However, I am digressing, as a man with a
grievance
always does.
Man and Superman- A Comedy and a Philosophy by Bernard Shaw
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. Well, we
two know these transfigured persons, these college passmen, these well
groomed monocular Algys and Bobbies, these cricketers to whom age brings
golf instead of wisdom, these plutocratic products of "the nail and
sarspan business as he got his money by. " Do you know whether to laugh
or cry at the notion that they, poor devils! will drive a team of
continents as they drive a four-in-hand; turn a jostling anarchy of
casual trade and speculation into an ordered productivity; and federate
our colonies into a world-Power of the first magnitude? Give these
people the most perfect political constitution and the soundest
political program that benevolent omniscience can devise for them, and
they will interpret it into mere fashionable folly or canting charity as
infallibly as a savage converts the philosophical theology of a Scotch
missionary into crude African idolatry.
I do not know whether you have any illusions left on the subject of
education, progress, and so forth. I have none. Any pamphleteer can show
the way to better things; but when there is no will there is no way. My
nurse was fond of remarking that you cannot make a silk purse out of
a sow's ear, and the more I see of the efforts of our churches and
universities and literary sages to raise the mass above its own level,
the more convinced I am that my nurse was right. Progress can do nothing
but make the most of us all as we are, and that most would clearly not
be enough even if those who are already raised out of the lowest
abysses would allow the others a chance. The bubble of Heredity has been
pricked: the certainty that acquirements are negligible as elements in
practical heredity has demolished the hopes of the educationists as well
as the terrors of the degeneracy mongers; and we know now that there is
no hereditary "governing class" any more than a hereditary hooliganism.
We must either breed political capacity or be ruined by Democracy,
which was forced on us by the failure of the older alternatives. Yet
if Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what
chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable
voters: that is, of political critics who, if they cannot govern in
person for lack of spare energy or specific talent for administration,
can at least recognize and appreciate capacity and benevolence in
others, and so govern through capably benevolent representatives? Where
are such voters to be found to-day? Nowhere. Promiscuous breeding has
produced a weakness of character that is too timid to face the full
stringency of a thoroughly competitive struggle for existence and
too lazy and petty to organize the commonwealth co-operatively. Being
cowards, we defeat natural selection under cover of philanthropy: being
sluggards, we neglect artificial selection under cover of delicacy and
morality.
Yet we must get an electorate of capable critics or collapse as Rome
and Egypt collapsed. At this moment the Roman decadent phase of panem
et circenses is being inaugurated under our eyes. Our newspapers and
melodramas are blustering about our imperial destiny; but our eyes and
hearts turn eagerly to the American millionaire. As his hand goes down
to his pocket, our fingers go up to the brims of our hats by instinct.
Our ideal prosperity is not the prosperity of the industrial north, but
the prosperity of the Isle of Wight, of Folkestone and Ramsgate, of Nice
and Monte Carlo. That is the only prosperity you see on the stage, where
the workers are all footmen, parlourmaids, comic lodging-letters
and fashionable professional men, whilst the heroes and heroines are
miraculously provided with unlimited dividends, and eat gratuitously,
like the knights in Don Quixote's books of chivalry.
The city papers prate of the competition of Bombay with Manchester and
the like. The real competition is the competition of Regent Street with
the Rue de Rivoli, of Brighton and the south coast with the Riviera, for
the spending money of the American Trusts. What is all this growing
love of pageantry, this effusive loyalty, this officious rising
and uncovering at a wave from a flag or a blast from a brass band?
Imperialism: Not a bit of it. Obsequiousness, servility, cupidity roused
by the prevailing smell of money. When Mr Carnegie rattled his millions
in his pockets all England became one rapacious cringe. Only, when
Rhodes (who had probably been reading my Socialism for Millionaires)
left word that no idler was to inherit his estate, the bent backs
straightened mistrustfully for a moment. Could it be that the Diamond
King was no gentleman after all? However, it was easy to ignore a rich
man's solecism. The ungentlemanly clause was not mentioned again; and
the backs soon bowed themselves back into their natural shape.
But I hear you asking me in alarm whether I have actually put all this
tub thumping into a Don Juan comedy. I have not. I have only made my Don
Juan a political pamphleteer, and given you his pamphlet in full by way
of appendix. You will find it at the end of the book. I am sorry to say
that it is a common practice with romancers to announce their hero as
a man of extraordinary genius, and to leave his works entirely to the
reader's imagination; so that at the end of the book you whisper to
yourself ruefully that but for the author's solemn preliminary assurance
you should hardly have given the gentleman credit for ordinary good
sense. You cannot accuse me of this pitiable barrenness, this feeble
evasion. I not only tell you that my hero wrote a revolutionists'
handbook: I give you the handbook at full length for your edification if
you care to read it. And in that handbook you will find the politics of
the sex question as I conceive Don Juan's descendant to understand them.
Not that I disclaim the fullest responsibility for his opinions and for
those of all my characters, pleasant and unpleasant. They are all right
from their several points of view; and their points of view are, for the
dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle the people who believe that
there is such a thing as an absolutely right point of view, usually
their own. It may seem to them that nobody who doubts this can be in a
state of grace. However that may be, it is certainly true that nobody
who agrees with them can possibly be a dramatist, or indeed anything
else that turns upon a knowledge of mankind. Hence it has been pointed
out that Shakespear had no conscience. Neither have I, in that sense.
You may, however, remind me that this digression of mine into politics
was preceded by a very convincing demonstration that the artist never
catches the point of view of the common man on the question of sex,
because he is not in the same predicament. I first prove that anything I
write on the relation of the sexes is sure to be misleading; and then I
proceed to write a Don Juan play. Well, if you insist on asking me why
I behave in this absurd way, I can only reply that you asked me to,
and that in any case my treatment of the subject may be valid for the
artist, amusing to the amateur, and at least intelligible and therefore
possibly suggestive to the Philistine. Every man who records his
illusions is providing data for the genuinely scientific psychology
which the world still waits for. I plank down my view of the existing
relations of men to women in the most highly civilized society for what
it is worth. It is a view like any other view and no more, neither true
nor false, but, I hope, a way of looking at the subject which throws
into the familiar order of cause and effect a sufficient body of fact
and experience to be interesting to you, if not to the play-going public
of London. I have certainly shown little consideration for that public
in this enterprise; but I know that it has the friendliest disposition
towards you and me as far as it has any consciousness of our existence,
and quite understands that what I write for you must pass at a
considerable height over its simple romantic head. It will take my books
as read and my genius for granted, trusting me to put forth work of such
quality as shall bear out its verdict. So we may disport ourselves on
our own plane to the top of our bent; and if any gentleman points out
that neither this epistle dedicatory nor the dream of Don Juan in the
third act of the ensuing comedy is suitable for immediate production at
a popular theatre we need not contradict him. Napoleon provided Talma
with a pit of kings, with what effect on Talma's acting is not recorded.
As for me, what I have always wanted is a pit of philosophers; and this
is a play for such a pit.
I should make formal acknowledgment to the authors whom I have pillaged
in the following pages if I could recollect them all. The theft of the
brigand-poetaster from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is deliberate; and the
metamorphosis of Leporello into Enry Straker, motor engineer and New
Man, is an intentional dramatic sketch for the contemporary embryo of
Mr H. G. Wells's anticipation of the efficient engineering class
which will, he hopes, finally sweep the jabberers out of the way of
civilization. Mr Barrio has also, whilst I am correcting my proofs,
delighted London with a servant who knows more than his masters. The
conception of Mendoza Limited I trace back to a certain West Indian
colonial secretary, who, at a period when he and I and Mr Sidney
Webb were sowing our political wild oats as a sort of Fabian Three
Musketeers, without any prevision of the surprising respectability
of the crop that followed, recommended Webb, the encyclopedic and
inexhaustible, to form himself into a company for the benefit of the
shareholders. Octavius I take over unaltered from Mozart; and I hereby
authorize any actor who impersonates him, to sing "Dalla sua pace" (if
he can) at any convenient moment during the representation. Ann was
suggested to me by the fifteenth century Dutch morality called Everyman,
which Mr William Poel has lately resuscitated so triumphantly. I
trust he will work that vein further, and recognize that Elizabethan
Renascence fustian is no more bearable after medieval poesy than Scribe
after Ibsen. As I sat watching Everyman at the Charterhouse, I said to
myself Why not Everywoman? Ann was the result: every woman is not Ann;
but Ann is Everywoman.
That the author of Everyman was no mere artist, but an
artist-philosopher, and that the artist-philosophers are the only sort
of artists I take quite seriously, will be no news to you. Even Plato
and Boswell, as the dramatists who invented Socrates and Dr Johnson,
impress me more deeply than the romantic playwrights. Ever since, as
a boy, I first breathed the air of the transcendental regions at a
performance of Mozart's Zauberflote, I have been proof against the
garish splendors and alcoholic excitements of the ordinary stage
combinations of Tappertitian romance with the police intelligence.
Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth and Turner (these four apart and above all the
English Classics), Goethe, Shelley, Schopenhaur, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris,
Tolstoy, and Nietzsche are among the writers whose peculiar sense of
the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own. Mark the word
peculiar. I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint;
but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not
co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's
sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations;
and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the
specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human
feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and
shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and
shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive
gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a
combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But
they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its
unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for
professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney
Carton and the ghost in Hamlet! ): they are anarchical, and cannot
balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock
and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader:
they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as
dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or
inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of
his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow
motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from
the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to
be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the
cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to
manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his
crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I
leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest
question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of
Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so
inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the
world was to Shakespear a great "stage of fools" on which he was utterly
bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens
saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the
world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them
could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a
human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment
came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh,
that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial
external stimulus to make it work. This is what is the matter with
Hamlet all through: he has no will except in his bursts of temper.
Foolish Bardolaters make a virtue of this after their fashion:
they declare that the play is the tragedy of irresolution; but all
Shakespear's projections of the deepest humanity he knew have the same
defect: their characters and manners are lifelike; but their actions
are forced on them from without, and the external force is grotesquely
inappropriate except when it is quite conventional, as in the case of
Henry V. Falstaff is more vivid than any of these serious reflective
characters, because he is self-acting: his motives are his own appetites
and instincts and humors. Richard III, too, is delightful as the
whimsical comedian who stops a funeral to make love to the corpse's
widow; but when, in the next act, he is replaced by a stage villain who
smothers babies and offs with people's heads, we are revolted at the
imposture and repudiate the changeling. Faulconbridge, Coriolanus,
Leontes are admirable descriptions of instinctive temperaments: indeed
the play of Coriolanus is the greatest of Shakespear's comedies; but
description is not philosophy; and comedy neither compromises the author
nor reveals him. He must be judged by those characters into which he
puts what he knows of himself, his Hamlets and Macbeths and Lears and
Prosperos. If these characters are agonizing in a void about factitious
melodramatic murders and revenges and the like, whilst the comic
characters walk with their feet on solid ground, vivid and amusing,
you know that the author has much to show and nothing to teach. The
comparison between Falstaff and Prospero is like the comparison
between Micawber and David Copperfield. At the end of the book you know
Micawber, whereas you only know what has happened to David, and are not
interested enough in him to wonder what his politics or religion might
be if anything so stupendous as a religious or political idea, or a
general idea of any sort, were to occur to him. He is tolerable as a
child; but he never becomes a man, and might be left out of his own
biography altogether but for his usefulness as a stage confidant, a
Horatio or "Charles his friend" what they call on the stage a feeder.
Now you cannot say this of the works of the artist-philosophers.
You cannot say it, for instance, of The Pilgrim's Progress. Put your
Shakespearian hero and coward, Henry V and Pistol or Parolles, beside
Mr Valiant and Mr Fearing, and you have a sudden revelation of the abyss
that lies between the fashionable author who could see nothing in the
world but personal aims and the tragedy of their disappointment or the
comedy of their incongruity, and the field preacher who achieved virtue
and courage by identifying himself with the purpose of the world as
he understood it. The contrast is enormous: Bunyan's coward stirs your
blood more than Shakespear's hero, who actually leaves you cold and
secretly hostile. You suddenly see that Shakespear, with all his flashes
and divinations, never understood virtue and courage, never conceived
how any man who was not a fool could, like Bunyan's hero, look back
from the brink of the river of death over the strife and labor of his
pilgrimage, and say "yet do I not repent me"; or, with the panache of
a millionaire, bequeath "my sword to him that shall succeed me in my
pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. " This
is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by
yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you
are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a
feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that
the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only
real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for
purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere
misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth;
and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work
to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so
willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and
the like.
It may seem a long step from Bunyan to Nietzsche; but the difference
between their conclusions is purely formal. Bunyan's perception that
righteousness is filthy rags, his scorn for Mr Legality in the village
of Morality, his defiance of the Church as the supplanter of religion,
his insistence on courage as the virtue of virtues, his estimate of the
career of the conventionally respectable and sensible Worldly Wiseman
as no better at bottom than the life and death of Mr Badman: all
this, expressed by Bunyan in the terms of a tinker's theology, is what
Nietzsche has expressed in terms of post-Darwinian, post-Schopenhaurian
philosophy; Wagner in terms of polytheistic mythology; and Ibsen in
terms of mid-XIX century Parisian dramaturgy. Nothing is new in these
matters except their novelties: for instance, it is a novelty to
call Justification by Faith "Wille," and Justification by Works
"Vorstellung. " The sole use of the novelty is that you and I buy and
read Schopenhaur's treatise on Will and Representation when we should
not dream of buying a set of sermons on Faith versus Works. At bottom
the controversy is the same, and the dramatic results are the same.
Bunyan makes no attempt to present his pilgrims as more sensible or
better conducted than Mr Worldly Wiseman. Mr W. W. 's worst enemies, as
Mr Embezzler, Mr Never-go-to-Church-on-Sunday, Mr Bad Form, Mr Murderer,
Mr Burglar, Mr Co-respondent, Mr Blackmailer, Mr Cad, Mr Drunkard, Mr
Labor Agitator and so forth, can read the Pilgrim's Progress without
finding a word said against them; whereas the respectable people who
snub them and put them in prison, such as Mr W. W. himself and his young
friend Civility; Formalist and Hypocrisy; Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and
Pragmatick (who were clearly young university men of good family
and high feeding); that brisk lad Ignorance, Talkative, By-Ends of
Fairspeech and his mother-in-law Lady Feigning, and other reputable
gentlemen and citizens, catch it very severely. Even Little Faith,
though he gets to heaven at last, is given to understand that it served
him right to be mobbed by the brothers Faint Heart, Mistrust, and
Guilt, all three recognized members of respectable society and veritable
pillars of the law. The whole allegory is a consistent attack on
morality and respectability, without a word that one can remember
against vice and crime. Exactly what is complained of in Nietzsche and
Ibsen, is it not? And also exactly what would be complained of in all
the literature which is great enough and old enough to have attained
canonical rank, officially or unofficially, were it not that books are
admitted to the canon by a compact which confesses their greatness in
consideration of abrogating their meaning; so that the reverend rector
can agree with the prophet Micah as to his inspired style without being
committed to any complicity in Micah's furiously Radical opinions. Why,
even I, as I force myself; pen in hand, into recognition and civility,
find all the force of my onslaught destroyed by a simple policy of
non-resistance. In vain do I redouble the violence of the language in
which I proclaim my heterodoxies. I rail at the theistic credulity of
Voltaire, the amoristic superstition of Shelley, the revival of tribal
soothsaying and idolatrous rites which Huxley called Science and
mistook for an advance on the Pentateuch, no less than at the welter
of ecclesiastical and professional humbug which saves the face of the
stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry.
Even atheists reproach me with infidelity and anarchists with nihilism
because I cannot endure their moral tirades. And yet, instead of
exclaiming "Send this inconceivable Satanist to the stake," the
respectable newspapers pith me by announcing "another book by this
brilliant and thoughtful writer. " And the ordinary citizen, knowing that
an author who is well spoken of by a respectable newspaper must be all
right, reads me, as he reads Micah, with undisturbed edification from
his own point of view. It is narrated that in the eighteen-seventies an
old lady, a very devout Methodist, moved from Colchester to a house in
the neighborhood of the City Road, in London, where, mistaking the Hall
of Science for a chapel, she sat at the feet of Charles Bradlaugh
for many years, entranced by his eloquence, without questioning
his orthodoxy or moulting a feather of her faith. I fear I small be
defrauded of my just martyrdom in the same way.
However, I am digressing, as a man with a grievance always does. And
after all, the main thing in determining the artistic quality of a book
is not the opinions it propagates, but the fact that the writer has
opinions. The old lady from Colchester was right to sun her simple soul
in the energetic radiance of Bradlaugh's genuine beliefs and disbeliefs
rather than in the chill of such mere painting of light and heat as
elocution and convention can achieve. My contempt for belles lettres,
and for amateurs who become the heroes of the fanciers of literary
virtuosity, is not founded on any illusion of mind as to the permanence
of those forms of thought (call them opinions) by which I strive to
communicate my bent to my fellows. To younger men they are already
outmoded; for though they have no more lost their logic than an
eighteenth century pastel has lost its drawing or its color, yet, like
the pastel, they grow indefinably shabby, and will grow shabbier until
they cease to count at all, when my books will either perish, or, if
the world is still poor enough to want them, will have to stand, with
Bunyan's, by quite amorphous qualities of temper and energy. With this
conviction I cannot be a bellettrist. No doubt I must recognize, as even
the Ancient Mariner did, that I must tell my story entertainingly if I
am to hold the wedding guest spellbound in spite of the siren sounds of
the loud bassoon. But "for art's sake" alone I would not face the toil
of writing a single sentence. I know that there are men who, having
nothing to say and nothing to write, are nevertheless so in love with
oratory and with literature that they keep desperately repeating as much
as they can understand of what others have said or written aforetime.
I know that the leisurely tricks which their want of conviction leaves
them free to play with the diluted and misapprehended message supply
them with a pleasant parlor game which they call style. I can pity their
dotage and even sympathize with their fancy. But a true original style
is never achieved for its own sake: a man may pay from a shilling to a
guinea, according to his means, to see, hear, or read another man's act
of genius; but he will not pay with his whole life and soul to become a
mere virtuoso in literature, exhibiting an accomplishment which will not
even make money for him, like fiddle playing. Effectiveness of assertion
is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no
style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far
in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry
him. Disprove his assertion after it is made, yet its style remains.
Darwin has no more destroyed the style of Job nor of Handel than Martin
Luther destroyed the style of Giotto. All the assertions get disproved
sooner or later; and so we find the world full of a magnificent debris
of artistic fossils, with the matter-of-fact credibility gone clean out
of them, but the form still splendid. And that is why the old masters
play the deuce with our mere susceptibles. Your Royal Academician thinks
he can get the style of Giotto without Giotto's beliefs, and correct
his perspective into the bargain. Your man of letters thinks he can
get Bunyan's or Shakespear's style without Bunyan's conviction or
Shakespear's apprehension, especially if he takes care not to split
his infinitives. And so with your Doctors of Music, who, with their
collections of discords duly prepared and resolved or retarded or
anticipated in the manner of the great composers, think they can learn
the art of Palestrina from Cherubim's treatise. All this academic art
is far worse than the trade in sham antique furniture; for the man who
sells me an oaken chest which he swears was made in the XIII century,
though as a matter of fact he made it himself only yesterday, at least
does not pretend that there are any modern ideas in it, whereas your
academic copier of fossils offers them to you as the latest outpouring
of the human spirit, and, worst of all, kidnaps young people as pupils
and persuades them that his limitations are rules, his observances
dexterities, his timidities good taste, and his emptinesses purities.
And when he declares that art should not be didactic, all the people who
have nothing to teach and all the people who don't want to learn agree
with him emphatically.
I pride myself on not being one of these susceptible: If you study
the electric light with which I supply you in that Bumbledonian public
capacity of mine over which you make merry from time to time, you will
find that your house contains a great quantity of highly susceptible
copper wire which gorges itself with electricity and gives you no light
whatever. But here and there occurs a scrap of intensely insusceptible,
intensely resistant material; and that stubborn scrap grapples with the
current and will not let it through until it has made itself useful to
you as those two vital qualities of literature, light and heat. Now if I
am to be no mere copper wire amateur but a luminous author, I must also
be a most intensely refractory person, liable to go out and to go wrong
at inconvenient moments, and with incendiary possibilities. These are
the faults of my qualities; and I assure you that I sometimes dislike
myself so much that when some irritable reviewer chances at that moment
to pitch into me with zest, I feel unspeakably relieved and obliged. But
I never dream of reforming, knowing that I must take myself as I am and
get what work I can out of myself. All this you will understand; for
there is community of material between us: we are both critics of life
as well as of art; and you have perhaps said to yourself when I have
passed your windows, "There, but for the grace of God, go I. " An awful
and chastening reflection, which shall be the closing cadence of this
immoderately long letter from yours faithfully,
G. BERNARD SHAW.
WOKING, 1903
ACT I
Roebuck Ramsden is in his study, opening the morning letters. The study,
handsomely and solidly furnished, proclaims the man of means. Not
a speck of dust is visible: it is clear that there are at least two
housemaids and a parlormaid downstairs, and a housekeeper upstairs who
does not let them spare elbow-grease. Even the top of Roebuck's head is
polished: on a sunshiny day he could heliograph his orders to distant
camps by merely nodding. In no other respect, however, does he suggest
the military man. It is in active civil life that men get his broad air
of importance, his dignified expectation of deference, his determinate
mouth disarmed and refined since the hour of his success by the
withdrawal of opposition and the concession of comfort and precedence
and power. He is more than a highly respectable man: he is marked out
as a president of highly respectable men, a chairman among directors,
an alderman among councillors, a mayor among aldermen. Four tufts of
iron-grey hair, which will soon be as white as isinglass, and are in
other respects not at all unlike it, grow in two symmetrical pairs above
his ears and at the angles of his spreading jaws. He wears a black frock
coat, a white waistcoat (it is bright spring weather), and trousers,
neither black nor perceptibly blue, of one of those indefinitely mixed
hues which the modern clothier has produced to harmonize with the
religions of respectable men. He has not been out of doors yet to-day;
so he still wears his slippers, his boots being ready for him on the
hearthrug. Surmising that he has no valet, and seeing that he has no
secretary with a shorthand notebook and a typewriter, one meditates
on how little our great burgess domesticity has been disturbed by new
fashions and methods, or by the enterprise of the railway and hotel
companies which sell you a Saturday to Monday of life at Folkestone as a
real gentleman for two guineas, first class fares both ways included.
How old is Roebuck? The question is important on the threshold of a
drama of ideas; for under such circumstances everything depends on
whether his adolescence belonged to the sixties or to the eighties. He
was born, as a matter of fact, in 1839, and was a Unitarian and Free
Trader from his boyhood, and an Evolutionist from the publication of
the Origin of Species. Consequently he has always classed himself as an
advanced thinker and fearlessly outspoken reformer.
Sitting at his writing table, he has on his right the windows giving
on Portland Place. Through these, as through a proscenium, the curious
spectator may contemplate his profile as well as the blinds will permit.
On his left is the inner wall, with a stately bookcase, and the door
not quite in the middle, but somewhat further from him. Against the wall
opposite him are two busts on pillars: one, to his left, of John Bright;
the other, to his right, of Mr Herbert Spencer. Between them hang an
engraved portrait of Richard Cobden; enlarged photographs of Martineau,
Huxley, and George Eliot; autotypes of allegories by Mr G. F. Watts (for
Roebuck believed in the fine arts with all the earnestness of a man who
does not understand them), and an impression of Dupont's engraving of
Delaroche's Beaux Artes hemicycle, representing the great men of
all ages. On the wall behind him, above the mantelshelf, is a family
portrait of impenetrable obscurity.
A chair stands near the writing table for the convenience of business
visitors. Two other chairs are against the wall between the busts.
A parlormaid enters with a visitor's card. Roebuck takes it, and nods,
pleased. Evidently a welcome caller.
RAMSDEN. Show him up.
The parlormaid goes out and returns with the visitor.
THE MAID. Mr Robinson.
Mr Robinson is really an uncommonly nice looking young fellow. He must,
one thinks, be the jeune premier; for it is not in reason to suppose
that a second such attractive male figure should appear in one story.
The slim shapely frame, the elegant suit of new mourning, the small head
and regular features, the pretty little moustache, the frank clear eyes,
the wholesome bloom and the youthful complexion, the well brushed glossy
hair, not curly, but of fine texture and good dark color, the arch of
good nature in the eyebrows, the erect forehead and neatly pointed chin,
all announce the man who will love and suffer later on. And that he will
not do so without sympathy is guaranteed by an engaging sincerity and
eager modest serviceableness which stamp him as a man of amiable nature.
The moment he appears, Ramsden's face expands into fatherly liking and
welcome, an expression which drops into one of decorous grief as the
young man approaches him with sorrow in his face as well as in his black
clothes. Ramsden seems to know the nature of the bereavement. As the
visitor advances silently to the writing table, the old man rises and
shakes his hand across it without a word: a long, affectionate shake
which tells the story of a recent sorrow common to both.
RAMSDEN. [concluding the handshake and cheering up] Well, well,
Octavius, it's the common lot. We must all face it someday. Sit down.
Octavius takes the visitor's chair. Ramsden replaces himself in his own.
OCTAVIUS. Yes: we must face it, Mr Ramsden. But I owed him a great deal.
He did everything for me that my father could have done if he had lived.
RAMSDEN. He had no son of his own, you see.
OCTAVIUS. But he had daughters; and yet he was as good to my sister as
to me. And his death was so sudden! I always intended to thank him--to
let him know that I had not taken all his care of me as a matter
of course, as any boy takes his father's care. But I waited for an
opportunity and now he is dead--dropped without a moment's warning. He
will never know what I felt. [He takes out his handkerchief and cries
unaffectedly].
RAMSDEN. How do we know that, Octavius? He may know it: we cannot
tell. Come! Don't grieve. [Octavius masters himself and puts up his
handkerchief]. That's right. Now let me tell you something to console
you. The last time I saw him--it was in this very room--he said to me:
"Tavy is a generous lad and the soul of honor; and when I see how little
consideration other men get from their sons, I realize how much better
than a son he's been to me. " There! Doesn't that do you good?
OCTAVIUS. Mr Ramsden: he used to say to me that he had met only one man
in the world who was the soul of honor, and that was Roebuck Ramsden.
RAMSDEN. Oh, that was his partiality: we were very old friends, you
know. But there was something else he used to say about you. I wonder
whether I ought to tell you or not!
OCTAVIUS. You know best.
RAMSDEN. It was something about his daughter.
OCTAVIUS. [eagerly] About Ann! Oh, do tell me that, Mr Ramsden.
RAMSDEN. Well, he said he was glad, after all, you were not his son,
because he thought that someday Annie and you--[Octavius blushes
vividly]. Well, perhaps I shouldn't have told you. But he was in
earnest.
OCTAVIUS. Oh, if only I thought I had a chance! You know, Mr Ramsden, I
don't care about money or about what people call position; and I can't
bring myself to take an interest in the business of struggling for them.
Well, Ann has a most exquisite nature; but she is so accustomed to be
in the thick of that sort of thing that she thinks a man's character
incomplete if he is not ambitious. She knows that if she married me she
would have to reason herself out of being ashamed of me for not being a
big success of some kind.
RAMSDEN. [Getting up and planting himself with his back to the
fireplace] Nonsense, my boy, nonsense! You're too modest. What does she
know about the real value of men at her age? [More seriously] Besides,
she's a wonderfully dutiful girl. Her father's wish would be sacred to
her. Do you know that since she grew up to years of discretion, I don't
believe she has ever once given her own wish as a reason for doing
anything or not doing it. It's always "Father wishes me to," or "Mother
wouldn't like it. " It's really almost a fault in her. I have often told
her she must learn to think for herself.
OCTAVIUS. [shaking his head] I couldn't ask her to marry me because her
father wished it, Mr Ramsden.
RAMSDEN. Well, perhaps not. No: of course not. I see that. No: you
certainly couldn't. But when you win her on your own merits, it will be
a great happiness to her to fulfil her father's desire as well as her
own. Eh? Come! you'll ask her, won't you?
OCTAVIUS. [with sad gaiety] At all events I promise you I shall never
ask anyone else.
RAMSDEN. Oh, you shan't need to. She'll accept you, my boy--although
[here he suddenly becomes very serious indeed] you have one great
drawback.
OCTAVIUS. [anxiously] What drawback is that, Mr Ramsden? I should rather
say which of my many drawbacks?
RAMSDEN. I'll tell you, Octavius. [He takes from the table a book bound
in red cloth]. I have in my hand a copy of the most infamous, the most
scandalous, the most mischievous, the most blackguardly book that ever
escaped burning at the hands of the common hangman. I have not read
it: I would not soil my mind with such filth; but I have read what the
papers say of it. The title is quite enough for me. [He reads it]. The
Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion by John Tanner, M. I. R. C. ,
Member of the Idle Rich Class.
OCTAVIUS. [smiling] But Jack--
RAMSDEN. [testily] For goodness' sake, don't call him Jack under my
roof [he throws the book violently down on the table, Then, somewhat
relieved, he comes past the table to Octavius, and addresses him at
close quarters with impressive gravity]. Now, Octavius, I know that my
dead friend was right when he said you were a generous lad. I know that
this man was your schoolfellow, and that you feel bound to stand by
him because there was a boyish friendship between you. But I ask you
to consider the altered circumstances. You were treated as a son in my
friend's house. You lived there; and your friends could not be turned
from the door. This Tanner was in and out there on your account almost
from his childhood. He addresses Annie by her Christian name as freely
as you do. Well, while her father was alive, that was her father's
business, not mine. This man Tanner was only a boy to him: his opinions
were something to be laughed at, like a man's hat on a child's head.
But now Tanner is a grown man and Annie a grown woman. And her father
is gone. We don't as yet know the exact terms of his will; but he often
talked it over with me; and I have no more doubt than I have that you're
sitting there that the will appoints me Annie's trustee and guardian.
[Forcibly] Now I tell you, once for all, I can't and I won't have Annie
placed in such a position that she must, out of regard for you, suffer
the intimacy of this fellow Tanner. It's not fair: it's not right: it's
not kind. What are you going to do about it?
OCTAVIUS. But Ann herself has told Jack that whatever his opinions are,
he will always be welcome because he knew her dear father.
RAMSDEN. [out of patience] That girl's mad about her duty to her
parents. [He starts off like a goaded ox in the direction of John
Bright, in whose expression there is no sympathy for him. As he speaks,
he fumes down to Herbert Spencer, who receives him still more coldly]
Excuse me, Octavius; but there are limits to social toleration. You
know that I am not a bigoted or prejudiced man. You know that I am plain
Roebuck Ramsden when other men who have done less have got handles to
their names, because I have stood for equality and liberty of conscience
while they were truckling to the Church and to the aristocracy.
Whitefield and I lost chance after chance through our advanced opinions.
But I draw the line at Anarchism and Free Love and that sort of thing.
If I am to be Annie's guardian, she will have to learn that she has a
duty to me. I won't have it: I will not have it. She must forbid John
Tanner the house; and so must you.
The parlormaid returns.
OCTAVIUS. But--
RAMSDEN. [calling his attention to the servant] Ssh! Well?
THE MAID.
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. Well, we
two know these transfigured persons, these college passmen, these well
groomed monocular Algys and Bobbies, these cricketers to whom age brings
golf instead of wisdom, these plutocratic products of "the nail and
sarspan business as he got his money by. " Do you know whether to laugh
or cry at the notion that they, poor devils! will drive a team of
continents as they drive a four-in-hand; turn a jostling anarchy of
casual trade and speculation into an ordered productivity; and federate
our colonies into a world-Power of the first magnitude? Give these
people the most perfect political constitution and the soundest
political program that benevolent omniscience can devise for them, and
they will interpret it into mere fashionable folly or canting charity as
infallibly as a savage converts the philosophical theology of a Scotch
missionary into crude African idolatry.
I do not know whether you have any illusions left on the subject of
education, progress, and so forth. I have none. Any pamphleteer can show
the way to better things; but when there is no will there is no way. My
nurse was fond of remarking that you cannot make a silk purse out of
a sow's ear, and the more I see of the efforts of our churches and
universities and literary sages to raise the mass above its own level,
the more convinced I am that my nurse was right. Progress can do nothing
but make the most of us all as we are, and that most would clearly not
be enough even if those who are already raised out of the lowest
abysses would allow the others a chance. The bubble of Heredity has been
pricked: the certainty that acquirements are negligible as elements in
practical heredity has demolished the hopes of the educationists as well
as the terrors of the degeneracy mongers; and we know now that there is
no hereditary "governing class" any more than a hereditary hooliganism.
We must either breed political capacity or be ruined by Democracy,
which was forced on us by the failure of the older alternatives. Yet
if Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what
chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable
voters: that is, of political critics who, if they cannot govern in
person for lack of spare energy or specific talent for administration,
can at least recognize and appreciate capacity and benevolence in
others, and so govern through capably benevolent representatives? Where
are such voters to be found to-day? Nowhere. Promiscuous breeding has
produced a weakness of character that is too timid to face the full
stringency of a thoroughly competitive struggle for existence and
too lazy and petty to organize the commonwealth co-operatively. Being
cowards, we defeat natural selection under cover of philanthropy: being
sluggards, we neglect artificial selection under cover of delicacy and
morality.
Yet we must get an electorate of capable critics or collapse as Rome
and Egypt collapsed. At this moment the Roman decadent phase of panem
et circenses is being inaugurated under our eyes. Our newspapers and
melodramas are blustering about our imperial destiny; but our eyes and
hearts turn eagerly to the American millionaire. As his hand goes down
to his pocket, our fingers go up to the brims of our hats by instinct.
Our ideal prosperity is not the prosperity of the industrial north, but
the prosperity of the Isle of Wight, of Folkestone and Ramsgate, of Nice
and Monte Carlo. That is the only prosperity you see on the stage, where
the workers are all footmen, parlourmaids, comic lodging-letters
and fashionable professional men, whilst the heroes and heroines are
miraculously provided with unlimited dividends, and eat gratuitously,
like the knights in Don Quixote's books of chivalry.
The city papers prate of the competition of Bombay with Manchester and
the like. The real competition is the competition of Regent Street with
the Rue de Rivoli, of Brighton and the south coast with the Riviera, for
the spending money of the American Trusts. What is all this growing
love of pageantry, this effusive loyalty, this officious rising
and uncovering at a wave from a flag or a blast from a brass band?
Imperialism: Not a bit of it. Obsequiousness, servility, cupidity roused
by the prevailing smell of money. When Mr Carnegie rattled his millions
in his pockets all England became one rapacious cringe. Only, when
Rhodes (who had probably been reading my Socialism for Millionaires)
left word that no idler was to inherit his estate, the bent backs
straightened mistrustfully for a moment. Could it be that the Diamond
King was no gentleman after all? However, it was easy to ignore a rich
man's solecism. The ungentlemanly clause was not mentioned again; and
the backs soon bowed themselves back into their natural shape.
But I hear you asking me in alarm whether I have actually put all this
tub thumping into a Don Juan comedy. I have not. I have only made my Don
Juan a political pamphleteer, and given you his pamphlet in full by way
of appendix. You will find it at the end of the book. I am sorry to say
that it is a common practice with romancers to announce their hero as
a man of extraordinary genius, and to leave his works entirely to the
reader's imagination; so that at the end of the book you whisper to
yourself ruefully that but for the author's solemn preliminary assurance
you should hardly have given the gentleman credit for ordinary good
sense. You cannot accuse me of this pitiable barrenness, this feeble
evasion. I not only tell you that my hero wrote a revolutionists'
handbook: I give you the handbook at full length for your edification if
you care to read it. And in that handbook you will find the politics of
the sex question as I conceive Don Juan's descendant to understand them.
Not that I disclaim the fullest responsibility for his opinions and for
those of all my characters, pleasant and unpleasant. They are all right
from their several points of view; and their points of view are, for the
dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle the people who believe that
there is such a thing as an absolutely right point of view, usually
their own. It may seem to them that nobody who doubts this can be in a
state of grace. However that may be, it is certainly true that nobody
who agrees with them can possibly be a dramatist, or indeed anything
else that turns upon a knowledge of mankind. Hence it has been pointed
out that Shakespear had no conscience. Neither have I, in that sense.
You may, however, remind me that this digression of mine into politics
was preceded by a very convincing demonstration that the artist never
catches the point of view of the common man on the question of sex,
because he is not in the same predicament. I first prove that anything I
write on the relation of the sexes is sure to be misleading; and then I
proceed to write a Don Juan play. Well, if you insist on asking me why
I behave in this absurd way, I can only reply that you asked me to,
and that in any case my treatment of the subject may be valid for the
artist, amusing to the amateur, and at least intelligible and therefore
possibly suggestive to the Philistine. Every man who records his
illusions is providing data for the genuinely scientific psychology
which the world still waits for. I plank down my view of the existing
relations of men to women in the most highly civilized society for what
it is worth. It is a view like any other view and no more, neither true
nor false, but, I hope, a way of looking at the subject which throws
into the familiar order of cause and effect a sufficient body of fact
and experience to be interesting to you, if not to the play-going public
of London. I have certainly shown little consideration for that public
in this enterprise; but I know that it has the friendliest disposition
towards you and me as far as it has any consciousness of our existence,
and quite understands that what I write for you must pass at a
considerable height over its simple romantic head. It will take my books
as read and my genius for granted, trusting me to put forth work of such
quality as shall bear out its verdict. So we may disport ourselves on
our own plane to the top of our bent; and if any gentleman points out
that neither this epistle dedicatory nor the dream of Don Juan in the
third act of the ensuing comedy is suitable for immediate production at
a popular theatre we need not contradict him. Napoleon provided Talma
with a pit of kings, with what effect on Talma's acting is not recorded.
As for me, what I have always wanted is a pit of philosophers; and this
is a play for such a pit.
I should make formal acknowledgment to the authors whom I have pillaged
in the following pages if I could recollect them all. The theft of the
brigand-poetaster from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is deliberate; and the
metamorphosis of Leporello into Enry Straker, motor engineer and New
Man, is an intentional dramatic sketch for the contemporary embryo of
Mr H. G. Wells's anticipation of the efficient engineering class
which will, he hopes, finally sweep the jabberers out of the way of
civilization. Mr Barrio has also, whilst I am correcting my proofs,
delighted London with a servant who knows more than his masters. The
conception of Mendoza Limited I trace back to a certain West Indian
colonial secretary, who, at a period when he and I and Mr Sidney
Webb were sowing our political wild oats as a sort of Fabian Three
Musketeers, without any prevision of the surprising respectability
of the crop that followed, recommended Webb, the encyclopedic and
inexhaustible, to form himself into a company for the benefit of the
shareholders. Octavius I take over unaltered from Mozart; and I hereby
authorize any actor who impersonates him, to sing "Dalla sua pace" (if
he can) at any convenient moment during the representation. Ann was
suggested to me by the fifteenth century Dutch morality called Everyman,
which Mr William Poel has lately resuscitated so triumphantly. I
trust he will work that vein further, and recognize that Elizabethan
Renascence fustian is no more bearable after medieval poesy than Scribe
after Ibsen. As I sat watching Everyman at the Charterhouse, I said to
myself Why not Everywoman? Ann was the result: every woman is not Ann;
but Ann is Everywoman.
That the author of Everyman was no mere artist, but an
artist-philosopher, and that the artist-philosophers are the only sort
of artists I take quite seriously, will be no news to you. Even Plato
and Boswell, as the dramatists who invented Socrates and Dr Johnson,
impress me more deeply than the romantic playwrights. Ever since, as
a boy, I first breathed the air of the transcendental regions at a
performance of Mozart's Zauberflote, I have been proof against the
garish splendors and alcoholic excitements of the ordinary stage
combinations of Tappertitian romance with the police intelligence.
Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth and Turner (these four apart and above all the
English Classics), Goethe, Shelley, Schopenhaur, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris,
Tolstoy, and Nietzsche are among the writers whose peculiar sense of
the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own. Mark the word
peculiar. I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint;
but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not
co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's
sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations;
and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the
specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human
feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and
shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and
shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive
gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a
combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But
they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its
unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for
professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney
Carton and the ghost in Hamlet! ): they are anarchical, and cannot
balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock
and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader:
they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as
dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or
inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of
his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow
motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from
the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to
be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the
cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to
manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his
crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I
leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest
question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of
Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so
inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the
world was to Shakespear a great "stage of fools" on which he was utterly
bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens
saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the
world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them
could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a
human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment
came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh,
that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial
external stimulus to make it work. This is what is the matter with
Hamlet all through: he has no will except in his bursts of temper.
Foolish Bardolaters make a virtue of this after their fashion:
they declare that the play is the tragedy of irresolution; but all
Shakespear's projections of the deepest humanity he knew have the same
defect: their characters and manners are lifelike; but their actions
are forced on them from without, and the external force is grotesquely
inappropriate except when it is quite conventional, as in the case of
Henry V. Falstaff is more vivid than any of these serious reflective
characters, because he is self-acting: his motives are his own appetites
and instincts and humors. Richard III, too, is delightful as the
whimsical comedian who stops a funeral to make love to the corpse's
widow; but when, in the next act, he is replaced by a stage villain who
smothers babies and offs with people's heads, we are revolted at the
imposture and repudiate the changeling. Faulconbridge, Coriolanus,
Leontes are admirable descriptions of instinctive temperaments: indeed
the play of Coriolanus is the greatest of Shakespear's comedies; but
description is not philosophy; and comedy neither compromises the author
nor reveals him. He must be judged by those characters into which he
puts what he knows of himself, his Hamlets and Macbeths and Lears and
Prosperos. If these characters are agonizing in a void about factitious
melodramatic murders and revenges and the like, whilst the comic
characters walk with their feet on solid ground, vivid and amusing,
you know that the author has much to show and nothing to teach. The
comparison between Falstaff and Prospero is like the comparison
between Micawber and David Copperfield. At the end of the book you know
Micawber, whereas you only know what has happened to David, and are not
interested enough in him to wonder what his politics or religion might
be if anything so stupendous as a religious or political idea, or a
general idea of any sort, were to occur to him. He is tolerable as a
child; but he never becomes a man, and might be left out of his own
biography altogether but for his usefulness as a stage confidant, a
Horatio or "Charles his friend" what they call on the stage a feeder.
Now you cannot say this of the works of the artist-philosophers.
You cannot say it, for instance, of The Pilgrim's Progress. Put your
Shakespearian hero and coward, Henry V and Pistol or Parolles, beside
Mr Valiant and Mr Fearing, and you have a sudden revelation of the abyss
that lies between the fashionable author who could see nothing in the
world but personal aims and the tragedy of their disappointment or the
comedy of their incongruity, and the field preacher who achieved virtue
and courage by identifying himself with the purpose of the world as
he understood it. The contrast is enormous: Bunyan's coward stirs your
blood more than Shakespear's hero, who actually leaves you cold and
secretly hostile. You suddenly see that Shakespear, with all his flashes
and divinations, never understood virtue and courage, never conceived
how any man who was not a fool could, like Bunyan's hero, look back
from the brink of the river of death over the strife and labor of his
pilgrimage, and say "yet do I not repent me"; or, with the panache of
a millionaire, bequeath "my sword to him that shall succeed me in my
pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. " This
is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by
yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you
are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a
feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that
the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only
real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for
purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere
misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth;
and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work
to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so
willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and
the like.
It may seem a long step from Bunyan to Nietzsche; but the difference
between their conclusions is purely formal. Bunyan's perception that
righteousness is filthy rags, his scorn for Mr Legality in the village
of Morality, his defiance of the Church as the supplanter of religion,
his insistence on courage as the virtue of virtues, his estimate of the
career of the conventionally respectable and sensible Worldly Wiseman
as no better at bottom than the life and death of Mr Badman: all
this, expressed by Bunyan in the terms of a tinker's theology, is what
Nietzsche has expressed in terms of post-Darwinian, post-Schopenhaurian
philosophy; Wagner in terms of polytheistic mythology; and Ibsen in
terms of mid-XIX century Parisian dramaturgy. Nothing is new in these
matters except their novelties: for instance, it is a novelty to
call Justification by Faith "Wille," and Justification by Works
"Vorstellung. " The sole use of the novelty is that you and I buy and
read Schopenhaur's treatise on Will and Representation when we should
not dream of buying a set of sermons on Faith versus Works. At bottom
the controversy is the same, and the dramatic results are the same.
Bunyan makes no attempt to present his pilgrims as more sensible or
better conducted than Mr Worldly Wiseman. Mr W. W. 's worst enemies, as
Mr Embezzler, Mr Never-go-to-Church-on-Sunday, Mr Bad Form, Mr Murderer,
Mr Burglar, Mr Co-respondent, Mr Blackmailer, Mr Cad, Mr Drunkard, Mr
Labor Agitator and so forth, can read the Pilgrim's Progress without
finding a word said against them; whereas the respectable people who
snub them and put them in prison, such as Mr W. W. himself and his young
friend Civility; Formalist and Hypocrisy; Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and
Pragmatick (who were clearly young university men of good family
and high feeding); that brisk lad Ignorance, Talkative, By-Ends of
Fairspeech and his mother-in-law Lady Feigning, and other reputable
gentlemen and citizens, catch it very severely. Even Little Faith,
though he gets to heaven at last, is given to understand that it served
him right to be mobbed by the brothers Faint Heart, Mistrust, and
Guilt, all three recognized members of respectable society and veritable
pillars of the law. The whole allegory is a consistent attack on
morality and respectability, without a word that one can remember
against vice and crime. Exactly what is complained of in Nietzsche and
Ibsen, is it not? And also exactly what would be complained of in all
the literature which is great enough and old enough to have attained
canonical rank, officially or unofficially, were it not that books are
admitted to the canon by a compact which confesses their greatness in
consideration of abrogating their meaning; so that the reverend rector
can agree with the prophet Micah as to his inspired style without being
committed to any complicity in Micah's furiously Radical opinions. Why,
even I, as I force myself; pen in hand, into recognition and civility,
find all the force of my onslaught destroyed by a simple policy of
non-resistance. In vain do I redouble the violence of the language in
which I proclaim my heterodoxies. I rail at the theistic credulity of
Voltaire, the amoristic superstition of Shelley, the revival of tribal
soothsaying and idolatrous rites which Huxley called Science and
mistook for an advance on the Pentateuch, no less than at the welter
of ecclesiastical and professional humbug which saves the face of the
stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry.
Even atheists reproach me with infidelity and anarchists with nihilism
because I cannot endure their moral tirades. And yet, instead of
exclaiming "Send this inconceivable Satanist to the stake," the
respectable newspapers pith me by announcing "another book by this
brilliant and thoughtful writer. " And the ordinary citizen, knowing that
an author who is well spoken of by a respectable newspaper must be all
right, reads me, as he reads Micah, with undisturbed edification from
his own point of view. It is narrated that in the eighteen-seventies an
old lady, a very devout Methodist, moved from Colchester to a house in
the neighborhood of the City Road, in London, where, mistaking the Hall
of Science for a chapel, she sat at the feet of Charles Bradlaugh
for many years, entranced by his eloquence, without questioning
his orthodoxy or moulting a feather of her faith. I fear I small be
defrauded of my just martyrdom in the same way.
However, I am digressing, as a man with a grievance always does. And
after all, the main thing in determining the artistic quality of a book
is not the opinions it propagates, but the fact that the writer has
opinions. The old lady from Colchester was right to sun her simple soul
in the energetic radiance of Bradlaugh's genuine beliefs and disbeliefs
rather than in the chill of such mere painting of light and heat as
elocution and convention can achieve. My contempt for belles lettres,
and for amateurs who become the heroes of the fanciers of literary
virtuosity, is not founded on any illusion of mind as to the permanence
of those forms of thought (call them opinions) by which I strive to
communicate my bent to my fellows. To younger men they are already
outmoded; for though they have no more lost their logic than an
eighteenth century pastel has lost its drawing or its color, yet, like
the pastel, they grow indefinably shabby, and will grow shabbier until
they cease to count at all, when my books will either perish, or, if
the world is still poor enough to want them, will have to stand, with
Bunyan's, by quite amorphous qualities of temper and energy. With this
conviction I cannot be a bellettrist. No doubt I must recognize, as even
the Ancient Mariner did, that I must tell my story entertainingly if I
am to hold the wedding guest spellbound in spite of the siren sounds of
the loud bassoon. But "for art's sake" alone I would not face the toil
of writing a single sentence. I know that there are men who, having
nothing to say and nothing to write, are nevertheless so in love with
oratory and with literature that they keep desperately repeating as much
as they can understand of what others have said or written aforetime.
I know that the leisurely tricks which their want of conviction leaves
them free to play with the diluted and misapprehended message supply
them with a pleasant parlor game which they call style. I can pity their
dotage and even sympathize with their fancy. But a true original style
is never achieved for its own sake: a man may pay from a shilling to a
guinea, according to his means, to see, hear, or read another man's act
of genius; but he will not pay with his whole life and soul to become a
mere virtuoso in literature, exhibiting an accomplishment which will not
even make money for him, like fiddle playing. Effectiveness of assertion
is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no
style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far
in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry
him. Disprove his assertion after it is made, yet its style remains.
Darwin has no more destroyed the style of Job nor of Handel than Martin
Luther destroyed the style of Giotto. All the assertions get disproved
sooner or later; and so we find the world full of a magnificent debris
of artistic fossils, with the matter-of-fact credibility gone clean out
of them, but the form still splendid. And that is why the old masters
play the deuce with our mere susceptibles. Your Royal Academician thinks
he can get the style of Giotto without Giotto's beliefs, and correct
his perspective into the bargain. Your man of letters thinks he can
get Bunyan's or Shakespear's style without Bunyan's conviction or
Shakespear's apprehension, especially if he takes care not to split
his infinitives. And so with your Doctors of Music, who, with their
collections of discords duly prepared and resolved or retarded or
anticipated in the manner of the great composers, think they can learn
the art of Palestrina from Cherubim's treatise. All this academic art
is far worse than the trade in sham antique furniture; for the man who
sells me an oaken chest which he swears was made in the XIII century,
though as a matter of fact he made it himself only yesterday, at least
does not pretend that there are any modern ideas in it, whereas your
academic copier of fossils offers them to you as the latest outpouring
of the human spirit, and, worst of all, kidnaps young people as pupils
and persuades them that his limitations are rules, his observances
dexterities, his timidities good taste, and his emptinesses purities.
And when he declares that art should not be didactic, all the people who
have nothing to teach and all the people who don't want to learn agree
with him emphatically.
I pride myself on not being one of these susceptible: If you study
the electric light with which I supply you in that Bumbledonian public
capacity of mine over which you make merry from time to time, you will
find that your house contains a great quantity of highly susceptible
copper wire which gorges itself with electricity and gives you no light
whatever. But here and there occurs a scrap of intensely insusceptible,
intensely resistant material; and that stubborn scrap grapples with the
current and will not let it through until it has made itself useful to
you as those two vital qualities of literature, light and heat. Now if I
am to be no mere copper wire amateur but a luminous author, I must also
be a most intensely refractory person, liable to go out and to go wrong
at inconvenient moments, and with incendiary possibilities. These are
the faults of my qualities; and I assure you that I sometimes dislike
myself so much that when some irritable reviewer chances at that moment
to pitch into me with zest, I feel unspeakably relieved and obliged. But
I never dream of reforming, knowing that I must take myself as I am and
get what work I can out of myself. All this you will understand; for
there is community of material between us: we are both critics of life
as well as of art; and you have perhaps said to yourself when I have
passed your windows, "There, but for the grace of God, go I. " An awful
and chastening reflection, which shall be the closing cadence of this
immoderately long letter from yours faithfully,
G. BERNARD SHAW.
WOKING, 1903
ACT I
Roebuck Ramsden is in his study, opening the morning letters. The study,
handsomely and solidly furnished, proclaims the man of means. Not
a speck of dust is visible: it is clear that there are at least two
housemaids and a parlormaid downstairs, and a housekeeper upstairs who
does not let them spare elbow-grease. Even the top of Roebuck's head is
polished: on a sunshiny day he could heliograph his orders to distant
camps by merely nodding. In no other respect, however, does he suggest
the military man. It is in active civil life that men get his broad air
of importance, his dignified expectation of deference, his determinate
mouth disarmed and refined since the hour of his success by the
withdrawal of opposition and the concession of comfort and precedence
and power. He is more than a highly respectable man: he is marked out
as a president of highly respectable men, a chairman among directors,
an alderman among councillors, a mayor among aldermen. Four tufts of
iron-grey hair, which will soon be as white as isinglass, and are in
other respects not at all unlike it, grow in two symmetrical pairs above
his ears and at the angles of his spreading jaws. He wears a black frock
coat, a white waistcoat (it is bright spring weather), and trousers,
neither black nor perceptibly blue, of one of those indefinitely mixed
hues which the modern clothier has produced to harmonize with the
religions of respectable men. He has not been out of doors yet to-day;
so he still wears his slippers, his boots being ready for him on the
hearthrug. Surmising that he has no valet, and seeing that he has no
secretary with a shorthand notebook and a typewriter, one meditates
on how little our great burgess domesticity has been disturbed by new
fashions and methods, or by the enterprise of the railway and hotel
companies which sell you a Saturday to Monday of life at Folkestone as a
real gentleman for two guineas, first class fares both ways included.
How old is Roebuck? The question is important on the threshold of a
drama of ideas; for under such circumstances everything depends on
whether his adolescence belonged to the sixties or to the eighties. He
was born, as a matter of fact, in 1839, and was a Unitarian and Free
Trader from his boyhood, and an Evolutionist from the publication of
the Origin of Species. Consequently he has always classed himself as an
advanced thinker and fearlessly outspoken reformer.
Sitting at his writing table, he has on his right the windows giving
on Portland Place. Through these, as through a proscenium, the curious
spectator may contemplate his profile as well as the blinds will permit.
On his left is the inner wall, with a stately bookcase, and the door
not quite in the middle, but somewhat further from him. Against the wall
opposite him are two busts on pillars: one, to his left, of John Bright;
the other, to his right, of Mr Herbert Spencer. Between them hang an
engraved portrait of Richard Cobden; enlarged photographs of Martineau,
Huxley, and George Eliot; autotypes of allegories by Mr G. F. Watts (for
Roebuck believed in the fine arts with all the earnestness of a man who
does not understand them), and an impression of Dupont's engraving of
Delaroche's Beaux Artes hemicycle, representing the great men of
all ages. On the wall behind him, above the mantelshelf, is a family
portrait of impenetrable obscurity.
A chair stands near the writing table for the convenience of business
visitors. Two other chairs are against the wall between the busts.
A parlormaid enters with a visitor's card. Roebuck takes it, and nods,
pleased. Evidently a welcome caller.
RAMSDEN. Show him up.
The parlormaid goes out and returns with the visitor.
THE MAID. Mr Robinson.
Mr Robinson is really an uncommonly nice looking young fellow. He must,
one thinks, be the jeune premier; for it is not in reason to suppose
that a second such attractive male figure should appear in one story.
The slim shapely frame, the elegant suit of new mourning, the small head
and regular features, the pretty little moustache, the frank clear eyes,
the wholesome bloom and the youthful complexion, the well brushed glossy
hair, not curly, but of fine texture and good dark color, the arch of
good nature in the eyebrows, the erect forehead and neatly pointed chin,
all announce the man who will love and suffer later on. And that he will
not do so without sympathy is guaranteed by an engaging sincerity and
eager modest serviceableness which stamp him as a man of amiable nature.
The moment he appears, Ramsden's face expands into fatherly liking and
welcome, an expression which drops into one of decorous grief as the
young man approaches him with sorrow in his face as well as in his black
clothes. Ramsden seems to know the nature of the bereavement. As the
visitor advances silently to the writing table, the old man rises and
shakes his hand across it without a word: a long, affectionate shake
which tells the story of a recent sorrow common to both.
RAMSDEN. [concluding the handshake and cheering up] Well, well,
Octavius, it's the common lot. We must all face it someday. Sit down.
Octavius takes the visitor's chair. Ramsden replaces himself in his own.
OCTAVIUS. Yes: we must face it, Mr Ramsden. But I owed him a great deal.
He did everything for me that my father could have done if he had lived.
RAMSDEN. He had no son of his own, you see.
OCTAVIUS. But he had daughters; and yet he was as good to my sister as
to me. And his death was so sudden! I always intended to thank him--to
let him know that I had not taken all his care of me as a matter
of course, as any boy takes his father's care. But I waited for an
opportunity and now he is dead--dropped without a moment's warning. He
will never know what I felt. [He takes out his handkerchief and cries
unaffectedly].
RAMSDEN. How do we know that, Octavius? He may know it: we cannot
tell. Come! Don't grieve. [Octavius masters himself and puts up his
handkerchief]. That's right. Now let me tell you something to console
you. The last time I saw him--it was in this very room--he said to me:
"Tavy is a generous lad and the soul of honor; and when I see how little
consideration other men get from their sons, I realize how much better
than a son he's been to me. " There! Doesn't that do you good?
OCTAVIUS. Mr Ramsden: he used to say to me that he had met only one man
in the world who was the soul of honor, and that was Roebuck Ramsden.
RAMSDEN. Oh, that was his partiality: we were very old friends, you
know. But there was something else he used to say about you. I wonder
whether I ought to tell you or not!
OCTAVIUS. You know best.
RAMSDEN. It was something about his daughter.
OCTAVIUS. [eagerly] About Ann! Oh, do tell me that, Mr Ramsden.
RAMSDEN. Well, he said he was glad, after all, you were not his son,
because he thought that someday Annie and you--[Octavius blushes
vividly]. Well, perhaps I shouldn't have told you. But he was in
earnest.
OCTAVIUS. Oh, if only I thought I had a chance! You know, Mr Ramsden, I
don't care about money or about what people call position; and I can't
bring myself to take an interest in the business of struggling for them.
Well, Ann has a most exquisite nature; but she is so accustomed to be
in the thick of that sort of thing that she thinks a man's character
incomplete if he is not ambitious. She knows that if she married me she
would have to reason herself out of being ashamed of me for not being a
big success of some kind.
RAMSDEN. [Getting up and planting himself with his back to the
fireplace] Nonsense, my boy, nonsense! You're too modest. What does she
know about the real value of men at her age? [More seriously] Besides,
she's a wonderfully dutiful girl. Her father's wish would be sacred to
her. Do you know that since she grew up to years of discretion, I don't
believe she has ever once given her own wish as a reason for doing
anything or not doing it. It's always "Father wishes me to," or "Mother
wouldn't like it. " It's really almost a fault in her. I have often told
her she must learn to think for herself.
OCTAVIUS. [shaking his head] I couldn't ask her to marry me because her
father wished it, Mr Ramsden.
RAMSDEN. Well, perhaps not. No: of course not. I see that. No: you
certainly couldn't. But when you win her on your own merits, it will be
a great happiness to her to fulfil her father's desire as well as her
own. Eh? Come! you'll ask her, won't you?
OCTAVIUS. [with sad gaiety] At all events I promise you I shall never
ask anyone else.
RAMSDEN. Oh, you shan't need to. She'll accept you, my boy--although
[here he suddenly becomes very serious indeed] you have one great
drawback.
OCTAVIUS. [anxiously] What drawback is that, Mr Ramsden? I should rather
say which of my many drawbacks?
RAMSDEN. I'll tell you, Octavius. [He takes from the table a book bound
in red cloth]. I have in my hand a copy of the most infamous, the most
scandalous, the most mischievous, the most blackguardly book that ever
escaped burning at the hands of the common hangman. I have not read
it: I would not soil my mind with such filth; but I have read what the
papers say of it. The title is quite enough for me. [He reads it]. The
Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion by John Tanner, M. I. R. C. ,
Member of the Idle Rich Class.
OCTAVIUS. [smiling] But Jack--
RAMSDEN. [testily] For goodness' sake, don't call him Jack under my
roof [he throws the book violently down on the table, Then, somewhat
relieved, he comes past the table to Octavius, and addresses him at
close quarters with impressive gravity]. Now, Octavius, I know that my
dead friend was right when he said you were a generous lad. I know that
this man was your schoolfellow, and that you feel bound to stand by
him because there was a boyish friendship between you. But I ask you
to consider the altered circumstances. You were treated as a son in my
friend's house. You lived there; and your friends could not be turned
from the door. This Tanner was in and out there on your account almost
from his childhood. He addresses Annie by her Christian name as freely
as you do. Well, while her father was alive, that was her father's
business, not mine. This man Tanner was only a boy to him: his opinions
were something to be laughed at, like a man's hat on a child's head.
But now Tanner is a grown man and Annie a grown woman. And her father
is gone. We don't as yet know the exact terms of his will; but he often
talked it over with me; and I have no more doubt than I have that you're
sitting there that the will appoints me Annie's trustee and guardian.
[Forcibly] Now I tell you, once for all, I can't and I won't have Annie
placed in such a position that she must, out of regard for you, suffer
the intimacy of this fellow Tanner. It's not fair: it's not right: it's
not kind. What are you going to do about it?
OCTAVIUS. But Ann herself has told Jack that whatever his opinions are,
he will always be welcome because he knew her dear father.
RAMSDEN. [out of patience] That girl's mad about her duty to her
parents. [He starts off like a goaded ox in the direction of John
Bright, in whose expression there is no sympathy for him. As he speaks,
he fumes down to Herbert Spencer, who receives him still more coldly]
Excuse me, Octavius; but there are limits to social toleration. You
know that I am not a bigoted or prejudiced man. You know that I am plain
Roebuck Ramsden when other men who have done less have got handles to
their names, because I have stood for equality and liberty of conscience
while they were truckling to the Church and to the aristocracy.
Whitefield and I lost chance after chance through our advanced opinions.
But I draw the line at Anarchism and Free Love and that sort of thing.
If I am to be Annie's guardian, she will have to learn that she has a
duty to me. I won't have it: I will not have it. She must forbid John
Tanner the house; and so must you.
The parlormaid returns.
OCTAVIUS. But--
RAMSDEN. [calling his attention to the servant] Ssh! Well?
THE MAID.
