Page 1 of 5
European Journal of Business &
Social Sciences
Available at https://ejbss.org/
ISSN: 2235-767X
Volume 07 Issue 02
February 2019
Available online: https://ejbss.org/ P a g e | 205
Bernard Shaw as a Disciple of Freedom
Javid Maqbool Shah Qurashi
Research Scholar, Department of
Comparative Languages and Culture
Davv Indore
Abstract
According to Bernard Shaw what is a perfectly free person? Evidently a person
who can do what he likes, when he likes, and where he likes, or do nothing at all if he
prefers it. Well, there is no such person, and there never can be any such person, whether
we like it or not, we must all sleep for one third of our life time – wash and dress and
undress-we must spend a couple of hours eating and drinking – we must spend nearly as
much in getting about form place to place. For half the day we slaves to necessities which
we can’t shirk, whether we are Monarchs with a thousands slaves are humble laborers
with no servants but there wives. And the wives must undertake the addition heavy
slavery of child bearing, burring, if the world is still to be peopled.
Key Words: - Freedom, slavery, Labour, Government, Revaluation, Democracy .
At a time when woman a condition and : future are being increasingly
recognized as of the utmost value to the race it is not surprising that a man of the keen
vision and strong "social passion" of George Bernard Shaw, should be, among scores of
great minds, a contributor to the solution of her problems. Indeed, this 1s one of' the most
important phases, one might
Almost say the chief significance, of his work. As with all human nature, he sees
with piercing insight the weakness of woman and some of the causes of this weakness in
the institutions and prejudices of the day. In his plays he reveals these needs and gives his
ideas concerning woman, love, and marriage,- yet not hie, he assures us, but only the
thought of hie day. rt is certainly part of the thought of hie day; his part is to point out the
wrongs, and this he does with such enthusiasm and earnestness that he is often
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European Journal of Business &
Social Sciences
Available at https://ejbss.org/
ISSN: 2235-767X
Volume 07 Issue 02
February 2019
Available online: https://ejbss.org/ P a g e | 206
Misunderstood. Shaw is unique in the way he portrays women; they are women the like
of which were never seen before in literature. 'Of appreciate his interpretation it is
necessary to know his ideas of life and of the mission of literature. It is impossible to read
a play of Bernard Shaw without seeing at once that he looks at life in an unusual and very
modern way. Hie is not a new romance based on the old notions of conduct and feeling; it
is rather that view of life which strips way the veils of convention and hypocrisy and
looks squarely at the reality. It seeks to analyze and determine the value of these realities
not under their given names of love 1 duty, modesty, and morality, but as they really are,
and so prepare to build a new morality which shall have sincerity as its foundation at one,
and facts and unbiased truth as its pillars and beams. Augustine Filan has said of Shaw:
"Allies theatre is only a campaign against our poor old institutions, and against the
principles on whole repose, both good and bad; against marriage, the family, individual
property, against morality and even against the idea of duty. If this is true, Shaw is indeed
a public sinner, an enemy to t .Ruth and purity, and a perverted of the young. But this
critic is one of those very souls who has bowed low to the old conventions and failed to
see that they no longer embody true morality; therefore his words are truer even than he
knows. Shaw does transgress all the "virtues"', but only because they are no longer what
their names signify, but anther shields for crime and hindrances to the ·development of
true virtue. As Temple Scott says, many of the "virtues" prevent human happiness,
interfere with one's freedom to assert his best self, and really asphyxiate all the finer
emotions; as south hey are not virtues but damnable vices. Life, freedom, and happiness
do not follow in the wake of present institutions and morality, but misery, sorrow,
Shaw says practically the same thing in his preface to the Pleasant Plays: "I can
no longer be satisfied with fictitious morals and fictitious good conduct, shedding
fictitious glory on overcrowding, disease, crime, drink, war, cruelty, infant mortality, and
all the other commonplaces of civilization which drive men to the theatre to make foolish
pretences that these things are progress, science, morals, religion, patriotism, imperial
supremacy, national greatness and all the other names the newspapers call them.” It is not
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European Journal of Business &
Social Sciences
Available at https://ejbss.org/
ISSN: 2235-767X
Volume 07 Issue 02
February 2019
Available online: https://ejbss.org/ P a g e | 207
the idea alone but the way the idea works out in practice that is important to the modern
mind. Science regards the reality alone, not the ideal far ·removed from truth, as a
legitimate basis for theory. It takes far more courage and optimism to be hopeful about
human nature after one has penetrated clear-sightedly into its petty shams and pretences,
but it is the only optimism which an honest mind can countenance. Moreover, ~he
realities may be unpleasant to a romantic mind, but to the Social scientist they ·are sacred
and significant because they are true. Shaw's idealism is firmer and higher, in the few
glimpses of it which he gives us unconsciously, because it reaches down deeper. He has
stated his position in hie usual clear and forceful way in the preface to "Three Plays f~r
Puritans": "l do not see moral chaos and anarchy as an alternative to romantic convention;
and I am not going to pretend I do to please less clear-sighted people who are convinced
that the world is only held together by the force of unanimous, strenuous, eloquent,
trumpet-tongued lying. To me the tragedy and comedy of life lie in the consequences
sometimes terrible, sometimes ludicrous, of our persistent· attempts to found our
institutions on the ideals suggested to our imagination by our half-satisfied passions,
instead of on a genuinely scientific natural history." The search for truth, then, ie behind
all the art of this dramatist; but even truth for its own sake is too narrow an aim for his
attempt to disseat human motives and institutions. It is because George Bernard Shaw has
a great passion for the welfare of his brother-man and sister-woman that hie anger is
poured out upon the things which keep them f ·room the realization of that divine self
which, with an idealism. Surpassing that of the angels, he sees in every human creature.
Sometimes he goes too far, often he is not logical and judicial,, or even trying to be,
many times he ignores the other side of .his case, and fails to reason things out to their ·
logical conclusion; but all these are faults of his earnestness and not of his motives. He
has certain ideas which he knows are true and he is earnestly trying to hammer them
home. Shaw has not formulated a perfect scheme of things; he is only helping to prepare
the way for it, in line with many others whose genius extends in different directions were
his is lacking. His is the gift of "normal" vision, where most other people's vision
abnormal.
