Lastly, he has obliterated the mere cynic. He has been so much more cynical than anyone else for the public good that no one has dared since to be really cynical for anything smaller. The Chinese crackers of the frivolous cynics fail to excite us after the dynamite of the serious and aspiring cynic. Bernard Shaw and I (who are growing grey together) can remember an epoch which many of his followers do not know: an epoch of real pessimism. The years from 1885 to 1898 were like the hours of afternoon in a rich house with large rooms; the hours before tea-time. They believed in nothing except good manners; and the essence of good manners is to conceal a yawn. A yawn may be defined as a silent yell. The power which the young pessimist of that time showed in this direction would have astonished anyone but him. He yawned so wide as to swallow the world. He swallowed the world like an unpleasant pill before retiring to an eternal rest. Now the last and best glory of Shaw is that in the circles where this creature was found, he is not. He has not been killed (I don’t know exactly why), but he has actually turned into a Shaw idealist. This is no exaggeration. I meet men who, when I knew them in 1898, were just a little too lazy to destroy the universe. They are now conscious of not being quite worthy to abolish some prison regulations. This destruction and conversion seem to me the mark of something actually great. It is always great to destroy a type without destroying a man. The followers of Shaw are optimists; some of them are so simple as even to use the word. They are sometimes rather pallid optimists, frequently very worried optimists, occasionally, to tell the truth, rather cross optimists: but they not pessimists; they can exult though they cannot laugh. He has at least withered up among them the mere pose of impossibility. Like every great teacher, he has cursed the barren fig-tree. For nothing except that impossibility is really impossible.

  I know it is all very strange. From the height of eight hundred years ago, or of eight hundred years hence, our age must look incredibly odd. We call the twelfth century ascetic. We call our own time hedonist and full of praise and pleasure. But in the ascetic age the love of life was evident and enormous, so that it had to be restrained. In an hedonist age pleasure has always sunk low, so that it has to be encouraged. How high the sea of human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now only know by the colossal walls that they built to keep it in bounds. How low human happiness sank in the twentieth century our children will only know by these extraordinary modern books, which tell people that it is a duty to be cheerful and that life is not so bad after all. Humanity never produces optimists till it has ceased to produce happy men. It is strange to be obliged to impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men to a banquet with spears. But this shall be written of our time: that when the spirit who denies besieged the last citadel, blaspheming life itself, there were some, there was one especially, whose voice was heard and whose spear was never broken.

  The Later Phases

  SOMEBODY suggested that I should write a series with some such title as “Second Thoughts”; being a reconsideration of old controversies. Whether or no second thoughts are best, I fear they are not always brightest. It does not normally occur to us that the word “revision” contains the blazing word “vision.” And it may be that a vision does not come twice, even if it be only the first impression of a poor little literary gent upon the (sometimes) depressing topic of the literature of his time. But if second thoughts are not always the brightest, it may be maintained that they are generally the broadest. And in making these notes on the later phases of Mr. Bernard Shaw, I know the necessity of breadth; because I have argued with him nearly all my life; and the campaign has always depended on the tactic of outflanking or encirclement, which means being broader than your enemy.

  The first joy of conflict is to congratulate Mr. Bernard Shaw on the fact that he is still emphatically not only alive, but kicking. In some cases, as in that of Capitalism, I think he is kicking what thoroughly deserves to be kicked. In other cases, as in that of Catholicism, I think he is kicking against the pricks; like another very controversial person on the road to Damascus. But at least it is delightful, after this stretch of years, to offer oneself to be kicked by one still capable of that all too neglected gesture.

  In the same way, I have been asked to add a postscript to my long, argumentative and even abusive book about my friend Mr. Bernard Shaw. I recoiled from it at first with horror; because it seemed to involve two especially terrible conditions. The first was that I should read all Mr. Bernard Shaw’s later works. The second, and far more ghastly duty, was that I should read one of my own earlier works. I am not going to pretend that I have discharged either of these duties in detail. A liar must have a good memory, to remember what he has said; but a bigot, a fanatic, a man fixed in one dogmatic scheme of faith (like Bernard Shaw and myself) need not bother to remember what he has written. He knows that it was all true; because he has not altered his fundamental test of truth. Thus it will be found that politicians anxiously re-read their old speeches; but priests are buoyantly free from the burden of reading their old sermons. Mr. Shaw and I agree that agreement is more practical than appreciation. In other words, we agree that it is worth while to disagree. This is not what is meant by agreeing to differ; because it is agreeing to dispute.

  Heaven knows how long ago it is that I wrote this rather crude and juvenile piece of controversy; which Mr. Bernard Shaw, in a typically handsome manner, described by saying, “This book is, as everyone expected it to be, the best critical study I have yet produced.” And the first fact to be hailed with a sort of abstract joy, by all who are interested in Life even if they do not trouble to call it a Life-Force, is the joyful energy and enthusiasm with which Bernard Shaw has taken that long stretch of time in his giant stride. He still achieves the noblest natural triumph of man; which is to find exuberance merely in existence. This is a victory which more than balances all that can be criticised on the merely theoretical side. Bernard Shaw is an old man who is still young; in an age when the young men are most of them very old. There is a real score for his negative eccentricities, when we can still see him making merry over cold water and cabbages, while men who might be his grandsons or great-grandsons are making themselves miserable over cocktails and champagne. In whatever sense we call him a sceptic, nobody could ever call him a pessimist; and he has lived to see a race of youths who are too pessimistic even to call themselves pessimists. That first fact alone must be affirmed to his great glory; whatever may be meant by being a Pacifist in the Great War, he has never been a Defeatist in the Holy War, which has been called the Battle of Life. Hope, hearty conviction, the fighting spirit — these are things not so abounding among the youth of our time, that we can fail to salute them in the chief literary veteran of the age.

  The second great quality he always possessed, and has never lost, is this: and it is a paradox. He has largely defended what are called Modern Ideas; and yet he is not dull. The Modern Ideas in question are now nearly two hundred years old, when they are not merely as old as the world; and as they are expressed by everybody else, their dullness is devastating. Shaw has seldom allowed them to be dull; because he has cultivated a certain art or manœuvre, which may be called the Surprise Attack. He does besiege the old castle, whether of conventions or convictions, but he never scales it on the same side as its other enemies. An excellent example of this was the play of St. Joan. What a wilderness of wearisome plays might have littered the world, on the ordinary anti-clerical theme as developed by the ordinary anti-clerical denouncing the clerics who condemn the popular and patriotic heroine. And what a wind of refreshment, scattering all such waste paper, to find one anti-clerical who is clever enough to base his case on defending the clerics, instead of denouncing the clerics. Then he can draw the deduction that clericalism at its best was bound to condemn a heroine; because a heroine was bound to be a heretic. The new argument is quite as fallacious as the old argument; but how bracing a relief to find such a prodigy as a Modernist who really has a new argument! For outside this charming perversity of G. B. S., the Modernists have made the modern world a desert of dusty monotony and dull repetition. Shaw still talks a great deal of nonsense, and some of it I fear serious nonsense; but always something that awakens us with bravado and does not merely send us to sleep with familiarity. Never will you hear that amiable Irish voice saying, with a hundred voices on the platform or over the wireless, “The modern mind has surely outgrown creeds and dogmas as it has outgrown cannibalism and the tyranny of the Stuarts; and institutions not suited to our modern conditions. . . .” You will never hear it intoning those ancient and almost pathetic words, “When we remember that our ancestors burned witches, that they tolerated negro slavery, until the genius of John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. . . .” If Bernard Shaw did say anything about the Stuarts or the witches or the negroes, at least it would not be something that ten million men had said before.

  As I have lightly and even irresponsibly hinted, I have not the slightest intention of following my hero’s later career step by step, in the manner of a good and faithful biographer. I am much too interested in what he really means to bother myself about everything that he merely says. Even in my old book the biographical and chronological sequence is sufficiently vague; and I shall not in this appendix deal in detail with each of the works which appeared after the date when my book was published. Shaw has done a vast amount of fine work, and had a vast amount of fun, since that date; but none of it seems to me to negative my general view of him, except for those who would disagree with me on the earlier work as much as on the later. In a play like Getting Married he demonstrated that drama can be dramatic, by dialogue rather than action. But that is only another way of saying that public debates are popular. And as mobs of men will go to hear party leaders discussing unreal differences on a platform it is not so strange that they will go to hear a man of genius expressing real differences on the old popular stage. He proved his talent in the trick I have mentioned, that of the surprise attack, by making an attack on marriage come, not from a mere free lover, but from a celibate priest. But he also proved his ignorance of the creed held by the celibate priests. Fanny’s First Play had a certain freshness expressed in its title; but it was not Shaw’s first play nor his last; nor does it mark any very fundamental transition or turning point in his work. The two plays which do represent something real in this way are St. Joan and The Apple-Cart.

  The Apple-Cart is important as showing how many million miles he is still ahead of the Progressives; how much more Modern he is than the Modernists. He has realised that the really Modern thing is Monarchy. It does not in the least follow that because it is the modern thing, it is the right thing. I never accepted Democracy merely because it was Modern; and I shall not accept Monarchy for any such unreasonable reason. It may not be very important to be up-to-date; but at least Bernard Shaw in his old age is up-to-date. He understands the political change and challenge of our time. He horrified all the other Socialists by expressing approval of the Fascists. Indeed his last political phase seems to be largely a general loathing of anarchy; and a disposition to accept whatever can reduce it to rational order, whether it be Fascism or Bolshevism. But in The Apple-Cart he brings out many truths that his merely progressive critics were too conventional to see. They missed the fact that the play is a tragedy rather than a comedy The King scores by playing the one piece he really has; which is the King. He hits popular government in its one really weak spot; that it is not popular. But it is a shallow view to suppose that he ends with the vulgarity of victory. He ends fighting against the stars and fates and forces of the modern world like any of the tragic heroes; sed victa Catoni. But Cato fought against Cæsar and this King fought against some thing queer and very different. Here again, Shaw is admirable in seizing a real modern fact. Critics supposed that the Prime Minister was meant merely for a clumsy buffoon with a bad temper. They did not realise that his bad temper was good policy. The King represented the old dignified diplomacy, which was unruffled. The Prime Minister represented the much more secret diplomacy which is ruffled whenever it finds it convenient to be ruffled. That is the point of modern politics; that we are deceived by frankness, and swindled in a heart-to-heart talk. Emotions disguise motives.

  I have already mentioned St. Joan, which any atheist might have made a eulogy on the Saint, but only Shaw would have made a defence of the Inquisition. As to his pretence of finding a Protestant in Joan of Arc, I think it sufficient answer to ask him why he did not write about Joanna Southcott. The fact is that we do distinguish between Joan and Joanna; not by whether they used private judgment, but by whether they are judged by history and humanity to have been rightly related to a Last Judgment. If there is nothing external that can judge Joan or Joanna, why then Joanna is just as likely to be right as Joan. If our brightest Bolshie remembers Joan after five hundred years, and forgets Joanna after a hundred years, it is because there is something beyond private judgment; which is public judgment. It is the judgment of the world, if it is not the judgment of the Church. But, as a fact, in the case of St. Joan, the judgment of the Church put itself right centuries before the judgment of the world.

  But I do not profess, as I have said, to be doing justice to these particular dramatic triumphs; though the two last mentioned certainly were dramatic triumphs. I am most concerned about works I have not yet mentioned; because I am interested in basic things like theology. And in practice every man is a theologian, even when he is not a theist. The great later work of Shaw is in Back to Methuselah; in which he says men must live three hundred years. And I say that if he did live three hundred years he would be a Catholic.

  I see no reason to retract, or even revise, what may be called the basic thesis of this old piece of pre-war journalism; which was that whatever else Mr. Bernard Shaw is, he is an orphan. There is something in the image of that motherless child, his pale face turned pathetically to the moon amid the slow snow-flakes of a Victorian melodrama, which I know would appeal to him in a soothing manner. By this I do not mean to reflect at all on his actual origin in the Dublin middle class; which was highly respectable ; far, far too respectable. That is part of the point; that he was exiled from Ireland in the very act of being born in Ireland. It was precisely because he was born in the Ascendancy Party in Ireland that he was bound to join the Revolutionary Party in England. Where he was born, he was born to be a Unionist; he had to seek a strange land, a very strange land; in which he could be a Revolutionist without being a Nationalist. About the same time, I suppose, another middle-class Dublin man was born, and accepted his Imperial destiny and petered out under the name of “Northcliffe.” Bernard Shaw at least escaped the Calvinist predestination which has ended mostly in a sort of suburban Toryism. He escaped to England, the land of sportsmen, where even revolution has always been a sport. But the result was that he was not really born in either of the two countries. And I should now say more strongly, what I said much more stumblingly, in this old book of mine. He is so alive that we might fancy he would never die. But he still suffers, even down to his splendid old age, from the annoying omission of having never been born.

  Never being born might be great fun, if we could really live in those bloodless extravagances, which Bernard Shaw meant to make attractive in Back to Methuselah, and a younger and more advanced writer obviously meant to make repulsive in Brave New World. But as things are in any known state, there is a fallacy in the universal notion of not being born any where. The lost child finds his limitations: only they are worse limitations. The child may forget the family; but the orphan remembers the orphanage. He is not free because he is lost; he is not a cherub surveying the world from the sky. He is either born in a house or in a workhouse; he is either born in a home or in a Home. So the Poor Exile of Erin (under which sentiment figure Mr. Shaw will instantly recognise himself) did in fact begin to accumulate first impressions; and many of them do in fact remain to the last. The trouble is that they were not old impressions of Ireland, but new impressions of England; or rather of the extraordinary gang of new international idealists, cranks and crooks from every country, who always found their favourite club in England. They also were uprooted people: in other words, the Communist Club was very like an orphanage. That, I still think, is the starting-point of Bernard Shaw; and the explanation of most things about him. He did not start from home, but from homelessness. By which I do not mean the homelessness of the poor, for the poor always remember the home they never had. If Mr. Shaw, instead of being the son of solid Protestant parents in the respectable quarter of Dublin, had been the son of peasants evicted from a cottage in Connaught, and sent tramping aimlessly across the whole world, he would have been the greatest of all champions of Domesticity and the Family.