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

A Creed for Living 11
tions of death which, in the event, were true: he died shortly after the
article appeared. It had been Archer who had given Shaw his start, who had
provided the eccentric Irishman his first opportunity to take the stage as
Punch—otherwise G.B.S., the absurdly paradoxical critic of London’s art
world. By this time, however, Shaw was enjoying the success of Saint Joan,
thought by many the crowning achievement of his career and by others
the last flare of his dying genius. Archer salutes his old friend as “the
Grand Old Man of literary Europe” but then goes on to say that Shaw’s
mind “is concave, convex, corrugated, many-faceted—anything you like
except plane and objective” and that “his perceptions are warped by the
intensity of his feelings: the mirror of his mind does not accurately image
the external object.” Archer continues:
Mr. Shaw is the most complete and instinctive apriorist of recorded
time. He does not live in the real world, but in a world of his own
construction. No doubt this is in some measure true of all of us, but it
is the inmost secret of Mr. Shaw’s whole psychology. His perception
of fact is absolutely at the mercy of his will. The world without has no
existence for him, except in so far as it can be, and is, fitted into the
pre-existent scheme of his world within. The result is that he can
seldom or never make a perfectly accurate statement of fact. The
most honourable of men, the most incapable of telling a falsehood for
his own advantage, or even in furtherance of a cause or an argument,
he is equally incapable of seeing, reflecting, expressing things as they
objectively or historically are. He sees them through the distorting,
systematising medium of his own personality; whereas the man who
is to be an effective force in this world must either have the clearest
insight into things as they are, or, if he sees them awry, must do so by
reason of a common and popular obliquity of vision. (“The Psychology
of G.B.S.” 300, 301, 303)
One must beware here of succumbing to the inevitable temptation to dismiss
Archer, since, after all, who is William Archer now, except a name
peripheral to those of Ibsen and Shaw? Archer was a perceptive and intelligent
critic; it would be dangerously presumptuous for us to condescend
to him from what we may perceive to be the summit of our postmodern
wisdom. It is wonderfully flattering to agree with Shaw about the follies of
the Victorian era; we all see through them now, of course, and when we
imagine ourselves in Shaw’s place, looking at them through Shaw’s eyes,
we can identify with the solitary crusader against pomposity and falsehood.
But it does not follow that we would have seen things as he saw them