Bernard Shaw happened to be born in an epoch, or rather at the end
of an epoch, which was in its way unique in the ages of history. The nineteenth
century was not unique in the success or rapidity of its reforms or in their
ultimate cessation; but it was unique in the peculiar character of the failure
which followed the success. The French Revolution was an enormous act of human
realisation; it has altered the terms of every law and the shape of every town
in Europe; but it was by no means the only example of a strong and swift period
of reform. What was really peculiar about the Republican energy was this,
that it left behind it, not an ordinary reaction but a kind of dreary, drawn
out and utterly unmeaning hope. The strong and evident idea of reform sank
lower and lower until it became the timid and feeble idea of progress.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century there appeared its two incredible
figures; they were the pure Conservative and the pure Progressive; two figures
which would have been overwhelmed with laughter by any other intellectual
commonwealth of history. There was hardly a human generation which could
not have seen the folly of merely going forward or merely standing still; of
mere progressing or mere conserving. In the coarsest Greek Comedy we might have
a joke about a man who wanted to keep what he had, whether it was yellow gold
or yellow fever. In the dullest mediaeval morality we might have a joke about a
progressive gentleman who, having passed heaven and come to purgatory, decided
to go further and fare worse. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were
an age of quite impetuous progress; men made in one rush, roads, trades,
synthetic philosophies, parliaments, university settlements, a law that could
cover the world and such spires as had never struck the sky. But they would not
have said that they wanted progress, but that they wanted the road, the
parliaments, and the spires. In the same way the time from Richelieu to the
Revolution was upon the whole a time of conservation, often of harsh and
hideous conservation; it preserved tortures, legal quibbles, and despotism. But
if you had asked the rulers they would not have said that they wanted
conservation; but that they wanted the torture and the despotism. The old
reformers and the old despots alike desired definite things, powers, licenses, payments, vetoes,
and permissions. Only the modern progressive and the modern conservative have
been content with two words.
G K Chesterton in GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
