No More Learning

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. Mr Tanner wishes to see you, sir.

RAMSDEN. Mr Tanner!

OCTAVIUS. Jack!

RAMSDEN. How dare Mr Tanner call on me! Say I cannot see him.

OCTAVIUS. [hurt] I am sorry you are turning my friend from your door
like that.

THE MAID. [calmly] He's not at the door, sir. He's upstairs in the
drawingroom with Miss Ramsden. He came with Mrs Whitefield and Miss Ann
and Miss Robinson, sir.

Ramsden's feelings are beyond words.

OCTAVIUS. [grinning] That's very like Jack, Mr Ramsden. You must see
him, even if it's only to turn him out.

RAMSDEN. [hammering out his words with suppressed fury] Go upstairs and
ask Mr Tanner to be good enough to step down here. [The parlormaid goes
out; and Ramsden returns to the fireplace, as to a fortified position].
I must say that of all the confounded pieces of impertinence--well, if
these are Anarchist manners I hope you like them. And Annie with him!
Annie! A-- [he chokes].

OCTAVIUS. Yes: that's what surprises me. He's so desperately afraid of
Ann. There must be something the matter.

Mr John Tanner suddenly opens the door and enters. He is too young to be
described simply as a big man with a beard. But it is already plain that
middle life will find him in that category. He has still some of the
slimness of youth; but youthfulness is not the effect he aims at: his
frock coat would befit a prime minister; and a certain high chested
carriage of the shoulders, a lofty pose of the head, and the Olympian
majesty with which a mane, or rather a huge wisp, of hazel colored
hair is thrown back from an imposing brow, suggest Jupiter rather than
Apollo. He is prodigiously fluent of speech, restless, excitable (mark
the snorting nostril and the restless blue eye, just the thirty-secondth
of an inch too wide open), possibly a little mad. He is carefully
dressed, not from the vanity that cannot resist finery, but from a sense
of the importance of everything he does which leads him to make as
much of paying a call as other men do of getting married or laying a
foundation stone. A sensitive, susceptible, exaggerative, earnest man: a
megalomaniac, who would be lost without a sense of humor.

Just at present the sense of humor is in abeyance. To say that he is
excited is nothing: all his moods are phases of excitement. He is now in
the panic-stricken phase; and he walks straight up to Ramsden as if with
the fixed intention of shooting him on his own hearthrug. But what he
pulls from his breast pocket is not a pistol, but a foolscap document
which he thrusts under the indignant nose of Ramsden as he exclaims--

TANNER. Ramsden: do you know what that is?

RAMSDEN. [loftily] No, Sir.

TANNER. It's a copy of Whitefield's will. Ann got it this morning.

RAMSDEN. When you say Ann, you mean, I presume, Miss Whitefield.

TANNER. I mean our Ann, your Ann, Tavy's Ann, and now, Heaven help me,
my Ann!

OCTAVIUS. [rising, very pale] What do you mean?

TANNER. Mean! [He holds up the will]. Do you know who is appointed Ann's
guardian by this will?

RAMSDEN. [coolly] I believe I am.

TANNER. You! You and I, man. I! I! ! I! ! ! Both of us! [He flings the will
down on the writing table].

RAMSDEN. You! Impossible.

TANNER. It's only too hideously true. [He throws himself into Octavius's
chair]. Ramsden: get me out of it somehow. You don't know Ann as well
as I do. She'll commit every crime a respectable woman can; and
she'll justify every one of them by saying that it was the wish of
her guardians. She'll put everything on us; and we shall have no more
control over her than a couple of mice over a cat.

OCTAVIUS. Jack: I wish you wouldn't talk like that about Ann.

TANNER. This chap's in love with her: that's another complication. Well,
she'll either jilt him and say I didn't approve of him, or marry him
and say you ordered her to. I tell you, this is the most staggering blow
that has ever fallen on a man of my age and temperament.

RAMSDEN. Let me see that will, sir. [He goes to the writing table and
picks it up]. I cannot believe that my old friend Whitefield would have
shown such a want of confidence in me as to associate me with-- [His
countenance falls as he reads].

TANNER. It's all my own doing: that's the horrible irony of it. He told
me one day that you were to be Ann's guardian; and like a fool I began
arguing with him about the folly of leaving a young woman under the
control of an old man with obsolete ideas.

RAMSDEN. [stupended] My ideas obsolete! ! ! ! !

TANNER. Totally. I had just finished an essay called Down with
Government by the Greyhaired; and I was full of arguments and
illustrations. I said the proper thing was to combine the experience of
an old hand with the vitality of a young one. Hang me if he didn't take
me at my word and alter his will--it's dated only a fortnight after that
conversation--appointing me as joint guardian with you!

RAMSDEN. [pale and determined] I shall refuse to act.

TANNER. What's the good of that? I've been refusing all the way from
Richmond; but Ann keeps on saying that of course she's only an orphan;
and that she can't expect the people who were glad to come to the house
in her father's time to trouble much about her now. That's the latest
game. An orphan! It's like hearing an ironclad talk about being at the
mercy of the winds and waves.

OCTAVIUS. This is not fair, Jack. She is an orphan. And you ought to
stand by her.

TANNER. Stand by her! What danger is she in? She has the law on her
side; she has popular sentiment on her side; she has plenty of money
and no conscience. All she wants with me is to load up all her moral
responsibilities on me, and do as she likes at the expense of my
character. I can't control her; and she can compromise me as much as she
likes. I might as well be her husband.

RAMSDEN. You can refuse to accept the guardianship. I shall certainly
refuse to hold it jointly with you.

TANNER. Yes; and what will she say to that? what does she say to it?
Just that her father's wishes are sacred to her, and that she shall
always look up to me as her guardian whether I care to face the
responsibility or not. Refuse! You might as well refuse to accept the
embraces of a boa constrictor when once it gets round your neck.

OCTAVIUS. This sort of talk is not kind to me, Jack.

TANNER. [rising and going to Octavius to console him, but still
lamenting] If he wanted a young guardian, why didn't he appoint Tavy?

RAMSDEN. Ah! why indeed?

OCTAVIUS. I will tell you. He sounded me about it; but I refused the
trust because I loved her. I had no right to let myself be forced on her
as a guardian by her father. He spoke to her about it; and she said I
was right. You know I love her, Mr Ramsden; and Jack knows it too. If
Jack loved a woman, I would not compare her to a boa constrictor in his
presence, however much I might dislike her [he sits down between the
busts and turns his face to the wall].

RAMSDEN. I do not believe that Whitefield was in his right senses
when he made that will. You have admitted that he made it under your
influence.

TANNER. You ought to be pretty well obliged to me for my influence. He
leaves you two thousand five hundred for your trouble. He leaves Tavy a
dowry for his sister and five thousand for himself.

OCTAVIUS. [his tears flowing afresh] Oh, I can't take it. He was too
good to us.

TANNER. You won't get it, my boy, if Ramsden upsets the will.

RAMSDEN. Ha! I see. You have got me in a cleft stick.

TANNER. He leaves me nothing but the charge of Ann's morals, on the
ground that I have already more money than is good for me. That shows
that he had his wits about him, doesn't it?

RAMSDEN. [grimly] I admit that.

OCTAVIUS. [rising and coming from his refuge by the wall] Mr Ramsden:
I think you are prejudiced against Jack. He is a man of honor, and
incapable of abusing--

TANNER. Don't, Tavy: you'll make me ill. I am not a man of honor: I am
a man struck down by a dead hand. Tavy: you must marry her after all and
take her off my hands. And I had set my heart on saving you from her!

OCTAVIUS. Oh, Jack, you talk of saving me from my highest happiness.

TANNER. Yes, a lifetime of happiness. If it were only the first half
hour's happiness, Tavy, I would buy it for you with my last penny. But
a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on
earth.

RAMSDEN. [violently] Stuff, sir. Talk sense; or else go and waste
someone else's time: I have something better to do than listen to your
fooleries [he positively kicks his way to his table and resumes his
seat].

TANNER. You hear him, Tavy! Not an idea in his head later than
eighteen-sixty. We can't leave Ann with no other guardian to turn to.

RAMSDEN. I am proud of your contempt for my character and opinions, sir.
Your own are set forth in that book, I believe.

TANNER. [eagerly going to the table] What! You've got my book! What do
you think of it?

RAMSDEN. Do you suppose I would read such a book, sir?

TANNER. Then why did you buy it?