________________________________________________
_ CLEOPATRA'S CURE FOR BALDNESS
For the sake of conciseness in a hurried situation I have made
Cleopatra recommend rum. This, I am afraid, is an anachronism:
the only real one in the play. To balance it, I give a couple of
the remedies she actually believed in. They are quoted by Galen
from Cleopatra's book on Cosmetic.
"For bald patches, powder red sulphuret of arsenic and take it up
with oak gum, as much as it will bear. Put on a rag and apply,
having soaped the place well first. I have mixed the above with a
foam of nitre, and it worked well."
Several other receipts follow, ending with: "The following is the
best of all, acting for fallen hairs, when applied with oil or
pomatum; acts also for falling off of eyelashes or for people
getting bald all over. It is wonderful. Of domestic mice burnt,
one part; of vine rag burnt, one part; of horse's teeth burnt,
one part; of bear's grease one; of deer's marrow one; of reed
bark one. To be pounded when dry, and mixed with plenty of honey
til it gets the consistency of honey; then the bear's grease and
marrow to be mixed (when melted), the medicine to be put in a
brass flask, and the bald part rubbed til it sprouts."
Concerning these ingredients, my fellow-dramatist, Gilbert
Murray, who, as a Professor of Greek, has applied to classical
antiquity the methods of high scholarship (my own method is pure
divination), writes to me as follows: " Some of this I don't
understand, and possibly Galen did not, as he quotes your
heroine's own language. Foam of nitre is, I think, something like
soapsuds. Reed bark is an odd expression. It might mean the
outside membrane of a reed: I do not know what it ought to be
called. In the burnt mice receipt I take that you first mixed the
solid powders with honey, and then added the grease. I expect
Cleopatra preferred it because in most of the others you have to
lacerate the skin, prick it, or rub it till it bleeds. I do not
know what vine rag is. I translate literally."
APPARENT ANACHRONISMS
The only way to write a play which shall convey to the general
public an impression of antiquity is to make the characters speak
blank verse and abstain from reference to steam, telegraphy, or
any of the material conditions of their existence. The more
ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little
parish and their little chapel is an apex which civilization and
philosophy have painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a
desert of savagery. Savagery, they think, became barbarism;
barbarism became ancient civilization; ancient civilization
became Pauline Christianity; Pauline Christianity became Roman
Catholicism; Roman Catholicism became the Dark Ages; and the Dark
Ages were finally enlightened by the Protestant instincts of the
English race. The whole process is summed up as Progress with a
capital P. And any elderly gentleman of Progressive temperament
will testify that the improvement since he was a boy is enormous.
Now if we count the generations of Progressive elderly gentlemen
since, say, Plato, and add together the successive enormous
improvements to which each of them has testified, it will strike
us at once as an unaccountable fact that the world, instead of
having been improved in 67 generations out all recognition,
presents, on the whole, a rather less dignified appearance in
Ibsen's Enemy of the People than in Plato's Republic. And in
truth, the period of time covered by history is far too short to
allow of any perceptible progress in the popular sense of
Evolution of the Human Species. The notion that there has been
any such Progress since Caesar's time (less than 20 centuries) is
too absurd for discussion. All the savagery, barbarism, dark ages
and the rest of it of which we have any record as existing in the
past, exists at the present moment. A British carpenter or
stonemason may point out that he gets twice as much money for his
labor as his father did in the same trade, and that his suburban
house, with its bath, its cottage piano, its drawingroom suite,
and its album of photographs, would have shamed the plainness of
his grandmother's. But the descendants of feudal barons, living
in squalid lodgings on a salary of fifteen shillings a week
instead of in castles on princely revenues, do not congratulate
the world on the change. Such changes, in fact, are not to the
point. It has been known, as far back as our records go, that man
running wild in the woods is different to man kennelled in a city
slum; that a dog seems to understand a shepherd better than a
hewer of wood and drawer of water can understand an astronomer;
and that breeding, gentle nurture and luxurious food and shelter
will produce a kind of man with whom the common laborer is
socially incompatible. The same thing is true of horses and dogs.
Now there is clearly room for great changes in the world by
increasing the percentage of individuals who are carefully bred
and gently nurtured even to finally making the most of every man
and woman born. But that possibility existed in the days of the
Hittites as much as it does to-day. It does not give the
slightest real support to the common assumption that the
civilized contemporaries of the Hittites were unlike their
civilized descendants to-day.
This would appear the truest commonplace if it were not that the
ordinary citizen's ignorance of the past combines with his
idealization of the present to mislead and flatter him. Our
latest book on the new railway across Asia describes the dulness
of the Siberian farmer and the vulgar pursepride of the Siberian
man of business without the least consciousness that the sting of
contemptuous instances given might have been saved by writing
simply "Farmers and provincial plutocrats in Siberia are exactly
what they are in England." The latest professor descanting on the
civilization of the Western Empire in the fifth century feels
bound to assume, in the teeth of his own researches, that the
Christian was one sort of animal and the Pagan another. It might
as well be assumed, as indeed it generally is assumed by
implication, that a murder committed with a poisoned arrow is
different to a murder committed with a Mauser rifle. All such
notions are illusions. Go back to the first syllable of recorded
time, and there you will find your Christian and your Pagan, your
yokel and your poet, helot and hero, Don Quixote and Sancho,
Tamino and Papageno, Newton and bushman unable to count eleven,
all alive and contemporaneous, and all convinced that they are
heirs of all the ages and the privileged recipients of THE truth
(all others damnable heresies), just as you have them to-day,
flourishing in countries each of which is the bravest and best
that ever sprang at Heaven's command from out of the azure main.
Again, there is the illusion of "increased command over Nature,"
meaning that cotton is cheap and that ten miles of country road
on a bicycle have replaced four on foot. But even if man's
increased command over Nature included any increased command over
himself (the only sort of command relevant to his evolution into
a higher being), the fact remains that it is only by running away
from the increased command over Nature to country places where
Nature is still in primitive command over Man that he can recover
from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the
overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the cheap
cotton costs us. If manufacturing activity means Progress, the
town must be more advanced than the country; and the field
laborers and village artizans of to-day must be much less changed
from the servants of Job than the proletariat of modern London
from the proletariat of Caesar's Rome. Yet the cockney
proletarian is so inferior to the village laborer that it is only
by steady recruiting from the country that London is kept alive.
This does not seem as if the change since Job's time were
Progress in the popular sense: quite the reverse. The common
stock of discoveries in physics has accumulated a little: that is
all.
One more illustration. Is the Englishman prepared to admit that
the American is his superior as a human being? I ask this
question because the scarcity of labor in America relatively to
the demand for it has led to a development of machinery there,
and a consequent "increase of command over Nature" which makes
many of our English methods appear almost medieval to the
up-to-date Chicagoan. This means that the American has an
advantage over the Englishman of exactly the same nature that the
Englishman has over the contemporaries of Cicero. Is the
Englishman prepared to draw the same conclusion in both cases? I
think not. The American, of course, will draw it cheerfully; but
I must then ask him whether, since a modern negro has a greater
"command over Nature" than Washington had, we are also to accept
the conclusion, involved in his former one, that humanity has
progressed from Washington to the fin de siecle negro.
Finally, I would point out that if life is crowned by its success
and devotion in industrial organization and ingenuity, we had
better worship the ant and the bee (as moralists urge us to do in
our childhood), and humble ourselves before the arrogance of the
birds of Aristophanes.
My reason then for ignoring the popular conception of Progress in
Caesar and Cleopatra is that there is no reason to suppose that
any Progress has taken place since their time. But even if I
shared the popular delusion, I do not see that I could have made
any essential difference in the play. I can only imitate humanity
as I know it. Nobody knows whether Shakespear thought that
ancient Athenian joiners, weavers, or bellows menders were any
different from Elizabethan ones; but it is quite certain that one
could not have made them so, unless, indeed, he had played the
literary man and made Quince say, not "Is all our company here?"
but "Bottom: was not that Socrates that passed us at the Piraeus
with Glaucon and Polemarchus on his way to the house of
Kephalus." And so on.
CLEOPATRA
Cleopatra was only sixteen when Caesar went to Egypt; but in
Egypt sixteen is a riper age than it is in England. The
childishness I have ascribed to her, as far as it is childishness
of character and not lack of experience, is not a matter of
years. It may be observed in our own climate at the present day
in many women of fifty. It is a mistake to suppose that the
difference between wisdom and folly has anything to do with the
difference between physical age and physical youth. Some women
are younger at seventy than most women at seventeen.
It must be borne in mind, too, that Cleopatra was a queen, and
was therefore not the typical Greek-cultured, educated Eyptian
lady of her time. To represent her by any such type would be as
absurd as to represent George IV by a type founded on the
attainments of Sir Isaac Newton. It is true that an ordinarily
well educated Alexandrian girl of her time would no more have
believed bogey stories about the Romans than the daughter of a
modern Oxford professor would believe them about the Germans
(though, by the way, it is possible to talk great nonsense at
Oxford about foreigners when we are at war with them). But I do
not feel bound to believe that Cleopatra was well educated. Her
father, the illustrious Flute Blower, was not at all a parent of
the Oxford professor type. And Cleopatra was a chip of the old
block.
BRITANNUS
I find among those who have read this play in manuscript a strong
conviction that an ancient Briton could not possibly have been
like a modern one. I see no reason to adopt this curious view. It
is true that the Roman and Norman conquests must have for a time
disturbed the normal British type produced by the climate. But
Britannus, born before these events, represents the unadulterated
Briton who fought Caesar and impressed Roman observers much as we
should expect the ancestors of Mr. Podsnap to impress the
cultivated Italians of their time.
I am told that it is not scientific to treat national character
as a product of climate. This only shows the wide difference
between common knowledge and the intellectual game called
science. We have men of exactly the same stock, and speaking the
same language, growing in Great Britain, in Ireland, and in
America. The result is three of the most distinctly marked
nationalities under the sun. Racial characteristics are quite
another matter. The difference between a Jew and a Gentile has
nothing to do with the difference between an Englishman and a
German. The characteristics of Britannus are local
characteristics, not race characteristics. In an ancient Briton
they would, I take it, be exaggerated, since modern Britain,
disforested, drained, urbanified and consequently cosmopolized,
is presumably less characteristically British than Caesar's
Britain.
And again I ask does anyone who, in the light of a competent
knowledge of his own age, has studied history from contemporary
documents, believe that 67 generations of promiscuous marriage
have made any appreciable difference in the human fauna of these
isles? Certainly I do not.
JULIUS CAESAR
As to Caesar himself, I have purposely avoided the usual
anachronism of going to Caesar's books, and concluding that the
style is the man. That is only true of authors who have the
specific literary genius, and have practised long enough to
attain complete self-expression in letters. It is not true even
on these conditions in an age when literature is conceived
as a game of style, and not as a vehicle of self-expression by
the author. Now Caesar was an amateur stylist writing books of
travel and campaign histories in a style so impersonal that
the authenticity of the later volumes is disputed. They reveal
some of his qualities just as the Voyage of a Naturalist Round
the World reveals some of Darwin's, without expressing his
private personality. An Englishman reading them would say that
Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning
thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
In exhibiting Caesar as a much more various person than the
historian of the Gallic wars, I hope I have not succumbed
unconsciously to the dramatic illusion to which all great men owe
part of their reputation and some the whole of it. I admit that
reputations gained in war are specially questionable. Able
civilians taking up the profession of arms, like Caesar and
Cromwell, in middle age, have snatched all its laurels from
opponent commanders bred to it, apparently because capable
persons engaged in military pursuits are so scarce that the
existence of two of them at the same time in the same hemisphere
is extremely rare. The capacity of any conqueror is therefore
more likely than not to be an illusion produced by the incapacity
of his adversary. At all events, Caesar might have won his
battles without being wiser than Charles XII or Nelson or Joan of
Arc, who were, like most modern "self-made" millionaires,
half-witted geniuses, enjoying the worship accorded by all races
to certain forms of insanity. But Caesar's victories were only
advertisements for an eminence that would never have become
popular without them. Caesar is greater off the battle field than
on it. Nelson off his quarterdeck was so quaintly out of the
question that when his head was injured at the battle of the
Nile, and his conduct became for some years openly scandalous,
the difference was not important enough to be noticed. It may,
however, be said that peace hath her illusory reputations no less
than war. And it is certainly true that in civil life mere
capacity for work--the power of killing a dozen secretaries under
you, so to speak, as a life-or-death courier kills horses--
enables men with common ideas and superstitions to distance all
competitors in the strife of political ambition. It was this
power of work that astonished Cicero as the most prodigious of
Caesar's gifts, as it astonished later observers in Napoleon
before it wore him out. How if Caesar were nothing but a Nelson
and a Gladstone combined! A prodigy of vitality without any
special quality of mind! Nay, with ideas that were worn out
before he was born, as Nelson's and Gladstone's were! I have
considered that possibility too, and rejected it. I cannot cite
all the stories about Caesar which seem to me to show that he was
genuinely original; but let me at least point out that I have
been careful to attribute nothing but originality to him.
Originality gives a man an air of frankness, generosity, and
magnanimity by enabling him to estimate the value of truth,
money, or success in any particular instance quite independently
of convention and moral generalization. He therefore will not, in
the ordinary Treasury bench fashion, tell a lie which everybody
knows to be a lie (and consequently expects him as a matter of
good taste to tell). His lies are not found out: they pass for
candors. He understands the paradox of money, and gives it away
when he can get most for it: in other words, when its value is
least, which is just when a common man tries hardest to get it.
He knows that the real moment of success is not the moment
apparent to the crowd. Hence, in order to produce an impression
of complete disinterestedness and magnanimity, he has only to act
with entire selfishness; and this is perhaps the only sense in
which a man can be said to be naturally great. It is in this
sense that I have represented Caesar as great. Having virtue, he
has no need of goodness. He is neither forgiving, frank, nor
generous, because a man who is too great to resent has nothing to
forgive; a man who says things that other people are afraid to
say need be no more frank than Bismarck was; and there is no
generosity in giving things you do not want to people of whom you
intend to make use. This distinction between virtue and goodness
is not understood in England: hence the poverty of our drama in
heroes. Our stage attempts at them are mere goody-goodies.
Goodness, in its popular British sense of self-denial, implies
that man is vicious by nature, and that supreme goodness is
supreme martyrdom. Not sharing that pious opinion, I have not
given countenance to it in any of my plays. In this I follow the
precedent of the ancient myths, which represent the hero as
vanquishing his enemies, not in fair fight, but with enchanted
sword, superequine horse and magical invulnerability, the
possession of which, from the vulgar moralistic point of view,
robs his exploits of any merit whatever.
As to Caesar's sense of humor, there is no more reason to assume
that he lacked it than to assume that he was deaf or blind. It is
said that on the occasion of his assassination by a conspiracy of
moralists (it is always your moralist who makes assassination a
duty, on the scaffold or off it), he defended himself until the
good Brutes struck him, when he exclaimed "What! you too,
Brutes!" and disdained further fight. If this be true, he must
have been an incorrigible comedian. But even if we waive this
story, or accept the traditional sentimental interpretation of
it, there is still abundant evidence of his lightheartedness and
adventurousness. Indeed it is clear from his whole history that
what has been called his ambition was an instinct for
exploration. He had much more of Columbus and Franklin in him
than of Henry V.
However, nobody need deny Caesar a share, at least, of the
qualities I have attributed to him. All men, much more Julius
Caesars, possess all qualities in some degree. The really
interesting question is whether I am right in assuming that the
way to produce an impression of greatness is by exhibiting a man,
not as mortifying his nature by doing his duty, in the manner
which our system of putting little men into great positions (not
having enough great men in our influential families to go round)
forces us to inculcate, but by simply doing what he naturally
wants to do. For this raises the question whether our world has
not been wrong in its moral theory for the last 2,500 years or
so. It must be a constant puzzle to many of us that the Christian
era, so excellent in its intentions, should have been practically
such a very discreditable episode in the history of the race. I
doubt if this is altogether due to the vulgar and sanguinary
sensationalism of our religious legends, with their substitution
of gross physical torments and public executions for the passion
of humanity. Islam, substituting voluptuousness for torment (a
merely superficial difference, it is true) has done no better. It
may have been the failure of Christianity to emancipate itself
from expiatory theories of moral responsibility, guilt,
innocence, reward, punishment, and the rest of it, that baffled
its intention of changing the world. But these are bound up in
all philosophies of creation as opposed to cosmism. They may
therefore be regarded as the price we pay for popular religion.
-The End-
"Caesar and Cleopatra", by George Bernard Shaw. _
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