THE SHAVIAN SITUATION *
By BONAMY DOBRIE
IF you ask haphazard acquaintances what they think of Mr. Shaw, they will almost certainly answer, irritatingly, with phonographic regularity, " Oh, Shaw.
• 'Well, damned clever, of course—but then, of course, he isn't serious ; of course he's an Irishman . . " The bombardment of " of courses " represents the Englishman's profound suspicion of the intellect. But what. is most astonishing about this string is that the average man will end up with a remark which is, though_ he does not know it, of the flagrantly " You're another ". kind : he will say, " Of course, he's irresponsible." Now that is the one thing. Mr. Shaw has been continually saying to us, for if you were to try to sum up in one phrase what his teachings, preachings, exhortations, and denunciations are all about, you woulld say that his text has invariably been " For heaven's sake, realize your responsibility, and shoulder it." His superman, as defined in the preface to The Sanity- of Ait (1907) is one who will accept new and heavier obligations; his preface to On the Rocki (1933) is a notification to rulers. to be responsible or to get out. In nearly 'all his pre faces you will find that he is urging people to face the implications of their acts, or of their lethargic failure to act, and to take up . the burden of their responsibilities.
The fact that Mr. Shaw is an Irishman gives him the advantage that foreigners always have of being able to see us clearly, and of not being tarred with the brush that he so easily discerns blackening us ; he is thus in an admirable position to exercise that noble faculty, of " cynicism," as seeing through, pretensions is called by those who bluff themselves, a faculty usually very salutary. It gave Farquhar, in many respects Mr. Shaw's forerunner, his bite ; MandeVille also had the advantage of being a foreigner, and there is a good deal of Mandeville also in Mr. Shaw. Moreover, there is another thing which giVes Mr. Shaw the advantageliStance in time as well as in, space ; for he *belongs to the eighteenth century; firstly in his romantic idealization of women, which he combats and deplores but cannot get over ; and; secondly, in his conviction that the only virtues worth bothering about are the social virtues. Even his meta-. physics are social metaphysics : the urge of creative evolution is towards producing better citizens.
But his metaphysics do not permit him to dwell quite happily in the eighteenth-century rationalism which is. also his home : looking out from his happy distances he cannot accept mankind as it is, nor tolerate its infuriating inability to manage its affairs. He cries out to his deity—Creative Evolution—" 0 God, give them more intelligence, make them grow up 1 " Himself supremely endowed with intelligence, he sees the monstrous folly of those systems on which we pride ourselves, the thinness_ of the screen which divides us from barbarity, the lunacy of our financial system, the horror of our wars, the criminality of our legal codes, the hideous cruelty of our most cherished morals. He would help to create a new religion for mankind, a new civic order, and in his last stage has become so impatient of human inertia that he sees nothing for it but to provide us-with dictators who will not hesitate to shoot. Yet he has not altogether abandoned Fabianism, and still seems to believe that you can abolish poverty by abolishing the rich. The reason for abolishing the rich is that they are irresponsible, while
* Prefaces. By Bernard Shaw. (COnstable. 12s. 6cL)
the poor have not the means to responsibility. For he has, ultimately, in spite of his Caesarism, no belief in a society created by force : " All communities must live finally by their ethical values : that is, by their genuine virtues. Living virtuously is an art that can be learnt only by living in full responsibility for our own actions." Thus the object of his plays and his prefaces is to bring conviction of guilt to every man- jack of us : and our crimes are cant, mugwumpery, hypocrisy, cruelty, and an obstinate refusal to face issues. Our greatest pamphleteer since Swift, master of impeccable prose, wielder of a style Which is original because he has something to say, added to a supreme gift of the gab, he represents, for thefirst three or four decades of this century, the great exploder of complacency. The difficulty is to discover wliy he has not ha4 more effect on his time ; a great deal of -effect he certainly has had, but not one comparable to that of; say, Voltaire. Yet he is as serious, as genuinely comedic, as great a master of vituperation. The answer perhaps is that he is too generously endowed with the Irish faculty for logic; a faculty notoriously abhorrent to Englishmen. Besides; he urges with as great moral fervour as he does important debatable ones, issues which seem to most men already settled. in a direction repugnant to Mr. Shaw, settled it seems to them by common sense, common usage, common appetite, and this has made Mr. Shaw appear frivolous to them.' He cannot be serious, they say, about vaccina- tion or vegetarianism, though they may give him the benefit of the doubt on vivisection ; therefore, how can he be serious about other things ? " Of course " (again) " he does not mean what he says." And further Mr. Shaw. does not allow enough for the weaknesses of mankind you never feel that he would be capable of enjoying -sin as Voltaire might have enjoyed sin. Or, to put it another Way, his Puritanism has served him badly : for never having sinned, he has no sense of sin, a sense which gave Bunyan, whom he so much admires, such power over his readers. Moreover, the ordinary human being wishes that Mr. Shaw would sometimes exhibit rancour, and attack persons instead of institutions. They accuse him of pride, whereas really he is kindly ; they convict him of arrogance, whereas he is modest enough, feeling only that unless the point is driven home it is not worth while driving it at all. Therefore, -a slight . aroma of self- righteousness clings about him, a fate which is undeserved;. but men may be excused for sniffing it. This may he because, though he has sometimes changed his mind, as all intelligent men do, he will never admit to an incon- sistency : the brilliant debater takes charge, and suggests that you are a fool not to have seen that the inconsistency is only apparent. The only thing he lacks as. a con- troversialist is the trick of conceding points to his opponent that he may more convincingly smash him later on.
If in his plays he has in the main used the comic method, to awaken men's consciences, in his prefaces he haS always adopted a more direct method. This volume is a noble apologia. Unlike his contemporaries, he has not timidly- attacked or tinkered at isolated abuses, but rushed upon the whole group of conceptions .upon which, our tottering society rests. Though he has added, nothing to philosophy, but taken it ready-made -where he could find it, he has been original in applying it in such a whole- sale fashion, so logically, to life. Some- of his ideas, as he knows, are already outmoded, partly because we have accepted them ; but he is assured of immortality because lie has always dealt with the things that matter at the moment in the most effective language of the moment. Though he cares nothing for style as such, it is for his style that future ages will read him, secure in a civilization where the problems of this one will seem fantastic, because the work of a great craftsman, who is also passionately sincere, will always fascinate others who practise that craft.
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