THE BERNARD SHAW LIBRARY
MAN AND SUPERMAN
‘He did his best in redressing the fateful unbalance between truth and reality, in lifting mankind to a higher rung of social maturity. He often pointed a scornful finger at human frailty, but his jests were never at the expense of humanity’ Thomas Mann
‘Shaw will not allow complacency; he hates second-hand opinions; he attacks fashion; he continually challenges and unsettles, questioning and provoking us even when he is making us laugh. And he is still at it. No cliché or truism of contemporary life is safe from him’ Michael Holroyd
‘In his works Shaw left us his mind…Today we have no Shavian wizard to awaken us with clarity and paradox, and the loss to our national intelligence is immense’ John Carey, Sunday Times
‘An important writer and an interesting socialist and critic…Thank God he lived’ Peter Levi, Independent
‘He was a Tolstoy with jokes, a modern Dr Johnson, a universal genius who on his own modest reckoning put even Shakespeare in the shade’ John Campbell, Independent
‘His plays were superb exercises in high-level argument on every issue under the sun, from feminism and God, to war and eternity, but they were also hits – and still are’ Paul Johnson, Daily Mail
BERNARD SHAW was born in Dublin in 1856. Although essentially shy, he created the persona of G.B.S., the showman, satirist, controversialist, critic, pundit, wit, intellectual buffoon and dramatist. Commentators brought a new adjective into English: Shavian, a term used to embody all his brilliant qualities.
After his arrival in London in 1876 he became an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He wrote on many social aspects of the day: on Common Sense about the War (1914), How to Settle the Irish Question (1917) and The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928). He undertook his own education at the British Museum and consequently became keenly interested in cultural subjects. Thus his prolific output included music, art and theatre reviews, which were collected into several volumes, such as Music In London 1890–1894 (3 vols., 1931), Pen Portraits and Reviews (1931); and Our Theatres in the Nineties (23 vols., 1931). He also wrote five novels, including Cashel Byron’s Profession (published by Penguin), and a collection of shorter works issued as A Black Girl in Search of God and Some Lesser Tales (also in Penguin).
Shaw conducted a strong attack on the London Theatre and was closely associated with the intellectual revival of British Theatre. His many plays (the full canon runs to 52) fall into several categories: ‘Plays Pleasant’; ‘Plays Unpleasant’; ‘Plays for Puritans’; political plays; chronicle plays; ‘metabiological Pentateuch’ (Back to Methuselah) in five plays; extravaganzas; romances; and fables. He died in 1950.
STANLEY WEINTRAUB is Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author and editor of nearly fifty books. Of these, twenty are about, or by, Bernard Shaw, including Private Shaw and Public Shaw, Bernard Shaw 1914–1918: Journey to Heartbreak and Shaw’s People. He has edited Shaw’s diaries and his art criticism, was editor of The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies until 1990 and wrote the Shaw entry in the New Dictionary of National Biography.
DAN H. LAURENCE, editor of Shaw’s Collected Letters, his Collected Plays with their Prefaces, Shaw’s Music and (with Daniel Leary) The Complete Prefaces, was Literary Adviser to the Shaw Estate until his retirement in 1990. He is Series Editor for the works of Shaw in Penguin.
A Comedy and a Philosophy
Definitive text under the editorial supervision of
DAN H. LAURENCE
with an Introduction by STANLEY WEINTRAUB
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 1903
The play (without the Don Juan in Hell scene) first
produced in London and New York in 1905
Don Juan in Hell first produced in 1907
The play in its entirety first performed in 1915 (Edinburgh)
Published in Penguin Books 26 July 1946
Reprinted with a new Introduction in Penguin Classics 2000
Reprinted with a new Chronology 2004
12
Copyright 1903, 1913, 1930, 1941, George Bernard Shaw
Copyright 1957, The Public Trustee as Executor of the Estate of George Bernard Shaw
Introduction copyright © Stanley Weintraub 2000
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90403–0
Introduction
Chronology
Preface
MAN AND SUPERMAN
Principal Works of Bernard Shaw
In a cartoon by Max Beerbohm about Man and Superman, the Danish critic Georg Brandes asks Bernard Shaw what he would take for his motley clothes, and Shaw answers, ‘Immortality.’ The sophisticated Brandes scoffs, ‘Come, I’ve handled these same goods before! Coat, Mr. Schopenhauer’s; waistcoat, Mr. Ibsen’s; trousers, Mr. Nietzche’s…’
‘Ah,’ counters Shaw, ‘but look at the patches!’ And the patches are a collection of other influential writers to whom Shaw was allegedly indebted. Beerbohm’s mockery failed to disturb Shaw. He would write, in the preface to another play, ‘I did not cut these cerebral capers in mere inconsiderate exuberance. I did it because the worst convention of the criticism of the theatre current at that time was that intellectual seriousness is out of place on the stage…. My answer to all this was to put all my intellectual goods in the shop window under the sign of Man and Superman. By good luck and acting, the comedy triumphed on the stage…’
He began the scenario in July 1901, determined not only to write a play that would be for all seasons, but one that would encapsulate the new century’s intellectual inheritance. ‘Accordingly,’ he wrote, ‘…I took the legend of Don Juan in its Mozartian form and made it a dramatic parable.’ He also took some of his Don Juan from Lord Byron’s verse satire, where the alleged philanderer is not the pursuer, but the pursued, a concept Shaw also attributed to ‘Shakespearean law,’ where ‘the woman always takes the initiative.’ From the Victorian comedy fashionable in Shaw’s earliest days he took the twin themes of love and money, giving one heroine an inheritance but not the man she wants to share it with her, and the other the man, but not the money his father wants to withhold if he marries the wrong woman.
‘I should make formal acknowledgment,’ he wrote in his preface to the play, ‘to the authors I have pillaged in the following pages if I could recollect them all.’ His ‘brigand—poetaster’ was owed to Arthur Conan Doyle; his ‘motor engineer and New Man’ was from H. G. Wells. His ‘servant who knows more than his masters’ he conceded to James Barrie. He took his Octavius ‘unaltered from Mozart,’ but neglected to note that the same character is also ‘Ricky-Ticky-Tavy,’ from Rudyard Kipling. After watching a production of the medieval Everyman, he asked himself, ‘Why not Everywoman?’ – and confessed, ‘Ann was the result: every woman is not Ann, but Ann is Everywoman.’
Readers and playgoers will find that the feast of overt and covert sources in Man and Superman adds continuing dimensions to the comedy. There are many more. Shaw even mined his own earlier and little-known writings. As a failed novelist in his twenties, Shaw began a satirical novel he intended to call The Heartless Man but eventually titled An Unsocial Socialist (1883). Its hero is an analogue of John Tanner in the later play, and the novel’s ineffectual poetasting suitor is a precursor to Octavius. Its ‘duel of sex’ at the conclusion recalls Congreve’s elegant comedy of manners The Way of the World (1700) and anticipates the witty, ironic last scene of Shaw’s play. Even less known is Shaw’s 1887 short story ‘Don Giovanni Explains’, rejected by editors who sensed scandal. In this, his first working out of the Don Juan legend, the narrator – the Don himself – confides that he had been initiated in sex by an amorous widow. Two years before, that had actually happened to Shaw, who noted in his diary that he had celebrated his birthday ‘by a new experience.’ (Shaw finally published the story in his Collected Edition in 1932, when he was seventy-six.)
Even the four figments of a dream in the almost-independent Interlude that makes up most of Act III are anticipated in ‘Don Giovanni Explains’, which opens with a young woman daydreaming on a train about the opera she has just seen, and then observing the Don sitting opposite her in his traditional Mozartian costume. When she startles, he advises her, ‘Pray be quiet. You are alone. I am only what you call a ghost, and have not the slightest interest in meddling with you.’ At that point the story turns into what seems to be a preliminary scenario for ‘Don Juan in Hell’, the dream interlude, with the Lady, an equivalent to Dona Ana, who finds herself at the opening of the interlude face-to-face with an equally ethereal Don Juan.
Even more striking is the resemblance of the concepts of Heaven and Hell in the Shavian short story to those in the Hell Scene. The principals of the Hell Scene – all four are equivalents to characters in the frame-play – learn that the frontier separating Heaven from Hell is ‘only the difference between two ways of looking at things,’ and Ana is told that they ‘see each other as bodies only because we learnt to think about one another under that aspect when we were alive.’ The Don of the story had told the Lady, ‘If I speak of [Hell] as a place at all, I do so in order to make my narrative comprehensible, just as I express myself to you phenomenally as a gentleman in hat, cloak, and boots, although such things are no part of the category to which I belong.’ The Hell of the play is a place for gross satisfaction of the senses, and the Devil is the leader of its best society. The Don acknowledges the Devil’s intellectual and debating gifts, but resents his insufferable cordiality. In the story, the Don confides to the Lady, ‘I found society there composed chiefly of the vulgar, hysterical, brutish, weak, good-for-nothing people, all well-intentioned, who kept up the reputation of the place by making themselves and each other as unhappy as they were capable of being. They wearied and disgusted me; and I disconcerted them beyond measure. The Prince of Darkness is not a gentleman. His knowledge and insight are remarkable as far as they go;…and I was polite to him.’ Each Don, in both the early story and the mature play, is a subversive whose austere vision of life is unsuitable for the Shavian Hell.
To integrate play and play-within-die-play, Shaw would identify his hero, John Tanner, as a distant relative of the legendary Don Juan Tenorio – thus his echo of a surname. Throughout the romantic misadventures and misunderstandings with which the play abounds are echoes of dreams and references to dreams, even, in Ann/Ana’s words ‘an echo from a former existence which always seems to me such a striking proof that we have immortal souls.’ Toward the close, Tanner wonders, ‘When did all this happen to me before? Are we two dreaming?’
Shaw calls the phenomenon which disturbs John Tanner the Life Force, and explains it at length in the preface which he dedicated ironically and extravagantly to Arthur Bingham Walkley, the most influential theatre critic of the day. Drama reviewer for The Times, Walkley loathed Shaw’s plays and wished none of them well. He failed to appreciate the wry comedy of manners which Shaw had wrapped around his philosophical romp (produced at first without the interlude in Hell), and was at a loss to explain why the play worked. When it was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square in 1904, Walkley began his critique by comparing Shaw to Shakespeare and putting his ambitious contemporary down. ‘On the one hand a born dramatist, and that the greatest,’ he wrote of the Bard; ‘on the other [hand] a man who is no dramatist at all.’ Yet Walkley felt forced to confess that there was something peculiar about what he had seen. ‘When I venture to say that Mr Shaw is no dramatist I do not mean that he fails to interest and stimulate and amuse us in the theatre. Many of us find him more entertaining than any other living writer for the stage. There are many things in his plays that give us far keener thrills of delight…than many things in Shakespeare’s plays.’
Walkley and most other critics could not make sense of Shaw’s coupling of newness and tradition in what was the first great twentieth century English play. It was even more difficult for the London critical fraternity to comprehend it in its book form. ‘I decorated it,’ Shaw blamed himself later, ‘too brilliantly and too lavishly. I surrounded it with a comedy of which it formed only one act, and that act was so completely episodical (it was a dream that did not affect the action of the piece) that the comedy could be detached and played by itself. Also I supplied the published work with an imposing framework consisting of a preface, an appendix called ‘The Revolutionist’s Handbook’ [supposedly written by John Tanner], and a final display of [Tanner’s] aphoristic fireworks.’ It was all too much for the critics, who had never seen anything like it before. They dismissed it. Somehow he and theatre critic William Archer remained friends despite Archer’s smug dismissal that Shaw ‘is not, and never will be, a great dramatist; but he is something rarer, if not better – a philosophic humorist, with the art of expressing himself in dramatic form’. The Daily Telegraph agreed that there was no play, not even a story, in Man and Superman, but, its reviewer conceded, ‘let us frankly admit that it is one of the most amusing pieces of work which…the Court Theatre has ever put upon the stage.’
Shaw subtitled his pairing of play and dream ‘a comedy and a philosophy.’ When the third act, largely John Tanner’s dream, is performed with the frame-play, the performance can run five hours – no longer than the uncut Hamlet, Shaw reminded contemporaries. (It was first given in full in 1915.) In its entirety it is a vivid evocation of his ideas about male—female relations and the inner forces that dominate them. Playing it in its Edwardian setting does not diminish that impact. Performed without the dream interlude, as audiences first experienced it in 1905, Man and Superman is buoyant, romantic theatre with a satirical edge. Performed separately as ‘Don Juan in Hell’ in 1907, and often, still, performed independently, the dream-interlude proved to be a lively conversation, a quartet for voices that aspires to the condition of music, yet given dramatic tension by a thread of plot: which alternative, Heaven or Hell, will Juan and Ana each choose? Whether the characters are only opinions in costume, or mythic figures brought to near-life, remains Shaw’s challenge to directors, players, audiences – and, even, readers.
As the play closes, with the heroines having snared their prey, we realize that Shaw’s plays are open-ended, like life. Is the power of biological purpose, which both Juan and his Edwardian successor, John Tanner, consider unscrupulous, enough to keep the sexes together for a lifetime? The ‘true joy of life’, Shaw contends in his rhetorical feat of a preface, is ‘being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out [in fulfilling it] before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.’ If so, is Man and Superman, for all its effervescence, a comedy after all?
The Royal Court Theatre, managed and directed then by John Vedrenne and Harley Granville Barker, used the repertory system, making long runs impossible, but the public demanded more opportunities to see Man and Superman. Through 1907 the Court revived it three times, for a total of 176 performances. That success was too much for the still-influential quarterly, Blackwood’s, which sneered that Shaw had enjoyed a ‘peculiar triumph’, and predicted unhappily that ‘henceforth there is no extravagance which will not be permitted to him’ while he ‘wrap[ped] up a genuine talent in the rags of charlatanry…under the inspiration of that demented professor, Friedrich Nietzsche’. Shaw did not believe in wasting his writing energy on anger, and waited until 1910 to put a collection of critics into a comedy. In Fanny’s First Play, Walkley is the critic ‘Trotter’, who reviews the play-within-the-play ostensibly written by Fanny O’Dowda. Waiting for the curtain to go up, ‘Trotter’ rails against an unnamed playwright, clearly Shaw, who ‘resorts to the dastardly subterfuge of calling [his work for the stage] conversation pieces, discussions, and so forth.’ To ‘Trotter’ they were, of course, not plays. But play or nay, Fanny would run for 622 performances, one of the longest-running hits of the time.
By putting recognizable critics on stage in the frame-play, Shaw was taking a step farther toward what Bertolt Brecht would later call the ‘alienation effect’ – the audience recognition that the play being seen and heard was not a representation of reality but a presentation by a playwright that required, beyond possible empathy with its characters, a stepping back to consider the play as a play. While a Shakespeare or a Dryden had created a ‘Chorus’ figure to step forward and ask the audience (as in Henry V) to ‘entertain conjecture of a time’, Shaw created as early as Man and Superman the player who is both actor and character in the same person – the self-conscious character, or actor directly aware of his audience. In ‘Don Juan in Hell’ he combined two of the most primitive, yet basic, elements of the self-conscious theatre – the platform of the philosopher and the ring of the clown. In post-Shavian refinements the technique would sweep across the century. When the Devil, exasperated by Juan’s long speeches, challenges, ‘Let us go on for another hour if you like,’ and Don Juan agrees, ‘Good: let us,’ the perceptible groans amid the laughter make it clear that the audience knows it is at a play. When the Statue (of the Commander) carps, ‘I begin to doubt whether you will ever finish, my friend. You are extremely fond of hearing yourself talk,’ the audience recognizes Shaw’s tongue in his cheek, a perception reinforced by Juan’s response, ‘True; but since you have endured so much, you may as well endure to the end.’
That a playwright can misunderstand the implications of his words has energized critics since the dawn of drama reviewing. Shaw, then, may have been mistaken in his contention, quoted earlier, that the dispensable dream scene does not affect the action of the frame-play. Indeed it seems otherwise. Readers and audiences may find John Tanner’s collapse of resistance to betrothal related to his experience as the dreamer, for in the dream scene Don Juan encounters the inevitability of the Life Force, ‘the universal creative energy, of which the parties are both the helpless agents, [which] overrides and sweeps away all personal considerations’, and which throws potential sexual partners ‘into one another’s arms at the exchange of a glance.’ Whether or not Ann has long plotted her moves, and Tanner has long resisted even the thought of them, his subconscious, in the grip of his dream, prepares him for the inevitable. Tanner recognizes that he is doomed to happiness and to what Francis Bacon, in his Shakespeare-era essay on marriage, had called ‘hostages to fortune’. Despite pages of paradoxes, Shaw had, in the end, recognized the realities of the box-office, without which there is no theatre. Thus Man and Superman plays on, and on, and on.
Stanley Weintraub
1856 Born in Dublin on 26 July
1871 After only short periods of schooling, started work as an office boy in a Dublin firm of land agents
1873 Mother and sisters moved to London
1876 Joined mother in London; she taught singing and his sister Lucy sang professionally in musical plays
1879 While working for the Edison Telephone Company began to meet the earliest British socialists, including, in 1880, Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter (later Mrs Webb), who became lifelong friends
1879–81 Wrote five novels, four published serially in magazines
1884 Joined the Fabian Society, which advocated gradual progress towards socialism, and began giving lectures both to the Fabians and on their behalf. At about the same time, met the hugely influential theatre critic William Archer, who helped Shaw to find work as a critic. First meeting with William Morris whose disciple he became
1885 Appointed as a book reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and music critic for the new Dramatic Review
1886–9 Art critic for The World
1888–90 Music critic for The Star (under the pseudonym ‘Corno di Bassetto’)
1889 Attended English première of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House
1890–94 Music critic for The World (writing as GBS)
1891 Published The Quintessence of Ibsenism
1892 Widowers’ Houses (his first published play) given a private performance by the Independent Theatre in London
1894 Arms and the Man produced at the Avenue Theatre in London; then by actor—manager Richard Mansfield in New York
1895–8 Drama critic for The Saturday Review
1897 Encouraged by the success of The Devil’s Disciple in New York, gave up most of his work as a critic
1897–1903 Elected borough councillor for the London borough of St Pancras
1898 Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant published. Married Charlotte Payne-Townshend. Began concentrating on his writing as playwright and essayist
1899 The newly founded Stage Society produced You Never Can Tell, followed by Candida and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion in 1900
1904–7 Granville Barker and Vedrenne take over the (Royal) Court Theatre in a challenge to the commercial West End theatre system. Eleven Shaw plays produced at the Court including the newly written Man and Superman, John Bull’s Other Island, Major Barbara and The Doctor’s Dilemma
1905 Bought a country home at Ayot St Lawrence, approximately 25 miles north of London (retaining an apartment in Adelphi Terrace, off the Strand)
1910 Misalliance produced at the Duke of York’s Theatre
1913 Androcles and the Lion at St James’s Theatre. World première of Pygmalion in Vienna (in German), followed by a production in Berlin
1914 Pygmalion produced by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, at His Majesty’s Theatre. Common Sense about the War published
1920 Heartbreak House produced at the Royal Court. Completed Back to Methuselah, a five-part cycle of plays, transforming the biblical version of creation and human destiny into post-Darwinian science fiction
1924 Saint Joan produced at the New Theatre
1925 Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. First English public performance of Mrs Warren’s Profession (banned by the censor since 1898)
1928 Published The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
1929 The Apple Cart, produced at the first Malvern Festival, organized by Barry Jackson’s Birmingham Repertory Theatre with Shaw as its figurehead
1931 Visited Moscow, and met Stanislavski, Gorki and Stalin
1932 Too True to be Good produced at Malvern. Published fable of The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God following a visit to South Africa
1933 Travelled to India, Hong Kong, China, Japan and the USA
1936 Celebrated 80th birthday. Gave up driving
1938 Awarded Oscar for the best screenplay for Gabriel Pascal’s film of Pygmalion. Geneva (featuring caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini called before the International Court of Justice at the Hague) transferred from Malvern to Saville Theatre, and then to St James’s Theatre
1939 Ceremonially presented with the deeds of a site (in South Kensington) for the National Theatre of Great Britain
1943 Death of Charlotte Shaw
1944 Published Everybody’s Political What’s What?, an instant best-seller
1946 On his 90th birthday, honoured with the freedom of both Dublin and the borough of St Pancras
1950 Died on 2 November
1955 Alan J. Lerner based the book and lyrics of the musical My Fair Lady closely on Pygmalion
1856 End of the Crimean War. Sigmund Freud born
1859 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species published. Construction of the Suez Canal started
1861–5 American Civil War
1866 The Fenians, Irish Republicans, opposed the English occupation of Ireland
1867 Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ published
1870 Education Act made primary schooling compulsory in England and Wales
1871 Year of political change in Europe: Italy and Germany both unified
1883 Death of Marx. The left-wing Fabian Society founded
1886 Home Rule for Ireland first proposed by Gladstone’s Liberal government; the Conservative Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister
1887 Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee
1892 Keir Hardie elected as first Independent Socialist Member of Parliament
1895 Oscar Wilde imprisoned for homosexual offences. Lumière brothers patented cinematograph
1897 Irish Literary Theatre founded by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn
1899–1902 Anglo-Boer War in South Africa
1901 Death of Queen Victoria, accession of Edward VII
1907 Rudyard Kipling the first British winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
1911 Members of Parliament paid a salary for the first time. Women’s Freedom League founded
1914–18 First World War
1916 Easter Rising by Irish Nationalists in Dublin
1920 League of Nations created. Government of Ireland Act, partitioning Ireland
1922 Continuing civil war in Ireland
1924 First Labour government in Britain, under Ramsay Macdonald; replaced by the Conservative Unionists, under Stanley Baldwin. Death of Lenin
1920 Women over twenty-one in the United Kingdom given the vote.
1929 New York Stock Exchange crash led to world economic depression. Election of second Labour minority government in Britain (which became a multi-party national government in 1931)
1933 Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany
1939–45 Second World War
1945 Labour Party, under Clement Attlee, won the election, replacing the wartime leader Winston Churchill
1946 First meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations
1948 British National Health Service founded
MAN AND SUPERMAN
EPISTLE DEDICATORY
MAN AND SUPERMAN
THE REVOLUTIONIST’S HANDBOOK
I. On Good Breeding
II. Property and Marriage
III. The Perfectionist Experiment at Oneida Creek
IV. Man’s Objection to His Own Improvement
V. The Political Need for the Superman
VI. Prudery Explained
VII. Progress an Illusion
VIII. The Conceit of Civilization
IX. The Verdict of History
X. The Method
MAXIMS FOR REVOLUTIONISTS
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 épater 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 XVIII 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 XX 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 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. Molière’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 trade ans de cette vie-ci, et puis nous songerons à nous.’ After Molière 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 transcendent 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 Doña 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 XVIII century, have they not Molière 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 Molière 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 Westernmarck, 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.