue to The Return to God : It is in part because I am puzzled that I am going to write this book. I am sceptical about the fresh-water supply because, in the course of his *' Adventures," Mr. Shaw seems to have done not a little to poison the wells of Science from which he would have me draw. He finds that Shaw is facing both ways, and he seems to think the position unnatural. But what other position is possible for Life Force prophets ? They must always be travelling north and south, always setting out as they are arriving, always gazing at their own backs as they progress round and round the fatal enclosure : fA ^ z _ " z 200 S H A W Shaw's contradictions turn about everything, but mainly about Christianity and sex. He is for ever dealing with them, for ever turning them upside down and inside out — searching. He seems to say at once about each that it is the only thing worth considering, and that it is an absurdity ; he wants them and he wants them wiped out ; they are simultaneously good and evil. A mother with her baby is the most important thing in the world, and love is an illusion to be laughed off the face of the earth : " When we want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither do we turn? To the murder column ; and there we are rarely disap- pointed " {Prefaces^ p. 715). Contradictory urges make him careless. Or rather — ^for he is never careless — they dull his vision. There is no man more scrupulous for the integrity of the written word, yet when he wishes to show that Christ and St. Paul were at odds with one another about marriage, he suddenly begins to read the Bible so blindly that he attributes St. Paul's statements (i Cor. vii) to Jesus, and thus makes his argument bite its own head off {Prefaces, p. 561) . Then, again, when he wants to scoff at love, he looks to La Roche- foucauld for support, and quotes him as saying : " very few people would ever imagine themselves in love if they had never read anything about it " {Prefaces, p. 108), and is so pleased with the mis- quotation that he stores it away and repeats seven years later : " Love did nothing but prove the 201 SHAW soundness of La Rochefoucauld's saying that very few people would fall in love if they never read anything about it " {Prefaces, p. 380). O blind and perverse ! How could anyone believe for a minute that a Frenchman would say anything so idiotic, and how did Shaw come to offer such strange and heavy-handed renderings of the delicious "II y a des gens qui n'auroient jamais ete amoureux s'ils n'avoient jamais entendu parler de I'amour ? " The treatment of love in The Adventures of the Black Girl is even stranger and more perverse. On p. 7 the woman missionary is described as an odd little body who : had settled down in the African forest to teach little African children to lovcj Christ and adore the Gross. She was a born apostle of love 2. At school she had adored one or other of her teachers with an idolatry that was proof against all snubbing, but had never cared much for girls of her own age and standing. At eighteen she began falling in love 3 with earnest clergymen, and actually became engaged to six of them in succession. But when it came to the point, she always broke it off; for these love 4 affairs, full at first of ecstatic happiness and hope, somehow became unreal and eluded her in the end. The clergymen, thus suddenly and unac- countably disengaged, did not always conceal their sense of relief and escape, as if they too had discovered that the dream was only a 202 SHAW dream, or a sort of metaphor by which they had striven to express the real thing, but not itself the real thing. One of the jilted, however, committed suicide ; and this tragedy gave her an extra- ordinary joy. It seemed to take her from a fool's paradise of false happiness into a real region in which intense suffering became transcendent rapture. Here are the clues for this crazy cross-word puzzle : Lovcj = Charity. LovCg = I, 3 or 4. LovCg = Sentimentalising. Love4 = Perverted. It is a strange, frothy, clever, repellent opening, and it seems to have little to do with what follows. But when Christ is brought on the scene it will be found that the motif is repeated and developed. On p. 29 the Black Girl meets " the conjuror," who is repre- sented as a feeble, well-meaning, touchy, ricky-ticky- tavy young man. The Black Girl, full up with Man and Superman, hardly gives him a chance to get in a word edgeways : " I've seen worse kings," said the black girl, " so you need not blush. Well, let you be King Solomon, and let me be the Queen of Sheba, same as in the Bible. I come to you and say that I love you. That means I have come to take possession of you. I come with 203 SHAW the love of a lioness and eat you up, and make you a part of myself. From this time, you will have to think, not of what pleases you, but of what pleases me. I will stand between you and yourself, between you and God. Is not that a terrible tyranny? Love is a devouring thing. Can you imagine heaven with love in it? '* *' In my heaven there is nothing else. What else is heaven but love ? " said the conjuror boldly but uncomfortably. " It is glory. It is the home of God and his thoughts ; there is no biUing and cooing there, no clinging to one another like a tick to a sheep. The missionary, my teacher, talks of love ; but she has run away from all her lovers to do God's work. The whites turn their eyes away from me lest they should love me. There are companies of men and women who have devoted themselves to God's work, but though they call themselves brotherhoods and sisterhoods, they do not speak to one another. " It all gives the curious fleeting impression of love being pursued by distortion and hatred, and yet there is also in it that equally curious redeeming childish quahty which persists through all Shaw's writings. " There's * glory ' for you," says he, just like Humpty-Dumpty : "But 'glory' doesn't mean, *a nice knock- down argument,' " Alice objected. *'When / use a word," Humpty Dumpty 204 SHAW said in rather a scornful tone, '* it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less." " The question is," said Alice, ** whether you can make words mean so many different things. " Shaw himself was apparently rather puzzled by the Adventures of the Black Girl. He tells his readers on p. 59 that he was inspired to write it — that he was, in fact, only a penholder — and he warns them that it may be all nonsense : I know by observation and introspection that the instrument on which the inspiring force plays may be a very faulty one, and may even end like Bunyan in The Holy War, by making the most ridiculous nonsense of his message. But he seems to have no doubt that it is the wish of the Life Force that belief and trust in Christ be wiped out so that the modern State may come into its own, for his last words on p. 74 are : When the question of the existence of Noah's idol is raised on the point, vital to high civilisa- tion, whether our children shall continue to be brought up to worship it and compound for their sins by sacrificing to it, or, more cheaply, by sheltering themselves behind another's sacri- fice to it, then whoever hesitates to bring down the knobkerry with might and main is ludicrously unfit to have any part in the govern- ment of a modern State. The importance of a 205 S H A W message to that effect at the present world crisis is probably at the bottom of my curious and sudden inspiration to write this tale instead of cumbering theatrical literature with another stage comedy. This nightmare view of Christian belief may offend the orthodox, but they must remember that Shaw has been working all his Hfe on inside informa- tion about Christianity gathered prior to 1866, and that his doctrinal age is probably about nine years. The Sunday-school teaching of that period appears to have been very crude— he was taught, for instance, that all Catholics would sizzle in hell — and it is evident from the Adventures that many early mis- conceptions were still flourishing in 1932. It will be hard for many to beHeve that the author of St. Joan remained all his Hfe so immature and uninformed about the essentials of Christian doctrine — but it is a fact — or rather it is an hypothesis which fits the facts. This does not mean that it will fit all the Shaws. For this book is not an attempt to dissect a real man, but an effort to find some key to a set of writings. It makes no pretence to offer a picture of the real Shaw, still less explain him. A botanist doesn't explain a tree — in fact, when he is finished with the root and the sap and the leaves, there is precious little tree left. Still, the leaves are interesting and have a story to tell. Shaw's works must stand by themselves if they are to stand at all, and whatever pitfalls lie in the way of an attempt to 206 SHAW see them and their writer as they may be seen in A,D. 2000, or even A.D. 2,000,000, must be gaily faced. Let there be no bones about this either ; let nothing be lacking that can add to the defiance of this challenge — of behef in a perfectly reliable God and eternal order — to the Shavian creed of eternal con- fusion, with its morahty perpetually in the melting- pot. All that matters, in what is written here, might be written any time by anyone with a set of Shaw's works, a few standard history books, a real world, and some common sense, at his disposal. There is no appeal to anything but the evidence which they offer, and there is no need to turn back when the evidence piles up overv/helmingly to show that those works were produced by a man behind whose beard and bushy eyebrows a child was hiding. There is a fiesh-and-blood Shaw who goes about the world radiating such bracing kindliness that the magazines and newspapers teem with the pleasant, if rather puzzled, references of those who have made personal contact with him. Whether the Shaw who wrote the books is the same Shaw or not, does not matter here ; the whole point is, that they were written by two different persons. It is convenient — saving their presence — to call them George and Bernard, and to visualise one of them as a prophet- at-a-loss, rather ignored by the general public (who ever heard of George Shaw ?) and to think of the other as that Peter Pan, that eternal youth, that popular favourite whose name is a household word. 207 SHAW When these two are at work together, it is very trying. In the second act of Heartbreak House they pose, for a few pages, as Captain Shotover and EUie. To make it hard, Bernard is dressed up as " an ancient but still hardy man with an immense white beard, in a reefer jacket," but he has " a whistle hanging from his neck," which is just right. George comes on demurely as " a pretty girl, slender, fair, and intelHgent looking." To make matters worse, they are incHned to swop places as that earnest dialogue proceeds. It is all rather hard on people who are going to the theatre for a night's relaxation ; but after all, isn't there the burglar and Mrs. Hushabye, and the rum-drinking — oh, there's lots of drollery in that play. Bernard has wonderful vision ; he is a natural observer who gathers material as he goes, and hands it to George to sort out. In a way this is hard on George, for he hasn't the head for such a job ; but he is a great worker, and, under Life Force management, he has arranged the material so that Creative Evolution may be staged as the religion of the twentieth century. The curious thing is that Bernard sometimes comes out in front to take a look at George's God and says that he doesn't think much of either of them. He and Ann agreed that George was just " Talking " — talking through his hat — that time he got himself up as Jack Tanner. Another way of putting all this is to say that George does not think in abstract terms. Instead 208 SHAW of a sequence of thought, he offers a series of vivid pictures, each with a high emotional content and something in common with the one which went before it. He starts off with his conclusion and then goes on in lively fashion to personal applications and particular instances, all bearing progressively on what he wants his readers to believe. The selection is kaleidoscopic and the presentation marvellous ; it is word pageantry as gorgeous as a royal procession, and as hypnotic. It makes some people worshipful, others wild, and a few a little impatient that a man should take so long to grow up. The process is applied to all topics like a formula, and shows little change with passing years : 1903 •• But ordinary men cannot produce really impressive art-works. Those who can are men of genius : that is, men selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an intellectual consciousness of her own instinctive purpose. Accordingly, we observe in the man of genius all the unscrupulousness and all the " self- sacrifice " (the two things are the same) 01 Woman. He will risk the stake and the cross , starve, when necessary, in a garret all his life ; study women and live on their work and care as Darwin studied worms and lived upon sheep ; work his nerves into rags without payment, a sublime altruist in his disregard of him.self, an atrocious egoist in his disregard of others. Here s. 209 ^ SHAW Woman meets a purpose as impersonal and irresistible as her own ; and the clash is some- times tragic. {Prefaces, p. 157.) 1908 : There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking and thinking it would be bad enough ; but it goes further into disastrous anarchical action. Because our marriage law is inhuman and unreasonable to the point of downright abomina- tion, the bolder and more rebelHous spirits form illicit unions, defiantly sending cards round to their friends announcing what they have done. Young women come to me and ask me whether I think they ought to consent to marry the man they have decided to live with ; and they are perplexed and astonished when I, who am supposed (heaven knows why !) to have the most advanced views attainable on the subject, urge them on no account to compromise themselves without the security of an authentic wedding ring. [Prefaces, p. i .) 1910 : Childhood is a stage in the process of that continual remanufacture of the Life Stuff by which the human race is perpetuated. The Life Force either will not or cannot achieve immortahty except in very low organisms : indeed it is by no means ascertained that even 2J0 SHAW the amoeba is immortal. Human beings visibly wear out, though they last longer than their friends the dogs. Turtles, parrots, and elephants are believed to be capable of outliving the memory of the oldest human inhabitant. But the fact that new ones are born conclusively proves that they are not immortal. {Prefaces^ p. 45.) 1916 : Setting aside the huge mass of inculcated Christ-worship which has no real significance because it has no intelligence, there is, among people who are really free to think for them- selves on the subject, a great deal of hearty dislike of Jesus and of contempt for his failure to save himself and overcome his enemies by personal bravery and cunning as Mahomet did. I have heard this feeling expressed far more impatiently by persons brought up in England as Christians than by Mahometans, who are, like their prophet, very civil to Jesus, and allow him a place in their esteem and veneration at least as high as we accord to John the Baptist. {Prefaces^ p. 526.) Let us be clear about the meaning of the terms. A genius is a person, who, seeing farther and probing deeper than other people, has a different set of ethical valuations from theirs, and has energy enough to give effect to this extra vision and its valuations in whatever manner best suits his or her specific talents. 211 SHAW A saint is one who having practised heroic virtues, and enjoyed revelations or powers which the Church classes technically as supernatural, is eligible for canonisation. If a historian is Anti-Feminist, and does not believe women to be capable of genius in the traditional masculine departments, he will never make anything of Joan, whose genius was turned to practical account mainly in soldiering and politics. {Prefaces, p. 584.) 1933 .• All modern progressive and revolutionary movements are at bottom attacks on private property. A Chancellor of the Exchequer apologising for an increase in the surtax, a Fascist dictator organising a Corporate State, a Soviet Commissar ejecting a kulak and adding his acres to a collective farm, are all running the same race, though all of them except the Commissar may be extremely reluctant to win it. For in the long run the power to exterminate is too grave to be left in any hands but those of a thoroughly Communist Government responsible to the whole com- munity. The landlord with his writ of eject- ment and the employer with his sack must finally go the way of the nobleman with his sword and his benefit of clergy, and of Hannibal Chollop with his bowie knife and pistol. {Prefaces, p. 355.) 212 SHAW Some people, like Mrs. Le Mesurier, Mr. Strachey, and Father Walker, hold that thinking should be done with the intellect, but these passages and thousands of others like them show what colourful work can be done by the emotions. Shaw's thought is the swift-flowing, impulsive imagery-thinking of a child. The Fabian Essay on Rent is full of it. It is a shocking thing to have to say, but it really must be said — Shaw does not understand economic science. He knows all about rent. Two hundred years of Kilkenny, topped off with four years of a Molesworth Street estate oflSce, taught him the way of a man with land. He got his theories of value from books, but he learnt landlordism in a practical school. In nineteenth-century England, land- lordism and the structure of society were so closely linked that it was easy to mistake one for the other. It was natural for Shaw, pursuing his empirical way, to see everything in terms of rent, and to ignore the credit system ; for rent comes in chunks that can be counted, whereas credit is an intangible element too evasive for pictorial methods of thinking ; it is like value which also evaded him as it dived frantically into a maze of differentials ; but what he loses on the calculus he makes up in careful observation among the common swings and roundabouts. Just when George's incompetent theorising threatens to have serious consequences, Bernard comes along and puts in a brass tack. Neither of them understands economic science. 213 SHAW But is there such a science, and do the economists themselves understand it ? All engineers agree on fundamental questions like " What is a horse-power, and how does it exchange for calories ? " and so they can get ahead ; but the economists have not yet decided the question : " What is a man's soul and how much is it worth ? " Some of them are haggling over it, and some cannot even see that the science of economics does not emerge till that value is fixed in hard cash, or commodities, or at least in terms of a printed card. The Marxians agree that the answer is all in terms of material needs and satisfactions ; and so long as that answer holds, their science will hold. If man consents to enslavement, problems of value vanish and economics becomes a stable science with firm unchanging laws. George, whose taste runs rather to libraries, uses the Marxian answer as a foundation stone, but Bernard makes all his Communistic friends uneasy by throw- ing back his young head and laughing at it. It is perfectly clear that each of them is trying hard to be faithful to his tutors. They had no ordinary education : George was brought up by the Kilkenny Shaws and John Vandaleur Lee, till he got into the hands of Helmholtz, Tyndall, Rousseau and Marx ; Bernard started with his mother and an Irish Catholic nurse, and then went on to Mozart, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo and Dickens ; both of them sat at the feet of Shelley and Wagner. How can any of us compete with such a combina- 214 SHAW tion ? We can only watch it competing with itself in that conflict called his works, that record of his researches which is such a complete guide to the process by which the idea of Propagation of Species, made dogma, leads men (even men like Marx and Buckle and Freud) into the darkness and enchains their minds. George is a slave. He bows down to that dogma and adores before the Life Force ; he works for it, or perhaps it would be truer to say it works through him. Listen to his surrender : r perceive the value and truth of Calvin's conviction that once a man is born, it is too late to him ; you may " educate character " until you are black in the FACE ; HE IS PREDESTINATE AND HIS SOUL CANNOT BE CHANGED ANY MORE THAN A SILK PURSE CAN BE CHANGED INTO A SOW's EAR. (AugUSt, I909, Pen Portraits and Reviews, p. 91.) This is the burden of his message and the core of his teaching. The Life Force surges bhndly, tapping out its slaves by the million : tap tap . . Rich man, Poor man . . tap tap tap . . . Tinker, Tailor, Thief . . . tap tap tap tap. . . . Sinner, Saint, Hero, Hussy .... and so ad infinitum. Bernard is free. He values the gift of freedom and power of choice above all things and rejects that accursed doctrine. It has tried in a hundred disguises over nearly as many years to entrap him, 215 SHAW but he always eludes it. It presents itself as the garb of maturity, but if the acceptance of that is the price of growing up, he prefers to remain free and a child for ever. This is why he had led George such a dance ; this is why he has so annoyed and bewil- dered his votaries ; this is why all the rest of us love him. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply indebted to the following books : Candlelight Attic, by Cecily Hallack. St, Catherine, by AHce Curtayne. Plays and Prefaces, by Bernard Shaw. Shaw, Playboy and Prophet, by Archibald Henderson. Progress and Religion, by Christopher Dawson. The Nature of Belief , by U. C. D'Arcy, S.J. and also to Father Stephen Brown, S.J., to Father Aegidius Dovlan, O.P., and to Mr. F. J. Sheed. J. P. HACKETT. Dublin, July 1937 216 Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: May 2009 PreservationTechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 1 6066 I79ii\ T7Cl.9^^^