What more
impassable
gulf could you have?
Man and Superman- A Comedy and a Philosophy by Bernard Shaw
ANA. Father! Vanity! personal vanity! from you!
THE STATUE. Ah, you outlived that weakness, my daughter: you must be
nearly 80 by this time. I was cut off (by an accident) in my 64th year,
and am considerably your junior in consequence. Besides, my child,
in this place, what our libertine friend here would call the farce of
parental wisdom is dropped. Regard me, I beg, as a fellow creature, not
as a father.
ANA. You speak as this villain speaks.
THE STATUE. Juan is a sound thinker, Ana. A bad fencer, but a sound
thinker.
ANA. [horror creeping upon her] I begin to understand. These are devils,
mocking me. I had better pray.
THE STATUE. [consoling her] No, no, no, my child: do not pray. If you
do, you will throw away the main advantage of this place. Written over
the gate here are the words "Leave every hope behind, ye who enter. "
Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral
responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no
work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what
you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but
amuse yourself. [Don Juan sighs deeply]. You sigh, friend Juan; but if
you dwelt in heaven, as I do, you would realize your advantages.
DON JUAN. You are in good spirits to-day, Commander. You are positively
brilliant. What is the matter?
THE STATUE. I have come to a momentous decision, my boy. But first,
where is our friend the Devil? I must consult him in the matter. And Ana
would like to make his acquaintance, no doubt.
ANA. You are preparing some torment for me.
DON JUAN. All that is superstition, Ana. Reassure yourself. Remember:
the devil is not so black as he is painted.
THE STATUE. Let us give him a call.
At the wave of the statue's hand the great chords roll out again but
this time Mozart's music gets grotesquely adulterated with Gounod's.
A scarlet halo begins to glow; and into it the Devil rises, very
Mephistophelean, and not at all unlike Mendoza, though not so
interesting. He looks older; is getting prematurely bald; and, in spite
of an effusion of goodnature and friendliness, is peevish and sensitive
when his advances are not reciprocated. He does not inspire much
confidence in his powers of hard work or endurance, and is, on the
whole, a disagreeably self-indulgent looking person; but he is clever
and plausible, though perceptibly less well bred than the two other men,
and enormously less vital than the woman.
THE DEVIL. [heartily] Have I the pleasure of again receiving a visit
from the illustrious Commander of Calatrava? [Coldly] Don Juan, your
servant. [Politely] And a strange lady? My respects, Senora.
ANA. Are you--
THE DEVIL. [bowing] Lucifer, at your service.
ANA. I shall go mad.
THE DEVIL. [gallantly] Ah, Senora, do not be anxious. You come to us
from earth, full of the prejudices and terrors of that priest-ridden
place. You have heard me ill spoken of; and yet, believe me, I have
hosts of friends there.
ANA. Yes: you reign in their hearts.
THE DEVIL. [shaking his head] You flatter me, Senora; but you are
mistaken. It is true that the world cannot get on without me; but it
never gives me credit for that: in its heart it mistrusts and hates me.
Its sympathies are all with misery, with poverty, with starvation of the
body and of the heart. I call on it to sympathize with joy, with love,
with happiness, with beauty.
DON JUAN. [nauseated] Excuse me: I am going. You know I cannot stand
this.
THE DEVIL. [angrily] Yes: I know that you are no friend of mine.
THE STATUE. What harm is he doing you, Juan? It seems to me that he was
talking excellent sense when you interrupted him.
THE DEVIL. [warmly shaking the statue's hand] Thank you, my friend:
thank you. You have always understood me: he has always disparaged and
avoided me.
DON JUAN. I have treated you with perfect courtesy.
THE DEVIL. Courtesy! What is courtesy? I care nothing for mere courtesy.
Give me warmth of heart, true sincerity, the bond of sympathy with love
and joy--
DON JUAN. You are making me ill.
THE DEVIL. There! [Appealing to the statue] You hear, sir! Oh, by what
irony of fate was this cold selfish egotist sent to my kingdom, and you
taken to the icy mansions of the sky!
THE STATUE. I can't complain. I was a hypocrite; and it served me right
to be sent to heaven.
THE DEVIL. Why, sir, do you not join us, and leave a sphere for which
your temperament is too sympathetic, your heart too warm, your capacity
for enjoyment too generous?
THE STATUE. I have this day resolved to do so. In future, excellent Son
of the Morning, I am yours. I have left Heaven for ever.
THE DEVIL. [again grasping his hand] Ah, what an honor for me! What a
triumph for our cause! Thank you, thank you. And now, my friend--I may
call you so at last--could you not persuade HIM to take the place you
have left vacant above?
THE STATUE. [shaking his head] I cannot conscientiously recommend
anybody with whom I am on friendly terms to deliberately make himself
dull and uncomfortable.
THE DEVIL. Of course not; but are you sure HE would be uncomfortable?
Of course you know best: you brought him here originally; and we had the
greatest hopes of him. His sentiments were in the best taste of our best
people. You remember how he sang? [He begins to sing in a nasal operatic
baritone, tremulous from an eternity of misuse in the French manner].
Vivan le femmine!
Viva il buon vino!
THE STATUE. [taking up the tune an octave higher in his counter tenor]
Sostegno a gloria
D'umanita.
THE DEVIL. Precisely. Well, he never sings for us now.
DON JUAN. Do you complain of that? Hell is full of musical amateurs:
music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to
abstain?
THE DEVIL. You dare blaspheme against the sublimest of the arts!
DON JUAN. [with cold disgust] You talk like a hysterical woman fawning
on a fiddler.
THE DEVIL. I am not angry. I merely pity you. You have no soul; and you
are unconscious of all that you lose. Now you, Senor Commander, are a
born musician. How well you sing! Mozart would be delighted if he were
still here; but he moped and went to heaven. Curious how these clever
men, whom you would have supposed born to be popular here, have turned
out social failures, like Don Juan!
DON JUAN. I am really very sorry to be a social failure.
THE DEVIL. Not that we don't admire your intellect, you know. We do. But
I look at the matter from your own point of view. You don't get on with
us. The place doesn't suit you. The truth is, you have--I won't say no
heart; for we know that beneath all your affected cynicism you have a
warm one.
DON JUAN. [shrinking] Don't, please don't.
THE DEVIL. [nettled] Well, you've no capacity for enjoyment. Will that
satisfy you?
DON JUAN. It is a somewhat less insufferable form of cant than the
other. But if you'll allow me, I'll take refuge, as usual, in solitude.
THE DEVIL. Why not take refuge in Heaven? That's the proper place for
you. [To Ana] Come, Senora! could you not persuade him for his own good
to try a change of air?
ANA. But can he go to Heaven if he wants to?
THE DEVIL. What's to prevent him?
ANA. Can anybody--can I go to Heaven if I want to?
THE DEVIL. [rather contemptuously] Certainly, if your taste lies that
way.
ANA. But why doesn't everybody go to Heaven, then?
THE STATUE. [chuckling] I can tell you that, my dear. It's because
heaven is the most angelically dull place in all creation: that's why.
THE DEVIL. His excellency the Commander puts it with military bluntness;
but the strain of living in Heaven is intolerable. There is a notion
that I was turned out of it; but as a matter of fact nothing could have
induced me to stay there. I simply left it and organized this place.
THE STATUE. I don't wonder at it. Nobody could stand an eternity of
heaven.
THE DEVIL. Oh, it suits some people. Let us be just, Commander: it is
a question of temperament. I don't admire the heavenly temperament: I
don't understand it: I don't know that I particularly want to understand
it; but it takes all sorts to make a universe. There is no accounting
for tastes: there are people who like it. I think Don Juan would like
it.
DON JUAN. But--pardon my frankness--could you really go back there if
you desired to; or are the grapes sour?
THE DEVIL. Back there! I often go back there. Have you never read the
book of Job? Have you any canonical authority for assuming that there is
any barrier between our circle and the other one?
ANA. But surely there is a great gulf fixed.
THE DEVIL. Dear lady: a parable must not be taken literally. The gulf
is the difference between the angelic and the diabolic temperament.
What more impassable gulf could you have? Think of what you have seen
on earth. There is no physical gulf between the philosopher's class room
and the bull ring; but the bull fighters do not come to the class room
for all that. Have you ever been in the country where I have the largest
following--England? There they have great racecourses, and also concert
rooms where they play the classical compositions of his Excellency's
friend Mozart. Those who go to the racecourses can stay away from them
and go to the classical concerts instead if they like: there is no law
against it; for Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do
whatever the Government and public opinion allows them to do. And the
classical concert is admitted to be a higher, more cultivated, poetic,
intellectual, ennobling place than the racecourse. But do the lovers of
racing desert their sport and flock to the concert room? Not they.
They would suffer there all the weariness the Commander has suffered in
heaven. There is the great gulf of the parable between the two places. A
mere physical gulf they could bridge; or at least I could bridge it for
them (the earth is full of Devil's Bridges); but the gulf of dislike
is impassable and eternal. And that is the only gulf that separates my
friends here from those who are invidiously called the blest.
ANA. I shall go to heaven at once.
THE STATUE. My child; one word of warning first. Let me complete my
friend Lucifer's similitude of the classical concert. At every one of
those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are
there, not because they really like classical music, but because they
think they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in heaven.
A number of people sit there in glory, not because they are happy, but
because they think they owe it to their position to be in heaven. They
are almost all English.
THE DEVIL. Yes: the Southerners give it up and join me just as you
have done. But the English really do not seem to know when they are
thoroughly miserable. An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only
uncomfortable.
THE STATUE. In short, my daughter, if you go to Heaven without being
naturally qualified for it, you will not enjoy yourself there.
ANA. And who dares say that I am not naturally qualified for it? The
most distinguished princes of the Church have never questioned it. I owe
it to myself to leave this place at once.
THE DEVIL. [offended] As you please, Senora. I should have expected
better taste from you.
ANA. Father: I shall expect you to come with me. You cannot stay here.
What will people say?
THE STATUE. People! Why, the best people are here--princes of the church
and all. So few go to Heaven, and so many come here, that the blest,
once called a heavenly host, are a continually dwindling minority. The
saints, the fathers, the elect of long ago are the cranks, the faddists,
the outsiders of to-day.
THE DEVIL. It is true. From the beginning of my career I knew that I
should win in the long run by sheer weight of public opinion, in spite
of the long campaign of misrepresentation and calumny against me. At
bottom the universe is a constitutional one; and with such a majority as
mine I cannot be kept permanently out of office.
DON JUAN. I think, Ana, you had better stay here.
ANA. [jealously] You do not want me to go with you.
DON JUAN. Surely you do not want to enter Heaven in the company of a
reprobate like me.
ANA. All souls are equally precious. You repent, do you not?
DON JUAN. My dear Ana, you are silly. Do you suppose heaven is like
earth, where people persuade themselves that what is done can be undone
by repentance; that what is spoken can be unspoken by withdrawing it;
that what is true can be annihilated by a general agreement to give it
the lie? No: heaven is the home of the masters of reality: that is why I
am going thither.
ANA. Thank you: I am going to heaven for happiness. I have had quite
enough of reality on earth.
DON JUAN. Then you must stay here; for hell is the home of the unreal
and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven,
which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from
earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The earth is a
nursery in which men and women play at being heros and heroines, saints
and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool's paradise by
their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease,
death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must
be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be
engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at
last to have but one prayer, "Make me a healthy animal. " But here you
escape the tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all:
you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless,
ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no
political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no
sanitary questions. Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions
love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did
on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic
contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing
but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. As our German friend put
it in his poem, "the poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and the
Eternal Feminine draws us ever upward and on"--without getting us a step
farther. And yet you want to leave this paradise!
ANA. But if Hell be so beautiful as this, how glorious must heaven be!
The Devil, the Statue, and Don Juan all begin to speak at once in
violent protest; then stop, abashed.
DON JUAN. I beg your pardon.
THE DEVIL. Not at all. I interrupted you.
THE STATUE. You were going to say something.
DON JUAN. After you, gentlemen.
THE DEVIL. [to Don Juan] You have been so eloquent on the advantages of
my dominions that I leave you to do equal justice to the drawbacks of
the alternative establishment.
DON JUAN. In Heaven, as I picture it, dear lady, you live and work
instead of playing and pretending. You face things as they are; you
escape nothing but glamor; and your steadfastness and your peril are
your glory. If the play still goes on here and on earth, and all the
world is a stage, Heaven is at least behind the scenes. But Heaven
cannot be described by metaphor. Thither I shall go presently, because
there I hope to escape at last from lies and from the tedious, vulgar
pursuit of happiness, to spend my eons in contemplation--
THE STATUE. Ugh!
DON JUAN. Senor Commander: I do not blame your disgust: a picture
gallery is a dull place for a blind man. But even as you enjoy the
contemplation of such romantic mirages as beauty and pleasure; so would
I enjoy the contemplation of that which interests me above all things
namely, Life: the force that ever strives to attain greater power of
contemplating itself. What made this brain of mine, do you think? Not
the need to move my limbs; for a rat with half my brains moves as well
as I. Not merely the need to do, but the need to know what I do, lest in
my blind efforts to live I should be slaying myself.
THE STATUE. You would have slain yourself in your blind efforts to fence
but for my foot slipping, my friend.
DON JUAN. Audacious ribald: your laughter will finish in hideous boredom
before morning.
THE STATUE. Ha ha! Do you remember how I frightened you when I said
something like that to you from my pedestal in Seville? It sounds rather
flat without my trombones.
DON JUAN. They tell me it generally sounds flat with them, Commander.
ANA. Oh, do not interrupt with these frivolities, father. Is there
nothing in Heaven but contemplation, Juan?
DON JUAN. In the Heaven I seek, no other joy. But there is the work of
helping Life in its struggle upward. Think of how it wastes and scatters
itself, how it raises up obstacles to itself and destroys itself in its
ignorance and blindness. It needs a brain, this irresistible force, lest
in its ignorance it should resist itself. What a piece of work is man!
says the poet. Yes: but what a blunderer! Here is the highest miracle of
organization yet attained by life, the most intensely alive thing that
exists, the most conscious of all the organisms; and yet, how wretched
are his brains! Stupidity made sordid and cruel by the realities learnt
from toil and poverty: Imagination resolved to starve sooner than face
these realities, piling up illusions to hide them, and calling itself
cleverness, genius! And each accusing the other of its own defect:
Stupidity accusing Imagination of folly, and Imagination accusing
Stupidity of ignorance: whereas, alas! Stupidity has all the knowledge,
and Imagination all the intelligence.
THE DEVIL. And a pretty kettle of fish they make of it between them. Did
I not say, when I was arranging that affair of Faust's, that all Man's
reason has done for him is to make him beastlier than any beast. One
splendid body is worth the brains of a hundred dyspeptic, flatulent
philosophers.
DON JUAN. You forget that brainless magnificence of body has been tried.
Things immeasurably greater than man in every respect but brain have
existed and perished. The megatherium, the icthyosaurus have paced the
earth with seven-league steps and hidden the day with cloud vast wings.
Where are they now? Fossils in museums, and so few and imperfect at
that, that a knuckle bone or a tooth of one of them is prized beyond the
lives of a thousand soldiers. These things lived and wanted to live; but
for lack of brains they did not know how to carry out their purpose, and
so destroyed themselves.
THE DEVIL. And is Man any the less destroying himself for all this
boasted brain of his? Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately?
I have; and I have examined Man's wonderful inventions. 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. What is
his religion? An excuse for hating ME. What is his law? An excuse for
hanging YOU. What is his morality? Gentility! an excuse for consuming
without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures
of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot
because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cockfighting. I spent an
evening lately in a certain celebrated legislature, and heard the
pot lecturing the kettle for its blackness, and ministers answering
questions. When I left I chalked up on the door the old nursery
saying--"Ask no questions and you will be told no lies. " I bought a
sixpenny family magazine, and found it full of pictures of young men
shooting and stabbing one another. I saw a man die: he was a London
bricklayer's laborer with seven children. He left seventeen pounds
club money; and his wife spent it all on his funeral and went into
the workhouse with the children next day. She would not have spent
sevenpence on her children's schooling: the law had to force her to let
them be taught gratuitously; but on death she spent all she had. Their
imagination glows, their energies rise up at the idea of death, these
people: they love it; and the more horrible it is the more they enjoy
it. Hell is a place far above their comprehension: they derive their
notion of it from two of the greatest fools that ever lived, an Italian
and an Englishman. The Italian described it as a place of mud, frost,
filth, fire, and venomous serpents: all torture. This ass, when he was
not lying about me, was maundering about some woman whom he saw once in
the street. The Englishman described me as being expelled from Heaven
by cannons and gunpowder; and to this day every Briton believes that
the whole of his silly story is in the Bible. What else he says I do not
know; for it is all in a long poem which neither I nor anyone else ever
succeeded in wading through. It is the same in everything. The highest
form of literature is the tragedy, a play in which everybody is
murdered at the end. In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and
pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of God
and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles.
In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and
explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the
fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the
chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty of empires, and the
littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about
the streets yelling with delight, and egg their Governments on to spend
hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the strongest
Ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against the poverty
and pestilence through which they themselves daily walk. I could give
you a thousand instances; but they all come to the same thing: the power
that governs the earth is not the power of Life but of Death; and the
inner need that has nerved Life to the effort of organizing itself into
the human being is not the need for higher life but for a more efficient
engine of destruction. The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the
tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and crocodile were
too easily satiated and not cruel enough: something more constantly,
more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that
something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows,
and the electrocutor; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty,
patriotism and all the other isms by which even those who are clever
enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most
destructive of all the destroyers.
DON JUAN. Pshaw! all this is old. Your weak side, my diabolic friend,
is that you have always been a gull: you take Man at his own valuation.
Nothing would flatter him more than your opinion of him. He loves to
think of himself as bold and bad. He is neither one nor the other: he
is only a coward. Call him tyrant, murderer, pirate, bully; and he will
adore you, and swagger about with the consciousness of having the blood
of the old sea kings in his veins. Call him liar and thief; and he will
only take an action against you for libel. But call him coward; and
he will go mad with rage: he will face death to outface that stinging
truth. Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for
his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is
his cowardice. Yet all his civilization is founded on his cowardice, on
his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. There are limits
to what a mule or an ass will stand; but Man will suffer himself to be
degraded until his vileness becomes so loathsome to his oppressors that
they themselves are forced to reform it.
THE DEVIL. Precisely. And these are the creatures in whom you discover
what you call a Life Force!
DON JUAN. Yes; for now comes the most surprising part of the whole
business.
THE STATUE. What's that?
DON JUAN.
