"Mr. Bernard Shaw is always represented by those who disagree with him, and, I fear, also (if such exist) by those who agree with him, as a capering humorist, a dazzling acrobat, a quick-change artist. It is said that he cannot be taken seriously, that he will defend anything or attack anything, that he will do anything to startle and amuse. All this is not only untrue, but it is, glaringly, the opposite of the truth; it is as wild as to say that Dickens had not the boisterous masculinity of Jane Austen. The whole force and triumph of Mr. Bernard Shaw lie in the fact that he is a thoroughly consistent man. So far from his power consisting in jumping through hoops or standing on his head, his power consists in holding his won fortress night and day.
He puts the Shaw test rapidly and rigorously to everything that happens in heaven or earth. His standard never varies. The thing which weak-minded revolutionists and weak-minded Conservatives really hate (and fear) in him, is exactly this, that his scales, such as they are, are held even, and that his law, such as it is, is justly enforced. You may attack his principles, as I do; but I do not know of any instance in which you can attack their application. If he dislikes lawlessness, he dislikes the lawlesness of the Socialists as much as that of Individualists. If he dislikes the fever of patriotism, he dislikes it in Boers and Irishmen as well as in Englishmen. If he dislikes the vows and bonds of marriage, he dislikes still more the fiercer bonds and wilder vows that are made by lawless love. If he laughts at the authority of priests, he laughs louder at the pomposity of men of science. If he condemns the irresponsibility of faith, he condemns with a sane consistency the equal irresponsibility of art.
He has pleased all the bohemians by saying that women are equal to men; but he has infuriated them by suggesting that men are equal to women. He is almost mechanically just; he has something of the terrible quality of a machine. The man who is really wild and whirling, the man who is really fantastic and incalculable, is not Mr. Shaw, but the average Cabinet Minister. It is Sir Michael Hicks-Beach who jumps through hoops. It is Sir Henry Fowler who stands on his head. The solid and respectable statesman of that type does really leap from position to position; he is ready to defend anything or nothing; he is really not to be taken seriously. I know perfectly well what Mr. Bernard Shaw will be saying thirty years hence; he will be saying what he has alway said. If thirty years hence I meet Mr. Shaw, a reverent being with a silver beard sweeping the earth, and say to him, 'One can never, of course, make a verbal attack upon a lady,' the patriarch will lift his aged hand and fell me to the earth. We know, I say, what Mr. Shaw will be saying thirty years hence. But is there any one so darkly read in stars and oracles that he will dare to predict what Mr. Asquith will be saying thirty years hence?"
In other words, those who did not understand Shaw thought that he was simply taking positions for the sake of novelty while in fact, he did have principles more than the politicians who would say anything based on where they thought the wind was blowing. Interestingly enough, Chesterton had a similar experience shortly after he wrote Orthodoxy, the sequel to Heretics. He writes in his autobiography:
"But there did remain one rather vague virtue about the title [Orthodoxy], from my point of view; that it was provocative. And it is an exact test of that extraordinary modern society that it really was provocative. I had begun to discover that, in all that welter of inconsistent and incompatible heresies, the one and only really unpardonable heresy was orthodoxy. A serious defece of orthodoxy was far more startling to the English critic than a serious attack on orthodoxy was to the Russian censor. And through this experience I learned two very interesting things, which serve to divide all this part of my life into two distinct periods. Very nearly everybody, in the ordinary literary and journalistic world, began by taking it for granted that my faith in the Christian creed was a pose or a paradox.
The mroe cynical supposed that it was only a stunt. The more generous and loyal warmly maintained that it was only a joke. It was not until long afterwards that the full horror of the truth burst upon them; the disgraceful truth that I really thought the thing was true. And I have found, as I say, that this represents a real transition or border-line in the life of the apologists. Critics were almost entirely complimentary to what they were pleased to call my brilliant paradoxes; until they discovered that I really meant what I said. Since then they have been more combative; and I do not blame them."
And this relates to a thought experiment I have wondered about occasionally. If many of those from the past who saw themselves as progressives or reformers could come back and see the present day, what would they think? I believe that pretty much all the ones who actually did have principles, such as George Bernard Shaw, would reconsider their views. They would realize that what we have now is, despite what its proponents say, not a continuation of their principles, it is a going off the rails, a jettisoning of any principles at all.
The inflection point seems to have occurred around the late 1960s, when the Old Left (primarily focused on economics and of which Shaw was a part) transtitioned into the New Left focusing on constantly mutating means subversion. And so, where we are now, and increasingly so, is not a development from the past, it's a going off the rails. A replacement of what came before with what is dishonestly claimed to be its continuation.
" I believe that pretty much all the ones who actually did have principles, such as George Bernard Shaw, would reconsider their views."
ReplyDeleteOn the face of it, and as somewhat who read vast quantities of GB Shaw as a young man! - you may well be right. But probably it would depend on 'spiritual matters'.
What I find most striking is that 'the facts' may seem to say some-thing very obvious; but the facts never are independent of the perceiving consciousness. A situation that seems to me absolutely lucid, an argument that seems absolutely simple and clear, the implications of just two generally-accepted truths... in practice, there is often extreme disagreement about what some-thing means.
And the same applies to large scale situations - for example whether communism has been 'a success' or not; the continues to be subject to wide disagreement.
In the end, I think that I am pretty sure I know exactly what Chesterton would say about any particular thing in 2021 (except Pope Francis - I'm not sure which way he would go on that one) because he was (in later life) a devout Roman Catholic of a Thomist kind. He would say the kind of things we can read among the Catholics of The Orthosphere, or Peter Kreeft.
But I'm not confident about Shaw; because Shaw's deep metaphysical assumptions were shaky. It seems that his 'bottom line' conviction was Creative Evolution and (speaking as an ex adherent to that spirituality) it is not coherent, and therefore does not provide a secure root or clarity of guidance over the long-term.
I agree about Chesteron, and I see what you mean about Shaw. He would be confronted with the circumstances, but then he would have to make the decision to learn from them.
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