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 of having the courage to live.*
[* _George Bernard Shaw_. Week-End Library, p. 190.]
Here comes the great parting of the two men's thought. G.K. believed in God and in joy. But he saw that Shaw had much of value for this strange diseased world. His primary value was not merely (as some said) that he woke it up. The literary world might not be awake to the social evil, but it was painfully awake to the ills, real or imaginary, inherent in human life.
We do not need waking up; rather we suffer from insomnia, with all its results of fear and exaggeration and frightful waking dreams. The modern mind is not a donkey which wants kicking to make it go on. The modern mind is more like a motor-car on a lonely road which two amateur motorists have been just clever enough to take to pieces but are not quite clever enough to put together again.
Shaw had not merely asked questions of the age: that would have been worse than useless. What he had done was at moments to rise above his own thoughts and give, through his characters, inspired answers: G.K. instances _Candida_, with its revelation of the meaning of marriage when the woman stays with the strong man because he is so weak and needs her. And Shaw had brought back philosophy into drama--that is, he had recreated the atmosphere, lost since Shakespeare,* in which men were thinking, and might, therefore, find the answers that the age needed. And here again we come back to the world which these men were shaking and to the respective philosophies with which they looked at it. It was a world of conventions and these conventions had become empty of meaning. Throw them away, said Shaw and Wells; no, said Chesterton; keep them and look for their meaning; Revolution does not mean destruction: it means restoration.