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Title: Man And Superman

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Release Date: March 21, 2006 [EBook #3328]

Language: English


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MAN AND SUPERMAN

A COMEDY AND A PHILOSOPHY

By Bernard Shaw




EPISTLE DEDICATORY TO ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY

My dear Walkley:

You once asked me why I did not write a Don Juan play. The levity with
which you assumed this frightful responsibility has probably by this
time enabled you to forget it; but the day of reckoning has arrived:
here is your play! I say your play, because qui facit per alium facit
per se. Its profits, like its labor, belong to me: its morals, its
manners, its philosophy, its influence on the young, are for you to
justify. You were of mature age when you made the suggestion; and you
knew your man. It is hardly fifteen years since, as twin pioneers of
the New Journalism of that time, we two, cradled in the same new sheets,
made an epoch in the criticism of the theatre and the opera house by
making it a pretext for a propaganda of our own views of life. So you
cannot plead ignorance of the character of the force you set in motion.
You meant me to epater le bourgeois; and if he protests, I hereby refer
him to you as the accountable party.

I warn you that if you attempt to repudiate your responsibility, I shall
suspect you of finding the play too decorous for your taste. The
fifteen years have made me older and graver. In you I can detect no such
becoming change. Your levities and audacities are like the loves and
comforts prayed for by Desdemona: they increase, even as your days do
grow. No mere pioneering journal dares meddle with them now: the stately
Times itself is alone sufficiently above suspicion to act as your
chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its stars that
new plays are not produced every day, since after each such event
its gravity is compromised, its platitude turned to epigram, its
portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum
into naughtiness by criticisms which the traditions of the paper do not
allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign with the
most extravagant flourishes between the lines. I am not sure that this
is not a portent of Revolution. In eighteenth century France the end was
at hand when men bought the Encyclopedia and found Diderot there. When
I buy the Times and find you there, my prophetic ear catches a rattle of
twentieth century tumbrils.

However, that is not my present anxiety. The question is, will you not
be disappointed with a Don Juan play in which not one of that hero's
mille e tre adventures is brought upon the stage? To propitiate you, let
me explain myself. You will retort that I never do anything else: it
is your favorite jibe at me that what I call drama is nothing but
explanation. But you must not expect me to adopt your inexplicable,
fantastic, petulant, fastidious ways: you must take me as I am, a
reasonable, patient, consistent, apologetic, laborious person, with the
temperament of a schoolmaster and the pursuits of a vestryman. No doubt
that literary knack of mine which happens to amuse the British public
distracts attention from my character; but the character is there none
the less, solid as bricks. I have a conscience; and conscience is
always anxiously explanatory. You, on the contrary, feel that a man who
discusses his conscience is much like a woman who discusses her modesty.
The only moral force you condescend to parade is the force of your
wit: the only demand you make in public is the demand of your artistic
temperament for symmetry, elegance, style, grace, refinement, and the
cleanliness which comes next to godliness if not before it. But my
conscience is the genuine pulpit article: it annoys me to see people
comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making
them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you don't
like my preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it.

In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I explained the predicament of
our contemporary English drama, forced to deal almost exclusively with
cases of sexual attraction, and yet forbidden to exhibit the incidents
of that attraction or even to discuss its nature. Your suggestion that
I should write a Don Juan play was virtually a challenge to me to treat
this subject myself dramatically. The challenge was difficult enough
to be worth accepting, because, when you come to think of it, though we
have plenty of dramas with heroes and heroines who are in love and must
accordingly marry or perish at the end of the play, or about people
whose relations with one another have been complicated by the marriage
laws, not to mention the looser sort of plays which trade on the
tradition that illicit love affairs are at once vicious and delightful,
we have no modern English plays in which the natural attraction of the
sexes for one another is made the mainspring of the action. That is
why we insist on beauty in our performers, differing herein from the
countries our friend William Archer holds up as examples of seriousness
to our childish theatres. There the Juliets and Isoldes, the Romeos and
Tristans, might be our mothers and fathers. Not so the English actress.
The heroine she impersonates is not allowed to discuss the elemental
relations of men and women: all her romantic twaddle about novelet-made
love, all her purely legal dilemmas as to whether she was married
or "betrayed," quite miss our hearts and worry our minds. To console
ourselves we must just look at her. We do so; and her beauty feeds our
starving emotions. Sometimes we grumble ungallantly at the lady because
she does not act as well as she looks. But in a drama which, with all
its preoccupation with sex, is really void of sexual interest, good
looks are more desired than histrionic skill.

Let me press this point on you, since you are too clever to raise the
fool's cry of paradox whenever I take hold of a stick by the right
instead of the wrong end. Why are our occasional attempts to deal with
the sex problem on the stage so repulsive and dreary that even those
who are most determined that sex questions shall be held open and their
discussion kept free, cannot pretend to relish these joyless attempts at
social sanitation? Is it not because at bottom they are utterly sexless?
What is the usual formula for such plays? A woman has, on some past
occasion, been brought into conflict with the law which regulates the
relations of the sexes. A man, by falling in love with her, or
marrying her, is brought into conflict with the social convention which
discountenances the woman. Now the conflicts of individuals with law and
convention can be dramatized like all other human conflicts; but they
are purely judicial; and the fact that we are much more curious about
the suppressed relations between the man and the woman than about the
relations between both and our courts of law and private juries of
matrons, produces that sensation of evasion, of dissatisfaction, of
fundamental irrelevance, of shallowness, of useless disagreeableness,
of total failure to edify and partial failure to interest, which is as
familiar to you in the theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented
those uncomfortable buildings, and found our popular playwrights in the
mind to (as they thought) emulate Ibsen.

I take it that when you asked me for a Don Juan play you did not want
that sort of thing. Nobody does: the successes such plays sometimes
obtain are due to the incidental conventional melodrama with which the
experienced popular author instinctively saves himself from failure.
But what did you want? Owing to your unfortunate habit--you now, I
hope, feel its inconvenience--of not explaining yourself, I have had to
discover this for myself. First, then, I have had to ask myself, what
is a Don Juan? Vulgarly, a libertine. But your dislike of vulgarity
is pushed to the length of a defect (universality of character is
impossible without a share of vulgarity); and even if you could acquire
the taste, you would find yourself overfed from ordinary sources
without troubling me. So I took it that you demanded a Don Juan in the
philosophic sense.

Philosophically, Don Juan is a man who, though gifted enough to be
exceptionally capable of distinguishing between good and evil, follows
his own instincts without regard to the common statute, or canon law;
and therefore, whilst gaining the ardent sympathy of our rebellious
instincts (which are flattered by the brilliancies with which Don
Juan associates them) finds himself in mortal conflict with existing
institutions, and defends himself by fraud and farce as unscrupulously
as a farmer defends his crops by the same means against vermin. The
prototypic Don Juan, invented early in the XVI century by a Spanish
monk, was presented, according to the ideas of that time, as the enemy
of God, the approach of whose vengeance is felt throughout the drama,
growing in menace from minute to minute. No anxiety is caused on Don
Juan's account by any minor antagonist: he easily eludes the police,
temporal and spiritual; and when an indignant father seeks private
redress with the sword, Don Juan kills him without an effort. Not until
the slain father returns from heaven as the agent of God, in the form
of his own statue, does he prevail against his slayer and cast him into
hell. The moral is a monkish one: repent and reform now; for to-morrow
it may be too late. This is really the only point on which Don Juan is
sceptical; for he is a devout believer in an ultimate hell, and risks
damnation only because, as he is young, it seems so far off that
repentance can be postponed until he has amused himself to his heart's
content.

But the lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world
chooses to learn from his book. What attracts and impresses us in El
Burlador de Sevilla is not the immediate urgency of repentance, but
the heroism of daring to be the enemy of God. From Prometheus to my own
Devil's Disciple, such enemies have always been popular. Don Juan became
such a pet that the world could not bear his damnation. It reconciled
him sentimentally to God in a second version, and clamored for
his canonization for a whole century, thus treating him as English
journalism has treated that comic foe of the gods, Punch. Moliere's Don
Juan casts back to the original in point of impenitence; but in piety he
falls off greatly. True, he also proposes to repent; but in what terms?
"Oui, ma foi! il faut s'amender. Encore vingt ou trente ans de cette
vie-ci, et puis nous songerons a nous. " After Moliere comes the
artist-enchanter, the master of masters, Mozart, who reveals the hero's
spirit in magical harmonies, elfin tones, and elate darting rhythms as
of summer lightning made audible. Here you have freedom in love and in
morality mocking exquisitely at slavery to them, and interesting you,
attracting you, tempting you, inexplicably forcing you to range the hero
with his enemy the statue on a transcendant plane, leaving the prudish
daughter and her priggish lover on a crockery shelf below to live
piously ever after.

After these completed works Byron's fragment does not count for much
philosophically. Our vagabond libertines are no more interesting from
that point of view than the sailor who has a wife in every port, and
Byron's hero is, after all, only a vagabond libertine. And he is dumb:
he does not discuss himself with a Sganarelle-Leporello or with the
fathers or brothers of his mistresses: he does not even, like Casanova,
tell his own story. In fact he is not a true Don Juan at all; for he is
no more an enemy of God than any romantic and adventurous young sower of
wild oats. Had you and I been in his place at his age, who knows whether
we might not have done as he did, unless indeed your fastidiousness
had saved you from the empress Catherine. Byron was as little of a
philosopher as Peter the Great: both were instances of that rare and
useful, but unedifying variation, an energetic genius born without
the prejudices or superstitions of his contemporaries. The resultant
unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a greater poet than
Wordsworth just as it made Peter a greater king than George III; but
as it was, after all, only a negative qualification, it did not prevent
Peter from being an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did
it enable Byron to become a religious force like Shelley. Let us, then,
leave Byron's Don Juan out of account. Mozart's is the last of the true
Don Juans; for by the time he was of age, his cousin Faust had, in the
hands of Goethe, taken his place and carried both his warfare and his
reconciliation with the gods far beyond mere lovemaking into politics,
high art, schemes for reclaiming new continents from the ocean, and
recognition of an eternal womanly principle in the universe. Goethe's
Faust and Mozart's Don Juan were the last words of the XVIII century
on the subject; and by the time the polite critics of the XIX century,
ignoring William Blake as superficially as the XVIII had ignored Hogarth
or the XVII Bunyan, had got past the Dickens-Macaulay Dumas-Guizot stage
and the Stendhal-Meredith-Turgenieff stage, and were confronted with
philosophic fiction by such pens as Ibsen's and Tolstoy's, Don Juan had
changed his sex and become Dona Juana, breaking out of the Doll's House
and asserting herself as an individual instead of a mere item in a moral
pageant.

Now it is all very well for you at the beginning of the XX century to
ask me for a Don Juan play; but you will see from the foregoing survey
that Don Juan is a full century out of date for you and for me; and
if there are millions of less literate people who are still in the
eighteenth century, have they not Moliere and Mozart, upon whose art no
human hand can improve? You would laugh at me if at this time of day I
dealt in duels and ghosts and "womanly" women. As to mere libertinism,
you would be the first to remind me that the Festin de Pierre of
Moliere is not a play for amorists, and that one bar of the voluptuous
sentimentality of Gounod or Bizet would appear as a licentious stain on
the score of Don Giovanni. Even the more abstract parts of the Don Juan
play are dilapidated past use: for instance, Don Juan's supernatural
antagonist hurled those who refuse to repent into lakes of burning
brimstone, there to be tormented by devils with horns and tails. Of that
antagonist, and of that conception of repentance, how much is left that
could be used in a play by me dedicated to you? On the other hand, those
forces of middle class public opinion which hardly existed for a
Spanish nobleman in the days of the first Don Juan, are now triumphant
everywhere. Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman
dares now shock his greengrocer. The women, "marchesane, principesse,
cameriere, cittadine" and all, are become equally dangerous: the sex
is aggressive, powerful: when women are wronged they do not group
themselves pathetically to sing "Protegga il giusto cielo": they grasp
formidable legal and social weapons, and retaliate. Political parties
are wrecked and public careers undone by a single indiscretion. A man
had better have all the statues in London to supper with him, ugly as
they are, than be brought to the bar of the Nonconformist Conscience by
Donna Elvira. Excommunication has become almost as serious a business as
it was in the X century.

As a result, Man is no longer, like Don Juan, victor in the duel of
sex. Whether he has ever really been may be doubted: at all events
the enormous superiority of Woman's natural position in this matter is
telling with greater and greater force. As to pulling the Nonconformist
Conscience by the beard as Don Juan plucked the beard of the
Commandant's statue in the convent of San Francisco, that is out of the
question nowadays: prudence and good manners alike forbid it to a hero
with any mind. Besides, it is Don Juan's own beard that is in danger of
plucking. Far from relapsing into hypocrisy, as Sganarelle feared,
he has unexpectedly discovered a moral in his immorality. The growing
recognition of his new point of view is heaping responsibility on him.
His former jests he has had to take as seriously as I have had to take
some of the jests of Mr W. S. Gilbert. His scepticism, once his least
tolerated quality, has now triumphed so completely that he can no
longer assert himself by witty negations, and must, to save himself from
cipherdom, find an affirmative position. His thousand and three affairs
of gallantry, after becoming, at most, two immature intrigues leading to
sordid and prolonged complications and humiliations, have been discarded
altogether as unworthy of his philosophic dignity and compromising to
his newly acknowledged position as the founder of a school. Instead of
pretending to read Ovid he does actually read Schopenhaur and Nietzsche,
studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead
of for the freedom of his own instincts. Thus his profligacy and his
dare-devil airs have gone the way of his sword and mandoline into the
rag shop of anachronisms and superstitions. In fact, he is now more
Hamlet than Don Juan; for though the lines put into the actor's mouth to
indicate to the pit that Hamlet is a philosopher are for the most
part mere harmonious platitude which, with a little debasement of the
word-music, would be properer to Pecksniff, yet if you separate the real
hero, inarticulate and unintelligible to himself except in flashes of
inspiration, from the performer who has to talk at any cost through
five acts; and if you also do what you must always do in Shakespear's
tragedies: that is, dissect out the absurd sensational incidents and
physical violences of the borrowed story from the genuine Shakespearian
tissue, you will get a true Promethean foe of the gods, whose
instinctive attitude towards women much resembles that to which Don Juan
is now driven. From this point of view Hamlet was a developed Don Juan
whom Shakespear palmed off as a reputable man just as he palmed poor
Macbeth off as a murderer. To-day the palming off is no longer necessary
(at least on your plane and mine) because Don Juanism is no longer
misunderstood as mere Casanovism. Don Juan himself is almost ascetic in
his desire to avoid that misunderstanding; and so my attempt to bring
him up to date by launching him as a modern Englishman into a modern
English environment has produced a figure superficially quite unlike the
hero of Mozart.

And yet I have not the heart to disappoint you wholly of another glimpse
of the Mozartian dissoluto punito and his antagonist the statue. I feel
sure you would like to know more of that statue--to draw him out when he
is off duty, so to speak. To gratify you, I have resorted to the trick
of the strolling theatrical manager who advertizes the pantomime of
Sinbad the Sailor with a stock of second-hand picture posters designed
for Ali Baba. He simply thrusts a few oil jars into the valley of
diamonds, and so fulfils the promise held out by the hoardings to
the public eye. I have adapted this simple device to our occasion by
thrusting into my perfectly modern three-act play a totally extraneous
act in which my hero, enchanted by the air of the Sierra, has a dream in
which his Mozartian ancestor appears and philosophizes at great length
in a Shavio-Socratic dialogue with the lady, the statue, and the devil.

But this pleasantry is not the essence of the play. Over this essence
I have no control. You propound a certain social substance, sexual
attraction to wit, for dramatic distillation; and I distil it for you.
I do not adulterate the product with aphrodisiacs nor dilute it with
romance and water; for I am merely executing your commission, not
producing a popular play for the market. You must therefore (unless,
like most wise men, you read the play first and the preface afterwards)
prepare yourself to face a trumpery story of modern London life, a life
in which, as you know, the ordinary man's main business is to get means
to keep up the position and habits of a gentleman, and the ordinary
woman's business is to get married. In 9,999 cases out of 10,000, you
can count on their doing nothing, whether noble or base, that conflicts
with these ends; and that assurance is what you rely on as their
religion, their morality, their principles, their patriotism, their
reputation, their honor and so forth.

On the whole, this is a sensible and satisfactory foundation for
society. Money means nourishment and marriage means children; and that
men should put nourishment first and women children first is, broadly
speaking, the law of Nature and not the dictate of personal ambition.
The secret of the prosaic man's success, such as it is, is the
simplicity with which he pursues these ends: the secret of the artistic
man's failure, such as that is, is the versatility with which he strays
in all directions after secondary ideals. The artist is either a poet
or a scallawag: as poet, he cannot see, as the prosaic man does, that
chivalry is at bottom only romantic suicide: as scallawag, he cannot see
that it does not pay to spunge and beg and lie and brag and neglect
his person. Therefore do not misunderstand my plain statement of the
fundamental constitution of London society as an Irishman's reproach to
your nation. From the day I first set foot on this foreign soil I knew
the value of the prosaic qualities of which Irishmen teach Englishmen to
be ashamed as well as I knew the vanity of the poetic qualities of which
Englishmen teach Irishmen to be proud. For the Irishman instinctively
disparages the quality which makes the Englishman dangerous to him; and
the Englishman instinctively flatters the fault that makes the Irishman
harmless and amusing to him. What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman
is what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries: stupidity. The
vitality which places nourishment and children first, heaven and hell
a somewhat remote second, and the health of society as an organic whole
nowhere, may muddle successfully through the comparatively tribal stages
of gregariousness; but in nineteenth century nations and twentieth
century empires the determination of every man to be rich at all costs,
and of every woman to be married at all costs, must, without a highly
scientific social organization, produce a ruinous development of
poverty, celibacy, prostitution, infant mortality, adult degeneracy, and
everything that wise men most dread. In short, there is no future for
men, however brimming with crude vitality, who are neither intelligent
nor politically educated enough to be Socialists. So do not
misunderstand me in the other direction either: if I appreciate the
vital qualities of the Englishman as I appreciate the vital qualities of
the bee, I do not guarantee the Englishman against being, like the
bee (or the Canaanite) smoked out and unloaded of his honey by beings
inferior to himself in simple acquisitiveness, combativeness, and
fecundity, but superior to him in imagination and cunning.

The Don Juan play, however, is to deal with sexual attraction, and not
with nutrition, and to deal with it in a society in which the serious
business of sex is left by men to women, as the serious business of
nutrition is left by women to men. That the men, to protect themselves
against a too aggressive prosecution of the women's business, have set
up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must
always come from the man, is true; but the pretence is so shallow that
even in the theatre, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only
on the inexperienced. In Shakespear's plays the woman always takes the
initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love
interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down. She may
do it by blandishment, like Rosalind, or by stratagem, like Mariana; but
in every case the relation between the woman and the man is the same:
she is the pursuer and contriver, he the pursued and disposed of. When
she is baffled, like Ophelia, she goes mad and commits suicide; and the
man goes straight from her funeral to a fencing match. No doubt Nature,
with very young creatures, may save the woman the trouble of scheming:
Prospero knows that he has only to throw Ferdinand and Miranda together
and they will mate like a pair of doves; and there is no need for
Perdita to capture Florizel as the lady doctor in All's Well That Ends
Well (an early Ibsenite heroine) captures Bertram. But the mature
cases all illustrate the Shakespearian law. The one apparent exception,
Petruchio, is not a real one: he is most carefully characterized as
a purely commercial matrimonial adventurer. Once he is assured that
Katharine has money, he undertakes to marry her before he has seen her.
In real life we find not only Petruchios, but Mantalinis and Dobbins who
pursue women with appeals to their pity or jealousy or vanity, or cling
to them in a romantically infatuated way. Such effeminates do not count
in the world scheme: even Bunsby dropping like a fascinated bird into
the jaws of Mrs MacStinger is by comparison a true tragic object of
pity and terror. I find in my own plays that Woman, projecting herself
dramatically by my hands (a process over which I assure you I have no
more real control than I have over my wife), behaves just as Woman did
in the plays of Shakespear.

And so your Don Juan has come to birth as a stage projection of the
tragi-comic love chase of the man by the woman; and my Don Juan is the
quarry instead of the huntsman. Yet he is a true Don Juan, with a sense
of reality that disables convention, defying to the last the fate which
finally overtakes him. The woman's need of him to enable her to carry
on Nature's most urgent work, does not prevail against him until his
resistance gathers her energy to a climax at which she dares to throw
away her customary exploitations of the conventional affectionate and
dutiful poses, and claim him by natural right for a purpose that far
transcends their mortal personal purposes.

Among the friends to whom I have read this play in manuscript are some
of our own sex who are shocked at the "unscrupulousness," meaning
the total disregard of masculine fastidiousness, with which the woman
pursues her purpose. It does not occur to them that if women were as
fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the
race. Is there anything meaner then to throw necessary work upon other
people and then disparage it as unworthy and indelicate. We laugh at the
haughty American nation because it makes the negro clean its boots and
then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the negro by the fact
that he is a shoeblack; but we ourselves throw the whole drudgery of
creation on one sex, and then imply that no female of any womanliness
or delicacy would initiate any effort in that direction. There are no
limits to male hypocrisy in this matter. No doubt there are moments when
man's sexual immunities are made acutely humiliating to him. When
the terrible moment of birth arrives, its supreme importance and its
superhuman effort and peril, in which the father has no part, dwarf
him into the meanest insignificance: he slinks out of the way of the
humblest petticoat, happy if he be poor enough to be pushed out of the
house to outface his ignominy by drunken rejoicings. But when the
crisis is over he takes his revenge, swaggering as the breadwinner, and
speaking of Woman's "sphere" with condescension, even with chivalry, as
if the kitchen and the nursery were less important than the office in
the city. When his swagger is exhausted he drivels into erotic poetry
or sentimental uxoriousness; and the Tennysonian King Arthur posing as
Guinevere becomes Don Quixote grovelling before Dulcinea. You must admit
that here Nature beats Comedy out of the field: the wildest hominist or
feminist farce is insipid after the most commonplace "slice of life. "
The pretence that women do not take the initiative is part of the farce.
Why, the whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls
for the capture of men by women. Give women the vote, and in five years
there will be a crushing tax on bachelors. Men, on the other hand,
attach penalties to marriage, depriving women of property, of the
franchise, of the free use of their limbs, of that ancient symbol of
immortality, the right to make oneself at home in the house of God by
taking off the hat, of everything that he can force Woman to dispense
with without compelling himself to dispense with her. All in vain. Woman
must marry because the race must perish without her travail: if the risk
of death and the certainty of pain, danger and unutterable discomforts
cannot deter her, slavery and swaddled ankles will not. And yet we
assume that the force that carries women through all these perils and
hardships, stops abashed before the primnesses of our behavior for young
ladies. It is assumed that the woman must wait, motionless, until she is
wooed. Nay, she often does wait motionless. That is how the spider waits
for the fly. But the spider spins her web. And if the fly, like my hero,
shows a strength that promises to extricate him, how swiftly does she
abandon her pretence of passiveness, and openly fling coil after coil
about him until he is secured for ever!

If the really impressive books and other art-works of the world were
produced by ordinary men, they would express more fear of women's
pursuit than love of their illusory beauty. But ordinary men cannot
produce really impressive art-works. Those who can are men of genius:
that is, men selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an
intellectual consciousness of her own instinctive purpose. Accordingly,
we observe in the man of genius all the unscrupulousness and all the
"self-sacrifice" (the two things are the same) of Woman. He will risk
the stake and the cross; starve, when necessary, in a garret all his
life; study women and live on their work and care as Darwin studied
worms and lived upon sheep; work his nerves into rags without payment,
a sublime altruist in his disregard of himself, an atrocious egotist in
his disregard of others. Here Woman meets a purpose as impersonal, as
irresistible as her own; and the clash is sometimes tragic. When it is
complicated by the genius being a woman, then the game is one for a king
of critics: your George Sand becomes a mother to gain experience for
the novelist and to develop her, and gobbles up men of genius, Chopins,
Mussets and the like, as mere hors d'oeuvres.

I state the extreme case, of course; but what is true of the great man
who incarnates the philosophic consciousness of Life and the woman who
incarnates its fecundity, is true in some degree of all geniuses and
all women. Hence it is that the world's books get written, its pictures
painted, its statues modelled, its symphonies composed, by people who
are free of the otherwise universal dominion of the tyranny of sex.
Which leads us to the conclusion, astonishing to the vulgar, that art,
instead of being before all things the expression of the normal sexual
situation, is really the only department in which sex is a superseded
and secondary power, with its consciousness so confused and its purpose
so perverted, that its ideas are mere fantasy to common men. Whether the
artist becomes poet or philosopher, moralist or founder of a religion,
his sexual doctrine is nothing but a barren special pleading for
pleasure, excitement, and knowledge when he is young, and for
contemplative tranquillity when he is old and satiated. Romance and
Asceticism, Amorism and Puritanism are equally unreal in the great
Philistine world. The world shown us in books, whether the books be
confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political
orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it
is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the
specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you
and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that
of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is
giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call
education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution
of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete
fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt
observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not
strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters
of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of
highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly
questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of
life. The schoolboy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head
makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe
with reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime, with
your Aristotle.

Fortunately for us, whose minds have been so overwhelmingly
sophisticated by literature, what produces all these treatises and poems
and scriptures of one sort or another is the struggle of Life to become
divinely conscious of itself instead of blindly stumbling hither and
thither in the line of least resistance. Hence there is a driving
towards truth in all books on matters where the writer, though
exceptionally gifted is normally constituted, and has no private axe to
grind. Copernicus had no motive for misleading his fellowmen as to the
place of the sun in the solar system: he looked for it as honestly as a
shepherd seeks his path in a mist. But Copernicus would not have written
love stories scientifically. When it comes to sex relations, the man of
genius does not share the common man's danger of capture, nor the woman
of genius the common woman's overwhelming specialization. And that is
why our scriptures and other art works, when they deal with love, turn
from honest attempts at science in physics to romantic nonsense, erotic
ecstasy, or the stern asceticism of satiety ("the road of excess leads
to the palace of wisdom" said William Blake; for "you never know what is
enough unless you know what is more than enough").

There is a political aspect of this sex question which is too big for my
comedy, and too momentous to be passed over without culpable frivolity.
It is impossible to demonstrate that the initiative in sex transactions
remains with Woman, and has been confirmed to her, so far, more and more
by the suppression of rapine and discouragement of importunity,
without being driven to very serious reflections on the fact that this
initiative is politically the most important of all the initiatives,
because our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap
misgovernment, will ruin us if our citizens are ill bred.

When we two were born, this country was still dominated by a selected
class bred by political marriages. The commercial class had not then
completed the first twenty-five years of its new share of political
power; and it was itself selected by money qualification, and bred, if
not by political marriage, at least by a pretty rigorous class marriage.
I warn you that if you attempt to repudiate your responsibility, I shall
suspect you of finding the play too decorous for your taste. The
fifteen years have made me older and graver. In you I can detect no such
becoming change. Your levities and audacities are like the loves and
comforts prayed for by Desdemona: they increase, even as your days do
grow. No mere pioneering journal dares meddle with them now: the stately
Times itself is alone sufficiently above suspicion to act as your
chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its stars that
new plays are not produced every day, since after each such event
its gravity is compromised, its platitude turned to epigram, its
portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum
into naughtiness by criticisms which the traditions of the paper do not
allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign with the
most extravagant flourishes between the lines. I am not sure that this
is not a portent of Revolution. In eighteenth century France the end was
at hand when men bought the Encyclopedia and found Diderot there. When
I buy the Times and find you there, my prophetic ear catches a rattle of
twentieth century tumbrils.

However, that is not my present anxiety. The question is, will you not
be disappointed with a Don Juan play in which not one of that hero's
mille e tre adventures is brought upon the stage? To propitiate you, let
me explain myself. You will retort that I never do anything else: it
is your favorite jibe at me that what I call drama is nothing but
explanation. But you must not expect me to adopt your inexplicable,
fantastic, petulant, fastidious ways: you must take me as I am, a
reasonable, patient, consistent, apologetic, laborious person, with the
temperament of a schoolmaster and the pursuits of a vestryman. No doubt
that literary knack of mine which happens to amuse the British public
distracts attention from my character; but the character is there none
the less, solid as bricks. I have a conscience; and conscience is
always anxiously explanatory. You, on the contrary, feel that a man who
discusses his conscience is much like a woman who discusses her modesty.
The only moral force you condescend to parade is the force of your
wit: the only demand you make in public is the demand of your artistic
temperament for symmetry, elegance, style, grace, refinement, and the
cleanliness which comes next to godliness if not before it. But my
conscience is the genuine pulpit article: it annoys me to see people
comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making
them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you don't
like my preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it.

In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I explained the predicament of
our contemporary English drama, forced to deal almost exclusively with
cases of sexual attraction, and yet forbidden to exhibit the incidents
of that attraction or even to discuss its nature. Your suggestion that
I should write a Don Juan play was virtually a challenge to me to treat
this subject myself dramatically. The challenge was difficult enough
to be worth accepting, because, when you come to think of it, though we
have plenty of dramas with heroes and heroines who are in love and must
accordingly marry or perish at the end of the play, or about people
whose relations with one another have been complicated by the marriage
laws, not to mention the looser sort of plays which trade on the
tradition that illicit love affairs are at once vicious and delightful,
we have no modern English plays in which the natural attraction of the
sexes for one another is made the mainspring of the action. That is
why we insist on beauty in our performers, differing herein from the
countries our friend William Archer holds up as examples of seriousness
to our childish theatres. There the Juliets and Isoldes, the Romeos and
Tristans, might be our mothers and fathers. Not so the English actress.
The heroine she impersonates is not allowed to discuss the elemental
relations of men and women: all her romantic twaddle about novelet-made
love, all her purely legal dilemmas as to whether she was married
or "betrayed," quite miss our hearts and worry our minds. To console
ourselves we must just look at her. We do so; and her beauty feeds our
starving emotions. Sometimes we grumble ungallantly at the lady because
she does not act as well as she looks. But in a drama which, with all
its preoccupation with sex, is really void of sexual interest, good
looks are more desired than histrionic skill.

Let me press this point on you, since you are too clever to raise the
fool's cry of paradox whenever I take hold of a stick by the right
instead of the wrong end. Why are our occasional attempts to deal with
the sex problem on the stage so repulsive and dreary that even those
who are most determined that sex questions shall be held open and their
discussion kept free, cannot pretend to relish these joyless attempts at
social sanitation? Is it not because at bottom they are utterly sexless?
What is the usual formula for such plays? A woman has, on some past
occasion, been brought into conflict with the law which regulates the
relations of the sexes. A man, by falling in love with her, or
marrying her, is brought into conflict with the social convention which
discountenances the woman. Now the conflicts of individuals with law and
convention can be dramatized like all other human conflicts; but they
are purely judicial; and the fact that we are much more curious about
the suppressed relations between the man and the woman than about the
relations between both and our courts of law and private juries of
matrons, produces that sensation of evasion, of dissatisfaction, of
fundamental irrelevance, of shallowness, of useless disagreeableness,
of total failure to edify and partial failure to interest, which is as
familiar to you in the theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented
those uncomfortable buildings, and found our popular playwrights in the
mind to (as they thought) emulate Ibsen.

I take it that when you asked me for a Don Juan play you did not want
that sort of thing. Nobody does: the successes such plays sometimes
obtain are due to the incidental conventional melodrama with which the
experienced popular author instinctively saves himself from failure.
But what did you want? Owing to your unfortunate habit--you now, I
hope, feel its inconvenience--of not explaining yourself, I have had to
discover this for myself. First, then, I have had to ask myself, what
is a Don Juan? Vulgarly, a libertine. But your dislike of vulgarity
is pushed to the length of a defect (universality of character is
impossible without a share of vulgarity); and even if you could acquire
the taste, you would find yourself overfed from ordinary sources
without troubling me. So I took it that you demanded a Don Juan in the
philosophic sense.

Philosophically, Don Juan is a man who, though gifted enough to be
exceptionally capable of distinguishing between good and evil, follows
his own instincts without regard to the common statute, or canon law;
and therefore, whilst gaining the ardent sympathy of our rebellious
instincts (which are flattered by the brilliancies with which Don
Juan associates them) finds himself in mortal conflict with existing
institutions, and defends himself by fraud and farce as unscrupulously
as a farmer defends his crops by the same means against vermin. The
prototypic Don Juan, invented early in the XVI century by a Spanish
monk, was presented, according to the ideas of that time, as the enemy
of God, the approach of whose vengeance is felt throughout the drama,
growing in menace from minute to minute. No anxiety is caused on Don
Juan's account by any minor antagonist: he easily eludes the police,
temporal and spiritual; and when an indignant father seeks private
redress with the sword, Don Juan kills him without an effort. Not until
the slain father returns from heaven as the agent of God, in the form
of his own statue, does he prevail against his slayer and cast him into
hell. The moral is a monkish one: repent and reform now; for to-morrow
it may be too late. This is really the only point on which Don Juan is
sceptical; for he is a devout believer in an ultimate hell, and risks
damnation only because, as he is young, it seems so far off that
repentance can be postponed until he has amused himself to his heart's
content.

But the lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world
chooses to learn from his book. What attracts and impresses us in El
Burlador de Sevilla is not the immediate urgency of repentance, but
the heroism of daring to be the enemy of God. From Prometheus to my own
Devil's Disciple, such enemies have always been popular. Don Juan became
such a pet that the world could not bear his damnation. It reconciled
him sentimentally to God in a second version, and clamored for
his canonization for a whole century, thus treating him as English
journalism has treated that comic foe of the gods, Punch. Moliere's Don
Juan casts back to the original in point of impenitence; but in piety he
falls off greatly. True, he also proposes to repent; but in what terms?
"Oui, ma foi! il faut s'amender. Encore vingt ou trente ans de cette
vie-ci, et puis nous songerons a nous. " After Moliere comes the
artist-enchanter, the master of masters, Mozart, who reveals the hero's
spirit in magical harmonies, elfin tones, and elate darting rhythms as
of summer lightning made audible. Here you have freedom in love and in
morality mocking exquisitely at slavery to them, and interesting you,
attracting you, tempting you, inexplicably forcing you to range the hero
with his enemy the statue on a transcendant plane, leaving the prudish
daughter and her priggish lover on a crockery shelf below to live
piously ever after.

After these completed works Byron's fragment does not count for much
philosophically. Our vagabond libertines are no more interesting from
that point of view than the sailor who has a wife in every port, and
Byron's hero is, after all, only a vagabond libertine. And he is dumb:
he does not discuss himself with a Sganarelle-Leporello or with the
fathers or brothers of his mistresses: he does not even, like Casanova,
tell his own story. In fact he is not a true Don Juan at all; for he is
no more an enemy of God than any romantic and adventurous young sower of
wild oats. Had you and I been in his place at his age, who knows whether
we might not have done as he did, unless indeed your fastidiousness
had saved you from the empress Catherine. Byron was as little of a
philosopher as Peter the Great: both were instances of that rare and
useful, but unedifying variation, an energetic genius born without
the prejudices or superstitions of his contemporaries. The resultant
unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a greater poet than
Wordsworth just as it made Peter a greater king than George III; but
as it was, after all, only a negative qualification, it did not prevent
Peter from being an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did
it enable Byron to become a religious force like Shelley. Let us, then,
leave Byron's Don Juan out of account. Mozart's is the last of the true
Don Juans; for by the time he was of age, his cousin Faust had, in the
hands of Goethe, taken his place and carried both his warfare and his
reconciliation with the gods far beyond mere lovemaking into politics,
high art, schemes for reclaiming new continents from the ocean, and
recognition of an eternal womanly principle in the universe. Goethe's
Faust and Mozart's Don Juan were the last words of the XVIII century
on the subject; and by the time the polite critics of the XIX century,
ignoring William Blake as superficially as the XVIII had ignored Hogarth
or the XVII Bunyan, had got past the Dickens-Macaulay Dumas-Guizot stage
and the Stendhal-Meredith-Turgenieff stage, and were confronted with
philosophic fiction by such pens as Ibsen's and Tolstoy's, Don Juan had
changed his sex and become Dona Juana, breaking out of the Doll's House
and asserting herself as an individual instead of a mere item in a moral
pageant.

Now it is all very well for you at the beginning of the XX century to
ask me for a Don Juan play; but you will see from the foregoing survey
that Don Juan is a full century out of date for you and for me; and
if there are millions of less literate people who are still in the
eighteenth century, have they not Moliere and Mozart, upon whose art no
human hand can improve? You would laugh at me if at this time of day I
dealt in duels and ghosts and "womanly" women. As to mere libertinism,
you would be the first to remind me that the Festin de Pierre of
Moliere is not a play for amorists, and that one bar of the voluptuous
sentimentality of Gounod or Bizet would appear as a licentious stain on
the score of Don Giovanni. Even the more abstract parts of the Don Juan
play are dilapidated past use: for instance, Don Juan's supernatural
antagonist hurled those who refuse to repent into lakes of burning
brimstone, there to be tormented by devils with horns and tails. Of that
antagonist, and of that conception of repentance, how much is left that
could be used in a play by me dedicated to you? On the other hand, those
forces of middle class public opinion which hardly existed for a
Spanish nobleman in the days of the first Don Juan, are now triumphant
everywhere. Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman
dares now shock his greengrocer. The women, "marchesane, principesse,
cameriere, cittadine" and all, are become equally dangerous: the sex
is aggressive, powerful: when women are wronged they do not group
themselves pathetically to sing "Protegga il giusto cielo": they grasp
formidable legal and social weapons, and retaliate. Political parties
are wrecked and public careers undone by a single indiscretion. A man
had better have all the statues in London to supper with him, ugly as
they are, than be brought to the bar of the Nonconformist Conscience by
Donna Elvira. Excommunication has become almost as serious a business as
it was in the X century.

As a result, Man is no longer, like Don Juan, victor in the duel of
sex. Whether he has ever really been may be doubted: at all events
the enormous superiority of Woman's natural position in this matter is
telling with greater and greater force. As to pulling the Nonconformist
Conscience by the beard as Don Juan plucked the beard of the
Commandant's statue in the convent of San Francisco, that is out of the
question nowadays: prudence and good manners alike forbid it to a hero
with any mind. Besides, it is Don Juan's own beard that is in danger of
plucking. Far from relapsing into hypocrisy, as Sganarelle feared,
he has unexpectedly discovered a moral in his immorality. The growing
recognition of his new point of view is heaping responsibility on him.
His former jests he has had to take as seriously as I have had to take
some of the jests of Mr W. S. Gilbert. His scepticism, once his least
tolerated quality, has now triumphed so completely that he can no
longer assert himself by witty negations, and must, to save himself from
cipherdom, find an affirmative position. His thousand and three affairs
of gallantry, after becoming, at most, two immature intrigues leading to
sordid and prolonged complications and humiliations, have been discarded
altogether as unworthy of his philosophic dignity and compromising to
his newly acknowledged position as the founder of a school. Instead of
pretending to read Ovid he does actually read Schopenhaur and Nietzsche,
studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead
of for the freedom of his own instincts. Thus his profligacy and his
dare-devil airs have gone the way of his sword and mandoline into the
rag shop of anachronisms and superstitions. In fact, he is now more
Hamlet than Don Juan; for though the lines put into the actor's mouth to
indicate to the pit that Hamlet is a philosopher are for the most
part mere harmonious platitude which, with a little debasement of the
word-music, would be properer to Pecksniff, yet if you separate the real
hero, inarticulate and unintelligible to himself except in flashes of
inspiration, from the performer who has to talk at any cost through
five acts; and if you also do what you must always do in Shakespear's
tragedies: that is, dissect out the absurd sensational incidents and
physical violences of the borrowed story from the genuine Shakespearian
tissue, you will get a true Promethean foe of the gods, whose
instinctive attitude towards women much resembles that to which Don Juan
is now driven. From this point of view Hamlet was a developed Don Juan
whom Shakespear palmed off as a reputable man just as he palmed poor
Macbeth off as a murderer. To-day the palming off is no longer necessary
(at least on your plane and mine) because Don Juanism is no longer
misunderstood as mere Casanovism. Don Juan himself is almost ascetic in
his desire to avoid that misunderstanding; and so my attempt to bring
him up to date by launching him as a modern Englishman into a modern
English environment has produced a figure superficially quite unlike the
hero of Mozart.

And yet I have not the heart to disappoint you wholly of another glimpse
of the Mozartian dissoluto punito and his antagonist the statue. I feel
sure you would like to know more of that statue--to draw him out when he
is off duty, so to speak. To gratify you, I have resorted to the trick
of the strolling theatrical manager who advertizes the pantomime of
Sinbad the Sailor with a stock of second-hand picture posters designed
for Ali Baba. He simply thrusts a few oil jars into the valley of
diamonds, and so fulfils the promise held out by the hoardings to
the public eye. I have adapted this simple device to our occasion by
thrusting into my perfectly modern three-act play a totally extraneous
act in which my hero, enchanted by the air of the Sierra, has a dream in
which his Mozartian ancestor appears and philosophizes at great length
in a Shavio-Socratic dialogue with the lady, the statue, and the devil.

But this pleasantry is not the essence of the play. Over this essence
I have no control. You propound a certain social substance, sexual
attraction to wit, for dramatic distillation; and I distil it for you.
I do not adulterate the product with aphrodisiacs nor dilute it with
romance and water; for I am merely executing your commission, not
producing a popular play for the market. You must therefore (unless,
like most wise men, you read the play first and the preface afterwards)
prepare yourself to face a trumpery story of modern London life, a life
in which, as you know, the ordinary man's main business is to get means
to keep up the position and habits of a gentleman, and the ordinary
woman's business is to get married. In 9,999 cases out of 10,000, you
can count on their doing nothing, whether noble or base, that conflicts
with these ends; and that assurance is what you rely on as their
religion, their morality, their principles, their patriotism, their
reputation, their honor and so forth.

On the whole, this is a sensible and satisfactory foundation for
society. Money means nourishment and marriage means children; and that
men should put nourishment first and women children first is, broadly
speaking, the law of Nature and not the dictate of personal ambition.
The secret of the prosaic man's success, such as it is, is the
simplicity with which he pursues these ends: the secret of the artistic
man's failure, such as that is, is the versatility with which he strays
in all directions after secondary ideals. The artist is either a poet
or a scallawag: as poet, he cannot see, as the prosaic man does, that
chivalry is at bottom only romantic suicide: as scallawag, he cannot see
that it does not pay to spunge and beg and lie and brag and neglect
his person. Therefore do not misunderstand my plain statement of the
fundamental constitution of London society as an Irishman's reproach to
your nation. From the day I first set foot on this foreign soil I knew
the value of the prosaic qualities of which Irishmen teach Englishmen to
be ashamed as well as I knew the vanity of the poetic qualities of which
Englishmen teach Irishmen to be proud. For the Irishman instinctively
disparages the quality which makes the Englishman dangerous to him; and
the Englishman instinctively flatters the fault that makes the Irishman
harmless and amusing to him. What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman
is what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries: stupidity. The
vitality which places nourishment and children first, heaven and hell
a somewhat remote second, and the health of society as an organic whole
nowhere, may muddle successfully through the comparatively tribal stages
of gregariousness; but in nineteenth century nations and twentieth
century empires the determination of every man to be rich at all costs,
and of every woman to be married at all costs, must, without a highly
scientific social organization, produce a ruinous development of
poverty, celibacy, prostitution, infant mortality, adult degeneracy, and
everything that wise men most dread. In short, there is no future for
men, however brimming with crude vitality, who are neither intelligent
nor politically educated enough to be Socialists. So do not
misunderstand me in the other direction either: if I appreciate the
vital qualities of the Englishman as I appreciate the vital qualities of
the bee, I do not guarantee the Englishman against being, like the
bee (or the Canaanite) smoked out and unloaded of his honey by beings
inferior to himself in simple acquisitiveness, combativeness, and
fecundity, but superior to him in imagination and cunning.

The Don Juan play, however, is to deal with sexual attraction, and not
with nutrition, and to deal with it in a society in which the serious
business of sex is left by men to women, as the serious business of
nutrition is left by women to men. That the men, to protect themselves
against a too aggressive prosecution of the women's business, have set
up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must
always come from the man, is true; but the pretence is so shallow that
even in the theatre, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only
on the inexperienced. In Shakespear's plays the woman always takes the
initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love
interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down. She may
do it by blandishment, like Rosalind, or by stratagem, like Mariana; but
in every case the relation between the woman and the man is the same:
she is the pursuer and contriver, he the pursued and disposed of. When
she is baffled, like Ophelia, she goes mad and commits suicide; and the
man goes straight from her funeral to a fencing match. No doubt Nature,
with very young creatures, may save the woman the trouble of scheming:
Prospero knows that he has only to throw Ferdinand and Miranda together
and they will mate like a pair of doves; and there is no need for
Perdita to capture Florizel as the lady doctor in All's Well That Ends
Well (an early Ibsenite heroine) captures Bertram. But the mature
cases all illustrate the Shakespearian law. The one apparent exception,
Petruchio, is not a real one: he is most carefully characterized as
a purely commercial matrimonial adventurer. Once he is assured that
Katharine has money, he undertakes to marry her before he has seen her.
In real life we find not only Petruchios, but Mantalinis and Dobbins who
pursue women with appeals to their pity or jealousy or vanity, or cling
to them in a romantically infatuated way. Such effeminates do not count
in the world scheme: even Bunsby dropping like a fascinated bird into
the jaws of Mrs MacStinger is by comparison a true tragic object of
pity and terror. I find in my own plays that Woman, projecting herself
dramatically by my hands (a process over which I assure you I have no
more real control than I have over my wife), behaves just as Woman did
in the plays of Shakespear.

And so your Don Juan has come to birth as a stage projection of the
tragi-comic love chase of the man by the woman; and my Don Juan is the
quarry instead of the huntsman. Yet he is a true Don Juan, with a sense
of reality that disables convention, defying to the last the fate which
finally overtakes him. The woman's need of him to enable her to carry
on Nature's most urgent work, does not prevail against him until his
resistance gathers her energy to a climax at which she dares to throw
away her customary exploitations of the conventional affectionate and
dutiful poses, and claim him by natural right for a purpose that far
transcends their mortal personal purposes.

Among the friends to whom I have read this play in manuscript are some
of our own sex who are shocked at the "unscrupulousness," meaning
the total disregard of masculine fastidiousness, with which the woman
pursues her purpose. It does not occur to them that if women were as
fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the
race. Is there anything meaner then to throw necessary work upon other
people and then disparage it as unworthy and indelicate. We laugh at the
haughty American nation because it makes the negro clean its boots and
then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the negro by the fact
that he is a shoeblack; but we ourselves throw the whole drudgery of
creation on one sex, and then imply that no female of any womanliness
or delicacy would initiate any effort in that direction. There are no
limits to male hypocrisy in this matter. No doubt there are moments when
man's sexual immunities are made acutely humiliating to him. When
the terrible moment of birth arrives, its supreme importance and its
superhuman effort and peril, in which the father has no part, dwarf
him into the meanest insignificance: he slinks out of the way of the
humblest petticoat, happy if he be poor enough to be pushed out of the
house to outface his ignominy by drunken rejoicings. But when the
crisis is over he takes his revenge, swaggering as the breadwinner, and
speaking of Woman's "sphere" with condescension, even with chivalry, as
if the kitchen and the nursery were less important than the office in
the city. When his swagger is exhausted he drivels into erotic poetry
or sentimental uxoriousness; and the Tennysonian King Arthur posing as
Guinevere becomes Don Quixote grovelling before Dulcinea. You must admit
that here Nature beats Comedy out of the field: the wildest hominist or
feminist farce is insipid after the most commonplace "slice of life. "
The pretence that women do not take the initiative is part of the farce.
Why, the whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls
for the capture of men by women. Give women the vote, and in five years
there will be a crushing tax on bachelors. Men, on the other hand,
attach penalties to marriage, depriving women of property, of the
franchise, of the free use of their limbs, of that ancient symbol of
immortality, the right to make oneself at home in the house of God by
taking off the hat, of everything that he can force Woman to dispense
with without compelling himself to dispense with her. All in vain. Woman
must marry because the race must perish without her travail: if the risk
of death and the certainty of pain, danger and unutterable discomforts
cannot deter her, slavery and swaddled ankles will not. And yet we
assume that the force that carries women through all these perils and
hardships, stops abashed before the primnesses of our behavior for young
ladies. It is assumed that the woman must wait, motionless, until she is
wooed. Nay, she often does wait motionless. That is how the spider waits
for the fly. But the spider spins her web. And if the fly, like my hero,
shows a strength that promises to extricate him, how swiftly does she
abandon her pretence of passiveness, and openly fling coil after coil
about him until he is secured for ever!

If the really impressive books and other art-works of the world were
produced by ordinary men, they would express more fear of women's
pursuit than love of their illusory beauty. But ordinary men cannot
produce really impressive art-works. Those who can are men of genius:
that is, men selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an
intellectual consciousness of her own instinctive purpose. Accordingly,
we observe in the man of genius all the unscrupulousness and all the
"self-sacrifice" (the two things are the same) of Woman. He will risk
the stake and the cross; starve, when necessary, in a garret all his
life; study women and live on their work and care as Darwin studied
worms and lived upon sheep; work his nerves into rags without payment,
a sublime altruist in his disregard of himself, an atrocious egotist in
his disregard of others. Here Woman meets a purpose as impersonal, as
irresistible as her own; and the clash is sometimes tragic. When it is
complicated by the genius being a woman, then the game is one for a king
of critics: your George Sand becomes a mother to gain experience for
the novelist and to develop her, and gobbles up men of genius, Chopins,
Mussets and the like, as mere hors d'oeuvres.

I state the extreme case, of course; but what is true of the great man
who incarnates the philosophic consciousness of Life and the woman who
incarnates its fecundity, is true in some degree of all geniuses and
all women. Hence it is that the world's books get written, its pictures
painted, its statues modelled, its symphonies composed, by people who
are free of the otherwise universal dominion of the tyranny of sex.
Which leads us to the conclusion, astonishing to the vulgar, that art,
instead of being before all things the expression of the normal sexual
situation, is really the only department in which sex is a superseded
and secondary power, with its consciousness so confused and its purpose
so perverted, that its ideas are mere fantasy to common men. Whether the
artist becomes poet or philosopher, moralist or founder of a religion,
his sexual doctrine is nothing but a barren special pleading for
pleasure, excitement, and knowledge when he is young, and for
contemplative tranquillity when he is old and satiated. Romance and
Asceticism, Amorism and Puritanism are equally unreal in the great
Philistine world. The world shown us in books, whether the books be
confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political
orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it
is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the
specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you
and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that
of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is
giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call
education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution
of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete
fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt
observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not
strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters
of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of
highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly
questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of
life. The schoolboy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head
makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe
with reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime, with
your Aristotle.

Fortunately for us, whose minds have been so overwhelmingly
sophisticated by literature, what produces all these treatises and poems
and scriptures of one sort or another is the struggle of Life to become
divinely conscious of itself instead of blindly stumbling hither and
thither in the line of least resistance. Hence there is a driving
towards truth in all books on matters where the writer, though
exceptionally gifted is normally constituted, and has no private axe to
grind. Copernicus had no motive for misleading his fellowmen as to the
place of the sun in the solar system: he looked for it as honestly as a
shepherd seeks his path in a mist. But Copernicus would not have written
love stories scientifically. When it comes to sex relations, the man of
genius does not share the common man's danger of capture, nor the woman
of genius the common woman's overwhelming specialization. And that is
why our scriptures and other art works, when they deal with love, turn
from honest attempts at science in physics to romantic nonsense, erotic
ecstasy, or the stern asceticism of satiety ("the road of excess leads
to the palace of wisdom" said William Blake; for "you never know what is
enough unless you know what is more than enough").

There is a political aspect of this sex question which is too big for my
comedy, and too momentous to be passed over without culpable frivolity.
It is impossible to demonstrate that the initiative in sex transactions
remains with Woman, and has been confirmed to her, so far, more and more
by the suppression of rapine and discouragement of importunity,
without being driven to very serious reflections on the fact that this
initiative is politically the most important of all the initiatives,
because our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap
misgovernment, will ruin us if our citizens are ill bred.

When we two were born, this country was still dominated by a selected
class bred by political marriages. The commercial class had not then
completed the first twenty-five years of its new share of political
power; and it was itself selected by money qualification, and bred, if
not by political marriage, at least by a pretty rigorous class marriage.
Aristocracy and plutocracy still furnish the figureheads of politics;
but they are now dependent on the votes of the promiscuously bred
masses. And this, if you please, at the very moment when the political
problem, having suddenly ceased to mean a very limited and occasional
interference, mostly by way of jobbing public appointments, in the
mismanagement of a tight but parochial little island, with occasional
meaningless prosecution of dynastic wars, has become the industrial
reorganization of Britain, the construction of a practically
international Commonwealth, and the partition of the whole of Africa and
perhaps the whole of Asia by the civilized Powers. Can you believe that
the people whose conceptions of society and conduct, whose power of
attention and scope of interest, are measured by the British theatre as
you know it to-day, can either handle this colossal task themselves, or
understand and support the sort of mind and character that is (at least
comparatively) capable of handling it? For remember: what our voters are
in the pit and gallery they are also in the polling booth. We are
all now under what Burke called "the hoofs of the swinish multitude. "
Burke's language gave great offence because the implied exceptions to
its universal application made it a class insult; and it certainly was
not for the pot to call the kettle black. The aristocracy he defended,
in spite of the political marriages by which it tried to secure breeding
for itself, had its mind undertrained by silly schoolmasters and
governesses, its character corrupted by gratuitous luxury, its
self-respect adulterated to complete spuriousness by flattery and
flunkeyism. It is no better to-day and never will be any better: our
very peasants have something morally hardier in them that culminates
occasionally in a Bunyan, a Burns, or a Carlyle. But observe, this
aristocracy, which was overpowered from 1832 to 1885 by the middle
class, has come back to power by the votes of "the swinish multitude. "
Tom Paine has triumphed over Edmund Burke; and the swine are now courted
electors. How many of their own class have these electors sent to
parliament? Hardly a dozen out of 670, and these only under the
persuasion of conspicuous personal qualifications and popular eloquence.
The multitude thus pronounces judgment on its own units: it admits
itself unfit to govern, and will vote only for a man morphologically
and generically transfigured by palatial residence and equipage, by
transcendent tailoring, by the glamor of aristocratic kinship.