Superman.PDF

MAN AND SUPERMAN

A Comedy and A Philosophy

BERNARD SHAW

with an Introduction and notes by A. C. WARD

CONTENTS

Epistle Dedicatory

MAN AND SUPERMAN:

Act I

Act II

Act III

Act IV

By A. C. WARD:

General Introduction to the Works of Bernard Shaw

Introduction to MAN AND SUPERMAN

TO ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY 1

MY DEAR WALKLEY

You once asked me why I did not write a Don Juan play. 2 The levity with which you assumed this frightful

responsibility has probably by this time enabled you to forget it; but the day of reckoning has arrived: here is

your play! I say your play, because qui facit per alium facit per se . 3 Its profits, like its labour, belong to me: its

morals, its manners, its philosophy, its influence on the young, are for you to justify. You were of mature age

when you made the suggestion; and you knew your man. It is hardly fifteen years since, as twin pioneers of the

New Journalism 4 of that time, we two, cradled in the same new sheets, began an epoch in the criticism of the

1 Arthur Bingham Walkley : English dramatic critic and essayist who lived from 1855 to 1926. He was a civil servant for

the main part of his life, rising to a senior position in the service of the British Post Office. In his leisure time he wrote

dramatic criticism for various publications, finally for The Times from 1900 onward. He also wrote essays in an elegant prose

style on literary and other subjects, collecting them in a number of volumes, Pastiche and Prejudice (1921), etc. Though he

was among the first in England to welcome Ibsen's plays, Walkley turned later against the works of Ibsen's British disciples

and adopted a conservative attitude. He was much influenced by French literature and was often laughed at by other writers

on account of his frequent use of French phrases and allusions.

2 Don Juan : a Spanish legendary character who first appeared in literature in El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de

piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Guest of Stone) written in 1630 by Tirso de Molina (? 1584-1648), a monk whose

real name was Gabriel TélIez. Since then the Don Juan story has been used by, many other writers in differing versions, the

most popular being those which present Juan as a great lover and deceiver of women, among them being Donna Anna whose

father he killed in a duel. In mockery Juan invites the statue of the dead man to supper and, the invitation having been

accepted, Juan is afterwards dragged down to hell. In Man and Superman Shaw treats the legend in a very different way (see

the Introduction to this edition, above).

3 qui facit per alium facit per se : he who creates by (or through) others, creates by (or for) himself. (Latin.)

4 the New Journalism : Until the 1890s British newspapers were read mainly by prosperous and well-educated people, but

towards the end of the century the effects of the Education Act of 1870 (the first British measure for free national elementary

education) were becoming apparent and a new reading public had to be provided for. The newspapers already existing were

solid and heavy in style and dull in appearance, but in 1885 a new London evening paper, The Star , was founded by T. P.

O'Connor with Bernard Shaw as one of its writers. But although this was the beginning of the New Journalism, less has been

said of The Star in this connection than of the Daily Mail , a morning paper started by Alfred Harmsworth in 1896. In his

determination to produce a newspaper that would be bought and read by the newly educated classes, Harmsworth cultivated

G. B. S HAW : Man and Superman

theatre and the opera house by making it the pretext for a propaganda of our own views of life. So you cannot

plead ignorance of the character of the force you set in motion. You meant me to épater le bourgeois; 5 and if he

protests, I hereby refer him to you as the accountable party.

I warn you that if you attempt to repudiate your responsibility, I shall suspect you of finding the play too

decorous for your taste. The fifteen years have made me older and graver. In you I can detect no such becoming

change. Your levities and audacities are like the loves and comforts prayed for by Desdemona 6 : they increase,

even as your days do grow. No mere pioneering journal dares meddle with them now: the stately Times 7 itself is

alone sufficiently above suspicion to act as your chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its stars

that new plays are not produced every day, since after each such event its gravity is compromised, its platitude

turned to epigram, its portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum into naughtiness by

criticisms which the traditions of the paper do not allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign

with the most extravagant flourishes between the lines. I am not sure that this is not a portent of Revolution. In

eighteenth century France the end was at hand when men bought the Encyclopedia and found Diderot there. 8

When I buy the Times and find you there, my prophetic ear catches a rattle of twentieth century tumbrils.

However, that is not my present anxiety. The question is, will you not be disappointed with a Don Juan play

in which not one of that hero's mille etre 9 adventures is brought upon the stage? To propitiate you, let me explain

myself. You will retort that I never do anything else: it is your favourite jibe at me that what I call drama is

nothing but explanation. But you must not expect me to adopt your inexplicable, fantastic, petulant, fastidious

ways: you must take me as I am, a reasonable, patient, consistent, apologetic, laborious person, with the

temperament of a schoolmaster and the pursuits of a vestryman. 10 No doubt that literary knack of mine which

happens to amuse the British public distracts attention from my character; but the character is there none the less,

solid as bricks. I have a conscience; and conscience is always anxiously explanatory. You, on the contrary, feel

that a man who discusses his conscience is much like a woman who discusses her modesty. The only moral force

you condescend to parade is the force of your wit: the only demand you make in public is the demand of your

artistic temperament for symmetry, elegance, style, grace, refinement, and the cleanliness which comes next to

godliness if not before it. But my conscience is the genuine pulpit article: 11 it annoys me to see people

comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making them think in order to bring them to

conviction of sin. If you don’t like my preaching you must lump it. 12 I really cannot help it.

In the preface to my Plays for Puritans 13 I explained the predicament of our contemporary English drama,

forced to deal almost: exclusively with cases of sexual attraction, and yet forbidden to exhibit the incidents of that

attraction or even to discuss its nature. Your suggestion that I should write a Don Juan play was virtually a

challenge to me to treat this subject myself dramaticallv. The challenge was difficult enough to be worth

accepting, because, when you come to think of it, though we have plenty of dramas with heroes and heroines who

are in love and must accordingly marry or perish at the end of the play, or about people whose relations with one

another have been complicated by the marriage laws, not to mention the looser sort of plays which trade on the

tradition that illicit love affairs are at once vicious and delightful, we have no modern English plays in which the

natural attraction of the sexes for one another is made the main-spring of the action. That is why we insist on

sensationalism in the presentation of news and gave less attention to accuracy. His methods succeeded so well that he became

a millionaire and a peer, Viscount Northcliffe; but his part in the New Journalism is not universally approved, for there are

many who think he did much to encourage mass prejudices and inflame mass passions while neglecting unique opportunities

for the cultivation of well-informed and rational public opinion.

5 épater le bourgeois : a French idiomatic phrase frequently used by British writers and speakers, usually with a sarcastic

intention. Literally, 'dumbfounding the middle class', but 'shocking the narrow-minded' is usually intended.

6 Desdemona : the heroine of Shakespeare's tragedy Othello .

7 the stately Times : The Times is the leading British newspaper and noted for its dignified treatment of news. Its contents

are by anonymous writers, except for occasional special articles by eminent experts and for the letters sent to the editor.

8 the Encyclopedia : L'Encyclopédie , published in France in thirty-five volumes (1751-80) with Denis Diderot (1713-84)

as chief founder and editor and with Voltaire and Rousseau among the writers. Its views were unorthodox in both politics

and religion, it was banned by the authorities, and it is regarded as one of the intellectual forces which brought about the

French Revolution in 1789.

9 mille etre : an allusion to the thousand or more love affairs attributed to Don Juan in certain versions of the legend.

10 vestryman : From 1897 to 1900 Shaw was an elected member of the St Pancras Vestry, a local municipal body

responsible for the conduct of public services (such as sanitation, etc.). The Vestries became Borough Councils in 1900 and

Shaw continued as a member in St Pancras (a large district in the north-western part of London) until 1903.

11 my conscience is the genuine pulpit article : Shaw intended his plays to be taken as seriously as a preacher's sermons

from the pulpit of a church.

12 If you don’t like my preaching you must lump it : 'If you don't like it you must lump it' is an English idiom meaning that

the person addressed must tolerate the behaviour or circumstances referred to.

13 Plays for Puritans : Three Plays for Puritans (1901), containing Shaw's The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra,

and Captain Brassbound's Conversion .

G. B. S HAW : Man and Superman

beauty in our performers, differing herein from the countries our friend William Archer 14 holds up as examples of

seriousness to our childish theatres. There the Juliets and Isoldes, the Romeos and Tristans, 15 might be our

mothers and fathers. Not so the English actress. The heroine she impersonates is not allowed to discuss the

elemental relations of men and women: all her romantic twaddle 16 about novelet-made love, 17 all her purely legal

dilemmas as to whether she was married or "betrayed," quite miss our hearts and worry our minds. To console

ourselves we must just look at her. We do so; and her beauty feeds our starving emotions. Sometimes we

grumble ungallantly at the lady because she does not act as well as she looks. But in a drama which, with all its

preoccupation with sex, is really void of sexual interest, good looks are more desired than histrionic skill. 18

Let me press this point on you since you are too clever to raise the fool's cry of paradox whenever I take hold

of a stick by the right instead of the wrong end. Why are our occasional attempts to deal with the sex problem on

the stage so repulsive and dreary that even those who are most determined that sex questions shall be held open

and their discussion kept free, cannot pretend to relish these joyless attempts at social sanitation? Is it not

because at bottom they are utterly sexless? What is the usual formula for such plays? A woman has, on some

past occasion, been brought into conflict with the law which regulates the relations of the sexes. A man, by

falling in love with her, or marrying her, is brought into conflict with the social convention which

discountenances the woman. Now the conflicts of individuals with law and convention can be dramatized like all

other human conflicts; but they are purely judicial; and the fact that we are much more curious about the

suppressed relations between the man and the woman than about the relations between both and our courts of law

and private juries of matrons, produces that sensation of evasion, of dissatisfaction, of fundamental irrelevance,

of shallowness, of useless disagreeableness, of total failure to edify and partial failure to interest, which is as

familiar to you in the theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented those uncomfortable buildings, and found

our popular playwrights in the mind to (as they thought) emulate Ibsen. 19

I take it that when you asked me for a Don Juan play you did not want that sort of thing. Nobody does: the

successes such plays sometimes obtain are due to the incidental conventional melodrama 20 with which the

experienced popular author instinctively saves himself from failure. But what did you want? Owing to your

unfortunate habit — you now, I hope, feel its inconvenience — of not explaining yourself, I have had to discover

this for myself. First, then, I have had to ask myself, what is a Don Juan? Vulgarly, a libertine. But your dislike

of vulgarity is pushed to the length of a defect (universality of character is impossible without a share of

vulgarity); and even if you could acquire the taste, you would find yourself overfed from ordinary sources

without troubling me. So I took it that you demanded a Don Juan in the philosophic sense.

Philosophically, Don Juan is a man who, though gifted enough to be exceptionally capable of distinguishing

between good and evil, follows his own instincts without regard to the common, statute, or canon law; and

therefore, whilst gaining the ardent sympathy of our rebellious instincts (which are flattered by the brilliancies

with which Don Juan associates them) finds himself in mortal conflict with existing institutions, and defends

himself by fraud and force as unscrupulously as a farmer defends his crops by the same means against vermin.

The prototypic 21 Don Juan, invented early in the XVI century by a Spanish monk, was presented, according to the

ideas of that time, as the enemy of God, the approach of whose vengeance is felt throughout the drama, growing

in menace from minute to minute. No anxiety is caused on Don Juan's account by any minor antagonist: he easily

eludes the police, temporal and spiritual; and when an indignant father seeks private redress with the sword, Don

Juan kills him without an effort. Not until the slain father returns from heaven as the agent of God, in the form of

his own statue, does he prevail against his slayer and cast him into hell. The moral is a monkish one: repent and

reform now; for tomorrow it may be too late. This is really the only point on which Don Juan is sceptical; for he

is a devout believer in an ultimate hell, and risks damnation only because, as he is young, it seems so far off that

repentance can be postponed until he has amused himself to his heart's content.

14 William Archer : English dramatic critic, translator of Ibsen, and playwright (1856-1924). He befriended Shaw in the

latter's early years in London, introducing him to journalistic work, and suggesting a plot for his first play.

15 Juliets ... Tristans : Juliet and Romeo, heroine and hero of Shakespeare's tragedy; Isolde and Tristan, heroine and hero

of one of the most famous Teutonic legends.

16 twaddle : sentimental nonsense.

17 novelet-made love : an allusion to the ridiculously unreal love stories printed in the cheap English magazines which are

commonly called 'novelettes'.

18 histrionic skill : ability as an actor or actress.

19 Ibsen : Norwegian playwright and poet (1828-1906). His plays on social, domestic, and personal problems brought

about a revolution in drama throughout Europe.

20 melodrama : originally a play with music (melody-drama), but now applied to any poorly written play which depends

upon an exciting plot, unlifelike characters, and extravagant language and sentiments.

21 prototypic : the first, or original, specimen of the kind.

G. B. S HAW : Man and Superman

But the lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book. What

attracts and impresses us in El Burlador de Sevilla 22 is not the immediate urgency of repentance, but the heroism

of daring to be the enemy of God. From Prometheus 23 to my own Devil's Disciple, 24 such enemies have always

been popular. Don Juan became such a pet that the world could not bear his damnation. It reconciled him

sentimentally to God in a second version, and clamoured for his canonization for a whole century, thus treating

him as English journalism has treated that comic foe of the gods, Punch. 25 Molière's 26 Don Juan casts back to the

original in point of impenitence; but in piety he falls off greatly. True, he also proposes to repent; but in what

terms! "Oui, ma foi! il faut s'amender. Encore vingt ou trente ans de cette vie-ci, et puis nous songerons à

nous." 27 After Molière comes the artist-enchanter, the master beloved by masters, Mozart, 28 revealing the hero's

spirit in magical harmonies, elfin tones, and elate darting rhythms as of summer lightning made audible. Here

you have freedom in love and in morality mocking exquisitely at slavery to them, and interesting you, attraccting

you, tempting you, inexplicably forcing you to range the hero with his enemy the statue on a transcendent plane,

leaving the prudish daughter and her priggish lover on a crockery shelf below to live piously ever after.

After these completed works Byron's fragment 29 does not count for much philosophically. Our vagabond

libertines are no more interesting from that point of view than the sailor who has a wife in every port; and

Byron’s hero is, after all, only a vagabond libertine. And he is dumb: he does not discuss himself with a

Sganarelle-Leporello 30 or with the fathers or brothers of his mistresses: he does not even, like Casanova, 31 tell his

own story. In fact he is not a true Don Juan at all; for he is no more an enemy of God than any romantic and

adventurous young sower of wild oats. Had you and I been in his place at his age, who knows whether we might

not have done as he did, unless indeed your fastidiousness had saved you from the empress Catherine. 32 Byron

was as little of a philosopher as Peter the Great 33 : both were instances of that rare and useful, but unedifying

variation, an energetic genius born without the prejudices or superstitions of his contemporaries. The resultant

unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a bolder poet than Wordsworth 34 just as it made Peter a bolder

king than George III; 35 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 36 .

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, 37 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

22 El Burlador de Sevilla : See note on Don Juan above.

23 Prometheus : in Greek mythology the hero who stole fire from heaven and was punished by the chief of the gods (Zeus)

by being chained to a rock and tortured by vultures.

24 my own Devil's Disciple : Richard Dudgeon, the hero of The Devil's Disciple (1897) by Shaw.

25 Punch : the principal character in the puppet drama of Punch and Judy which originated in Italy about A. D. 1600 and

has since been adopted in other countries as an entertainment for children.

26 Molière : France's greatest comic playwright (1622-73). Among his masterpieces is Dom Juan ou Le Festin de pierre

(Don Juan, or The Statue at the Feast).

27 ' Oui, mafoi! ... nous songerons à nous ': 'Yes, my word! we must mend our ways. Twenty or thirty more years of life

like this, and then we'll think about it.'

28 Mozart : Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91), Austrian composer, whose many instrumental and operatic works

include Don Giovanni , the greatest musical treatment of the Don Juan story.

29 Byron's fragment : the unfinished satirical poem by Lord Byron (1788-1824). It was published in instalments between

1819 and 1824, and is now generally considered the finest work of this English romantic poet.

30 Sganarelle-Leporello : Sganarelle, Don Juan's servant in Molière's play; Leporello, his servant in Mozart's opera.

31 Casanova : Giacomo Casanova de Seingalt (1725-98), Italian adventurer and libertine whose autobiography gives a

revealing account of European society in the 18th century.

32 empress Catherine : Catherine the Great of Russia (1729-96). Catherine II.

33 Peter the Great : Peter I, Emperor of Russia (1672-1725).

34 Wordsworth : William Wordsworth, English poet (1770-1850). As a young man he was enthusiastic for the French

Revolution, but he became disillusioned by the revolutionaries' excesses and was in later life extremely conservative or, as

some of his contemporaries thought, reactionary.

35 George III : King of England (lived 1738-1820; reigned 1760-1820).

36 Shelley : Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), English poet. He was expelled from Oxford University in 1811 because

his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism outraged the Christian principles which at that period governed the University, and

Shelley was always antagonistic to orthodox religion. Shaw's reference to him as 'a religious force' relates to his passionate

concern for justice and right-dealing between the strong and the weak — his (as it might be called) religion of humanity.

Shaw was converted to vegetarianism by Shelley's teaching and in other ways was influenced by the poet's convictions.

37 Goethe : Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Germany's greatest poet. His dramatic poem Faust (Part I, 1808;

II, 1832), started about 1770, is the most famous treatment of the medieval legend.

G. B. S HAW : Man and Superman

the XIX century, ignoring William Blake 38 as superficially as the XVIII had ignored Hogarth 39 or the XVII

Bunyan, 40 had got past the Dickens-Macaulay Dumas-Guizot 41 stage and the Stendhal-Meredith-Turgenieff 42

stage, and were confronted with philosophic fiction by such pens as Ibsen's and Tolstoy's 43 , Don Juan had

changed his sex and become Doña Juana, breaking out of the Doll's House 44 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 Molière and Mozart, upon

whose art no human hand can improve? You would laugh at me if at this time of day I dealt in duels and ghosts

and "womanly" women. 45 As to mere libertinism, you would be the first to remind me that the Festin de Pierre of

Molière is not a play for amorists, and that one bar of the voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod or Bizet 46 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" 47 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" 48 : 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 49 by Donna Elvira. Excommunication has become almost as serious a business as it was in the tenth

century.

As a result, Man is no longer, like Don Juan, victor in the duel of sex. Whether he has ever really been may

be doubted: at all events the enormous superiority of Woman's natural position in this matter is telling with

greater and greater force. As to pulling the Nonconformist Conscience by the beard as Don Juan plucked the

beard of the Commandant's statue in the convent of San Francisco, that is out of the question nowadays: prudence

38 William Blake : English poet, painter, and engraver (1757-1827). His work was neglected for some fifty years after his

death, but he is now rated among the most important of the English poets, artists, and religious mystics.

39 Hogarth : William Hogarth (1697-1764), English painter and engraver whose pictures had a satirical and reformatory

purpose in his lifetime. He has since become valued as a great painter and founder of the modern English style.

40 Bunyan : John Bunyan (1628-88), whose chief work, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), is one of the foremost English

literary and religious classics.

41 Dickens : Charles Dickens (1812-70), English novelist; Macaulay : Thomas Babington Macaulay (afterwards Lord

Macaulay), British historian, essayist, poet, and statesman (1800-1859); Dumas : Alexandre Dumas the Elder (1803-70),

French novelist and playwright. His son, Alexandre Dumas the Younger (1824-1895), was a lesser playwright; Guizot :

François Guizot (1787-1874), French Protestant historian and politician.

42 Stendhal : pen-name of Henri Beyle (1783-1842), French novelist, whose reputation has increased greatly in the present

century; Meredith : George Meredith (1828-l909), English novelist and poet; Turgenieff : Ivan Sergievich Turgenieff (1818-

83), with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky one of the three greatest Russian novelists.

43 Tolstoy : Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and reformer.

After a wild early life he became converted to an austere and self-denying but also self-tormenting religion, in which non-

resistance to evil was the leading principle. His contemporary influence as a religious and political thinker was enormous

throughout the world, but his future reputation may rest more certainly upon his immeasurable genius as a novelist, his

greatest achievement being War and Peace (1865-72).

44 the Doll's House : a play by Ibsen, first performed in Norway in 1879 and later in many other countries. It was an

important landmark in the European movement for the emancipation of women from domestic and emotional bondage.

45 ‘womanly' women : In the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th, English women of the

intellectual classes developed a strong desire to attain complete equality with men and some adopted masculine dress and

habits and endeavoured to repress their natural or 'womanly' emotional life.

46 Gounod : Charles François Gounod (1818-93), French composer. Faust remains the most popular of his operas, but

none of his works is first-rate music; Bizet : Georges Bizet (1838-75), French composer of Carmen and other operas of similar

quality to Gounod's.

47 ‘ marchesane ... cittadine ': Shaw uses the descriptive words for the several ranks of Italian female society as an

alternative to saying that all women are now alike, whatever level of society they come from.

48 ' Protegga il giusto cielo ': 'May just Heaven protect us'. (Italian.)

49 the Nonconformist Conscience : a phrase used in English to denote a narrow and somewhat self-righteous attitude in

religious, social, and political conduct. The Nonconformists were the people who broke away from the Church of England in

the 17th century and formed separate religious denominations, e.g . Baptists, Congregationalists, etc. The word is still used in

a general sense of all people who obey the inner voice of conscience and defy, if it becomes necessary, the commands of

those in authority.

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