Man and Superman E-book
Author: George Bernard Shaw
Genre: Comedy, Drama
1903
MAN AND SUPERMAN: A COMEDY AND A PHILOSOPHY
by George Bernard Shaw
Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)
EPISTLE DEDICATORY
TO ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY
-
My dear Walkley
You once asked me why I did not write a Don Juan play. The levity
with which you assumed this frightful responsibility has probably by
this time enabled you to forget it; but the day of reckoning has
arrived: here is your play! I say your play, because qui facit per
alium facit per se. * Its profits, like its labor, belong to me:
its morals, its manners, its philosophy, its influence on the young,
are for you to justify. You were of mature age when you made the
suggestion; and you knew your man. It is hardly fifteen years since,
as twin pioneers of the New Journalism of that time, we two, cradled
in the same new sheets, began an epoch in the criticism of the theatre
and the opera house by making it the pretext for a propaganda of our
own views of life. So you cannot plead ignorance of the character of
the force you set in motion. You meant me to epater le bourgeois;
and if he protests, I hereby refer him to you as the accountable
party.
I warn you that if you attempt to repudiate your responsibility, I
shall suspect you of finding the play too decorous for your taste. The
fifteen years have made me older and graver. In you I can detect no
such becoming change. Your levities and audacities are like the
loves and comforts prayed for by Desdemona: they increase, even as
your days do grow. No mere pioneering journal dares meddle with them
now: the stately Times itself is alone sufficiently above suspicion to
act as your chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its
stars that new plays are not produced every day, since after each such
event its gravity is compromised, its platitude turned to epigram, its
portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum
into naughtiness by criticisms which the traditions of the paper do
not allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign with
the most extravagant flourishes between the lines. I am not sure
that this is not a portent of Revolution. In eighteenth century France
the end was at hand when men bought the Encyclopedia and found Diderot
there. When I buy the Times and find you there, my prophetic ear
catches a rattle of twentieth century tumbrils.
However, that is not my present anxiety. The question is, will you
not be disappointed with a Don Juan play in which not one of that
hero's mille etre adventures is brought upon the stage? To
propitiate you, let me explain myself. You will retort that I never do
anything else: it is your favorite jibe at me that what I call drama
is nothing but explanation. But you must not expect me to adopt your
inexplicable, fantastic, petulant, fastidious ways: you must take me
as I am, a reasonable, patient, consistent, apologetic, laborious
person, with the temperament of a schoolmaster and the pursuits of a
vestryman. No doubt that literary knack of mine which happens to amuse
the British public distracts attention from my character; but the
character is there none the less, solid as bricks. I have a
conscience; and conscience is always anxiously explanatory. You, on
the contrary, feel that a man who discusses his conscience is much
like a woman who discusses her modesty. The only moral force you
condescend to parade is the force of your wit: the only demand you
make in public is the demand of your artistic temperament for
symmetry, elegance, style, grace, refinement, and the cleanliness
which comes next to godliness if not before it. But my conscience is
the genuine pulpit article: it annoys me to see people comfortable
when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making them think
in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you dont like my
preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it.
In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I explained the
predicament of our contemporary English drama, forced to deal almost
exclusively with cases of sexual attraction, and yet forbidden to
exhibit the incidents of that attraction or even to discuss its
nature. Your suggestion that I should write a Don Juan play was
virtually a challenge to me to treat this subject myself dramatically.
The challenge was difficult enough to be worth accepting, because,
when you come to think of it, though we have plenty of dramas with
heroes and heroines who are in love and must accordingly marry or
perish at the end of the play, or about people whose relations with
one another have been complicated by the marriage laws, not to mention
the looser sort of plays which trade on the tradition that illicit
love affairs are at once vicious and delightful, we have no modern
English plays in which the natural attraction of the sexes for one
another is made the mainspring of the action. That is why we insist on
beauty in our performers, differing herein from the countries our
friend William Archer holds up as examples of seriousness to our
childish theatres. There the Juliets and Isoldes, the Romeos and
Tristans, might be our mothers and fathers. Not so the English
actress. The heroine she impersonates is not allowed to discuss the
elemental relations of men and women: all her romantic twaddle about
novelet-made love, all her purely legal dilemmas as to whether she was
married or "betrayed," quite miss our hearts and worry our minds. To
console ourselves we must just look at her. We do so; and her beauty
feeds our starving emotions. Sometimes we grumble ungallantly at the
lady because she does not act as well as she looks. But in a drama
which, with all its preoccupation with sex, is really void of sexual
interest, good looks are more desired than histrionic skill.
Let me press this point on you, since you are too clever to raise
the fool's cry of paradox whenever I take hold of a stick by the right
instead of the wrong end. Why are our occasional attempts to deal with
the sex problem on the stage so repulsive and dreary that even those
who are most determined that sex questions shall be held open and
their discussion kept free, cannot pretend to relish these joyless
attempts at social sanitation? Is it not because at bottom they are
utterly sexless? What is the usual formula for such plays? A woman
has, on some past occasion, been brought into conflict with the law
which regulates the relations of the sexes. A man, by falling in
love with her, or marrying her, is brought into conflict with the
social convention which discountenances the woman. Now the conflicts
of individuals with law and convention can be dramatized like all
other human conflicts; but they are purely judicial; and the fact that
we are much more curious about the suppressed relations between the
man and the woman than about the relations between both and our courts
of law and private juries of matrons, produces that sensation of
evasion, of dissatisfaction, of fundamental irrelevance, of
shallowness, of useless disagreeableness, of total failure to edify
and partial failure to interest, which is as familiar to you in the
theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented those uncomfortable
buildings, and found our popular playwrights in the mind to (as they
thought) emulate Ibsen.
I take it that when you asked me for a Don Juan play you did not
want that sort of thing. Nobody does: the successes such plays
sometimes obtain are due to the incidental conventional melodrama with
which the experienced popular author instinctively saves himself
from failure. But what did you want? Owing to your unfortunate
habit- you now, I hope, feel its inconvenience- of not explaining
yourself, I have had to discover this for myself. First, then, I
have had to ask myself, what is a Don Juan? Vulgarly, a libertine. But
your dislike of vulgarity is pushed to the length of a defect
(universality of character is impossible without a share of
vulgarity); and even if you could acquire the taste, you would find
yourself overfed from ordinary sources without troubling me. So I took
it that you demanded a Don Juan in the philosophic sense.
Philosophically, Don Juan is a man who, though gifted enough to be
exceptionally capable of distinguishing between good and evil, follows
his own instincts without regard to the common, statute, or canon law;
and therefore, whilst gaining the ardent sympathy of our rebellious
instincts (which are flattered by the brilliancies with which Don Juan
associates them) finds himself in mortal conflict with existing
institutions, and defends himself by fraud and force as unscrupulously
as a farmer defends his crops by the same means against vermin. The
prototypic Don Juan, invented early in the XVI century by a Spanish
monk, was presented, according to the ideas of that time, as the enemy
of God, the approach of whose vengeance is felt throughout the
drama, growing in menace from minute to minute. No anxiety is caused
on Don Juan's account by any minor antagonist: he easily eludes the
police, temporal and spiritual; and when an indignant father seeks
private redress with the sword, Don Juan kills him without an
effort. Not until the slain father returns from heaven as the agent of
God, in the form of his own statue, does he prevail against his slayer
and cast him into hell. The moral is a monkish one: repent and
reform now; for tomorrow it may be too late. This is really the only
point on which Don Juan is sceptical; for he is a devout believer in
an ultimate hell, and risks damnation only because, as he is young, it
seems so far off that repentance can be postponed until he has
amused himself to his heart's content.
But the lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the
world chooses to learn from his book. What attracts and impresses us
in El Burlador de Sevilla is not the immediate urgency of
repentance, but the heroism of daring to be the enemy of God. From
Prometheus to my own Devil's Disciple, such enemies have always been
popular. Don Juan became such a pet that the world could not bear
his damnation. It reconciled him sentimentally to God in a second
version, and clamored for his canonization for a whole century, thus
treating him as English journalism has treated that comic foe of the
gods, Punch. Moliere's Don Juan casts back to the original in point of
impenitence; but in piety he falls off greatly. True, he also proposes
to repent; but in what terms! "Oui, ma foi! il faut s'amender.
Encore vingt ou trente ans de cette vie-ci, et puis nous songerons a
nous." After Moliere comes the artist-enchanter, the master beloved by
masters, Mozart, revealing the hero's spirit in magical harmonies,
elfin tones, and elate darting rhythms as of summer lightning made
audible. Here you have freedom in love and in morality mocking
exquisitely at slavery to them, and interesting you, attracting you,
tempting you, inexplicably forcing you to range the hero with his
enemy the statue on a transcendant plane, leaving the prudish daughter
and her priggish lover on a crockery shelf below to live piously
ever after.
After these completed works Byron's fragment does not count for much
philosophically. Our vagabond libertines are no more interesting
from that point of view than the sailor who has a wife in every
port; and Byron's hero is, after all, only a vagabond libertine. And
he is dumb: he does not discuss himself with a Sganarelle-Leporello or
with the fathers or brothers of his mistresses: he does not even, like
Casanova, tell his own story. In fact he is not a true Don Juan at
all; for he is no more an enemy of God than any romantic and
adventurous young sower of wild oats. Had you and I been in his
place at his age, who knows whether we might not have done as he
did, unless indeed your fastidiousness had saved you from the
empress Catherine. Byron was as little of a philosopher as Peter the
Great: both were instances of that rare and useful, but unedifying
variation, an energetic genius born without the prejudices or
superstitions of his contemporaries. The resultant unscrupulous
freedom of thought made Byron a bolder poet than Wordsworth just as it
made Peter a bolder king than George III; but as it was, after all,
only a negative qualification, it did not prevent Peter from being
an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did it enable
Byron to become a religious force like Shelley. Let us, then, leave
Byron's Don Juan out of account. Mozart's is the last of the true
Don Juans; for by the time he was of age, his cousin Faust had, in the
hands of Goethe, taken his place and carried both his warfare and
his reconciliation with the gods far beyond mere lovemaking into
politics, high art, schemes for reclaiming new continents from the
ocean, and recognition of an eternal womanly principle in the
universe. Goethe's Faust and Mozart's Don Juan were the last words
of the XVIII century on the subject; and by the time the polite
critics of the XIX century, ignoring William Blake as superficially as
the XVIII had ignored Hogarth or the XVII Bunyan, had got past the
Dickens-Macaulay Dumas-Guizot stage and the
Stendhal-Meredith-Turgenieff stage, and were confronted with
philosophic fiction by such pens as Ibsen's and Tolstoy's, Don Juan
had changed his sex and become Dona Juana, breaking out of the
Doll's House and asserting herself as an individual instead of a
mere item in a moral pageant.
Now it is all very well for you at the beginning of the XX century
to ask me for a Don Juan play; but you will see from the foregoing
survey that Don Juan is a full century out of date for you and for me;
and if there are millions of less literate people who are still in the
eighteenth century, have they not Moliere and Mozart, upon whose art
no human hand can improve? You would laugh at me if at this time of
day I dealt in duels and ghosts and "womanly" women. As to mere
libertinism, you would be the first to remind me that the Festin de
Pierre of Moliere is not a play for amorists, and that one bar of
the voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod or Bizet would appear as a
licentious stain on the score of Don Giovanni. Even the more
abstract parts of the Don Juan play are dilapidated past use: for
instance, Don Juan's supernatural antagonist hurled those who refuse
to repent into lakes of burning brimstone, there to be tormented by
devils with horns and tails. Of that antagonist, and of that
conception of repentance, how much is left that could be used in a
play by me dedicated to you? On the other hand, those forces of middle
class public opinion which hardly existed for a Spanish nobleman in
the days of the first Don Juan, are now triumphant everywhere.
Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock
his greengrocer. The women, "marchesane, principesse, cameriere,
cittadine" and all, are become equally dangerous: the sex is
aggressive, powerful: when women are wronged they do not group
themselves pathetically to sing "Protegga il giusto cielo": they grasp
formidable legal and social weapons, and retaliate. Political
parties are wrecked and public careers undone by a single
indiscretion. A man had better have all the statues in London to
supper with him, ugly as they are, than be brought to the bar of the
Nonconformist Conscience by Donna Elvira. Excommunication has become
almost as serious a business as it was in the tenth century.
As a result, Man is no longer, like Don Juan, victor in the duel
of sex. Whether he has ever really been may be doubted: at all
events the enormous superiority of Woman's natural position in this
matter is telling with greater and greater force. As to pulling the
Nonconformist Conscience by the beard as Don Juan plucked the beard of
the Commandant's statue in the convent of San Francisco, that is out
of the question nowadays: prudence and good manners alike forbid it to
a hero with any mind. Besides, it is Don Juan's own beard that is in
danger of plucking. Far from relapsing into hypocrisy, as Sganarelle
feared, he has unexpectedly discovered a moral in his immorality.
The growing recognition of his new point of view is heaping
responsibility on him. His former jests he has had to take as
seriously as I have had to take some of the jests of Mr W. S. Gilbert.
His scepticism, once his least tolerated quality, has now triumphed so
completely that he can no longer assert himself by witty negations,
and must, to save himself from cipherdom, find an affirmative
position. His thousand and three affairs of gallantry, after becoming,
at most, two immature intrigues leading to sordid and prolonged
complications and humiliations, have been discarded altogether as
unworthy of his philosophic dignity and compromising to his newly
acknowledged position as the founder of a school. Instead of
pretending to read Ovid he does actually read Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche, studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the
race instead of for the freedom of his own instincts. Thus his
profligacy and his dare-devil airs have gone the way of his sword
and mandoline into the rag shop of anachronisms and superstitions.
In fact, he is now more Hamlet than Don Juan; for though the lines put
into the actor's mouth to indicate to the pit that Hamlet is a
philosopher are for the most part mere harmonious platitude which,
with a little debasement of the word-music, would be properer to
Pecksniff, yet if you separate the real hero, inarticulate and
unintelligible to himself except in flashes of inspiration, from the
performer who has to talk at any cost through five acts; and if you
also do what you must always do in Shakespear's tragedies: that is,
dissect out the absurd sensational incidents and physical violences of
the borrowed story from the genuine Shakespearian tissue, you will get
a true Promethean foe of the gods, whose instinctive attitude
towards women much resembles that to which Don Juan is now driven.
From this point of view Hamlet was a developed Don Juan whom
Shakespear palmed off as a reputable man just as he palmed poor
Macbeth off as a murderer. Today the palming off is no longer
necessary (at least on your plane and mine) because Don Juanism is
no longer misunderstood as mere Casanovism. Don Juan himself is almost
ascetic in his desire to avoid that misunderstanding; and so my
attempt to bring him up to date by launching him as a modern
Englishman into a modern English environment has produced a figure
superficially quite unlike the hero of Mozart.
And yet I have not the heart to disappoint you wholly of another
glimpse of the Mozartian dissoluto punito and his antagonist the
statue. I feel sure you would like to know more of that statue- to
draw him out when he is off duty, so to speak. To gratify you, I
have resorted to the trick of the strolling theatrical manager who
advertizes the pantomime of Sinbad the Sailor with a stock of
second-hand picture posters designed for Ali Baba. He simply thrusts a
few oil jars into the valley of diamonds, and so fulfils the promise
held out by the hoardings to the public eye. I have adapted this
easy device to our occasion by thrusting into my perfectly modern
three-act play a totally extraneous act in which my hero, enchanted by
the air of the Sierra, has a dream in which his Mozartian ancestor
appears and philosophizes at great length in a Shavio-Socratic
dialogue with the lady, the statue, and the devil.
But this pleasantry is not the essence of the play. Over this
essence I have no control. You propound a certain social substance,
sexual attraction to wit, for dramatic distillation; and I distil it
for you. I do not adulterate the product with aphrodisiacs nor
dilute it with romance and water; for I am merely executing your
commission, not producing a popular play for the market. You must
therefore (unless, like most wise men, you read the play first and the
preface afterwards) prepare yourself to face a trumpery story of
modern London life, a life in which, as you know, the ordinary man's
main business is to get means to keep up the position and habits of
a gentleman, and the ordinary woman's business is to get married. In
9,999 cases out of 10,000, you can count on their doing nothing,
whether noble or base, that conflicts with these ends; and that
assurance is what you rely on as their religion, their morality, their
principles, their patriotism, their reputation, their honor and so
forth.
On the whole, this is a sensible and satisfactory foundation for
society. Money means nourishment and marriage means children; and that
men should put nourishment first and women children first is,
broadly speaking, the law of Nature and not the dictate of personal
ambition. The secret of the prosaic man's success, such as it is, is
the simplicity with which he pursues these ends: the secret of the
artistic man's failure, such as that is, is the versatility with which
he strays in all directions after secondary ideals. The artist is
either a poet or a scallawag: as poet, he cannot see, as the prosaic
man does, that chivalry is at bottom only romantic suicide: as
scallawag, he cannot see that it does not pay to spunge and beg and
lie and brag and neglect his person. Therefore do not misunderstand my
plain statement of the fundamental constitution of London society as
an Irishman's reproach to your nation. From the day I first set foot
on this foreign soil I knew the value of the prosaic qualities of
which Irishmen teach Englishmen to be ashamed as well as I knew the
vanity of the poetic qualities of which Englishmen teach Irishmen to
be proud. For the Irishman instinctively disparages the quality
which makes the Englishman dangerous to him; and the Englishman
instinctively flatters the fault that makes the Irishman harmless
and amusing to him. What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman is
what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries: stupidity. The
vitality which places nourishment and children first, heaven and
hell a somewhat remote second, and the health of society as an organic
whole nowhere, may muddle successfully through the comparatively
tribal stages of gregariousness; but in nineteenth century nations and
twentieth century commonwealths the resolve of every man to be rich at
all costs, and of every woman to be married at all costs, must,
without a highly scientific social organization, produce a ruinous
development of poverty, celibacy, prostitution, infant mortality,
adult degeneracy, and everything that wise men most dread. In short,
there is no future for men, however brimming with crude vitality,
who are neither intelligent nor politically educated enough to be
Socialists. So do not misunderstand me in the other direction
either: if I appreciate the vital qualities of the Englishman as I
appreciate the vital qualities of the bee, I do not guarantee the
Englishmen against being, like the bee (or the Canaanite) smoked out
and unloaded of his honey by beings inferior to himself in simple
acquisitiveness, combativeness, and fecundity, but superior to him
in imagination and cunning.
The Don Juan play, however, is to deal with sexual attraction, and
not with nutrition, and to deal with it in a society in which the
serious business of sex is left by men to women, as the serious
business of nutrition is left by women to men. That the men, to
protect themselves against a too aggressive prosecution of the women's
business, have set up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative
in sex business must always come from the man, is true; but the
pretence is so shallow that even in the theatre, that last sanctuary
of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespear's
plays the woman always takes the initiative. In his problem plays
and his popular plays alike the love interest is the interest of
seeing the woman hunt the man down. She may do it by charming him,
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 utter 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 than 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's 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 at
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, shews 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 from 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's old and satiated. Romance and Asceticism, Amorism and
Puritanism are equally unreal in the great Philistine world. The world
shewn 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 twentyfive 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 today,
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
today 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
shew 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 today? Nowhere. Plutocratic
inbreeding 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, parlormaids, 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 then 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 playgoing public of London.
I have certainly shewn 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 of 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 Barrie 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, Schopenhauer,
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 punts 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 son'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 shew 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 I do 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 merely 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-Darwin,
post-Schopenhauer 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 Schopenhauer'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, 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 eighteenseventies 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 shall 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
mine 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 belletrist. 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 delight in 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
Cherubini'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 dont
want to learn agree with him emphatically.
I pride myself on not being one of these susceptibles. 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
-
P.S.- Amid unprecedented critical cerebration over this book of
ours- alas! that your own voice should be dedicated to silence!- I
find myself warned to prepare a new edition. I take the opportunity to
correct a slip or two. You may have noticed (nobody else has, by the
way) that I fitted you with a quotation from Othello, and then
unconsciously referred it to A Winter's Tale. I correct this with
regret; for half its appropriateness goes with Florizel and Perdita:
still, one must not trifle with Shakespear; so I have given
Desdemona back her property.
On the whole, the book has done very well. The strong critics are
impressed; the weak intimidated; the connoisseurs tickled by my
literary bravura (put in to please you): the humorists alone, oddly
enough, sermonize me, scared out of their profession into the
quaintest tumults of conscience. Not all my reviewers have
understood me: like Englishmen in France, confidently uttering their
own island diphthongs as good French vowels, many of them offer, as
samples of the Shavian philosophy, the likest article from their own
stock. Others are the victims of association of ideas: they call me
Pessimist because my remarks wound their self-complacency, and
Renegade because I would have my mob all Caesars instead of Toms,
Dicks, and Harrys. Worst of all, I have been accused of preaching a
Final Ethical Superman: no other, in fact, than our friend the Just
Man made Perfect! This misunderstanding is so galling that I lay
down my pen without another word lest I should be tempted to make
the postcript longer even than the letter.
ACT ONE
ROEBUCK RAMSDEN is in his study, opening the morning's 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 today; 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 believes 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 Arts
hemicycle, representing the great men of all ages. On the wall
behind him, above the mantel-shelf, 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. Shew him in.
-
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 on 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 some day.
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! dont grieve. [Octavius masters himself and puts up
his handkerchief]. Thats 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! Doesnt 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 shouldnt have told you. But
he was in earnest.
OCTAVIUS. Oh, if only I thought I had a chance! You know, Mr
Ramsden, I dont care about money or about what people call
position; and I cant 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! Youre 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 dont 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 wouldnt
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 couldnt 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 couldnt. 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! youll ask her, wont you?
OCTAVIUS [with sad gaiety] At all events I promise you I shall
never ask anyone else.
RAMSDEN. Oh, you shant 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, dont 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 man 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
dont 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 youre sitting there that the will appoints me Annie's
trustee and guardian. [Forcibly] Now I tell you, once for all,
I cant and I wont 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 wont 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
drawing room with Miss Ramsden. He came with Mrs Whitefield and
Miss Ann and Miss Robinson, sir.
-
Ramsden's feelings are beyond words.
-
OCTAVIUS [grinning] Thats 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: thats 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 dont
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 wouldnt talk like that about Ann.
TANNER. This chap's in love with her: thats another complication.
Well, she'll either jilt him and say I didnt 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 shewn 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: thats 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 didnt 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. Whats the good of that? Ive been refusing all the way from
Richmond; but Ann keeps on saying that of course she's only an
orphan; and that she cant expect the people who were glad to
come to the house in her father's time to trouble much about her
now. Thats the latest game. An orphan! It's like hearing an
ironclad talk about being at the mercy of the wind 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 cant 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 didnt 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 cant take it. He was too
good to us.
TANNER. You wont 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
shews that he had his wits about him, doesnt 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. Dont, Tavy: youll 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
eighteensixty. We cant 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! Youve 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?
RAMSDEN. I did not buy it, sir. It has been sent me by some foolish
lady who seems to admire your views. I was about to dispose of
it when Octavius interrupted me. I shall do so now, with your
permission. [He throws the book into the waste paper basket with
such vehemence that Tanner recoils under the impression that it
is being thrown at his head].
TANNER. You have no more manners than I have myself. However, that
saves ceremony between us. [He sits down again]. What do you
intend to do about this will?
OCTAVIUS. May I make a suggestion?
RAMSDEN. Certainly, Octavius.
OCTAVIUS. Arnt we forgetting that Ann herself may have some wishes
in this matter?
RAMSDEN. I quite intend that Annie's wishes shall be consulted in
every reasonable way. But she is only a woman, and a young and
inexperienced woman at that.
TANNER. Ramsden: I begin to pity you.
RAMSDEN [hotly] I dont want to know how you feel towards me, Mr
Tanner.
TANNER. Ann will do just exactly what she likes. And whats more,
she'll force us to advise her to do it; and she'll put the blame
on us if it turns out badly. So, as Tavy is longing to see her-
OCTAVIUS [shyly] I am not, Jack.
TANNER. You lie, Tavy: you are. So lets have her down from the
drawing room and ask her what she intends us to do. Off with
you, Tavy, and fetch her. [Tavy turns to go]. And dont be long;
for the strained relations between myself and Ramsden will make
the interval rather painful. [Ramsden compresses his lips, but
says nothing].
OCTAVIUS. Never mind him, Mr Ramsden. He's not serious. [He goes
out].
RAMSDEN [very deliberately] Mr Tanner: you are the most impudent
person I have ever met.
TANNER [seriously] I know it, Ramsden. Yet even I cannot wholly
conquer shame. We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed
of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of
our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions,
of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.
Good Lord, my dear Ramsden, we are ashamed to walk, ashamed to
ride in an omnibus, ashamed to hire a hansom instead of keeping
a carriage, ashamed of keeping one horse instead of two and a
groom-gardener instead of a coachman and footman. The more
things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. Why,
youre ashamed to buy my book, ashamed to read it: the only thing
youre not ashamed of is to judge me for it without having read
it; and even that only means that youre ashamed to have
heterodox opinions. Look at the effect I produce because my
fairy godmother withheld from me this gift of shame. I have
every possible virtue that a man can have except-
RAMSDEN. I am glad you think so well of yourself.
TANNER. All you mean by that is that you think I ought to be ashamed
of talking about my virtues. You dont mean that I havnt got
them: you know perfectly well that I am as sober and honest a
citizen as yourself, as truthful personally, and much more
truthful politically and morally.
RAMSDEN [touched on his most sensitive point] I deny that. I will
not allow you or any man to treat me as if I were a mere member
of the British public. I detest its prejudices; I scorn its
narrowness; I demand the right to think for myself. You pose as
an advanced man. Let me tell you that I was an advanced man
before you were born.
TANNER. I knew it was a long time ago.
RAMSDEN. I am as advanced as ever I was. I defy you to prove that I
have ever hauled down the flag. I am more advanced than ever I
was. I grow more advanced every day.
TANNER. More advanced in years, Polonius.
RAMSDEN. Polonius! So you are Hamlet, I suppose.
TANNER. No: I am only the most impudent person youve ever met. Thats
your notion of a thoroughly bad character. When you want to give
me a piece of your mind, you ask yourself, as a just and upright
man, what is the worst you can fairly say to me. Thief, liar,
forger, adulterer, perjurer, glutton, drunkard? Not one of these
names fits me. You have to fall back on my deficiency in shame.
Well, I admit it. I even congratulate myself; for if I were
ashamed of my real self, I should cut as stupid a figure as any
of the rest of you. Cultivate a little impudence, Ramsden; and
you will become quite a remarkable man.
RAMSDEN. I have no-
TANNER. You have no desire for that sort of notoriety. Bless you, I
knew that answer would come as well as I know that a box of
matches will come out of an automatic machine when I put a penny
in the slot: you would be ashamed to say anything else.
-
The crushing retort for which Mr Ramsden has been visibly
collecting his forces is lost for ever; for at this point Octavius
returns with Miss Ann Whitefield and her mother; and Ramsden springs
up and hurries to the door to receive them. Whether Ann is
good-looking or not depends upon your taste; also and perhaps
chiefly on your age and sex. To Octavius she is an enchantingly
beautiful woman, in whose presence the world becomes transfigured, and
the puny limits of individual consciousness are suddenly made infinite
by a mystic memory of the whole life of the race to its beginnings
in the east, or even back to the paradise from which it fell. She is
to him the reality of romance, the inner good sense of nonsense, the
unveiling of his eyes, the freeing of his soul, the abolition of time,
place, and circumstance, the etherealization of his blood into
rapturous rivers of the very water of life itself, the revelation of
all the mysteries and the sanctification of all the dogmas. To her
mother she is, to put it as moderately as possible, nothing whatever
of the kind. Not that Octavius's admiration is in any way ridiculous
or discreditable. Ann is a well formed creature, as far as that
goes; and she is perfectly ladylike, graceful, and comely, with
ensnaring eyes and hair. Besides, instead of making herself an
eyesore, like her mother, she has devised a mourning costume of
black and violet silk which does honor to her late father and
reveals the family tradition of brave unconventionality by which
Ramsden sets such store.
But all this is beside the point as an explanation of Ann's charm.
Turn up her nose, give a cast to her eye, replace her black and violet
confection by the apron and feathers of a flower girl, strike all
the aitches out of her speech, and Ann would still make men dream.
Vitality is as common as humanity; but, like humanity, it sometimes
rises to genius; and Ann is one of the vital geniuses. Not at all,
if you please, an oversexed person: that is a vital defect, not a true
excess. She is a perfectly respectable, perfectly self-controlled
woman, and looks it; though her pose is fashionably frank and
impulsive. She inspires confidence as a person who will do nothing she
does not mean to do; also some fear, perhaps, as a woman who will
probably do everything she means to do without taking more account
of other people than may be necessary and what she calls right. In
short, what the weaker of her own sex sometimes call a cat.
Nothing can be more decorous than her entry and her reception by
Ramsden, whom she kisses. The late Mr Whitefield would be gratified
almost to impatience by the long faces of the men (except Tanner,
who is fidgety), the silent handgrasps, the sympathetic placing of
chairs, the sniffing of the widow, and the liquid eye of the daughter,
whose heart, apparently will not let her control her tongue to speech.
Ramsden and Octavius take the two chairs from the wall, and place them
for the two ladies; but Ann comes to Tanner and takes his chair, which
he offers with a brusque gesture, subsequently relieving his
irritation by sitting down on the corner of the writing table with
studied indecorum. Octavius gives Mrs Whitefield a chair next Ann, and
himself takes the vacant one which Ramsden has placed under the nose
of the effigy of Mr Herbert Spencer.
Mrs Whitefield, by the way, is a little woman, whose faded flaxen
hair looks like straw on an egg. She has an expression of muddled
shrewdness, a squeak of protest in her voice, and an odd air of
continually elbowing away some larger person who is crushing her
into a corner. One guesses her as one of those women who are conscious
of being treated as silly and negligible, and who, without having
strength enough to assert themselves effectually, at any rate never
submit to their fate. There is a touch of chivalry in Octavius's
scrupulous attention to her, even whilst his whole soul is absorbed by
Ann.
Ramsden goes solemnly back to his magisterial seat at the
writing table, ignoring Tanner, and opens the proceedings.
-
RAMSDEN. I am sorry, Annie, to force business on you at a sad time
like the present. But your poor dear father's will has raised a
very serious question. You have read it, I believe?
-
Ann assents with a nod and a catch of her breath, too much
affected to speak.
-
I must say I am surprised to find Mr Tanner named as joint
guardian and trustee with myself of you and Rhoda. [A pause.
They all look portentous; but they have nothing to say. Ramsden,
a little ruffled by the lack of any responses, continues] I dont
know that I can consent to act under such conditions. Mr Tanner
has, I understand, some objection also; but I do not profess to
understand its nature: he will no doubt speak for himself. But
we are agreed that we can decide nothing until we know your
views. I am afraid I shall have to ask you to choose between my
sole guardianship and that of Mr Tanner; for I fear it is
impossible for us to undertake a joint arrangement.
ANN [in a low musical voice] Mamma-
MRS WHITEFIELD [hastily] Now, Ann, I do beg you not to put it on
me. I have no opinion on the subject; and if I had, it would
probably not be attended to. I am quite content with whatever
you three think best.
-
Tanner turns his head and looks fixedly at Ramsden, who angrily
refuses to receive this mute communication.
-
ANN [resuming in the same gentle voice, ignoring her mother's bad
taste] Mamma knows that she is not strong enough to bear the
whole responsibility for me and Rhoda without some help and
advice. Rhoda must have a guardian; and though I am older, I do
not think any young unmarried woman should be left quite to her
own guidance. I hope you agree with me, Granny?
TANNER [starting] Granny! Do you intend to call your guardians
Granny?
ANN. Dont be foolish, Jack. Mr Ramsden has always been Grandpapa
Roebuck to me: I am Granny's Annie; and he is Annie's Granny. I
christened him so when I first learned to speak.
RAMSDEN [sarcastically] I hope you are satisfied, Mr Tanner. Go on,
Annie: I quite agree with you.
ANN. Well, if I am to have a guardian, can I set aside anybody whom
my dear father appointed for me?
RAMSDEN [biting his lip] You approve of your father's choice, then?
ANN. It is not for me to approve or disapprove. I accept it. My
father loved me and knew best what was good for me.
RAMSDEN. Of course I understand your feeling, Annie. It is what I
should have expected of you; and it does you credit. But it does
not settle the question so completely as you think. Let me put
a case to you. Suppose you were to discover that I had been
guilty of some disgraceful action- that I was not the man your
poor dear father took me for! Would you still consider it right
that I should be Rhoda's guardian?
ANN. I cant imagine you doing anything disgraceful, Granny.
TANNER [to Ramsden] You havnt done anything of the sort, have you?
RAMSDEN [indignantly] No, sir.
MRS WHITEFIELD [placidly] Well, then, why suppose it?
ANN. You see, Granny, Mamma would not like me to suppose it.
RAMSDEN [much perplexed] You are both so full of natural and
affectionate feeling in these family matters that it is very
hard to put the situation fairly before you.
TANNER. Besides, my friend, you are not putting the situation fairly
before them.
RAMSDEN [sulkily] Put it yourself, then.
TANNER. I will. Ann: Ramsden thinks I am not fit to be your
guardian; and I quite agree with him. He considers that if your
father had read my book, he wouldnt have appointed me. That book
is the disgraceful action he has been talking about. He thinks
it's your duty for Rhoda's sake to ask him to act alone and to
make me withdraw. Say the word; and I will.
ANN. But I havnt read your book, Jack.
TANNER [diving at the waste-paper basket and fishing the book out
for her] Then read it at once and decide.
RAMSDEN [vehemently] If I am to be your guardian, I positively
forbid you to read that book, Annie. [He smites the table with
his fist and rises].
ANN. Of course not if you dont wish it. [She puts the book on the
table].
TANNER. If one guardian is to forbid you to read the other
guardian's book, how are we to settle it? Suppose I order you to
read it! What about your duty to me?
ANN [gently] I am sure you would never purposely force me into a
painful dilemma, Jack.
RAMSDEN [irritably] Yes, yes, Annie: this is all very well, and, as
I said, quite natural and becoming. But you must make a choice
one way or the other. We are as much in a dilemma as you.
ANN. I feel that I am too young, too inexperienced, to decide. My
father's wishes are sacred to me.
MRS WHITEFIELD. If you two men wont carry them out I must say it is
rather hard that you should put the responsibility on Ann. It
seems to me that people are always putting things on other
people in this world.
RAMSDEN. I am sorry you take it in that way.
ANN [touchingly] Do you refuse to accept me as your ward, Granny?
RAMSDEN. No: I never said that. I greatly object to act with Mr
Tanner: thats all.
MRS WHITEFIELD. Why? Whats the matter with poor Jack?
TANNER. My views are too advanced for him.
RAMSDEN [indignantly] They are not. I deny it.
ANN. Of course not. What nonsense! Nobody is more advanced than
Granny. I am sure it is Jack himself who has made all the
difficulty. Come Jack! be kind to me in my sorrow. You dont
refuse to accept me as your ward, do you?
TANNER [gloomily] No. I let myself in for it; so I suppose I must
face it. [He turns away to the bookcase, and stands there,
moodily studying the titles of the volumes].
ANN [rising and expanding with subdued but gushing delight] Then we
are all agreed; and my dear father's will is to be carried out.
You dont know what a joy that is to me and to my mother! [She
goes to Ramsden and presses both his hands, saying] And I shall
have my dear Granny to help and advise me. [She casts a glance
at Tanner over her shoulder]. And Jack the Giant Killer. [She
goes past her mother to Octavius]. And Jack's inseparable friend
Ricky-ticky-tavy [he blushes and looks inexpressibly foolish].
MRS WHITEFIELD [rising and shaking her widow's weeds straight] Now
that you are Ann's guardian, Mr Ramsden, I wish you would speak
to her about her habit of giving people nicknames. They cant be
expected to like it. [She moves towards the door].
ANN. How can you say such a thing, Mamma! [Glowing with affectionate
remorse] Oh, I wonder can you be right! Have I been
inconsiderate! [She turns to Octavius, who is sitting astride
his chair with his elbows on the back of it. Putting her hand on
his forehead she turns his face up suddenly]. Do you want to be
treated like a grown-up man? Must I call you Mr Robinson in
future?
OCTAVIUS [earnestly] Oh please call me Ricky-ticky-tavy. "Mr
Robinson" would hurt me cruelly. [She laughs and pats his cheek
with her finger; then comes back to Ramsden]. You know I'm
beginning to think that Granny is rather a piece of
impertinence. But I never dreamt of its hurting you.
RAMSDEN [breezily, as he pats her affectionately on the back] My
dear Annie, nonsense. I insist on Granny. I wont answer to any
other name than Annie's Granny.
ANN [gratefully] You all spoil me, except Jack.
TANNER [over his shoulder, from the bookcase] I think you ought to
call me Mr Tanner.
ANN [gently] No you dont, Jack. Thats like the things you say on
purpose to shock people: those who know you pay no attention to
them. But, if you like, I'll call you after your famous ancestor
Don Juan.
RAMSDEN. Don Juan!
ANN [innocently] Oh, is there any harm in it? I didnt know. Then I
certainly wont call you that. May I call you Jack until I can
think of something else?
TANNER. Oh, for Heaven's sake dont try to invent anything worse. I
capitulate. I consent to Jack. I embrace Jack. Here endeth my
first and last attempt to assert my authority.
ANN. You see, Mamma, they all really like to have pet names.
MRS WHITEFIELD. Well, I think you might at least drop them until we
are out of mourning.
ANN [reproachfully, stricken to the soul] Oh, how could you remind
me, mother? [She hastily leaves the room to conceal her
emotion].
MRS WHITEFIELD. Of course. My fault as usual! [She follows Ann].
TANNER [coming from the bookcase] Ramsden: we're beaten- smashed-
nonentitized, like her mother.
RAMSDEN. Stuff, sir. [He follows Mrs Whitefield out of the room].
TANNER [left alone with Octavius, stares whimsically at him] Tavy:
do you want to count for something in the world?
OCTAVIUS. I want to count for something as a poet: I want to write
a great play.
TANNER. With Ann as the heroine?
OCTAVIUS. Yes: I confess it.
TANNER. Take care, Tavy. The play with Ann as the heroine is all
right; but if youre not very careful, by heaven she'll marry
you.
OCTAVIUS [sighing] No such luck, Jack!
TANNER. Why, man, your head is in the lioness's mouth: you are half
swallowed already- in three bites- Bite One, Ricky; Bite Two,
Ticky; Bite Three, Tavy; and down you go.
OCTAVIUS. She is the same to everybody, Jack: you know her ways.
TANNER. Yes: she breaks everybody's back with the stroke of her paw;
but the question is, which of us will she eat? My own opinion is
that she means to eat you.
OCTAVIUS [rising, pettishly] It's horrible to talk like that about
her when she is upstairs crying for her father. But I do so want
her to eat me that I can bear your brutalities because they give
me hope.
TANNER. Tavy: thats the devilish side of a woman's fascination: she
makes you will your own destruction.
OCTAVIUS. But it's not destruction: it's fulfilment.
TANNER. Yes, of her purpose; and that purpose is neither her
happiness nor yours, but Nature's. Vitality in a woman is a
blind fury of creation. She sacrifices herself to it: do you
think she will hesitate to sacrifice you?
OCTAVIUS. Why, it is just because she is self-sacrificing that she
will not sacrifice those she loves.
TANNER. That is the profoundest of mistakes, Tavy. It is the
self-sacrificing women that sacrifice others most recklessly.
Because they are unselfish, they are kind in little things.
Because they have a purpose which is not their own purpose, but
that of the whole universe, a man is nothing to them but an
instrument of that purpose.
OCTAVIUS. Dont be ungenerous, Jack. They take the tenderest care of
us.
TANNER. Yes |
|
