Shaw borrowed nothing of Nietzsche, at least. In
fact, it is curious how their language coincides at
times when we remember that Nietzsche based his
system essentially on Darwinism, which Shaw despises.
But he had not even heard of Nietzsche when he wrote
the " Quintessence of Ibsenism." It was in the old
Zetetical Society days, when he heard Captain Wilson
and Stuart Glennie, and talked with Belfort Bax, that
he became a moral rebel. This moral rebellion was
strengthened by Butler and Ibsen, and based on
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 81
Shaw's philosophy. It is very important to under-
stand it aright, as it is misconceived by enemies and
put in practice by emancipated admirers. It will be
remembered that a criminal once pleaded Shaw's
philosophy in court. I have myself been told by
young men, after giving a very plain lecture on the
ethic of Goethe's " Faust " : "I don't believe in your
sex-morality. I follow Bernard Shaw."
His biographers usually observe, almost apologeti-
cally, that Shaw is really on the side of the angels.
" Nothing in the whole world is so far from Shaw as
moral indifferentism," says Julius Bab ; but ordinary
moral rules do not meet his moral needs. Dr
Henderson remarks that he is " fundamentally an
ethicist." As he loathes Ethicists, who are generally
Rationalists, this is mis-leading. In the preface to
" The Irrational Knot " he says that if the mob can be
persuaded to adopt his doctrine of equal incomes
" the sluggards who are content to be wealthy without
working and the dastards who are content to work
without being wealthy, together with all the pseudo-
moralists and ethicists and cowardice-mongers gener-
ally, would be exterminated without shrift." One may
say that a man who does not practise what he preaches
exposes himself to misunderstanding. Has Shaw
not always been a pattern of all the virtues, except
those " seven deadly virtues " which he recommends
to others ? That is just the paradox. He has been
entirely faithful to his philosophy, yet has been a
model citizen, a living rebuke to suburban church-
wardens ; nay, he has bored and irritated many of us
ethicists by his saintly example and his frowns at our
tobacco, our beer, and our beef.
The truth is that he is so naturally and unshakably I
virtuous that he does not appreciate the need of moral 3
82 BERNARD SHAW
rules. He smiles, as an archangel would, at the
decalogue : or as Ruskin or Pater would smile at
rules of grammar or style. He then notices that the
current moral rules are made the pretext or excuse
for a vast amount of cruelty. Children are tortured
into compliance with them by stupid teachers and
parents : clergymen and other professionally pious
people stoop to lying and hypocrisy : women who
transgress them are driven to suicide or murder : and
a very large amount of really brutal conduct is con-
doned because it does not fall literally under the ban
of the commandments. After Ibsen, Shaw is the most
acute and penetrating observer of this side of life.
He further notices that these moral rules are ancient
formulae, tinged with ancient superstitions and tabus,
not growing with the growth of man's mind and social
life. And, finally, he feels that the life-spirit in
himself dictates a nobler conduct than these rules
engender in his neighbours, and he places his rebellion
on a philosophic basis. Scorn rules : assert your
p%. own will.
The academic element in this position need not be
considered at length. Shaw is an anarchist by
temperament and experience : a man who does not
need discipline and rules, and smiles at their effect on
others. This agrees with the philosophy into which
his rejection of Christianity on the one hand and of
Rationalism on the other has driven him. Trust the
life-spirit in you. Moral rules, moreover, are intellec-
tual summaries, and will, not intellect, is the supreme
reality. At the best, moral rules are the formulation
of some other person's will (say, the will of Christ),
and the Life-Force has moved on since the days of
ancient Judaea. Recent versions of moral rules are
due to the " Rationalist-Mercantilist," or utilitarian.
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 83
theory of life, which he rejects altogether, as a theory :
we shall see that he comes back to it in detail. There
is no need to add to the criticisms I have already
passed on this philosophy. I need only point out
again the utter unsoundness of his psychology. He
does not follow his own " will," but his judgment.
Ibsen, into whom he reads his own bad psychology
is clear enough about this. It is only when the
intellect dictates your course that you pit your will
against that of society (like Dr Stockmann in "An
Enemy of the People"). Reason takes precedence.
We do not say that it is the superior or more
fundamental thing ; any more than man is superior
to woman. It happens to be reason's function to
formulate conduct, and the will's to achieve it.
From this confusion we get Shaw's mistaken view
of the nature of moral principles. He says in " The
Sanity of Art," for instance : " Abstract principles
of conduct break down in practice because kindness
and truth and justice are not duties founded on
abstract principles external to man, but human passions
which have, in their time, conflicted with higher
passions as well as with lower ones." Kindness is a
sentiment, of course, and there is a passion for truth
and justice. Kindness is, in fact, often a natural
quality apart altogether from reason : as in the ladies
who are kind to professional tramps and beggars.
But the bulk of us are not naturally kind, especially
in Mr Shaw's estimate of us, and we have to be reasoned
into a cultivation of our scanty native endowment.
Truthfulness and justice, on the other hand, are
abstract principles, rules of social conduct. If they
were merely subjective feelings, present in one and
absent from another, Shaw would have no right to
attempt to impose his taste on others. When he talks to
84 BERNARD SHAW
the people who sweat labour, or own brothels or squalid
houses, or manufacture cannon, they have a right,
on his own theory, to shrug their shoulders and tell
him that tastes differ. The Life-Force tells Rudyard
Kipling one thing, Gabriele d'Annunzio another, and
Shaw another. Why is Shaw's version of its will
infallible ? You are forced to consult reason and.
objective standards.
Indeed Shaw, like Ibsen, does consult objective
tests, and turns utilitarian. Why should a man not
lie if he is so disposed ? Because, says Shaw (" Quin-
tessence of Ibsenism ") "the liar's punishment is
that he cannot believe anyone else." Add that he
will find it very inconvenient to be known as a liar,
since no one can believe him, and you have the utili-
tarian principle in its perfection. There are vices
which, like poisons, are medicinal in small doses and
pernicious in the lump. In defending his " Arms
and the Man " against critics who have called his
heroine a minx and a liar, he says, rejecting their
moral categories : "I have nothing to do with that :
the only moral question for me is, does she do good
or harm ? " As a matter of fact, she saves a man's
life. It is the utilitarian principle making an ex-
ception of the rule. Remember how Charles Reade
makes his heroine, for a good purpose, " lie with the
sweetness of a Madonna " ; and how that other
would-be anti-utilitarian, Maeterlinck, makes a woman
yield to a man's desire in order to save a city — and
the only objection our precious dramatic censor saw
to it was that she did it in her nightdress !
Shaw is constantly admitting this test, and certainly
J. S. Mill would have supported him in claiming that
utility, in the highest sense, demands exceptions to,
or even the abolition of, some of the conventional
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 85
rules of morality. A final quotation, from the preface
to " The Irrational Knot," will suffice to close the
subject. Shaw says : "To all writers of the first
order these rules, and the need for them produced by
the moral and intellectual incompetence of the ordinary
human animal, are no more invariably beneficial and
respectable than the sunlight which ripens the wheat
in Sussex and leaves the desert deadly in Sahara,
making the cheeks of the ploughman's child rosy in
the morning and striking the ploughman brainsick or
dead in the afternoon." Quite so : morality must
be tested by the utilitarian principle as well as im-
morality. In point of fact, all this defiance is really
related only to one line of the moral code — sex-morality
— and we shall see in the next chapter that utilitari-
anism is not rigid on that point. When you put aside
his confused psychology and mystic philosophy,
Shaw turns out to be a utilitarian.
This is further seen when nervous people point out
to him the probable consequences, individual and
social, of young people adopting his theory of moral
anarchy. He does not say : " Damn the conse-
quences." He says that your fears are groundless.
When you press him into this corner, you find that,
in spite of all his withering indictments of our genera-
tion, he believes that " a really evil " man or woman
is as rare as a genius. Men steal, and women prostitute
themselves, from economic pressure. He is more
optimistic than many of us " cowardice-mongers,"
for we know that (as Mrs Gallichan has shown in
her " Truth about Woman ") prostitution is not
generally due to economic pressure, or theft to poverty.
There may be " temporary excesses," he admits, if
the principle of following one's own impulses were
generally adopted, but the emancipated young lady
86 BERNARD SHAW
will generally find, to her surprise, that " the indis-
pensable qualification for a wicked life is not freedom,
but wickedness." In the various cases that have
come under my own observation the emancipated
young lady has easily found the " wickedness/' but
has paid a heavy price for it ; as we shall presently
find Shaw saying.
In his " Sanity of Art " Shaw deals at some length
with this point. Incidentally, let me notice how the
whole controversy is almost always narrowed down
to an attack on rules of sex-morality. We will give
this point special consideration later, but must take
it here as a general consideration of morality and duty.
He has two not very consistent lines of defence. At
one point he urges that, in plain English, young
people will burn their fingers by playing with fire and
learn wisdom. " At the best," he says to the would-be
rebel, " you will find that your passions, if you really
and honestly let them all loose impartially, will disci-
pline you with a severity which your conventional
friends, abandoning themselves to the mechanical
routine of fashion, could not stand for a day. " " Plenty
of young women have tried the experiment," he says,
and in a few years they found themselves " plunged
into duties, responsibilities, and sacrifices from which
they were glad to retreat to the life of an ordinary
respectable woman." He almost holds the fear of
hell over them. At least he talks just the utilitarian-
morality language which Goethe and Swinburne talked
in their sober old age. The utilitarian would merely
ask : If this is experience, why not formulate the gist
of it in moral rules and impart it to the young in time —
with explanations ? And Shaw quite agrees. Laws
are necessary, a set of rules is "an overwhelming
convenience," because so few have the leisure or
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 87
ability to formulate their own standards. We must
take them as rules of etiquette, choosing the best
available, as one chooses a typewriter.
But Shaw seems to reflect afterwards that, in saying
that mankind will learn sobriety by its headaches,
and so prompting the obvious suggestion that it would
be better to learn it by the headaches of other people
(which is the essence of morality), he is getting far
away from his philosophy. He returns to his belief
in the goodness of man. It is a fiction that we are
bursting with a set of diabolical impulses known as
" passions." " The ingrained habit of thinking of
the propensities of which we are ashamed as * our
passions,' and our shame of them and our propensities
to noble conduct as a negative and inhibitory depart-
ment called generally our conscience, leads us to
conclude that to accept the guidance of our passions
is to plunge recklessly into the insupportable tedium
of what is called a life of pleasure." It is a pity that
we have to differ from Shaw in his rare moments of
appreciation of us, but his last phrase gives him
away. He is judging the mass by his own ascetic
and sober temperament. He only succeeds in getting
back to his philosophy by a sophistication of life.
If he could some Saturday night constrain himself to
explore London — dip into a few hundred pubs and
music-halls and slums and dark open spaces, and so
on — he would speak differently. In any case, his
ethic is clear. If you have no passions, follow them.
If you are an ascetic, follow your impulses : if you
are a voluptuary, follow them at your miserable
peril. The chief defect of this rule of conduct
seems to me that it is too ascetic. An inter-
mediate position, with self-discipline or morality,
seems happier.
88 BERNARD SHAW
I conclude that Shaw has weakened the whole
structure of his ideas by giving it a very disputable
scientific foundation. He has adopted a position
which no one without a wide command of biological
science can even discuss, which is now almost deserted
by biologists as the science advances in knowledge,
and which cannot derive the least real support from
pre-scientific speculations like those of Schopenhauer.
His position is utterly indefensible when he pits himself
against the whole scientific world on a scientific issue
such as natural selection, of which he knows very little.
He further worsens it by relying on a psychological
confusion to attack rationalism, while really attempt-
ing to justify by reason every opinion he expresses.
He is thus led into confusion and inconsistency in
stating the fundamental principle of his practical
creed, his ethic, fiercely assailing utilitarianism and
constantly falling back on it. Hence the paradox
and contradiction of much of his teaching. It is not
due to " Celtic brilliance," or the license of genius,
or an impatience of pedantry. It is due to philosophis-
ing on life without a knowledge of the facts, to pedantry
in forcing common-sense opinions into conformity
with his supposed philosophy, to obstinacy in adher-
ing to an ancient error, and to the common mistake
of framing a general theory on an exceptional tempera-
ment. And the confusion is worse confounded by
allowing sympathies and antipathies to have a share
in shaping his intellectual position.
I have already shown how this unsound philosophy
pours into and influences Shaw's most practical and
detailed opinions on constructive matters. We have
now to see this in connection with the important and
engrossing subjects of marriage, sex-morals, women,
children, and eugenics. But I should like first to
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 89
deal with another general consideration, his persistent
scorn of idealists.
Shaw is one of the most ardent idealists of his
generation. This is not a paradox, or an assurance
that he hides a warm heart under a cynical exterior,
or anything of that kind. He is an idealist in the
literal and ordinary sense of the word. He flays us
Decause he sees how much better we might be. His
Superman is an ideal : his Super-State is an ideal :
the Shavian woman, the Shavian artisan, the Shavian
municipal nursery — all are ideals. The ideal is merely
a conception of a possible better type than the actual.
It is utopianism, or the conception of an impossible
better type, which Shaw rejects. Yet he never loses
an opportunity to have a shy at the idealist. Part
of his paradox and whimsicality, we are told. It is
nothing of the kind.
It is, naturally, in the " Quintessence of Ibsenism "
that he deals most clearly with the subject. He
interprets the whole series of Ibsen's plays as attacks
on the idealist, and we have nowhere a better instance
of that weakness of his strong intelligence which I
have already discussed. An ideal, he says, is a mask
which we put on an ugly fact. On death we put the
mask of immortality : on the family we put the mask
of a fictitious harmony and blessedness. Almost
immediately he defines the ideal, in very different
terms, as " an image of what we would fain have in the
place " of the ugly fact, which is the true and ordinary
meaning of the word. It is a fiction, of course ; and
it is perfectly true that we often " idealise " facts
(especially the family) by insisting that the reality
is already the ideal. This is the source of the whole
confusion. An idealist is to him at first the man who
puts his mask on reality and says that it is actually fair
90 BERNARD SHAW
to look upon, and he goes on, by a natural but lament-
able error, to attack all men who hold ideals before
us or themselves.
He makes this clearer by taking marriage. Of a.
thousand married persons he imagines seven hundred
content with their condition, and two hundred and
ninety-nine dissatisfied. The malcontents dare not
murmur against the sacred institution in face of so'
solid a majority, and they therefore put a mask
on their experience and laud marriage to the skies.
These are what he calls idealists. For the moment
we need not ask whether unhappily married people
really do this. It is enough that this is what Shaw
means by idealists : properly, idealisers or optimists.
Then comes the one strong man in the thousand, the
Ibsen or Shaw or Brieux, who tears the mask from
marriage and exposes the facts. He is the Realist ;
and none are more bitter against him — for some
inscrutable reason — than the people whom he would,
benefit, the idealists. If Shaw always meant by
idealists, in his strictures, these men who put a false
gloss on reality, there would be no harm done beyond
a confusion of words. But he does not ; nor does
Ibsen. If Peer Gynt, and Julian, and Helmer are
all to be called idealists, it is only by a grave confusion.
Taking a fiction for a fact is one thing : trying to sub-
stitute a fiction or ideal for a fact (say, Socialism for
the actual economic order) is a totally different thing.
Shaw is too apt to sweep both into the particular
rubbish-heap which he calls idealism, especially if
the other man's ideals differ from his. Every true
realist (in Shaw's sense) is an idealist (in the ordinary
sense). He exposes ugly facts only in order to have
their ugliness removed, or a better state of things set
up, even if he has not himself a conception of what will
THE SHAVIAN PHILOSOPHY 91
be substituted. That one idealist differs from another,
and that some idealists are fanatical, and that new
ideals must arise as the mind of man grows, are not
reasons for impugning idealism. It is important
to remember this confusion when Shaw butts stormily
at " idealists."
C-tf*
^
***
CHAPTER IV
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE
The eighteenth century questioned the divine right
of kings : the nineteenth century questioned the
divine right of priests : the twentieth century questions
the divine right of moralists. So the epigrammatist
might sum up three centuries of rebellion. The
divine right of kings has disappeared : the divine
right of priests is disappearing. Will the authority
of the moralist be placed in the tomb along with
that of these more ancient pedagogues ? The re-
bellion against it gathers strength. Ibsen and Bjorn-
son, Hauptmann and Sudermann, D'Annunzio and
Galdos, Brieux and A. France, Shaw and so many
others in England, are a formidable general staff, with
a large army behind them. In every great city of
Europe and America the dramas and novels of these
distinguished artists now find ample support. After
a century of feverish effort to disentangle morals from
theology and re-assure nervous folk, it is claimed that
the one depended essentially on the other and must
perish with it.
In examining impartially this third revolt, as every
serious man and woman will, one soon sees that, as I
said, it is in the main a revolt against one only of the
ten commandments. The great artists I have enumer-
ated, as well as Zola, Maupassant, Swinburne, Meredith
and other earlier artists, do not applaud dishonesty,
hypocrisy, injustice, lying, cruelty, or meanness. On
92
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 93
the contrary, they do more than all the bishops in
Europe to promote honest}', sincerity, justice, truth-
fulness, kindliness, and honour. A Nietzsche or a
Shaw may trumpet sonorous indictments of morality
in general, but we take little notice of these. They
are doctrinaire statements, deductions from meta-
physical principles which, when he finds other men
indulging in them, Shaw calls " parlour games." He
lashes his generation, not because it is moral, but
because it professes high principles and does not live
them. He tells a man that he has no duty whatever
except to himself, and, if the man then proceeds to
vivisect, or to sweat the worker, or to exploit a lower
race, because he will profit by it, Shaw makes his hair
stand on end with the fury of his invectives. The
general attack on morality is a feint, so to say, to
cover a concentrated attack on a particular point ;
but as moralists have a way of considering this point
(sex-morals) as the ethical citadel, the confusion is
not unnatural.
Properly speaking, the attack on the received
standard of sex-relations is not an attack on morality.
It is a controversy as to whether this standard has
a legitimate place in the moral code. Most of us
have discarded the idea that morality is an eternal
truth, as Plato thought, intued by the human mind,
and unalterable. The European moral code has
changed considerably in five hundred years, and has
had to sacrifice many illusions. Humility was once
thought the greatest of virtues : suicide the deadliest
of crimes : cruelty to animals a matter of moral in-
difference. St Augustine and other early authorities
would not condemn a man for having a concubine in
certain circumstances : the Bishop of London, who
probably does not know this, would put him in the
94 BERNARD SHAW
stocks if he had the power. There is room for con-
sideration of the matter, without falling into con-
vulsions of moral indignation.
Now the most characteristic and generally interest-
ing feature of Shaw's revolt, and the one most scantily
treated by his biographers, is his position in regard
to woman and the family. Here also he touches one
of the great themes of our age : one on which, in view
of the changes which are proceeding, it is most im-
portant to have clear ideas. I therefore make no
apology for devoting a special section of this essay
to his opinions on problems of marriage and the
family.
As contradictory statements may be extracted
from Shaw's works on this important subject, it is
advisable to put a few of them in their chronological
order, exhibiting the development of his opinions.
We saw how the experience of his early years would
dispose him to criticise the family-arrangement, and
how the intellectual environment of his twenties was
saturated with moral rebellion. J. S. Mill himself
was by no means ethically orthodox in regard to
marriage, and the bold example of George Eliot
and others encouraged heretics to discuss the subject
with freedom. In the Socialist world, also, there is
much heterodoxy, especially on the continent. Hence
when, in 1890, Shaw penned the first grave statement
of his social beliefs (in " The Quintessence of Ibsen-
ism "), he had already come to the conclusion that
marriage was " a conventional arrangement, legally
enforced." As he more plainly puts it : " When the
social organism becomes bent on civilisation, it has to
force marriage and family-life on the individual, because
it can perpetuate itself in no other way whilst love
is still known only in fitful glimpses." It is accord-
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 95
ingly decorated with ideals (fictions) for the attraction
of the young, and they in turn, after a period of weary
disillusion, give the same fallacious representation of
it to the children whom they would find it expensive
to support indefinitely.
The great theme of the later dramas is already
given, and it is related to Shaw's general ethic. He
follows Ibsen, as interpreted by himself. The woman
must come out of her doll's house, and assert her will.