marriage. It would take a clever statistician to tell
us, on the available data — and it is well for writers
on both sides to recognise the ridiculously loose
character of the data — whether marriage is a failure
or no. You may say that the truth lies somewhere
between Dickens and Shaw, or that Dickens describes
one extreme and Shaw the other, but at least most
people will grant that his indictment has grave
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 109
foundations. His chief tactical mistake is to confine
himself to the middle class and satirise it out of re-
cognition. In all classes the home-life, though it is
brightened by hours and days which Shaw ignores,
though it is honoured by honest tears when the daughter
passes from it to marriage and the child or parent passes
into the silence, imposes a strain on character, is, in
a lamentable proportion of cases, a focus of irritation,
bickering, discourtesy, and selfishness, and is often
made an excuse for brutality of which the parent or
child would not be guilty in relations with strangers.
In his remedy of easy and cheap divorce also Shaw
reflects the feeling of most people who are not com-
pelled to take into account a religious doctrine of in-
dissoluble marriage. His scorn of the liberal com-
promise of enlarging the grounds of divorce is an
anticipation of the future and a deduction from the
experience of several other civilised nations. Each
new ground of divorce liberates some tens of thou-
sands of sufferers, but the radical source of misery —
the plain fact that thousands discover that it is
impossible to live in such intimate association with
dignity and happiness — is left by this liberal com-
promise to poison the life of the communitv. As
long as this is permitted, the new novel and the new
drama will riddle and ridicule the life of the home.
More interesting is Shaw's plea for the freedom of
the surplus women and the women (now numerous,
and increasing in number) who find it repugnant to
their taste or feeling to live intimately with a man.
This is not a point for argument with those who
accept Christian morals. They shudder and pass
on. But in such a city as London, where six out of
seven refuse to hear sermons, it is a point for frank
consideration. There is, and always has been, a
110 BERNARD SHAW
vast amount of unmarried commerce, and there is
much looseness of conception on the point among
non-Christian moralists. This is probably one of the
reasons why Shaw speaks of ethicists as " cowardice-
mongers," though the chief reason is that they do
not, as a body, rebuke vivisectors and imperialist
misadventures.
The principle which Shaw offers will probably be
accepted only by an infinitesimal minority, for two
reasons. First, it is a direct conclusion from his
Life-Force, which is supposed to arm with supreme
authority the will of the individual ; secondly,
because he would grant liberty only for the purpose
of procreation. I have sufficiently discussed both
points. One meets people who profess to follow
Shaw in the matter, yet do not believe in his Life-
Force and do not accept his asceticism. It is, there-
fore, probable that in this Shaw is merely enforcing
the teaching of the utilitarian moralists or, if you
like, immoralists. A moral law must not entail
misery or privation, unless some grave interest of the
community enforces it ; any law which departs from
this standard is not a moral law. It is on this ground
that most of Shaw's artist-colleagues demand greater
sexual freedom. The laws of justice, honour, and
humanity forbid indiscriminate looseness. But a
transcendental ideal like chastity, with no basis in
social needs, is on a different footing ; and, in cases
where no injustice, dishonour of contract, or suffering
is entailed, chastity remains an aesthetic standard
which some may respect and others not. Shaw puts
himself out of joint with the artists and thinkers with
whom he is usually associated in this connection by
measuring values according to his ascetic temper and
mystic philosophy. He rejects the greater part of
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 111
the liberty they claim and the ground on which they
claim it. It is quite other writers whom the English
Puritan should dread on the subject of " free love."
Deferring Eugenics and Malthusianism to the next
chapter, and ignoring what the Superman will do
with the lingering " matrimoniomaniacs," we may
close with a word about Shaw's attitude toward
woman. We have found him avowing himself a
" homoist," or anti-feminist, with a reference to
Belfort Bax. But there is a wide stretch of sentiment
between the attitude toward woman of Belfort Bax
(in his " Outspoken Essays," for instance) and that
of Mr Shaw. Comparatively, Shaw has written very
little about woman, and he leaves us to gather his
sentiments precariously from his women-characters.
I have quoted the passage, written about the end
of the last century, in which he describes middle-class
women as " graceless, ignorant, narrow-minded to a
quite appalling degree." The development of his
views does not tend to make him appreciative. He
takes the Life-Force and its purposes very seriously,
and believes that its " purpose of fecundity " is in-
carnated in woman ; though an unphilosophic observer
would surmise that it is even more intensely incarnated
in man, who has more pronounced sexual feelings.
This speculation redeems woman in some measure,
as it justifies what Shaw regards as her habitual
pursuit of man ; and he would probably grant that the
petty fibbing and hypocrisy with which he supposes
her to cloak this pursuit are venial results of man's
own hypocrisy in maintaining that she must be coy
and retiring.
But, as we shall see particularly in the next chapter,
this view of woman really embitters Shaw. In the
class to which he belongs, the middle class, the women
112 BERNARD SHAW
now fall into two categories : the religious, whose
character he may respect but whose prejudices he
deplores, and the more or less heretical. In this
latter category the practice of Malthusianism is now
general, and Shaw is sternly and violently opposed to
it. Such women not only rebel against the purposes
of the Life-Force (" the will of God "), not only delay
the coming of the super-race, but they do this, he
says, from voluptuousness, which he detests. We
shall presently see the language with which he lashes
such women, yet they are the women who, in other
respects, are the one class in which he has hope. It
is not strange that he has had no personal message to
the women of his generation, in spite of the acute
urgency of their problems, and made no serious
contribution to the psychology of sex. He merely
repeats Ibsen's injunction to rebel against duty and
sacrifice, and enfeebles the injunction by his ex-
planations and his metaphysic.
When we turn to the dramas we seem at first com-
pelled to abandon this position entirely and regard
him as a most penetrating observer and theorist.
But even some of his best admirers have not an
unqualified estimate of his women. Huneker puts it
in his strong American : " While you wonder at the
strength of their souls, you do not miss the size of
their feet." I do not quote critics of the hostile
school, whose language is violent, and cannot here
examine his feminine characters in detail. Glance
at them as they successively step out of his artistic
imagination. Blanche Sartorius — silly, hypocritical,
almost brutal : Julia and Sylvia Craven — foolish and
blatant ; Grace Cuthbertson — the refined and sensible
foil to the preceding : Mrs Warren, a coarse and
realistic prostitute, and Vivie, an unreal, mechanically.
THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE 113
constructed girl : Raina — romantic and hypocritical :
Candida — strong and charming and improbable :
Napoleon's lady — wholly admirable because she is
Ellen Terry : Mrs Crampton — firm, sane, and real :
Gloria Crampton — stiff, mendacious, unlovely : Dolly
Crampton — delightful and impossible. And so on.
You have every type, precisely limned, real and un-
real, but with academic additions to the psychology
of most of the real characters. Acute observation
no one will question, but the policy of caricature and
the belief in the Life-Force moderate the value of it
in very many cases.
But it is impossible to do justice here to his dramatic
creativeness, and where justice is not done injustice
results. Shaw would probably claim to have made
a most penetrating analysis of the real motives of
women ; he says that what they and the ordinary
psychologist call their motives are only excuses. It
is true that he is a penetrating observer, but un-
fortunate that he is also a theorist. The motive-
springs in his characters have too often been put
there by himself, and then he artlessly calls us to see
what he has discovered.
His ideal woman, a Super- woman, is too vague.
He does not believe in ideals, and so his idealism has
to express itself in unguarded moments. The woman
of the future must be free, economically and morally,
absolute mistress of herself, of sufficiently strong and
developed intelligence to repel all illusions, indifferent
to sex-pleasure but submissive to sex-burdens (her
one obedience) . But what will she be emotionally ?
That is the great question, and Shaw evades it. You.
cannot draw a conclusion from his dramatic types ;
they are necessarily varied and conflicting. He
would say that he has nothing to do with the future •
H
114 BERNARD SHAW
he is not a Bellamy. But people who are unable to
trust his Life-Force (which " has gone mad " in us),
and feel that the life of to-day is fashioning the life
of to-morrow, must have a pattern or ideal to guide
them. Some women found it in his Candida — and
he promptly wrote a farce about the " Candida-
maniacs." It is not Mephistophelean laughter, but
a philosophy out of accord with reality.
CHAPTER V
PROBLEMS OF THE FAMILY AND THE STATE
On various occasions we have found the normal
development of Mr Shaw's opinions violently dis-
located by a recent ardour for Eugenics. We saw
how, for a time, even his Socialist zeal was almost
absorbed by the new passion : how the progressive
moderation of his early anti-feminism was checked
by a discovery that middle-class women, of the best
type, were sinning against the commands of the Life-
Force : how his general philosophy was contorted
into some strange conclusions on encountering this
new ideal. It is now time to examine his Eugenic
theory and proposals. They have come to occupy
a commanding place in his mind during the last
decade, and the story of their development is interest-
ing and characteristic.
The first announcement of his thoroughgoing
adherence to the new reform is in the preface to
" Man and Superman." The first appeal of Eugenics
to the modern imagination has an impressive, scientific
quality. We have discarded natural selection in
breeding our most valuable horses, dogs, fowl, fruits,
and flowers. We select the breeders or the seeds,
and create a new and finer type with a rapidity and
economy that make the procedure of nature seem
stupid, wasteful, and old-fashioned. Burbank does
not throw a handful of seeds on a cultivated plot,
and let them struggle for survival. He chooses the
116
116 BERNARD SHAW
parent-seeds, with excellent result. But the breeding
of our most valuable animal, man, we leave to the
cruel and wasteful method of nature. We fling a
thousand babies, born of haphazard mating, into the
civic arena, and tell them to fight it out. Grave
writers like B. Kidd say that we must do this, because
nature does it, and, of course, a " natural law " (at
which scientists now smile) is a dreadful thing to
ignore. These " laws of nature " have played a
remarkable part in modern culture. They are not
laws at all, but simple summaries of hitherto observed
facts, yet certain philosophers bluffed theologians out
of their belief in miracles by parading these " eternal
iron laws," and sociologists would bluff us out of our
schemes of reform by the use of the same bogey. The
Eugenist points out that " artificial selection " is as
natural as " natural selection," and much wiser and
less costly. Hence the wide disposition to consider
schemes of breeding superior humans.
This scientific appeal of Eugenics is hardly noticed
by Shaw. A careful consideration of it would not
harmonise with his views about science and selection.
It is unfortunate that the Eugenic argument which
appeals to him is an unsound argument. " The
bubble of heredity has been pricked," he says ; mean-
ing that science has now rejected the old belief
that a modification of the individual brain or body
(acquired modification) could be transmitted to off-
spring. If this were so — if acquired modifications
were certainly not inherited, as he says — the education
and improvement of each generation would die with
it, and the work would have to begin entirely afresh
in each generation. All the increased fineness of
brain which education might give a man or woman
would disappear with that particular body. Hence
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 117
it would be far wiser and more economical to breed
a slightly better brain and body in each generation ;
it is stupid to go on breeding ineducable brains and
coarse or ugly bodies. We must prevent the con-
tinuance of bad stocks (negative Eugenics), and
concentrate on the cultivation of good stocks (positive
Eugenics). Then, in a few generations, the teacher
and social reformer will have far finer material to
handle, and man will rapidly rise toward the super-
human stage.
It is, as I said, unfortunate that there is a flaw in
this argument. Science has not pricked the bubble
of heredity. It is a point of very serious controversy
in science to-day whether acquired modifications are
or are not transmitted. In England it happens that
the majority of biologists and embryologists are on
the negative side, and probably Mr Shaw has seen
some misleading dogmatic statement on that side.
But Sir William Turner, Professor Bastian, and others
are on the affirmative side, and on the Continent and
in the United States the old view has very formidable
champions. It is a grave mistake for certain Eugenists
to build on disputed theories of heredity, such as
Weismannism or Mendelism (both exceedingly dis-
puted), and it is just this mistake which Shaw has
endorsed.
His real reason is his very pessimistic estimate of
our generation, and this is worth examining. We saw
in an earlier chapter how he appeals to Mr A. B.
Walkley to admit that democracy, education, and all
the " illusions " of their youth have failed ; and how,
in the " Handbook " he adds Socialism, Ethicism,
etc., to the illusions, and insists that we are making
no progress whatever. It is all " goose-cackle " to
talk about progress. He dips into history to prove
118 BERNARD SHAW
it. Was England any better under the Puritans
than under Laud ? Is republican France, with its
Panama and Dreyfus, any better than imperial France
was ? Is the United States, with its trusts and
millionaires, improved ? This precious nineteenth
century (he says in the preface to " Three Plays by
Brieux "), which " regarded itself as the summit of
civilisation " and " talked of the past as a cruel
gloom that had been dispelled for ever by the railway
and the electric telegraph," was stripped of its masks
by Marx and Zola and Ibsen and Strindberg, and
" revealed itself as, on the whole, perhaps the most
villainous page of recorded human history." We
are actually degenerating, instead of advancing.
Our boasted factory and penal legislation, and housing,
and so forth, are merely things that money has done,
not outcomes and proofs of character and statesman-
ship. On the other scale he heaps the Boer War, the
mutilation of the Mahdi's body, the expedition to
Peking, Denshawi, our jails, our lawyers, our doctors,
our teachers, our divines, our foie gras, our furs and
feathers, and so on. The world is " a den of wild
animals " and " will not bear thinking of to those
who know what it is."
He warms to the work and goes further into history.
Our conduct and codes are no improvement on those
of Rome and Athens. Is the modern chauffeur greater
than the old chariot-driver, or the modern Prime
Minister greater than Caesar ? In the notes to
" Caesar and Cleopatra " he says that " the world
presents, on the whole, a rather less dignified appear-
ance in Ibsen's ' Enemy of the People ' [a piece of
constructive pessimism] than in Plato's Republic "
[a piece of whollv imaginary utopianism]. We see
no progress in the whole historical period ; except
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 119
in engineering, which has given us the smoke of
London and Sheffield. In short, the command over
the forces of nature has not been accompanied by an
increased command over self, which he takes as the
test of progress. In all the changes which have
chequered the history of Europe during the last 2000
years, we have not even got back to the mark reached
by the older civilisations. A certain point has been
attained in the development of each historical civilisa-
tion, and we have not passed it, if we have reached it,
in modern times ; and even this point was only " a
pinnacle above an abyss of squalor/'
Shaw denies that he is a pessimist. When Max
Nordau intimidated Europe and America with his
pessimistic " Degeneration " in 1895, it was Shaw
who made the most spirited defence of the nineteenth
century. In the artistic movements which Nordau
took to be symptoms of senile decay Shaw saw indi-
cations of healthy and vigorous youth. A few years
later he penned the scathing indictments of " Man
and Superman." This is not pessimism, he says,
because he has a firm faith in the future — a confidence
in the Life-Force. He is a meliorist. But, whatever
we call his mood, there is hardly another distinguished
writer in the world to-day who would endorse his
estimate of contemporary life. And since this
estimate is the direct cause of his stress in Eugenics,
and indeed darkens the serious elements of all his
recent work, it merits consideration. It is a good
opportunity to test his bad opinion of us.
We want a plainer test of progress than " increased
command over self," and Shaw would agree to test
it by our success in diminishing prejudice, cruelty,
injustice, coarseness, and dishonesty. In these
respects I would, on behalf of our age, challenge
120 BERNARD SHAW
comparison with any age that has been recorded in the
story of man. One is inclined to dismiss Mr Shaw's
opinion that we are deteriorating, and that the
nineteenth century is " the most villainous page of
recorded human history," with one simple remark.
If George Bernard Shaw had lived five hundred years
ago, he would have been burned at the stake or boiled
in oil ; if he had lived one hundred years ago, he
would have been sent to Botany Bay, or hounded
from country to country like Paine, or driven insane
(as many were) in an English jail. In our age he is
respected throughout Europe and the United States,
and can make £10,000 in one year by libelling us in
his amusing way. He will not study or reflect what
England was only a hundred years ago, or France
under Louis XVIII., or the American Colony under
the witch-hunting Puritans. London a century ago
(we have a detailed account by the head of the police
at the time, as well as many serious social studies)
had, to a population of one million, far more prostitutes
than it has to-day ; and it reeked with crime, drunken-
ness, duelling, coarse and cruel pastimes, dense
prejudices, tyranny, political corruption, and squalor
to an extent of which our experience gives us no idea.
Each point can be amply established. The treatment
of child-workers was brutal in the extreme, adult
workers were fearfully overstrained and brutalised,
the homes of the poor were hovels of inconceivable
squalor, women were grossly wronged, and so on.
And the abatement of these evils is due solely to
humanitarian, and very largely Rationalist, workers,
forming and building upon an improved general
sentiment. When you compare things, you must
know both terms of the comparison. If the Boer
War had been a hundred years ago, what would
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 121
have been the number and the fate of the Pro-
Boers ?
In his larger historical comparison Mr Shaw seems
to have an imperfect knowledge of ancient civilisations
and an imperfect grasp of the course of history. No
one but a religious apologist would suggest that
medieval Europe was an improvement on ancient
Europe, and that the present indicated continuous
progress. We have been slowly advancing for seven
hundred years, but in the preceding seven hundred
Europe had receded enormously. There has not been
continuous progress, and in many respects the nine-
teenth century merely climbed back to the position
whence Athens and Rome had been dislodged. But
one has only to reflect on the slavery and the hem-
lock-cup of Athens, and the slavery, the gladiators,
and the imperial corruption of Rome, to see that
we have now gone far beyond them. Mankind has
got into its stride at last. There is no possibility
now of barbarism overthrowing civilisation as it
formerly did. It is not true that civilisation keeps
rising to a point and ebbing again. It reaches a
higher water-mark in each great civilisation, and is
far above them all to-day, with no sign of receding
again.
The actual evils, stupidities, and crimes that linger
in our civilisation should be, not merely admitted,
but burned into the consciousness of every man and
woman. That is the great and enduring work of
Shaw. His exaggerations and the feebleness of his
historical comparisons do not matter. The serious
student of his works must realise these exaggerations
and errors, but, when we have set them aside, his
indictment of our age rests on very serious evidence.
There is no need to go into it here, as it will be apparent
122 BERNARD SHAW
in the study of his dramas. It is well to give a warning,
however. Juvenal's famous indictment of Rome is
not only less reliable as to fact than many imagine,
but it confuses matters of taste and plain defects ; it
reviles the age because women have taken to letters,
and so on. In the same way, much of Shaw's indict-
ment of our age is based on personal standards or
disputable tests. We shall see a few instances
presently.
Studying these defects of our age, therefore, and
wrongly convinced that we are making no progress,
Shaw tells us to abandon education and other remedies,
and breed a new race. Most people are now agreed
that negative Eugenic proposals are sound, but the
positive proposals are vague and meagre, and we look
to a fearless thinker like Shaw to improve them.
He says that marriage is in the way, and must go.
" Being cowards, we defeat natural selection under
cover of philanthropy ; being sluggards, we neglect
artificial selection under cover of delicacy and
morality." Certainly the man who thinks that
marriage is in the way and will not say so is a coward ;
and there are many. It is probable, Shaw says, that
the best children will be born of parents who differ
from each other so much that they could not com-
fortably live together. It is at least not improbable,
though we need as yet a closer study of the importance
to offspring of real and deep sympathy between the
parents.
As to the method of carrying out the reform, Shaw
thinks it premature to speculate. It may be done by
the State, or by "a private company or a chartered
company for the improvement of human live stock."
We cannot help feeling some concern, at this vague
prospect, lest certain really fine and sound human
PROBLEMS OF FAMILY AND STATE 123
sentiments are not in danger of disappearing. How-
ever, the more practical question is : What qualities
are you going to choose in your breeders ? I need
not go into the serious difficulties which arise from
the great uncertainty of human inheritance, but we
do require some suggestion of a " pattern " or " speci-
fication." Shaw admits that he has none. " What
is really important in man is the part of him that
we do not yet understand " : which makes breeding
difficult. We know what we want, and how to get it,
in cattle and sheep. At one point, as I have said, — I
Shaw suggests mating a man of fine physique with a
woman of fine mind. But what is a fine mind ?
An Ibsenite type, or an Epicurean type, or a religious