Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

144 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
grace of God, go I.” The very fact that Cusins wants to avoid being a rascal
means that he too divides the world into rascals and heroes. He would
distribute the black and white hats differently from Stephen or Lady
Britomart, but the principle is the same.
This is how Undershaft greets Cusins’s claim to believe in love:
undershaft. I know. You love the needy and the outcast: you love the
oppressed races, the negro, the Indian ryot, the underdog everywhere.
Do you love the Japanese? Do you love the French? Do you
love the English?
cusins. No. Every true Englishman detests the English. We are the
wickedest nation on earth; and our success is a moral horror.
undershaft. That is what comes of your gospel of love, is it? (3: 177)
This passage is an assault on liberal idealism that has puzzled even the best
of Shaw’s critics. When Shaw says that we are all expressions of the Life
Force, imperfect manifestations of God’s attempts to become perfect,
Shavians nod in assent, but when he insists that is as true of the thief as the
saint, or the capitalist as the worker, many cannot take him seriously. But
the gospel of love falls apart when love is denied to those you have condemned
as wicked: those less fortunate than yourself. So Cusins is a moralist
as well, but rather than directing his moral scorn safely outward like
Stephen and his mother, he directs it toward himself and those groups of
which he is a member. If Barbara and her father are alike in possessing
unified souls, Cusins’s soul is marked by division and conflict. Shaw describes
him as a man whose health is being destroyed by a perpetual
struggle between his conscience and impulses of which he does not approve.
To judge from the passages he quotes, his favorite Greek tragedy is
The Bacchae, and like Pentheus, he is being torn apart. Pentheus is both
drawn to and repelled by Dionysus; Cusins is drawn to both Barbara and
Andrew Undershaft in spite of his conscience, and he casts both of them in
the role of Dionysus. 6 Yet he calls Barbara his “guardian angel” and turns
to her father to exclaim “Avaunt!” (3: 156). He describes himself as a “poor
professor of Greek, the most artificial and self-suppressed of human creatures”
(3: 117). His answer to bigotry, intolerance, and class snobbery is to
reverse the roles of the condemned and the privileged. Instead of damning
others, he damns himself. He identifies himself with the English when he
calls England the wickedest nation on earth. After accepting the role of
apprentice to Undershaft, he justifies himself by saying that he loves the
common people and wants to arm them against the intellectuals, a group to