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

Realism 23
no scoundrels. A similar strict impartiality, based on his conviction that we
are all moral equals, became a religious principle with Shaw, one which he
maintained to the end of his life, even in the face of the evidence presented
to his declining years in the shape of Hitler and Mussolini.
Why, then, did Shaw so emphatically reject Eliot? He accuses her of
“fatalism.”
“George Eliot” (Marion Evans) who, incredible as it now seems, was
during my boyhood ranked in literature as England’s greatest mind,
was broken by the fatalism that ensued when she discarded God. In
her most famous novel Middlemarch, which I read in my teens and
almost venerated, there is not a ray of hope: the characters have no
more volition than billiard balls: they are moved only by circumstances
and heredity. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they
kill us for their sport” was Shakespear’s anticipation of George Eliot.
(“Postscript: After Twenty-five Years” 702)
It is true that most of the characters in the novel are extremely limited in
both vision and ability and that the aspirations of those with greater aims
are constantly reduced by their circumstances. There are several references
to the “force of circumstance” and the “modest nature” of goodness (335,
314). One of the clear lessons of the book is that one cannot safely ignore
the forces of heredity and environment. But it is not hopelessly pessimistic.
These are the final words of the novel, George Eliot’s closing observations
on her heroine:
Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength,
spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the
effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for
the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts,
and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have
been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life
and rest in unvisited tombs. (811)
To a generation for whom Samuel Beckett’s “They give birth astride a
grave” is as familiar as a proverb, this is positively sunny; it may even
strike contemporary pessimists as skirting the verge of Pollyannaism.
Beyond, Not Against, Rationalism
Shaw’s judgment on Eliot and Middlemarch is surely too harsh, and the
same could be said of his reaction to Tyndall. Tyndall’s confident and exuberant
prose justifies Shaw’s perception of a glorious new age, and Eliot,