Personality in Literature Part 5

The second aspect of the question is more important, especially at a time when we are constantly reminded that the public is indifferent to the finest creative literature now produced. The fault may be with the public, and it may also be with the authors. It is worth remembering that this is a time when special forms of expression are being made to do work which once belonged to other forms. Fiction, for example, is being made to carry the load of philosophic psychology, of poetry, of the economic, moral, or political treatise. Drama is often used as a vehicle for truths which were once left to the pulpit, the political platform, or the lecture hall. Both of them, in the case of the extreme realists, are being used as the store-room or the dissecting chamber of the experimental scientist. Supposing that an author's facts are supremely important, his discernment most acute, his ideas significant, still, before we condemn the public unheard, we are compelled to ask of him: Have you given to this material a form which it will accept? Have you addressed the public in a language which has a wide human appeal? Are you, in fact, a master of that higher technique which implies an understanding, not only of the fine essences of truth, but the broad, common facts of human nature? It is just because they are not masters of this higher technique that many exponents of so-called "intellectual fiction" and "intellectual drama"

are doomed to failure.

I am well aware that such arguments as this must be qualified. For I have not forgotten that what are now the commonplaces of culture were once the unintelligible obscurities of a sage. Much that we now apprehend at a glance, all that makes our cultural birthright, was only acquired by slow and arduous processes, in which the pioneers were laughed to scorn. The original mind sees things in a new light, and his language is to us strange and unfamiliar, and we do not learn it till our eyes and ears have become accustomed. And there are others who do not stand conspicuously in the main stream of mental progress, who, nevertheless, remote and perhaps secluded as they are, have a vision rarefied, subtle, strange not only in their own times, but for all times. Those men have their own communication to make to those anxious to add to the fineness of their perception, or merely perhaps to the oddness of experience. If some sting of truth reaches the mind through writing obscure to the general, through language which may be barbarous in form, an author has justified himself; and it would be idle to follow Mr. Brander Matthews in his quotation from the ever-pleasing Lord Chesterfield: "Speak the language of the company you are in; speak it purely and unloaded with any other." For, after all, is it not open to the author to choose his company? If his receptions are ill-attended, that may not reflect ill on those who accept the invitation. Not everyone will read the poems of Mr.

Doughty; Mr. Doughty has made it hard for them; but if they do, they are repaid. Not everyone will tolerate the finesse of Mr. Henry James; but among those who can understand him, a.s.suredly Mr. James is in very good company.

VI

SPECIALISM IN PHILOSOPHY AND JUSTICE

In the play called _Justice_, Mr. Galsworthy attacked the professional mechanism of English law in much the same way as the late William James attacked professional philosophy. These two kinds of specialism, or departmentalism, may therefore conveniently be treated together; for I may leave Mr. Galsworthy and William James to conduct the attack, contenting myself with the task of linking up their forces.

Both Professor James and Mr. Galsworthy appealed against the machine--the one against the machine of thought which is divorced from common perception, the other against the machine of the law which has no contact with the needs of persons. "We," said William James, meaning the Pragmatists, or the Humanists, "turn to the great unpent and unstayed wilderness of truth as we feel it to be const.i.tuted, with as good a conscience as rationalists are moved by when they turn from our wilderness into their neater and cleaner intellectual abodes." In _Justice_ the young advocate who appears for the defence is not so much pleading for the client under the law, as arraigning the present legal system, setting up a new conception of law based upon common sense, human insight, and a morality finer than legalism.

"Gentlemen," he says, "men like the defendant are destroyed daily under our laws for want of that human insight which sees them as they are, patients, and not criminals.... Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself. Is this young man to be ground to pieces under this machine for an act which at the worst was one of weakness?"

This attempt to get back to something that _satisfies_ the human mind, the human idea of good, is to be seen equally in these two thinkers who belong to different countries and different traditions. The word "satisfactory" continually occurs in Professor James' writings.

"Humanism," he says, "conceiving the more 'true' as the more 'satisfactory,' has sincerely to renounce rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals of rigour and finality." He wishes to break with that view of philosophy which says "the anatomy of the world is logical, and its logic is that of a university professor." He is one of those who, having been a lifelong student of philosophy and psychology, has the energy to know that, however theoretically perfect may be the logical system evolved by thought, that system will not be sufficient to prevent a man from saying, "After all, am I sure of it?" The only things of which we are sure are those things which we directly experience. We know the appearance of a tree, because we see it; we know the emotion of pity or love, because we have felt it; we know that what we call tigers exist in India, because acquaintances have seen them, and direct experience has taught us that their evidence is satisfactory, and if we went to India their testimony could be found true by the evidence of our own senses. "What becomes our warrant for calling anything reality? The only reply is--the faith of the present critic or inquirer. At every moment of his life he finds himself subject to a belief in _some_ realities, even though his realities of this year should prove to be his illusions of the next." "_The most we can claim is, that what we say about cognition may be counted as true as what we say about anything else_." Nothing is true for him unless it has reference to the world which we know, which we accept on faith, by the practical evidence of our senses, or, it might be added, our desires, our aspirations, our intuitions. Nothing is ruled out so long as it can be pinned down at any moment to what is real, to what is individual. "Demonstration in the last resort" is to the senses.

Contemned though they may be by some thinkers, these sensations are the mother-earth, the anchorage, the stable rock, the first and last limits, the _terminus a quo_ and the _terminus ad quem_ of the mind. To find such sensational _termini_ should be our aim with all higher thought. They end discussion, they destroy the false conceit of knowledge, and without them we are all at sea with each other's meaning. If two men act alike on a percept, they believe themselves to feel alike about it; if not, they may suspect they know it in differing ways. We can never be sure we understand each other till we are able to bring the matter to this test. This is why metaphysical discussions are so much like fighting with the air; they have no practical issue of a sensational kind.

Truth, then, for the Pragmatists is that which has "practical consequences." A belief is held to be true when it is "found to work."

Transcendent ideas have no validity except as ideas unless they are found to have a "cash value" in practical life, that is to say, unless they refer to, and are operative in, the world of immediate experience. "Reality is an acc.u.mulation of our own intellectual inventions, and the struggle for 'truth' in our progressive dealings with it is always a struggle to work in new nouns and adjectives while altering as little as possible the old." You may talk of Absolutes as much as you like, you may contemplate the fundamental categories of the mind, you may dwell upon the _a priori_ conceptions to which all our experiences must conform, but the fact remains, says Professor James, turning his back on all transcendental idealism, "the concrete truth _for us_ will always be that way of thinking in which our various experiences most profitably combine."

The true is the opposite of whatever is instable, of whatever is practically disappointing, of whatever is useless, of whatever is lying and unreliable, of whatever is unverifiable and unsupported, of whatever is inconsistent and contradictory, of whatever is artificial and eccentric, of whatever is unreal in the sense of being of no practical account. Here are pragmatic reasons with a vengeance why we should turn to truth--truth saves us from a world of that complexion. What wonder that its very name awakens loyal feeling! In particular what wonder that all little provisional fools' paradises of belief should appear contemptible in comparison with its bare pursuit! When Absolutists reject humanism because they feel it to be untrue, that means that the whole habit of their mental needs is wedded already to a different view of reality, in comparison with which the humanistic world seems but the whim of a few irresponsible youths. Their own subjective apperceiving ma.s.s is what speaks here in the name of the eternal natures and bids them reject our humanism--as they apprehend it. Just so with us humanists, when we condemn all n.o.ble, clean-cut, fixed, eternal, rational, temple-like systems of philosophy.

I am not here seeking to examine closely, still less to criticise, Professor James' pragmatic doctrines. What I am concerned to show is that we have in him a trained philosopher adopting towards the theory of knowledge a point of view strangely similar to that which Mr.

Galsworthy takes up towards the social ethics of modern England. Is it not Mr. Galsworthy's function to "condemn all n.o.ble, clean-cut, fixed, eternal, rational, temple-like systems" of morality and etiquette?

Professor James' rationalist antagonists are exactly like the administrators of law and order criticised by Sweedle in the play: "They've forgot what human nature's like." Just as your Hegelian wishes for nothing but the perfection of knowledge, and leaves you in an inconceivable, unknowable Absolute, so, according to Falder, who has been in prison, "n.o.body wishes you any harm, but they down you all the same." In precisely the same way as Professor James pleads for a view of truth which rests on the unfailing vividness of finite experience, so Mr. Galsworthy pleads for a justice which shall be applicable, not to an infinite number of imaginary cases, but to the individual, to the person whom we might chance to know, and meet, and work with--to the necessitous human being. He pleads for a law which shall be elastic, not rigid; dealing with men, not cases; for which mercy shall come to be a part of the idea of justice. That which is good enough for human beings in their dealings one with another ought not to be too good for the law. Intercourse with concrete reality is Professor James' requirement for the truth of an idea; intercourse with human beings is Mr. Galsworthy's requirement as the basis of social morality and of law. That does not of course mean that the legislator must be acquainted with all those for whom he legislates any more than that we can directly experience the facts of history which we claim to know. But every rule--in knowledge, in morality, in law--must be referable to this test of intercourse. Let your judgment of human beings be such as you would award to those who are sufficiently human to be among your friends. Let it be directed solely towards the well-being of the individual so far as that is consistent with the well-being of society. Again and again Mr. Galsworthy has shown us how stereotyped views, abstractions of the human mind, settle down upon cla.s.ses and individuals and warp their judgments and their conduct. In _Fraternity_ he showed how the idea of cla.s.s differences becomes an obsession in the human mind, obliterating the truer idea of human community, of those common qualities in character which are not skin-deep, like cla.s.s, but fundamental. In _Strife_ he showed how the idea of the rights of an employer, of the rights of a workman, is an abstraction hiding from master and workman the human bond which human intercourse would have revealed. In _Justice_, again, he showed how that lowest of all existing codes, the legal code, erects a "temple-like" abstraction of the law to which all individuals, however different they may be, however various their requirements, are made to conform.

We may notice that in the cases both of the philosopher and the dramatist there is a return to what I may call a rudimentary common sense. Professor James' views come as a reaction in the course of the long evolution of ideas. If on the one side we had not had thinker after thinker who emphasised the necessity of approaching reality as a relation of the conscious mind, and on the other side sceptics who a.s.serted that there is nothing knowable but the continuum of disconnected sensations which present themselves--a blind array of atoms--there would be no meaning in a thesis like that of Professor James, which refutes the follies of the two extremes, and stands upon a ground which is very nearly a denial of the possibility of philosophy. In like manner Mr. Galsworthy's ethics are only valuable as a chain in the progress of morality and inst.i.tutions. Primitive society conceived punishment as an antidote to the horrors of unchecked violence. Medival law devised fearful penalties for the forger, because forgery was a fearful menace to the stability of a commerce not yet backed by a high commercial morality. But now we have reached the time when we are menaced by the machinery set up by our ancestors. The law works with a violence and a brutality which were invented in, and proper to, an age of violence and brutality; and we are confronted with the daily spectacle of judges compelled to administer an antiquated and ferocious law, which awards to the criminal the double penalty of chastis.e.m.e.nt and shame. The old barbarism clings to the machine and works havoc. And because it is old, and because we are accustomed to it, we tolerate it. We do not put it to the test, which must be a personal test: How does it work in the case of this individual and of that? Is the application of these rules "satisfactory" when they are made to operate on the human beings for whom they were devised? Has this code any social "cash value" when it is brought to bear on the lawyer's clerk who forged a cheque to save a woman?

I have not considered Professor James' merits as a dialectician, or Mr. Galsworthy's as a dramatist. I have attempted to hint at that quality in them which is called "humanism," humanism in thought, humanism in ethics--the quality which makes men seek to judge ideas, inst.i.tutions and things by what they are worth to human beings for their most pressing, their most vital needs. It is evident that this same "humanism" is beginning to manifest itself in politics, religion and even literary criticism. Clearly it tends at all times to set up individual conviction against authority, freedom against discipline.

It has as its virtue the quality of being opposed to red tape, professionalism, departmentalism pedantry, officiousness, intolerance, lethargy, and the tyranny of custom; it has its dangers in that, resting as it does in the last resort on the personal and the concrete, it tends in ill-balanced minds to neglect the value of ancient and dear illusions, and to degenerate into chaos and caprice.

Chaos, however, is not so much to be feared as those "little provisional fools' paradises of belief" exposed so brilliantly by William James.

PART THREE

LITERATURE AND MEN

I

BERNARD SHAW

It is doubtful if any person in England exercises so many-sided and so considerable an influence as that of Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is not that his books are read by very many thousands of readers; that his plays have long runs or can compete in popularity with those of Mr. Barrie or the Gaiety Theatre; that his lectures and speeches are reported so fully as those of an ordinary Cabinet Minister; that his letters to the newspapers are as numerous as those of Mr. Algernon Ashton or Dr.

Clifford in his prime. He seldom demonstrates his power by pa.s.sing Acts of Parliament or organising garden parties. He figures less often in the Social and Personal columns than Sir H. Beerbohm Tree. He is not so well known in the law courts as Mr. Horatio Bottomley. Yet there is no other man in England who is so conspicuous in so many spheres of activity, and wherever he appears he is always _facile princeps_ in the public eye. Everyone who has any knowledge of him is compelled to think about him, and those who have no direct knowledge of him--so insidious is his influence--are to be found constantly thinking in terms of Bernard Shaw. The active, talking, persuading, book-writing, lecturing, propagandist population of England has been bitten by him; it re-writes and popularises him; it even talks his jargon when it is criticising him. It began by regarding him as a brilliant and witty writer whom no one could take seriously; it now regards him as a serious, and indeed responsible, thinker whose wit is a matter of harmless inspiration, and often a tactical advantage.

Mr. Shaw, in fact, has thrust himself upon English public life.

Wherever anything is doing or being talked about he is in the thick of it. Whenever he rises to speak, he is supreme. He sweeps away all the false issues in a few sentences; he attacks the very heart of the problem under discussion, and makes the most practical proposals. He can cover a hostile argument with ridicule, and drive it out of the field with good-tempered laughter. But his method is not only that of raillery. He is remorselessly logical. He can pursue the logical sequence of his case, and set it forth with a fusillade of perfectly relevant and illuminating instances and a.n.a.logies. He never loses his thread like Mr. Chesterton; he never wanders off into vague rhetoric like Mr. Wells. He chases his enemies and his subject until he has subdued the first and set forth the second so that it s.h.i.+nes with crystal clearness. There is no man in England who can state a case, on the platform or in the Press, with such perfect lucidity, such logical order, with such brightness and lightness, or with such force as Mr.

Bernard Shaw. He is the greatest debater in England, the greatest pamphleteer, the most observable personality in public life.

That is not all. As an organiser there is no one who has more driving power. He can set himself to committee work, and keep every member of a committee active, himself included. He can, when necessary, pester responsible persons till they are goaded into action. Whilst his attention is always fixed on the central object, he has an eye for the most trifling details.

He is a first-rate business man. He knows as much about the trade of publis.h.i.+ng as any publisher. He refuses to employ a literary agent, and personally transacts the business of placing his work--and sometimes that of his friends--in the literary and dramatic market all over the world.

Also he is a man personally benevolent. No one was ever less sentimental or romantic, but he is charitably disposed to everyone whom he does not regard as a fool.

If we examine the records of Mr. Shaw's life we shall see that it has been spent somewhere mid-way between the lives of the man-of-action and the man-of-letters. He has been primarily and essentially a critic of the current ideas about existing facts, the ideas which are pre-supposed in the typical and habitual activities of our modern world. He has been, almost invariably, a destructive critic--a critic of that rare kind which is able to win attention because he himself is so active in this Vandal work of his, because he can make his critical attack in so many different ways, because there seem to be a greater vital force and spirit in his pulling down of G.o.ds than ever existed in the G.o.ds themselves. Socrates, one would suppose, was not more insistent and unexpected in his gadfly attacks upon the Athenian sophists than is Mr. Shaw in his raids upon the Pharisees of sophisticated London. His biography, when it is written, will be a very fascinating and a very large book, and Mr. Shaw himself thinks that it will be identical with the history of his time. There is already in existence a book which claims to be an authorised "Critical Biography;" and, needless to say, it was written by an American--Dr.

Archibald Henderson--who stepped in with superb confidence and compelled Mr. Shaw to criticise, overhaul, and contribute to his daring enterprise. "You can force my hand to some extent," said Mr.

Shaw, "for any story that you start will pursue me to all eternity."

This valiant American describes with gusto the active, talking, debating, propagating, protesting life that Mr. Shaw has lived. It has not been a "domestic" life; not even a specially "literary" life. We feel it has been a life in which there has been little privacy or intimacy, that it has seldom been wholly shut off from the market-place and the theatre; that if he is a man entirely dest.i.tute of "company manners," this is because he has lived always "in company." He was, of course, born in Ireland, not very far from Dublin. His parents were Protestants belonging to that middle cla.s.s which is hampered by social pretensions and insufficient worldly means. He was taught at Protestant schools, where he was expected to believe that "Roman Catholics are socially inferior persons, who will go to h.e.l.l when they die, and leave Heaven in the exclusive possession of ladies and gentlemen." At the age of fifteen he went into a land office and helped to collect rents, without realising, it is to be presumed, that he was contributing to an iniquitous system. He studied pictures in the Irish National Gallery, became interested in music through his mother and her friends, and made his first appearance in print when moved to protest against the evangelistic services of Sankey and Moody. At the age of twenty he turned his back upon Ireland, and started a literary career in London. In the first nine years of "consistent literary drudgery" he succeeded in earning six pounds.

To put it frankly, Mr. Shaw was not born to succeed as "a mere man of letters," and a.s.suredly not as a writer of romances. His own statement that he "exhausted romanticism before he was ten years old" is historically inaccurate. He started a literary career early, but at twenty-nine he was still a romantic young man who had written reams of romantic literature, and had signally failed. He was right to abandon romance; it had never inspired him, and it was entirely natural and human that he should ever after disown and abuse this treacherous mistress. It is characteristic that what really did inspire him and set him moving upon the course ever after to be his own was an event unconnected with those personal, intimate issues of experience which usually feed the flame of imaginative art. It was a debating speech by Henry George which aroused the reforming ardour thenceforward essential and characteristic in Mr. Shaw, a speech which sent him to Karl Marx, and made him a "man with some business in the world."

Henry George sent him to Karl Marx, and Karl Marx sent him to that group of clever people among whom were Graham Wallas, Hubert Bland, Sidney Olivier, and--of main importance--Sidney Webb.

"Quite the cleverest thing I ever did in my life," Mr. Shaw is reported to have said to his American interviewer, "was to force my friends.h.i.+p on Webb, to extort his, and keep it." Mr. Sidney Webb was then, as now, the constructive encyclopdist, the man who, wherever he went, "knew more than anybody present." "The truth of the matter is that Webb and I are very useful to each other. We are in perfect contrast, each supplying the deficiency in the other.... As I am an incorrigible mountebank, and Webb is one of the simplest of geniuses, I have always been in the centre of the stage, whilst Webb has been prompting me, invisible, from the side." It was this singular union more than anything else which gave direction and motive force to the propaganda carried on by the Fabian Society for a quarter of a century, whilst to Mr. Shaw personally it gave the consistency of thought and definiteness of aim which underlie all his later work. We cannot, of course, neglect the intellectual influence of Ibsen and Nietzsche, Wagner and Samuel Butler, the individualists and aristocrats who corrected the mob-sentiment of old-fas.h.i.+oned socialism; but these and similar influences matured in him through his Fabianism.

Bernard Shaw, of the Fabian Society, ceased to be a private citizen. He became a man of "affairs," destined, thenceforward, to live in the publicity of debating-halls, among those ideas which reformers and politicians have actually socialised, removing them from the privacy of human experience and turning them into public property--like parks, open s.p.a.ces, and wash-houses. I do not mean that he treated this public property as other, and more conventionally-minded, men habitually treat it. Mr. Shaw walks down the Strand as if it were his private bridle-path. He walks across an Insurance Bill or a National Theatre scheme or a policy for giving self-government to Englishmen as a man who might be treading the weeds in his own garden. But the intellectual stage-properties were all prepared for him and presented ready-made in those times when he went night after night to lecture in the city and suburbs of London. He had, indeed, the social cosmopolitanism which made him dissociate himself from small literary coteries and gain a practical knowledge of publicly-minded men. But one cannot fail to see that his long experience of lecturing, debating, setting up arguments, and parrying verbal attacks--which made him the best debater in England, and turned him, as Dr. Henderson has suggested, from a doctrinaire into a "practical opportunist"--served not only to endow him with his consistency as a thinker and his excellence in expounding ideas, but also confirmed him in his defects as a humanist. His continual intercourse with the innumerable fixed ideas of societies and committees, his debater's habit of attacking whatever fixed idea he encounters, have had the effect of organising his own mind along the lines of such fixed ideas, theses, positions and oppositions as could be defended or countered by his boundless resource in argument, wit, and raillery; and it followed that his interpretation of life was likely to resolve itself into the debater's generalisations, the partialities and half-truths which ignore what is individual, personal, intimate, and finest--for the finest things in life are those which cannot be generalised, which are individual and unique, which admit of being stated but not argued. It follows also that his strength is in attack and in destructive criticism. The only important positive ideas for which he stands are the Supermannish idea of the duty of every man to be himself to the utmost, and a generous democratic idea of freedom, in accordance with which every self-respecting man and woman should be given the opportunity to work out his or her own destiny fully, unhampered by the tyrannies of caste, prestige, sentimental traditions, false codes, and effete moral obligations.

But these ideas are of very considerable magnitude. They are capable of almost infinite extension and application to life. And it should be observed that, though Mr. Shaw thinks mainly about obvious "public questions"--politics, the professions, the inst.i.tution of marriage, patriotism, public oratory, public health, etc., he has nothing in common with the unimaginative public man who merely criticises proposals and policies. He is always interested in the state of mind which produces proposals and policies. When he pleads for the abolition of the Dramatic Censors.h.i.+p before a Royal Commission, he gives us not only the most effective practical exposure of the Censors.h.i.+p that has ever been written, but also a far-reaching philosophical a.n.a.lysis of liberty as freedom to express and propagate ideas. "My reputation has been gained by my persistent struggle to force the public to reconsider its morals," he says in the _Rejected Statement_, the presentation of which to the Royal Commission affords one of those delightful true stories that only a Shaw can make so damaging. "I write plays with the deliberate object of converting the nation to my opinion in these matters." That he has to a large extent already converted the intellectuals--whether by his plays or by other means--is beyond question. Many of the most powerful writers of the last ten years have concentrated their efforts on exposing the tyranny of the established idea and the established moral code. Such diverse writers as Mr. Wells, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Granville Barker, Mr.

Cunninghame-Graham, Mr. Belloc, and Mr. Chesterton have written books the motives of which have been satire, divine anger, _sva indignatio_, directed against the established moral codes or intellectual habits of the time. Mr. Shaw, who originally followed the obscure Samuel Butler, showed the way for the others. His method was, and is, to combine argument with the more telling weapon of ridicule.

In his Preface to _Blanco Posnet_ he exposes and ridicules the Dramatic Censors.h.i.+p, just as in _Getting Married_ he exposes and ridicules the popular conception of happy domestic life, and in like manner in _The Doctor's Dilemma_ the superst.i.tion that the faculty of medicine is infallible.

The picture of concerted professional fraud given us in _The Doctor's Dilemma_ is not too exaggerated for the purposes of a debating argument; but in his long essay on the subject he gives a far more reasonable statement of the case. He does not treat the doctor as a murderer, or a pickpocket, or a human vulture, or even a cold-blooded cynic; he explains what is likely to happen to the ordinary, moderately decent, normal man, without any special moral or intellectual equipment, who becomes a doctor. "As to the honour and conscience of doctors, they have as much as any other cla.s.s of men, no more and no less. And what other men," he adds characteristically, "dare pretend to be impartial where they have a strong pecuniary interest on one side?" He a.n.a.lyses the psychology of the pract.i.tioner and the specialist. He shows how much guesswork there must be where even the most distinguished differ; in what manner we are all handed over, bound, to the tender mercies of the men who are often poor, overworked, unscientific, and, if they are specialists, prejudiced by exclusive study of one disease. What he says about the surgeon and the specialist is nearer to the truth than what he says about the general pract.i.tioner. Long experience of all sorts of illnesses is more valuable for the curing of simple diseases than much so-called "scientific knowledge;" and, as it happens, the life of the general pract.i.tioner who comes into sympathetic contact with so many men and women of different types is one which does promote certain healthy cynicisms and human decencies singularly lacking in the specialist on the one side and the routine-driven hospital nurse on the other. But there we have the individual equation. Mr. Shaw is good at considering general cases; he is never, in his writing, much concerned about individuals.

The essay which preceded _Getting Married_ is stronger in its attack than in its reconstructive proposals; and the essay is better than the play, because Mr. Shaw can present arguments more effectively than persons, and arguments are more suited to essays than to plays. It is interesting to find him confessing that "young women come to me and ask me whether they ought to consent to marry the man they have decided to live with." Mr. Shaw, of course, urges them "on no account to compromise themselves without the security of an authentic wedding-ring." He should not have been surprised. He, if anyone, should have known that if you attack an existing morality, the public will inevitably think you are advocating the corresponding "immorality" as popularly understood; and one suspects that Mr. Shaw has, from this natural misunderstanding, more to answer for than he himself dreams of. When he calls himself "an immoralist," he means that he is the true moralist; that he is going to subst.i.tute for a decayed, outworn, conventional, and stupid morality, a morality based upon a rational human principle--a morality that will make society better and more tolerable. In this particular essay he asks us to get rid of the idea that the family, _as at present const.i.tuted_, is the highest form of human co-partners.h.i.+p. "The people who talk and write as if the highest attainable state is that of a family stewing in love continuously from the cradle to the grave can hardly have given five minutes' serious consideration to so outrageous a proposition."

Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a c.o.c.katoo. Its grave danger to the nation lies in its narrow views, its unnaturally sustained and spitefully jealous concupiscences, its petty tyrannies, its false social pretences, its endless grudges and squabbles, its sacrifice of the boy's future by setting him to earn money to help the family when he should be in training for his adult life (remember the boy d.i.c.kens and the blacking factory), and of the girl's chances by making her a slave to sick or selfish parents, its unnatural packing into little brick boxes of little parcels of humanity of ill-a.s.sorted ages, with the old scolding or beating the young for behaving like young people, and the young hating and thwarting the old for behaving like old people, and all the other ills, mentionable and unmentionable, that arise from excessive segregation. It sets these evils up as benefits and blessings representing the highest attainable degree of honour and virtue, whilst any criticism of or revolt against them is savagely persecuted as the extremity of vice.

But when Mr. Shaw begins to reconstruct, and thinks that the whole matter can be solved by such simple--and so far as they go, excellent--economic expedients as making women economically independent, and legitimising children, he ceases to be persuasive.

There comes a point when brilliant cleverness and sheer logic _from necessity_ miss the truth. It is precisely the cut-and-dried Fabian side of Mr. Shaw which blinds him to facts of a certain sort--the fact, for instance, that for certain human needs no ingenious, or _invented_, rational remedy is possible; that in certain departments of life where the great instincts are concerned the acc.u.mulated conscious and subconscious experience of thousands of years of mankind have produced a kind of instinctive knowledge which logic cannot tamper with; which is bound up with human nature and is near to a thousand subtle truths never yet brought within the scope of scientific knowledge; which it is dangerous to attack by a brutal frontal a.s.sault, as if the issue were a single and simple debating issue; which is defied only under just such penalties as Mr. Shaw himself alludes to.

It is already evident why Mr. Shaw is far better as lecturer, debater, pamphleteer, and writer of critical essays than as writer of either romances or plays. He is primarily a social reformer, like Henry George and Karl Marx, though he brings more wit, cleverness, driving power, and intellectual agility to bear upon his subjects. He is interested in public morality and "affairs," in generalities rather than individuals, in ideas about life rather than in life at first hand. He sees through the intellect rather than through the perceptions. He is concerned to prove and to teach rather than to _show_. He has made very few _characters_ in his plays, for the simple reason that he handicaps his persons by treating them as _ideas_ rather than as _persons_. This is to say, that as an artist he is never disinterested; he is more concerned with the case which his puppets are set up to prove than with a situation for its own sake. In _Csar and Cleopatra_ he did for once allow a subject to exist for its own sake. He had no axe to grind, primarily, on behalf of society and its morals. It is not perhaps the cleverest of his plays, but it is the play which is most a play; and if it is not a great play, that is because Mr. Shaw is not a great dramatist--he has not allowed himself to be a great imaginative artist--he turned his back upon imaginative art at the age of twenty-nine.

In the cleverest of his plays there is, indeed, always one real person, and that person is none other than himself. In _Man and Superman_, in _Arms and the Man_, and in _John Bull's Other Island_, the hero is in each case nothing more nor less than a new impersonation of Bernard Shaw. (In _John Bull's Other Island_ I take Larry Doyle as the hero.) The hero is a man who on every possible occasion either gets up and argues with extraordinary fluency and good sense as if he were a very brilliant young man in a debate, or else is forced into the sort of action which that brilliant debater would have advocated. Broadbent, in _John Bull's Other Island_, is not a person at all; he is a brilliantly conceived caricature of English stupidity; he is a general idea, not an individual. Even Keegan, who has been extolled as a romantic and unusual figure among the Shavian _dramatis person_, is a chorus rather than a character, and essentially Shavian in that his ideals are vegetarian, and that his language is couched in such terms as--

How will you drag our acres from the ferret's grip of Matthew Haffigan? How will you persuade Cornelius Doyle to forego the pride of being a small landowner? How will Barney Doran's millrace agree with your motor-boats?... Perhaps I had better vote for an efficient devil that knows his own mind and his own business than for a foolish patriot who has no mind and no business.

That is not the way in which priests, madmen, or idealists talk in Ireland. It is the way they talk at the Fabian Society.