The general formula of George Bernard Shaw, to wit, the announcement of the obvious in terms of the scandalous, is made so palpable in his new book, “Androcles and the Lion,” that even such besotted Shawolators as George Jean Nathan will at last perceive and acknowledge it. Here, indeed, the Irish Herbert Kaufman1 indulges himself in a veritable debauch of platitudes, and the sickly music of them fills the air. In the long and indignant preface to “Androcles” (it runs to 114 pages) all he manages to say about Christianity is what every man of the slightest intelligence has been thinking for years; and yet he gets into his statement of all this trite stuff so violent an appearance of radicalism that it will undoubtedly heat up the women’s clubs and the newspaper reviewers, and inspire them to hail him once more as a Great Thinker. It is amusing to rehearse in cold blood some of his principal contentions: (a) that the social and economical doctrines preached by Christ were indistinguishable from what is now called Socialism, (b) that the Pauline transcendentalism visible in the Acts and the Epistles differs enormously from the simple ideas set forth in the Four Gospels, (c) that the Christianity on tap to-day would be almost as abhorrent to Christ, supposing Him returned to earth, as the theories of Nietzsche, George Moore or Emma Goldman, (d) that the rejection of the Biblical miracles, and even of the historical credibility of the Gospels, by no means disposes of Christ Himself, and (e) that the early Christians were persecuted, not because their theology was unsound, but because their public conduct constituted a nuisance. Could one imagine a more abject surrender to the undeniable? And yet, as I say, these empty platitudes will probably be debated furiously as revolutionary iconoclasms, and perhaps even as blasphemies, and the reputation of Shaw as an original and powerful metaphysician will get a great boost.
In this new book his method of making a scandal with embalmed ideas is exactly the same that he used in all his previous prefaces, pontifications and pronunciamentos. That is to say, he takes a proposition which all reflective men know and admit to be true, and points out effects and implications of it which very few men, reflective or not, have the courage to face honestly. Turn to “Man and Superman” and you will see the whole process. There he starts out with the self-evident fact, disputed by no one, that a woman has vastly more to gain by marriage, under Christian monogamy, than a man, and then proceeds to manufacture a sensation by exhibiting the corollary fact that all women know it, and that they are thus more eager to marry than men are, and always prove it by taking the lead in the business. The second fact, to any man who has passed through the terrible decade between twenty-five and thirty-five, is as plain as the first, but its statement runs counter to many much-esteemed conventions and delusions of civilization, and so it cannot be stated without kicking up a row. That row stems from horror, and that horror has its roots in one of the commonest of all human weaknesses, viz.: intellectual cowardice, the craven yearning for mental ease and safety, the fear of thinking things out. Shaw is simply one who, for purposes of sensation, resolutely and mercilessly thinks things out—sometimes with much ingenuity and humor, but often, it must be said, in the same muddled way that the average “right-thinker” would do it if he ever got up the courage. Remember this formula, and all of the fellow’s alleged originality becomes no more than a sort of bad-boy audacity. He drags skeletons from their closets, and makes them dance obscenely—but everyone, of course, knew that they were there all the time. He would produce an excitement of exactly the same kind (though perhaps superior in intensity) if he should walk down the Strand naked to the waist, and so remind the horrified Londoners of the unquestioned fact (though conventionally concealed and forgotten) that he is a mammal, and hence outfitted with an umbilicus.
This is all I can get out of the long and highly diverting preface to “Androcles”: a statement of the indubitable in terms of the not-to-be-thought-of-for-an-instant. His discussion of the inconsistencies between the Four Gospels is no more than a réchauffé of what everyone knows who knows anything about the Four Gospels at all. You will find all of its points set forth at great length in any elemental treatise upon New Testament criticism—even in so childish a tract as Ramsden Balmforth’s.2 He actually dishes up, with a grave air of sapience, the news that there is a glaring inconsistency between the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew, I, 1–17, and the direct claim of Divine Paternity in Matthew, I, 18. More, he breaks out with the astounding discovery that Jesus was a good Jew, and that Paul’s repudiation of circumcision (now a cardinal article of Christian faith) would have surprised Him, and perhaps even shocked Him. Yet more, he takes thirty or forty pages to prove that the essential ideas of Jesus, stripped of the interpolations of Paul and all the later volunteers, were the ideas of a militant communist, and hence of a Socialist—a notion so obvious that it occurred to me (a man but little concerned with either Socialism or Christianity) fully a dozen years ago, and so much a part of my common stock of platitudes that I embalmed it in print last April in a tedious, rubber-stamp review of John Spargo’s “Marxian Socialism and Religion.”3 Of such startlingly “original” propositions the preface to “Androcles” is all compact. Searching it from end to end with eagle eye, I have failed to find a single fact or argument that has given me any sense of novelty—despite the circumstance, as I say, that I pay little attention to exegesis, and so might be expected to be surprised by its veriest commonplaces.
Nevertheless, this preface makes bouncing reading—and for the plain reason that Shaw is a clever workman in letters, and knows how to wrap up old goods in charming wrappers. When, in disposing of the common delusion that Jesus was a long-faced tear-squeezer like John the Baptist or the average Methodist evangelist, he arrives at the conclusion that He was “what we should call an artist and a Bohemian in His manner of life,” the result, no doubt, is a shock and a clandestine thrill to those who have been confusing the sour donkey they hear every Sunday with the genial, good-humored and likable Man they affect to worship. And when, dealing with the Atonement, he argues against it that it puts a premium upon weakness, and that the man who doesn’t accept it is apt to be a more careful and unflinching fellow than the man who does, he gets the easy dramatic effect of a raid upon the very sanctuary, and so achieves a pleasant devilishness. But, as I have said, these ideas are not, in themselves, new ideas, nor are they really very naughty. I have heard the first of the two maintained by a bishop, and as for the seeond, I myself urged it against a chance Christian encountered in a Pullman smoking-room three or four months ago, and snickered comfortably while he proceeded from an indignant repudiation of it to a reluctant confession of its practical truth. I remember well how staggered the poor old boy was when I complained that my inability to accept the orthodox doctrine put a heavy burden of moral responsibility upon me, and forced me to be more watchful of my conduct than the elect, and so robbed me of many good chances to make money. I was very considerate in dealing with this pious gentleman. So far as I remember, I avoided tackling him with any idea that was not wholly obvious. And yet, in half an hour, he was full of the same protesting (and subtly yielding) horror that afflicts the simple folk who support the fame of Shaw.
A double joke reposes in the Shaw legend. The first half of it I have ex-pounded; the second half is to be found in the fact that Shaw is not at all the heretic his fascinated victims see him, but an orthodox Scotch Presbyterian of the most cock-sure and bilious sort. In the theory that he is Irish I take little stock. His very name is as Scotch as haggis, and the part of Ireland from which he comes is peopled almost entirely by Scots. The true Irishman is a romantic; he senses religion as a mystery, a thing of wonder, an experience of ineffable beauty; his interest centers, not in the commandments, but in the sacraments. The Scot, on the contrary, is almost devoid of that sort of religious feeling; he hasn’t imagination enough for it; all he can see in the Word of God is a sort of police regulation; his concern is not with beauty, but with morals. Here Shaw runs true to type. Read his critical writings from end to end, and you will not find the slightest hint that objects of art were passing before him as he wrote. He founded, in England, the superstition that Ibsen was no more than a tinpot evangelist—a sort of brother to General Booth, Mrs. Pankhurst, Mother Eddy and Billy Sunday.4 He turned Shakespeare into a prophet of evil, croaking dismally in a rain-barrel. He even injected a moral content (by dint of abominable straining) into the music dramas of Richard Wagner, surely the most colossal slaughters of all moral ideas on the altar of beauty ever seen by man. Always this ethical obsession, the hall-mark of the Scotch Puritan, is visible in him. He is forever discovering an atrocity in what has hitherto passed as no more than a human weakness; he is forever inventing new sins, and demanding their punishment; he always sees his opponent, not only as wrong, but also as a scoundrel. I have called him a good Presbyterian. Need I add that, in “Androcles,” he flirts with predestination under the scientific euphemism of determinism—that he seems to be convinced that while men may not be responsible for their virtues, they are undoubtedly responsible for their sins, and deserve to be clubbed therefor? . . . And this is Shaw the revolutionist, the heretic, the iconoclast! Next, perhaps, we shall be hearing of Woodrow the immoralist, of Pius the atheist, of Nicholas the Hindenburgista!