IN THE ARTS OF LIFE MAN INVENTS NOTHING; BUT IN THE ARTS OF DEATH HE OUTDOES NATURE HERSELF

A couple of weeks ago I received a message whereby the sender requested my help in finding an alleged Shaw quotation "to the effect that we have surpassed ourselves in the art of war, but not so in the art of peace." 

After trying many different word combinations, I finally found the passage the original query referred to. It belongs to a long speech from Don Juan in Hell by the mouth of the Devil. The relevant fragment reads as follows: 

THE DEVIL. [...] And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness.

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We cannot disagree with Shaw in that "homo homini lupus;" in fact, many readers will find a certain parallelism between the words quoted above and Undershaft's (Major Barbara) peculiar philosophy of constant improvement in the "arts of death": 

UNDERSHAFT. Not at all. The more destructive war becomes the more fascinating we find it. No, Mr Lomax, I am obliged to you for making the usual excuse for my trade; but I am not ashamed of it. I am not one of those men who keep their morals and their business in watertight compartments. All the spare money my trade rivals spend on hospitals, cathedrals and other receptacles for conscience money, I devote to experiments and researches in improved methods of destroying life and property. I have always done so; and I always shall.

Another interesting thing that I've learned in the process of finding this quotation is that Shaw quite often connects the concepts of life and death in the form of another dichotomy with more social and political implications: war and peace. Let us take a look at some examples. I have decided to focus solely on quotations from the plays, because one could write a book if the prefaces, letters, pamphlets and speeches are considered.  

To begin with, and despite the socio-political implications I've alluded to, the drive for both war and peace are to be found within each individual person. For example, when Anderson (The Devil's Disciple) learns that the soldiers had come for him, the stage direction tells us that "the man of peace vanishes, transfigured into a choleric and formidable man of war." 

Conversely, as Aubrey (Too True to Be Good) argues when the Sergeant excuses his behaviour because "that was war,"

AUBREY. It was me, sergeant: ME. You cannot divide my conscience into a war department and a peace department. Do you suppose that a man who will commit murder for political ends will hesitate to commit theft for personal ends? Do you suppose you can make a man the mortal enemy of sixty millions of his fellow creatures without making him a little less scrupulous about his next door neighbour?

Of course, war and peace are closely connected in collective terms as well. First, because the existence of either does not depend on their ethical superiority, but on business questions instead - as Undershaft reminds us once again: 

UNDERSHAFT [with a touch of brutality] The government of your country! I am the government of your country: I, and Lazarus. Do you suppose that you and half a dozen amateurs like you, sitting in a row in that foolish gabble shop, can govern Undershaft and Lazarus? No, my friend: you will do what pays US. You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace when it doesn't.

The consequence of all this is that the dividing line between war and peace in practical terms gets thinner and thinner. The second part of Back to Methuselah ("The Gospel of the Brother Barnabas") contains some words to that effect: 

BURGE. We won the war: don't forget that.

FRANKLYN. No: the soldiers and sailors won it, and left you to finish it. And you were so utterly incompetent that the multitudes of children slain by hunger in the first years of peace made us all wish we were at war again.

Likewise, the Commander-in-Chief in the second of the Farfetched Fables knows all too well what the outcome of the situation will be, but he also knows that he cannot intervene because of certain technicalities: 

C.-IN-C. Not a bit of it. Ketch is far too cunning to go to war with us. He did not go to war with anybody. He dropped his bombs on the Isle of Wight just to shew Capetown and the rest that the world was at his mercy. He selected the Isle of Wight because it's a safe distance from his own people, just as we selected Hiroshima in 1945. He thinks islands are out-of-the-way little places that dont matter to us. But he maintains that his relations with the Commonwealth are friendly; and as you have not declared war on him we are still technically at peace. That makes it your job, not mine, though as usual when there is anything to be done except what was done last time, I shall have to do it.

Given all the grey areas between war and peace, I have to agree with Shaw's Caesar and proclaim that both war and peace are sophisticated arts that only the greatest artists can master, preferrably if an imperialist. 

CAESAR. What! Rome produces no art! Is peace not an art? Is war not an art? Is government not an art? Is civilization not an art? All these we give you in exchange for a few ornaments. You will have the best of the bargain.

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THE WORST SIN TOWARDS OUR FELLOW CREATURES IS NOT TO HATE THEM, BUT TO BE INDIFFERENT TO THEM.

The environmental website One Green Planet recently published a list of quotations on animal rights and against animal cruelty. Unsurprisinly, the list includes a quotation by Bernard Shaw. 

"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them."

This quotation, taken from act II of The Devil's Disciple is not, however, directly related to animals, but rather to fellow human beings at large. Below is the larger context, a conversation between Judith and Anderson:  

 JUDITH. But Richard said— 
ANDERSON (goodhumoredly cutting her short). Pooh! Richard said! He said what he thought would frighten you and frighten me, my dear. He said what perhaps (God forgive him!) he would like to believe. It's a terrible thing to think of what death must mean for a man like that. I felt that I must warn him. I left a message for him.
JUDITH (querulously). What message?
ANDERSON. Only that I should be glad to see him for a moment on a matter of importance to himself; and that if he would look in here when he was passing he would be welcome.
JUDITH (aghast). You asked that man to come here!
ANDERSON. I did.
JUDITH (sinking on the seat and clasping her hands). I hope he won't come! Oh, I pray that he may not come!
ANDERSON. Why? Don't you want him to be warned?
JUDITH. He must know his danger. Oh, Tony, is it wrong to hate a blasphemer and a villain? I do hate him! I can't get him out of my mind: I know he will bring harm with him. He insulted you: he insulted me: he insulted his mother.
ANDERSON (quaintly). Well, dear, let's forgive him; and then it won't matter.
JUDITH. Oh, I know it's wrong to hate anybody; but—
ANDERSON (going over to her with humorous tenderness). Come, dear, you're not so wicked as you think. The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity. After all, my dear, if you watch people carefully, you'll be surprised to find how like hate is to love. 

This quotation, of course, brings to mind two of the most popular topics of discussion among Shavians. The first, Shaw's concern for animal rights - including his vegetarianism - is often summarized in his famous words, reproduced in Hesketh Pearson's Bernard Shaw: A Biography: 

"My will con­tains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by herds of oxen, sheep, swine, flocks of poultry, and a small travelling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarves in honour of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow-creatures. It will be, with the excep­tion of the procession into Noah's Ark, the most remarkable thing of the kind ever seen." 

The second idea, that of indifference being one of the worst feelings we can hold for others, even worse than hatred, is frequently found in Shaw's writings. For example, the preface to Heartbreak House reads: 

"It is difficult to say whether indifference and neglect are worse than false doctrine."

As usual, then, Shaw's words are multifaceted and hardly ever a straightforward message, but we must not be indifferent to them - lest we become indifferent to our fellow inhabitants of this planet we call Earth. 

NO MAN FULLY CAPABLE OF HIS OWN LANGUAGE EVER MASTERS ANOTHER

Although - as a member of a Philology Department - I know a few people who are living proof that the above quotation is less than accurate, it is hard to tell to what extent Shaw's words are true - especially because there is no definition of what "fully capable" means. What I can tell you, though, is that these words can be found in Maxims for Revolutionists, a sort of annexe to The Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion. This, in turn, is an addendum to Man and Superman, as many of you already know. 

Shaw's interest in foreign languages was rather limited, with the exception of the translation of his plays. Whether because of the incompetence of many of his translators or because he wanted to oversee everything concerning the publication of his works, Shaw exchanged a number of letters over specific words, phrases or passages in translation. His Collected Letters contain many examples of these, particularly with the Hamons (Augustin and Henriette), his French translators, and with Siegfried Trebitsch, the German one. 

On a more personal note, however, Shaw was quite aware of his lack of ability for foreign languages, as he conceded on a number of occasions. Perhaps one of the most oft-quoted anecdotes in this respect is recounted in his letter to Dino Grandi, Italian ambassador to Britain at the time, who had invited the Shaws to dine. (Bernard Shaw Collected Letters Vol. IV, p. 371-2) Shaw politely declined the invitation, partially on the grounds of what had happened the last time: 

"Your lady graciously came and spoke to me. I lost my head completely and tried to speak in Italian (which I cannot speak). The result was a stammering in very bad French (I am the worst of linguistis - not like you, who speak English better than any Englishman). It was evident to the Signora Grande that I was very drunk; and the conversation ended abruptly before I recovered my presence of mind."

Despite these shortcomings, Shaw was regarded by some as a very good speaker of a few foreign languages - although for reasons beyond his actual mastery of any of them. As Archibald Henderson puts it in his Bernard Shaw: A Critical Biography (p. 492):

"[Shaw] speaks no language but his own, and reads no foreign language, save French, with ease. I remember hearing someone ask Rodin whether Shaw really spoke French. "Ah! no!" replied Rodin, with his genial smile and a faint twinkle of the eyes; "Monsieur Shaw does not speak French. But somehow or other, by the very violence of his manner and gesticulation, he succeeds in imposing his meaning upon you!" Shaw is fond of relating the incident which laid the foundation for his reputation as an Italian scholar. “Once I was in Milan with a party of English folk. We were dining at the railway restaurant, and our waiter spoke no language other than his own. When the moment came to pay and rush for the train, we were unable to make him understand that we wanted not one bill, but twenty-four separate ones. My friends insisted that I must know Italian, so to act as interpreter, I racked my memory for chips from the language of Dante, but in vain. All of a sudden, a line from The Huguenots flashed to my brain: Ognuno per se / per tutti il ciel (‘Every man for himself / and heaven for all) I declaimed it with triumphant success. The army of waiters was doubled up with laughter, and my fame as an Italian scholar has been on the increase ever since.”

At any rate, nobody can blame Shaw for trying to pass as a great linguist. As he himself acknowledged in a note he wrote on the occasion of the premiere of The Devil's Disciple at the Raimund Theatre, Vienna (the manuscript is transcribed and annotated in The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, Vol. 20, pages 247-252): 

"Like all really able men I am congenitally incapable of acquiring foreign languages; but I have been so steeped in German music, and consequently in German poetry, all my life (having indeed learned more of my art as a writer for the stage from Mozart than from Shakespear, Molière or any literary dramatist) that I cannot help believing that I know German. I sometimes speak it; and my German friends are all agreed that nobody else in Europe speaks it in quite the same manner."

"Shaw and Foreign Languages and Literature." Sounds like something someone should write a book on.