THERE is nothing pleasanter than to see a man of
great mind and of high accomplishment in his art come into his own, and receive the honest homage of his fellows—not the flattery of fashion or the lip-service of convention or the machine-made plaudits of a conspiracy in publicity, but the authentic gold of a genuine appreciation. To that Mr. Shaw has attained, and he has attained it without bowing his knee or his head in the House of Rimmon. Further, he has attained his conquest of the general mind in the sight way and on the right grounds. There is always a sense of disappointment and of distraction when a man is praised and thanked on the wrong grounds or, at any rate, for the things at which he is only second-rate. Mr. Shaw has won his place of honour in the two spheres in which he is without rivals—as a dramatist and as a master of mental analysis. On the scene he both inspires and informs. He gives us the delight of a poignant and well-ordered style, and at the same time stimulates and reinforces our minds. Though he will never stoop to conquer, he neglects no artifice that will help to wing his arrows of the brain. He has fully realized that through the dramatic form are quickest learnt and easiest taught the great lessons due to man, and that the dialectic of the stage is the chief conduit pipe by which wisdom can reach the soul. The balanced argument alone is worthy of the true philosopher, and that reaches us best in dialogue, as Plato taught long ago. We are stirred and impassioned by the potent irony and yet noble simplicity of the Apology, but it is the Dialogues that convince. The great tractate describes to us the nature of the Daimon, but it is in the talk of Socrates, and when the shuttle is flashing through the loom of debate, that we actually feel his presence. Me. Shaw has seen this instinctively. Again, like Socrates, he will not " dope " us or hypnotize us or even enmesh us in the nets of mere melody. Rather, he shakes us by the shoulder, and compels us to feel the great issues of human life. He will not let us die comfortably in the dark. But 83 careful is he of his argument, and of giving it the extremity of clear expression, that he is not content with the drama as his instrument of interpretation and information.
In his Preface, or perhaps, I should say, in his procession of Prefaces, he buttresses his arguments and makes still more moving his " Exegesis." That may raise a ripple in the quaking quagmire of the cynics' mind, but I honour Mr. Shaw for feeling, as he clearly does, that the greater the theme the more imperative the call to leave no single word unsaid that can clarify or amplify his exposition of those concerning truths which possess him. The Preface is to be valued as highly as the Play, though none can feel a stronger admiration of the play than I feel. That, I am convinced, will be a unanimous verdict. Mr. Shaw's apologetics for the Middle, as contrasted with the Dark Ages, are admirably just and convincing, as is also his exposition of the aims and objects of the Church in the matter of repressing heresy, and saving men's souls in their despite. He puts their true values on the Nationalism and Puritanism of Joan, and on the organized Bureaucratic Spirituality of the Roman Church—the faith of men, not their colour or their country, is what concerns
the Synods of Christ. Next he weighs the class-conscious Anti-Nationalism of the Feudal Nobility. Finally, he gives all the credit that the Roman Church ought to be given for its sincerity. And yet he never once becomes intoxicated by the potent wine of Essential Justice. Hard task though it must have been, he never falls into the sophist's fallacies, or lets his hand slip from the polished shoulder of Truth. He sees the essential weakness of the case for the Church, though he puts that case so well and so fully. If the Church had been truly informed by the spirit of Christ it would have judged Joan as our Lord judged the man whom he saw working in his Vineyard on the Sabbath.: "Oh man, if indeed thou knowest what thou doest thou art blessed, If thou knowest not, thou art accursed " (Luke vi. 5. Codex Bezale). Who can deny that Joan knew
what she was doing when she broke the law of obedience to the Church which she professed till she found a higher law in her own soul ? Therefore she inherited the blessing of Christ. If she had been merely doing what she had a fancy to do, and without knowing' or caring whether it was forbidden or not, had been, in fact, an anarchist without a faith, she would have been accursed. But she could not be a " pococurante,"-a go-as-you- please, a what-does-it-all-matter, woman. She felt she must know what she was about, and have a conscience in what she did. She was afraid, poor girl, of the fire -and of the loss of country and home and perhaps, low be it spoken in this age, of the joy of battle. She was even afraid of being held a heretic, and a disobedient daughter of the Church. But there was something she was still more afraid of—of sinning against the light, of not knowing when she might know. Joan was the Martyr of Reason and Truth.
Mr. Shaw brings out all this with an admirable clearness and sincerity. But he is not content to leave it there. As long as there is something more to be probed, probe he must. He has got to answer the question, Why did Joan feel she must do the things that made her die a Martyr ?—I have not forgotten that Mr. Shaw makes her dread of imprisonment the immediate force which makes her recant her recantation. Why did she think life and happiness well lost for the Truth ? Mr. Shaw's search for an answer is deeply moving. He comes back to " the Life-urge," or to what he now less happily, as I think, calls it, " the Evolutionary Appetite." Still, if cumbrous, it is probably more exact, and it avoids even an appearance of begging the question it sets out to solve. Here is the passage in which Mr. Shaw sets forth, or rather implies, his explanation :— " But that there are forces at work which use individuals for purposes far transcending the purpose of keeping these individuals alive and prosperous, and respectable and safe and happy in the middle station of life, which is all any good bourgeois can reason- ably require, is established by the fact that men will, in the pursuit of knowledge and of social readjustments for which they will not be a penny the better, and are, indeed, often many pence the worse, face poverty, infamy, exile, imprisonment, dreadful hard- ship and death. Even the selfish pursuit of personal power does not nerve men to the efforts and sacrifices which are eagerly made in pursuit of extensions of our power over Nature, though these extensions may not touch the personal life of the seeker at any point.- There is no mere mystery about this appetite for know- ledge and power than about the appetite for food : both are known as facts and as facts only, the difference between them being that the appetite for food is necessary to the life of the hungry man. and is therefore a personal appetite, whereas the other is an appetite for evolution, and therefore a superpersonal need. The diverse manners in which our imaginations dramatize the approach of the superpersonal forces is a problem for the psychologist, not for the historian. Only, the historian must understand that visionaries are neither impostors nor lunatics. It is one thing to say that the figure Joan recognized as St. Catherine was not really St. Catherine, but the dramatization of Joan's imagination of that pressure upon her of the driving force that is behind evolu- tion which I have just called the evolutionary appetite. It is quite another to class her visions with the vision of two moons seen by a drunken person, or with Bracken spectres, echoes and the like. St. Catherine's instructions were far too cogent for that ; and the simplest French peasant who believes in apparitions of celestial personages to- favoured mortals is nearer to the scientific truth about Joan than the Rationalist and Materialist historians and essayists who feel obliged to set down a girl who saw saints and heard them talking to her as either crazy or mendacious. If Joan was mad, all Christendom was mad, too ; for people who believe devoutly in the existence of celestial personages are every whit as mad in that sense as the people who think they see them. Luther, when he threw his inkhorn at the devil, was no more mad than any other Augustinian monk ; he had a more vivid imagina- tion,- and had perhaps eaten and slept leas, that was all."
This article grows too long. It is much better to read Mr. Shaw's actual play and Preface than to read about them in a review. Still I cannot resist quoting one more passage, that which has the cross heading : " The Law of Change is the Law of God " :-
" When Joan maintained her own ways she claimed, like Job, that there was not only God and the Church to be considered, but the Word made Flesh : that is, the unaveraged individual, repre- senting life—possibly at its highest actual human evolution, and possibly at its lowest, but never at its merely mathematical average. Now there is no deification of the democratic average in the theory of the Church ; it is an avowed hierarchy in which the members are sifted until at the end of the process an individual stands supreme as the Vicar of Christ. But when the process is examined it appears that its successive steps of selection and election are of the superior by the inferior (the cardinal vice of democracy), with the result that great popes are as rare and accidental as great kings, and that it has sometimes been safer for an aspirant to the Chair and the Keys to pass as a moribund dotard than as an energetic saint. At best very few popes have been canonized, or could be without letting down the standard of sanctity set by the self-elected saints. No other result could have been reasonably expected ; for it is not possible that an official organization of the spiritual needs of millions of men and women, mostly poor and ignorant, should compete successfully in the selection of its principals with the direct choice of the Holy Ghost as it flashes with unerring aim upon the individual. Nor can any College of Cardinals pray effectively that its choice may be inspired. The conscious prayer of the inferior may be that his choice may light on a greater than himself ; but the sub-conscious intention of his self-preserving individuality must be to find a trustworthy servant for his own purposes. The saints and prophets, though they may be accidentally in this or that official position or rank, are always really self-selected, like Joan. And since neither Church nor State, by the secular necessities of its constitution, can guarantee even the recognition of such self-chosen missions, there is nothing for us but to make it a point of honour to privilege heresy to the last bearable degree on the simple ground that all evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and miscon- duct. In short, though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance, or the recognition of the fact that the law of evolution is Ibsen's law of change. And as the law of God in any sense of the word which can now command a faith proof against science is a law of evolution, it follows that the law of God is a law of change, and that when the Churches sot themselves against change as such, they are setting themselves against the law of God."
There are dozens of other things almost as notable as these, and many a poignant thrust or crashing. blow given in the course of argument, but, alas ! I must leave them untouched. I will only say by way of postscript that the Roman Church reformed as Mr. Shaw would evidently like to see it reformed is quaintly enough almost exactly the Church of England, " as by law established "—the Anglican Church, that is, as it is known to civilian lawyers and as it is defined in the Statutes and administered in the courts. That is, no doubt, a Church little known to the world and little spoken of by the clergy. They for the most part talk of the Church of England as if it was merely a solid mass of second-hand superstition. As a matter of fact, however, that is a fancy body and not the real Church of England. Many people will think I am talking through my hat. I am not, and the proof is this. There is'no process by which I or anybody else can be legally " un-Churched," to use Fuller's word, or made a heretic of because of our beliefs or non-beliefs. There is not a rite of the Church of which I could be lawfully deprived on any ground except that of being a notorious and open evil liver—and that, of course, is not a matter of doctrine but a by-law of decency and police.
Jowett and Stanley had hardly more store of essential doctrinal orthodoxy than has Mr. Shaw, and yet no one could drive them from the Church or prevent their preaching or carrying out the offices of the Church in Balliol Chapel or in Westminster Abbey.
J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.
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