Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy
philosopher as Peter the Great: both were instances of that rare and
useful, but unedifying variation, an energetic genius born without
the prejudices or superstitions of his contemporaries. The resultant
unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a greater poet than
Wordsworth just as it made Peter a greater king than George III; but
as it was, after all, only a negative qualification, it did not prevent
Peter from being an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did
it enable Byron to become a religious force like Shelley. Let us, then,
leave Byron's Don Juan out of account. Mozart's is the last of the true
Don Juans; for by the time he was of age, his cousin Faust had, in the
hands of Goethe, taken his place and carried both his warfare and his
reconciliation with the gods far beyond mere lovemaking into politics,
high art, schemes for reclaiming new continents from the ocean, and
recognition of an eternal womanly principle in the universe. Goethe's
Faust and Mozart's Don Juan were the last words of the XVIII century
on the subject; and by the time the polite critics of the XIX century,
ignoring William Blake as superficially as the XVIII had ignored Hogarth
or the XVII Bunyan, had got past the Dickens-Macaulay Dumas-Guizot stage
and the Stendhal-Meredith-Turgenieff stage, and were confronted with
philosophic fiction by such pens as Ibsen's and Tolstoy's, Don Juan had
changed his sex and become Dona Juana, breaking out of the Doll's House
and asserting herself as an individual instead of a mere item in a moral
pageant.
Now it is all very well for you at the beginning of the XX century to
ask me for a Don Juan play; but you will see from the foregoing survey
that Don Juan is a full century out of date for you and for me; and
if there are millions of less literate people who are still in the
eighteenth century, have they not Moliere and Mozart, upon whose art no
human hand can improve? You would laugh at me if at this time of day I
dealt in duels and ghosts and "womanly" women. As to mere libertinism,
you would be the first to remind me that the Festin de Pierre of
Moliere is not a play for amorists, and that one bar of the voluptuous
sentimentality of Gounod or Bizet would appear as a licentious stain on
the score of Don Giovanni. Even the more abstract parts of the Don Juan
play are dilapidated past use: for instance, Don Juan's supernatural
antagonist hurled those who refuse to repent into lakes of burning
brimstone, there to be tormented by devils with horns and tails. Of that
antagonist, and of that conception of repentance, how much is left that
could be used in a play by me dedicated to you? On the other hand, those
forces of middle class public opinion which hardly existed for a
Spanish nobleman in the days of the first Don Juan, are now triumphant
everywhere. Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman
dares now shock his greengrocer. The women, "marchesane, principesse,
cameriere, cittadine" and all, are become equally dangerous: the sex
is aggressive, powerful: when women are wronged they do not group
themselves pathetically to sing "Protegga il giusto cielo": they grasp
formidable legal and social weapons, and retaliate. Political parties
are wrecked and public careers undone by a single indiscretion. A man
had better have all the statues in London to supper with him, ugly as
they are, than be brought to the bar of the Nonconformist Conscience by
Donna Elvira. Excommunication has become almost as serious a business as
it was in the X century.
As a result, Man is no longer, like Don Juan, victor in the duel of
sex. Whether he has ever really been may be doubted: at all events
the enormous superiority of Woman's natural position in this matter is
telling with greater and greater force. As to pulling the Nonconformist
Conscience by the beard as Don Juan plucked the beard of the
Commandant's statue in the convent of San Francisco, that is out of the
question nowadays: prudence and good manners alike forbid it to a hero
with any mind. Besides, it is Don Juan's own beard that is in danger of
plucking. Far from relapsing into hypocrisy, as Sganarelle feared,
he has unexpectedly discovered a moral in his immorality. The growing
recognition of his new point of view is heaping responsibility on him.
His former jests he has had to take as seriously as I have had to take
some of the jests of Mr W. S. Gilbert. His scepticism, once his least
tolerated quality, has now triumphed so completely that he can no
longer assert himself by witty negations, and must, to save himself from
cipherdom, find an affirmative position. His thousand and three affairs
of gallantry, after becoming, at most, two immature intrigues leading to
sordid and prolonged complications and humiliations, have been discarded
altogether as unworthy of his philosophic dignity and compromising to
his newly acknowledged position as the founder of a school. Instead of
pretending to read Ovid he does actually read Schopenhaur and Nietzsche,
studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead
of for the freedom of his own instincts. Thus his profligacy and his
dare-devil airs have gone the way of his sword and mandoline into the
rag shop of anachronisms and superstitions. In fact, he is now more
Hamlet than Don Juan; for though the lines put into the actor's mouth to
indicate to the pit that Hamlet is a philosopher are for the most
part mere harmonious platitude which, with a little debasement of the
word-music, would be properer to Pecksniff, yet if you separate the real
hero, inarticulate and unintelligible to himself except in flashes of
inspiration, from the performer who has to talk at any cost through
five acts; and if you also do what you must always do in Shakespear's
tragedies: that is, dissect out the absurd sensational incidents and
physical violences of the borrowed story from the genuine Shakespearian
tissue, you will get a true Promethean foe of the gods, whose
instinctive attitude towards women much resembles that to which Don Juan
is now driven. From this point of view Hamlet was a developed Don Juan
whom Shakespear palmed off as a reputable man just as he palmed poor
Macbeth off as a murderer. To-day the palming off is no longer necessary
(at least on your plane and mine) because Don Juanism is no longer
misunderstood as mere Casanovism. Don Juan himself is almost ascetic in
his desire to avoid that misunderstanding; and so my attempt to bring
him up to date by launching him as a modern Englishman into a modern
English environment has produced a figure superficially quite unlike the
hero of Mozart.
And yet I have not the heart to disappoint you wholly of another glimpse
of the Mozartian dissoluto punito and his antagonist the statue. I feel
sure you would like to know more of that statue--to draw him out when he
is off duty, so to speak. To gratify you, I have resorted to the trick
of the strolling theatrical manager who advertizes the pantomime of
Sinbad the Sailor with a stock of second-hand picture posters designed
for Ali Baba. He simply thrusts a few oil jars into the valley of
diamonds, and so fulfils the promise held out by the hoardings to
the public eye. I have adapted this simple device to our occasion by
thrusting into my perfectly modern three-act play a totally extraneous
act in which my hero, enchanted by the air of the Sierra, has a dream in
which his Mozartian ancestor appears and philosophizes at great length
in a Shavio-Socratic dialogue with the lady, the statue, and the devil.
But this pleasantry is not the essence of the play. Over this essence
I have no control. You propound a certain social substance, sexual
attraction to wit, for dramatic distillation; and I distil it for you.
I do not adulterate the product with aphrodisiacs nor dilute it with
romance and water; for I am merely executing your commission, not
producing a popular play for the market. You must therefore (unless,
like most wise men, you read the play first and the preface afterwards)
prepare yourself to face a trumpery story of modern London life, a life
in which, as you know, the ordinary man's main business is to get means
to keep up the position and habits of a gentleman, and the ordinary
woman's business is to get married. In 9,999 cases out of 10,000, you
can count on their doing nothing, whether noble or base, that conflicts
with these ends; and that assurance is what you rely on as their
religion, their morality, their principles, their patriotism, their
reputation, their honor and so forth.
On the whole, this is a sensible and satisfactory foundation for
society. Money means nourishment and marriage means children; and that
men should put nourishment first and women children first is, broadly
speaking, the law of Nature and not the dictate of personal ambition.
The secret of the prosaic man's success, such as it is, is the
simplicity with which he pursues these ends: the secret of the artistic
man's failure, such as that is, is the versatility with which he strays
in all directions after secondary ideals. The artist is either a poet
or a scallawag: as poet, he cannot see, as the prosaic man does, that
chivalry is at bottom only romantic suicide: as scallawag, he cannot see
that it does not pay to spunge and beg and lie and brag and neglect
his person. Therefore do not misunderstand my plain statement of the
fundamental constitution of London society as an Irishman's reproach to
your nation. From the day I first set foot on this foreign soil I knew
the value of the prosaic qualities of which Irishmen teach Englishmen to
be ashamed as well as I knew the vanity of the poetic qualities of which
Englishmen teach Irishmen to be proud. For the Irishman instinctively
disparages the quality which makes the Englishman dangerous to him; and
the Englishman instinctively flatters the fault that makes the Irishman
harmless and amusing to him. What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman
is what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries: stupidity. The
vitality which places nourishment and children first, heaven and hell
a somewhat remote second, and the health of society as an organic whole
nowhere, may muddle successfully through the comparatively tribal stages
of gregariousness; but in nineteenth century nations and twentieth
century empires the determination of every man to be rich at all costs,
and of every woman to be married at all costs, must, without a highly
scientific social organization, produce a ruinous development of
poverty, celibacy, prostitution, infant mortality, adult degeneracy, and
everything that wise men most dread. In short, there is no future for
men, however brimming with crude vitality, who are neither intelligent
nor politically educated enough to be Socialists. So do not
misunderstand me in the other direction either: if I appreciate the
vital qualities of the Englishman as I appreciate the vital qualities of
the bee, I do not guarantee the Englishman against being, like the
bee (or the Canaanite) smoked out and unloaded of his honey by beings
inferior to himself in simple acquisitiveness, combativeness, and
fecundity, but superior to him in imagination and cunning.
The Don Juan play, however, is to deal with sexual attraction, and not
with nutrition, and to deal with it in a society in which the serious
business of sex is left by men to women, as the serious business of
nutrition is left by women to men. That the men, to protect themselves
against a too aggressive prosecution of the women's business, have set
up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must
always come from the man, is true; but the pretence is so shallow that
even in the theatre, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only