George Bernard Shaw

From Philosopedia

Shaw, George Bernard (26 July 1856 - 2 November 1950)

An Irish playwright, winner in 1925 of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Shaw was born at 33 Synge Street in Dublin, Ireland.

In his early London years Shaw boldly proclaimed himself “like Shelley, a socialist, an atheist, and a vegetarian.” He told Joseph McCabe that for a time he had to live on twelve cents a day.

When Charles Bradlaugh died in 1891, leaving the National Secular Society without a leader, Shaw was asked to take on the leadership. However, he called them the fundamentalists of the secularist movement, and they withdrew their offer to make him Bradlaugh’s successor, accusing Shaw of having an outlook that relied on purely mystical assumptions.

Shaw had many careers - playwright, critic, journalist, platform spellbinder, protester against censorship, unpopular critic of Britain’s war policies, producer and director of many of his own plays, champion of the rights of women. He had a twenty-five-year exchange with a nun, Dame Laurentia McLachlan, during which both tried and failed to convert the other. She never forgave him for his blasphemous picture of Jesus as “the conjurer” in his fable, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932).

Although he would never allow himself to be called a Christian, he can be classed as an unbeliever only in the sense that there was, as he said at the end of his life, no church in the world that would receive him, or any in which he could consent to be received. Shaw has written,

• The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. Whether Socrates got as much out of life as Wesley [John Wesley, the founder of Methodism] is an unanswerable question, but a nation of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of Wesleys.

Not everyone appreciated Shaw’s wit nor his dramatic plots. Frank Harris described him as “the first man to have cut a swathe through the theater and left it strewn with virgins.”

Oscar Wilde observed, “Bernard Shaw has no enemies but is intensely disliked by his friends.”

H. L. Mencken wrote of Shaw, “It is his life work to announce the obvious in terms of the scandalous.”

McCabe wrote, “He virulently criticizes Christianity and suggests that Jesus was of unbalanced mind - and equally criticizes Rationalism (and science), following Samuel Butler in the belief that a Vital Principle animates the living universe and that instinct (or the inspiration of this) is the guide, not reason.”

George Orwell thought Shaw was probably not a Communist but was “reliably pro-Russian on all major issues.”

Shaw was turned down several times before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925. St. Joan was published in 1924. The prize was not awarded until 1926, leading to the author’s Shavian comment, “I wrote nothing in 1925, and that is probably why they gave it to me.”

In Bernard Shaw, The Ascent of the Superman (1996), Sally Peters claims the playwright was a gender bender, a Uranian or Urning, terms made fashionable by the Marquess of Queensberry to derogate “queer” people. Although her proofs are not entirely convincing to other scholars, she told of Shaw’s woolly yellow Jaeger one-piece suits which he thought contained one’s body odors.

He was a neurotic washer, and he felt his body excrements would be odorless if he stuck to a vegetarian diet. Vaccinations, he held, killed people and should be avoided.

Shaw the socialist author left a capitalist estate of $1,028,252. Reaffirming his belief in creative evolution rather than in any specific church creed, he asked that memorials to him that took “the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice” be omitted. His ashes were to be sprinkled at Ayot St. Lawrence. “Personally,” he wrote in his final instructions, “I prefer the garden to the cloister.” After making numerous small bequests, Shaw left the bulk of his sizable fortune for the development of a British alphabet having forty letters. In court, however, the request was lowered to a £500 prize being offered in a competition to select a letter design.

At the age of ninety-four, Shaw was lucid but tired during his final days. Biographer St. John G. Ervine has written that to a few close friends Shaw said he was ready, if not longing, for his final rest. On the last day of his life an hour before he died and when visited by a friend, Ellen O’Casey, he said wryly, “Well, it will be a new experience anyway.”

(Shaw’s acquaintance with many leading freethinkers is described in The London Heretics by Warren Sylvester Smith. See entry for George Orwell.)

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