ONE of the most oddly significant commentaries upon the Anglo-Saxon indifference to the great ideas of the century whenever they are concretized into the form of actable drama, is furnished by the amazing unanimity, on the part of dramatic critics in both England and America, in denying the actual existence of such an entity as the Shavian philosophy. So irreparably is the average theatrical newsman, by courtesy dubbed Dramatic Critic, divorced from the real life of philosophy, ethics, politics, and sociology; so hopelessly is his critical perception warped by the romantic conventions, senescent models, and classic traditions of the stage; so entirely does he breathe the air of boxoffice receipts, shine in the reflected halo of "stars," or dwell in the unreal atmosphere of stage human nature, that when the new truths of a new philosophy present themselves to his judgment, his power to recognize them as valuable or even as truths, is irretrievably lost. And if perchance the dramatist, accepting as a mere rhetorical question Horace's "Quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?" possesses the genius and the hardihood to embody his profoundly serious views of life in brilliantly witty and epigrammatic expression, let him beware of the penalty of being regarded as a frivolous and light-headed near-philosopher! Stranger still, one might even venture to say almost remarkable, is the attitude of the leading English and American dramatic critics, who are men of the world in the large sense, thoroughly cosmopolitan in spirit. Mr. Walkley is quite willing to admit that Bernard Shaw has let in a fresh current of ideas upon the English drama; and yet, in that airy manner of his with which he brushes aside, but does not dispose of, real problems, he

nonchalantly dubs these ideas the loose ends of rather questionable German philosophy. There seems little reason to doubt that Mr. Archer was quite sincere in his expressed belief that Bernard Shaw's philosophy may be picked up at any second-hand bookstall. Mr. Huneker is by no means unique in the opinion that Shaw's dramatic characters are mere mouthpieces for the ideas of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Ibsen.

It might be imagined that the verdict of Continental Europe, where so many of the most modern conceptions, most vitally fecund ideas, originate and flourish, would carry with it some weight of authority. America inaugurated Shaw's world-renown by recognizing in him a brilliant and witty personage who succeeded in entertaining the public through the adventitious medium of the stage. It was not until Shaw's plays swept from one end of Europe to the other that Shaw came to be recognized abroad as a man of ideas rather than a mere theatre-poet; indeed, as a genius of penetrative insight and philosophic depth. Forced by the example of America and Europe to recognize in Shaw a dramatist of Continental calibre and range, England at last accorded to Shaw, the dramatist, the acknowledgment so long and so discreditably overdue. Nevertheless, the English dramatic critics still continued to refer Shaw's philosophy to Schopenhauer, to Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Strindberg, "knowing nothing about them," as Mr. Shaw once remarked to me, "except that their opinions, like mine, are not those of The Times or The Spectator."

It is at least worthy of notice that Shaw does not claim to be a great novelist, or a great dramatist, or a great critic; for, as Mr. Chesterton says, he is very dogmatic,

but very humble. Indeed, Mr. Shaw once wrote me that he does not claim to be great: either he is or he is not great, and that is an end of the matter. But it is highly significant that Shaw does specifically claim to be a philosopher. Shaw's philosophical ideas have been regarded by English and American critics either as of undoubted European derivation, or else as fantastic paradoxes totally unrelated to the existing body of thought. "I urge them to remember," Shaw remonstrates," that this body of thought is the slowest of growths and the rarest of blossomings, and that if there is such a thing on the philosophic plane as a matter of course, it is that no individual can make more than a minute contribution to it." An earnest effort to discover Shaw's original minute contribution to the existing body of thought is, it seems to me, a much more worthy undertaking than glib accusations of plagiarism; and the introduction of chronological evidence and personal testimony may tend to prove that Shaw is essentially an independent thinker, with a clearly coördinated system of philosophy. Let us critically endeavor, then, in the language of political economy, to award Shaw his merited "rent of ability."

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My studies of the life and work of Bernard Shaw have led me to the unwavering conclusion that every phase in his career is the logical outcome of his socialism. His philosophy is the consistent integration of his empirical criticisms of modern society and its present organization, founded on authority and based upon capitalism. In essence, Shaw's drama is socially deterministic; his characters are what they are, become what they become, far less on account of heredity or ancestral influence than on account of the social structure of the environment through which their fate is moulded. Economist as well as moralist, Shaw attributes paramount importance to the economic and political conditions of the régime in which his characters live and move and have their being. His drama has its true origin in the

conflict between the wills of his charac ters and the social determinism perpetually at work to destroy their freedom. The germ idea of his philosophy is rooted in the effort to supplant modern social organization by socialism, through the intermediary of the free operation of the will of humanity.

Shaw's fundamental postulate is that morality is transitory, evolutional -a concomitant fluxion of civilization. "What people call vice is eternal," he once wrote; "what they call virtue is mere fashion." This is only an extravagant, epigrammatic mode of stating that morality is not simply "purement géographique," as an eminent Frenchman once observed, but a creature of occasion, conditioned by circumstance and environment. Historically considered, progress connotes repudiation of custom and abrogation of authority; the step from the premise that morality is a variable function of civilization to the conclusion that salvation lies alone in revolt, is inevitable. Huxley says in a passage truly Shavian," History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions."

To the student of modern art and thought, there is nothing especially paradoxical, or even novel, in the notion that morality flows. "The ideal is dead; long live the ideal!" is the epitome of all human progress. In the nineteenth century men ceased to be always on the side of the angels and the devil began to get his due. The day of the advocatus diaboli of the saintly anarch, has dawned. The whole anarchistic spirit of our time is summed up in the words of a character in one of Ibsen's plays: "The old beauty is no longer beautiful; the new truth is no longer true." Every age has its dominant, accepted ideas and forms, petrifactions, crystallizations; but, as Georg Brandes has said," Besides these it owns whole class of quite different ideas, which have not yet taken shape, but are in the air, and are apprehended by the greatest men of the age as the results which must

another

now be arrived at." The ideas of the evolutionary trend of human ideals, of the triumphant hypocrisy of current morality, of the necessity for repudiating the code of the multitude, were in the air; they were slowly being arrived at by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Stirnir in philosophy; by Lassalle, Marx, and Morris in economics and sociology; by Ibsen, Mark Twain, Shelley, Ruskin, and Carlyle in literature and art. Bernard Shaw epitomizes the movement in a phrase: "Duty is what one should never do; " and embodies his faith in a perfect epigram: "The golden rule is that there are no golden rules." The literature of the age resounds with the "rattle of twentieth-century tumbrils."

The destruction of the principle of alien authority involves the necessity for the creation of the individual standard. Nietzsche has defined freedom as the will to be responsible for one's self. And Max Stirnir, scorning the claims of the species, avers that" to be a man is not to realize the ideal of Man, but to present one's self, the individual. It is not how I realize the generally human that needs to be my task, but how I satisfy myself. I am my species, am without law, without model, and the like. It is possible that I can make very little out of myself; but this little is everything, and is better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the State, etc." Whilst differing fundamentally from Nietzsche merely in the advocacy of socialism, and from Stirnir in profound concern for the progressive evolution of the species. Shaw is in agreement with them both in desiring the autonomy of the individual. Like many a great master from Molière to Whitman, from Rabelais to Rousseau, Shaw raises the world-old cry, "Back to Nature."

The repudiation of the idea of duty, and of the principle of alien authority, throws the source of action upon the individual; and to Shaw, naturam sequere means to heed the voice of instinct

in the conduct of life. Shaw turns from the guidance of "conscience," so-called, to the dictates of natural impulse; and is unwavering in urging to the fullest extent the Protestant's claim of right of private judgment in all matters of conscience. And in doing so, he realizes full well that whilst "heterodoxy in art is at worst rated as eccentricity or folly, heterodoxy in morals is at once rated as scoundrelism, and, what is worse, propagandist scoundrelism, which must, we are told, if successful, undermine society and bring us back to barbarism after a period of decadence like that which brought imperial Rome to its downfall."

I do not believe that I am exaggerating in saying that Shaw's life-work, ethically considered, has consisted in an attack upon the conception that passions are necessarily base and unclean; his art works are glorifications of the man of conviction who can find a motive, and not an excuse, for his passions; whose conduct flows from his own ideas of right and wrong; and who obeys the law of his own nature in defiance of appearance, of criticism, of alien authority — in a word, of any external trammel whatsoever. "The ingrained habit of thinking of the propensities of which we are ashamed as 'our passions,'" Shaw has pointed out, "and of our shame of them and of the propensities to noble conduct as a negative and inhibitory deportment called our conscience, leads us to conclude that to accept the guidance of our passions is to plunge recklessly into the insupportable tedium of what is called a 'life of pleasure.' Reactionists against the almost equally insupportable slavery of what is called a life of duty' are nevertheless willing to venture on these terms." But, according to Shaw, the would-be wicked ones find, when they come to the point, that "the indispensable qualification for a wicked life is not freedom, but wickedness."

The difficulty of personal conduct guided by instinct, with its oftentimes appalling consequences, is fully recog