Killing No Murder
Too True to be Good ; The Village Wooing ; On the Rocks. By Bernard Shaw. (Constable. 7s. fld.)
Tim most curious thing about Mr. Shaw's new volume of plays and-prefaces is its discrepancies, both in ideas and in literary form. No wonder dramatic critics are puzzled by his plays. Too True To Be Good, which ostensibly deals with the collapse of any directive idea in the modern world, turns out from the preface to be a play about the dreadful misery of being rich : On The Rocks, which anybody who saw it must have thought a witty satire on government, seriously destructive as all good satire is, we are told to look upon as an essay in defence of mass-murder, or political elimination (liquidation, as they say in Russia). The prefaces, like all those of Mr. Shaw, are beautifully written, they contain much sound criticism of the present dispensation ; they also show with alarming clarity the stage to which Mr. Shaw has got ; they reveal, as well, what can only be regarded as a wilful confusion of mind, if we put aside the untenable pro- position that Mr. Shaw does not understand how human beings behave. Let us accept Mr. Shaw's contention that "liquidation " on a large scale occurs in a democratic Capitalist State by means of the gradual starvation of the unemployed. The argument then goes that if liquidation is to occur, and it always does, and must occur, then those who are responsible for it should boldly accept the responsibility, and carry it out sanely and cleanly by means of anaesthetics or machine guns, as they do, we are to gather, in Russia. Before discussing the principle behind this, we can note the first discrepancy : on Mr. Shaw's own showing, liquidation is carried out in Russia by means of starvation just as, by hypothesis, it is carried out here. Now for the principle. The people who govern in the interests of the State should be allowed to despatch anybody who interferes with the proper running of the State, who refuses to accept the new morality. The question Mr. Shaw does not face is, who are " the State " ? As Lenin remarked, " At bottom, the question of control is really the question : Who is it that exercises control ? That is to say, what class controls, and what class is controlled ? " Precisely : but one would say, pace Lenin, that the question is, not what social or economic class, but what class of mind ? Well, when Mr. Shaw's revolution comes about, it will be the class of mind that is prepared to shoot, a class of mind which, if not inspired by hatred, forgets in its worship of "the State" that " the State " is, after all composed of individuals. But, apart from this, what body of men is good enough' to be trusted with unlimited power to kill ? Mr. Shaw tells us plainly, " only a thoroughly Communist Government•respons- ible toa the whole . community." 0 sancta simplicitas ! And are not those thousands, even perhaps millions, who are to be killed, also part of " the whole community " ? And will hatred never creep in ? Ah, but Mr. Shaw says, " The Australian gunman pots the aboriginal native to satisfy his personal antipathy to a black man with uncut hair. Thit nobody in the French Revolution had this feeling about Lavoisier, nor can any German Nazi have felt that way about Einstein." The statement takes one's breath away. Why do " Aryans " want to exterminate Jews ? Why does the mob hate the man of intellect ? Simply because they are different. And then, as a further inconsistency, Mr, Shaw has quoted " Hates any man the thing he would not kill ? " and adds " said Shylock naively." Perhaps Mr. Shaw would think it equally naive to ask, " Kills any man the thing he does not hate ? "—unless, of course, he wants to eat it.
- And further, Mr. Shaw seems to think that men who kill wholesale will retain all their integrity ; at least, when it suits him he says he thinks so. Unlimited power of life and death is bound to change a man.• No man can order wholesale cold- blooded executions and remain what he was before. The whole moral scale-is altered. The odd thing is that in another context Mr. Shaw. understands this perfectly well. " Do you suppose," Aubrey asks in TOO- True To Be Good, " that a man who will commit murder for political ends will hesitate to commit theft for personal ends ?" But then, according to Mr. Shaw, in the new State the rulers will be kept morally straight by the force of. free. criticism. There• is a passionate plea for. toleration;-for freedom ef -criticism; In the preface to On The Rocks. As though dictatorship and freedom of criti- cism were compatible ! Any dictator (and if a man who can murder wholesale is not a dictator, who is ?) must crush hostile opinion in case it should crystallize into action. But then again, according to Mr. Shaw, only the silly Englishman imagines that he can act as he thinks if his thought is contrary to that of "the State." Yet suppose these nonconformists in thought amount to several millions. Is it really to the benefit of humanity that they should be liquidated " in the interest of a doctrinaire " State " ? Humanity I What is that com- pared with " the State" ? Is it possible that Mr. Shaw is at heart a hard-bitten Tory, who longs above all for " efficiency," for the strong hand in India ? Shall we soon see him dancing a minuet with Lord Lloyd ?
Mr. Shaw sees no need for a man to act according to his beliefs if the established order is hostile to them. Indeed, it is absurd to do so. Karl Marx, who believed in the nationaliza- tion of land, did not send the rent of his villa to the English exchequer : Mr. Shaw does not surrender the riches he cares for so little to Mr. Chamberlain. Yet one wonders whether a group of people who, firm in the faith, living on the £300 a year Mr. Shaw has declared to be the reasonable income, might not bring about a revolution in thought, and so in life, as effectively as a violent upheaval. An ounce of example is worth a ton of precept. Suppose twenty rich men should pension off their dependants and live in this way, would not the sincerity of their conviction make a profound impression Y It might alter the whole face of society.
Yet whatever Mr. Shaw says, he is always worth reading : his constructive ideas may not hold water, but one cannot afford to ignore his brilliant destructive criticism, which ought to disturb every thinking man who does not already agree with him on the major points. His plays would have more effect if he would only respect the intelligence of his audience a little more : crude farce is not a necessary solvent for his ideas. The first act of Too True To Be Good is an insult to any audience, and the joke " Medea ! Medea ! " " It isn't an idea," is unfor- givable : the young people in On The Rocks are hopelessly out of date. But then there is the superb phrasing of the great tirades : who could better " Determinism is gone, shattered, buried with a thousand dead religions, evaporated with the clouds of a million forgotten winters. The science I pinned my faith to is bankrupt : its tales were more foolish than all the miracles of the priests, its cruelties more horrible than all the atrocities of the Inquisitors " ? There has been no such master of stage prose since Congreve.
BONAMY Domti.E.
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