Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy
masses. And this, if you please, at the very moment when the political
problem, having suddenly ceased to mean a very limited and occasional
interference, mostly by way of jobbing public appointments, in the
mismanagement of a tight but parochial little island, with occasional
meaningless prosecution of dynastic wars, has become the industrial
reorganization of Britain, the construction of a practically
international Commonwealth, and the partition of the whole of Africa and
perhaps the whole of Asia by the civilized Powers. Can you believe that
the people whose conceptions of society and conduct, whose power of
attention and scope of interest, are measured by the British theatre as
you know it to-day, can either handle this colossal task themselves, or
understand and support the sort of mind and character that is (at least
comparatively) capable of handling it? For remember: what our voters are
in the pit and gallery they are also in the polling booth. We are
all now under what Burke called "the hoofs of the swinish multitude."
Burke's language gave great offence because the implied exceptions to
its universal application made it a class insult; and it certainly was
not for the pot to call the kettle black. The aristocracy he defended,
in spite of the political marriages by which it tried to secure breeding
for itself, had its mind undertrained by silly schoolmasters and
governesses, its character corrupted by gratuitous luxury, its
self-respect adulterated to complete spuriousness by flattery and
flunkeyism. It is no better to-day and never will be any better: our
very peasants have something morally hardier in them that culminates
occasionally in a Bunyan, a Burns, or a Carlyle. But observe, this
aristocracy, which was overpowered from 1832 to 1885 by the middle
class, has come back to power by the votes of "the swinish multitude."
Tom Paine has triumphed over Edmund Burke; and the swine are now courted
electors. How many of their own class have these electors sent to
parliament? Hardly a dozen out of 670, and these only under the
persuasion of conspicuous personal qualifications and popular eloquence.
The multitude thus pronounces judgment on its own units: it admits
itself unfit to govern, and will vote only for a man morphologically
and generically transfigured by palatial residence and equipage, by
transcendent tailoring, by the glamor of aristocratic kinship. Well, we
two know these transfigured persons, these college passmen, these well
groomed monocular Algys and Bobbies, these cricketers to whom age brings
golf instead of wisdom, these plutocratic products of "the nail and
sarspan business as he got his money by." Do you know whether to laugh
or cry at the notion that they, poor devils! will drive a team of
continents as they drive a four-in-hand; turn a jostling anarchy of
casual trade and speculation into an ordered productivity; and federate
our colonies into a world-Power of the first magnitude? Give these
people the most perfect political constitution and the soundest
political program that benevolent omniscience can devise for them, and
they will interpret it into mere fashionable folly or canting charity as
infallibly as a savage converts the philosophical theology of a Scotch
missionary into crude African idolatry.
I do not know whether you have any illusions left on the subject of
education, progress, and so forth. I have none. Any pamphleteer can show
the way to better things; but when there is no will there is no way. My
nurse was fond of remarking that you cannot make a silk purse out of
a sow's ear, and the more I see of the efforts of our churches and
universities and literary sages to raise the mass above its own level,
the more convinced I am that my nurse was right. Progress can do nothing
but make the most of us all as we are, and that most would clearly not
be enough even if those who are already raised out of the lowest
abysses would allow the others a chance. The bubble of Heredity has been
pricked: the certainty that acquirements are negligible as elements in
practical heredity has demolished the hopes of the educationists as well
as the terrors of the degeneracy mongers; and we know now that there is
no hereditary "governing class" any more than a hereditary hooliganism.
We must either breed political capacity or be ruined by Democracy,
which was forced on us by the failure of the older alternatives. Yet
if Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what
chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable
voters: that is, of political critics who, if they cannot govern in
person for lack of spare energy or specific talent for administration,
can at least recognize and appreciate capacity and benevolence in
others, and so govern through capably benevolent representatives? Where
are such voters to be found to-day? Nowhere. Promiscuous breeding has
produced a weakness of character that is too timid to face the full
stringency of a thoroughly competitive struggle for existence and
too lazy and petty to organize the commonwealth co-operatively. Being
cowards, we defeat natural selection under cover of philanthropy: being
sluggards, we neglect artificial selection under cover of delicacy and
morality.
Yet we must get an electorate of capable critics or collapse as Rome
and Egypt collapsed. At this moment the Roman decadent phase of panem
et circenses is being inaugurated under our eyes. Our newspapers and
melodramas are blustering about our imperial destiny; but our eyes and
hearts turn eagerly to the American millionaire. As his hand goes down
to his pocket, our fingers go up to the brims of our hats by instinct.
Our ideal prosperity is not the prosperity of the industrial north, but
the prosperity of the Isle of Wight, of Folkestone and Ramsgate, of Nice
and Monte Carlo. That is the only prosperity you see on the stage, where
the workers are all footmen, parlourmaids, comic lodging-letters
and fashionable professional men, whilst the heroes and heroines are
miraculously provided with unlimited dividends, and eat gratuitously,
like the knights in Don Quixote's books of chivalry.
The city papers prate of the competition of Bombay with Manchester and
the like. The real competition is the competition of Regent Street with
the Rue de Rivoli, of Brighton and the south coast with the Riviera, for
the spending money of the American Trusts. What is all this growing
love of pageantry, this effusive loyalty, this officious rising
and uncovering at a wave from a flag or a blast from a brass band?
Imperialism: Not a bit of it. Obsequiousness, servility, cupidity roused
by the prevailing smell of money. When Mr Carnegie rattled his millions
in his pockets all England became one rapacious cringe. Only, when
Rhodes (who had probably been reading my Socialism for Millionaires)
left word that no idler was to inherit his estate, the bent backs
straightened mistrustfully for a moment. Could it be that the Diamond
King was no gentleman after all? However, it was easy to ignore a rich
man's solecism. The ungentlemanly clause was not mentioned again; and
the backs soon bowed themselves back into their natural shape.
But I hear you asking me in alarm whether I have actually put all this
tub thumping into a Don Juan comedy. I have not. I have only made my Don
Juan a political pamphleteer, and given you his pamphlet in full by way
of appendix. You will find it at the end of the book. I am sorry to say
that it is a common practice with romancers to announce their hero as
a man of extraordinary genius, and to leave his works entirely to the
reader's imagination; so that at the end of the book you whisper to
yourself ruefully that but for the author's solemn preliminary assurance
you should hardly have given the gentleman credit for ordinary good
sense. You cannot accuse me of this pitiable barrenness, this feeble
evasion. I not only tell you that my hero wrote a revolutionists'
handbook: I give you the handbook at full length for your edification if
you care to read it. And in that handbook you will find the politics of
the sex question as I conceive Don Juan's descendant to understand them.
Not that I disclaim the fullest responsibility for his opinions and for
those of all my characters, pleasant and unpleasant. They are all right
from their several points of view; and their points of view are, for the
dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle the people who believe that
there is such a thing as an absolutely right point of view, usually
their own. It may seem to them that nobody who doubts this can be in a
state of grace. However that may be, it is certainly true that nobody
who agrees with them can possibly be a dramatist, or indeed anything
else that turns upon a knowledge of mankind. Hence it has been pointed
out that Shakespear had no conscience. Neither have I, in that sense.
You may, however, remind me that this digression of mine into politics
was preceded by a very convincing demonstration that the artist never
catches the point of view of the common man on the question of sex,
because he is not in the same predicament. I first prove that anything I
write on the relation of the sexes is sure to be misleading; and then I
proceed to write a Don Juan play. Well, if you insist on asking me why
I behave in this absurd way, I can only reply that you asked me to,
and that in any case my treatment of the subject may be valid for the
artist, amusing to the amateur, and at least intelligible and therefore
possibly suggestive to the Philistine. Every man who records his
illusions is providing data for the genuinely scientific psychology
which the world still waits for. I plank down my view of the existing
relations of men to women in the most highly civilized society for what
it is worth. It is a view like any other view and no more, neither true
nor false, but, I hope, a way of looking at the subject which throws
into the familiar order of cause and effect a sufficient body of fact
and experience to be interesting to you, if not to the play-going public
of London. I have certainly shown little consideration for that public
in this enterprise; but I know that it has the friendliest disposition
towards you and me as far as it has any consciousness of our existence,
and quite understands that what I write for you must pass at a
considerable height over its simple romantic head. It will take my books
as read and my genius for granted, trusting me to put forth work of such
quality as shall bear out its verdict. So we may disport ourselves on
our own plane to the top of our bent; and if any gentleman points out
that neither this epistle dedicatory nor the dream of Don Juan in the
third act of the ensuing comedy is suitable for immediate production at
a popular theatre we need not contradict him. Napoleon provided Talma
with a pit of kings, with what effect on Talma's acting is not recorded.
As for me, what I have always wanted is a pit of philosophers; and this
is a play for such a pit.
I should make formal acknowledgment to the authors whom I have pillaged
in the following pages if I could recollect them all. The theft of the
brigand-poetaster from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is deliberate; and the
metamorphosis of Leporello into Enry Straker, motor engineer and New
Man, is an intentional dramatic sketch for the contemporary embryo of
Mr H. G. Wells's anticipation of the efficient engineering class
which will, he hopes, finally sweep the jabberers out of the way of
civilization. Mr Barrio has also, whilst I am correcting my proofs,
delighted London with a servant who knows more than his masters. The
conception of Mendoza Limited I trace back to a certain West Indian
colonial secretary, who, at a period when he and I and Mr Sidney