Chesterton, Heretics, 4

Mr. Bernard Shaw

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities,when genial old Ibsen filled the world with wholesome joy, and thekindly tales of the forgotten Emile Zola kept our firesides merryand pure, it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.It may be doubted whether it is always or even generally a disadvantage.The man who is misunderstood has always this advantage over his enemies,that they do not know his weak point or his plan of campaign.They go out against a bird with nets and against a fish with arrows.There are several modern examples of this situation. Mr. Chamberlain,for instance, is a very good one. He constantly eludes or vanquisheshis opponents because his real powers and deficiencies are quitedifferent to those with which he is credited, both by friends and foes.His friends depict him as a strenuous man of action; his opponentsdepict him as a coarse man of business; when, as a fact, he is neitherone nor the other, but an admirable romantic orator and romantic actor.He has one power which is the soul of melodrama--the power of pretending,even when backed by a huge majority, that he has his back to the wall.For all mobs are so far chivalrous that their heroes must makesome show of misfortune--that sort of hypocrisy is the homagethat strength pays to weakness. He talks foolishly and yetvery finely about his own city that has never deserted him.He wears a flaming and fantastic flower, like a decadent minor poet.As for his bluffness and toughness and appeals to common sense,all that is, of course, simply the first trick of rhetoric.He fronts his audiences with the venerable affectation of Mark Antony--

"I am no orator, as Brutus is; But as you know me all, a plain blunt man."
It is the whole difference between the aim of the orator andthe aim of any other artist, such as the poet or the sculptor.The aim of the sculptor is to convince us that he is a sculptor;the aim of the orator, is to convince us that he is not an orator.Once let Mr. Chamberlain be mistaken for a practical man, and hisgame is won. He has only to compose a theme on empire, and peoplewill say that these plain men say great things on great occasions.He has only to drift in the large loose notions common to allartists of the second rank, and people will say that businessmen have the biggest ideals after all. All his schemes haveended in smoke; he has touched nothing that he did not confuse.About his figure there is a Celtic pathos; like the Gaels in MatthewArnold's quotation, "he went forth to battle, but he always fell."He is a mountain of proposals, a mountain of failures; but stilla mountain. And a mountain is always romantic.

There is another man in the modern world who might be calledthe antithesis of Mr. Chamberlain in every point, who is alsoa standing monument of the advantage of being misunderstood.Mr. Bernard Shaw is always represented by those who disagreewith him, and, I fear, also (if such exist) by those who agree with him,as a capering humorist, a dazzling acrobat, a quick-change artist.It is said that he cannot be taken seriously, that he will defend anythingor attack anything, that he will do anything to startle and amuse.All this is not only untrue, but it is, glaringly, the opposite ofthe truth; it is as wild as to say that Dickens had not the boisterousmasculinity of Jane Austen. The whole force and triumph of Mr. BernardShaw lie in the fact that he is a thoroughly consistent man.So far from his power consisting in jumping through hoops or standing onhis head, his power consists in holding his own fortress night and day.He puts the Shaw test rapidly and rigorously to everythingthat happens in heaven or earth. His standard never varies.The thing which weak-minded revolutionists and weak-minded Conservativesreally hate (and fear) in him, is exactly this, that his scales,such as they are, are held even, and that his law, such as it is,is justly enforced. You may attack his principles, as I do; but Ido not know of any instance in which you can attack their application.If he dislikes lawlessness, he dislikes the lawlessness of Socialistsas much as that of Individualists. If he dislikes the fever of patriotism,he dislikes it in Boers and Irishmen as well as in Englishmen.If he dislikes the vows and bonds of marriage, he dislikes stillmore the fiercer bonds and wilder vows that are made by lawless love.If he laughs at the authority of priests, he laughs louder at the pomposityof men of science. If he condemns the irresponsibility of faith,he condemns with a sane consistency the equal irresponsibility of art.He has pleased all the bohemians by saying that women are equal to men;but he has infuriated them by suggesting that men are equal to women.He is almost mechanically just; he has something of the terriblequality of a machine. The man who is really wild and whirling,the man who is really fantastic and incalculable, is not Mr. Shaw,but the average Cabinet Minister. It is Sir Michael Hicks-Beach whojumps through hoops. It is Sir Henry Fowler who stands on his head.The solid and respectable statesman of that type does reallyleap from position to position; he is really ready to defendanything or nothing; he is really not to be taken seriously.I know perfectly well what Mr. Bernard Shaw will be sayingthirty years hence; he will be saying what he has always said.If thirty years hence I meet Mr. Shaw, a reverent beingwith a silver beard sweeping the earth, and say to him,"One can never, of course, make a verbal attack upon a lady,"the patriarch will lift his aged hand and fell me to the earth.We know, I say, what Mr. Shaw will be, saying thirty years hence.But is there any one so darkly read in stars and oracles that he willdare to predict what Mr. Asquith will be saying thirty years hence?

The truth is, that it is quite an error to suppose that absenceof definite convictions gives the mind freedom and agility.A man who believes something is ready and witty, because he hasall his weapons about him. he can apply his test in an instant.The man engaged in conflict with a man like Mr. Bernard Shaw mayfancy he has ten faces; similarly a man engaged against a brilliantduellist may fancy that the sword of his foe has turned to ten swordsin his hand. But this is not really because the man is playingwith ten swords, it is because he is aiming very straight with one.Moreover, a man with a definite belief always appears bizarre,because he does not change with the world; he has climbed intoa fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope.Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and sensiblemerely because they always catch the fashionable insanity,because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstromof the world.

People accuse Mr. Shaw and many much sillier persons of "proving that blackis white." But they never ask whether the current colour-language isalways correct. Ordinary sensible phraseology sometimes calls black white,it certainly calls yellow white and green white and reddish-brown white.We call wine "white wine" which is as yellow as a Blue-coat boy's legs.We call grapes "white grapes" which are manifestly pale green.We give to the European, whose complexion is a sort of pink drab,the horrible title of a "white man"--a picture more blood-curdlingthan any spectre in Poe.

Now, it is undoubtedly true that if a man asked a waiter in a restaurantfor a bottle of yellow wine and some greenish-yellow grapes, the waiterwould think him mad. It is undoubtedly true that if a Government official,reporting on the Europeans in Burmah, said, "There are only twothousand pinkish men here" he would be accused of cracking jokes,and kicked out of his post. But it is equally obvious that bothmen would have come to grief through telling the strict truth.That too truthful man in the restaurant; that too truthful manin Burmah, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. He appears eccentric and grotesquebecause he will not accept the general belief that white is yellow.He has based all his brilliancy and solidity upon the hackneyed,but yet forgotten, fact that truth is stranger than fiction.Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction,for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

So much then a reasonable appreciation will find in Mr. Shawto be bracing and excellent. He claims to see things as they are;and some things, at any rate, he does see as they are,which the whole of our civilization does not see at all.But in Mr. Shaw's realism there is something lacking, and that thingwhich is lacking is serious.

Mr. Shaw's old and recognized philosophy was that powerfullypresented in "The Quintessence of Ibsenism." It was, in brief,that conservative ideals were bad, not because They were conservative,but because they were ideals. Every ideal prevented men from judgingjustly the particular case; every moral generalization oppressedthe individual; the golden rule was there was no golden rule.And the objection to this is simply that it pretends to free men,but really restrains them from doing the only thing that men want to do.What is the good of telling a community that it has every libertyexcept the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is whatconstitutes a free people. And what is the good of telling a man(or a philosopher) that he has every liberty except the liberty tomake generalizations. Making generalizations is what makes him a man.In short, when Mr. Shaw forbids men to have strict moral ideals,he is acting like one who should forbid them to have children.The saying that "the golden rule is that there is no golden rule,"can, indeed, be simply answered by being turned round.That there is no golden rule is itself a golden rule, or ratherit is much worse than a golden rule. It is an iron rule;a fetter on the first movement of a man.

But the sensation connected with Mr. Shaw in recent years hasbeen his sudden development of the religion of the Superman.He who had to all appearance mocked at the faiths in the forgottenpast discovered a new god in the unimaginable future. He who had laidall the blame on ideals set up the most impossible of all ideals,the ideal of a new creature. But the truth, nevertheless, is that anyone who knows Mr. Shaw's mind adequately, and admires it properly,must have guessed all this long ago.

For the truth is that Mr. Shaw has never seen things as they really are.If he had he would have fallen on his knees before them.He has always had a secret ideal that has withered all the thingsof this world. He has all the time been silently comparing humanitywith something that was not human, with a monster from Mars,with the Wise Man of the Stoics, with the Economic Man of the Fabians,with Julius Caesar, with Siegfried, with the Superman. Now, to havethis inner and merciless standard may be a very good thing,or a very bad one, it may be excellent or unfortunate, but itis not seeing things as they are. it is not seeing things as theyare to think first of a Briareus with a hundred hands, and then callevery man a cripple for only having two. It is not seeing thingsas they are to start with a vision of Argus with his hundred eyes,and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one.And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigodof infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latterdays of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots. And thisis what Mr. Shaw has always in some degree done. When we really seemen as they are, we do not criticise, but worship; and very rightly.For a monster with mysterious eyes and miraculous thumbs,with strange dreams in his skull, and a queer tenderness for thisplace or that baby, is truly a wonderful and unnerving matter.It is only the quite arbitrary and priggish habit of comparison withsomething else which makes it possible to be at our ease in front of him.A sentiment of superiority keeps us cool and practical; the mere factswould make, our knees knock under as with religious fear. It is the factthat every instant of conscious life is an unimaginable prodigy.It is the fact that every face in the street has the incredibleunexpectedness of a fairy-tale. The thing which prevents a manfrom realizing this is not any clear-sightedness or experience,it is simply a habit of pedantic and fastidious comparisonsbetween one thing and another. Mr. Shaw, on the practical sideperhaps the most humane man alive, is in this sense inhumane.He has even been infected to some extent with the primaryintellectual weakness of his new master, Nietzsche, the strangenotion that the greater and stronger a man was the more he woulddespise other things. The greater and stronger a man is the morehe would be inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle.That Mr. Shaw keeps a lifted head and a contemptuous face beforethe colossal panorama of empires and civilizations, this doesnot in itself convince one that he sees things as they are.I should be most effectively convinced that he did if I foundhim staring with religious astonishment at his own feet."What are those two beautiful and industrious beings," I can imagine himmurmuring to himself, "whom I see everywhere, serving me I know not why?What fairy godmother bade them come trotting out of elfland when Iwas born? What god of the borderland, what barbaric god of legs,must I propitiate with fire and wine, lest they run away with me?"

The truth is, that all genuine appreciation rests on a certainmystery of humility and almost of darkness. The man who said,"Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed,"put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth "Blessedis he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised."The man who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see,and greener grass, and a more startling sun. Blessed is he thatexpecteth nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains;blessed is the meek, for he shall inherit the earth. Until werealize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.Until we see the background of darkness we cannot admire the lightas a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness,all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine.Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God,and can realize none of the trophies of His ancient war.It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know nothinguntil we know nothing,

Now this is, I say deliberately, the only defect in the greatnessof Mr. Shaw, the only answer to his claim to be a great man,that he is not easily pleased. He is an almost solitary exception tothe general and essential maxim, that little things please great minds.And from this absence of that most uproarious of all things, humility,comes incidentally the peculiar insistence on the Superman.After belabouring a great many people for a great many years forbeing unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense,that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with twolegs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whetherhumanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased,would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity.Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanitywith all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake.If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress,Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kindof man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitterfood for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it wasnot suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food,but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuableand lovable in our eyes is man--the old beer-drinking,creed-making, fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man.And the things that have been founded on this creature immortally remain;the things that have been founded on the fancy of the Superman havedied with the dying civilizations which alone have given them birth.When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society,He chose for its comer-stone neither the brilliant Paul northe mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob a coward--in a word, a man.And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hellhave not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdomshave failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness,that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men.But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was foundedon a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible.For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.