XXIV.G. Bernard Shaw

XXIV G. BERNARD SHAW George Bernard Shaw, British dramatist, critic, novelist, humanitarian; born at Dublin, Ireland, 1856. Music and art critic; Shakespeare enthusiast; one of the founders of the Fabian Society; at present devoting his time to lecturing on social and ethical questions, and writing. His works include the novels, The Irrational Knot, Love Among the Artists, Cashel Byron's Profession, and An Unsocial Socialist) Fabianism and the Empire, 1900; Fabianism and the Fiscal Question, 1904; The Sanity of Art, 1898; The Perfect Wagnerite, 1898; Dramatic Criticisms; and plays, including Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898), Three Plays for Puritans (1900), The Admirable Bashville (1901), Major Barbara (1905), Getting Married (1908), Press Cuttings (1909), The Doctor's Dilemma, The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet (1908), Fanny's First Play (1912), etc. The selections are from The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) and Man and Superman (1903).

Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death. In heaven an angel is nobody in particular. Liberty means responsibility. That it is why most men dread it. It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid. Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing. Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality. Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it. No man dares say so much of what he thinks as to appear to himself an extremist. Vice is waste of life. Poverty, obedience and celibacy are the canonical vices. A king nowadays is only a dummy put up to draw your fire off the real oppressors of society. Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

G. Bernard Shaw 417 If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself. Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices. (In the Fabian Society) no one of us is strong enough to impose his will on the rest, or weak enough to allow himself to be overridden. Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation. I can no longer be satisfied with fictitious morals and fictitious good conduct, shedding fictitious glory on overcrowding, disease, crime, drink, war, cruelty, infant mortality, and all the other commonplaces of civilization which drive men to the theater to make foolish pretences that these things are progress, science, morals, religion, patriotism, imperial supremacy, national greatness, and all the other names the newspapers call them.

How to Beat Children.—If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven. If you beat children for pleasure, avow your object frankly, and play the game according to the rules, as a foxhunter does; and you will do comparatively little harm. No foxhunter is such a cad as to pretend that he hunts the fox to teach it not to steal chickens, or that he suffers more acutely than the fox at the death. Remember that even in child-beating there is the sportsman's way and the cad's way. The Perfect Gentleman.—The fatal reservation of the gentleman is that he sacrifices everything to his honor except his gentility. A gentleman of our days is one who has money enough to do what every fool would do if he could afford it: that is, consume without producing.

418 Liberty and the Great Libertarians The true diagnostic of modern gentility is parasitism. No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism. A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit. The Golden Rule.—Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same. Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good. Do not love your neighbor as yourself. If you are on good terms with yourself it is an impertinence: if on bad, an injury. The golden rule is that there are no golden rules. Idolatry.—The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood. A limited monarchy is a device for combining the inertia of a wooden idol with the credibility of a flesh and blood one. When the wooden idol does not answer the savage's prayer, he beats it: when the flesh and blood idol does not satisfy.the civilized man, he cuts its head off. He who slays a king and he who dies for him are alike idolaters. Democracy.—If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved. Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. Democratic republics can no more dispense with national idols than monarchies with public functionaries.

G. Bernard Shaw 419 Government presents only one problem: the discovery of a trustworthy anthropometric method. Social progress takes effect through the replacement of old institutions by new ones; and since every institution involves the recognition of the duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every step. If the Englishman had not repudiated the duty of absolute obedience to his king, his political progress would have been impossible. If women had not repudiated the duty of absolute submission to their husbands, and defied public opinion as to the limits set by modesty to their education, they would never have gained the protection of the Married Women's Property Act or the power to qualify themselves as medical practitioners. If Luther had not trampled on his duty to the head of his Church and on his vow of chastity, our priests would still have to choose between celibacy and profligacy. There is nothing new, then, in the defiance of duty by the reformer: every step of progress means a duty repudiated, and a scripture torn up. And every reformer is denounced accordingly, Luther as an apostate, Cromwell as a traitor, Mary Wollstonecraft as an unwomanly virago, Shelley as a libertine, and Ibsen as all the things enumerated in the Daily Telegraph.

Women.—Now of all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous, I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under pretence that she likes it; and, if she ventures to contradict the pretence, declaring her no true woman. In India they carried this piece of idealism to the length of declaring that a wife could not bear to survive her husband, but would be prompted by her own faithful, loving, beautiful nature to offer up her life on the pyre which consumed his dead body. The astonishing thing is that women, sooner than be branded as unsexed wretches, allowed themselves to be stupefied with drink, and in that unwomanly condition burnt alive. The domestic career is no more natural to all women than 420 Liberty and the Great Libertarians the military career is natural to all men; although it may be necessary that every able-bodied woman should be called on to risk her life in childbed just as it may be necessary that every man should be called on to risk his life in the battlefield.

It is of course quite true that the majority of women are kind to children and prefer their own to other people's. But exactly the same thing is true of the majority of men, who nevertheless do not consider that their proper sphere is the nursery. The case may be illustrated more grotesquely by the fact that the majority of women who have dogs are kind to them, and prefer their own dogs to other people's; yet it is not proposed that women should restrict their activities to the rearing of puppies. If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot—because they have never seen one anywhere else. No doubt there are Philistine parrots who agree with their owners that it is better to be in a cage than out, so long as there is plenty of hempseed and Indian corn there. There may even be idealist parrots who persuade themselves that the mission of a parrot is to minister to the happiness of a private family by whistling and saying f'Pretty Polly,"

and that it is in the sacrifice of its liberty to this altruistic pursuit that a true parrot finds the supreme satisfaction of its soul. I will not go so far as to affirm that there are theological parrots who are convinced that imprisonment is the will of God because it is unpleasant; but I am confident that there are rationalist parrots who can demonstrate that it would be a cruel kindness to let a parrot out to fall a prey to cats, or at least to forget its accomplishments and coarsen its naturally delicate fibres in an unprotected struggle for existence. Still, the only parrot a free-souled person can sympathize with is the one that insists on being let out as the first condition of its making itself agreeable. A selfish bird, you may say: one that puts its own gratification before that of the family which G. Bernard Shaw 421 is so fond of it—before even the greatest happiness of the greatest number: one that, in aping the independent spirit of a man, has unparroted itself and become a creature that has neither the home-loving nature of a bird nor the strength and enterprise of a mastiff. All the same, you respect that parrot in spite of your conclusive reasoning; and if it persists, you will have either to let it out or kill it.

Duty.—The sum of the matter is that unless woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself. But her duty to herself is no duty at all, since a debt is canceled when the debtor and creditor are the same person. Its payment is simply a fulfilment of the individual will, upon which all duty is a restriction, founded on the conception of the will as naturally malign and devilish. Therefore, woman has to repudiate duty altogether. In that repudiation lies her freedom; for it is false to say that woman is now directly the slave of man: she is the immediate slave of duty; and as man's path to freedom is strewn with the wreckage of the duties and ideals he has trampled on, so must hers be. She may indeed mask her iconoclasm by proving in rationalist fashion, as man has often done for the sake of a quiet life, that all these discarded idealist conceptions will be fortified instead of shattered by her emancipation.

No one ever feels helpless by the side of the self-helper; whilst the self-sacrificer is always a drag, a responsibility, a reproach, an everlasting and unnatural trouble with whom no really strong soul can live. Only those who have helped themselves know how to help others, and to respect their right to help themselves. Love and Marriage.—Although romantic idealists generally insist on self-surrender as an indispensable element in true womanly love, its repulsive effect is well known and feared in practice by both sexes. The extreme instance is the reckless self-abandonment seen in the infatuation of passionate sexual 422 Liberty and the Great Libertarians desire. Every one who becomes the object of that infatuation shrinks from it instinctively. Love loses its charm when it is free; and whether the compulsion is that of custom and law, or of infatuation, the effect is the same: it becomes valueless.

The desire to give inspires no affection unless there is also the power to withhold; and the successful wooer, in both sexes alike, is the one who can stand out for honorable conditions, and, failing them, go without. Such conditions are evidently not offered to either sex by the legal marriage of today; for it is the intense repugnance inspired by the compulsory character of the legalized conjugal relation that leads, first to the idealization of marriage whilst it remains indispensable as a means of perpetuating society; then to its modification by divorce and by the abolition of penalties for refusal to comply with judicial orders for restitution of conjugal rights; and finally to its disuse and disappearance as the responsibility for the maintenance and education of the rising generation is shifted from the parent to the community. First there was man's duty to God, with the priest as assessor.

That was repudiated; and then came man's duty to his neighbor, with Society as the assessor. Will this too be repudiated, and be succeeded by Man's duty to himself, assessed by himself? And if so, what will be the effect on the conception of duty in the abstract? Duty arises at first, a gloomy tyranny, out of man's helplessness, his self-mistrust, in a word, his abstract fear. He personifies all that he abstractly fears as God, and straightway becomes the slave of his duty to God. He imposes that slavery fiercely on his children, threatening them with hell, and punishing them for their attempts to be happy. When, becoming bolder, he ceases to fear everything, and dares to love something, this duty of his to what he fears evolves into a sense of duty to what he loves. Sometimes he again personifies what he loves as God; and the God of Wrath becomes the God of Love: sometimes he at once becomes a humanitarian, an altruist, G. Bernard Shaw 423 acknowledging only his duty to his neighbor. This stage is correlative to the rationalist stage in the evolution of philosophy and the capitalist phase in the evolution of industry. But in it the emancipated slave of God falls under the dominion of society, which, having just reached a phase in which all the love is ground out of it by the competitive struggle for money, remorselessly crushes him until, in due course of the further growth of his spirit or will, a sense at last arises in him of his duty to himself. And when this sense is fully grown, which it hardly is yet, the tyranny of duty is broken; for now the man's God is himself; and he, self-satisfied at last, ceases to be selfish. The evangelist of this last step must therefore preach the repudiation of duty. This, to the unprepared of his generation, is indeed the wanton masterpiece of paradox. What! after all that has been said by men of noble life as to the secret of all right conduct being only "Duty, duty, duty," is he to be told now that duty is the primal curse from which we must redeem ourselves before we can advance another step on the road along which, as we imagine—having forgotten the repudiations made by our fathers—duty and duty alone has brought us thus far? But why not? God was once the most sacred of our conceptions; and he had to be denied. Then reason became the infallible Pope, only to be deposed in turn. Is duty more sacred than God or reason?