I've blogged about how I received the Constable & Co. collection of the works of Bernard Shaw previously owned by noted scholar Chuck Berst, kindly shipped to me by his widow Roelina, who left in place all of the slips of paper where her late husband had noted something interesting.
The always insightful Chuck Berst had stuck slips of paper in Chapter VI of the novel, and had as a further help marked in pencil some key passages in which Cashel espouses an active philosophy of executive power. It might be tempting to attribute the character's views to Shaw himself, who later showed not just a tolerance for but even an admiration of authoritarian leaders such as Joseph Stalin. Here's a bit of the first marked passage:
Suppose you walked along the street and saw a man beating a woman, and setting a bad example to the roughs. Well, you would be bound to set a good example to them; and, if youre men, youd like to save the woman; but you couldn't do it by merely living; for that would be setting the bad example of passing on and leaving the poor creature to be beaten. What is it that you need to know, then, so as to be able to act up to your ideas? Why, you want to know how to hit him, when to hit him, and where to hit him; and then you want the nerve to go in and do it. Thats executive power; and thats whats wanted worse than sitting down and thinking...
To Cashel, this is just common sense. However, readers today might recognize the same self-righteous mentality that allowed the Soviets to slaughter millions of people in an effort to "set a good example" for humanity. Stalin, after all, had asked his followers to "act up to" their ideals by killing others as well as frequently getting killed themselves. Perhaps most telling is that the prizefighter advocates knowing how, when, and where to hit and likens this to the executive power wielded by individuals and nations alike.
A few pages later, in another section flagged by an old piece of paper courtesy of Chuck Berst, the character makes the political analogy explicit. What is more, Shaw's prizefighter belittles those who struggle and strive to better the world without the necessary force to back themselves up and the necessary will to use that force when it might be effective. Here's another passage I found bracketed in pencil:
All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake; not because it isnt a good thing to improve the world if you know how to do it, but because striving and struggling is the worst way you could set about doing anything. It gives a man a bad style, and weakens him. It shews that he dont believe in himself much.
For those who might mistake a character for his author, this defense of executive power might seem pretty damning. Things look even worse for Shaw when later in the book he explicitly mentions eugenics, a concept most people today rightfully find abhorrent, though it was a common article of faith for many people (on both the left and the right) back in Shaw's day.
Toward the end of Chapter XIV, the heroine Lydia Carew explains to her cousin that since her "body is frail" and her "brain morbidly active" it makes sense that she marry "a man strong in body and untroubled in mind" since "it is a plain proposition in eugenics."
Before condemning Shaw for supporting a debunked ideology, however, it's important to read the rest of the book. In the final chapter of Cashel Byron's Profession, the narrator says of Lydia Carew: "Her children, so carefully planned by her to inherit her intelligence with their father's robustness, proved to her that heredity is not so simple a matter..." Instead, the boys inherit her own lack of athletic aptitude while the girls take after their father's impetuousness.
So while Lydia has faith in eugenics, the narrator most definitely does not. Of course, the narrator does not necessarily represent Shaw's opinions either, but the ending of Cashel Byron's Profession would seem to caution us against making too many assumptions about the author.
