may say literally that Shaw desires man to be an
animal. That is, he desires him to cling first and last to life, to the
spirit of animation, to the thing which is common to him and the birds
and plants. Man should have the blind faith of a beast: he should be as
mystically immutable as a cow, and as deaf to sophistries as a fish.
Shaw does not wish him to be a philosopher or an artist; he does not
even wish him to be a man, so much as he wishes him to be, in this holy
sense, an animal. He must follow the flag of life as fiercely from
conviction as all other creatures follow it from instinct.

But this Shavian worship of life is by no means lively. It has nothing
in common either with the braver or the baser forms of what we commonly
call optimism. It has none of the omnivorous exultation of Walt Whitman
or the fiery pantheism of Shelley. Bernard Shaw wishes to show himself
not so much as an optimist, but rather as a sort of faithful and
contented pessimist. This contradiction is the key to nearly all his
early and more obvious contradictions and to many which remain to the
end. Whitman and many modern idealists have talked of taking even duty
as a pleasure; it seems to me that Shaw takes even pleasure as a duty.
In a queer way he seems to see existence as an illusion and yet as an
obligation. To every man and woman, bird, beast, and flower, life is a
love-call to be eagerly followed. To Bernard Shaw it is merely a
military bugle to be obeyed. In short, he fails to feel that the command
of Nature (if one must use the anthropomorphic fable of Nature instead
of the philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as well as obeyed. He paints
life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap in
the dark. That is heroic; and to my instinct at least Schopenhauer
looks like a pigmy beside his pupil. But it is the heroism of a morbid
and almost asphyxiated age. It is awful to think that this world which
so many poets have praised has even for a time been depicted as a
man-trap into which we may just have the manhood to jump. Think of all
those ages through which men have talked of having the courage to die.
And then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having
the courage to live.

It is exactly this oddity or dilemma which may be said to culminate in
the crowning work of his later and more constructive period, the work in
which he certainly attempted, whether with success or not, to state his
ultimate