Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  In his mid-sixties Shaw sensed the encroachments of age not in ill-health and sexual loss, but more obliquely as philosophical pessimism and financial threat, a sense of falling out of step with the contemporary world and losing contact with his audience. The Continent was miraculously transformed from a battlefield into a playground. Don Juan’s picture of hell had been visited on earth. Below the whirling triviality, Shaw sensed a disillusionment. He was fighting disillusionment in himself. These terrible post-war years sometimes seemed to him more frightful than the war itself. Every day he received appeals to save babies who were starving overseas. Every week some unfortunate German author would ‘write me the whole history of his life, more to console himself and persuade his wife that he was doing something that might bring them the price of a sack of coals, than in any real hope of escaping from his miseries,’ he told the German playwright Julius Bab; ‘...it became part of the day’s routine to hear that So and So and his wife were starving and that there was not a child under 7 years of age left alive in Poland.’ Before the war Shaw had been remarkably generous to all manner of people who appealed to him for money. But the financial calamity now seemed beyond all reckoning. His generosity persisted but, seeming almost pointless, grew capricious – one tragedy more or less was hardly noticeable when the whole world was breaking up.

  It was an immense relief to work in the futuristic world of Back to Methuselah, phasing out the miseries of life around him. The expectation of death (with which Heartbreak House concluded) had utterly exhausted people who had learnt to feel, think and act as if there were no future. In Back to Methuselah, Shaw struggled to discover what this discouraged generation needed to have said to it. He wanted to give it back a future with new prospects of living, and restore the certainty of his own position.

  His cycle of plays is a metaphysical (or what he called a metabiological) enquiry into the causes of pessimism in the development of thought since Darwin, and a search for a legitimate philosophical basis on which to reengage optimism. His political experience suggested that men and women were incapable of solving the social problems raised by their civilization and had therefore been doomed to the poverty against which socialism vainly protested. But he insisted that this was no reason to abandon socialism. ‘I take the view that the worse a job is the more reason for trying to make the best of it,’ he wrote. ‘But my creed of creative evolution means in practice that man can change himself to meet every vital need, and that however long the trials and frequent the failures may be, we can put up a soul as an athlete puts up a muscle. Thus to men who are themselves cynical I am a pessimist; but to genuinely religious men I am an optimist, and even a fantastic and extravagant one.’

  Back to Methuselah is the vision of an extravagant fantasist, a Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained which seeks to demolish our concepts of normality, reintroduces the imaginative quality of free will as an unconscious process, and treats the present as a passing phase of history in which crisis and even collapse might be interpreted as vital changes for the future. There was a peculiar satisfaction for Shaw in responding to what he believed were the needs of the present by removing himself into the future. ‘The present occupies all my time,’ he wrote. But his chief contact with the historic present comes through newspapers and his animosity towards journalism – which pretends to be an organ and not the exploiter of public opinion – is partly the awareness of its inadequacy as a primary source. He dreamed of a renewal of faith that would measure conduct by the longest conceivable perspective, and of an imaginative rather than academic lens through which to regard history. He wanted to go as far as thought, and much further than facts, could reach. An instinctively trained eye was needed to recognize the tiny shoots and buds sent out by the Life Force – for example, the natural tendency for people in the twentieth century to live longer. Maynard Keynes caught the mood of the moment when in 1923 he wrote that in the long run we were all dead. But what would happen if, in the long run, we were still alive?

  *

  ‘Our will to live depends on hope,’ Shaw was to write; ‘for we die of despair, or, as I have called it in the Methuselah cycle, discouragement.’ Christ had reformed the vindictive morality of Moses with his perception of the futility and wickedness of punishment and revenge. But after almost two thousand years another Reformation was needed to adapt Christian morality to the mental habits of modern times. Shaw believed it was necessary to redistil religion by scientific methods. This meant a change in vocabulary: a matter of replacing the word God with the concept of an evolutionary appetite operating by trial and error towards the achievement of greater power over the environment. From our past it was easy to prove that mankind was incorrigible. But though all known civilizations had collapsed, and contemporary civilization was showing all the recorded symptoms of collapse, nobody could prove that men and women would not succeed this time, or next time, or sometime. And even if the human species were scrapped, like the megalo-organisms which were known through fossils, that was no cause for pessimism. ‘Man may easily be beaten: Evolution will not be beaten.’

  Shaw called for the same sort of admission that Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin had demanded. He too removed human beings from their central position as unique instruments through which a divine will operated, but he restored to them their own will. As subjects of literary biographies will collaborate with their unknown biographers in the future writing of their lives, so our general history may be considered as part of an unfinished narrative that did not cater for our self-interest, but would be influenced by individual acts and thoughts. This collaborative hypothesis restored the value of instinct and the use of intelligence as controls for human destiny.

  ‘If I must explain what I dont understand,’ Shaw wrote, ‘I prefer to do it in an inspiring way and not in a stultifying one.’ His treatise is a modernizing of the first five books of the Old Testament (he subtitled his play ‘A Metabiological Pentateuch’) in which the Garden of Eden is comprehensively weeded. Back to Methuselah is Shaw’s version of Gulliver’s Travels, with longevity replacing size, and the element of the future added as a preventative against morbidity. For it had been a crude blunder, he argued, to treat causation as a process by which the present was determined by the past and would determine the future. ‘The true view is that the future determines the present,’ he wrote. ‘If you take a ticket to Milford Haven you will do so not because you were in Swansea yesterday but because you want to be in Milford Haven to-morrow.’

  Shaw encouraged everyone to treat themselves, under a strictly impartial rent act, as tenant-caretakers of this planet. He regarded the isolated figure of Samuel Butler as a pioneer in the crusade against the environmental consequences of Darwinism. Butler had revealed his genius to Shaw in Life and Habit, the essay on evolution where he compressed his objections to the dogma of Natural Selection into six words: ‘Darwin banished mind from the universe.’ In 1887 Shaw had been sent Butler’s Luck or Cunning? for review by the Pall Mall Gazette. ‘I was indignant because the review was not printed at full length,’ he remembered, ‘presumably because the literary editor did not consider Butler important enough... From this time on I was acquainted with Butler’s view of evolution, though I do not think I grasped its full significance until years afterwards when I had arrived at it in my own way.’

  The review treats Butler’s opinions as being of equal merit to Darwin’s. ‘The question at issue is – granted the survival of the fittest, were the survivors made fit by mere luck, or did they fit themselves by cunning?’ he wrote. ‘Mr Butler is for cunning; and he will have it that Darwin was all for luck.’ Shaw leaves undecided the matter of whether the controversy was one of semantics or metaphysical truth. Yet the review had felt almost epoch-making to Butler himself. Butler ‘admits pure luck as a factor in evolution,’ Shaw wrote,

  ‘but denies its sufficiency as an explanation of all the phenomena, and insists that organisms that have the luck to be cunning make further luck for themselves
by the deliberate exercise of that cunning, and so introduce design into the universe – not design as we used to conceive it, all-foreseeing from the first, but “a piecemeal, solvitur ambulando design”, which, as it becomes more self-conscious and intelligent, tends to supplant natural selection by functional modification.’

  In the decade following this review, Butler and Shaw met on several occasions. In his Notebooks, Butler admits to having ‘long been repelled’ by Shaw, though ‘at the same time attracted by his coruscating power’. At the Fabian Society, after Butler had advocated his ingenious theory that the Odyssey was written by a young woman living at Trapani, Shaw got up and ‘spoke so strongly that people who had only laughed with me all through my lecture began to think there might be something in it after all. Still,’ Butler continues, ‘there is something uncomfortable about the man which makes him uncongenial to me.’ Shaw did not mind being disliked: he had long been uncongenial to himself. He regarded Butler as the sort of person he himself might have turned into if he had not invented G.B.S. – someone who, having gone around ‘undermining every British institution, shocking every British prejudice, and deriding every British Bigwig with irreconcilable pertinacity’, was dismissed by the public as an oddity and a vulgarian, and could make no headway with his writings. ‘He died in 1902,’ Shaw wrote; ‘and, outside a small but highly select circle, nobody cared.’

  As ‘one of the select few who read “Erewhon” and swore by it’, Shaw counted himself within this circle. By suggesting that poverty should be attacked as a crime instead of being coddled like a disease, Butler ‘made me reconsider a rather thoughtless contempt for money, and thereby led me towards the theme of Major Barbara,’ he acknowledged. In the Preface to Major Barbara he had described Butler as being ‘in his own department the greatest English writer of the latter half of the XIX century’. Thereafter he makes many references to Butler which reveal the kinship he felt for this uncomfortable man. He pictures Butler as being ‘naturally affectionate’ as a child, as having ‘sought for affection at home’ and gone on ‘assuming that he loved his dear parents’ whose good names he later slew in The Way of All Flesh ‘so reasonably, so wittily, so humorously, and even in a ghastly way so charitably’.

  In a letter to Butler’s biographer Festing Jones, Shaw wrote: ‘Butler can stand on his own legs and carry most of us on his shoulders as well.’ It was as an evolutionist, and particularly in Back to Methuselah, that Shaw stood on Butler’s shoulders. As a great moralist, a writer whose Erewhon Shaw called ‘the only rival to Gulliver’s Travels in English Literature’, who used his instinctive knowledge of human nature instead of a collection of evidence based on guinea-pigs in laboratories, Butler had stood alone. But he had committed the strategic error of handling Darwin like a moral delinquent. In his Methuselah Preface Shaw comes to praise Darwin, not to dig him up and throw stones. He was ‘an amiable and upright man’ and an ‘honest naturalist’ who ‘never puzzled anybody’. Shaw congratulates him on ‘having the luck’ to be everybody’s good neighbour. ‘Darwin, by the way, was no more a Darwinist than I am a Shavian,’ he adds. But in order to separate Darwin from his followers and repair the damage done by Butler’s insults, he advances into factual error. Darwin had declared himself ‘convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification’. Shaw paraphrases this by declaring that Darwin ‘did not pretend’ that Natural Selection ‘excluded other methods, or that it was the chief method’. Taking this extra step enables him to get beyond range of Darwin and to concentrate on the Neo-Darwinians whose minds Darwin himself had influenced only ‘unintentionally’.

  In Shaw’s Preface Charles Darwin becomes a figure from The Doctor’s Dilemma: someone whose evolutionary ‘discovery’ had often been made in the past – by his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin among others. By describing Natural Selection as Circumstantial Selection, Shaw made it all seem rather unremarkable. He used all his dialectical skills to undermine the authority of determinism, accusing its adherents of having reduced Evolution to the level of external accident, ‘as if a tree could be properly said to have “evolved” into firewood by the storm which blew it down’.

  Shaw felt an aversion to ‘the barren cruelties of the laboratories’, and objected to ‘manufactured evidence in a secret chamber’ because it produced knowledge that, being based on constructed and controlled events, was necessarily mechanistic. If the central debate in a scientific age was to be limited to the laboratory findings of people who would ‘guess eggs if they saw the shells’, then he was once more the complete outsider. He wanted to erase the distinction between scientists and imaginative artists such as Leonardo and Goethe. ‘I have made observations and experiments in the spacious laboratory of the world with a marvellous portable apparatus compactly arranged in my head.’

  Shaw’s Preface to Back to Methuselah is an example of that compound of Will and Hope called wishful thinking. He took his readers to a high place and made them look round. What better evidence was there of where a belief in the ‘survival of the fittest’ had led than the contest of a world war?

  But was all this necessary? Shaw says not, if we regard such disasters as evidence of the results and not as evidence of the truth of Neo-Darwinism. For we are co-authors of our world and our ‘imagination is the beginning of creation’. Organic Natural Selection was unrepeatable in our life-span. Shaw therefore used the time-scale of his imagination. But he thought less about the scientific origins than the social effects of Darwin, whose theory of competitive survival could so conveniently be used to justify individualistic capitalism. ‘I argue out the statements until I reach a verdict – often comic in its simplicity – and then I give the verdict,’ he declared. But Shaw’s verdicts were to sound as predetermined and his statements, hammered out in the secret chamber of his head, as much ‘put up jobs’ as any laboratory trial.

  ‘Posterity will believe what it wishes to believe; and if its wishes jump with my guesses I shall be among the prophets,’ he concluded. ‘If not, I shall be only Simon Magus.’

  *

  After this appeal to the intellect came a demand of the imagination. Even the history of science carried its tales of witchcraft and wonders, from Archimedes in his bath to Newton under his apple tree. Shaw had begun to make a dramatic parable of his religion in the dream sequence of Man and Superman; and in the science fiction of Back to Methuselah he attempted to provide it with an iconography. ‘I abandon the legend of Don Juan with its erotic associations, and go back to the legend of the Garden of Eden,’ he announced. ‘I exploit the eternal interest of the philosopher’s stone which enables man to live for ever.’

  The hell scene in Man and Superman took a Mozartian form; the Methuselah cycle, though it quotes from Mozart, advances as a series of Wagnerian leitmotifs. ‘Back to Methuselah is my Ring,’ Shaw confirmed. Despite its machinery of ghosts and miracles, with a cast that includes a couple of lethal Pavlovian dolls, one huge badly-behaved egg, a hooded serpent and a terrifying Oracle, Shaw did not intend it as a work of remote antiquity or impossible futurism, but as a contemporary drama gathering up the styles of political satire and drawing-room comedy, disquisition and extravaganza he had developed in earlier plays, and pointing the way to his future mystical fantasies.

  The long journey begins in the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve come across a fawn that has stumbled and broken its neck. It is their discovery of death, and Shaw’s illustration of how accident controls dying rather than living. The discourse that follows this discovery between the two of them and the serpent is a wonderful seminar in which vocabulary and understanding advance together. In the beginning there was Lilith, the Mother of Creation. ‘I was her darling as I am yours,’ says the Serpent, which represents Shaw’s evolutionary belief that all habits are acquired and inherited – inherited by infinitesimal instalments and, when discarded, recapitulated in leaps and bounds.

  While Lilith remained alone, all humankind was vulnerable to extin
ction by a single accident. So, like the snake, she renewed herself and overcame death by the miracle of birth. She imagined; she desired; she dared; she willed – and then she conceived. But since the labour of renewing life was too dangerous for one, she divided herself in two and created Adam and Eve to share this burden in the future.

  Adam and Eve are suspended between two terrifying possibilities – the prospect of living for ever, and the accidental extinction of themselves. But they have not been created equal. ‘Fear is stronger in me than hope,’ Adam says. ‘I must have certainty.’ But hope is stronger than fear in Eve. She identifies improvement with the species rather than with herself, and accepts uncertainty, even death, as an inevitable risk in the process of creation.

  The first scene of the play ends with the Serpent whispering the secret of conception to Eve. The stage directions read: ‘Eve’s face lights up with intense interest, which increases until an expression of overwhelming repugnance takes its place. She buries her face in her hands.’ This passage was criticized by St John Ervine. Was it not more likely, he demanded, that Eve ‘leapt with joy’? Shaw defended his representation of a woman ‘in a state of complete pre-sex innocence as making a wry face when it was explained to her that in consequence of the indelicacy with which Nature, in a fit of economy, has combined a merely excretory function with a creatively ejaculatory one in the same bodily part (she knowing only the excretory use of it), she is to allow herself to be syringed in an unprecedented manner by Adam... It is true that the indignity has compensations which, when experienced, overwhelm all the objections to it; but Eve had not then experienced them.’ Coming at the end of this magical first scene which shows life expanding in an atmosphere of strangeness, as idea gives birth to idea in the sunny stillness of that garden, Eve’s repugnance is theatrically powerful.