^p< V ^<^ ^^0^ oV ^:% ^^ -^ ^''J 5'. %^ J^ SV'^^*^ ^ ^■^■/ .4*' ti/ eii\y ^1 /-I THE WISDOM OF BERNARD SHAW 6p THE WISDOM OF BERNARD SHAW BEING PASSAGES FROM THE WORKS OF BERNARD SHAW CHOSEN BY CHARLOTTE F. SHAW NEW YORK BRENTANO'S 1913 i^- h Copyright, 1913, by Bernard Shaw ©CI.A847801 rt_. T i Actor Page 1 5 / nonitions 19 the World's a Stage . . . . 19 irchy 21 21 _. u for Art's Sake 32 The Artist and the Tradesman . 33 Assassination 37 Assertions 37 The Puritan Attitude .... 40 The Romantic Attitude . . .41 Autobiography 41 Autres Temps Autres Moeurs . . 42 Beethoven . ; 43 The Bible 45 Books 48 Both Sides 49 Bringing the Accusation Home . 49 Bunyan, Shakespear and Heroism . 50 Children and Religious Teaching . 52 Christianity 53 Christmas 54 Citizenship and Circumstances . 54 Conscience . 56 Conventional Morality .... 56 5 Table of Contents coSln?s Courage Page 60 Cowardice 61 ___The Criminal Law 62 Criticism 63 The Crows that Follow the Plough 64 Cruelty 66 Democracy 66 Democracy and Justice .... 72 The Devil's Friends 73 Discipline 74. Discriminations 75! Divorce and Sacramental Marriage 86! The Dramatist 87! Duty 881 Economic Independence . . . 91 The Economic Independence of Women 92 Education 92 The Elocutionist 95 The End and the Means • • • 97 The English Home 98 The Englishman lOl The Englishman and the Comic Spirit IOC Equality . llf 6 The Personal Factor . . Page 117 J^JJ|„;| Famous Actors 118 The Farcical Comedy . . . .123 Formulas 126 The God of Fine Ladies . . .126 The Golden Rule 128 The Governing Classes . . . :- . 129 The Great Man's Burden . . .135 Happiness 136 Heaven 136 Heaven and Hell . . . . . 137 Hell 139 The Hereditary Principle . . .141 The Home 141 Home Rule 142 Hospitals 143 A Humanitarian 145 Human Nature and Institutions . 146 Ibsen 147 Ibsen and Shakespear .... 149 The Idea 152 [deals ......... 153 Idealism .155 The Illusion of the Stage . . .159 imperialism „ . 161 i 7 C6nL?l Individuality Page 162 Infirmity of Purpose . . . .164 The Injured Husband .... 165 Inspiration 167 The Instability of Morals . . .167 Our Institutions 169 It Begins to Date 170 Mr. Henry James's Novels . . -173 John Bunyan and William Shakespear i "jG Judgment 184 Laodiceanism 185 Law 188 The Law of Rent 191 The Lie 193 The Life Force 193 London 203 Love 205 The Machine-Made Man . . . 2o6| The Manicheism of Party Politics . 207 Marat and Charlotte Corday . . 208 '^■Marriage 210 ^The Marriage Laws 216 '*^'Marriage and the Reformation . 222 Materialism ... . . . . 223 Maternity 226 8 Meat and Drink .... Page 227 Jj^Lti The Medical Profession . . . 228 Melodrama 231 Methods of Reform 232 Middle Class Unsociability . .233 Might and Right 234 Militarism 237 Miracles 238 Money . . . . . . . . 238 Morality 241 Morality and Censorships . . . 247 Moral Passion 250 Motherhood 251 Mothers and the State . . . .251 Municipal Trading 252 Nationalism 256 Nice People 258 The Nineteenth Century . . . 258 'Not What They Like, but What is Good for Them 259 Observations 262 Obsolete Institutions .... 262 Oscar Wilde's Plays 264 Parasitic Trades 267 The Passions 367 9 coSL?I The Peace Which Passeth all Un- derstanding .... Page 269 Personal 269 Personal Mindedness .... 273 The Philosopher 273 The Philosopher's Brain . . . 277 The Philosophy of Life .... 279 Political Economy 280 Poverty 280 Poverty and Wealth .... 286 Prayer 292 The Problem Play 293 Professional Work . . . . . 294 Progress 296 Public Life 301 Punch and Judy 301 Punishment 302 The Pure Fool 305 Real Plays 305 Reason 307 Reflections 307 Religion on the Stage . . . .312 Religions and Poverty . . . .314 Remuneration 315 Rent of Ability 317 10 Reparation Page 319 Reputations 319 Resentment 320 Retaliation . . . . . . . 320 Reverence 323 Revolution 323 Right and Wrong 329 The Right to Live 332 Romance . . 333 The Romances of Science . . . 339 Routine Morality 340 Routine Morality and the Superman 343 Saving 343 The Secret of the Governing Caste 344 Self-Control 345 Self-Sacrifice 346 Shakespear 348 Shakespear's Music 351 Shakespear's Plays 356 The Shirtfront 366 The Snob 369 Social Chaos 370 Social Questions 371 Soul Hunger 372 The Soul's Spring Cleaning . . 372 II Table of Contents co5ln?s' The Stage Villain . . . Page 373 Style 375 Submission 376 The Superman 376 The Theatre 385 Toleration -385 The Two Pioneers 387 Values 388 A Vigilance Association . . . 389 The Deadly Virtues 393 Vivisection 393 War 398 Warnings 399 Wealth 400 Wealth and Punishment . . . 402 The Will 402 The Will to Believe . . . * . . 403 The Will to Live and its Conse- quences 404 The Will and the Spirit . . . 405 Wisdom 406 Woman 406 Woman and Sex Initiative . . . 414 Work for the Unemployed . . . 420 The Young and the Old . . . 420 12 I THE WISDOM OF BERNARD SHAW 'T'HE accomplishments which distin- J^f^^ -'' guish the trained actor from the amateur are not the same as the quali- ties which distinguish great actors from ordinary ones. Take, first, the differ- ence between the trained actor and the man In the street — the layman. When the layman walks, his only object Is to get to Charing Cross; when he makes a gesture. It Is to attract the attention of a cab-driver or bus-conductor; when he speaks, It Is to convey or demand information, or tell a He, or otherwise further his prosaic ends; when he moves his hands. It is to put up his umbrella or to take out his handkerchief. On the stage these merely utilitarian pur- poses are only simulated: the real pur- pose Is to produce an effect on the senses and imagination of the spectator. The actor's walk Is addressed to the spectator's sense of grace, dignity, or strength of movement, and his voice to the listener's sense of expressive or beautiful tone. Impersonations even of IS ugly or deformed creatures with harsh voices have the same artistic character, and are agreeably disagreeable, just as the most extreme discords in a sym- phony or opera are distinctly musical, and perfectly different to the random cacophonies which arise from the tun- ing of the orchestra. Now, the power of complying with artistic conditions without being so preoccupied by them as to be incapable of thinking of any- thing else is hard to acquire, and can be perfected only by long practice. Talma estimated the apprenticeship at twenty years. The habit can never be- come as instinctive as keeping one's bal- ance, for instance, because failure in that for even an instant means a fall, so that the practice in it is lifelong and constant; whereas the artistic habit lapses more or less in the absence of an audience, and even on the stage can be forgotten for long periods without any worse consequences than a loss of charm which nothing may bring to the i6 actor's attention. The real safeguard against such lapses is a sense of beauty — the artistic sense — cultivated to such a degree of sensitiveness that a coarse or prosaic tone, or an awkward gesture, jars instantly on the artist as a note out of tune jars on the musician. The defect of the old-fashioned systems of training for the stage was that they attempted to prescribe the conclusions of this constantly evolving artistic sense instead of cultivating it and leaving the artist to its guidance. Thus they taught you an old-fashioned stage-walk, an old- fashioned stage-voice, an old-fashioned stage way of kneeling, of sitting down, of shaking hands, of picking up a hand- kerchief, and so on, each of them sup- posed to be the final and perfect way of doing it. The end of that was, of course, to discredit training altogether. But neglect of training very quickly dis- credits itself; and It will now perhaps be admitted that the awakening and culture of the artistic conscience Is a real 17 service which a teacher can render to an actor. When that conscience Is thor- oughly awakened and cultivated, when a person can maintain vigilant artistic sensitiveness throughout a performance whilst making all the movements re- quired by the action of the drama, and speaking all its dialogue graphically without preoccupation or embarrass- ment, then that person Is a technically competent artistic actor, able to play a part of which he hardly comprehends one line, in a play of which he knows nothing except his own words and speeches and the cues thereto, much more Intelligibly and effectively, as well as agreeably, than a statesman with ten times his general ability could. He can only be beaten, in fact, by the professional rival who has equal skill in execution, but has more numerous and valuable Ideas to exe- cute. The finest actors — Jefferson, Co- quelln, Salvini, Duse — carry this tech- nical skill to such a point that though i8 they act so beautifully that you cannot take your eyes off them even when you do not understand what they are saying, yet the beauty seems so spontaneous and Inevitable that It Is generally quite Im- possible to persuade their admirers that there Is any art or study In their acting at all. The Saturday Review^ I2th October 1895. _j..j_ 'VrOU cannot believe In honor until ^?J?J°" you have achieved It. Better keep yourself clean and bright: you are the window through which you must see the world. Man and Superman^ p. 233. Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing. If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed your- self. Man and Superman^ p. 244. "^OTHING Is more significant than ^o^w's -^^ the statement that " all the world's a stage ^ 5tage." The whole world is ruled by theatrical illusion. Between the Caesars, the emperors, the Christian heroes, the Grand Old Men, the kings, prophets, saints, heroes and judges, of the news- papers and the popular imagination, and the actual Juliuses, Napoleons, Gor- dons, Gladstones, and so on, there is the same difference as between Hamlet and Sir Henry Irving. The case is not one of fanciful similitude, but of iden- tity. The great critics are those who penetrate and understand the illusion: the great men are those who, as drama- tists planning the development of na- tions, or as actors carrying out the drama, are behind the scenes of the world instead of gaping and gushing in the auditorium after paying their taxes at the doors. And yet Shakespear, with the rarest opportunities of observing this, lets his pregnant metaphor slip, and, with his usual incapacity for pur- suing any idea, wanders off into a grandmotherly Elizabethan edition of the advertisement of Cassell's Popular 20 Educator. How anybody over the age of seven can take any interest in a lit- erary toy so silly in its conceit and com- mon in its ideas as the Seven Ages of j Man passes my understanding. The ! Saturday Review^ 5th December 1896. A PPLIED to the industrial or polit- Anarchy '^ ical machinery of modern society, anarchy must always reduce itself speed- ily to absurdity. Even the modified form of anarchy on which modern civilization is based: that is, the aban- donment of industry, in the name of individual liberty, to the upshot of competition for personal gain between private capitalists, is a disastrous fail- ure, and is, by the mere necessities of the case, giving way to ordered Social- ism. The Perfect Wagnerite, p. 79. /^^SAR [seeing Apollodorus and call- Art ^^ ing to him~\ Apollodorus : I leave the art of Egypt in your charge. Re- member: Rome loves art and will en- courage it ungrudgingly. APOLLODORUS. I understand, Caesar. Rome will produce no art itself; but it will buy up and take away whatever the other nations produce. c^SAR. What! Rome produce no art! Is peace not an art? Is war not an art? Is government not an art? Is civilization not an art? All these we give you in exchange for a few orna- ments. Casar and Cleopatra^ p. 193. The claim of art to our respect must stand or fall with the validity of its pretension to cultivate and refine our senses and faculties until seeing, hear- ing, feeling, smelling, and tasting be- come highly conscious and critical acts with us, protesting vehemently against ugliness, noise, discordant speech, frow- zy clothing, and re-breathed air, and taking keen interest and pleasure in beauty. In music, and in nature, besides making us insist, as necessary for com- fort and decency, on clean, wholesome, handsome fabrics to wear, and utensils of fine material and elegant workman- ship to handle. Further, art should refine our sense of character and con- duct, of justice and sympathy, greatly heightening our self-knowledge, self- control, precision of action, and consid- erateness, and making us intolerant of baseness, cruelty, injustice, and intellec- tual superficiality or vulgarity. The worthy artist or craftsman is he who serves the physical and moral senses by feeding them with pictures, musical compositions, pleasant houses and gar- dens, good clothes and fine implements, poems, fictions, essays, and dramas which call the heightened senses and ennobled faculties into pleasurable ac- tivity. The great artist is he who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by sup- plying works of a higher beauty and a higher interest than have yet been per- ceived, succeeds, after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in adding this fresh 4 extension of sense to the heritage of the race. The Sanity of Jrt, p. 68. I am convinced that fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective means of moral propagandism in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favour of the art of the stage, because It works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made in- telligible and moving to crowds of un- observant unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing. Author's Apol- ogy. Mrs. Warren's Profession, p- 25. The severity of artistic discipline is produced by the fact that in creative art no ready-made rules can help you. There is nothing to guide you to the right expression for your thought ex- cept your own sense of beauty and fit- ness; and, as you advance upon those who went before you, that sense of beauty and fitness is necessarily often in 24 conflict, not with fixed rules, because there are no rules, but with precedents. The Sanity of Art^ p. 82. In all the arts there is a distinction be- tween the mere physical artistic faculty, consisting of a very fine sense of color, form, tone, rhythmic movement, and so on, and that supreme sense of humanity which alone can raise the art work cre- ated by the physical artistic faculties Into a convincing presentment of life. The Saturday Review, 6th June 1896. All art Is gratuitous; and the will to produce It, like the will to live, must be held to justify Itself. When that will Is associated with brilliant specific talent for the established forms and attractions of fine art, no advance is made, because the artist can distinguish and satisfy himself by novel, witty and touching rehandllngs of the old themes. If Wagner had possessed the astonishing specific talent of Mozart, or Mr. George Meredith that of Dickens, they 25 would not have been forced to make a revolution In their art by lifting it to a plane on which it developed new and extraordinary specific talents in them- selves, and revealed the old specific tal- ents to them as mere hindrances. A critic who has not learned this from the nineteenth century has learned nothing. Such a one, on discovering that a writer is deficient in all current specific talents, at once condemns him without benefit of clergy. But for my part, when I find the characteristic devotion of the born artist accompanied by a hopeless deficiency in all the fashionable specific talents I immediately give him my most respectful attention, and am particularly careful to indulge in none of those prophecies of extinction which were so confidently launched at Wagner, Ibsen, and Meredith. The Saturday Review, 2nd April 1898. I call Madox Brown a Realist because he had vitality enough to find intense 26 enjoyment and Inexhaustible Interest in the world as It really Is, unbeautlfied, unideallzed, untltlvated In any way for artistic consumption. This love of life and knowledge of its worth is a rare thing — whole Alps and Andes above the common market demand for prettlness, fashlonableness, refinement, elegance of style, delicacy of sentiment, charm of character, sympathetic philosophy (the philosophy of the happy ending), decorative moral systems contrasting roseate and rapturous vice with lllied and languorous virtue, and making " Love " face both ways as the univer- sal softener and redeemer, the whole being worshipped as beauty or virtue, and set in the place of life to narrow and condition it Instead of enlarging and fulfilling it. To such self-indulgence most artists are mere pandars; for the sense of beauty needed to make a man an artist is so strong that the sense of life in him must needs be quite pro- digious to overpower It. It must always 27 be a mystery to the ordinary beauty- fancying, life-shirking amateur how the realist in art can bring his unbeautified, remorseless celebrations of common life in among so many pretty, pleasant, sweet, noble, touching fictions, and yet take his place there among the highest, although the railing, the derision, the protest, the positive disgust, are almost universal at first. The Saturday Re- view, 13th March 1897. Turn to Mr. Watts, and you are in- stantly in a visionary world, in which life fades into mist, and the imaginings of nobility and beauty with which we invest life become embodied and visible. The gallery is one great transfiguration : life, death, love, and mankind are no longer themselves : they are glorified, sublimified, lovelified: the very draperies are either rippling lakes of color har- mony, or splendid banners like the fly- ing cloak of Titian's Bacchus In the National Gallery. To pretend that the 28 world is like this Is to live the heavenly life. It Is to lose the whole world and gain one's own soul. Until you have reached the point of realizing what an astonishingly bad bargain that Is you cannot doubt the sufficiency of Mr. Watts' art, provided only your eyes are fine enough to understand Its language of line and color. The Saturday Re- view^ 13th March 1897. Truly the secret of wisdom is to become as a little child again. But our art- loving authors will not learn the lesson. They cannot understand that when a great genius lays hands on a form of art and fascinates all who understand its language with it, he makes it say all that it can say, and leaves it exhausted. When Bach has got the last word out of the fugue, Mozart out of the opera, Beethoven out of the symphony, Wag- ner out of the symphonic drama, their enraptured admirers exclaim: "Our masters have shewn us the way: let us 29 compose some more fugues, operas, symphonies, and Bayreuth dramas." Through just the same error the men who have turned dramatists on the frivolous ground of their love for the theatre have plagued a weary world with Shakespearean dramas in five acts and in blank verse, with artificial com- edies after Congreve and Sheridan, and with the romantic goody-goody fiction which was squeezed dry by a hundred strong hands in the first half of this century. It is only when we are dissat- isfied with existing masterpieces that we create new ones: if we merely worship them, we only try to repeat the exploit of their creator by picking out the tit- bits and stringing them together, in some feeble fashion of our own, into a " new and original " botching of what our master left a good and finished job. We are encouraged in our folly by the need of the multitude for intermediaries between its childishness and the ma- turity of the mighty men of art, and 30 also by the fact that art fecundated by itself gains a certain lapdog refinement, very acceptable to lovers of lapdogs. The Incas of Peru cultivated their royal race in this way, each Inca marrying his sister. The result was that an average Inca was worth about as much as an average fashionable drama bred care- fully from the last pair of fashionable dramas, themselves bred in the same way, with perhaps a cross of novel. But vital art work comes always from a cross between art and life: art being of one sex only, and quite sterile by it- self. Such a cross is always possible; for though the artist may not have the capacity to bring his art into contact with the higher life of his time, ferment- ing in its religion, its philosophy, its science, and its statesmanship (perhaps, indeed, there may not be any statesman- ship going), he can at least bring it into contact with the obvious life and com- mon passions of the streets. The Sat- urday Review^ 6th November 1897. AJt's""" A RT for art's sake" means In prac- sake -^^ tice " Success for money's sake." Great art Is never produced for Its own sake. It Is too difficult to be worth the effort. All the great artists enter Into a terrible struggle with the public, often involving bitter poverty and personal hu- miliation, and always Involving calumny and persecution, because they believe they are apostles doing what used to be called the Will of God, and Is now called by many prosaic names, of which " pub- lic work " is the least controversial. And when these artists have travailed and brought forth, and at last forced the public to associate keen pleasure and deep Interest with their methods and morals, a crowd of smaller men — art confectioners, we may call them — hasten to make pretty entertainments out of scrap and crumbs from the master- pieces. Offenbach laid hands on Beet- hoven's Seventh Symphony and pro- duced J'alme les mllltalres, to the dis- gust of Schumann, who was nevertheless 32 doing precisely the same thing in a more pretentious way. And these confection- ers are by no means mere plagiarists. They bring all sorts of engaging quali- ties to their work: love of beauty, desire to give pleasure, tenderness, humor, everything except the high republican conscience, the Identification of the art- ist's purpose with the purpose of the universe, which alone makes an artist great. Three Plays by Brieux^ Preface, pp. XX., xxi. New Ideas make their technique as wa- ter makes Its channel; and the technician without ideas is as useless as the canal constructor without water, though he may do very skilfully what the Missis- sippi does very crudely. Three Plays for Puritans^ p. xxxiil. WHAT happens under our system The Artist , Y 1 •' J and the IS that the tradesman supersedes Tradesman the artist. The tradesman adapts him- self to the market : he offers you a thlrd- 33 class article for a third-class price, and a second-class article for a second-class price, preferring the third-class contract if, as often happens, it is the more prof- itable. First-class work he cannot do at all; and the man who can do it, the artist, cannot do anything else. When second or third-class work is demanded, he may, and very often does, try to do it for the sake of the money, a man with a wife and family being, as Talley- rand said, capable of anything; but he inevitably botches it, and only confirms his employer's prejudice against artists and in favor of tradesmen. A Bovril or Condensed Milk poster by Sir Ed- ward Burne-Jones would probably be worth no more than Wagner's Philadel- phia Centennial march. But the world is not quite so clear-cut as this description of it. The distinction between artist and tradesman is not a distinction between one man and an- other, but between two sides of the same man. The number of persons who, be- 34 ing unquestionably eminent artists, have yet been so absolutely uncommercial as to be uninfluenced by their market, Is very small Indeed; and of these some, like Giotto, have found their market so entirely sympathetic that In doing as they pleased they simply sailed before the wind; whilst others, like Shelley, Goethe, or Landor, were independent of It In point of both money and social standing. Beethoven, Wagner, and Ibsen, though dependent on their art for both money and position, certainly did eventually take Europe by the scruff of the neck and say, " You shall take what I like and not what you want " ; but in comparison with Bunyan and Blake they were keen men of business. I know of no dramatist dependent on his profession who has not been very seriously Influenced by his market. Shakespear's case, the leading one for England, Is beyond a doubt. He would have starved If he had followed his bent towards a genuine science of life and 35 character. His instinct for reality had to be surreptitiously gratified under the mask of comedy. Dr. Johnson pointed out long ago that it was only in comedy that our immortal stalking horse for bogus criticism was really happy. To this day such splendid melodramas as Othello, with Its noble savage, its vil- lain, its funny man. Its carefully as- sorted pathetic and heavy feminine in- terest, its smothering and suicide. Its police-court morality and commonplace thought; or, As You Like It, with its Adelphi hero. Its prize fight, its coquet In tights, its good father and wicked uncle, represent the greatness of Shak- spear to nine-tenths of his adorers, who mostly, when you mention Helena, or the Countess of Rousillon, or Isa- bella, or Cresslda, or Ulysses, or Ber- tram stare at you, and think you are talking about Calderon and Homer. The Saturday Review, I2th February 1898. 36 V CURELY, If dramatists are bent on Assassina- the fundamentally impossible task of Inventing pardonable assassinations, they should recognize that the man who, for no reward or satisfaction to his direct personal instincts, but at the risk of his own life, kills for the sake of an Idea, believing that he Is striking In the cause of the general weal. Is at any rate more respectable than the de- humanized creature who stabs or shoots to slake a passion which he has in common with a stag. The Saturday Review, ist June 1895. t-TUMANITY Is neither a commer- Assertions cial nor a political speculation, but a condition of noble life. Civilization and the Soldier. The Humane Review, January 1901, P- 312. SIR PATRICK. There are two things that can be wrong with any man. One of them Is a cheque. The other Is a 37 woman. Until you know that a man's sound on these two points, you know nothing about him. The Doctor s Di- lemma, p. 47. Honor is worth its danger and its cost, and life is worthless without honor. John Bull's Other Island, p. Ixi. The balance sheet of a city's welfare cannot be stated in figures. Counters of a much more spiritual kind are needed, and some imagination and con- science to add them up, as well. The Common Sense of Municipal Trading, p. V. It is only the man who has no mes- \ sage who is too fastidious to beat the drum at the door of his booth. Three Plays by Brieux^ Preface, p. x. BOHUN. McComas: there will be no difficulty about the important questions. There never is. It is the trifles that will wreck you at the harbor mouth. You Never Can Tell, p. 323. 38 MRS. CLANDON. Let me tell you, Mr. Valentine, that a life devoted to the Cause of Humanity has enthusiasms and passions to offer which far tran- scend the selfish personal infatuations and sentimentalities of romance. You Never Can Tell, p. 296. LESBIA. As I said before, an English lady is not the slave of her appetites. That is what an English gentleman seems incapable of understanding. Get- ting Married, p. 220. POTHINUS [bitterly] Is it possible that Caesar, the conqueror of the world, has time to occupy himself with such a trifle as our taxes? C^SAR. My friend: taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world. Casar and Cleopatra, p. 117. Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like : it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability. The DeviVs Disciple, p. ^6, 39 »unte Progress is not achieved by panic- stricken rushes back and forward be- tween one folly and another, but by sifting all movements and adding what survives the sifting to the fabric of our morality. Three Plays by Brieux, Pref- ace, p. xliv. pSritan T HAVE, I think, always been a Puri- Att^tude -■■ tan in my attitude towards Art. I am as fond of fine music and handsome building as Milton was, or Cromwell, or Bunyan; but if I found that they were becoming the instruments of a sys- tematic idolatry of sensuousness, I would hold it good statesmanship to blow every cathedral in the world to pieces with dynamite, organ and all, without the least heed to the screams of the art critics and cultured volup- tuaries. And when I see that the nine- teenth century has crowned the idola- try of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he 40 has announced that Love is the Su- preme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer In the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major- generals than It will be If ever It gets Into mine. The pleasures of the senses I can sympathize with and share; but the substitution of sensuous ecstasy for Intellectual activity and honesty Is the very devil. Three Plays for Puritans, p. XX. THE lot of the man who sees life The 1 11*11 ■ * Romantic truly and thrnks about it romanti- Attitude cally Is Despair. How well we know the cries of that despair! Three Plays for Puritans, p. xxvIII. ALL autobiographies are lies. I do Auto- , • • , biography not mean unconscious, uninten- tional lies: I mean deliberate lies. No man is bad enough to tell the truth about himself during his lifetime, in- volving, as it must, the truth about his 41 / Autres Temps Autres Mxurs family and friends and colleagues. And no man Is good enough to tell the truth to posterity In a document which he suppresses until there Is nobody left alive to contradict him. In the Days of my Youth. M.J. P., 17th September 1898, 'T'HE disloyalty of Hampden and of Washington; the revolting Im- morality of Luther in not only marry- ing when he was a priest, but actually marrying a nun; the heterodoxy of Galileo; the shocking blasphemies and sacrileges of Mahomet against the Idols whom he dethroned to make way for his conception of one god; and the still more startling blasphemy of Jesus when he declared God to be the son of man and himself to be the son of God, are all examples of shocking Immoralities (every Immorality shocks somebody) the suppression and extinc- tion of which would have been more 42 disastrous than the utmost mischief that can be conceived as ensuing from the toleration of vice. The Shewing- up of Blanco Posnet, p. 348. "DEETHOVEN was the first man Beethoven who used music with absolute In- tegrity as the expression of his own emotional life. Others had shewn how It could be done — had done it themselves as a curiosity of their art In rare, self-indulgent, unprofessional mo- ments — but Beethoven made this, and nothing else, his business. Stupendous as the resultant difference was between his music and any other ever heard In the world before his time, the distinc- tion Is not clearly apprehended to this day, because there was nothing new in the musical expression of emotion: every progression In Bach is sanctified by emotion; and Mozart's subtlety, delicacy, and exquisite tender touch and noble feeling were the despair of all the musical world. But Bach's 43 theme was not himself, but his religion; and Mozart was always the dramatist and story-teller, making the men and women of his imagination speak, and dramatizing even the instruments in his orchestra, so that you know their very sex the moment their voices reach you. Haydn really came nearer to Beethoven, for he is neither the praiser of God nor the dramatist, but, always within the limits of good manners and of his primary function as a purveyor of formal decorative music, a man of moods. This is how he created the symphony and put it ready-made into Beethoven's hand. The revolution- ary giant at once seized it, and, throw- ing supernatural religion, convention- al good manners, dramatic fiction, and all external standards and objects into the lumber room, took his own human- ity as the material of his music, and expressed it all without compromise, from his roughest jocularity to his holiest aspiration after what purely hu- man reign of Intense life — of Freude — when Alle Menschen werden Briider Wo dein sanfter Fliigel weilt. In thus fearlessly expressing himself, he has, by his common humanity, ex- pressed us as well, and shewn us how beautifully, how strongly, how trust- worthily we can build with our own real selves. This is what is proved by the immense superiority of the Beethoven symphony to any oratorio or opera. The Saturday Review, 14th November 1896. T IKE all highly developed litera- The tures, the Bible contains a great deal of sensational fiction, imagined with Intense vividness, appealing to the most susceptible passions, and narrated with a force which the ordinary man Is quite unable to resist. Perhaps only an expert can thoroughly appreciate the power with which a story well told, 45 or an assertion well made, takes pos- session of a mind not specially trained to criticize it. Try to imagine all that is most powerful in English literature bound into one volume, and offered to a comparatively barbarous race as an J instrument of civilization invested with supernatural authority! Indeed, let us leave what we call barbarous races out of the question, and suppose it of- fered to the English nation on the same assumptions as to its nature and au- thority which the children in our popu- lar schools are led to make to-day con- cerning the Bible under the School Board compromise! How much re- sistance would there be to the illusion created by the art of our great story- tellers? Who would dare to affirm that the men and women created by Chaucer, Shakespear, Bunyan, Field- ing, Goldsmith, Scott and Dickens had never existed? Who could resist the force of conviction carried by the tre- mendous assertive power of Cobbett, 46 the gorgeous special-pleading of Rus- kin, or the cogency of Sir Thomas More, or even Matthew Arnold? Above all, who could stand up against the inspiration and moral grandeur of our prophets and poets, from Lang- land to Blake and Shelley? The power of Scripture has not waned with the ages. We have no right to trick a child's instinctive sense of revelation and inspiration by such a surpassingly blasphemous pessimistic lie as that both have become extinct, and that the wretched world, like its dead moon, is hving out its old age on a scanty rem- nant of spiritual energy, hoarded from thousands of years ago. And yet the whole question at stake in the School Board election was whether this lie should be told as a black lie or a white one. The stupid part of the business is that it is quite unnecessary to tell any lies at all. Why not teach children the realities of inspiration and revela- tion as they work daily through scribes 47 and lawgivers? It would, at all events, make better journalists and parish councillors of them. The Saturday Review, 27th November 1897. Books 'Y'HEODOTUS.i Caesar: will you go down to posterity as a barbar- ous soldier too Ignorant to know the value of books? C^SAR. Theodotus: I am an author \ myself; and I tell you It Is better that \ the Egyptians should live their lives ^ than dream them away with the help of books. THEODOTUS [kneeling, with genuine lit- erary emotion: the passion of the ped- ant'] Caesar: once In ten generations of men the world gains an Immortal book. C^SAR [inflexible] If It did not flatter mankind, the common executioner would burn it. THEODOTUS. Without history, death will lay you beside your meanest soldier. ^ The library of Alexandria is in flames. Theodotus asks for soldiers to extinguish them. 48 C^SAR. Death will do that In any case. I ask no better grave. THEODOTUS. What is burning there is the memory of mankind. c^SAR. A shameful memory. Let it burn. THEODOTUS [wildly] Will you destroy the past? c.^SAR. Ay, and build the future with Its ruins. Casar and Cleopatra, p. 132. _^^ 'T^HE way to get at the merits of a Both sides case is not to listen to the fool who imagines himself impartial, but to get it argued with reckless bias for and against. To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist. The Sanity of Art, p. 4. ' I *HE reason why Shakespear and gj^ljf^^^. Moliere are always well spoken of SfnHomt and recommended to the young is that \| their quarrel is really a quarrel with 49 God for not making men better. If they had quarrelled with a specified class of persons with incomes of four figures for not doing their work better, or for doing no work at all, they would be de- nounced as seditious, impious, and prof- ligate corrupters of morality. Three Plays by Brieux, Preface, p. xvii. pUT your Shakespearian hero and coward, Henry V. and Pistol or ParoUes, beside Mr. Valiant and Mr. Fearing, and you have a sudden revela- tion of the abyss that lies between the fashionable author who could see noth- ing 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 sud- 50 denly see that Shakespear, with all his flashes and divinations, never under- stood virtue and courage, never con- ceived 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 pilgrim- age, 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 be- ing 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 griev- ances 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 51 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 peo- ple would so willingly employ as pan- dar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimen- tallzer and the like. Man and Super- man, pp. xxxi., xxxii. Children and /^UR duty to our school-children is ReTigious ^^ clear enough. Just as we teach ng ^i^gj^ |.|^^^ ^j^g various races and classes and colors of men have such and such customs and laws and habits differing from our own, so we should teach them that there exist In the world divers creeds and observances, theories of morals, and views as to the origin and destiny of life and the moral sanctions of conduct. And we should add that these differences do not connote differ- ences of what children call goodness and badness, and that quite as good men and women, and even (which they will, 52 perhaps, find It harder to believe) just as bad men and women, are to be found among " heathens " as among their own fathers and mothers. That is all we have any right to teach children about creeds nowadays. The Daily News, 25th August 1902. ■ I 1 npHE problem being to make heroes Christianity out of cowards, we paper apostles and artist-magicians have succeeded only in giving cowards all the sensations of heroes whilst they tolerate every ^^ abomination, accept every plunder, and submit to every oppression. Christian- ity in making a merit of such submis- sion, has marked only that depth in the abyss at which the very sense of shame is lost. The Christian has been like Dickens' doctor in the debtor's prison, who tells the newcomer of its ineffable peace and security: no duns; no tyran- nical collectors of rates, taxes and rent; no importunate hopes nor exacting duties; nothing but the rest and safety 53 stances of having no further to fall. Major \ Barbara, p. 179. , Christmas r^QURAGE, f Hcnd ! We all loathe Christmas; but it comes only oncej a year and is soon over. Christmas Card. i; Citizenship JT Is QuItc usclcss to dcclarc that all; and I ^ . . . J , circum- xxitn are born tree 11 you deny tnati they are born good. Guarantee a man s! goodness and his liberty will take care; of itself. To guarantee his freedom oni condition that you approve of his moral character is formally to abolish all free- dom whatsoever, as every man's liberty Is at the mercy of a moral indictment, which any fool can trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or as a rascal. This Is the lesson Democracy has to learn be- fore it can become anything but the most oppressive of all the priesthoods. Ma- jor Barbara, p. 187. 54 Every practicable man (and woman) Is a potential scoundrel and a potential good citizen. What a man Is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances. Major Barbara, p. 185. Take the utmost care to get well born and well brought up. This means that your mother must have a good doctor. Be careful to go to a school where there Is what they call a school clinic, where your nutrition and teeth and eyesight and other matters of Importance to you will be attended to. Be particularly careful to have all this done at the ex- pense of the nation, as otherwise It will not be done at all, the chances being about forty to one against your being able to pay for It directly yourself, even If you know how to set about It. Other- wise you will be what most people are at present: an unsound citizen of an un- sound nation, without sense enough to 55 be ashamed or unhappy about it. The Doctor's Dilemma, p. xcli. Conscience T UST as the llar's punishment is, not J in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else, so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent. Quintessence of Ibsenism, p. 2. Con- O RITANNUS [shocked] Csser: this ventional I J • , Morality IS nOt prOpcr. THEODOTUS [outraged] How! C^SAR. Pardon him, Theodotus : he is a barbarian and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature. Casar and Cleopatra, p. 119. Surely the time is past for patience with writers who, having to choose between giving up life in despair and discarding the trumpery moral kitchen scales in which they try to weigh the universe, 56 ^ superstitlously stick to the scales, and spend the rest of the lives they pretend to despise in breaking men's spirits. Three Plays for Puritans, p. xxviii. The truth is, laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making so- ciety better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date. You will ask me: " Why have them at all? " I will tell you. They are made necessary, though we all secretly detest them, by the fact that the number of people who can think out a line of conduct for themselves even on one point is very small, and the number who can afford the time for it still smaller. Nobody can afford the time to do it on all points. The professional thinker may on occa- sion make his own morality and philos- ophy as the cobbler may make his own boots; but the ordinary man of business must buy at the shop, so to speak, and put up with what he finds on sale there, 57 \ whether It exactly suits him or not, be- cause he can neither make a morahty for himself nor do without one. The San- ity of Art J p. 46. Remember, the objection to all progress Is that It Is Immoral. Correspondence. 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 re- ligion, 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 theol- ogy. Is what Nietzsche has expressed in terms of post-Darwinian, post-Scho- penhauerian philosophy; Wagner In terms of polytheistic mythology; and Ib- sen in terms of mid-nineteenth century Parisian dramaturgy. Nothing Is new In these matters except their novelties: for 58 ! instance, It Is a novelty to call Justifica- tion by Faith " Wllle," and Justification by Works " Vorstellung." The sole use of the novelty is that you and I buy and read Schopenhauer's treatise on Will and Representation when we should not dream of buying a set of sermons on Faith versus Works. At bottom the controversy Is the same, and the dra- matic results are the same. Bunyan makes no attempt to present his pilgrims as more sensible or better conducted than Mr. Worldly Wiseman. Mr. W. W.'s worst enemies, Mr. Embezzler, Mr. Never-go-to-Church-on-S u n d a y, Mr. Bad Form, Mr. Murderer, Mr. Burglar, Mr. Correspondent, 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 Hypoc- 59 risy; Wlldhead, 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 so- ciety and veritable pillars of the law. The whole allegory is a consistent at- tack 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? Man and Superman, pp. xxxii., xxxiii. Courage A ND now, supposc you had done all '^ this — suppose you had come safely out with that letter in your hand, know- 60 Ing that when the hour came, your fear had tightened, not your heart, but your grip of your own purpose — that It had ceased to be fear, and had become strength, penetration, vigilance. Iron resolution — how would you answer then If you were asked whether you were a coward? The Man of Destiny, p. i86. C UCH abominations as the Inquisition cowardice and the Vaccination Acts are possible only In the famine years of the soul, when the great vital dogmas of honor, liberty, courage, the kinship of all life, faith that the unknown Is greater than the known and Is only the As Yet Unknown, and resolution to find a manly highway to It, have been forgotten In a paroxysm of lit- tleness and terror In which nothing Is ac- tive except concupiscence and the fear of death, playing on which any trader can filch a fortune, any blackguard gratify his cruelty, and any tyrant make us his slaves. The Doctor s Dilemma, p. xc. 6i Buffer States at one end of the scale, dog muzzles at the other; between, the whole gamut of human cowardice, with " I'honneur de I'armee " and " our gal- lant Tommies " for keynote. And yet this poor trembling creature, Man, can- not rest or retreat, and must brag and dare — must even seek concrete danger as a relief from superstitious fear, just as men sometimes commit suicide to es- cape from the dread of death. Civilization and the Soldier. The Humane Review, January 1901, p. 304. cri^nai "R ^- -^"^ ^^ ^^ ^° ^^ allowed to de- Law -'-'• fy the criminal law of the land? SIR PATRICK. The criminal law is no use to decent people. It only helps blackguards to blackmail their families. What are we family doctors doing half our time but conspiring with the family solicitor to keep some rascal out of jail and some family out of disgrace? B. B. But at least it will punish him. 62 SIR PATRICK. Oh yes: itll punish him. Itll punish not only him but everybody connected with him, innocent and guilty alike. Itll throw his board and lodg- ing on our rates and taxes for a couple of years, and then turn him loose on us a more dangerous blackguard than ever. Itll put the girl in prison and ruin her; itll lay his wife's life waste. You may put the criminal law out of your head once for all: it's only fit for fools and savages. The Doctor' s Dilemma^ p. 72. TF you are clever enough to construct criticism one of those dolls which close their eyes when you lay them on their backs, and speak plaintively when you nip them in the epigastric region, any imaginative little girl will explain to you at great length and in minute detail how the doll got tired and sleepy, and what it means by the squeak. The most popular dra- matic criticisms of to-day are stories of dolls, prettily invented and touchingly 63 told. And when you give the critic a woman to criticize instead of a doll, and scenes from real life instead of turns of the stageland kaleidoscope to con- sider, he protests that you are confront- ing him with the morbid, the unmanage- able, the diseased. The Saturday Review, 20th July 1895. Criticism may be pardoned for every mistake except that of not knowing a man of rank in literature when it meets one. The Saturday Review^ 30th Jan- uary 1897. The Crows \ FTER Shakcspcar, the dramatists that Follow h\. • ^U -u' r C U £u the "^ were m the position or Spohr after Plough Mozart. A ravishing secular art had been opened up to them, and was refin- ing their senses and ennobling their ro- mantic illusions and enthusiasms instead of merely stirring up their basest pas- sions. Cultivated lovers of the beauties of Shakespear's art — true amateurs, in fact — took the place of the Marlovian 64 crew. Such amateurs, let loose In a field newly reaped by a great master, have always been able to glean some dropped ears, and even to raise a brief aftermath. In this way the world has gained many charming and fanciful, though not really original, works of art — blank verse dramas after Shakespear, rhetorical frescoes after Raphael, fugues after Bach, operas after Mozart, sym- phonies after Beethoven, and so on. This, I take It, Is the distinction between Marlowe and Company and the firm of Beaumont and Fletcher. The pair wrote a good deal that was pretty disgraceful; but at all events they had been educated out of the possibility of writing Titus Andronlcus. They had no depth, no conviction, no religious or philosophic basis, no real power or seriousness — Shakespear himself was a poor master In such matters — but they were dainty romantic poets, and really humorous character-sketchers In Shakespear's pop- ular style : that Is, they neither knew nor 6s cared anything about human psychology, but they could mimic the tricks and man- ners of their neighbors, especially the vulgarer ones, in a highly entertaining way. The Saturday Review, 19th Feb- ruary 1898. Cruelty T ^JT US not shrink from the fact that cruelty is^ne of the primitive pleas- ures of mankind, and that the detection J of its Protean disguises as law, educa- tion, medicine, discipline, sport and so forth. Is one of the most , difficult of the unending tasks of the legislator. The Doctor's Dilemma^ p. xllv. Democracy "j^ERO was popular wIth the people: -^ his despotism reached them only In the shape of splendid entertainments. His government was so unrepresentative, so undemocratic, that it was no govern- ment at all: the moment the people Im- mediately about Nero had the sense to tell him that If he did not cut his own 66 throat they would save him the trouble, he had to obey like the meanest gladi- ator. To attain real power, he should have made himself the keystone of an oligarchy. To attain extensive power that oligarchy would have had to make itself the keystone of a democracy. Let me put this evolutionary process in blunter terms. An assassin may be feared and dreaded; but he can enjoy neither power nor safety. To escape from this position he associates other assassins with him and becomes a brig- and. To make brigandage pay, it Is soon necessary to resort to blackmail, and protect travellers who pay for pro- tection. Thus the brigands, with the worst possible intentions, find themselves transformed into a police force. At last they become regular policemen as poachers become gamekeepers. At which point their power reaches its max- imum. Hence the paradox that Democ- racy represents the extreme of possible State tyranny. Unpublished. (>7 Democracy Is really only an arrange- ment by which the whole people are given a certain share in the control of the government. It has never been proved that this is ideally the best ar- rangement : it became necessary because the people willed to have it; and it has been made effective only to the very limited extent short of which the dis- satisfaction of the majority would have taken the form of actual violence. Now when men had to submit to kings, they consoled themselves by making it an article of faith that the king was always right — Idealized him as a Pope, In fact. In the same way we who have to submit to majorities set up Voltaire's pope, " Monsieur Tout-le-monde," and make it blasphemy against Democracy to deny that the majority Is always right, al- though that, as Ibsen says, is a lie. It Is a scientific fact that the majority, how- ever eager It may be for the reform of old abuses. Is always wrong In Its opinion of new developments, or rather is al- 68 ways unfit for them (for It can hardly be said to be wrong In opposing de- velopments for which It Is not yet fit). The pioneer Is a tiny minority for the force he heads; and so, though It Is easy to be In a minority and yet be wrong, It Is absolutely Impossible to be In the majority and yet be right as to the newest social prospects. We should never progress at all if it were possible for each of us to stand still on demo- cratic principles until we saw whither all the rest were moving, as our statesmen declare themselves bound to do when they are called upon to lead. What- ever clatter we may make for a time with our filing through feudal serf col- lars and kicking off rusty capitalistic fet- ters, we shall never march a step for- ward except at the heels of " the strong- est man, he who is able to stand alone " and to turn his back on " the damned compact Liberal majority." All of which Is no disparagement of adult suf- frage, payment of members, annual par- 69 llaments and so on, but simply a whole- some reduction of them to their real place in the social economy as pure ma- chinery — machinery which has absolute- ly no principles except the principles of mechanics, and no motive power in it- self whatsoever. The idealization of public organizations is as dangerous as that of kings or priests. We need to be reminded that though there is in the world a vast number of buildings in which a certain ritual is conducted be- fore crowds called congregations by a functionary called a priest, who is sub- ject to a central council controlling all such functionaries on a few points, there is not therefore any such thing in re- ality as the ideal Catholic Church, nor ever was, nor ever will be. There may, too, be a highly elaborate organization of public affairs; but there is no such thing as the ideal State. All abstrac- tions invested with collective conscious- ness or collective authority, set above the individual, and exacting duty from 70 him on pretence of acting or thinking with greater validity than he, are man- eating idols red with human sacrifices. Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 97, 98, 99. We must either breed political ca- pacity 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 be- nevolent despot, what chance has De- mocracy, which requires a whole popu- lation of capable voters: that is, of political critics who. If they cannot gov- ern in person for lack of spare energy or specific talent for administration, can at least recognize and appreciate capac- ity and benevolence in others, and so govern through capably benevolent rep- resentatives? Where are such voters to be found to-day? Nowhere. Pro- miscuous breeding has produced a weak- ness of character that Is too timid to face the full stringency of a thoroughly 71 competitive struggle for existence and too lazy and petty to organize the com- monwealth co-operatively. Being cow- ards, we defeat natural selection under cover of philanthropy: being sluggards, we neglect artificial selection under cover of delicacy and morality. Man and Superman, p. xxiv. Real democracy is impossible without public opinion. And In our system the difficulty Is not, as we so often say, that public opinion Is not enlight- ened. The difficulty Is that public opin- ion does not exist. There Is literally no such thing. Opinion means a view of the world; and a view of the world means an Income. Unpublished. Democracy HpHERE Is Only onc condltlon on Justice -■> which a man can do justice between two litigants, and that is that he shall have no interest in common with either of them, whereas it is only by having every Interest in common with both of 72 them that he can govern them tolerably. The indispensable preliminary to Democ- racy is the representation of every in- terest: the indispensable preliminary to justice is the elimination of every In- terest. John BuU's Other Island, p. xxvii. r\ON JUAN [to the Devil] Pooh! The.^,^ '^ why should I be civil to them or FrilLds to you? In this Palace of Lies a truth or two will not hurt you. Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only deco- rated. They are not clean : they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated: they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pewrenters. They are not moral : they are only con- ventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only "frail." They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. 73 They are not prosperous : they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not cour- ageous, only quarrelsome; not deter- mined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not so- cial, only gregarious; not considerate, only poHte; not intelligent, only opin- ionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative, only superstitious; not just, only vindictive ; not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all — liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls. Man and Superman, P- 130- _^^ Discipune T g^Y that Certain things are to be done; but I dont order anybody to do them. I dont say, mind you, that there Is no ordering about and snubbing and even bullying. The men snub the 74 boys and order them about; the car- men snub the sweepers ; the artisans snub the unskilled laborers; the foremen drive and bully both the laborers and artisans; the assistant engineers find fault with the foremen; the chief engineers drop on the assistants; the departmental managers worry the chiefs; and the clerks have tall hats and hymnbooks and keep up the social tone by refusing to associate on equal terms with anybody. The result is a colossal profit, which comes to me. Major Barbara^ p. 283. According to the disciplinarian theory, the captain of a cruiser ought to be the most absolute autocrat, and the secre- tary of a trade-union the most abject slave In Engjand. As a matter of fact It Is the captain who is the slave and the secretary who is the autocrat. Correspondence. "fyiARCHBANKS. Do you think D^scr^m- that the things people make fools '"^'°°^ 75 of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? Candida, p. loS. Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the unsound. Man and Superman , p. 243. He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with sim- ilarity has never thought for five min- utes about either. Man and Superman^ p. 229. Any fool can scoff. The serious matter is which side you scoff at. Scoffing at pretentious dufferdom is a public duty: scoffing at an advancing torchbearer is a deadly sin. The men who praised Shakespear in my time were mostly the men who would have stoned him had they been his contemporaries. To praise him saved them the trouble of thinking; got them the credit of correct and pro- found opinions; and enabled them to pass as men of taste when they explained that Ibsen was an obscene dullard. To 76 expose these humbugs and to rescue the real Shakespear from them, it was nec- essary to shatter their idol. It has taken the iconoclasm of three generations of Bible smashers to restore Hebrew liter- ature to us, after three hundred years of regarding the volume into which it was bound as a fetish and a talisman; and it will take as many generations of Shakespear smashers before we can read the plays of Shakespear with as free minds as we read The Nation. The Nation, 2nd April 19 lo. When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater. Man and Superman, p. 232. Go on to Florence and try San Lorenzo, a really noble church (which the Milan Cathedral is not) , Brunelleschi's master- piece. You cannot but admire its in- tellectual command of form, its unaf- 77 fected dignity, its power and accomplish- ment, its masterly combination of sim- plicity and homogeneity of plan with ele- gance and variety of detail: you are even touched by the retention of that part of the beauty of the older time which was perceptible to the Renascent intellect be- fore its weaning from heavenly food had been followed by starvation. You un- derstand the deep and serious respect which Michael Angelo had for Brunel- leschi — why he said " I can do different work, but not better." But a few min- utes' walk to Santa Maria Novella or Santa Croce, or a turn in the steamtram to San Miniato, will bring you to churches built a century or two earlier: and you have only to cross their thresh- olds to feel, almost before you have smelt the incense, the difference between a church built to the pride and glory of God (not to mention the Medici) and one built as a sanctuary shielded by God's presence from pride and glory and all the other burdens of Hfe. In San 78 Lorenzo up goes your head — every Iso- lating advantage you have of talent, power or rank asserts Itself with thrill- ing poignancy. In the older churches you forget yourself, and are the equal of the beggar at the door, standing on ground made holy by that labor in which we have discovered the reality of prayer. On Going to Church. The Savoy, Jan- uary 1896, pp. 19, 20. What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say " I know " instead of " I am learning," and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for scepticism and activity. The Doctor's Dilemma^ p. xc. An Englishman never asks what he is doing or why he is doing it. He pre- fers not to know, as he suspects that whatever it Is, it is something wrong. The Scotchman, nurtured on the Shoiter Catechism, is able to use his brains, and 79 therefore likes using them. He attacks the problem of life with an appetite. The Irishman, on the other hand, knows what he is doing without any study of the subject whatever. The result is that he often gets there before the re- flective Scotchman or the recalcitrant Englishman. Life, Literature and Po- litical Economy. Clare Market Re- view^ January 1906, p. 31. SCHUTZMACHER. When an Englishman borrows, all he knows or cares is that he wants money; and he'll sign anything to get it, without in the least understand- ing it, or intending to carry out the agreement if it turns out badly for him. In fact he thinks you a cad If you ask him to carry It out under such circum- stances. Just like the Merchant of Ven- ice, you know. But if a Jew makes an agreement, he means to keep it and ex- pects you to keep it. If he wants money for a time, he borrows It and knows he must pay It at the end of the time. 80 If he knows he can't pay, he begs it as a gift. The Doctor's Dilenuna^ P- S^- UNDERSHAFT. You have learnt some- thing. That always feels at first as If you had lost something. Major Barbara^ p. 284. UNDERSHAFT {with grave compassion'] You see, my dear, it Is only the big men who can be treated as children. Major Barbara^ p. 277. An Englishman reading Caesar's books would say that Caesar was a man of / great common sense and good taste, y/ meaning thereby a man without original- ity or moral courage. Three Plays for Puritans^ p. 205. Originality gives a man an air of frank- ness, generosity and magnanimity by enabling him to estimate the value of truth, money, or success in any particu- lar Instance quite independently of con- vention and moral generalization. He 81 therefore will not, In the ordinary Treas- ury Bench fashion, tell a He which every- body knows to be a He (and consequent- ly expects him as a matter of good taste to tell). His lies are not found out: ^ey pass for candors. He understands || the paradox of money, and gives It awayi when he can get most for It; In other! words, when Its value is least, which Is just when a common man tries hardest to get It. He knows that the real mo- ment of success is not the moment ap- parent to the crowd. Hence, In order to produce an Impression of complete disinterestedness and magnanimity, he has only to act with entire selfishness, and this is perhaps the only sense in which a man can be said to be naturally great. It is in this sense that I have repre- sented Caesar as great. Having virtue, he has no need of goodness. He Is neither forgiving, frank, nor generous, because a man who Is too great to resent has nothing to forgive ; a man who says 82 things that other people are afraid to say need be no more frank than Bis- marck was; and there is no generosity in giving things you do not want to people of whom you intend to make use. This distinction between virtue and goodness is not understood in England: hence the poverty of our drama in heroes. Our stage attempts at them are mere goody-goodies. Goodness, in its popular British sense of self-denial, im- plies that man is vicious by nature, and that supreme goodness is supreme mar- tyrdom. Not sharing that pious opin- ion, I have not given countenance to it in any of my plays. In this I follow the precedent of the ancient myths, which represent the hero as vanquishing his enemies, not in fair fight, but with enchanted sword, superequine horse and magic invulnerability, the possession of which, from the vulgar moralistic point of view, robs his exploits of any merit whatever. Three Plays for Puritans^ pp. 206, 207. 83 CENTURION [sulkily] I do my duty. That is enough for me. APOLLODORUS. Majesty: |ivhen a stu- i pid man Is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it Is! his duty."\ Casar and Cleopatra, p. 144. ^v What the world calls originality Is only an unaccustomed method of tickling It. Three Plays for Puritans, p. xxxvi. JOHNNY. The Governor's a wonder- ful man; but he's not quite all there, you know. If you notice, he's different from me ; and whatever my failings may be, I'm a sane man. Erratic: thats what he Is. And the danger Is that some day he'll give the whole show away. LORD SUMMERHAYS. Giving the show away is a method like any other method. Keeping It to yourself Is only another method. I should keep an open mind about It. JOHNNY. Has it ever occurred to you that a man with an open mind must be a bit of a scoundrel? If you ask me, 84 I like a man who makes up his mind once for all as to whats right and whats wrong and then sticks to it. At all events you know where to have him. LORD SUMMERHAYS. That may not be his object. BENTLEY. He may want to have you, old chap. JOHNNY. Well, let him. If a member of my club wants to steal my umbrella, he knows where to find it. If a man put up for the club who had an open mind on the subject of property in um- brellas, I should blackball him. An open mind is all very well in clever talky- talky; but in conduct and in business give me solid ground. LORD SUMMERHAYS. Yes : the quick- sands make life difficult. Still, there they are. It's no use pretending theyre rocks. JOHNNY. I dont know. You can draw a line and make other chaps toe it. Thats what I call morality. Misalliance (unpublished, 19 12). ■ 85 The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel. Any- body can behave well when things are going smoothly. The Philanderer y p. 151. The effect of deterrents depends much less on their severity than on their cer- tainty. The Free Lance, 25 th January 1902. ■ I 1 Sir''^ jV/IAMMON overreached himself menSi whcn he imposed his doctrine of Marriage inalienable property on the Church un- \ der the guise of indissoluble marriage. \ For the Church tried to shelter this in- 4 human doctrine and flat contradiction of the gospel by claiming, and rightly claim- ing, that marriage is a sacrament. So it is; but that is exactly what makes di- vorce a duty when the marriage has lost the inward and spiritual grace of which the marriage ceremony is the outward and visible sign. In vain do bishops stoop to pick up the discarded arguments 86 of the atheists of fifty years ago by pleading that the words of Jesus were in an obscure Aramaic dialect, and were probably misunderstood, as Jesus, they think, could not have said anything a bishop would disapprove of. Unless they are prepared to add that the state- ment that those who take the sacrament with their lips but not with their hearts eat and drink their own damnation is also a mistranslation from the Aramaic, they are most solemnly bound to shield marriage from profanation, not merely by permitting divorce, but by making it compulsory in certain cases as the Chi- nese do. Getting Married^ p. 195. LIFE as it occurs is senseless: a po- The r 4. \^ ' i. ^ 1 • Dramatist liceman may watch it and work m it for thirty years In the streets and courts of Paris without learning as much of It or from It as a child or a nun may learn from a single play by Brieux. For It is the business of Brieux to pick out the significant incidents from the chaos 87 Duty of daily happenings, and arrange them so that their relation to one another becomes significant, thus changing us from bewildered spectators of a mon- strous confusion to men intelligently con- scious of the world and its destinies. This is the highest function that man can perform — the greatest work he can set his hand to ; and this Is why the great dramatists of the world, from Eu- ripides and Aristophanes to Shakespear and Moliere, and from them to Ibsen and Brieux, take that majestic and pon- tifical rank which seems so strangely above all the reasonable pretensions of mere strolling actors and theatrical au- thors. Three Plays by Brieux, Preface, p. XXV. AXTHAT, during all these overthrow- Ings of things sacred and things infallible, has been happening to that pre-eminently sanctified thing, Duty? Evidently it cannot have come off scathe- less. First there was man's duty to God, with the priest as assessor. That was repudiated; and then came Man's duty to his neighbor, with Society as the as- sessor. Will this too be repudiated, and be succeeded by Man's duty to himself, assessed by himself? And if so, what will be the effect on the conception of Duty in the abstract? Let us see. Duty arises at first, a gloomy tyranny, out of man's helplessness, his self-mis- trust, in a word, his abstract fear. He personifies all that he abstractly fears as God, and straightway becomes the slave of his duty to God. He imposes that slavery fiercely on his children, threat- ening them with hell, and punishing them for their attempts to be happy. When, becoming bolder, he ceases to fear everything, and dares to love some- thing, this duty of his to what he fears evolves into a sense of duty to what he loves. Sometimes he again personifies what he loves as God: and the God of Wrath becomes the God of Love; some- times he at once becomes a humanitarian, 89 an altruist, acknowledging only his duty to his neighbor. This stage is correla- tive to the rationalist stage in the evo- lution of philosophy and the capitalist phase in the evolution of industry. But in It the emancipated slave of God falls under the dominion of Society, which, having just reached a phase In which all the love is ground out of it by the com- petitive struggle for money, remorseless- ly crushes him until. In due course of the further growth of his spirit or will, a sense at last arises in him of his duty to himself. And when this sense is fully grown, which it hardly is. yet, the tyr- rany of duty is broken; for now the man's God Is himself; and he, self-sat- isfied at last, ceases to be selfish. The evangelist of this last step must there- fore preach the repudiation of duty. This, to the unprepared of his genera- tion, is Indeed the wanton masterpiece of paradox. What! after all that has been said by men of noble life as to the secret of all right conduct being only 90 *' Duty, duty, duty," is he to be told now that duty is the primal curse from which we must redeem ourselves before we can advance another step on the road along which, as we imagine — having forgot- ten the repudiations made by our fathers — duty and duty alone has brought us thus far? But why not? God was once the most sacred of our conceptions; and he had to be denied. Then Reason be- came the Infallible Pope, only to be deposed in turn. Is Duty more sacred than God or Reason? Quintessence of Ibsen'ism, pp. 17, 18. T BELIEVE that any society which Economic desires to found itself on a high dencr°' standard of integrity of character in its units should organize itself in such a fashion as to make it possible for all men and all women to maintain themselves in reasonable comfort by their industry without selling their affections and their convictions. Plays: Pleasant and Un- pleasant. Vol. I. Unpleasant^ p. xxvi. 91 The Economic Indepen- dence of Women Education P'AMILY life will never be decent, •*■ much less ennobling, until the central horror of the dependence of women on men Is done away with. At present It reduces the difference between mar- riage and prostitution to the difference between Trade Unionism and unorgan- ized casual labor: a huge difference, no doubt, as to order and comfort, but not a difference In kind. Getting Married^ p. 164. nPHE ruthless repression which we practise on our fellow-creatures whilst they are too small to defend them- selves, ends in their reaching their full bodily growth in a hopelessly lamed and Intimidated condition, unable to conceive of any forces in the world except physi- cally coercive and socially conventional ones. Exactly In proportion as Parliament con- sists of thoroughly schooled men, do we find it given to shuffling and prevari- cation, and convinced that the world can 92 only be held together by flogging, pun- ishing, coercing and retaliating. And the exponents of this philosophy of cow- ardice are personally docile, abject to superior rank and royalty, horribly afraid to say, do, or think anything un- less they see everybody else setting them the example. Incapable of conceiving lib- erty and equality: In short, schoolboy- ish. That is, they are exactly what they have been educated to be from their weakest childhood; and they are every- where beaten in character and energy by the men who, through the poverty, care- lessness, or enlightenment of their par- ents, have more or less escaped educa- tion. Great communities are built by men who sign with a mark: they are wrecked by men who write Latin verses. Does Modern Education Ennoble? Great Thoughts, 7th October 1905, p. 6. People are said not to care for educa- tion; and this is true enough; but they would care for it if they were confronted 93 dally with an undeniably superior effi- ciency in the most expensively educated classes. What they actually are con- fronted with need not be described here : suffice it to say that no rational being can be conceived as willing to be rated an- other threepence in the pound to secure some more of it. Correspondence, LORD SUMMERHAYS. Reading is a dan- gerous amusement, Tarleton. I wish I could persuade some of your free li- brary people of that. TARLETON. Why, man, it's the begin- ning of education. LORD SUMMERHAYS. On the contrary, it's the end of it. How can you dare teach a man to read until you have taught him everything else first? Misalliance (unpublished, 19 12). And since what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experi- ence, of literature for life, of the obso- lete fictitious for the contemporary real, 94 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 think- ing, and manufacturers of highly ques- tionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of life. Man and Superman^ pp. xx., xxl. POWERFUL among the enemies of The Shakespear are the commentator ^^^'^^ and the elocutionist : the commentator because, not knowing Shakespear's lan- guage, he sharpens his reasoning faculty to examine propositions advanced by an eminent lecturer from the Midlands, In- stead of sensitizing his artistic faculty to receive the Impression of moods and Inflexions of feeling conveyed by word- music; the elocutionist because he Is a born fool. In which capacity, observing 95 with pain that poets have a weakness for imparting to their dramatic dialogue a quality which he describes and deplores as " sing-song," he devotes his life to the art of breaking up verse in such a way as to make it sound like insanely pompous prose. The effect of this on Shakespear's earlier verse, which Is full of the naive delight of pure oscillation, to be enjoyed as an Italian enjoys a barc- arolle, or a child a swing, or a baby a rocking-cradle, is destructively stupid. In the later plays, where the barcarolle measure has evolved into much more varied and complex rhythms, it does not matter so much since the work is no longer simple enough for a fool to pick to pieces. But in every play from Love's Labour's Lost to Henry V. the elocu- tionist meddles simply as a murderer, and ought to be dealt with as such with- out benefit of clergy. To our young people studying for the stage I say, with all solemnity, learn how to pronounce the English alphabet clearly and beauti- 96 fuily from some person who Is at once an artist and a phonetic expert. And then leave blank verse patiently alone until you have experienced emotion deep enough to crave for poetic expression, at which point verse will seem an abso- lutely natural and real form of speech to you. Meanwhile, If any pedant, with an uncultivated heart and a theoretic ear, proposes to teach you to recite, send in- stantly for the police. The Saturday Re- view, 2nd February 1895. -t-H- 'X'O me the play Is only the means, the The End -*• end being the expression of feeling Sfe Mean by the arts of the actor, the poet, the musician. Anything that makes this ex- pression more vivid, whether It be versi- fication, or an orchestra, or a deliberately artificial delivery of the lines, is so much to the good for me, even though It may destroy all the verisimilitude of the scene. The Saturday Review, 13th April 1895. 97 Enlush T-f OME life as we understand it is no Home <*- -■' more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo. Its grave dan- ger to the nation lies in its narrow views, its unnaturally sustained and spitefully jealous concupiscences, its petty tyr- ranies, its false social pretences, its end- less grudges and squabbles, its sacrifice of the boy's future by setting him to earn money to help the family when he should be in training for his adult life (remember the boy Dickens and the blacking factory), and of the girl's chances by making her a slave to sick or selfish parents, its unnatural packing into little brick boxes of little parcels of hu- manity of ill-assorted ages, with the old scolding or beating the young for be- having like young people, and the young hating and thwarting the old for behav- ing like old people, and all the other ills, mentionable and unmentionable, that arise from excessive segregation. It sets these evils up as benefits and bless- ings representing the highest attainable 98 degree of honor and virtue, whilst any criticism of or revolt against them is savagely persecuted as the extremity of vice. The revolt, driven underground and exacerbated, produces debauchery veiled by hypocrisy, and overwhelming demand for licentious theatrical enter- tainments which no censorship can stem, and, worst of all, a confusion of virtue with the mere morality that steals its name until the real thing is loathed be- cause the imposture is loathsome. Getting Married^ pp. 132, 133. If on any night at the busiest part of the theatrical season in London the au- diences were cordoned by the police and examined individually as to their views on the subject, there would probably not be a single house-owning native among them who would not conceive a visit to the theatre, or indeed to any public assembly, artistic or political, as an exceptional way of spending an even- ing, the normal English way being to 99 sit in separate families in separate houses, each person silently occupied with a book, a paper, or a game of halma, cut off equally from the blessings of society and solitude. You may make the acquaintance of a thousand streets of middle-class English families without coming on a trace of any consciousness of citizenship, or any artistic cultivation of the senses. The condition of the men is bad enough, in spite of their daily escape into the city, because they carry the exclusive and unsocial habits of " the home " with them into the wider world of their business. Amiable and compan- ionable enough by nature, they are, by home training, so incredibly ill-man- nered, that not even their Interest, as men of business in welcoming a possible customer in every inquirer, can correct their habit of treating everybody who has not been " introduced " as a stran- ger and intruder. The women, who have not even the city to educate them, are much worse : they are positively un- 100 fit for civilized intercourse — graceless, ignorant, narrow-minded to a quite ap- palling degree. Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant. Vol. I. Unpleasant, pp. xvii., xviii. J^APOLEON. No Englishman is too low to have scruples : no Eng- lishman is high enough to be free from their tyranny. But every Englishman is born with a certain miraculous power that makes him master of the world. When he wants a thing, he never tells himself that he wants it. He waits pa- tiently until there comes into his mind, no one knows how, a burning conviction that It Is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who have got the thing he wants. Then he becomes irresistible. Like the aristocrat, he does what pleases him and grabs what he covets : like the shopkeeper, he pursues his purpose with the industry and steadfastness that come from strong religious conviction and lOI \ deep sense of moral responsibility. He is never at a loss for an effective moral attitude. As the great champion of freedom and national independence, he conquers and annexes half the world, and calls it Colonization. When he wants a new market for his adulterated Man- chester goods, he sends a missionary to teach the natives the Gospel of Peace. The natives kill the missionary: he flies to arms in defence of Christianity; fights for it; conquers for it; and takes the market as a reward from heaven. In defence of his island shores, he puts a chaplain on board his ship; nails a flag with a cross on it to his top-gallant mast; and sails to the ends of the earth, sink- ing, burning and destroying all who dispute the empire of the seas with him. He boasts that a slave is free the mo- ment his foot touches British soil; and he sells the children of his poor at six years of age to work under the lash in his factories for sixteen hours a day. He makes two revolutions, and then de- 102 dares war on our one in the name of law and order. There Is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find English- men doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles; he supports his king on loyal principles and cuts off his king's head on republican principles. His watchword is always Duty; and he never forgets that the nation which lets its duty get on the opposite side to Its Interest Is lost. The Man of Destiny, pp. 212, 213. Englishmen . . . always lean sincerely to virtue's side as long as it costs them nothing either In money or In thought. They feel deeply the Injustice of for- eigners, who allow them no credit for this conditional high-mlndedness. Man and Superman^ p. 216. 103 ■^^ Englishmen believe in nothing but the soldier, who is a positive nuisance, the gentleman, who Is a comparative nui- sance, and the lady, who is a superlative nuisance. And so I think the world will tire at last of the Englishman's stupidity, \ and send him back to his hovel, like the fisherman in the fairy tale who wanted to be lord of the sun and moon because his simpler virtues had been rewarded by a success or two. Civilization and the Soldier. The Humane Review, Jan- uary 1901, p. 314. It seems impossible to root out of an Englishman's mind the notion that vice is delightful, and that abstention from it is privation. The Author's Apology, Mrs. Warren's Profession, p. 29. DOYLE. A caterpillar when It gets Into a tree, instinctively makes itself look ex- actly like a leaf; so that both its ene- mies and its prey may mistake It for one and think It not worth bothering about. The world Is as full of fools 104 as a tree Is full of leaves. Well, the Englishman does what the caterpillar does. He instinctively makes himself look like a fool, and eats up all the real fools at his ease while his enemies let him alone and laugh at him for being a fool like the rest. Oh, nature is cun- ning, cunning ! John BulFs Other Island, p. 25. CETEWAYO. Are these anaemic dogs the English people? LUCIAN. Mislike us not for our com- plexions. The pallid liveries of the pall of smoke Belched by the mighty chimneys of our factories, And by the million patent kitchen ranges Of happy English homes. The Admirable Bashville, p. 37. - I - 1 npHE Englishman is the most success- The ful man in the world simply be- anl^uJe cause he values success — meaning money spSt*^ and social precedence — more than any- 105 Englishman thing else, especially more than fine art, his attitude towards which, culture-affec- tation apart, is one of half diffident, half contemptuous curiosity; and of course more than clear-headedness, spir- itual insight, truth, justice and so forth. It is precisely this unscrupulousness and singleness of purpose that constitutes the Englishman's pre-eminent " common sense " ; and this sort of common sense, I submit to Mr. Meredith, is not only not " the basis of the comic," but actu- ally makes comedy impossible, because it would not seem like common sense at all if it were not self-satisfiedly uncon- scious of its moral and intellectual blunt- ness, whereas the function of comedy is to dispel such unconsciousness by turn- ing the searchlight of the keenest moral and intellectual analysis right on to it. Now the Frenchman, the Irishman, the American, the ancient Greek, Is disabled from this true British common sense by intellectual virtuosity, leading to a love of accurate and complete consciousness io6 of things — of intellectual mastery of them. This produces a positive enjoy- ment of disillusion (the most dreaded and hated of calamities in England) and consequently a love of comedy (the fine art of disillusion) deep enough to make huge sacrifices of dearly idealized insti- tutions to It. Thus, in France, Moliere was allowed to destroy the Marquises. In England he could not have shaken even such titles as the accidental sher- iff's knighthood of the late Sir Augus- tus Harris. And yet the Englishman thinks himself much more Independent, level-headed, and genuinely republican than the Frenchman — not without good superficial reasons; for nations with the genius of comedy often carry all the snobbish ambitions and idealist enthusi- asms of the Englishman to an extreme which the Englishman himself laughs at. But they sacrifice them to comedy, to which the Englishman sacrifices nothing; so that. In the upshot, aristocracies, thrones and churches go by the board 107 at the attack of comedy among our de- votedly conventional, loyal and fanat- ical next door neighbors, whilst we, having absolutely no disinterested re- gard for such Institutions, draw a few of their sharpest teeth, and then main- tain them determinedly as part of the machinery of worldly success. The Englishman prides himself on this anti-comedic common sense of his as at least eminently practical. As a matter of fact. It Is just as often as not most pigheadedly unpractical. For example, electric telegraphy, telephony and trac- tion are invented, and establish them- selves as necessities of civilized life. The unpractical foreigner recognizes the fact, and takes the obvious step of put- ting up poles In his streets to carry wires. This expedient never occurs to the Briton. He wastes leagues of wire and does unheard-of damage to property by tying his wires and posts to such chim- ney stacks as he canbegullehouseholders into letting him have access to. Finally, 1 08 when It comes to electric traction, and the housetops are out of the question, he suddenly comes out in the novel charac- ter of an amateur in urban picturesque- ness, and declares that the necessary cable apparatus would spoil the appear- ance of our streets. The streets of Nu- remberg, the heights of Fiesole, may not be perceptibly the worse for these con- trivances ; but the beauty of Tottenham Court Road Is too sacred to be so pro- faned: to Its loveliness the strained bus- horse and his offal are the only acces- sories endurable by the beauty-loving Cockney eye. This is your common- sense Englishman. His helplessness in the face of electricity Is typical of his helplessness In the face of everything else that lies outside the set of habits he calls his opinions and capacities. In the theatre he is the same. It Is not common sense to laugh at your own prejudices : It Is common sense to feel insulted when any one else laughs at them. Besides, the Englishman Is a serious person: that Is, 109 he is firmly persuaded that his prejudices and stupidities are the vital material of civilization, and that it is only by hold- ing on to their moral prestige with the stiffest resolution that the world is saved from flying back into savagery and go- rilladom, which he always conceives, in spite of natural history, as a condition of lawlessness and promiscuity, instead of, as it actually is, the extremity, long since grown unbearable, of his own no- tions of law and order, morality and conventional respectability. Thus he is a moralist, an ascetic, a Christian, a truth-teller and a plain dealer by profes- sion and by conviction; and it is wholly against this conviction that, judged by his own canons, he finds himself in prac- tice a great rogue, a liar, an unconscion- able pirate, a grinder of the face of the poor, and a libertine. Mr. Meredith points out daintily that the cure for this self-treasonable confusion and darkness Is Comedy, whose spirit overhead will *' look humanely malign and cast an 110 oblique light on them, followed by vol- leys of silvery laughter." Yes, Mr. Meredith; but suppose the patients have " common sense " enough not to want to be cured! Suppose they realize the im- mense commercial advantage of keeping their ideal life and their practical busi- ness life in two separate conscience-tight compartments, which nothing but " the Comic Spirit " can knock into one ! Sup- pose, therefore, they dread the Comic Spirit more than anything else in the world, shrinking from its " illumina- tion," and considering its " silvery laugh- ter " in execrable taste ! Surely in doing so they are only carrying out the common-sense view, in which an encour- agement and enjoyment of comedy must appear as silly and suicidal and " un- English " as the conduct of the man who sets fire to his own house for the sake of seeing the flying sparks, the red glow in the sky, the fantastic shadows on the walls, the excitement of the crowd, the gleaming charge of the engines, and III the dismay of the neighbors. No doubt the day will come when we shall de- liberately burn a London street every day to keep our city up to date in health and handsomeness, with no more misgiv- ing as to our common sense than we now have when sending our clothes to the laundry every week. When that day comes, perhaps comedy will be popular too; for, after all, the function of com- edy, as Mr. Meredith after twenty years' further consideration is perhaps by this time ripe to admit, is nothing less than the destruction of old-established morals. Unfortunately, today such iconoclasm can be tolerated by our playgoing citi- zens only as a counsel of despair and pessimism. They can find a dreadful joy in it when it is done seriously, or even grimly and terribly as they under- stand Ibsen to be doing it; but that it should be done with levity, with silvery laughter like the crackling of thorns un- der a pot, is too scandalously wicked, too cynical, too heartlessly shocking to 112 be borne. Consequently our plays must either be exploitations of old-established morals or tragic challengings of the or- der of Nature. Reductions to absurd- ity, however logical; banterings, how- ever kindly; irony, however delicate; merriment, however silvery, are out of the question in matters of morality, ex- cept among men with a natural appetite for comedy which must be satisfied at all costs and hazards : that is to say, not among the English playgoing public, which positively dislikes comedy. No doubt it is patriotically indulgent of Mr. Meredith to say that " Our English school has not clearly imagined societ}%" and that " of the mind hover- ing above congregated men and women it has imagined nothing." But is he quite sure that the audiences of our Eng- lish school do not know too much about society and " congregated men and women " to encourage any exposures from " the vigilant Comic," with its " thoughtful laughter," its '' oblique II- lumination," and the rest of It? May it not occur to the purchasers of half- guinea stalls that it is bad enough to have to put up with the pryings of Fac- tory Inspectors, Public Analysts, County Council Inspectors, Chartered Account- ants and the like, without admitting this Comic Spirit to look Into still more deli- cate matters? Is It clear that the Comic Spirit would break into silvery laughter If it saw all that the nineteenth century has to show It beneath the veneer? There Is Ibsen, for Instance: he is not lacking, one judges, in the Comic Spirit; yet his laughter does not sound very silvery, does it? No: If this were an age for comedies, Mr. Meredith would have been asked for one before this. How would a comedy from him be rel- ished, I wonder, by the people who wanted to have the revisers of the Au- thorized Version of the Bible prosecuted for blasphemy because they corrected as many of its mistranslations as they dared, and who reviled Froude for not sup- 114 pressing Carlyle's diary and writing a fictitious biography of him, instead of letting out the truth? Comedy, indeed! I drop the subject with a hollow laugh. Saturday Review, 27th March 1897. - i -' i T^QUALITY is essential to good breed- Equality •*^ ing; and equality, as all economists know, is incompatible with property. Man and Superman, p. 186. I am not bound to keep my temper with an imposture so outrageous, so abjectly sycophantic, as the pretence that the existing inequalities of income corre- spond to and are produced by moral and physical inferiorities and superiorities — that Barnato was five million times as great and good a man as William Blake, and committed suicide because he lost two-fifths of his superiority; that the life of Lord Anglesey has been on a far higher plane than that of John Ruskin; that Mademoiselle Liane de Pougy has been raised by her successful sugar specu- 115 latlon to moral heights never attained by Florence Nightingale; and that an arrangement to establish economic equal- ity between them by duly adjusted pen- sions would be impossible. I say that no sane person can be expected to treat such impudent follies with patience, much less with respect. The evil resulting from the existing un- equal distribution of wealth is so enor- mous, so incalculably greater than any other evil, actual or conceivable, on the face of the earth, that it is our first duty to alter it into an equal distribution. The chief physical agent needed for the change is a sufficiency of cannon. The chief moral agent a sufficiency of charac- ter, which seems to be the difficulty so far, the nation exhibiting, instead of those diversities of opinion and capac- ity which so impress The Pall Mall Ga- zette, a dead level of baseness and tame- ness which makes it possible to drive men in flocks to fight over the question of the proprietorship of other countries ii6 before we have dared even to raise the question of the proprietorship of our own. The Daily News, 8th December 1904. I - 1 - T F you lived in London, where the The whole system Is one of false good- Facto?*^ fellowship, and you may know a man for twenty years without finding out that he hates you like poison, you would soon have your eyes opened. There we do unkind things in a kind way: we , say bitter things in a sweet voice: we ^/ always give our friends chloroform ^ when we tear them to pieces. But think of the other side of it! Think of the people who do kind things In an unkind way — people whose touch hurts, whose voices jar, whose tempers play them false, who wound and worry the people they love in the very act of trying to conciliate them, and yet who need af- fection as much as the rest of us. Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant. Vol. II. Pleasant, pp. 309, 310. Famous Actors BARRY SULLIVAN T) ARRY SULLIVAN was a splendld- ■^ ly monstrous performer in his prime : there was hardly any part suffi- ciently heroic for him to be natural in it. He had deficiencies in his nature or rather blanks, but no weaknesses, be- cause he had what people call no heart. Being a fine man, as proud as Lucifer, and gifted with an intense energy which had enabled him to cultivate himself physically to a superb degree, he was the very incarnation of the old individual- istic, tyrannical conception of a great ac- tor. By magnifying that conception to sublimity, he reduced it to absurdity. There were just two serious parts which he could play — Hamlet and Richelieu — the two loveless parts in the grand rep- ertory. The Saturday Review, 14th December 1895. DUSE But in Duse you necessarily get the great school in its perfect integrity, be- 118 cause Duse without her genius would be a plain little woman of no use to any manager, whereas Miss Terry or Miss Achurch, If they had no more skill than can be acquired by any person of ordi- nary capacity In the course of a few years' experience, would always find a certain degree of favour as pretty lead- ing ladles. Duse with her genius, is so fascinating that it Is positively difficult to attend to the play instead of attend- ing wholly to her. The extraordinary richness of her art can only be under- stood by those who have studied the process by which an actress Is built up. You offer a part to a young lady who Is an enthusiastic beginner. She reads it devoutly, and forms, say, half a dozen great Ideas as to points which she will make. The difficulty then Is to Induce her to do nothing between these points; so that the play may be allowed at such moments to play itself. Probably when it comes to the point, these intervals will prove the only effective periods dur- 119 ing her performance, the points being ill chosen or awkwardly executed. The majority of actresses never get beyond learning not to invent new points for themselves, but rather to pick out In their parts the passages which admit of certain well worn and tried old points being reapphed. When they have learnt to make these points smoothly and to keep quiet between whiles with a grace- ful air of having good reasons for do- ing nothing, they are finished actresses. The great actress has a harder struggle. She goes on inventing her points and her business determinedly, constantly in- creasing the original half-dozen, and constantly executing them with greater force and smoothness. A time comes when she Is always making points, and making them well; and this Is the finish- ing point with some actresses. But with the greatest artists there soon com- mences an integration of the points into a continuous whole, at which stage the actress appears to make no points at all, and to proceed In the most unstudied and " natural " way. This rare con- summation Duse has reached. An at- tentive study of her Marguerite Gau- thier, for instance, by a highly trained observer of such things, will bring to light how its apparently simple strokes are combinations of a whole series of strokes, separately conceived originally, and added one by one to the part, un- til finally, after many years of evolu- tion, they have Integrated into one single highly complex stroke. Take, as a very simple illustration, the business of Ca- mille's tying up the flowers in the third act. It seems the most natural thing in the world; but it is really the final de- velopment of a highly evolved dance with the arms — even, when you watch it consciously, a rather prolonged and elaborate one. The strokes of charac- ter have grown up In just the same way. And this is the secret of the extraordi- nary interest of such acting. There are years of work, bodily and mental, be- hind every Instant of it — work, mind, not mere practice and habit, which Is quite a different thing. It Is the rarity of the gigantic energy needed to sustain this work which makes Duse so excep- tional; for the work Is In her case high- ly Intellectual work, and so requires energy of a quality altogether superior to the mere head of steam needed to produce Bernhardtlan explosions with the requisite regularity. With such high energy, mere personal fascination becomes a thing which the actress can put off and on like a garment. Sarah Bernhardt has nothing but her own charm, for the exhibition of which Sar- dou contrives love scenes — save the mark. Duse's own private charm has not yet been given to the public. She gives you Cesarlne's charm. Marguerite Gauthler's charm, the charm of La Lo- candlera, the charm, In short, belonging to the character she Impersonates; and you are enthralled by Its reality and de- lighted by the magical skill of the artist 122 without for a moment feeling any com- plicity either on your own part or hers In the passion represented. And with that clue to the consistency of supreme admiration for the artist with perfect respect for the woman — a combination so rare that some people doubt its pos- sibility — I must leave discussion of the plays she has appeared in this week to my next article. — The Saturday Review, 8th June 1895. 1 - 1 - ONE of the strongest objections to The ^^ ' '^ ' r • Farcical the mstitution or monogamy is comedy the existence of Its offspring, the conven- tional farcical comedy. The old warn- ing, " Beware how you kiss when you do not love," ought to be paraphrased on the playbills of all our lighter theatres as " Beware how you laugh when you do not enjoy." To laugh without sympathy is a ruinous abuse of a noble function; and the degredation of any race may be measured by the de- gree of their addiction to it. In its 123 subtler forms it is dying very hard: for instance, we find people who would not join in the laughter of a crowd of peas- ants at the village idiot, or tolerate the public flogging or pillorying of a crim- inal, booking seats to shout with laugh- ter at a farcical comedy which is, at bottom, the same thing — namely, the deliberate indulgence of that horrible, derisive joy in humiliation and suffering which is the beastliest element in human nature. I make these portentous obser- vations not by way of breaking a but- terfly on a wheel, but in order to bring out with violent emphasis the distinction between the high and the base comedy of errors — between Pink Dominos and Twelfth Night; or, to illustrate from another art, between the caricatures of Leech or Gavarni and those which mark the last intolerable stages of the degra- dation of Ally Sloper (who in his or- iginal Ross-Duval days was not without his merits). To produce high art in the theatre, the author must create per- 124 sons whose fortunes we can follow as those of a friend or enemy: to produce base laughter, It is only necessary to turn human beings on to the stage as rats are turned Into a pit, that they may be worried for the entertainment of the spectators. The Saturday Review, 9th May 1896. Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, It leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled Into It; and that Is why, though I laugh as much as anybody at a farcical comedy, I am out of spirits before the end of the second act, and out of temper before the end of the third, my miserable mechanical laughter Intensifying these symptoms at every outburst. If the public ever becomes In- telligent enough to know when It Is really enjoying Itself and when It Is not, there win be an end of farcical comedy. The Saturday Review, 23d February, 1895. I2S Formulas \ 1 ADY BRITOMART. In good so- •^ clety In England, Charles, men drivel at all ages by repeating silly form- ulas with an air of wisdom. Schoolboys make their own formulas out of slang, like you. When they reach your age, and get political private secretaryships and things of that sort, they drop slang and get their formulas out of The Spec- tator or The Times. You had better confine yourself to The Times. Major Barbara, p. 272. The God T KNOW that my " Ignorant and inex- Lad^es^ perlenced God " disgusts people who are accustomed to the best of every- \ \ thing. The old-fashioned gentleman X^ who felt that God would not lightly damn a man of his quality has given place to the lady who declines to be saved by a deity who Is not absolutely first-class In every particular. Sir Isaac Newton's confession of Ignorance and inexperience seems to her to mark a 126 lower grade of character and intelli- gence than the assurance of Mr. Stig- gins, who knows everything and can move mountains with his faith. I know this high-class deity very well. When I hire a furnished house for my holi- days, as I very often do, I find his por- trait in the best bedroom. It is the por- trait of a perfect gentleman, not older than thirty-eight, with nice hair, a nice beard, nice draperies, a nice pet lamb under his arm or somewhere about, and an expression which combines the tone of the best society wath the fascination of Wilson Barrett as Hamlet. The ladies who worship him are themselves worshipped by innumerable poor Job- lings in shabby lodgings who pin up the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty on their walls. Far be it from me to mock at this worship: if you dare not or can- not look the universe in the face you will at least be the better for adoring that spark of the divine beauty and the eter- nal force that glimmers through the 127 weaknesses and inadequacies of a pretty man or a handsome woman; but please, dear sect of sweethearts, do not mock at me either. You have your nicely buttered little problem and are content with Its nicely buttered little solution. I have to face a larger problem and find a larger solution; and since on my scale the butter runs short I must serve the bread of life dry. The Academy, 29th June 1907. The Golden \^^HAT Ibsen Insists on Is that there Rule' Is no golden rule — that conduct must justify Itself by Its effect upon hap- piness and not by its conformity to any rule or ideal. And since happiness con- sists In the fulfilment of the will, which Is constantly growing, and cannot be ful- filled to-day under the conditions which secured Its fulfilment yesterday, he claims afresh the old Protestant right of private judgment In questions of con- duct as against all institutions, the so- called Protestant Churches themselves 128 included. Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 140, 141. TT is impossible to prove that the gov- The erning few have ever, in any gener- ciallS*"^ ally valid sense, been the ablest men of their time. James I. governed Shake- spear: was he an abler man? Louis XV. and his mistresses governed Tur- got : was it by their superiority in abil- ity or character? Socialism and Supe- rior Brains, p. 52. When power and riches are thrown hap- hazard into children's cradles as they are in England, you get a governing class without industry, character, cour- age, or real experience; and under such circumstances reforms are produced only by catastrophes followed by panics in which " something must be done." Thus it costs a cholera epidemic to achieve a Public Health Act, a Crimean War to reform the Civil Service, and a gunpowder plot to disestablish the Irish 129 Church. It was by the light, not of reason, but of the moon, that the need for paying serious attention to the Irish land question was seen in England. John Bull's Other Island, pp. xxv., xxvi. LORD SUMMERHAYS. Men are not gov- erned by justice, but by law or persua- sion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both. I used both when law and persuasion failed me. Every ruler of men since the world began has done so, even when he has hated both fraud and force as heartily as I do. Misalliance (unpub- lished 19 1 2). We are all now under what Burke called " the hoofs of the swinish multitude." Burke's language gave great offence be- cause the implied exceptions to its uni- versal 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 130 marriages by which it tried to secure breeding for itself, had its mind under- trained by silly schoolmasters and gov- ernesses, its character corrupted by gratuitous luxury, its self-respect adul- terated 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 occa- sionally in a Bunyan, a Burns, or a Car- lyle. 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 persua- sion of conspicuous personal qualifica- tions and popular eloquence. The mul- titude thus pronounces judgment on its own units : it admits itself unfit to gov- 131 ern, and will vote only for a man mor- phologically 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 in- stead of wisdom, these plutocratic prod- ucts of " the nail and sarspan business as he got his money by." Do they know whether to laugh or cry at the no- tion 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 or- dered 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 132 as Infallibly as a savage converts the philosophical theology of a Scotch mis- sionary Into crude African Idolatry. Man and Superman, pp. xxIL, xxIII. A King Is an Idol: that Is why I am a Republican. The New Age, 2nd June 1910. When an artificial aristocracy Is created by Idolization It will work with all the appearance of a natural and Inevitable system as long as the aristocrats not only wear their trappings and keep up the observances which set their dally lives and habits apart from those of or- dinary folk, but also do the work which the Idolization system was Invented to provide for, and without which It has no sense. But once let them evade the work whilst retaining the privileges, and they will become an Idle class, and, as such, an Inferior class; for no mortal power can maintain the idler at a higher level than the worker. The Idol who 133 does not earn his worship Is an Impostor and a robber; and it is found in practice that whereas an aristocracy which really governs can maintain its supremacy even when its members are in their personal conduct what we should call infernal scoundrels, aristocracies of the most charming ladies and gentlemen imagin- able who do not govern, finally collapse and are trampled out with every circum- stance of violence and insult by the mob. By the mob I mean the unldolized. The question for the political scientist, in other words for the Fabian, Is whether It Is possible to devise any sys- tem of constitutional checks or safe- guards by which the system of govern- ment by Idolized aristocracy can be secured against this danger. And when I say idolized aristocracy, I Include its latest form, which Is an Idolized bureau- cracy of experts. Socialism without experts Is as impossible as shipbuilding without experts or dentistry without ex- perts. In so far as we have already 134 done without experts, we have done without Socialism; and all the fears ex- pressed that Socialism will produce a huge increase of officialism are quite well grounded: under Socialism we shall all be officials, actually or potentially. Unpublished. The insensibility of the English govern- ing classes to philosophical, moral and social considerations — in short, to any considerations which require a little In- tellectual exertion and sympathetic alert- ness — is tempered, as we Irish well know, by an absurd susceptibility to in- timidation. John Bull's Other Island, p. XX vl. pLEOPATRA. When I was foolish, The ^ I did what I liked, except when Man4 Ftatateeta beat me; and even then I ^""'^^'^ cheated her and did it by stealth. Now that Caesar has made me wise, It is no use my liking or disliking: I do what must be done, and have no time to at- 135 Happiness \ Heaven tend to myself. That Is not happiness; but It Is greatness. Casar and Cleopatra, p. 165. 'VT'OU must never say that the knowl- edge of how to live without hap- piness is happiness. A teetotaller might as well preach that the knowledge of how to practise total abstinence Is the truest drunkenness. Happiness Is not the object of life: life has no object: It Is an end In Itself; and courage consists In the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an Intenser quality of life. Corre- spondence. l^EEGAN. In my dreams heaven Is a country where the State is the Church and the Church the people : three In one and one In three. It is a com- monwealth In which work Is play and play Is life: three In one and one In three. It Is a temple in which the priest is the worshipper and worshipper the worshipped: three in one and one in 136 three. It Is a godhead In which all life is human and all humanity divine : three in one and one in three. John Bull's Other Island, p. 125. DON JUAN. In Heaven, as I picture it, dear lady, you live and work instead of playing and pretending. You face things as they are; you escape nothing but glamor; and your steadfastness and your peril are your glory. Man and Superman, p. 104. DON JUAN. Do you suppose heaven is like earth, where people persuade them- selves that what is done can be undone by repentance; that what is spoken can be unspoken by withdrawing it; that what is true can be annihilated by a general agreement to give it the lie? No: Heaven is the home of the masters of reality. Man and Superman, p. 103. 'HE DEVIL. The gulf between Heaven Heaven and Hell is the difference betweer the angelic and the diabolic 137 and Hell temperament. What more impassable gulf could you have? Think of what you have seen on earth. There Is no physical gulf between the philosopher's class room and the bull ring; but the bull fighters do not come to the class room for all that. Have you ever been In the country where I have the largest following — England? There they have great race-courses, and also concert rooms where they play the classical com- positions of his Excellency's friend Mo- zart. Those who go to the race-courses can stay away from them and go to the classical concerts Instead If they like: there Is no law against It; for English- men never will be slaves : they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do. And the classical concert Is admitted to be a higher, more cultivated, poetic. Intel- lectual, ennobling place than the race- course. But do the lovers of racing de- sert their sport and flock to the concert room? Not they. They would suffer 138 there all the weariness the Commander has suffered In Heaven. There Is the great gulf of the parable between the two places. A mere physical gulf they could bridge; or at least I could bridge It for them (the earth Is full of Devil's Bridges) ; but the gulf of dislike Is Im- passable and eternal. Man and Super- man, pp. lOI, I02. DON JUAN. Senor Commander: you know the way to the frontier of hell and heaven. Be good enough to direct me. THE STATUE. Oh, the frontier Is only the difference between two ways of look- ing at things. Any road will take you across It If you really want to get there. Man and Superman, p. 135. rj"ELL Is the home of honor, duty, Heii justice, and the rest of the seven deadly virtues. All the wickedness on earth Is done In their name: where else but In hell should they have their re- 139 ward? Have I not told you that the truely damned are those who are happy in hell? Man and Superman, p. 91. Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. Man and Superman, p. 239- KEEGAN. This world, sir, is very clear- ly a place of torment and penance, a place where the fool flourishes and the good and wise are hated and persecuted, a place where men and women torture one another in the name of love; where children are scourged and enslaved in the name of parental duty and educa- tion; where the weak in body are poi- soned and mutilated in the name of heal- ing, and the weak In character are put to the horrible torture of imprisonment, not for hours but for years, in the name of justice. It is a place where the hard- est toil is a welcome refuge from the horror and tedium of pleasure, and where charity and good works are done only for hire to ransom the souls of the 140 spoiler and the sybarite. Now, sir, there Is only one place of horror and torment known to my religion ; and that place is hell. Therefore it is plain to me that this earth of ours must be hell, and that we are all here to expiate crimes committed by us In a former existence. John Bull's Other Island, p. 97. THE English are extremely particu- The , . °, . 1-1 11-1^ Hereditary lar m selectmg their butlers, whilst principle they do not select their barons at all, / taking them as the accident of birth v sends them. The consequences include much Ironic comedy. The Irrational Knot, p. xIII. - i - i - 'T'HERE are two sorts of family life, The Home •^ Phil ; and your experience of human nature only extends, so far, to one of them. The sort you know Is based on mutual respect, on recognition of the right of every member of the household to Independence and privacy in their 141 personal concerns. And because you have always enjoyed that, It seems such a matter of course to you that you don't value It. But there Is another sort of family life; a life In which husbands open their wives' letters and call on them to account for every farthing of their expenditure and every moment of their time; In which women do the same to their children; In which no room Is private and no hour sacred; In which duty, obedience, affection, home, moral- ity and religion are detestable tyrannies, and life Is a vulgar round of punish- ments and lies, coercion and rebellion, jealousy, suspicion, recrimination. You Never Can Tell, pp. 234, 235. gome "pVEN If Home Rule were as un- healthy as an Englishman's eatlnpj, as Intemperate as his drinking, as filthy as his smoking, as licentious as his do- mesticity, as corrupt as his elections, as murderously greedy as his commerce, as cruel as his prisons, and as merciless 142 as his streets, Ireland's claim to self- government would still be as good as England's. John Bull's Other Island, p. XXXV III. IITOSPITALS are not public luxuries, Hospitals but public necessities : when the private contributor buttons up his pocket — as he Invariably now does If he understands what he is about — the re- sult Is not that the sick poor are left to perish in their slums, but that a hospital rate is struck, and the hospitals happi- ly rescued from the abuses of practi- cally Irresponsible private management (which the rich writers of conscience- money cheques never dream of attempt- ing to control), with income uncertain; authority scrambled for by committee, doctors, chiefs of the nursing staff, and permanent officials; and the angel-eyed nurses, coarsely and carelessly fed, sweated and overworked beyond all en- durance except by women to whom the opportunity of pursuing a universally 143 respected occupation with a considerable chance of finally marrying a doctor is worth seizing at any cost. For this the overthrow of the begging, cadging, advertising, voluntary-contribution sys- tem means the substitution of the cer- tain income, the vigilant audit, the ex- pert official management, the standard wages and hours of work, the sensitive- ness to public opinion (including that of the class to which the patients be- long), the subjection to fierce criticism by party newspapers keen for scandals to be used as local electioneering capi- tal, all of which have been called into action by the immense development in local government under the Acts of the last ten years. Of course, as long as Ignorant philanthropists, and people anxious to buy positions as public bene- factors, maintain private hospitals by private subscription, the ratepayers and the local authorities will be only too glad to shirk their burdens and duties, just as they would if they could induce 144 philanthropists to light and pave the streets for them; but when the philan- thropists learn that the only practical effect of their misplaced bounty on the poor Is that the patient gets less accom- modation and consideration, and the nurse less pay and no security In return for longer hours of labor, they will be- gin to understand how all the old objec- tions to pauperizing individuals apply with tenfold force to pauperizing the public. The Saturday Review, 19th December 1896. "VT^ETthls hand, That many a two days bruise hath ruthless given. Hath kept no dungeon locked for twen- ty years. Hath slain no sentient creature for my sport. I am too squeamish for your dainty world, That cowers behind the gallows and the lash, 145 A Human- itarian The world that robs the poor and with their spoil Does what its tradesmen tell It. Oh, your ladles ! Sealskinned and egret-feathered; all de- fiance To Nature; cowering If one say to them " What will the servants think? " Your gentlemen ! Your tailor-tyrannized visitors of whom Flutter of wing and singing In the wood Make chickenbutchers. And your medi- cine men ! Groping for cures In the tormented en- trails Of friendly dogs. The Admirable Bashville, p. 31. Human \^7E must finally adapt our instltu- Nattxre and y y . , •' ^ -, , Institutions tions to human nature. In the long run our present plan of trying to force human nature Into a mould of existing abuses, superstitions, and cor- 146 rupt interests, produces the explosive forces that wreck civilization. Getting Married, p. 204. TBSEN never presents his play to you ibsen as a romance for your entertainment : he says, In effect, " Here is yourself and myself, our society, our civilization. The evil and good, the horror and the hope of It, are woven out of your life and mine." The Saturday Review, 27th April 1895. If Ibsen were to visit London, and ex- press his opinion of our English theatre — as Wagner expressed his opinion of the Philharmonic Society, for example — our actors and managers would go down to posterity as exactly such per- sons as Ibsen described them. He is master of the situation, this man of genius; and when we complain that he does not share our trumpery little no- tions of life and society; that the themes 147 that make us whine and wince have no terrors for him, but infinite interest; and that he is far above the barmaid's and shop superintendent's obligation to be agreeable to Tom, Dick and Harry (which naturally convinces Tom, Dick and Harry that he is no gentleman), we are not making out a case against him, but simply stating the grounds of his eminence. When any person objects to an Ibsen play because it does not hold the mirror up to his own mind, I can only remind him that a horse might make exactly the same objection. For my own part, I do not endorse all Ib- sen's views : I even prefer my own plays to his in some respects; but I hope I know a great man from a little one as far as my comprehension of such things goes. Criticism may be pardoned for every, mistake except that of not know- ing a man of rank in literature when it meets one. The Saturday Review, 30th January 1897. 148 \X7'HEN an American journalist de- scribes Sir Edward Burne-Jones as " The English Gustave Dore," or declares Madox Brown to have been " as a realist, second only to Frith," he means well; and possibly the victims of his good intentions give him credit for them. But I do most earnestly beg the inhabitants of this island to be extreme- ly careful how they compare any for- eigner to Shakespear. The foreigner can know nothing of Shakspear's power over language. He can only judge him by his intellectual force and dra- matic insight, quite apart from his beauty of expression. From such a test Ibsen comes out with a double first class: Shakespear comes out hardly any- where. Our English deficiency in ana- lytic power makes it extremely hard for us to understand how a man who is great in any respect can be insignificant in any other respect; and perhaps the average foreigner is not much cleverer. But when the foreigner has the particu- 149 lar respect In which our man is great cut off from him artificially by the change of language, as a screen of col- oured glass will shut off certain rays from a camera, then the deficiency which is concealed even from our experts by the splendour of Shakespear's literary gift, may be obvious to quite common- place people who know him only through translations. In any language of the world Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor or Galilean prove their author a thinker of extraordinary penetration, and a moralist of international influence. Turn from them to To be or not to be, or The seven ages of man, and imagine, if you can, anybody more critical than a village schoolmaster being imposed on by such platitudinous fudge. The com- parison does not honor Ibsen: it makes Shakespear ridiculous; and for both their sakes it should not be drawn. If we cannot for once leave the poor Bard alone, let us humbly apologize to Ibsen for our foolish worship of a foolish col- 150 lection of shallow proverbs in blank verse. Let us plead that if we compare, not the absolute Shakespear with the absolute Ibsen, but the advance from the old stage zany Hamblet to our William's Hamlet with the advance from Faust to Peer Gynt, Ham- let was really a great achievement, and might stand as an isolated feat against Peer Gynt as an isolated feat. But as it led to nothing, whereas Peer Gynt led to so much that it now ranks only as part of Ibsen's romantic wild oats — above all, as Ibsen's message nerved him to fight all Europe in the teeth of starvation, whereas Shake- spear's was not proof even against the ignorance and vulgarity of the London playgoer, it only needs another turn of the discussion to shew that a comparison of the two popular masterpieces is like a comparison of the Eiffel Tower to one of the peaks in an Alpine chain. The Saturday Review, 26th March 1898. 151 The Idea QON JUAN. ThIs creaturc Man, ^"^ who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. He may be abject as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a fanatic. He can only be enslaved whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen to reason. I tell you, gentlemen, if you can shew a man a piece of what he now calls God's work to do, and what he will later on call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally. Man and Superman, p. 1 1 1. DON JUAN. Every idea for which Man will die will be a Catholic idea. When the Spaniard learns at last that he is no better than the Saracen, and his prophet no better than Mahomet, he will arise, more Catholic than ever, and die on a barricade across the filthy slum he starves in, for universal liberty and equality. THE STATUE. Bosh ! 152 DON JUAN. What you call bosh Is the only thing men dare die for. Later on, Liberty will not be Catholic enough: men will die for human perfection, to which they will sacrifice all their liberty gladly. THE DEVIL. Ay: they will never be at a loss for an excuse for killing one an- other. DON JUAN. What of that! It is not death that matters, but the fear of j death. It Is not killing and dying that degrades us, but base living, and accept- j Ing the wages and profits of degrada- ! tion. Man and Superman, p. iio. j A S Man grows through the ages, he weais j '^ finds himself bolder by the growth f of his spirit (if I may so name the un- known) and dares more and more to love and trust Instead,^ of to fear and fight. But his courage has other ef- fects: he also raises himself from mere consciousness to knowledge by daring 153 more and more to face facts and tell himself the truth. For in his infancy of helplessness and terror he could not face the inexorable; and facts being of all things the most inexorable, he masked all the threatening ones as fast as he discovered them; so that now every mask requires a hero to tear it off. The King of terrors, Death, was the Arch- Inexorable: Man could not bear the dread of that thought. He must per- suade himself that Death could be pro- pitiated, circumvented, abolished. How he fixed the mask of immortality on the face of Death for this purpose we all know. And he did the like with all dis- agreeables as long as they remained inevitable. Otherwise he must have gone mad with terror of the grim shapes around him, headed by the skeleton with the scythe and hourglass. The masks were his ideals, as he called them; and what, he would ask, would life be with- out ideals? Thus he became an ideal- ist, and remained so until he dared to 154 begin pulling the masks off and looking the spectres In the face — dared, that is, to be more and more a realist. But all men are not equally brave; and the greatest terror prevailed whenever some realist bolder than the rest laid hands on a mask which they did not yet dare to do without. We have plenty of these masks round us still — some of them more fantastic than any of the Sandwich Islanders* masks in the British Museum. In our novels and romances especially we see the most beautiful of all the masks — those devised to disguise the brutalities of the sexual instinct In the earlier stages of Its development, and to soften the rigorous aspect of the iron laws by which Society regulates its gratification. Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 20, 21. TDEALISM, which is only a flatter- weausm Ing name for romance In politics and morals, Is as obnoxious to me as ro- mance in ethics or religion. Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant. Vol. 11. Pleasant, p. xvlli. The realist at last loses patience with Ideals altogether, and sees In them only something to blind us, something to numb us, something whereby, Instead of resisting death, we can disarm It by committing suicide. The Idealist, who has taken refuge with the Ideals because he hates himself and is ashamed of himself, thinks that all this is so much the better. The realist, who has come to have a deep respect for himself and faith in the validity of his own will, thinks it so much the worse. To the one, human nature, naturally corrupt. Is only held back from the excesses of the last years of the Roman Empire by self- denying conformity to the Ideals. To the other, these Ideals are only swad- dling clothes which man has outgrown, and which Insufferably Impede his move- ments. No wonder the two cannot 156 agree. The idealist says, " Realism means egotism; and egotism means de- pravity." The realist declares that when a man abnegates the will to live and be free in a world of the living and free, seeking only to conform to ideals for the sake of being, not himself, but " a good man," then he is morally dead and rotten, and must be left unheeded to abide his resurrection, if that by good luck arrive before his bodily death. Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 30, 31. Since it is on the weaknesses of the higher types of character that idealism seizes, Ibsen's examples of vanity, sel- fishness, folly and failure are not vulgar villains, but men who in an ordinary novel or melodrama would be heroes. His most tragic point is reached in the destinies of Brand and Rosmer, who drive those whom they love to death in its most wanton and cruel form. The ordinary Philistine commits no such atrocities: he marries the woman he ^S7 likes, and lives more or less happily ever after; but that is not because he is greater than Brand or Rosmer, but be- cause he is less. The idealist is a more dangerous animal than the Philistine just as a man is a more dangerous ani- mal than a sheep. Though Brand vir- tually murdered his wife, I can under- stand many a woman, comfortably married to an amiable Philistine, read- ing the play and envying the victim her husband. For when Brand's wife, hav- ing made the sacrifice he has exacted, tells him that he was right; that she is happy now; that she sees God face to face — but reminds him that " whoso sees Jehovah dies," he instinctively clasps his hands over her eyes; and that action raises him at once far above the criticism that sneers at idealism from beneath, instead of surveying it from the clear ether above, which can only be reached through its mists. Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 130, 131. 158 r^ ENERATIONS of shallow critics, xhe^.^^ ^^ ^^ mostly amateurs, have laughed at thrsSge Partridge for admiring the King In Hamlet more than Hamlet himself (with Garrick In the part), because '' any one could see that the King was an actor." But surely Partridge was right. He went to the theatre to see, not a real limited monarch, but a stage king, speaking as Partridges like to hear a king speaking, and able to have people's heads cut off, or to brow-beat treason from behind an Invisible hedge of majestically asserted divinity. Field- ing misunderstood the matter because In a world of Fieldlngs there would be neither kings nor Partridges. It Is all very well for Hamlet to declare that the business of the theatre Is to hold the mirror up to nature. He Is allowed to do it out of respect for the bard, just as he Is allowed to say to a minor actor, " Do not saw the air thus," though he has himself been sawing the air all the evening, and the unfortunate minor ac- IS9 tor has hardly had the chance of cutting a chip off with a penknife. But every- body knows perfectly well that the func- tion of the theatre is to realize for the spectators certain pictures which their imagination craves for, the said pictures being fantastic as the dreams of Alnas- char. Nature is only brought in as an accomplice in the illusion: for example, the actress puts rouge on her cheek in- stead of burnt cork because it looks more natural; but the moment the illu- sion is sacrificed to nature, the house is up in arms and the play is chivied from the stage. I began my own dramatic career by writing plays in which I faith- fully held the mirror up to nature. They are much admired in private read- ing by social reformers, industrial in- vestigators, and revolted daughters; but on one of them being rashly exhibited behind the footlights, it was received with a paroxysm of execration, whilst the mere perusal of the others induces loathing in every person, including my- i6o self, in whom the theatrical Instinct flour- ishes In Its Integrity. Shakespear made exactly one attempt, In Troilus and Cresslda, to hold the mirror up to na- ture ; and he probably nearly ruined him- self by It. The Saturday Review, 7th November 1896. \X7'HAT Is all this growing love of ImperiaUsm pageantry, this effusive loyalty, this officious rising and uncovering at a wav^e from a flag or a blast from a brass band? Imperialism? Not a bit of It. Obsequiousness, servility, cupidity roused by the pre- vailing smell of money. When Mr. Carnegie rattled his millions In his pockets all England became one rapa- cious 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 mo- ment. Could It be that the Diamond King was no gentleman after all? 161 i 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. Man and Superman, p. xxv. Now for England's share of warning. Let her look to her Empire; for unless she makes It such a Federation for civil strength and defence that all free peo- ples will cling to It voluntarily, It will Inevitably become a military tyranny to prevent them from abandoning It; and such a tyranny will drain the English taxpayer of his money more effectually than Its worst cruelties can ever drain Its victims of their liberty. A political scheme that cannot be carried out except by soldiers will not be a permanent one. John Bull's Other Island, p. xl. iaut^'^" npHE moral evolution of the social Individual Is from submission and obedience as economizers of effort and 162 responsibility, and safeguards against panic and incontinence, to wilfulness and self-assertion made safe by reason and self-control, just as plainly as his physical growth leads from the peram- bulator and the nurse's apron-string to the power of walking alone, and from the tutelage of the boy to the responsi- bility of the man. The Sanity of Art, P- S?>' If you study the electric light 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 intense- ly insusceptible, intensely resistant ma- terial; 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 163 most Intensely refractory person, liable to go out and to go wrong at inconven- ient moments, and with incendiary possi- bilities. Man and Superman, p. xxxvi. of^Pur*^se TTEW of US Havc vitality enough to ''■ make any of our instincts imperi- ous: we can be made to live on pre- tences, as the masterful minority well know. Three Plays for Puritans, p. xvi. ANN. But, Jack, you cannot get through life without considering other people a little. TANNER. Ay; but what other people? It is this consideration of other people — or rather this cowardly fear of them which we call consideration — that makes : us the sentimental slaves as we are. To, consider you, as you call it, is to substi-^ tute your will for my own. How if it be a baser will than mine? Are wom- j en taught better than men or worse?; Are mobs of voters taught better than j 164 ■ statesmen or worse? Worse, of course, In both cases. And then what sort of world are you going to get, with its pub- lic men considering its voting mobs, and Its private men considering their wives? Man and Superman^ P- S^- TT seems to me that the natural atti- The tude for a husband whose wife pre- nSl^d fers another man is a purely apologetic one; though I observe that on the stage he seems to take It for granted that he Is an Injured person as well as an unfor- tunate one. No doubt my moral sense J has not been properly trained on such points; so possibly I shall alter my opin- ion when I get married, though I confess I regard that as an additional reason for not getting married. The Saturday Review, 30th November 1895. When King Arthur left Guinevere grov- elling on the floor with her head within an inch of his toes, and stood plainly 165 J conveying to the numerous bystanders that this was the proper position for a female who had forgotten herself so far as to prefer another man to him, one's gorge rose at the Tappertitian vulgarity and infamy of the thing; and it was a relief when the scene ended with a fine old Richard the Third effect of Arthur leading his mail-clad knights off to bat- tle. That vision of a fine figure of a woman, torn with sobs and remorse, stretched at the feet of a nobly superior and deeply wronged lord of creation, is no doubt still as popular with the men whose sentimental vanity it flatters as it was in the days of the Idylls of the King. But since then we have been learning that a woman is something more than a piece of sweetstuff to fat- ten a man's emotions; and our amateur King Arthurs are beginning to realize, with shocked surprise, that the more gen- erous the race grows the stronger be- comes its disposition to bring them to their senses with a stinging dose of i66 wholesome ridicule. The Saturday Re- view, 19th January 1895. t-IIS will, in setting his imagination to inspiration work, had produced a great puzzle for his intellect. In no case does the difference between the will and the intel- lect come out more clearly than In that of the poet, save only that of the lover. ... It is only the naif who goes to the creative artist with absolute confidence in receiving an answer to his " What does this passage mean? " That Is the very question which the poet's own Intel- lect, which had no part In the conception of the poem, may be asking him. And this curiosity of the Intellect — this rest- less life In it which differentiates It from dead machinery, and which troubles our lesser artists but little. Is one of the marks of the greater sort. Quintessence of Ibsenisni, pp. 59, 60. — }-H — THE promotion of immoralities Into The I'.' • i. -1 • Instability moralities is constantly going on. of Morals 167 Christianity and Mohammedanism, once thought ojf and dealt with exactly as Anarchism Is thought of and dealt with to-day, have become established relig- ions; and fresh Immoralities are perse- cuted In their name. The truth Is that the vast majority of persons professing these religions have never been anything but simple moralists. The respectable Englishman who Is a Christian because he was born In Clapham would be a Mahometan for the cognate reason If he had been born In Constantinople. He has never willingly tolerated Immorality. He did not adopt any Innovation until It had become moral ; and then he adopt- ed It, not on Its merits, but solely be- cause It had become moral. In doing so he never realized that It had ever been Immoral; consequently Its early strug- gles taught him no lesson; and he has opposed the next step In human progress as Indignantly as If neither manners, cus- toms, nor thought had ever changed since the beginning of the world. Tol- i68 eratlon must be imposed on him as a mystic and painful duty by his spiritual and political leaders, or he will condemn the world to stagnation, w^hlch Is the penalty of an Inflexible morality. The Shewmg-iip of Blanco Posnet, pp. 348, 349- T DO not see moral chaos and anarchy our as the alternative to romantic con- ^°^***^^°°^ ventlon; and I am not going to pretend I do merely to please the people who are convinced that the world Is only held together by the force of unanimous, strenuous, eloquent, trumpet-tongued ly- ing. To me the tragedy and comedy of life He In the consequences, sometimes terrible, sometimes ludicrous, of our per- sistent attempts to found our Institutions on the ideals suggested to our Imagina- tions by our half-satisfied passions, in- stead of on a genuinely scientific natu- ral history. Plays: Pleasant and Un- pleasant. Vol. II. Pleasant, p. xvili. 169 One of the evils of the pretence that our Institutions represent abstract principles of justice instead of being mere social scaffolding is that persons of a certain temperament take the pretence seriously, and, when the law is on the side of In- justice, will not accept the situation, and are driven mad by their vain struggle against It. Dickens has drawn the type In his Man from Shropshire In Bleak House. Most public men and all law- yers have been appealed to by victims of this sense of injustice — the most unhelp- able of afflictions In a society like ours. Three Plays for Puritans, pp. 297, 298. to dI^?^ nrO say that fashions change more rap- ^ idly than men is a very crude state- ment of extremes. Everything has its own rate of change. Fashions change more quickly than manners, manners more quickly than morals, morals more quickly than passions, and, in general, the conscious, reasonable, intellectual life more quickly than the instinctive, wilful, 170 affectionate one. The dramatist who deals with the Irony and humour of the relatively durable sides of life, or with their pity and terror, Is the one whose comedies and tragedies will last longest — sometimes so long as to lead a book- struck generation to dub him " Immor- tal," and proclaim him as " not for an age, but for all time." Fashionable dramatists begin to " date," as the crit- ics call It, In a few years : the accusation Is rife at present against the earlier plays of PInero and Grundy, though It Is due to these gentlemen to observe that Shake- spear's plays must have " dated " far more when they were from twenty to a hundred years old than they have done since the world gave up expecting them to mirror the passing hour. When Caste and Diplomacy were fresh, London As- surance had begun to date most horri- bly: nowadays Caste and Diplomacy date like the day before yesterday's tinned salmon; whereas If London As- surance were revived (and I beg that 171 nothing of the kind be attempted) , there would be no more question of dating about it than about the plays of Gar- rick or Tobin or Mrs. Centlivre. But now observe the consequences, as to this dating business, of the fact that morals change more slowly than cos- tumes and manners, and instincts and passions than morals. It follows, does it not, that every " immortal " play will run the following course. First, like London Assurance its manners and fash- ions will begin to date. If its matter is deep enough to tide it over this danger, it will come into repute again, like the comedies of Sheridan or Goldsmith, as a modern classic. But after some time — some centuries, perhaps — it will begin to date again in point of its ethical con- ception. Yet if it deals so powerfully with the instincts and passions of hu- manity as to survive this also, it will again regain its place, this time as an an- tique classic, especially if it tells a capital story. It is impossible now to read, with- 1 172 out a curdling of the blood and a bris- tling of the hair, the frightful but dra- matically most powerful speech which David, on his deathbed, delivers to his son about the old enemy whom he had himself sworn to spare. " Thou art a wise man and knowest what thou ought- est to do unto him; but his hoar head bring thou down to the grave with blood." Odysseus, proud of outwitting all men at cheating and lying, and in- tensely relishing the blood of Penelope's suitors, is equally outside our morality. So is Punch. But David and Ulysses, like Punch and Judy, will survive for many a long day yet. Not until the change has reached our instincts and passions will their stories begin to " date " again for the last time before their final obsolescence. The Saturday Review, 27th June 1896. ' I 'HERE is no reason why life as we Mr. Henry find it in Mr. James's novels — life, no^Iis^ that is, in which passion is subordinate 173 to intellect and to fastidious artistic taste — should not be represented on the stage. If It is real to Mr. James, it must be real to others; and why should not these others have their drama instead of being banished from the theatre (to the thea- tre's great loss) by the monotony and vulgarity of drama in which passion Is everything, intellect nothing, and art only brought In by the incidental out- rages upon it. As It happens, I am not myself In Mr. James's camp; In all the life that has energy enough to be Inter- esting to me, subjective volition, passion, will, make Intellect the merest tool. But there Is In the centre of that cyclone a certain calm spot where cultivated ladles and gentlemen live on independent In- comes or by pleasant artistic occupa- tions. It Is there that Mr. James's art touches life, selecting whatever Is grace- ful, exquisite, or dignified In Its serenity. It Is not life as Imagined by the pit or gallery, or even by the stalls: It is, let us say, the ideal of the balcony; but 174 that Is no reason why the pit and gallery should excommunicate It on the ground that It has no blood and entrails In It, and have Its sentence formulated for It by the fiercely ambitious and wilful pro- fessional man In the stalls. The whole case against Its adequacy really rests on its violation of the cardinal stage con- vention that love Is the most Irresistible of all the passions. Since most people go to the theatre to escape from reality, this convention is naturally dear to a world in which love, all powerful in the secret, unreal, day-dreaming life of the imagination, is in the real active life the abject slave of every trifling habit, preju- dice, and cowardice, easily stifled by shyness, class feeling, and pecuniary pru- dence, or diverted from what is theatri- cally assumed to be Its hurricane course by such obstacles as a thick ankle, a cockney accent, or an unfashionable hat. The Saturday Review, I2th January 1895. 175 Shakespear Bunyanand W^^^ ."^ ^^^ ^ ^^^^^ VCrsion of The wiiHam^^^ ' ^ Pilgrim's Progress announced for production, I shook my head, knowing that Bunyan is far too great a dramatist for our theatre, which has never been resolute enough even in Its lewdness and venality to win the respect and interest which positive, powerful wickedness al- ways engages, much less the services of men of heroic conviction. Its greatest catch, Shakespear, wrote for the theatre because, with extraordinary artistic pow- ers, he understood nothing and believed nothing. Thirty-six big plays in five blank verse acts and (as Ruskin, I think, once pointed out) not a single hero! Only one man in them all who believes in life, enjoys life, thinks life worth liv- ing, and has a sincere, unrhetorical tear dropped over his deathbed; and that man — Falstaff ! What a crew they are — these Saturday to Monday athletic stockbroker Orlandos, these villains, fools, clowns, drunkards, cowards, in- triguers, fighters, lovers, patriots, hypo- 176 chondriacs who mistake themselves (and are mistaken by the author) for philoso- phers, princes without any sense of pub- lic duty, futile pessimists who imagine they are confronting a barren and un- meaning world when they are only con- templating their own worthlessness, self- seekers of all kinds, keenly observed and masterfully drawn from the romantic- commercial point of view. Once or twice we scent among them an antici- pation of the crudest side of Ibsen's polemics on the Woman Question, as in All's Well that Ends Well, where the man cuts as meanly selfish a figure be- side his enlightened lady doctor wife as Helmer beside Nora; or in Cymbeline, where Posthumus, having, as he be- lieves, killed his wife for inconstancy, speculates for a moment on what his life would have been worth if the same standard of continence had been applied to himself. And certainly no modern study of the voluptuous temperament, and the spurious heroism and heroinism 177 which its ecstasies produce, can add much to Antony and Cleopatra, unless it were some sense of the spuriousness on the author's part. But search for statesmanship, or even citizenship, or any sense of the commonwealth, material or spiritual, and you will not find the making of a decent vestryman or curate in the whole horde. As to faith, hope, courage, conviction, or any of the true heroic qualities, you find nothing but death made sensational, despair made stage sublime, sex made romantic, and barrenness covered up by sentimentality and the mechanical lilt of blank verse. All that you miss in Shakespear you find in Bunyan, to whom the true heroic came quite obviously and naturally. The world was to him a more terrible place than it was to Shakespear; but he saw through it a path at the end of which a man might look not only forward to the Celestial City, but back on his life and say: — " Tho' with great difficulty 178 I am got hither, yet now I do not re- pent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me In my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get It." The heart vibrates like a bell to such an utterance as this: to turn from It to " Out, out, brief candle," and " The rest Is silence," and " We are such stuff as dreams are made of; and our little life Is rounded by a sleep " Is to turn from life, strength, resolution, morning air and eternal youth, to the terrors of a drunk- en nightmare. Let us descend now to the lower ground where Shakespear Is not disabled by his Inferiority In energy and elevation of spirit. Take one of his big fighting scenes, and compare Its blank verse, in point of mere rhetorical strenuousness, with Bunyan's prose. Macbeth's fa- mous cue for the fight with Macduff runs thus: — 179 Yet I will try the last: before my body I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff, And damned be him that first cries, Hold, enough! Turn from this jingle, dramatically right in feeling, but silly and resourceless in thought and expression, to Apollyon's cue for the fight in the Valley of Humili- ation : " I am void of fear in this matter. Prepare thyself to die; for I swear by my infernal den that thou shalt go no farther : here will I spill thy soul." This is the same thing done masterly. Apart from Its superior grandeur, force, and appropriateness, it is better claptrap and Infinitely better word music. Shakespear, fond as he is of describ- ing fights, has hardly ever sufliclent energy or reality of imagination to finish without betraying the paper origin of his fancies by dragging In something classical in the style of the Cyclops' ham- mer falling " on Mars's armor, forged i8o for proof eterne." Hear how Bunyan does it: "I fought till my sword did cleave to my hand; and when they were joined together as if the sword grew out of my arm; and when the blood ran thorow my fingers, then I fought with most courage." Nowhere in all Shake- spear is there a touch like that of the blood running down through the man's fingers, and his courage rising to passion at it. Even in mere technical adaptation to the art of the actor, Bunyan's dra- matic speeches are as good as Shake- spear's tirades. Only a trained dramatic speaker can appreciate the terse man- ageableness and effectiveness of such a speech as this, with its grandiose exor- dium, followed up by its pointed ques- tion and its stern threat: "By this I perceive thou art one of my subjects; for all that country is mine and I am the Prince and the God of it. How is it then that thou hast ran away from thy King? Were it not that I hope thou mayst do me more service I would strike i8i thee now at one blow to the ground." Here there is no raving and swearing and rhyming and classical allusion. The sentences go straight to their mark; and their concluding phrases soar like the sunrise, or swing and drop like a ham- mer, just as the actor wants them. I might multiply these instances by the dozen; but I had rather leave dramatic students to compare the two authors at first hand. In an article on Bunyan lately published in the Contemporary Review — the only article worth reading on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank you : I am quite familiar with Macau- lay's patronizing prattle about The Pil- grim's Progress) — Mr. Richard Heath, the historian of the Anabaptists, shows how Bunyan learnt his lesson, not only from his own rough pilgrimage through life, but from the tradition of many an actual journey from real Cities of De- struction (under Alva), with Inter- preters' houses and convoy of Great- hearts all complete. Against such a man 182 what chance had our poor Immortal Wilham, with his " little Latin " (would it had been less like his Greek!), his heathen mythology, his Plutarch, his Boc- caccio, his Holinshed, his circle of Lon- don literary wits, soddening their minds w4th books and their nerves with alcohol (quite like us), and all the rest of his Strand and Fleet Street surroundings, activities and interests, social and profes- sional, mentionable and unmentionable? Let us applaud him, in due measure, in that he came out of It no black- guardedly Bohemian, but a thoroughly respectable snob; raised the desperation and cynicism of its outlook to something like sublimity In his tragedies; drama- tized Its morbid, self-centred passions and Its feeble and shallow speculations with all the force that was in them ; dis- infected it by copious doses of romantic poetry, fun, and common-sense ; and gave to Its perpetual sex-obsession the relief of Individual character and feminine wln- someness. Also — If you are a suffi- 183 clently good Whig — that after incarnat- ing the spirit of the whole epoch which began with the sixteenth century and is ending (I hope) with the nineteenth, he is still the idol of all well-read children. But as he never thought a noble life worth living or a great work worth doing, because the commercial profit and loss sheet shewed that the one did not bring happiness nor the other money, he never struck the great vein — the vein In which Bunyan told of that *' man of a very stout countenance " who went up to the keeper of the book of life and said, not " Out, out, brief candle," but " Set down my name, sir," and im- mediately fell on the armed men and cut his way Into heaven after receiving and giving many wounds. The Satur- day Review, 2nd January 1897. Judgment T UCIUS. Pshaw I You havc seen severed heads before, Caesar, and severed right hands too, I think; some thousands of them, In Gaul, after you 184 vanquished Vercingetorlx. Did you spare him, with all your clemency? Was that vengeance? C^SAR. No, by the Gods! would that it had been ! Vengeance at least is hu- man. No, I say: those severed right hands and the brave Vercingetorix basely strangled in a vault beneath the Capitol, were [with shuddering satire'] a wise se- verity, a necessary protection to the com- monwealth, a duty of statesmanship — follies and fictions ten times bloodier than honest vengeance ! What a fool was I then ! To think that men's lives should be at the mercy of such fools ! Casar and Cleopatra, pp. 123, 124. Vy/'HAT people call goodness has to Laodi be kept in check just as carefully as what they call badness ; for the human constitution will not stand very much of either without serious psychological mis- chief, ending in insanity or crime. The fact that the insanity may be privileged, as Savonarola's was, up to the point of i8s ceanism wrecking the social life of Florence, does not alter the case. We always hesi- tate to treat a dangerously good man as a lunatic because he may turn out to be a prophet In the true sense : that Is, a man of exceptional sanity who Is In the right when we are In the wrong. How- ever necessary It may have been to get rid of Savonarola, It was foolish to poi- son Socrates and burn St. Joan of Arc. But It Is none the less necessary to take a firm stand against the monstrous prop- osition that because certain attitudes and sentiments may be heroic and admirable at some momentous crisis, they should or can be maintained at the same pitch con- tinuously through life. A life spent in prayer and almsgiving is really as in- sane as a life spent in cursing and pick- ing pockets : the effect of everybody lead- ing it would be equally disastrous. Getting Married, pp. 137, 138. Ethical strain is just as bad for us as physical strain. It is desirable that the 186 normal pitch of conduct at which men are not conscious of being particularly virtuous, although they feel mean when they fall below it, should be raised as high as possible; but It is not desirable that they should attempt to live con- stantly above this pitch any more than that they should habitually walk at the rate of five miles an hour, or carry a hundredweight continually on their backs. Their normal condition should be in nowise difficult or remarkable; and it is a perfectly sound Instinct that leads us to mistrust the good man as much as the bad man, and to object to the clergy- man who Is pious extra-professionally as much as to th: professional pugilist who Is quarrelsome and violent In private life. We do not want good men and bad men any more than we want giants and dwarfs. What we do want is a high quality for our normal: that is, people who can be much better than what we now call respectable without self-sacri- fice. Conscious goodness, like conscious 187 Law muscular effort, may be of use in emer- gencies; but for everyday national use it is negligible ; and its effect on the char- acter of the individual may easily be disastrous. Getting Married, ^^, 138, 139. TN a developing civilization nothing can make laws tolerable unless their changes and modifications are kept as closely as possible on the heels of the changes and modifications in social con- ditions which development involves. Also there is a bad side to the very convenience of law. It deadens the con- science of individuals by relieving them of the ethical responsibility of their own actions. The Sanity of Art. p. 52. Law is never so necessary as when it has no ethical significance whatever, and is pure law for the sake of law. The law that compels me to keep to the left when driving along Oxford Street is ethically senseless, as is shewn by the fact that keeping to the right answers equally well 188 In Paris; and It certainly destroys my freedom to choose my side; but by en- abling me to count on every one else keeping to the left also, thus making traffic possible and safe, it enlarges my life and sets my mind free for nobler issues. The Sanity of Art, p. 48. The continual danger to liberty created by law arises, not from the encroach- ments of Governments, which are always regarded with suspicion, but from the Immense utility and consequent popu- larity of law, and the terrifying danger and obvious Inconvenience of anarchy; so that even pirates appoint and obey a captain. Law soon acquires such a good character that people will believe no evil of It; and at this point it becomes pos- sible for priests and rulers to commit the most pernicious crimes in the name of law and order. The Sanity of Art, p. 5 i . Godhead, face to face with Stupidity, must compromise. Unable to enforce on 189 the world the pure law of thought, It must resort to a mechanical law of com- mandments to be enforced by brute pun- ishments and the destruction of the dis- obedient. And however carefully these laws are framed to represent the highest thoughts of the framers at the moment of their promulgation, before a day has elapsed that thought has grown and widened by the ceaseless evolution of life; and lo! yesterday's law already fallen out with today's thought. Yet If the high givers of that law themselves set the example of breaking It before It is a week old, they destroy all Its author- ity with their subjects, and so break the weapon they have forged to rule them for their own good. They must there- fore maintain at all costs the sanctity of the law, even when It has ceased to represent their thought; so that at last they get entangled In a network of or- dinances which they no longer believe In, and yet have made so sacred by custom and so terrible by punishment, that they 190 cannot themselves escape from them. Thus Wotan's resort to law finally costs him half the integrity of his godhead — as if a spiritual king, to gain temporal power, had plucked out one of his eyes — and at last he begins secretly to long for the advent of some power higher than himself which will destroy his arti- ficial empire of law, and establish a true republic of free thought. The Perfect Wagnerite, p. ii. TV/TODERN civilization is reduced to The Law absurdity by obvious and mon- strous inequalities and injustices in the distribution of wealth and the encour- agement of labor. The well-to-do-man ascribes these to inequalities of charac- ter, to improvidence, intemperance and laziness being beaten in the race by thrift, sobriety and industry. The poor man pleads that he is unlucky. Both will tell you that if an equal distribution of goods were made now, all the present inequalities would presently reappear, 191 This Is quite true, and would be equally true if the equal distribution of goods were accompanied by an equal and per- manent distribution of character. Char- acter is a negligible factor in the busi- ness. The real importance of the law of rent is that it shews how the govern- ing factor in the distribution of wealth is not the individual human producer, but the material at his disposal and the place in which he works. Faculty is tol- erably equally divided; but soils and situations vary enormously. And so in the course of time the proprietors of the better soils and the masters of the better situations become rich without working at all, and accumulate spare money. And spare money, according to the terse and perfect definition of Jevons, is capital : the most important of all the factors in production nowadays. This science of rent is the foundation of mod- ern economic socialism, the greatest revolutionary force of your time. Life, Literature and Political Economy. 192 Clare Market Review , January 1906, nPHERE are often profoundly moral The Lie necessities at the back of a lie; and It Is often well to give a false conscious- ness to another person. Illusions play a large and often beneficial part in hu- man conduct; and truth may mean false- hood to people Incapable of It: a nurse's reason to a child may be of more use to the child than the reason Socrates would have given to Plato on the same point. Life, Literature and Political Economy. Clare Market Review, January 1906, p. 29. 11 - T) ATIONALLY considered, life Is The Life only worth living when Its pleasures ^°'"*^® are greater than Its pains. Now to a generation which has ceased to believe in heaven, and has not yet learned that the degradation by poverty of four out of every five of Its number Is artificial and remediable, the fact that life is not worth 193 living is obvious. Is Is useless to pre- tend that the pessimism of Koheleth, Shakespear, Dryden and Swift can be re- futed if the world progresses solely by the destruction of the unfit, and yet can only maintain its civilization by manu- facturing the unfit in swarms of which that appalling proportion of four to one represents but the comparatively fit sur- vivors. Plainly, then, the reasonable thing for the rationalists to do Is to refuse to live. But as none of them will commit suicide in obedience to this dem- onstration of " the necessity " for it, there is an end of the notion that we live for reasons instead of In fulfilment of our will to live. Quintessence of Ibsenism, p. 13. Demonstrate to me that life is relig- iously, morally, scientifically, politically, philosophically and practically not worth going on with, and I must reply, So much the worse, not for life, but for what you call religion, science, politics, 194 philosophy, and the current practice of the art of living. There is something wrong with these things if they lead to nihilistic conclusions. Civilization and the Soldier. The Humane Review, Jan- uary 1901, p. 302. It was not the Churches but that very freethinking philosopher Schopenhauer who re-established the old theological doctrine that reason is no motive power; that the true motive power in the world is will (otherwise Life) ; and that the setting-up of reason above will is a dam- nable error. But the theologians could not open their arms to Schopenhauer, be- cause he fell into the Rationalist-Mer- cantilist error of valuing life according to its individual profits in pleasure, and of course came to the idiotic pessimist conclusion that life is not worth living, and that the will which urges us to live in spite of this is necessarily a malign torturer, or at least a bad hand at busi- ness, the desirable end of all things being I9S the Nirvana of the stilling of the will and the consequent setting of life's sun " into the blind cave of eternal night." . . . We can now, as soon as we are strong- minded enough, drop the Nirvana non- sense, the pessimism, the rationalism, the supernatural theology, and all the other subterfuges to which we cling because we are afraid to look life straight in the face and see in it, not the fulfilment of a moral law or of the deductions of rea- son, but the satisfaction of a passion in us of which we can give no rational ac- count whatever. It is natural for man to shrink from the terrible responsibility thrown on him by this inexorable fact. The Sanity of Art, pp. 57, 58. I suggest to you that the reason why we go on striving to understand life better instead of confining ourselves to mere pleasure hunting, is that this mysterious force behind us — I will call it the Life 196 Force— Is Itself In desperate need of an organ of intelligent consciousness; and that the human mind Is its most elab- orate experiment In the evolution of such an organ. Life, Literature and Politi- cal Economy. The Clare Market Re- view, January 1906, p. 28. Do you see that the reason you will de- cide to continue living is that you have in hand the pressing business of conquer- ing for the Life Force a larger, higher, more intelligent, more compre- hensive consciousness : In short to enable It to economize? Life, Literature and Political Economy. Clare Market Re- view, January 1906, p. 28. DON JUAN. Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one Is his cowardice. Yet all his civilization Is founded on his cowardice, on his abject tameness, which he calls his respectabil- ity. There are limits to what a mule 197 or an ass will stand; but Man will suffer himself to be degraded until his vlleness becomes so loathsome to his oppressors that they themselves are forced to re- form it. THE DEVIL. Precisely. And these are the creatures In whom you discover what you call a Life Force ! DON JUAN. Yes; for now comes the most surprising part of the whole busi- ness. THE STATUE. What's that? DON JUAN. Why, that you can make any of these cowards brave by simply putting an Idea Into his head. THE STATUE. Stuff! As an old sol- dier I admit the cowardice: It's as uni- versal as sea sickness, and matters just as little. But that about putting an Idea Into a man's head is stuff and nonsense. In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that It's more dangerous to lose than to win. 198 DON JUAN. That Is perhaps why bat- tles are so useless. But men never really overcome fear until they imagine they are fighting to further a universal pur- pose — fighting for an Idea, as they call It. Why was the Crusader braver than the pirate? Because he fought, not for him- self, but for the Cross. What force was It that met him with a valor as reck- less as his own? The force of men who fought, not for themselves, but for Is- lam. Man and Superman^ pp. 109, no. ANA. Is there nothing in heaven but contemplation, Juan? DON JUAN. In the Heaven I seek, no other joy. But there is the work of helping Life In Its struggle upward. Think of how it wastes and scatters it- self, how it raises up obstacles to itself and destroys itself in Its Ignorance and blindness. It needs a brain, this Irre- sistible force, lest in its ignorance It should resist Itself. What a piece of 199 work is a man! says the poet. Yes: but' what a blunderer! Here is the highest miracle of organization yet attained by Hfe, the most intensely alive thing that exists, the most conscious of all the or- ganisms; and yet, how wretched are his brains ! Stupidity made sordid and cruel by the realities learnt from toil and pov- erty: Imagination resolved to starve sooner than face these realities, piling up illusions to hide them, and calling it- self cleverness, genius ! And each accus- ing the other of its own defect : Stupidity accusing Imagination of folly, and Im- agination accusing Stupidity of ignor- ance: whereas, alas! Stupidity has all the knowledge, and Imagination all the intelligence. Man and Superman, pp. 105, 106. If we could only realize that though the Life Force supplies us with its own purpose, it has no other brains to work with than those it has painfully and imperfectly evolved in our heads, 200 the peoples of the earth would learn some pity for their gods; and we should have a religion that would not be con- tradicted at every turn by the thing that is giving the He to the thing that ought to be. The Irrational Knot, pp. xxv., xxvl. DON JUAN. I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than my- self I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring It Into existence or clearing the way for It. That Is the law of my life. That Is the working within me of Life's Incessant aspiration to higher organiza- tion, wider, deeper, Intenser self-con- sciousness, and clearer self-understand- ing. Man and Superman, p. 129. DON JUAN. A picture gallery is a dull place for a blind man. But even as you enjoy the contemplation of such roman- tic mirages as beauty and pleasure; so would I enjoy the contemplation of that which Interests me above all things : namely. Life : the force that ever strives 201 to attain greater power of contemplating itself. What made this brain of mine, do you think? Not the need to move my limbs; for a rat with half my brains moves as well as I. Not merely the need to do, but the need to know what I do, lest in my blind efforts to live I should be slaying myself. Man and Superman, p. 105. DON JUAN. Just as Life, after ages of struggle, evolved that wonderful bodily organ the eye, so that the living organ- ism could see where it was going and what was coming to help or threaten it, and thus avoid a thousand dangers that formerly slew it, so it is evolving to-day a mind's eye that shall see, not the physi- cal world, but the purpose of Life, and thereby enable the individual to work for that purpose instead of thwarting and baffling it by setting up shortsighted personal aims as at present. Man and Superman, p. 115, 202 T HAVE a very poor opinion of Lon- London don In Its collective capacity. It is alike Incapable of appreciating a bene- fit and of resenting an outrage. For example, one of the finest views In the world is within a minute's walk of Charing Cross. Go down Villiers Street and ascend the first stairs to your right after you pass the music hall. This brings you Into the loggia attached to the wall of the South-Eastern terminus, and leading to the Hungerford foot- bridge. He who designed this loggia was no Orcagna, though he had such a chance as Orcagna never had in Flor- ence. It is a dismal square hole in a .mass of dirty bricks, through which men hurry with loathing. Yet if you look out through one of the holes — prefer- ably the last but one — made for the convenience of the east wind, you will find the view magnificent. Right into one of the foci of that view, London, without a murmur, permitted Mr. Jabez 203 Balfour to dump the building which is now the Hotel Cecil, just as it allowed the London Pavilion Music-hall to spoil Piccadilly Circus. If that building had darkened the smallest window of a rag and bone shop, the proprietor thereof would have been supported by all the might of the State in maintaining his " Ancient Lights." But because all Lon- don — nay, all the world that visits Lon- don — was injured, there was no placard with " Ancient View " on it put up in that grimy loggia. If the malefactor had confined himself to injuring the pub- lic collectively, he would by this time have been one of our most eminent citi- zens. Unfortunately, he trifled with pri- vate property; and we instantly stretched out our hand to the uttermost parts of the earth whither he had fled; seized him; and cast him into prison. If the question had been one of beneficence In- stead of maleficence, we should have shewn the same hyperassthesia to a pri- 204 vate advantage, the same anaesthesia to a public one. The Saturday Review^ ist May 1897. . . . the London in which the people who pay to be amused by my dramatic representation of Peter Shirley turned out to starve at forty because there are younger slaves to be had for his wages, do not take, and have not the slightest intention of taking, any effective step to organize society in such a way as to make that everyday Infamy Impossible. Major Barbara, p. 178. T ET realism have Its demonstration, Love "^ comedy its criticism, or even baw- dry Its horselaugh at the expense of sex- ual Infatuation, if it must: but to ask us to subject our souls to Its ruinous glamor, to worship it, deify it, and imply that it alone makes our life worth living, Is nothing but folly gone mad erotlcally. Three Plays for Puritans, p. xxix. 205 Think of how some of our married friends worry one another, tax one an- other, are jealous of one another, cant bear to let one another out of sight for a day, are more like jailers and slave- owners than lovers. Think of those very same people with their enemies, scrupulous, lofty, self-respecting, deter- mined to be independent of one another, careful of how they speak of one an- other — pooh ! havent you often thought that if they only knew it, they were better friends to their enemies than to their own husbands and wives? The Devil's Disciple, p. 32. Ma'chine- TJNDERSHAFT. I want a man with Made Man ^^ no relations and no schooling: that is, a man who would be out of the run- ning altogether if he were not a strong man. And I cant find him. Every blessed foundling nowadays is snapped up in his infancy by Barnardo homes, or School Board officers, or Boards of Guardians: and if he shews the least 206 ability, he Is fastened on by schoolmas- ters; trained to win scholarships like a race-horse; crammed with second-hand Ideas; drilled and disciplined In docility and what they call good taste ; and lamed for life so that he Is fit for nothing but teaching. Major Barbara, p. 275. /^ET on your legs and talk the cur- The Mani- ^^ rent party Manicheism, according ife'^™ °^ to which there are two great parties rep- p°^'**<=s resenting two great principles, the one wholly malign and the other wholly be- neficent, composed of two different or- ders of beings, the one angelic and the other diabolic; and everything silly, everything drunken, infatuated, fanati- cal, envious, quarrelsome, in short, fool- ish in the audience responds to you at once. Assume, on the other hand, that one Government is very like* another, and that nothing will wreck a Govern- ment except a refusal to go where It Is driven, or an attempt to go where it Is not driven (especially If the recalcl- 207 trance be made a matter of party prin- ciple), and at once your audience is as happy and sensible as it is In the nature of an audience to be. But nobody at present combines the requisite political detachment with the requisite critical training except the art critic. I there- fore look forward to the time when elec- tion meetings will be advertised by plac- ards headed, " No Politics," and dis- playing a list of speakers headed, in the largest type, with the name of some noted critic of pictures, music, the drama, or literature. And the end of that will be that some bold editor will at last take the step I have vainly urged for years, and conduct the criticism of politics In his paper exactly as he now conducts the criticism of art. The Saturday Review^ 20th July 1895. Marat and T E AN PAUL MARAT, " pCOplc's corday ^ J f rlcnd " and altruist par excellence, was a man just after our playgoers' own hearts — a man whose virtue consisted in 208 burning indignation at the sufferings of others and an Intense desire to see them balanced by an exemplary retaliation. That Is to say, his morality was the morality of the melodrama, and of the gallery which applauds frantically when the hero knocks the villain down. It is only by coarsely falsifying Marat's char- acter that he has been made into an iVdelphi villain — nay, prevented from bringing down the house as an Adelphi hero, as he certainly would If the audi- ence could be shewn the horrors that pro- voked him and the personal disinterest- edness and sincerity with which he threw himself into a war of extermination against tyranny. Ibsen may have earned the right to prove by the example of such men as Marat that these virtues were the making of a scoundrel more mischievous than the most openly vi- cious aristocrat for whose head he clam- ored; but the common run of our playgoers will have none of Ibsen's mo- rality, and as much of Marat's as our 209 romantic dramatists can stuff them with. Charlotte Corday herself was simply a female Marat. She, too, hated tyranny and Idealized her passionate Instinct for bloody retaliation. There Is the true tragic Irony In Marat's death at her hand: It was not really murder: It was suicide — Marat slain by the spirit of Marat. No bad theme for a playwright capable of handling It! The Saturday Review, 5th February 1898. Marriage TTXON JUAN. Send mc to the galleys ^^^ and chain me to the felon whose number happens to be next to mine ; and I must accept the Inevitable and make the best of the companionship. Many such companionships, they tell me, are touchlngly affectionate; and most are at least tolerably friendly. But that does not make a chain a desirable ornament nor the galleys an abode of bliss. Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of Its vows are the very people who declare that If 210 the chain were broken and the prison- ers left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is? Man and Superman, p. 122. However much we may all suffer through marriage, most of us think so little about it that we regard it as a fixed part of the order of nature, like gravitation. Except for this error, which may be re- garded as constant, we use the word with reckless looseness, meaning a dozen dif- ferent things by it, and yet always as- suming that to a respectable man it can have only one meaning. The pious citi- zen, suspecting the Socialist (for exam- ple) of unmentionable things, and ask- ing him heatedly whether he wishes to abolish marriage, is infuriated by a sense of unanswerable quibbling when the So- cialist asks him what particular variety of marriage he means: English civil 211 marriage, sacramental marriage, Indis- soluble Roman Catholic marriage, mar- riage of divorced persons, Scotch mar- riage, Irish marriage, French, German, Turkish, or South Dakotan marriage. /In Norway and Sweden, two of the most highly civilized countries In the world, a marriage Is dissolved If both parties wish It, without any question of conduct. That Is what marriage means In Scan- dinavia. In Clapham that Is what they call by the senseless name of Free Love. In the British Empire we have unlimited Kulln polygamy, Muslim polygamy lim- ited to four wives, child marriages, and, nearer home, marriages of first cousins : all of them abominations In the eyes of many worthy persons. Not only may the respectable British champion of mar- riage mean any of these widely different Institutions ; sometimes he does not mean marriage at all. He means monogamy, chastity, temperance, respectability, mo-' rallty, Christianity, antl-soclalism, and a dozen other things that have no neces- 212 sary connection with marriage. He often means something that he dare not avow: ownership of the person of an- other human being, for Instance. And he never tells the truth about his own marriage either to himself or anyone else. Getting Married, pp. 121, 122. If we adopt the common romantic as- sumption that the object of marriage Is bliss, then the very strongest reason for dissolving a marriage is that It shall be disagreeable to one or other or both of the parties. If we accept the view that the object of marriage is to provide for the production and rearing of children, then childlessness should be a conclusive reason for dissolution. As neither of these causes entitles married persons to divorce in England, It is at once clear that our marriage law Is not founded on either assumption. What it Is really founded on Is the morality of the tenth commandment, which Englishwomen will one day succeed In obliterating from 213 the walls of our churches by refusing to enter any building where they are publicly classed with a man's house, his ox, and his ass, as his purchased chat- tels. Getting Married, p. 123. It is remarkable that the very people who romance most absurdly about the closeness and sacredness of the marriage tie are also those who are most convinced that the man's sphere and the woman's sphere are so entirely separate that only in their leisure moments can they ever be together. Getting Married, p. 140. The common notion that the existing forms of marriage are not political con- trivances, but sacred ethical obligations to which everything, even the very ex- istence of the human race must be sac- rificed If necessary (and this Is what the vulgar morality we mostly profess on the subject comes to), Is one on which no sane Government could act for a moment; and yet It Influences, or Is be- 214 lieved to Influence, so many votes, that no Government will touch the marriage question If It can possibly help It. Getting Married, p. 142. The religious revolt against marriage Is a very old one. Christianity began with a fierce attack on marriage; and to this day the celibacy of the Roman Catholic priesthood Is a standing protest against Its compatibility with the higher life. St. Paul's reluctant sanction of marriage; his personal protest that he countenanced If of necessity and against his own con- viction; his contemptuous "better to marry than to burn " is only out of date In respect of his belief that the end of the world was at hand, and that there was therefore no longer any population question. His Instinctive recoil from Its worst aspect as a slavery to pleasure which Induces two people to accept slav- ery to one another has remained an ac- tive force in the world to this day, and Is now stirring more uneasily than ever. Getting Married, ^^. 126, 127. 215 I have never met anybody really In fa- vor of maintaining marriage as It exists in England to-day. A Roman Catholic may obey his Church by assenting ver- bally to the doctrine of indissoluble marriage. But nobody worth counting believes directly, frankly, and instinct- ively that when a person commits a mur- der and is put into prison for twenty years for it, the free and Innocent hus- band or wife of that murderer should remain bound by the marriage. To putf it briefly, a contract for better for worse Is a contract that should not be toler- ated. Getting Married, p. 122. SSria e A ^^^^ twcnty-sIx ycars ago a some- Laws '*^^ what similar dilemma to that In Mr. Esmond's play ( The Divided fVay) arose between three persons no less famous than Wagner, Hans von Bu- low, and Liszt's daughter, Cosima von Bulow. Madame von Bulow preferred to spend her life with Wagner, just as Mrs. Humeden in the play preferred to 216 spend her life with Gaunt. The change was effected with the happiest results: at least I am not aware that anybody was a penny the worse — certainly not Madame Wagner, who holds her court at Bayreuth with a dignity which many actual princesses might, and probably do, envy. Far be it from me to suggest anarchical violations of our marriage laws rather than an orderly agitation for constitutional reform of them in har- mony with the higher morality of our own times; but I do venture to remark that people who decline to carry obedi- ence to that law too far are at least as interesting dramatically as people who forge and murder, and that the notion that the consequences of such disobedi- ence, when carried out in good faith by respectable people (George Eliot, for example), are necessarily so awful that suicide is the more reasonable alterna- tive, is a piece of nonsense that might as well be dropped on the stage. No hu- man institution could stand the strain of 217 the monstrous assumptions on which our existing marriage laws proceed if we were really sincere about them; and though there is much to be said for our English method of maintaining social order by collectively maintaining the sa- credness of our moral ideals whilst we individually mitigate their severity by evasion, collusion, and never seeing any- thing until our attention is compelled by legal proceedings, yet the abuse of this system of toleration by people whose conduct we are not prepared to excuse, but who cannot very well be exposed if the excusable people are to be spared, is landing us in looser views than we ever bargained for. Already we have an aimlessly rebellious crusade against mar- riage altogether, and a curious habit of circumspection on the part of the experi- enced man of the world, who, when newly introduced to an English house- hold, picks his way very cautiously un- til he has ascertained whether the hus- band and wife really would be husband 218 and wife in France or Germany or South Dakota, and, if his conclusion is un- favorable, which friend of the family is Mr. Gaunt Humeden, so to speak. Not that the domestic situations which are not white are all necessarily jet black or even disagreeably grey ; but the fact that under the English law a mistake in mar- riage cannot be effectively remedied ex- cept by the disgrace of either party — that is to say, cannot be remedied at all by de- cent people, divorce being thus a boon re- served for the dissolute — is continually producing a supply of cases not at all dis- similar to that which is the subject of Mr. Esmond's play. Most of them are set- tled, not by suicide, nor by flights into Egypt, but by the parties drifting along, nobody doing anything wrong, and no- body doing anything right, all seeing enough of one another to make them con- tented faiite de mieux, whilst maintaining their honor intact. Whether this custom- ary and convenable solution is really bet- ter — say in its effect on the children who 219 grow up observing it — than the violent method of open scandal and coliusory di- vorce, involving the public announcement of cruelties and adulteries which have never been committed, is an open ques- tion, not admitting of a general answer. Obviously, the ideal husband and wife who give all their affection to one an- other, and maintain a state of cold in- difference to everyone else, should be executed without benefit of clergy as a couple of heartless monopolists; for the idealist may be safely challenged to pro- duce a single instance of a thoroughly happy marriage in which the affection which makes the marriage happy does not extend to a wide circle of friends. Just as good mothers and fathers love all lovable children, so good wives and husbands love all lovable husbands and wives. People with this gift of heart are not prevented from marrying by Don Juan's difficulty: they can be faith- ful to one without being unfaithful to all the rest. Unfortunately, they are no 220 more common than the domestic terrors who are utterly incapable of living with anybody on tolerable terms. Family life may mean anything between these two extremes, from that of the southern countries where the guide-book warns the English tourist that If he asks a man after his wife's health he will probably be challenged to fight a duel, or that of the English stage, where the same evil construction is maintained on the same pretence of jealousy for private morality and the honor of womanhood, to the most cultivated sections of English and American society, where people think of our existing marriage law much as Mat- thew Arnold thought about Tennyson, and unfortunately keep their opinion to themselves with equal " good taste." The practical result Is, superhuman pre- tension, extravagant hypocrisy, toler- ance of every sort of misconduct — pro- vided it Is clandestine, and, of course, a conspiracy of silence. The Saturday Review, 30th November 1895. 221 Marrkge VXT'HEN the great protest of the slx- Reforma- teenth ccntury came, and the Church was reformed In several coun- tries, the Reformation was so largely a rebellion against sacerdotalism that mar- riage was very nearly excommunicated again, as It had been by the early Chris- tians: our modern civil marriage, round which so many fierce controversies and political conflicts have raged, would have been thoroughly approved of by Calvin, and hailed with relief by Luther. But the Instinctive doctrine that there Is something holy and mystic In sex, a doc- trine which many of us now easily disso- ciate from any priestly ceremony, but which In those days seemed to all who felt It to need a ritual affirmation, could not be thrown on the scrap-heap with the sale of Indulgences and the like; and so the Reformation left marriage where It was: a curious mixture of commercial sex slavery, early Christian sex abhor- rence, and later Christian sex sanctlfica- tion. Getting Married, p. 196. ]V/f ATERIALISM only Isolated the great mystery of consciousness by clearing away several petty mysteries with which we had confused it; just as rationalism isolated the great mystery of the will to live. The isolation made both more conspicuous than before. We thought we had escaped for ever from the cloudy region of metaphysics; and we were only carried further into the heart of them. Quintessence of Ibsenism, p. 14. Ibsen's writings shew how well he knew the crushing weight with which the sor- did cares of the ordinary struggle for money and respectability fell on the world when the romance of the creeds was discredited, and progress seemed for the moment to mean, not the growth of the spirit of man, but an effect of the survival of the fittest brought about by the destruction of the unfit, all the most frightful examples of this systematic de- struction being thrust Into the utmost 223 prominence by those who were fighting the Church with Mill's favorite dialecti- cal weapon, the incompatibility of divine omnipotence with divine benevolence. His plays are full of evidence of his overwhelming sense of the necessity of rousing the individual into self-assertion against this numbing fatalism; and yet he never seems to have freed his intellect wholly from the acceptance of its scien- tific validity. That it only accounted for progress at all on the hypothesis of a continuous increase in the severity of the conditions of existence — that is, on an assumption of just the reverse of what was actually taking place — appears to have escaped Ibsen as completely as it has escaped Professor Huxley himself. It is true that he did not allow himself to be stopped by this gloomy fortress of pessimism and materialism : his genius pushed him past It, but without intellec- tually reducing It; and the result is, that as far as one can guess, he went on be- lieving it impregnable, not dreaming 224 that It has been demolished, and that too with ridiculous ease, by the mere march behind him of the working class, which, by Its freedom from the characteristic bias of the middle classes, has escaped their characteristic Illusions, and solved many of the enigmas which they found Insoluble because they wished to find them so. His prophetic belief In the spontaneous growth of the will makes him a mellorlst without reference to the operation of natural selection; but his Impression of the light thrown by physi- cal and biological science on the facts of life seems to be the gloomy one of the period at which he must have received his education In these departments. Ex- ternal nature often plays her most ruth- less and destructive part In his works, which have an extraordinary fascination for the pessimists of that school, in spite of the incompatibility of his individual- ism with that mechanical utilitarian ethic of theirs which treats Man as the sport 225 of every circumstance, and Ignores his will altogether. Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 63, 64. Maternity jOLATO long ago poIntcd out the im- portance of being governed by men with a sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing; and yet we have taken his Instruction so little to heart that we are at present suffering acutely from government by gentlemen who will stoop to all the mean shifts of election- eering and Incur all Its heavy expenses for the sake of a seat In Parliament. But what our sentimentalists have not yet been told Is that exactly the same thing applies to maternity as to govern- ment. The best mothers are not those who are so enslaved by their primitive Instincts that they will bear children no matter how hard the conditions are, but precisely those who place a very high price on their services, and are quite 226 prepared to become old maids if the price is refused, and even to feel re- lieved at their escape. Our democratic and matrimonial institutions may have their merits : at all events they are most- ly reforms of something worse; but they put a premium on want of self-respect in certain very important matters; and the consequence is that we are very bad- ly governed and are, on the whole, an ugly, mean, ill-bred race. Getting Mar- ried, pp. 153, 154. A COMPARISON of the works of Meat and our carnivorous drunkard poets with those of Shelley, or of Dr. John- son's dictionary with that of the vege- tarian Littre, is sufficient to shew that the secret of attaining the highest emi- nence either in poetry or in dictionary compiling (and all fine literature lies between the two), is to be found neither in alcohol nor in our monstrous habit of bringing millions of useless and dis- agreeable animals into existence for the 227 Drink express purpose of barbarously slaugh- tering them, roasting their corpses, and eating them. On Going to Church. The Savoy, January 1896, pp. 16, 17. M V ai 'W'OTHING is more dangerous than Profession ^^ a poor doctor : not even a poor em- ployer or a poor landlord. The Doc- tor's Dilemma, p. xcl. It is not the fault of our doctors that the medical service of the community, as at present provided for, is a murder- ous absurdity. That any sane nation, having observed that you could provide for the supply of bread by giving bakers a pecuniary interest In baking for you, should go on to give a surgeon a pecun- iary interest in cutting off your leg, Is enough to make one despair of political humanity. But that Is precisely what we have done. And the more appalling the mutilation, the more the mutilator Is paid. He who corrects the Ingrowing toe-nail receives a few shillings: he who 228 cuts your inside out receives hundreds of guineas, except when he does it to a poor person for practice. Scandalized voices murmur that these operations are necessary. They may be. It may also be necessary to hang a man or pull down a house. But we take good care not to make the hang- man and the housebreaker the judges of that. If we did, no man's neck would be safe and no man's house stable. But we do make the doctor the judge, and fine him anything from sixpence to several hundred guineas if he decides in our favour. The Doctor's Dilemma^ p. V. Doctors are just like other Englishmen: most of them have no honor and no con- science: what they commonly mistake for these is sentimentality and an Intense dread of doing anything that everybody else does not do, or omitting to do any- thing that everybody else does. This of course does amount to a sort of work- 229 Ing or rule-of-thumb conscience; but it means that you will do anything, good or bad, provided you get enough people to keep you In countenance by doing It also. It Is the sort of conscience that makes It possible to keep order on a pirate ship, or In a troop of brigands. The Doctor's Dilemma, p. vIII. No doctor dare accuse another of mal- practice. He Is not sure enough of his own opinion to ruin another man by it. He knows that If such conduct were tolerated in his profession no doctor's livelihood or reputation would be worth a year's purchase. I do not blame him : I should do the same myself. But the effect of this state of things Is to make the medical profession a conspiracy to hide its own shortcomings. No doubt the same may be said of all professions. They are all conspiracies against the laity; and I do not suggest that the medical conspiracy Is either better or worse than the military conspiracy, the 230 legal conspiracy, the sacerdotal con- spiracy, the pedagogic conspiracy, the royal and aristocratic conspiracy, the literary and artistic conspiracy, and the innumerable industrial, commercial, and financial conspiracies, from the trade unions to the great exchanges, which make up the huge conflict which we call society. But it is less suspected. The Doctor's Dilemma, pp. xiv., xv. TT NFORTUNATELY, a really good Melodrama Adelphi melodrama Is very hard to get. It should be a simple and sincere drama of action and feeling, kept well within that vast tract of passion and motives which Is common to the philoso- pher and the laborer, relieved by plenty of fun, and depending for variety of hu- man character, not on the high comedy idiosyncrasies which individualize peo- ple In spite of the closest similarity of age, sex, and circumstances, but on broad contrasts between types of youth and age, sympathy and selfishness, the 231 masculine and the feminine, the serious and the frivolous, the sublime and the ridiculous, and so on. The whole character of the piece must be allegori- cal, idealistic, full of generalizations and moral lessons ; and it must represent conduct as producing swiftly and cer- tainly on the individual the results which in actual life it only produces on the race in the course of many centuries. All of which, obviously, requires for its accomplishment rather greater heads and surer hands than we commonly find in the service of the playhouse. The Saturday Review, 20th April 1895. ^^^^ttTta T ^^ ^^^ approve of private property in land, and I regard the appropria- tion of the ground rent of London by the present ground landlords as grossly inequitable; but were I asked on that account to finance a burglary in the Duke of Westminster's house, I should refuse. I am constantly teaching peo- ple that they must reform society before 232 they can reform themselves, and that individual sallies of rebellion are use- less and suicidal. Correspondence. HP HE whole difficulty of bringing up Middle a family well is the difficulty of uns^oda- making its members behave as consid- ^^^^ erately at home as on a visit in a strange house, and as frankly, kindly, and easily in a strange house as at home. In the middle classes, where the segregation of the artificially limited family in its little brick box is horribly complete, bad man- ners, ugly dresses, awkwardness, cow- ardice, peevishness, and all the petty vices of unsociability flourish like mush- rooms in a cellar. In the upper class, where families are not limited for money reasons; where at least two houses and sometimes three or four are the rule (not to mention the clubs) ; where there is travelling and hotel life; and where the men are brought up, not in the family, but in public schools, uni- versities, and the naval and military 233 services, besides being constantly In so- cial training in other people's houses, the result is to produce what may be called, in comparison with the middle class, something that might almost pass as a different and much more sociable species. And in the very poorest class, where people have no homes, only sleep- ing places, and consequently live practi- cally in the streets, sociability again ap- pears, leaving the middle class despised and disliked for its helpless and offensive unsociability as much by those below it as those above it, and yet ignorant enough to be proud of it, and to hold itself up as a model for the reform of the (as it considers) elegantly vicious rich and profligate poor alike. Getting Married, pp. 169, 170. JJif Right npHERE is no more identity or neces- sary connection between might and right than between chalk and cheese. Every man strives for might so that his will may prevail ; and when he attains 234 it his will prevails whether it is right or wrong. That Will, like gravitation, is a force in itself, is true; and that the human race cannot really will its own destruction is a thing that we may at least hope for on the ground that it manages to survive. But under the rule of a standard Morality evolution is lim- ited by the fact that at a certain point of development the individual in whom the advance is manifested (say the Superman) is attacked and destroyed in the name of Right by the other less developed individuals; so that in effect the race does will its own destruction on the plane of the Superman. And the attack presents itself to these less de- veloped ones as an attack of right on might; for to the ordinary citizen right means thinking as he does; and the Superman who goes deeper than he into morals is just as much a rascal to him as the criminal who does not go so deep. It seems clear, therefore, that the only chance for the Superman is to acquire 23s sufficient might to defy the efforts of the average respectable man to destroy him. Hitherto these attempts have not been successful on the physical plane. Napoleon's military system finally re- duced itself to absurdity, and forced the dufferdom of Europe to combine and destroy him. Caesar, with immense so- cial talents and moral gifts in addition to moral capacity, bribed the masses into tolerating him, but was killed by a con- spiracy of " good " men who killed him on principle as a protest of right against might. So much for the Superman of action ! As to the Superman who mere- ly writes and talks, he escapes because nobody understands him. " The tri- umph of his principles" means their degradation to the common level, the mob accepting his teaching just as a cannibal accepts the teaching of St. John or an Oxford undergraduate the philos- ophy of Plato or the poetry of Eu- ripides. The Nationalist, September, 1903. 236 ^ I ^HE soldier always begs to be al- MUitansm lowed to kill everybody who could possibly kill him In order that he may sheathe his sword for ever. And who shall blame him? But it is one thing not to blame a poor bedevilled, but logi- cal, military fellow-creature who pays with his skin for the murderous arro- gance of the fat citizens who skulk on their tight little island behind the guns of the fleet, clamoring for the blood of their neighbors. It is quite another to make his bedevilled logic the policy of your Empire. Civilization and the Sol- dier. The Humane Review, January 1901, p. 309. No man who has learnt a short and ap- parently effectual way of disposing of political difficulties will ever have pa- tience to forego that method. Crom- well's way with Ireland, Napoleon's way with Europe, is finally every ca- pable soldier's way everywhere. A sol- dier has no other policy; and to make 237 him your counsellor Is to relinquish all choice of policy. Civilization and the Soldier. The Humane Review, Janu- ary 1901, p. 310. ■1- 1- Miracies 'T'HAT definition of a miracle as " the •*' Divine Will overcoming the mere rule in things " is not bad. But surely the rule is that the Divine Will (my will and yours) can overcome everything finally, though It has to will pretty hard to do it, and overcomes nothing on the cheap, as your vulgar worshipper with his beggar's prayers would like to .be- lieve. The New Age, 7th January 1909. Money ly^'ONEY is indeed the most Impor- tant thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and na- tional morality should have this fact for its basis. Every teacher or twad- dler who denies it or suppresses It, is an enemy of life. Money controls moral- 238 Ity; and what makes the United States of America look so foolish even in fool- ish Europe is that they are always In a state of flurried concern and violent in- terference with morality, whereas they throw their money into the street to be scrambled for, and presently find that their cash reserves are not in their own hands, but In the pockets of a few mil- lionaires who, bewildered by their luck, and unspeakably incapable of making any truly economic use of it, endeavor to " do good " with It by letting them- selves be fleeced by philanthropic com- mittee men, building contractors, libra- rians and professors. In the name of education, science, art and what not; so that sensible people exhale relievedly when the pious millionaire dies, and his heirs, demoralized by being brought up on his outrageous Income, begin the so- cially beneficent work of scattering his fortune through the channels of the trades that flourish by riotous living. The Irrational Knot, p. xiv. 239 Money Is the most Important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty as conspicuously and undeniably as the want of It represents Illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not the least of Its virtues Is that It destroys base people as certainly as It fortifies and dignifies noble people. It Is only when It Is cheapened to worthlessness for some, and made Impossibly dear to others, that It becomes a curse. In short, It is a curse only In such foolish social conditions that life itself is a curse. For the two things are Insepar- able : money is the counter that enables life to be distributed socially: It is life as truly as sovereigns and bank notes are money. The first duty of every citi- zen Is to Insist on having money on rea- sonable terms; and this demand is not coi .plied with by giving four men three shillings each for ten or twelve hours' drudgery and one man a thousand pounds for nothing. The crying need 240 of the nation Is not for better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, cul- ture, redemption of fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money. And the evil to be at- tacked Is not sin, suffering, greed, priest- craft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, Ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any of the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but simply poverty. ( Major Barbara, p. 171. -^ 'VT'OUR morals are only your habits: Morality do not call other people immoral because they have other habits. Cor- respondence. Morality means custom; and It is cus- tom that tyrannizes over most people's minds. Correspondence. The Irrational Knot Is one of those fic- tions In which the morality is original and not readymade. Now this quality 241 is the true diagnostic of the first order in literature and indeed in all the arts, including the art of life. It is, for ex- ample, the distinction that sets Shake- spear's Hamlet above his other plays, and that sets Ibsen's work as a whole above Shakespear's work as a whole. Shakespear's morality is a mere reach- me-down; and because Hamlet does not feel comfortable In it, and struggles against the misfit, he suggests something better, futile as his struggle is, and In- competent as Shakespear shews himself in his effort to think out the revolt of his feeling against readymade morality. Ibsen's morality is original all through; he knows well that the men in the street have no use for principles, because they can neither understand nor apply them; and that what they can understand and apply are arbitrary rules of conduct, often frightfully destructive and inhu- man, but at least definite rules enabling the common stupid man to know where he stands and what he may do and not 242 do, without getting Into trouble. Now to all writers of the first order, these rules, and the need for them produced by the moral and Intellectual Incompe- tence of the ordinary human animal, are no more Invariably beneficial and re- spectable than the sunlight which ripens the wheat in Sussex and leaves the des- ert deadly in Sahara, making the cheeks of the ploughman's child rosy In the morning and striking the ploughman brainsick or dead In the afternoon; no more Inspired (and no less) than the religion of the Andaman Islanders; as much in need of frequent throwing away and replacement as the commu- nity's boots. By writers of the second order the readymade morality Is ac- cepted as the basis of all moral judg- ment and criticism of the characters they portray, even when their genius forces them to represent their most at- tractive heroes and heroines as violat- ing the readymade code In all directions. The Irrational Knot, pp. xxll., xxlli. 243 No man who shuts his eyes and opens his mouth when religion and morahty are offered to him on a long spoon can share the same Parnassian bench with those who make an original contribution to religion and morality, were it only a criticism. The Irrational Knot, p. xxiv. The statement that Ibsen's plays have an immoral tendency, is, in the sense in which it is used, quite true. Immo- rality does not necessarily imply mis- chievous conduct: it implies conduct, mischievous or not, which does not con- form to current ideals. Since Ibsen has devoted himself almost entirely to shew- ing that the spirit or will of Man is constantly outgrowing his ideals, and that therefore conformity to them is constantly producing results no less tragic than those which follow the vio- lation of ideals which are still vahd, the main effect of his plays is to keep before the public the importance of being al- 244 ways prepared to act Immorally, to re- mind men that they ought to be as careful how they yield to a temptation to tell the truth as to a temptation to hold their tongues, and to urge upon women that the desirability of their pre- serving their chastity depends just as much on circumstances as the desirabil- ity of taking a cab Instead of walking. He protests against the ordinary as- sumption that there are certain supreme ends which justify all means used to attain them; and insists that every end shall be challenged to show that It jus- tifies the means. Our Ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices. Let none of them, says Ibsen, be placed above the obliga- tion to prove that they are worth the sacrifices they demand; and let every- one refuse to sacrifice himself and others from the moment he loses his faith In the reality of the ideal. Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 136, 137. 245 There can be no question as to the effect likely to be produced on an individual by his conversion from the ordinary ac- ceptance of current ideals as safe stand- ards of conduct, to the vigilant open- mindedness of Ibsen. It must at once greatly deepen his sense of moral re- sponsibility. Before conversion the in- dividual anticipates nothing worse in the way of examination at the judgment bar of his conscience than such questions as Have you kept the commandments? Have you obeyed the law? Have you attended church regularly? paid your rates and taxes to Caesar? and con- tributed, In reason, to charitable insti- tutions? It maybe hard to do all these things; but It is still harder not to do them, as our ninety-nine moral cowards in the hundred well know. And even a scoundrel can do them all and yet live a worse life than the smuggler or pros- titute who must answer No all through the catechism. Quintessence of Ibsen- ism, pp. 137, 138. 246 NAPOLEON. There are three sorts of people in the world, the low people, the middle people, and the high people. The low people and the high people are alike in one thing: they have no scruples, no morality. The low are beneath morality, the high above it. I am not afraid of either of them ; for the low are unscrupulous without knowledge, so that they make an idol of me; whilst the high are unscrupulous without purpose, so that they go down before my will. Look you : I shall go over all the mobs and all the courts of Europe as a plough goes over a field. It is the middle peo- ple who are dangerous : they have both knowledge and purpose. But they, too, have their weak point. They are full of scruples — chained hand and foot by their morality and respectability. The Man of Destiny, pp. 211, 212. \X7^HATEVER is contrary to estab- Morality lished manners and customs is im- censorships moral. An immoral act or doctrine is 247 not necessarily a sinful one : on the con- trary, every advance in thought and con- duct is by definition immoral until it has converted the majority. For this rea- son it is of the most enormous impor- tance that immorality should be pro- tected jealously against the attacks of those who have no standard except the standard of custom, and who regard any attack on custom — that is, on morals — as an attack on society, on re- ligion, and on virtue. A censor is never intentionally a protect- or of immorality. He always aims at the protection of morality. Now mo- rality is extremely valuable to society. It imposes conventional conduct on the great mass of persons who are incapable of original ethical judgment, and who would be quite lost if they were not in leading-strings devised by lawgivers, philosophers, prophets, and poets for their guidance. But morality is not de- pendent on censorship for protection. It is already powerfully fortified by the 248 magistracy and the whole body of law. Blasphemy, indecency, libel, treason, se- dition, obscenity, profanity, and all the other evils which a censorship is sup- posed to avert are punishable by the civil magistrate with all the severity of vehement prejudice. Morality has not only every engine that lawgivers can devise in full operation for its protec- tion, but also that enormous weight of public opinion enforced by social ostra- cism which is stronger than all the statutes. A censor pretending to protect morality is like a child pushing the cush- ions of a railway carriage to give itself the sensation of making the train travel at sixty miles an hour. It is immorality, not morality, that needs protection: it is morality, not immorality, that needs restraint; for morality, with all the dead weight of human inertia and superstition to hang on the back of the pioneer, and all the malice of vulgarity and preju- dice to threaten him, is responsible for many persecutions and many martyr- 249 Moral Passion doms. The Shewing-up of Blanco Pos- net, pp. 346, 347. TT'ANNER. The change that came to me at thirteen was the birth In me of moral passion; and I declare that ac- cording to my experience moral passion is the only real passion. ANN. All passions ought to be moral, Jack. TANNER. Ought! Do you think that anything Is strong enough to Impose oughts on a passion except a stronger passion still? ANN. Our moral sense controls pas- sion, Jack. Don't be stupid. TANNER. Our moral sense I And is that not a passion? Is the devil to have all the passions as well as all the good tunes? If It were not a passion — if It were not the mightiest of the pas- sions, all the other passions would sweep It away like a leaf before a hurri- cane. It Is the birth of that passion 250 that turns a child Into a man. Man and Superman, p. 35. WHY the bees should pamper their Mother- mothers whilst we pamper only our operatic prima donnas Is a question worth reflecting on. Our notion of treating a mother Is, not to Increase her supply of food, but to cut It off by for- bidding her to work In a factory for a month after her confinement. Every- thing that can make birth a misfortune to the parents as well as a danger to the mother Is conscientiously done. Man and Superman, p. 199. r\R. • turns up his nose at the Mothers ^^ State. "Anything less like a t^t^^ mother than the State I find It hard to imagine." He may well say so. When the State left the children to the mothers, they got no schooling; they were sent out to work under inhuman 251 conditions underground and overground for atrociously long hours as soon as they were able to walk; they died of typhus fever In heaps; they grew up to be as wicked to their own children as their parents had been to them. State Socialism rescued them from the worst of that, and means to rescue them from all of It. I now publicly challenge Dr. to propose, If he dares, to with- draw the hand of the State and aban- don the children to their mothers as before. At present mothers cannot af- ford to take care of their children; and the State can. The Pall Mall Gazette, 2nd December 1907. -HH- Municipai T ET US imagmc a city m which the Trading I j ^ ^ ,. ^ ^ j ^^ poor rates, police rates and sani- tary rates are very low, and the children In the schools flourishing and of full weight, whilst all the public services of the city are municipalized and conducted without a farthing of profit, or even 252 with occasional deficits made up out of the rates. Suppose another city In which all the public services are In the hands of flourishing joint stock com- panies paying from 7 to 21 per cent, and in which the workhouses, the prisons, the hospitals, the sanitary In- spectors, the dislnfectors and strippers and cleansers are all as busy as the joint stock companies, whilst the schools are full of rickety children. According to the commercial test, the second town would be a triumphant proof of the prosperity brought by private enter- prise, and the first a dreadful example of the bankruptcy of municipal trade. But which town would a wise man rather pay rates in? The very share- holders of the companies in the second town would take care to live In the first. And what chance would a European State consisting of towns of the second type have In a struggle for survival with a State of the first? The Common Sense of Municipal Trading, p. 39. 253 Suppose the drink trade were debited with what it costs in disablement, in- efficiency, illness and crime, with all their depressing effects on industrial pro- ductivity, and with their direct cost in doctors, policemen, prisons, etc., etc., etc. ! Suppose at the same time the municipal highways and bridges ac- count were credited with the value of the time and wear and tear saved by them! It would at once appear that the roads and bridges pay for them- selves many times over, whilst the pleas- ures of drunkenness are costly beyond all reason,. The Common Sense of Municipal Trading, p. 19. If a municipality owned all the land within its jurisdiction, it would still have to make the occupiers, including its own departments, pay rent in proportion to the commercial or residential desirabil- ity of their holdings; but it could pool the total rent and establish a " moral minimum " of house accommodation at 254 a " fair rent *' on a perfectly sound economic basis. The Common Sense of Municipal Trading, p. 72. The sudden reintroductlon of competi- tion by a new departure — for example the tube railway suddenly upsetting the monopoly of the old underground in London — always brings down prices, a fact which proves that private enter- prise maintains the highest price that will pay instead of the lowest. This tendency is clearly an anti-social one. The Common Sense of Municipal Trad- ing, p. 52. ^ Now the all important difference be- tween the position of the commercial in- vestor and the ratepayer is that whilst the commercial investor has no respon- sibility for the laborers whom he em- ploys beyond paying them their wages whilst they are working for him, the ratepayer is responsible for their subsist- ence from the cradle to the grave. The Common Sense of Municipal Trad- ing, p. 20. 25s Municipal Trading seems a very sim- ple matter of business. Yet It Is conceiv- able by a sensible man that the political struggle over It may come nearer to a civil war than any issue raised In Eng- land since the Reform Bill of 1832. The Common Sense of Municipal Trad- ing, p. I. Nationausm "T^OYLE. Hcs a Nationalist and a ^^ Separatist. I'm a metallurgical chemist turned civil engineer. Now whatever else metallurgical chemistry may be, It's not national. It's Interna- tional. And my business and yours as civil engineers is to join countries, not to separate them. The one real po- litical conviction that our business has rubbed Into us Is that frontiers are hin- drances and flags confounded nuisances. John Bull's Other Island, p. 22. A healthy nation is as unconscious of Its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's na- 256 tlonality It will think of nothing else but getting It set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demand of the Na- tionalist Is granted. It will attend to no business, however vital, except the business of unification and liberation. John Bull's Other Island, Preface, p. xxxvi. The business of Socialism is the organi- zation of the highly evolved industrial communities now politically represented by the great Powers, and not this non- sensical shouting of the political woes of Poland, Ireland, and the Transvaal with their obsolete ideals, their obscur- antist religions, their communities of Ig- norant farmers or depressed laborers, and their unintelligent and bigoted indi- vidualism. Socialists are not in the habit of pitying Western Europe be- cause Napoleon conquered It, or Eng- land because Julius Caesar conquered It. Correspondence. ^S7 Nice People I am not myself an Englishman but an Irishman; and all my national prejudice Is anti-English. But one of the first things Socialism taught me was that na- tional prejudices are not politics. Cor- respondence. 'T CANNOT understand why she Is so unlucky : she Is such a nice wom- an! ": that is the formula. As if peo- ple with any force in them ever were altogether nice! The Irrational Knot, p. xxiv. 1 1 - TT is reserved for some great critic to give us a study of the psychology of the nineteenth century. Those of us who as adults saw It face to face In that last moiety of its days when one fierce hand after another — Marx's, Zola's, Ib- sen's, Strindberg's, Turgenlef's, Tol- stoy's — stripped its masks off and re- vealed it as, on the whole, perhaps the most villainous page of recorded human history, can also recall the strange con- 258 fidence with which it regarded itself as the very summit of civilization, and talked of the past as a cruel gloom that had been dispelled for ever by the rail- way and the electric telegraph. Three Plays by Brieux, Preface, p. viii. W HEN the popular tribune demands Not what " good words " from Coriolanus, but^Vhaf' he replies, " He that will give good for^xhem words to thee will flatter beneath abhor- ring"; and no great play can ever be written by a man who will allow the public to dictate to him. Even if the public really knew what it likes and what it dislikes — a consummation of wisdom which it is as far from as any child — the true master-dramatist would still give it, not what it likes, but what is good for it. The Saturday Review, 7th December 1895. It is true that the public consists largely of people who are incapable of fully ap- 259 predating the best sort of artistic work. It is even true that in every audience,* especially on first nights, there is an ap- preciable number of persons whose con- dition is such that — to turn Tennyson's shallow claptrap into a terrible truth — they needs must hate the highest when they see it. But why should we credit these unhappy persons with that attri- bute of the highest character, the power of liking what pleases them, of believ- ing in it, of standing by those who give it to them? For the most part they never enjoy anything; they are always craving for stimulants, whereas the es- sence of art is recreation; let their flat- terer slip, as he always does sooner or later, and they are at his throat merci- lessly before he can recover himself. But if you speak in their hearing as the great men speak (which is easy enough if you happen to be a great man), then you will find that their specialty is self- torture, and that they are always hank- ering, in spite of themselves, after their 260 I own boredom and bewilderment, driven, probably, by some sort of uneasy hope that Ibsen or Wagner or some other gigantic bore may exorcize the devils which rend them. The fact is, there is nothing the public despises so much as an attempt to please It. Torment Is Its natural element : it is only the saint who has any capacity for happiness. There is no greater mistake in theology than to suppose that it Is necessary to lock people into hell or out of heaven. You might as well suppose that It Is neces- sary to lock a professional tramp Into a public-house or out of a Monday pop- ular concert, on the ground that the con- cert Is the better and cheaper place of the two. The artist's rule must be Cromwell's: " Not what they want, but what Is good for them." That rule, carried out in a kindly and sociable way, Is the secret to success In the long run at the theatre as elsewhere. The Satur- day Review, 20th April 1895. 261 observa- ^pj^g philanthropist Is a parasite on misery. Man and Superman, p. 21 I. Necessity, ever Ironical towards Folly. Three Plays for Puritans, p. xll. •hiSutions \^0U have made for yourself some- thing that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesnt fit the facts. Well, scrap It. Scrap It and get one that does fit. That is what Is wrong with the world at present. It scraps Its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it wont scrap its old prej- udices and Its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitu- tions. Whats the result? In machin- ery It does very well ; but In morals and religion and politics It Is working at a loss that brings It nearer bankruptcy every year. Dont persist In that folly. If your old religion broke down yester- day, get a newer and a better one for to-morrow. Major Barbara, p. 297. 262 Enough, then, of this goose-cackle about Progress: Man, as he Is, never will nor can add a cubit to his stature by any of its quackeries, political, scientific, edu- cational, religious, or artistic. What Is likely to happen when this conviction gets Into the minds of the men whose present faith In these illusions Is the cement of our social system, can be Im- agined only by those who know how suddenly a civilization which has long ceased to think (or In the old phrase, to watch and pray) can fall to pieces when the vulgar belief In Its hypocrisies and Impostures can no longer hold out against Its failures and scandals. When religious and ethical formulae become so obsolete that no man of strong mind can believe them, they have also reached the point at which no man of high char- acter will profess them; and from that moment until they are formally dises- tablished, they stand at the door of every profession and every public office to keep out every able man who Is not 263 a sophist or a liar. A nation which re- vises Its parish councils once In three years, but will not revise Its articles of religion once In three hundred, even when those articles avowedly began as a political compromise, dictated by Mr. Faclng-Both-Ways, Is a nation that needs remaking. Man and Superman^ pp. 217, 218. Oscar Wilde's TN a certain sense Mr. Oscar Wilde is , Plays -*• to me our only thorough playwright. \ He plays with everything: with wit, 1 with philosophy, with drama, with ac- j tors and audience, with the whole \ theatre. Such a feat scandalizes the j Englishman, who can no more play with ' wit and philosophy than he can with a > football or a cricket bat. He works at ^ both, and has the consolation, if he can- j not make people laugh, of being the: best cricketer and footballer in the ; world. Now it Is the mark of the art- ; 1st that he will not work. Just as peo- ple with social ambitions will practise 264 the meanest economies In order to live expensively; so the artist will starve his way through Incredible toll and discour- agement sooner than go and earn a week's honest wages. Mr. Wilde, an arch-artist, Is so colossally lazy that he trifles even with the work by which an artist escapes work. He distils the very quintessence, and gets as product plays which are so unapproachably playful that they are the delight of every play- goer with twopenn'orth of brains. The English critic always protesting that the drama should not be didactic, and yet always complaining If the dramatist does not find sermons In stones and good In everything, will be conscious of a subtle and pervading levity In An Ideal Husband. All the literary dignity of the play, all the Imperturbable good sense and good manners with which Mr. Wilde makes his wit pleasant to his com- paratively stupid audience, cannot quite overcome the fact that Ireland Is of all countries the most foreign to England, 265 and that to the Irishman (and Mr. Wilde is almost as acutely Irish an Irish- man as the Iron Duke of Wellington) there is nothing in the world quite so exquisitely comic as an Englishman's seriousness. It becomes tragic, per- haps, when the Englishman acts on it; but that occurs too seldom to be taken into account, a fact which intensifies the humor of the situation, the total result being the Englishman utterly uncon- scious of his real self, Mr. Wilde keen- ly observant of it and playing on the self-unconsciousness with irresistible humor, and finally, of course, the Eng- lishman annoyed with himself for being amused at his own expense, and for be- ing unable to convict Mr. Wilde of what seems an obvious misunderstand- ing of human nature. He is shocked, too, at the danger to the foundations of society when seriousness is publicly laughed at. And to complete the odd- ity of the situation, Mr. Wilde, touch- ing what he himself reverences, is abso- 266 lutely the most sentimental dramatist of the day. The Saturday Review, I2th January 1895. HERE are EngHsh parasitic Indus- Parasitic T tries which are wholly bad — In which nearly all the work is done by lads and lasses who are not getting a living wage and are yet putting in a full day's work and eating more than an adult to keep themselves growing. Such Industries are really supported by the young people's parents. The young people's employers are sucking the blood of the industry which pays the parents' wages. That is what is at the bottom of the demand for a legal minimum wage for all workers in the country. Bernard Shaw as a Clerk. The Clerk, February 1908, p. 21. Trades I Passions F "the heart of man Is deceitful above The all things, and desperately wicked," then, truly, the man who allows himself 267 to be guided by his passions must needs be a scoundrel; and the teachers who advise such guidance might well be slain by his parents. But how If the youth thrown helpless on his passions found that honesty, that self-respect, that hatred of cruelty and Injustice, that the desire for soundness and health and efficiency were master passions: nay, that their excess Is so dangerous to youth that It Is part of the wisdom of age to say to the young: " Be not right- eous overmuch : why shouldst thou de- stroy thyself?" On the other hand, the people who profess to renounce and abjure their own passions, and ostenta- tiously regulate their conduct by the most convenient Interpretation of what the Bible means, or, worse still, by their ability to find reasons for It (as If there were not excellent reasons to be found for every conceivable course of conduct, from dynamiting and vivisection to martyrdom), seldom need a warning against being righteous overmuch, their 268 attention, Indeed, often needing a rather pressing jog In the opposite direction. Passion Is the steam In the engine of all religious and moral systems. In so far as It Is malevolent, the religions are malevolent too, and Insist on human sacrifices, on hell, wrath, and vengeance. The Sanity of Art, pp. 42, 44. IV/T ORELL. Man can climb to the The peace highest summits ; but he cannot pSSh au dwell there long. F^Si^g MARCHBANKS. It's false: there can he dwell for ever, and there only. It's In the other moments that he can find no rest, no sense of the silent glory of life. Where would you have me spend my moments, If not on the summits? Candida, p. 144. \X^HEN, In addressing an ordinary personal religious audience, I have occa- sion to speak of the force which they call the Will of God, and which I my- 269 self have called the Life Force, I use the term which is familiar and intelli- gible to them. The force in question is as obvious a reality to me as magnetism or gravitation; and I had very much rather be misunderstood as accepting some of its legendary associations than as denying or reckoning without its ex- istence. But as a matter of fact, my references to it are always accompanied by other observations which could not possibly be taken as proceeding from an ordinary Evangelical. I hope to de- fine my views on this subject more pre- cisely in a book entirely devoted to them; but should anything prevent me from accomplishing this design, the third Act of Man and Superman will remain on record as a statement of my creed. Correspondence. I am a moral revolutionary, interested, not in the class war, but in the struggle between human vitality and the artificial system of morality; and distinguishing, 270 not between capitalist and proletarian, but between moralist and natural histo- rian. Correspondence. For my own part, if I do not care to rhapsodize much about Mozart, it is because I am so violently prepossessed in his favor that I am capable of sup- plying any possible deficiency in his work by my imagination. Gounod has devoutly declared that Don Giovanni has been to him all his life a revelation of perfection, a miracle, a work without fault. I smile indulgently at Gounod, since I cannot afford to give myself away so generously (there being, no doubt, less of me) ; but I am afraid my fundamental attitude towards Mozart is the same as his. In my small boy- hood I by good luck had an opportunity of learning the Don thoroughly; and if it were only for the sense of the value of fine workmanship which I gained from it, I should still esteem that lesson the most important part of my edu- 271 cation. Indeed It educated me artis- tically in all sorts of ways, and disquali- fied me only in one — that of criticizing Mozart fairly. Everyone appears a sentimental, hysterical bungler in com- parison, when anything brings his finest work vividly back to me. The World, 9th December 1891, p. 26. I have a professional reason for not drinking alcohol. The work I have to do depends for Its quality on a very keen self-criticism. Anything that makes me easily pleased with myself Instantly re- duces the quality of my work. Instead of following up and writing down about two per cent of the ideas that occur to me on any subject, I put down ten per cent or even more if I go to work under the comfortable and self-indulgent In- fluence of a narcotic. Character Sketch. The Review of Reviews, February 1908, pp. 145, 146. I have not eaten meat for twenty-seven years. The results are before the pub- 272 lie. Character Sketeh. The Review of Reviews, February 1908, p. 145. ... a dwarf — a creature with energy Personal enough to make him strong of body and J^S*^®^' fierce of passion, but with a brutish nar- rowness of intelligence and selfishness of imagination: too stupid to see that his own welfare can only be compassed as part of the welfare of the world, too full of brute force not to grab vigor- ously at his own gain. Such dwarfs are quite common in London. The Perfect W agnerite , p. 8. npO make my readers realize what a The ^ philosopher is, I can only say that p^"°^°p^«^ / am a philosopher. If you ask incred- ulously, " How, then, are your articles so interesting? " I reply that there is nothing so interesting as philosophy, provided its materials are not spurious. For instance, take my own materials : humanity and the fine arts. Any stu- dious, timorously ambitious book-worm *73 can run away from the world with a few shelvesful of history, essays, descrip- tions, and criticisms, and, having pieced an Illusory humanity and art out of the effects produced by his library on his Im- agination, build some silly systematlza- tlon of his worthless Ideas over the abyss of his own nescience. Such a philosopher is as dull and dry as you please : It Is he who brings his profession into disrepute, especially when he talks much about art, and so persuades peo- ple to read him. Without having looked at more than fifty pictures In his life, or made up his mind on the small- est point about one of the fifty, he will audaciously take It upon himself to ex- plain the development of painting from Zeuxis and Apelles to Raphael and Michael Angelo. As to the way he will go on about music, of which he al- ways has an awe-stricken conceit. It spoils my temper to think of It, espe- cially when one remembers that musical composition is taught (a monstrous 274 pretension) In this country by people who read scores, and never by any chance listen to performances. Now, the right way to go to work — strange as It may appear — Is to look at pictures until you have acquired the power of seeing them. If you look at several thousand good pictures every year, and form some sort of practical judgment about every one of them — were It only that It Is not worth troubling over — then at the end of five years or so you will. If you have a wise eye, be able to see what Is actually In a picture, and not what you think Is In It. Similarly, If you listen critically to music every day for a number of years, you will. If you have a wise ear, acquire the power of hearing music. And so on with all the jarts. When we come to humanity It Is I still the same: only by Intercourse with imen and women can we learn anything I about It. This Involves an active life, mot a contemplative one; for unless you I do something In the world, you can have 27s no real business to transact with men; and unless you love and are loved, you can have no Intimate relations with them. And you must transact business, wirepull politics, discuss religion, give and receive hate, love and friendship with all sorts of people before you can acquire the sense of humanity. If you are to acquire the sense sufficiently to be a philosopher, you must do all these things unconditionally. You must not say that you will be a gentleman and limit your Intercourse to this class or that class; or that you will be a virtu- ous person and generalize about the af- fections from a single Instance — unless, Indeed, you have the rare happiness to stumble at first upon an all-enlightening Instance. You must have no convic- tions, because, as Nietzsche puts it,i " convictions are prisons." Thus, I blush to add, you cannot be a philoso- pher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one. You will say, perhaps, that If this be so, there 276 I should be no philosophers; and perhaps you are right; but though I make you this handsome concession, I do not de- fer to you to the extent of ceasing to exist. If you Insist on the hangman, whose pursuits are far from elevating, you may very well tolerate the philoso- pher, even If philosophy Involves phi- landering; or, to put It another way, If, In spite of your hangman, you tolerate murder within the sphere of war. It may b^ necessary to tolerate comparatively venial irregularities within the sphere of philosophy. It is the price of progress ; and, after all, it is the philos- opher, and not you, who will burn for It. The Saturday Review, i ith April 1896. T^ON JUAN. The philosopher is in Thepw- ^7^ the grip of the^ Life Force. This fe'^"'^ Life Force says to him, " I have done a thousand wonderful things unconscious- ly by merely willing to live and follow- ing the line of least resistance: now I 277 want to know myself and my destina- tion, and choose my path; so I have made a special brain — a philosopher's brain — to grasp this knowledge for me as the husbandman's hand grasps the plough for me. And this," says the Life Force to the philosopher, '" must thou strive to do for me until thou diest, when I will make another brain and another philosopher to carry on the work." THE DEVIL. What is the use of kno)}^- ing? DON JUAN. Why, to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of the least resistance. Does a ship sail to its des- tination no better than a log drifts nowhither? The philosopher is Na- ture's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer. Man and Super- man, p. 134. 278 "D UNYAN, Blake, Hogarth and Tur- The^^^ ^ "'■^ ner (these four apart and above all of ufe^ ^ the English classics), Goethe, Shelley, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoy and Nietzsche are among the writers whose peculiar sense of the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own. Mark the word peculiar. I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint; but their pregnant ob- servations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philoso- phy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observa- tions; and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feel- ing and thought in pre-eminent degree . . . but they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities. Man and Superman, pp. xxviii., xxix. 279 Life is a thing of which It Is Important to have a theory; vet most people take it for granted, and go on HvIng for no better reason than that they find them- selves alive. Life, Literature and Po- litical Economy. Clare Market Mag- azine, January 1906, p. 27. Ewno^ npHE players of the great game of °°™y X economics in future will have to be philosophers dealing with human con- duct and destiny in the largest sense, International as well as national. The field of the political economist will be life; and his instrument will be litera- ture. The prophet of the race will be a political economist. Life, Literature and Political Economy. Clare Market Review, January 1906, p. 32. Poverty ' I ^HE thoughtlcss wlckcdncss with which we scatter sentences of im- prisonment, torture in the solitary cell and on the plank bed, and flogging, on 280 moral Invalids and energetic rebels, Is as nothing compared to the stupid levity with which we tolerate poverty as If it were either a wholesome tonic for lazy people or else a virtue to be embraced as St. Francis embraced It. If a man Is Indolent, let him be poor. If he Is drunken, let him be poor. If he Is not a gentleman, let him be poor. If he Is addicted to the fine arts or to pure science instead of to trade and finance, let him be poor. If he chooses to spend his urban eighteen shillings a week or his agricultural thirteen shillings a week on his beer and his family instead of saving it up for his old age, let him be poor. Let nothing be done for '' the undeserving " : let him be poor. Serve him right ! Also — somewhat inconsist- ently — blessed are the poor! Major Barbara, p. i66. The man who cannot see that starva- tion, overwork, dirt, and disease are as immoral as prostitution — that they are 281 the vices and crimes of a nation, and not merely its misfortunes — is (to put it as politely as possible) a hopelessly Priv- ate Person. The Author's Apology. — Mrs. Warren's Profession, p. 54. . . . The irresistible natural truth which we all abhor and repudiate: to wit, that the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty, and that our first duty — a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed — is not to be poor. " Poor but honest," " the respectable poor," and such phrases are as intolerable and as im- moral as " drunken but amiable," " fraudulent but a good after-dinner speaker," " splendidly criminal," or the like. Security, the chief pretence of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of pov- erty, hangs over everybody's head. Major Barbara, p. 164. At present we say callously to each citi- zen: " If you want money, earn it," as 282 If his having or not having It were a matter that concerned himself alone. We do not even secure for him the op- portunity of earning It: on the contrary, we allow our Industry to be organized in open dependence on the maintenance of " a reserve army of unemployed " for the sake of " elasticity." The sen- sible course would be Cobden-Sander- son's : that Is, to give every man enough to live well on, so as to guarantee the community against the possibility of a case of the malignant disease of pov- erty, and then (necessarily) to see that he earned It. Major Barbara, p. 167. UNDERSHAFT. Cleanliness and respect- ablhty do not need justification, Bar- bara : they justify themselves. I see no darkness here, no dreadfulness. In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. 283 They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage. BARBARA. And their souls? UNDERSHAFT. I save their souls just as I saved yours. BARBARA [revolted] You saved my soul ! What do you mean? UNDERSHAFT. I fed you and clothed you and housed you. I took care that you should have money enough to live handsomely — more than enough; so that you could be wasteful, careless, generous. That saved your soul from the seven deadly sins. BARBARA [bewildered] The seven dead- ly sins ! UNDERSHAFT. Yes, the deadly seven. [Counting on his fingers] Food, cloth- ing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the mill- stones are lifted. I lifted them from 284 your spirit. I enabled Barbara to be- come Major Barbara; and I saved her from the crime of poverty. cusiNS. Do you call poverty a crime? UNDERSHAFT. The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pesti- lences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come in sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a mur- der here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter .f* they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine pro- fessional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, ab- ject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us mor- ally and physically: they kill the happi- ness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into 28s their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty. Pah ! Major Bar- bara, pp. 298, 299. \nd^^ "DUT as, thanks to our political im- weaith -■-^ becility and personal cowardice (fruits of poverty, both), the best imi- tation of a good life now procurable is life on an independent income, all sen- sible people aim at securing such an in- come, and are, of course, careful to legalize and moralize both it and all the actions and sentiments which lead to it and support it as an institution. What else can they do? They know, of course, that they are rich because others are poor. But they cannot help that: it i^.-for the poor to repudiate pov- erty when they have had enough of it. The thing can be done easily enough: the demonstrations to the contrary made by the economists, jurists, moral- ists and sentimentalists hired by the rich to defend them, or even doing the 286 work gratuitously out of sheer folly and abjectness, impose only on the hirers. The reason why the independent income- tax payers are not solid in defence of their position is that the poverty of those we rob prevents our having the good life for which we sacrifice them. Rich men or aristocrats with a devel- oped sense of life — men like Ruskin and William Morris and Kropotkin — have enormous social appetites and very fas- tidious personal ones. They are not content with handsome houses: they want handsome cities. They are not content with bediamonded wives and blooming daughters: they complain be- cause the charwoman is badly dressed, because the laundress smells of gin, be- cause the sempstress is anemic, because every man they meet is not a friend and every woman not a romance. They turn up their noses at their neighbors' drains, and are made ill by the architec- ture of their neighbors' houses. Trade patterns made to suit vulgar people do 287 not please them (and they can get noth- ing else) : they cannot sleep nor sit at ease upon " slaughtered " cabinet- makers' furniture. The very air is not good enough for them: there is too much factory smoke in it. They even demand abstract conditions: justice, honor, a noble moral atmosphere, a mystic nexus to replace the cash nexus. Finally they declare that though Frois- sart's Knight who " saw that to rob and pill was a good life " may have been right, because he did it with his own hand on horseback and in a steel coat, to rob and pill by the hands of the po- liceman, the bailiff, and the soldier, and to underpay them meanly for doing it, is not a good life, but rather fatal to all possibility of even a tolerable one. They call on the poor to revolt, and, finding the poor shocked at their un- gentlemanliness, despairingly revile the proletariat for its " damned wantless- ness " {verdammte Bedurfnislosigkeit). Major Barbara, ^^. i68, 169, 170. 288 I, always on the heroic plane Imagin- atively, had two disgusting faults which I did not recognize as faults because I could not help them. I was poor and shabby. I therefore tolerated the gross error that poverty, though an Incon- venience and a trial, Is not a sin and a disgrace; and I stood for my self-re- spect on the things I had: probity, abil- ity, knowledge of art, laboriousness, and whatever else came cheaply to me. Because I could walk Into Hampton Court Palace and the National Gallery (on free days) and enjoy Mantegna and Michael Angelo whilst millionaires were yawning miserably over Inept gluttonies; because I could suffer more by hearing a movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony taken at a wrong tempo than a duchess by losing a dia- mond necklace, I was Indifferent to the repulsive fact that If I had fallen In love with the duchess I did not possess a morning suit in which I could reason- ably have expected her to touch me with 289 the furthest protended pair of tongs; and I did not see that to remedy this I should have been prepared to wade through seas of other people's blood. Indeed It Is this perception which con- stitutes an aristocracy nowadays. It Is the secret of all our governing classes, which consist finally of people who, though perfectly prepared to be gener- ous, humane, cultured, philanthropic, public spirited and personally charming In the second Instance, are unalterably resolved, In the first, to have money enough for a handsome and delicate life, and will, in pursuit of that money, batter In the doors of their fellow-men, sell them up, sweat them In fetid dens, shoot, stab, hang. Imprison, sink, burn and de- stroy them In the name of law and order. And this shews their fundamental sanity and rightmindedness; for a sufficient in- come is Indispensable to the practice of virtue; and the man who will let any un- selfish consideration stand between him and its attainment Is a weakling, a dupe, 290 and a predestined slave. If I could convince our impecunious mobs of this, the world would be reformed before the fend of the week; for the sluggards who !are content to be wealthy without work- ing and the dastards who are content to work without being wealthy, together with all the pseudo-moralists and ethi- cists and cowardice mongers generally, would be exterminated without shrift, to the unutterable enlargement of life and ennoblement of humanity. We imight even make some beginnings of civilization under such happy circum- stances. The Irrational Knot, pp. xviii., xix. The instinct which has led the British peerage to fortify Itself by American al- liances Is healthy and well Inspired. Thanks to it, we shall still have a few people to maintain the tradition of a piandsome, free, proud, costly life, whilst 'the craven mass of us are keeping up our starveling pretence that It is more 291 Prayer Important to be good than to be rich, and piously cheating, robbing, and mur- dering one another by doing our duty as policemen, soldiers, balllfifs, jurymen, turnkeys, hangmen, tradesmen, and cu- rates, at the command of those who know that the golden grapes are not sour. Why, good heavens ! we shall all pretend that this straightforward truth of mine Is mere Swiftlan satire, because It would require a little courage to take it seriously and either act on it or make me drink the hemlock for ut- tering it. The Irrational Knot^ pp. xlx., XX. T ORD SUMMERHAYS. Do you "^ not pray as common people do? LiNA. Common people do not pray, my lord : they only beg. Lord Summerhays. You never ask for anything? LiNA. No. Misalliance (unpublished, 19 12). ■ t-i - 292 WHEN we succeed in adjusting our The . 1 ^ ^ • / ^ Problem social structure in such a way as piay to enable us to solve social questions as fast as they become really pressing, they will no longer force their way Into the theatre. Had Ibsen, for Instance, had any reason to believe that the abuses to which he called attention In his prose plays would have been adequately at- tended to without his interference, he would no doubt have gladly left them alone. The same exigency drove Wil- liam Morris In England from his tapes- tries, his epics, and his masterpieces of printing, to try and bring his fellow citi- zens to their senses by the summary process of shouting at them In the streets and in Trafalgar Square. John Rus- kln's writing began with Modern Paint- ers; Carlyle began with literary studies of German culture and the like: both were driven to become revolutionary pamphleteers. If people are rotting and starving In all directions, and nobody else has the heart or brains to make a 293 disturbance about It, the great writers must. The Problem Play. The Humanitarian, May 1895. -HH- Pro- npHIS Is a miserably Incompetent fessionai X world. The average doctor is a walking compound of natural ignorance and acquired witchcraft, who kills your favourite child, wreck's your wife's health, and orders you into habits of nervous dram-drinking before you have the courage to send him about his busi- ness, and take your chance like a gentle- man. The average lawyer is a nincom- poop, who contradicts your perfectly sound impressions on notorious points of law, involves you in litigation when your case is hopeless, compromises when your success Is certain, and cannot even make your will without securing the ut- ter defeat of your intention if any one takes the trouble to dispute them. And so on, down to the bootmaker whose boots you have to make your tortured 294 feet fit, and the tailor who clothes you as if you were a cast-iron hot-water ap- paratus. You imagine that these people have professions; and you find that what they have is only, in the correct old world, their " mystery "—a hum- bug, like all mysteries. And yet, how we help to keep up the humbug! The Saturday Review, i6th May 1896. What is called professional work Is, In point of severity, just what you choose to. make it, either commonplace, easy, and requiring only ^.vtensive industry to be lucrative, or else distinguished, diffi- cult, and exacting the fiercest fwtensive industry In return, after a probation of twenty years or so, for authority, repu- tation and an Income only sufficient for simple habits and plain living. The whole professional world lies between these two extremes. On Going to Church. The Savoy, January 1896, p. 16. 29s Progress 'T'HE morc Ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their Httle parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy have painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery. Sav- agery, they think, became barbarism; barbarism became ancient civilization; ancient civilization became Pauline Christianity; Pauline Christianity be- came Roman Catholicism; Roman Ca- tholicism became the Dark Ages; and the Dark Ages were finally enlightened by the Protestant instincts of the Eng- lish race. The whole process is summed up as Progress with a capital P. And any elderly gentleman of Progressive temperament will testify that the Im- provement since he was a boy Is enor- mous. Three Plays for Puritans] p. 199. Steam locomotion Is possible without a nation of Stephensons, although national Christianity is impossible without a na- 296 tlon of Chrlsts. But does any man seri- ously believe that the chauffeur who drives a motor car from Paris to Ber- lin Is a more highly evolved man than the charioteer of Achilles, or that a mod- ern Prime Minister Is a more enlight- ened ruler than Caesar because he rides a tricycle, writes his dispatches by the electric light, and Instructs his stock- broker through the telephone. Man and Superman^ p. 217. The point to seize Is that social progress takes effect through the replacement of old Institutions by new ones; and since every Institution Involves the recognition of the duty of conforming to It, progress must Involve the repudiation of an es- tablished duty at every step. If the Englishman had not repudiated the duty of absolute obedience to his king, his political progress would have been Im- possible. If women had not repudiated the duty of absolute submission to their husbands, and defied public opinion as 297 I to the limits set by modesty to their edu- cation, they would never have gained the protection of the Married Women's Property Act or the power to qualify themselves as medical practitioners. If Luther had not trampled on his duty to the head of his Church and on his vow of chastity, our priests would still have to choose between celibacy and prof- ligacy. There Is nothing new, then, in the defiance of duty by the reformer: every step of progress means a duty re- pudiated, and a scripture torn up. Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 7, 8. History, as far as we are capable of his- tory (which is not saying much as yet), shews that all changes from crudity of social organization to complexity, and from mechanical agencies in government to living ones, seem anarchic at first sight. No doubt it is natural to a snail to think that any evolution which threat- ens to do away with shells will result in general death from exposure. Never- 298 theless, the most elaborately housed be- ings today are born not only without houses on their backs but without even fur or feathers to clothe them. The Perfect Wagnerite, p. 77. Even if man's Increased command over Nature included any Increased command over himself (the only sort of command relevant to his evolution Into a higher being) , the fact remains that it Is only by running away from the Increased com- mand over Nature to country places where Nature Is still In primitive com- mand over Man that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which our civilization costs us. If manufacturing activity means Progress, the town must be more advanced than the country; and the field laborers and village artisans of today must be much less changed from the servants of Job than the proletariat of modern London from the proletariat 299 of Caesar's Rome. Yet the cockney pro- letarian is so inferior to the village laborer that it is only by steady recruit- ing from the country that London is kept alive. Three Plays for Puritans, pp. 201, 202. Unfortunately, human enlightenment does not progress by nicer and nicer ad- justments, but by violent corrective re- actions which invariably send us clean over our saddle and would bring us to the ground on the other side if the next reaction did not send us back again with equally excessive zeal. Ecclesiasticism and Constitutionalism send us one way, Protestantism and Anarchism the other; Order rescues us from confusion and lands us in Tyranny; Liberty then saves the situation and is presently found to be as great a nuisance as Despotism. A scientifically balanced application of these forces, theoretically possible, is practi- cally incompatible with human passion. The Perfect JVagnerite, pp. 68, 69. 300 'T'HERE Is no magic In the ordeal of pj^Uc "^ popular election to change narrow minds into wide ones, cowards into com- manders, private ambition into civic patriotism, or crankiness into common sense. But still less is there any tendency to reverse the operation; for the nar- rowest fool, the vulgarest adventurer, the most impossible fanatic, gets socially educated by public life and committee work to an extent never reached in pri- vate life, or even in private commerce. The Common Sense of Municipal Trad- ing, p. 5. ^^ PUNCH and Tudy, the eternal rogue's Punch J ^ ^- ^1 u • A and J"