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_ 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, made an epoch
in the criticism of the theatre and the opera house by making it
a 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. Yon 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 e tre 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 don't 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 farce 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 to-morrow 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 of masters, Mozart, who reveals 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 greater poet than
Wordsworth just as it made Peter a greater 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 X 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 Schopenhaur 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. To-day 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 simple 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 empires the determination 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 Englishman 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 blandishment, like Rosalind, or by
stratagem, like Mariana; but in every case the relation between
the woman and the man is the same: she is the pursuer and
contriver, he the pursued and disposed of. When she is baffled,
like Ophelia, she goes mad and commits suicide; and the man goes
straight from her funeral to a fencing match. No doubt Nature,
with very young creatures, may save the woman the trouble of
scheming: Prospero knows that he has only to throw Ferdinand and
Miranda together and they will mate like a pair of doves; and
there is no need for Perdita to capture Florizel as the lady
doctor in All's Well That Ends Well (an early Ibsenite heroine)
captures Bertram. But the mature cases all illustrate the
Shakespearian law. The one apparent exception, Petruchio, is not
a real one: he is most carefully characterized as a purely
commercial matrimonial adventurer. Once he is assured that
Katharine has money, he undertakes to marry her before he has
seen her. In real life we find not only Petruchios, but
Mantalinis and Dobbins who pursue women with appeals to their
pity or jealousy or vanity, or cling to them in a romantically
infatuated way. Such effeminates do not count in the world
scheme: even Bunsby dropping like a fascinated bird into the jaws
of Mrs MacStinger is by comparison a true tragic object of pity
and terror. I find in my own plays that Woman, projecting herself
dramatically by my hands (a process over which I assure you I
have no more real control than I have over my wife), behaves just
as Woman did in the plays of Shakespear.
And so your Don Juan has come to birth as a stage projection of
the tragi-comic love chase of the man by the woman; and my Don
Juan is the quarry instead of the huntsman. Yet he is a true Don
Juan, with a sense of reality that disables convention, defying
to the last the fate which finally overtakes him. The woman's
need of him to enable her to carry on Nature's most urgent work,
does not prevail against him until his resistance gathers her
energy to a climax at which she dares to throw away her customary
exploitations of the conventional affectionate and dutiful poses,
and claim him by natural right for a purpose that far transcends
their mortal personal purposes.
Among the friends to whom I have read this play in manuscript are
some of our own sex who are shocked at the "unscrupulousness,"
meaning the total disregard of masculine fastidiousness, with
which the woman pursues her purpose. It does not occur to them
that if women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically,
there would be an end of the race. Is there anything meaner
then to throw necessary work upon other people and then disparage
it as unworthy and indelicate. We laugh at the haughty American
nation because it makes the negro clean its boots and then proves
the moral and physical inferiority of the negro by the fact that
he is a shoeblack; but we ourselves throw the whole drudgery of
creation on one sex, and then imply that no female of any
womanliness or delicacy would initiate any effort in that
direction. There are no limits to male hypocrisy in this matter.
No doubt there are moments when man's sexual immunities are made
acutely humiliating to him. When the terrible moment of birth
arrives, its supreme importance and its superhuman effort and
peril, in which the father has no part, dwarf him into the
meanest insignificance: he slinks out of the way of the humblest
petticoat, happy if he be poor enough to be pushed out of the
house to outface his ignominy by drunken rejoicings. But when the
crisis is over he takes his revenge, swaggering as the
breadwinner, and speaking of Woman's "sphere" with condescension,
even with chivalry, as if the kitchen and the nursery were less
important than the office in the city. When his swagger is
exhausted he drivels into erotic poetry or sentimental
uxoriousness; and the Tennysonian King Arthur posing as Guinevere
becomes Don Quixote grovelling before Dulcinea. You must admit
that here Nature beats Comedy out of the field: the wildest
hominist or feminist farce is insipid after the most commonplace
"slice of life." The pretence that women do not take the
initiative is part of the farce. Why, the whole world is strewn
with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by
women. Give women the vote, and in five years there will be a
crushing tax on bachelors. Men, on the other hand, attach
penalties to marriage, depriving women of property, of the
franchise, of the free use of their limbs, of that ancient symbol
of immortality, the right to make oneself at home in the house of
God by taking off the hat, of everything that he can force Woman
to dispense with without compelling himself to dispense with her.
All in vain. Woman must marry because the race must perish
without her travail: if the risk of death and the certainty of
pain, danger and unutterable discomforts cannot deter her,
slavery and swaddled ankles will not. And yet we assume that the
force that carries women through all these perils and hardships,
stops abashed before the primnesses of our behavior for young
ladies. It is assumed that the woman must wait, motionless, until
she is wooed. Nay, she often does wait motionless. That is how
the spider waits for the fly. But the spider spins her web. And
if the fly, like my hero, shows a strength that promises to
extricate him, how swiftly does she abandon her pretence of
passiveness, and openly fling coil after coil about him until he
is secured for ever!
If the really impressive books and other art-works of the world
were produced by ordinary men, they would express more fear of
women's pursuit than love of their illusory beauty. But ordinary
men cannot produce really impressive art-works. Those who can are
men of genius: that is, men selected by Nature to carry on the
work of building up an intellectual consciousness of her own
instinctive purpose. Accordingly, we observe in the man of genius
all the unscrupulousness and all the "self-sacrifice" (the two
things are the same) of Woman. He will risk the stake and the
cross; starve, when necessary, in a garret all his life; study
women and live on their work and care as Darwin studied worms and
lived upon sheep; work his nerves into rags without payment, a
sublime altruist in his disregard of himself, an atrocious
egotist in his disregard of others. Here Woman meets a purpose as
impersonal, as irresistible as her own; and the clash is
sometimes tragic. When it is complicated by the genius being a
woman, then the game is one for a king of critics: your George
Sand becomes a mother to gain experience for the novelist and to
develop her, and gobbles up men of genius, Chopins, Mussets and
the like, as mere hors d'oeuvres.
I state the extreme case, of course; but what is true of the
great man who incarnates the philosophic consciousness of Life
and the woman who incarnates its fecundity, is true in some
degree of all geniuses and all women. Hence it is that the
world's books get written, its pictures painted, its statues
modelled, its symphonies composed, by people who are free of the
otherwise universal dominion of the tyranny of sex. Which leads
us to the conclusion, astonishing to the vulgar, that art,
instead of being before all things the expression of the normal
sexual situation, is really the only department in which sex is a
superseded and secondary power, with its consciousness so
confused and its purpose so perverted, that its ideas are mere
fantasy to common men. Whether the artist becomes poet or
philosopher, moralist or founder of a religion, his sexual
doctrine is nothing but a barren special pleading for pleasure,
excitement, and knowledge when he is young, and for contemplative
tranquillity when he is old and satiated. Romance and Asceticism,
Amorism and Puritanism are equally unreal in the great Philistine
world. The world shown us in books, whether the books be
confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in
political orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main
world at all: it is only the self-consciousness of certain
abnormal people who have the specific artistic talent and
temperament. A serious matter this for you and me, because the
man whose consciousness does not correspond to that of the
majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is
giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we
call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the
substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life,
of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real, education,
as you no doubt observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation,
every mind that is not strong enough to see through the imposture
and to use the great Masters of Arts as what they really are and
no more: that is, patentees of highly questionable methods of
thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the
majority but half valid representations of life. The schoolboy
who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head makes perhaps
the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe with
reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime,
with your Aristotle.
Fortunately for us, whose minds have been so overwhelmingly
sophisticated by literature, what produces all these treatises
and poems and scriptures of one sort or another is the struggle
of Life to become divinely conscious of itself instead of blindly
stumbling hither and thither in the line of least resistance.
Hence there is a driving towards truth in all books on matters
where the writer, though exceptionally gifted is normally
constituted, and has no private axe to grind. Copernicus had no
motive for misleading his fellowmen as to the place of the sun in
the solar system: he looked for it as honestly as a shepherd
seeks his path in a mist. But Copernicus would not have written
love stories scientifically. When it comes to sex relations, the
man of genius does not share the common man's danger of capture,
nor the woman of genius the common woman's overwhelming
specialization. And that is why our scriptures and other art
works, when they deal with love, turn from honest attempts at
science in physics to romantic nonsense, erotic ecstasy, or the
stern asceticism of satiety ("the road of excess leads to the
palace of wisdom" said William Blake; for "you never know what is
enough unless you know what is more than enough").
There is a political aspect of this sex question which is too big
for my comedy, and too momentous to be passed over without
culpable frivolity. It is impossible to demonstrate that the
initiative in sex transactions remains with Woman, and has been
confirmed to her, so far, more and more by the suppression of
rapine and discouragement of importunity, without being driven to
very serious reflections on the fact that this initiative is
politically the most important of all the initiatives, because
our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap
misgovernment, will ruin us if our citizens are ill bred.
When we two were born, this country was still dominated by a
selected class bred by political marriages. The commercial class
had not then completed the first twenty-five years of its new
share of political power; and it was itself selected by money
qualification, and bred, if not by political marriage, at least
by a pretty rigorous class marriage. Aristocracy and plutocracy
still furnish the figureheads of politics; but they are now
dependent on the votes of the promiscuously bred masses. And
this, if you please, at the very moment when the political
problem, having suddenly ceased to mean a very limited and
occasional interference, mostly by way of jobbing public
appointments, in the mismanagement of a tight but parochial
little island, with occasional meaningless prosecution of
dynastic wars, has become the industrial reorganization of
Britain, the construction of a practically international
Commonwealth, and the partition of the whole of Africa and
perhaps the whole of Asia by the civilized Powers. Can you
believe that the people whose conceptions of society and conduct,
whose power of attention and scope of interest, are measured by
the British theatre as you know it to-day, can either handle this
colossal task themselves, or understand and support the sort of
mind and character that is (at least comparatively) capable of
handling it? For remember: what our voters are in the pit and
gallery they are also in the polling booth. We are all now under
what Burke called "the hoofs of the swinish multitude." Burke's
language gave great offence because the implied exceptions to its
universal application made it a class insult; and it certainly
was not for the pot to call the kettle black. The aristocracy he
defended, in spite of the political marriages by which it tried
to secure breeding for itself, had its mind undertrained by silly
schoolmasters and governesses, its character corrupted by
gratuitous luxury, its self-respect adulterated to complete
spuriousness by flattery and flunkeyism. It is no better to-day
and never will be any better: our very peasants have something
morally hardier in them that culminates occasionally in a Bunyan,
a Burns, or a Carlyle. But observe, this aristocracy, which was
overpowered from 1832 to 1885 by the middle class, has come back
to power by the votes of "the swinish multitude." Tom Paine has
triumphed over Edmund Burke; and the swine are now courted
electors. How many of their own class have these electors sent to
parliament? Hardly a dozen out of 670, and these only under the
persuasion of conspicuous personal qualifications and popular
eloquence. The multitude thus pronounces judgment on its own
units: it admits itself unfit to govern, and will vote only for a
man morphologically and generically transfigured by palatial
residence and equipage, by transcendent tailoring, by the glamor
of aristocratic kinship. Well, we two know these transfigured
persons, these college passmen, these well groomed monocular
Algys and Bobbies, these cricketers to whom age brings golf
instead of wisdom, these plutocratic products of "the nail and
sarspan business as he got his money by." Do you know whether to
laugh or cry at the notion that they, poor devils! will drive a
team of continents as they drive a four-in-hand; turn a jostling
anarchy of casual trade and speculation into an ordered
productivity; and federate our colonies into a world-Power of the
first magnitude? Give these people the most perfect political
constitution and the soundest political program that benevolent
omniscience can devise for them, and they will interpret it into
mere fashionable folly or canting charity as infallibly as a
savage converts the philosophical theology of a Scotch missionary
into crude African idolatry.
I do not know whether you have any illusions left on the subject
of education, progress, and so forth. I have none. Any
pamphleteer can show the way to better things; but when there is
no will there is no way. My nurse was fond of remarking that you
cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and the more I see
of the efforts of our churches and universities and literary
sages to raise the mass above its own level, the more convinced I
am that my nurse was right. Progress can do nothing but make the
most of us all as we are, and that most would clearly not be
enough even if those who are already raised out of the lowest
abysses would allow the others a chance. The bubble of Heredity
has been pricked: the certainty that acquirements are negligible
as elements in practical heredity has demolished the hopes of the
educationists as well as the terrors of the degeneracy mongers;
and we know now that there is no hereditary "governing class" any
more than a hereditary hooliganism. We must either breed
political capacity or be ruined by Democracy, which was forced on
us by the failure of the older alternatives. Yet if Despotism
failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance
has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable
voters: that is, of political critics who, if they cannot govern
in person for lack of spare energy or specific talent for
administration, can at least recognize and appreciate capacity
and benevolence in others, and so govern through capably
benevolent representatives? Where are such voters to be found
to-day? Nowhere. Promiscuous breeding has produced a weakness of
character that is too timid to face the full stringency of a
thoroughly competitive struggle for existence and too lazy and
petty to organize the commonwealth co-operatively. Being cowards,
we defeat natural selection under cover of philanthropy: being
sluggards, we neglect artificial selection under cover of
delicacy and morality.
Yet we must get an electorate of capable critics or collapse as
Rome and Egypt collapsed. At this moment the Roman decadent phase
of panem et circenses is being inaugurated under our eyes. Our
newspapers and melodramas are blustering about our imperial
destiny; but our eyes and hearts turn eagerly to the American
millionaire. As his hand goes down to his pocket, our fingers go
up to the brims of our hats by instinct. Our ideal prosperity is
not the prosperity of the industrial north, but the prosperity of
the Isle of Wight, of Folkestone and Ramsgate, of Nice and Monte
Carlo. That is the only prosperity you see on the stage, where
the workers are all footmen, parlourmaids, comic lodging-letters
and fashionable professional men, whilst the heroes and heroines
are miraculously provided with unlimited dividends, and eat
gratuitously, like the knights in Don Quixote's books of
chivalry.
The city papers prate of the competition of Bombay with
Manchester and the like. The real competition is the competition
of Regent Street with the Rue de Rivoli, of Brighton and the
south coast with the Riviera, for the spending money of the
American Trusts. What is all this growing love of pageantry, this
effusive loyalty, this officious rising and uncovering at a wave
from a flag or a blast from a brass band? Imperialism: Not a bit
of it. Obsequiousness, servility, cupidity roused by the
prevailing smell of money. When Mr Carnegie rattled his millions
in his pockets all England became one rapacious cringe. Only,
when Rhodes (who had probably been reading my Socialism for
Millionaires) left word that no idler was to inherit his estate,
the bent backs straightened mistrustfully for a moment. Could it
be that the Diamond King was no gentleman after all? However, it
was easy to ignore a rich man's solecism. The ungentlemanly
clause was not mentioned again; and the backs soon bowed
themselves back into their natural shape.
But I hear you asking me in alarm whether I have actually put all
this tub thumping into a Don Juan comedy. I have not. I have only
made my Don Juan a political pamphleteer, and given you his
pamphlet in full by way of appendix. You will find it at the end
of the book. I am sorry to say that it is a common practice with
romancers to announce their hero as a man of extraordinary
genius, and to leave his works entirely to the reader's
imagination; so that at the end of the book you whisper to
yourself ruefully that but for the author's solemn preliminary
assurance you should hardly have given the gentleman credit for
ordinary good sense. You cannot accuse me of this pitiable
barrenness, this feeble evasion. I not only tell you that my hero
wrote a revolutionists' handbook: I give you the handbook at full
length for your edification if you care to read it. And in that
handbook you will find the politics of the sex question as I
conceive Don Juan's descendant to understand them. Not that I
disclaim the fullest responsibility for his opinions and for
those of all my characters, pleasant and unpleasant. They are all
right from their several points of view; and their points of view
are, for the dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle the
people who believe that there is such a thing as an absolutely
right point of view, usually their own. It may seem to them that
nobody who doubts this can be in a state of grace. However that
may be, it is certainly true that nobody who agrees with them can
possibly be a dramatist, or indeed anything else that turns upon
a knowledge of mankind. Hence it has been pointed out that
Shakespear had no conscience. Neither have I, in that sense.
You may, however, remind me that this digression of mine into
politics was preceded by a very convincing demonstration that the
artist never catches the point of view of the common man on the
question of sex, because he is not in the same predicament. I
first prove that anything I write on the relation of the sexes is
sure to be misleading; and then I proceed to write a Don Juan
play. Well, if you insist on asking me why I behave in this
absurd way, I can only reply that you asked me to, and that in
any case my treatment of the subject may be valid for the artist,
amusing to the amateur, and at least intelligible and therefore
possibly suggestive to the Philistine. Every man who records his
illusions is providing data for the genuinely scientific
psychology which the world still waits for. I plank down my view
of the existing relations of men to women in the most highly
civilized society for what it is worth. It is a view like any
other view and no more, neither true nor false, but, I hope, a
way of looking at the subject which throws into the familiar
order of cause and effect a sufficient body of fact and
experience to be interesting to you, if not to the play-going
public of London. I have certainly shown little consideration for
that public in this enterprise; but I know that it has the
friendliest disposition towards you and me as far as it has any
consciousness of our existence, and quite understands that what I
write for you must pass at a considerable height over its simple
romantic head. It will take my books as read and my genius for
granted, trusting me to put forth work of such quality as shall
bear out its verdict. So we may disport ourselves on our own
plane to the top of our bent; and if any gentleman points out
that neither this epistle dedicatory nor the dream of Don Juan in
the third act of the ensuing comedy is suitable for immediate
production at a popular theatre we need not contradict him.
Napoleon provided Talma with a pit of kings, with what effect on
Talma's acting is not recorded. As for me, what I have always
wanted is a pit of philosophers; and this is a play for such a
pit.
I should make formal acknowledgment to the authors whom I have
pillaged in the following pages if I could recollect them a11.
The theft of the brigand-poetaster from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is
deliberate; and the metamorphosis of Leporello into Enry Straker,
motor engineer and New Man, is an intentional dramatic sketch for
the contemporary embryo of Mr H. G. Wells's anticipation of the
efficient engineering class which will, he hopes, finally sweep
the jabberers out of the way of civilization. Mr Barrio has also,
whilst I am correcting my proofs, delighted London with a servant
who knows more than his masters. The conception of Mendoza
Limited I trace back to a certain West Indian colonial secretary,
who, at a period when he and I and Mr Sidney Webb were sowing our
political wild oats as a sort of Fabian Three Musketeers, without
any prevision of the surprising respectability of the crop that
followed, recommended Webb, the encyclopedic and inexhaustible,
to form himself into a company for the benefit of the
shareholders. Octavius I take over unaltered from Mozart; and I
hereby authorize any actor who impersonates him, to sing "Dalla
sua pace" (if he can) at any convenient moment during the
representation. Ann was suggested to me by the fifteenth century
Dutch morality called Everyman, which Mr William Poel has lately
resuscitated so triumphantly. I trust he will work that vein
further, and recognize that Elizabethan Renascence fustian is no
more bearable after medieval poesy than Scribe after Ibsen. As I
sat watching Everyman at the Charterhouse, I said to myself Why
not Everywoman? Ann was the result: every woman is not Ann; but
Ann is Everywoman.
That the author of Everyman was no mere artist, but an
artist-philosopher, and that the artist-philosophers are the only
sort of artists I take quite seriously, will be no news to you.
Even Plato and Boswell, as the dramatists who invented Socrates
and Dr Johnson, impress me more deeply than the romantic
playwrights. Ever since, as a boy, I first breathed the air of
the transcendental regions at a performance of Mozart's
Zauberflote, I have been proof against the garish splendors and
alcoholic excitements of the ordinary stage combinations of
Tappertitian romance with the police intelligence. Bunyan, Blake,
Hogarth and Turner (these four apart and above all the English
Classics), Goethe, Shelley, Schopenhaur, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris,
Tolstoy, and Nietzsche are among the writers whose peculiar sense
of the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own. Mark the
word peculiar. I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or
stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life
are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the
contrary, Dickens's sentimental assumptions are violently
contradicted by his observations; and Shakespear's pessimism is
only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the
fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought
in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and shrewder than the
philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and shrewder
than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive
gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a
combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good
humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world
instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they
exploit popular religion for professional purposes without
delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in
Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures
of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite
Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader: they
have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as
dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading
thought or inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk
the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are
alike forced to borrow motives for the more strenuous actions of
their personages from the common stockpot of melodramatic plots;
so that Hamlet has to be stimulated by the prejudices of a
policeman and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens,
without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets
and Macbeths, superfluously punt his crew down the stream of his
monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to
describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest
question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage
of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam
families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois.
The truth is, the world was to Shakespear a great "stage of
fools" on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort
of sense in living at all; and Dickens saved himself from the
despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the world for
granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them
could do anything with a serious positive character: they could
place a human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but
when the moment came for making it live and move, they found,
unless it made them laugh, that they had a puppet on their hands,
and had to invent some artificial external stimulus to make it
work. This is what is the matter with Hamlet all through: he has
no will except in his bursts of temper. Foolish Bardolaters make
a virtue of this after their fashion: they declare that the play
is the tragedy of irresolution; but all Shakespear's projections
of the deepest humanity he knew have the same defect: their
characters and manners are lifelike; but their actions are forced
on them from without, and the external force is grotesquely
inappropriate except when it is quite conventional, as in the
case of Henry V. Falstaff is more vivid than any of these serious
reflective characters, because he is self-acting: his motives are
his own appetites and instincts and humors. Richard III, too, is
delightful as the whimsical comedian who stops a funeral to make
love to the corpse's widow; but when, in the next act, he is
replaced by a stage villain who smothers babies and offs with
people's heads, we are revolted at the imposture and repudiate
the changeling. Faulconbridge, Coriolanus, Leontes are admirable
descriptions of instinctive temperaments: indeed the play of
Coriolanus is the greatest of Shakespear's comedies; but
description is not philosophy; and comedy neither compromises the
author nor reveals him. He must be judged by those characters
into which he puts what he knows of himself, his Hamlets and
Macbeths and Lears and Prosperos. If these characters are
agonizing in a void about factitious melodramatic murders and
revenges and the like, whilst the comic characters walk with
their feet on solid ground, vivid and amusing, you know that the
author has much to show and nothing to teach. The comparison
between Falstaff and Prospero is like the comparison between
Micawber and David Copperfield. At the end of the book you know
Micawber, whereas you only know what has happened to David, and
are not interested enough in him to wonder what his politics or
religion might be if anything so stupendous as a religious or
political idea, or a general idea of any sort, were to occur to
him. He is tolerable as a child; but he never becomes a man, and
might be left out of his own biography altogether but for his
usefulness as a stage confidant, a Horatio or "Charles his
friend" what they call on the stage a feeder.
Now you cannot say this of the works of the artist-philosophers.
You cannot say it, for instance, of The Pilgrim's Progress. Put
your Shakespearian hero and coward, Henry V and Pistol or
Parolles, beside Mr Valiant and Mr Fearing, and you have a sudden
revelation of the abyss that lies between the fashionable author
who could see nothing in the world but personal aims and the
tragedy of their disappointment or the comedy of their
incongruity, and the field preacher who achieved virtue and
courage by identifying himself with the purpose of the world as
he understood it. The contrast is enormous: Bunyan's coward stirs
your blood more than Shakespear's hero, who actually leaves you
cold and secretly hostile. You suddenly see that Shakespear, with
all his flashes and divinations, never understood virtue and
courage, never conceived how any man who was not a fool could,
like Bunyan's hero, look back from the brink of the river of
death over the strife and labor of his pilgrimage, and say "yet
do I not repent me"; or, with the panache of a millionaire,
bequeath "my sword to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage,
and my courage and skill to him that can get it." This is the
true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by
yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before
you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature
instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and
grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to
making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is the
being used by personally minded men for purposes which you
recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or
mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the
revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work to
the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so
willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger,
sentimentalizer and the like.
It may seem a long step from Bunyan to Nietzsche; but the
difference between their conclusions is purely formal. Bunyan's
perception that righteousness is filthy rags, his scorn for Mr
Legality in the village of Morality, his defiance of the Church
as the supplanter of religion, his insistence on courage as the
virtue of virtues, his estimate of the career of the
conventionally respectable and sensible Worldly Wiseman as no
better at bottom than the life and death of Mr Badman: all this,
expressed by Bunyan in the terms of a tinker's theology, is what
Nietzsche has expressed in terms of post-Darwinian,
post-Schopenhaurian philosophy; Wagner in terms of polytheistic
mythology; and Ibsen in terms of mid-XIX century Parisian
dramaturgy. Nothing is new in these matters except their
novelties: for instance, it is a novelty to call Justification by
Faith "Wille," and Justification by Works "Vorstellung." The sole
use of the novelty is that you and I buy and read Schopenhaur's
treatise on Will and Representation when we should not dream of
buying a set of sermons on Faith versus Works. At bottom the
controversy is the same, and the dramatic results are the same.
Bunyan makes no attempt to present his pilgrims as more sensible
or better conducted than Mr Worldly Wiseman. Mr W. W.'s worst
enemies, as Mr Embezzler, Mr Never-go-to-Church-on-Sunday, Mr Bad
Form, Mr Murderer, Mr Burglar, Mr Co-respondent, Mr Blackmailer,
Mr Cad, Mr Drunkard, Mr Labor Agitator and so forth, can read the
Pilgrim's Progress without finding a word said against them;
whereas the respectable people who snub them and put them in
prison, such as Mr W.W. himself and his young friend Civility;
Formalist and Hypocrisy; Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and Pragmatick
(who were clearly young university men of good family and high
feeding); that brisk lad Ignorance, Talkative, By-Ends of
Fairspeech and his mother-in-law Lady Feigning, and other
reputable gentlemen and citizens, catch it very severely. Even
Little Faith, though he gets to heaven at last, is given to
understand that it served him right to be mobbed by the brothers
Faint Heart, Mistrust, and Guilt, all three recognized members of
respectable society and veritable pillars of the law. The whole
allegory is a consistent attack on morality and respectability,
without a word that one can remember against vice and crime.
Exactly what is complained of in Nietzsche and Ibsen, is it not?
And also exactly what would be complained of in all the
literature which is great enough and old enough to have attained
canonical rank, officially or unofficially, were it not that
books are admitted to the canon by a compact which confesses
their greatness in consideration of abrogating their meaning; so
that the reverend rector can agree with the prophet Micah as to
his inspired style without being committed to any complicity in
Micah's furiously Radical opinions. Why, even I, as I force
myself; pen in hand, into recognition and civility, find all the
force of my onslaught destroyed by a simple policy of
non-resistance. In vain do I redouble the violence of the
language in which I proclaim my heterodoxies. I rail at the
theistic credulity of Voltaire, the amoristic superstition of
Shelley, the revival of tribal soothsaying and idolatrous rites
which Huxley called Science and mistook for an advance on the
Pentateuch, no less than at the welter of ecclesiastical and
professional humbug which saves the face of the stupid system of
violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry. Even
atheists reproach me with infidelity and anarchists with nihilism
because I cannot endure their moral tirades. And yet, instead of
exclaiming "Send this inconceivable Satanist to the stake," the
respectable newspapers pith me by announcing "another book by
this brilliant and thoughtful writer." And the ordinary citizen,
knowing that an author who is well spoken of by a respectable
newspaper must be all right, reads me, as he reads Micah, with
undisturbed edification from his own point of view. It is
narrated that in the 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 small be
defrauded of my just martyrdom in the same way.
However, I am digressing, as a man with a grievance always does.
And after all, the main thing in determining the artistic quality
of a book is not the opinions it propagates, but the fact that
the writer has opinions. The old lady from Colchester was right
to sun her simple soul in the energetic radiance of Bradlaugh's
genuine beliefs and disbeliefs rather than in the chill of such
mere painting of light and heat as elocution and convention can
achieve. My contempt for belles lettres, and for amateurs who
become the heroes of the fanciers of literary virtuosity, is not
founded on any illusion of mind as to the permanence of those
forms of thought (call them opinions) by which I strive to
communicate my bent to my fellows. To younger men they are
already outmoded; for though they have no more lost their logic
than an eighteenth century pastel has lost its drawing or its
color, yet, like the pastel, they grow indefinably shabby, and
will grow shabbier until they cease to count at all, when my
books will either perish, or, if the world is still poor enough
to want them, will have to stand, with Bunyan's, by quite
amorphous qualities of temper and energy. With this conviction I
cannot be a bellettrist. No doubt I must recognize, as even the
Ancient Mariner did, that I must tell my story entertainingly if
I am to hold the wedding guest spellbound in spite of the siren
sounds of the loud bassoon. But "for art's sake" alone I would
not face the toil of writing a single sentence. I know that there
are men who, having nothing to say and nothing to write, are
nevertheless so in love with oratory and with literature that
they keep desperately repeating as much as they can understand of
what others have said or written aforetime. I know that the
leisurely tricks which their want of conviction leaves them free
to play with the diluted and misapprehended message supply them
with a pleasant parlor game which they call style. I can pity
their dotage and even sympathize with their fancy. But a true
original style is never achieved for its own sake: a man may pay
from a shilling to a guinea, according to his means, to see,
hear, or read another man's act of genius; but he will not pay
with his whole life and soul to become a mere virtuoso in
literature, exhibiting an accomplishment which will not even make
money for him, like fiddle playing. Effectiveness of assertion is
the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no
style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go
as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction
will carry him. Disprove his assertion after it is made, yet its
style remains. Darwin has no more destroyed the style of Job nor
of Handel than Martin Luther destroyed the style of Giotto. All
the assertions get disproved sooner or later; and so we find the
world full of a magnificent debris of artistic fossils, with the
matter-of-fact credibility gone clean out of them, but the form
still splendid. And that is why the old masters play the deuce
with our mere susceptibles. Your Royal Academician thinks he can
get the style of Giotto without Giotto's beliefs, and correct his
perspective into the bargain. Your man of letters thinks he can
get Bunyan's or Shakespear's style without Bunyan's conviction or
Shakespear's apprehension, especially if he takes care not to
split his infinitives. And so with your Doctors of Music, who,
with their collections of discords duly prepared and resolved or
retarded or anticipated in the manner of the great composers,
think they can learn the art of Palestrina from Cherubim's
treatise. All this academic art is far worse than the trade in
sham antique furniture; for the man who sells me an oaken chest
which he swears was made in the XIII century, though as a matter
of fact he made it himself only yesterday, at least does not
pretend that there are any modern ideas in it, whereas your
academic copier of fossils offers them to you as the latest
outpouring of the human spirit, and, worst of all, kidnaps young
people as pupils and persuades them that his limitations are
rules, his observances dexterities, his timidities good taste,
and his emptinesses purities. And when he declares that art
should not be didactic, all the people who have nothing to teach
and all the people who don't want to learn agree with him
emphatically.
I pride myself on not being one of these susceptible: If you
study the electric light with which I supply you in that
Bumbledonian public capacity of mine over which you make merry
from time to time, you will find that your house contains a great
quantity of highly susceptible copper wire which gorges itself
with electricity and gives you no light whatever. But here and
there occurs a scrap of intensely insusceptible, intensely
resistant material; and that stubborn scrap grapples with the
current and will not let it through until it has made itself
useful to you as those two vital qualities of literature, light
and heat. Now if I am to be no mere copper wire amateur but a
luminous author, I must also be a most intensely refractory
person, liable to go out and to go wrong at inconvenient moments,
and with incendiary possibilities. These are the faults of my
qualities; and I assure you that I sometimes dislike myself so
much that when some irritable reviewer chances at that moment to
pitch into me with zest, I feel unspeakably relieved and
obliged. But I never dream of reforming, knowing that I must take
myself as I am and get what work I can out of myself. All this
you will understand; for there is community of material between
us: we are both critics of life as well as of art; and you have
perhaps said to yourself when I have passed your windows, "There,
but for the grace of God, go I." An awful and chastening
reflection, which shall be the closing cadence of this
immoderately long letter from yours faithfully,
G. BERNARD SHAW.
WOKING, 1903 _
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