the medical press quickly exposes them if their claim
is not sound. The majority have no interest in
vivisection, but have motives for defending it. The
first motive is much the same as that of the Zulu



PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 137



medicine-man. " The wickedness and stupidities
of our medicine-men are rooted in superstitions that
have no more to do with science than the traditional
ceremony of christening an ironclad has to do with
the effectiveness of an ironclad." They mystify us
merely in order to keep us in awe of their art. How
Mr Shaw, with no knowledge of physiology or
pathology, penetrated the secret he does not tell us.

The second and higher motive is the desire of
knowledge. But he cannot leave so fairly respectable
a motive as this without adulteration, and therefore,
as all human beings are cruel, he suggests that the
" curiosity " of the vivisector is far from pure.
Once, at an Anti- Vivisection meeting, he found himself
surrounded by men who hunted foxes and women
who wore furs and feathers, and he had the bad taste
to talk to them about cruelty to animals (without
anaesthetics, one may add). Hence, he says, " those
who accuse vivisectors of indulging the well-known
passion for cruelty under the cloak of research are
putting forward a strictly scientific psychological
hypothesis, which is also simple, human, obvious, and
probable." I know no more appalling instance of
controversial injustice. It would be as fair to suggest
that, in his scarification of the poor middle-class,
Shaw is " indulging the well-known passion for
cruelty." When the doctors plead that they use
anaesthetics, we must not be too ready to believe
them. " It is hardly to be expected that a man who
does not hesitate to vivisect for the sake of science will
hesitate to lie about it afterwards." Such excesses re-
strict Shaw's usefulness, and permit us to take his other
indictments of professions or classes with discretion.

There are two serious points in the controversy
about vivisection. The first is : Has the practice of



138 BERNARD SHAW

vivisection promoted the skill of the surgeon or
doctor and benefited mankind ? Shaw disdains to
discuss this, because his answer to the second question
overrules it. The second question is : Are men
justified in deriving advantage from the sufferings of
animals ? To this he thunders a negative reply.
One can hardly help reflecting that if we have no
duties to our fellow-men, we can scarcely recognise
duties to rats and dogs ; but we need not take advant-
age of his academic professions. The passion which
seethes in this indictment, the wish to see men rid of
the last shade of cruelty, commands our admiration.
But in his heat he states the problem unfairly. There
are really three questions. Are scientific men justi-
fied in causing pain to animals out of mere curiosity,
if any do ? To that the answer is obvious. Are
scientific men justified in experimenting on animals,
for the advance of medical science, when the animals
are rendered unconscious ? Most people will find it
possible to answer that. But are scientific men justi-
fied in experimenting on animals, for the advance-
ment of medicine or surgery, when they must cause
pain ? Opinions will differ, though there may be
detestation of cruelty on both sides. An important
element of the problem is the fact that a rat's or a
dog's consciousness of pain is as far removed from a
man's as a rat's or a dog's intelligence is removed
from that of a man. That is a truism, never
noticed by Mr Shaw, who thinks that the vivi-
sector might operate on men. In any case, his
confused, heated, and unjust indictment does not
help the judicious inquirer. " Compassion is the
fellow-feeling of the unsound," he says in " The
Revolutionist's Handbook." We need not go so far
as that either.



PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 139

In the end he returns to the profession. The
advance of sanitation, etc., have reduced disease,
and the doctors have stolen the credit for it. They
take advantage of the stupidity of the public, and
keep up a fiction of their infallibility. And so on.
He advocates the gradual municipalisation of the
profession. " Until the medical profession becomes
a body of men trained and paid by the country to
keep the country in health it will remain what it is at
present : a conspiracy to exploit popular credulity
and human suffering." This (the latter phrase) is
said seriously, not by way of playful exaggeration.
Private practitioners would not be abolished, but
for a time stimulate by their competition the municipal
Health Officers. The reasonable and discussable
suggestions are lost in a torrent of angry rhetoric
and too facile generalisation.

These opinions, and the general principles in which
they find inspiration, are the serious framework of
Shaw's dramas. Nothing is further from his mind
than the entertainment, as an entertainment, of the
British public. The next chapter, which deals with
his conception of art, will make this clear. Those,
therefore, who would pay serious attention to Shaw
and his work need to consider these opinions closely.
He does not wish to take a place in his generation
merely for the brilliance of his dramatic construction,
the wit and epigram of his dialogue, or any merely
artistic features, in the ordinary sense. The artist
who is content with such triumphs is, in his opinion,
the brother of the prostitute. He is an apostle. I
have therefore presented and commented upon his
gospel at length, and now need only describe his
idea of the artist's function before we approach the
long series of his dramatic works.



r



CHAPTER VI

THE FUNCTION OF ART

Throughout the long examination of Shaw's personal
utterances, as distinguished from the more or less
impersonal utterances of his characters, which we
have now made, we have found him defying morality
with the vigour of a rejuvenated Faust, yet lashing
the immorality of his generation with the fervour of
a Savonarola. He derides Ethicists for their ethics,
and then flays them for their weakness of character.
He sweeps idealists from his path and then gives us
pages of ardent idealism. This apparent paradox
is even more striking when we have to classify him
as an artist. Gabriele d'Annunzio is, perhaps, the
nearest of living artists to him in rebellion against
moral codes ; but Shaw disdains so much the work
of that " princely artist, of magnificent sensuality "
that he never mentions him. Tolstoi was, in his
ethical expressions, farther removed from Shaw than
any other artist in Europe, yet he would probably
claim the closest kinship with Tolstoi.

I have sufficiently explained this apparent paradox.
It is partly due to his tactical exaggerations, and
partly to the artificiality of his first principles. As
he has not the least fear that the average bourgeois
will take him seriously and follow his own impulses,
which Shaw constantly describes as beastly, he feels
safe in declaring a general war on morals, duties,
ideals, and codes of behaviour. It is the trumpet to

140



THE FUNCTION OF ART 141

call the crowd ; and it is also an academic conclusion
from his principles. When the crowd gathers, he
explains that he wishes to impose on them a burden
of duties, reforms, sacrifices, and discipline which
would ruin a monastic body. The Life-Force scorns
their written moral codes ; and then the Life-Force
produces from its own bosom a portentous enlarge-
ment of the same moral code which outrages the
personal liberty of the suburban churchwarden. We
are therefore quite prepared for a stringent conception
of the function of art. " Happiness and Beauty are-=^—^
by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of Happiness
and Beauty." So Shaw comes to scorn the musical
comedy idea of art, and approaches the grim figure
of Leo Tolstoi.

We have seen Shaw's early initiation to art. His
boyhood years were spent in an atmosphere vibrant
with music, and his leisure hours in the picture-gallery.
Reaching London, he feasts on greater music and
greater pictures, and devotes himself heroically to
literary art. In 1885 William Archer secured for him
the place of picture critic on the Pall Mall Gazette.
Except that he joined in the defence of the new Im-
pressionist School, which seemed to him to be " the
outcome of heightened attention and quickened
consciousness on the part of the artists," his work
does not call for examination. He soon learned that
freshness, opposition, and apparent flippancy were
needed to attract. " The critic adds the privileges
of the court- jester to those of the confessor. . . .
It was as Punch that I emerged from obscurity.
All I had to do was to open my normal eyes, and with
my utmost literary skill put the case exactly as it
struck me, or describe the thing exactly as I saw it,
to be applauded as the most humorously extravagant



142 BERNARD SHAW

paradoxer in London." He was still forging his
weapon. But behind all the light play he felt that he
must have a firm grip of facts. He has always been
much deeper in art than in philosophy. Style, as an
aesthetic quality, he calls " a parlour game." " Effec-
tiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style/'
For three years he visited every exhibition in
London, and, as these were the days of his most
assiduous lecturing, without fee, he found that the
work was very heavy and the reward light. In 1888
Mr T. P. O'Connor founded the Star, and the Fabians,
who were pervading everything, pervaded it. Shaw
became " Corno di Bassetto," the musical critic of
the new evening paper, with Clement Shorter, Richard
Le Gallienne, and A. B. Walkley as colleagues.
The work seemed like " the leisure of a Persian cat
after the labour of a cockney cab horse," and it took
him to the theatre as well as the concert-room. He
now had occasion to make his conception of art
precise and firm. In judging painters you cannot
speak much of moral purpose : in commenting on
operas you confront the issue. It was the period of
the Wagner controversy, and Shaw adopted Wagner
and found reasons for doing so. But it is better to
complete first the outline of his career.

In 1890 he wrote his " Quintessence of Ibsenism,"
and became known as an enthusiast of the new type
of drama. In the same year he took the position of
musical critic to the World, and wrote criticisms in
other papers, such as Henley's Scot's Observer. His
indifference to traditions and his passion for reality
and sincerity gave his criticism a distinctive character,
and the Italian opera and the academic musicians
were vehemently attacked. In 1894, however, he
retired from the staff of the World, and in the follow-



THE FUNCTION OF ART 143

ing year he began his lively and well-known period as
dramatic critic to the Saturday Review. He had
already written his first four plays, and in that year
he published his " Perfect Wagnerite " and " Sanity
of Art." He had now an original and very emphatic
conception of the function of art, and the " G. B. S. "
column of the Saturday Review became one of the
chief features of the journal.

When he resigned his position on the Saturday
Review in 1898, he recommended me to ask for it.
To my objection that, having just emerged from a
very inartistic monastery, I knew nothing about
art, he said : " That does not matter in the least."
One has only to look over his articles, republished in
his " Dramatic Opinions," to see how much it mattered.
It became a counsel in critical circles that when you
wished to attack " G. B. S." you must be very sure of
your case. His conception of art had become a
dogma, almost a religious belief, and the dramatic
production of Europe during those three years is
reviewed with the ease of conviction and a mastery
of technique. Popular idols were treated with little
courtesy, often with violence — when Hall Caine, for
instance, appeared. Irving and Sarah Bernhardt
and Rostand were treated like school-children ;
Sardou, Pinero, Barrie, and nearly all the most
appreciated playwrights, were sternly denounced.
Shakespeare was dissected and belaboured every few
months, and some of the most unpopular dramatists
in Europe were pressed on the public.

The root of Shaw's doctrine of art was, of course,
his asceticism. If beauty and happiness and enter-
tainment are by-products, every artist is perverse
who makes them his chief aim. Art for art's sake is
a truism to most artists : to Shaw it is the prostitution



144 BERNARD SHAW

of a great power. " For art's sake alone," he says,
" I would not face the toil of writing a single sentence."
Incidental entertainment, a sugar-coating to the
sociological pill, is an amiable concession to a childlike
public, but a comedy without a purpose is a mean
thing and a mere depictment of life in drama or
tragedy, without a serious thought in the mind of the
playwright, is an abuse of the theatre. Moreover,
the popular playwright never did depict life. He
gave us " stage combinations of Tappertitian romance
with the police intelligence." His work was a constant
love-story, but never told the true story of love. He
made the stage an instrument of sensuousness, a
flatterer ol romance and illusion, a soporific for the
intelligence, a tickler of jaded nerves.

" Artist-philosophers are the only sort of artists
I take quite seriously," he said. He enumerated
Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth, Turner, Goethe, Shelley,
Schopenhauer, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoi, and
Nietzsche. As for such popular idols as Shakespeare
and Dickens, " in all their fictions there is no leading
thought or inspiration for which any man could con-
ceivably risk the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much
less his life." It will surprise many to hear Dickens
classed as an artist without a high aim, but it is really
the romance and artificiality of Dickens which irritate
him. Shakespeare I consider later. " Art," he says
(in " The Sanity of Art "), " should refine our sense
of character and conduct, of justice and sympathy,
greatly heightening our self-knowledge, self-control,
precision of action, and considerateness, and making
us intolerant of baseness, cruelty, injustice, and in-
tellectual superficiality or vulgarity." The moral
code has clearly gone out of the window to return
through the door.



THE FUNCTION OF ART 145

But there is a deeper root to his conception of art
than asceticism of temperament. He applies his meta-
physic to the artist, and finds in him the embodiment
of a special purpose of the Life-Force. It seeks
consciousness of its purpose in the great artist, just
as it embodies its fecundity in woman. Hence the
different attitude of great and lesser artists toward
woman ; while the latter are absorbed in the charm
of her " illusory beauty," the former instinctively
fear her, moved by an antagonistic purpose. When
genius and woman meet there is a tragic clash, but
high art is produced, contrary to the general opinion,
by " people who are free from the otherwise universal
dominion of the tyranny of sex," and art is really
" the only department in which sex is a superseded
and secondary power, with its consciousness so con-
fused and its purpose so perverted, that its ideas are
mere fantasy to common men." Such a reflection
may naturally arise in defending the art of Tolstoi or
Ibsen or Strindberg or Nietzsche, but how far, or how
little, is it verified in the general history of art ?
Mr Shaw, the arch-foe of all academicians, is too fond
of basing statements on a theoretical speculation
rather than on a patient examination of facts. Great
artists rise above their fellows in the informing of
their work by an intellectual element, which makes
them something more than ministers to the aesthetic
or the voluptuary, but they are not generally those
types of genius in whom the purpose of the race is
most clearly formulated, and not generally antagon-
istic to woman.

But the list of twelve great artists in two hundred
years, which I have already quoted from Shaw, is
commentary enough on his attitude. He detests
the amorism and feminism of so much art, because



146 BERNARD SHAW

art is to him the supreme power in life, and love and
pleasure are things too mean and petty to absorb it.
Art must serve greater purposes. Shaw credits him-
self with " the specific talent of the mountebank,"
but disdains to use it merely for earning coppers.
He must use it to gather a crowd round the barrel
from which he preaches social righteousness. So each
great artist must use this specific talent, his particular
skill in combining sounds or colours or words. In
this feeling he set out to review the artists of his
time, and of previous times, and at last became
himself a creative artist. It is useful to see how he
applies his principles to others before we examine
his own work.

His criticisms of Shakespeare are amongst the
most characteristic and least understood part of his
work. A few audacious phrases such as " greater
than Shakespeare," which are merely part of his
policy of vigorous or exaggerated expression, are
isolated from his essays and give a wrong impression.
In the main, he defends two propositions. The work
of Shakespeare is very uneven, and much of it is
thoroughly bad ; to the substance of that proposition
most serious students of Shakespeare assent. His
second theme is that Shakespeare was an inferior
artist because he was not a moralist and philosopher ;
and in that he does not so much oppose the current
artistic appreciation of Shakespeare's best work as
propose a new and generally rejected standard of
judgment.

One can gather from his pages quite an anthology
of eulogies of Shakespeare. " Twelfth Night " and
" A Midsummer Night's Dream " are " the crown
jewels of dramatic poetry," while " no man will ever
write a better tragedy than ' Lear.' " " Othello " is



THE FUNCTION OF ART 147



" magnificent," and " there is no greater tragedy
than ' Macbeth '." It is the theatre-manager (who
" regards art as a quaint and costly ring in the nose
of Nature "), and the learned commentator (who looks
in Shakespeare for " propositions advanced by an
eminent lecturer from the Midlands ") that spoil
Shakespeare for us. When you read him, you find
that he is " unsurpassed as poet, story-teller, character
draughtsman, humorist, and rhetorician.' ' In a letter
to Tchertkoff on Tolstoi's opinion of Shakespeare
(in which he might have smitten Countolatry as well
as Bardolatry) he speaks of " his prodigious literary
power, his fun, his mimicry, and the endearing quali-
ties which have earned him the title of ' the gentle
Shakespeare.' ' In the preface to Brieux he talks
of " the great dramatists of the world from Euripides
and Aristophanes to Shakespeare and Moliere." In
" Dramatic Opinions " he says : "As far as sonority,
imagery, wit, humour, energy of imagination, power
over language, and a whimsically keen eye for idio-
syncrasies can make a dramatist, Shakespeare was
the king of dramatists " ; which is not far from
Bardolatry.

But mingled with these eulogies are more violent
criticisms than Voltaire or Tolstoi ever wrote.
" Cymbeline," the much-admired, is " for the most
part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order,
in parts abominably written, throughout intel-
lectually vulgar, and, judged in point of thought by
modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offen-
sive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance."
Shakespeare " took his characters from the common
stockpot of melodramatic plots, so that Hamlet has
to be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman
and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger."



148 BERNARD SHAW



There is not a sentence put in Caesar's mouth that is
'- worthy of an average Tammany boss." Strip
Shakespeare of his beauty of sound and his " miracles
of expression," and you find only " a platitude
that even an American professor of ethics would
blush to offer to his disciples "—nothing but " cant-
ing, snivelling, hypocritical unctuousness." He tells
Tchertkoff that he has done his best to open the
eyes of England to " the emptiness of Shakespeare's
philosophy, to the superficiality and secondhandness of
his morality, to his weakness and incoherence as a
thinker, to his snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his
ignorance, his disqualifications of all sorts for the
philosophic eminence claimed for him." " There are
moments," he wrote in the heat of the campaign, in
the Saturday Review, " when one asks despairingly,
why our stage should ever have been cursed with
this ' immortal ' pilferer of other men's stories and
ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his un-
bearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the
subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against
which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt, his
incredible unsuggestiveness, his sententious combina-
tion of ready reflection with complete intellectual
sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting
out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience
except when he solemnly says something so trans-
cendency platitudinous that his more humble-minded
hearers cannot bring themselves to believe that so
great a man really meant to talk like their grand-
mothers."

That is the indictment. It should be added that
the prosecuting counsel admits extenuating circum-
stances : the influence of a bad education and bad
companions. The Elizabethan public wanted patriotic



THE FUNCTION OF ART 149

bombast, blood, romance, elevation of dukes and
ridicule of clowns ; and the Elizabethan poets and
dramatists give it. Incidentally, one wonders why
Shaw forgets this when he argues that there has been
no progress ; there is now a large public for Ibsen
and Shaw, and a very large public for Pinero, Jones,
and Barrie. However, Shakespeare was born into
this medieval world and followed its customs and its
" ruffianly pedants." He admits (in the preface to
" The Admirable Bashville ") that Shakespeare was
too great to follow them servilely. He adopted their
" rigmarole " and made it the vehicle of " a new order
of thought/' But " the rigmarole could not stand
the strain, and Shakespeare's style ended in a chaos
of half-shattered old forms, half-emancipated new
ones, with occasional bursts of prose-eloquence on
the one hand, occasional delicious echoes of the
rigmarole, mostly from Calibans and masque person-
ages, on the other, with, alas ! a great deal of filling
up with formulary blank verse which had no purpose
except to save the author's time and thought."

Allowing for the fact that Shaw deliberately adopts
the pleading manner of Sergeant Buzfuz, we have
here a serious critical study. Shaw knew Shakespeare
w T ell from beginning to end, long before he became
a dramatic critic. He admits enough to justify
sober Bardolatry, and has a good case against com-
mentators whom the difficulty of finding something
new to say has driven into admiration of Shakespeare's
depth and subtlety. He does not do justice to what
he curtly dismisses as " magic of words " and " com-
mand of imagery," for these things are the essence
of poetry, and in them Shakespeare is supreme. But
he admits them, and adds wit, eloquence, and superb
power in telling a story or depicting a character.



150 BERNARD SHAW



His " pilfering " is not a serious fault, for Shaw has
admittedly pilfered much. One has a public right to
steal a badly told story and tell it well. Many of his
other defects are manufactured by judging Shake-
speare by " modern intellectual standards," and
expecting a man to be superior to snobbery and pre-
judice in Elizabethan England. A thinker might,
to some extent ; but Shakespeare was an artist.

There is the gist of the whole controversy. Shaw
says that a man cannot be a great artist without
being a thinker. Otherwise he is a showman, putting
" the human pig " before us very vividly but unable
to penetrate the real, internal principles of action.
" Description is not philosophy, and comedy neither
compromises the author nor reveals him." The
controversy is hopeless because it turns on a matter
of taste. Should the artist be a moralist or socio-
logist ? A sincere artist like Eden Phillpotts flatly
denies it. Art has a function which is not the function
of the moralist, and it implies a contempt of art as
such to say that it is of no value unless it be used for
moralising. It is the eternal battle of the Stoic and
the Epicurean, the Puritan and the Cavalier ; with
the added piquancy that here the Stoic and Puritan
is the great denier of duty and idealism. In short,