Shaw merely throws out hints at a lethal chamber.
Many would agree ; but, when you have chloroformed
the entirely inept and lazy, there remains a gradation
of ineptitude and laziness that would paralyse the
efforts of an industrial police. The interesting thing
is that Shaw is returning to the position that equality
of income is the first reform. One would almost
fancy that his asceticism is relenting, he insists so
much on money. " Thanks to our political imbecility
and personal cowardice (fruits of poverty both), the
best imitation of a good life now procurable is life
on an independent income." And again : " The
universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact
in our civilisation, the one sound spot in our social
conscience. It represents health, strength, honour,
generosity, and beauty as conspicuously and un-
deniably as the want of it represents illness, weakness,
disgrace, meanness, and ugliness,"



^J



54 BERNARD SHAW

So the Socialist ideal — Shaw disdains ideals and is
bursting with them — was reconciled with the Eugenic
ideal, and a peaceful menage a trois set up. Two
indications will suffice to show how this has become
Shaw's final and unwavering creed. They are oral
declarations, and therefore more valuable, because
Shaw had not time to think out an exaggerated or
humorous form of expression.

One is found in a series of articles in the Labour
Leader (March 31st, 191 1, and following) by the editor,
A. Fenner Brockway. Shaw was catechised, over
the fireside, by a group of Socialists, and — he told the
truth. The Independent Labour Party, to which
they belonged, is — some may need to be informed —
intermediate between the Fabians and the extreme
Socialists : much nearer, in fact, to the Fabian
moderation. Shaw bluntly told his hearers that
the moderate proposals of Fabians and members of
the I.L.P. are not Socialism at all. He means by
Socialism just what the man in the street conceives
it to be : "A system of society where all the income
of the country is to be divided up in exactly equal
proportions." Whereon the Socialist editor observes :
" We gasped ! " Only extreme Socialists dream of
this rigid equality. Mr Brockway is, in fact, puzzled
by Shaw's " sudden zeal for equality," but I have
shown that he had long entertained it.

By a simple sum in arithmetic Shaw made his
picture alluring. " Suppose the national income is
divided by the number of the population, and you
find the result is /500." Very many of us will be
prepared to consider the equalisation of income if it
means that every man, woman, and child will receive
£500 a year. Indeed, what with the asphyxiation of
incorrigible idlers and the conversion of unproductive



SOCIALISM 55



workers into productive, the figure ought to rise still
higher. I imagine myself and wife and four children
drawing £700 a year each from the national ex-
chequer, and am quite willing to depose millionaires
to attain that result. But I find, on comparing the
number of the population (40,000,000) and the annual
national income (£2,000,000,000) that the result
would be only £50 per year. 1

Shaw gives three reasons why the national income
ought to be equally divided. First, the possession
of equal money by all is the only way of securing
that the needs of all shall be met before any luxuries
are produced ; secondly, there will be no real demo-
cratic government until wealth is equal (a state-
ment which scarcely harmonises with experience in
Australasia) ; thirdly, the eugenic reform cannot be
carried out while there are inequalities of wealth
and caste. This equalisation is to be secured in the
way we have already seen : by the gradual extension
of municipal industry and ownership, the State being
only the contralisation of the municipalities. Not
only are mothers and all women to be endowed, but
the drunkard and the blackguard, the child and even
the baby, are to have their £50 a year. " The moment
you are born you should have £50 a year " : and not
more in your prime. Then the State must see that
you earn it. This is quite simple, Mr Shaw now finds.
You put each individual on trial every five years, and,
if he or she has not produced as much as he or

1 In the next article Mr Brockway gives the figure as £$o a year,
and one may think the earlier figure a misprint. I do not think so.
Fifty pounds a year is too ludicrous an ideal to hold out, and Shaw
clearly and emphatically (as we shall see) insists that the income is
to be divided between the total population— men, women, and
children. His zeal for equality largely rested on a statistical mis-
take.



56 BERNARD SHAW



she has consumed, off with him or her to the lethal
chamber.

After reading this remarkable account of his views,
even Socialists observed that Shaw could not expect
them to take him seriously. But he was — I will not
insist on the five years and the lethal chamber
too rigorously — in deep earnest. One distinguished
Socialist remarked to me a year or two ago, in con-
versation, that Shaw was showing signs of age. This
also is wrong. I heard him speak at the City Temple
recently (October 30th, 1913), and precisely the same
creed was unfolded, syllable for syllable, with the
gravest emphasis and with every indication that this
mental energy is still magnificent and his judgment
cold and clear as ever. He was speaking on " Christian
Economics." The Christianity of it I examine later :
the economic was the same as in 191 1. Every child
was to come into a birthright of an equal portion of
the national income. Only in this way could we
secure a full supply of necessaries before luxuries, a
proper administration of justice, and the free practice
of eugenics. He scouted the idea that political
democracy or economic collectivism implied any
moral progress (in the broadest sense) : he drew from
his ascetic and mystic principles the conclusion that
man's duty is to develop his spiritual powers : and,
after outraging their religious feelings and setting
forth ideals with which hardly a soul in the room
agreed, he was boisterously cheered by fifteen hundred
City Templars. It was a fine tribute — to the man.

It is hardly necessary in the end to summarise or
criticise Shaw's Socialism, as I stated its characteristic
features at the outset. He agrees with the extreme
Socialists in demanding equality of income, but differs
violently from them in estimating the effect of this



SOCIALISM 57



and the way to attain it, and heaps contempt on their
rhetoric and their economic science. He agrees with
the moderate Socialists in believing that the process
of socialisation will be gradual and businesslike, and
possibly not complete, but disdains them because they
will not embrace equality of income — in the babe and
the man, the defective and the inventor — and because
they trust education and democratic government.
And in his ascetic and irrational conception of the
base of Socialism he finds himself in agreement onlv
with a few mystically-minded Socialists like Mr Webb.
These things have, for the last twenty years, prevented
Socialists from deriving as much advantage from the
adherence of so powerful a writer as they had hoped
to do. The only work of his which they urge — and it
has had a very small circulation for a work of the size —
is his " Common Sense of Municipal Trading." It is
his fierce critical work which they generally applaud.
One hears it said at times that he is dangerous to his
friends because he is whimsical, paradoxical, irres-
ponsible in his utterances. This is incorrect. He is
by no means a model of consistency from year to year,
but he is generally serious and consistent, though he
may wave a red flag of exaggeration to draw the bull.
The truth is that his fundamental creed, his deeper
view of life, is peculiar, and must be carefully studied
before we approach the bewildering and pyrotechnic
discharge of criticisms and affirmations which splutters
in the life of England during his period of dramatic
production. We have already seen how his economic
reasoning is complicated by mystic considerations and
ascetic sentiments. You cannot even understand his
Socialism until you understand these other elements
which have given it a peculiarly personal form.



CHAPTER III

THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY

Mr Shaw's principal biographer observes that,
although he does not claim to be great, he does claim
to be a philosopher. That is, perhaps, one of the
unkindest disservices which Dr Henderson has
rendered to his subject. I am, of course, not thinking
of academic philosophy, of which no one would
expect Shaw to have any knowledge. But even if
the word be taken in its broader sense, as a title
accorded to any man who has endeavoured to syste-
matise his particular views of life by tracing all happen-
ings to a fundamental reality, it is unwise to apply it
to Mr Shaw. He has a theory of life, in the compre-
hensive and fundamental sense, but it is hardly deep
enough, or sufficiently grounded on positive knowledge,
to merit the high title of a philosophy. It is an intel-
lectual attitude in the development of which personal
sympathies and antipathies have counted for much
more than a scrutiny of realities ; and it is an attitude
which, as a natural consequence, takes no account of
the progress of knowledge, and is already in large
part antiquated.

Yet it is essential to study what is called Shaw's
philosophy, if one would understand his position on
the detailed problems of life. A man's philosophy
or creed has frequently no relation to his practical
attitude. Huxley affected to believe that we have no
confident knowledge of the existence of a material



THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 59

universe, yet he is to many — not unnaturally — the
arch-materialist of the nineteenth century. Rocke-
feller professes a deep admiration for the Sermon on
the Mount. Many people believe implicitly that
they are going to heaven, yet make heroic efforts to
remain out of it as long as possible. Shaw is too
virile and candid for this. His philosophy actively
shapes his views : especially his ethical views, from
which the most distinctive and audacious of his
opinions are derived. Indeed, in the last ten years
this philosophy has grown larger and more dogmatic
in his mind, and nearly every utterance is at once
related to it. We have already seen how even his
ideas of social reform are modified by mystic considera-
tions of which we had to defer the explanation. We
shall see that his characteristic ideas about morality
also are grounded on this deeper theory of life. In this
he believes that he improves upon Nietzsche and Ibsen.
Perhaps it will be well to give at once an outline of
his philosophy. In describing it as " antiquated "
I did not mean that Shaw was clinging in comparative
loneliness to one of those ancient wrecks which float
in the current of thought. As far as the first principle
of his creed goes, he is in high company. A brilliant
French philosopher, Professor Bergson, has recently
brought it into discussion again throughout the
civilised world. Sir Oliver Lodge has defended it for
two decades ; and, what is more important to those
who know anything about the subject, Professor A.
Thompson, and Principal Lloyd Morgan, and a group
of able biologists and embryologists on the continent,
defend it. Except Bergson, however, whose philos-
ophy is nearest in substance to that accepted by
Shaw, these scientific men would reject the rather
poetical form in which Shaw conceives the " Life-



60 BERNARD SHAW



Force," and certainly not one of them would sanction
for a moment Shaw's opposition to Darwinism. I
do not think there is one scientific man or philosopher
in Europe or the United States — except, in some
measure, the Rev. Professor Henslow — who would
endorse Shaw's philosophy on this point ; and you
must share Shaw's disdain of authority to be in-
different to that fact.

There are, according to the Shavian philosophy,
two fundamental realities : ^ matter ^and the Life-
Force. ^ Matter is, or may be, eternal. At a point in
time (as far as our planet is concerned) the other
and spiritual reality, the Life-Force, pervades matter
and begins to build its atoms into simple living things,
which it animates. Then comes the long story of
the evolution of life, the ascent from level to level of
organisation. Some (materialists) hold that this
upward procession was due to the struggle of living
things and the changes in their surroundings : some
(theists) believe that it was directed by a supreme
intelligence ; and some (vitalists) contend that the Life-
Force advanced, unconsciously but by native impulse,
in certain definite directions. In adopting the latter
view Shaw is still in respectable company, though when
he goes on to deny the struggle for life and survival
of the fittest, he stands alone. Then comes the im-
portant practical and religious bearing of this creed.
It gives Shaw a religion because he is prepared to call
the Life-Force God, and thinks it may yet become
omniscient and omnipotent. It gives him a basis for
his ethic, and so colours his whole outlook, because
it identifies his will with the Life-Force — identifies
God and man — and justifies his scorn of external rules
and authorities. It justifies his disdain of reason and
rationalisnij because it makes will or impulse the



THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 61



primary and true expression of the supreme force.
It rationalises his belief in the Superman — to say
nothing of his conception of woman, the artist, and
other particular types — by showing that this ever-
advancing power must go on to a still higher level ;
and it explains his deliberate asceticism, since man's
highest work is to co-operate with the " will of God " —
the Life-Force.

His philosophy is, therefore, no academic speculation,
but a vital part of every important opinion he has
expressed. If a man or woman affects to be a Shavian
and discards this philosophy, his or her creed is super-
ficial and disjointed. It is the mainspring in Andrew
Undershaft and John Tanner, in Major Barbara and
Ann Whitefield, and scores of other characters at
whom we have lightly laughed. The Shavian creed,
in so far as it is constructive, falls to pieces if you
reject this theoretical bond.

In order to understand how Shaw came to adopt
this theory of the Life-Force we must return for a
moment to his history. He landed on this shoal
by trying to steer between Scylla and Charybdis,
between Christianity and Rationalism. I have
already described this in general terms. At an early
age he rejects his religious beliefs and embraces the
spirit of the Zetetical Society. Then, mainly on
account of the supposed social implications of Dar-
winism, he sees a whirlpool in Rationalism and backs
away from it. He then discovers the theory of
Samuel Butler, who explains the universe without
either Christianity or Darwinism, and puts an un-
conscious mind or life-force in nature. Later he
finds that Schopenhauer has made an impressive
philosophy of this idea of a great impulse or will
pushing upward in nature, and he sees its moral



62 BERNARD SHAW

implications. We may examine these stages, or
phases, of his creed more closely.

We saw that in the 'eighties he called himself an
" atheist," and joined in fierce assaults on Christianity
at the Zetetical Society. Captain Wilson used to
call it " Crosstianity," and Shaw speaks of this
years afterwards, in his " Quintessence of Ibsenism,"
as an " apt name." Though he has ceased to call
himself an atheist, and begun to call himself a theist,
he has not in the least modified his antagonism to
Christian theology. In 1896, in his essay " On
going to Church" (Savoy), he merely recommends
people to go at a time when there is no service, and
he ends a remarkable and flippant confession of faith
with the words : " And I regard St Athanasius
as an irreligious fool — that is, in the only serious
sense of the word, a damned fool." In the preface
to " Man and Superman " and the " Handbook "
he is just as hostile : " Christianity means nothing
to the masses but a sensational public execution,"
and " We have relapsed into disputes about trans-
substantiation at the very moment when the discovery
of the wide prevalence of theophagy as a tribal custom
has deprived us of the last excuse for believing that
our official rites differ in essentials from those of bar-
barians." In the preface to " Major Barbara " (1905)
he repeats this : " Popular Christianity has for its
emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a sanguinary
execution after torture, and for its central mystery an
insane vengeance bought off by a trumpery 7 expiation."
His association with the City Temple and its liberal
preacher in recent years has led some to think that
he was moderating his antagonism to Christianity,
and some of the abler writers on him, like Julius Bab
and Dr Henderson, call him a Protestant or Neo-



THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 63

Protestant. He has himself used the phrase, but
it is wholly misleading. In 1908 he wrote to the
Freethinker (November 1st) to deny that there was
any material approach to Christianity in his develop-
ment. " I loathe/' he said, " the mess of mean
superstitions and misunderstood prophecies which is
still rammed down the throats of the children of this
country under the name of Christianity as contempt-
uously as ever." All that has happened is that, while
he used to regard the Christ of the Gospels as wholly
fictitious and impossible, Mr R. J. Campbell has
made the figure plausible, in the human sense. The
Christian God is still to him what he described in
his reply to Nordau in 1895 : "a frightfully jealous
and vindictive old gentleman sitting on a throne above
the clouds," and " heaven is a sort of bliss which
would bore any active person to a second death."

His relation to the liberal form of Christianity which
is taught at the City Temple was well shown on a
recent occasion, to which I have already referred.
Speaking from the pulpit of Dr Parker on " Christian
Economics," and premising that he " did not profess to
be a Christian," he laid down the conditions of an en-
tente ; and they were peremptorily rejected by Mr Camp-
bell. 1 Christ, he said, was the first and last Christian ;
the question was whether they should restore his teach-
ing — it was a matter of complete indifference to him
whether it was real or mythical — and whether Mr
Shaw could co-operate with them. To make that
possible they must surrender, not only hell and
heaven, which he notoriously derides, but every
pretence of a doctrine of atonement. Vindictive

1 The proceedings of this remarkable meeting, on October 30,
1913, were not accurately reported. I write from the notes which
i took at the time.



1



64 BERNARD SHAW

punishment is one of the things he most* abhors in
life, and he will not have the central doctrine of the
Christian scheme — fall and expiation — in any form.
Mr Campbell said at the close that in this they em-
phatically dissented from Mr Shaw.

But it seemed to me that Mr Campbell's emphatic
dissent was really due to a deeper and more chilling
heresy on the part of Mr Shaw, which it was indiscreet
to recall to the audience. He had insisted on the
" immanence " of God. Xew theologians and amateur
theologians are fond of imagining that in this they
rise superior to the " old theology," whereas every
great theologian of the Middle Ages, and all other
ages, taught the immanence of God. The real issue
is whether you identify God with the spirit of man.
Now even Mr Campbell believes that God was a
supreme, intelligent Being before man appeared,
and Mr Shaw holds the opposite : God is the Life-
Force which, as far as we know, has reached its high-
water mark in man.

And from this he drew a conclusion which sent a
shiver throughout the crowded chapel. A friend
had, he said, recently died and gone to heaven. [All
the youths and maidens who had come to hear Shavian
jokes leaned forward with beaming expectancy at
this solitary promise of humour.] To St Peter, at
the gate, he explained that he wanted to have a
word with the Almighty. When Peter demurred,
and the man insisted, Paul, Moses, and other ancients
were summoned to a council. [The smile slowly
disappeared, and the hundreds of Christian faces
became graver and graver.] They decided that the
man had a right to " see " God, and conducted him
across the golden streets to a sort of cathedral, where
'" a melancholy old man " sat on a gorgeous throne



THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 65

above the altar. The man was advancing toward
him, when Peter drew him back. " We have/' he
whispered, " granted you your right to see God,
but you cannot speak to him because — between
ourselves — God has gone mad." And on the awed
silence of the vast audience broke the cold and relent-
less assurance of the lecturer : " That is what is
wrong with the world : the God in us has gone mad."

It seems not only an interesting point in itself to
make clear Bernard Shaw's attitude on religion, but
that attitude has a most important bearing on his
ethical and even social opinions. This will appear
later, and I will briefly sum up his hostility to the
prevailing creed. He is drastically opposed to it,
even in its most liberal forms. He scorns even the
new-theology notion that God was alienated from
man and a reconciliation was needed. He disdains
the belief in personal immortality — " I neither believe
in it nor desire it," he says — and has heavily cari-
catured heaven and hell (in " Man and Superman "O
He thinks the notion of a Superior Being creating, or
directing the evolution of, inferior beings, especially
by a process of cruelty, " a horrible old idea." His
God is merely the Life-Force which has at length
reached consciousness in the brain of man, will one
day be the Superman, and may eventually be some-
thing higher. A two-edged sword lies between Shaw
and the Christian Church.

And the next point in the interpretation of his
creed is that he is equally alienated from Rational-
ism. In the letter to the Freethinker which I have
previously quoted he says, after expressing his con-
tempt of Christianity : " But I am contemptuously
and implacably anti-rationalist and anti-materialist."
Throughout the whole of his writings you find a scorn



66 BERNARD SHAW

of " the revival of tribal soothsaying and idolatrous
rites which Huxley called science and mistook for an
advance on the Pentateuch." Rationalism is a
system of " syllogism-worship with rites of human
sacrifice." Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, etc., are the
most mischievous seducers of mankind since Torque-
mada, and their doctrine of evolution is the most de-
vastating influence that has ever fallen on human
thought.

The way in which Shaw reaches this singular
position — singular in an anti-Christian — is instructive.
We first find a strong and clear expression of it in his
"Quintessence of Ibsenism " (1891). He finds in
Ibsen, or reads into Ibsen, traces of " how well he
knew the crushing weight with which the sordid cares
of the ordinary struggle for money and respectability
fell on the world when the romance of the creeds was
discredited, and progress seemed for the moment to
mean, not the growth of the spirit of man, but an effect
of the survival of the fittest brought about by the
destruction of the unfit, all the most frightful examples
of this systematic destruction being thrust into the
utmost prominence by those who were fighting the
Church with Mill's favourite dialectical weapon, the
incompatibility of divine omnipotence with divine
benevolence" (p. 59). As Shaw observes soon after-
wards that Ibsen never " saw through " natural
selection, we may take this as a piece of pure Shavian-
ism read into Ibsen. The essay is, in fact, one of
Shaw's most careful pieces of work and puts very
clearly his position in 1890. He not only opposes
natural selection, but rejects the very principle of
Rationalism — the supremacy of reason in matters of
opinion — and may almost be said to have anticipated
Bergson in substituting instinct for reason. Rational-



THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 67



ism discards tradition, and then finds " a creative
dynamic power " in reason : a description of reason
which is certainly not used by Rationalists. They
do, however, take reason as a guide in the investiga-
tion of reality, and Mr Shaw thinks theologians may
justly retort that " perhaps the conclusions of an