from
Bernard Shaw’s
Man and Superman

Bernard Shaw

These pages: Man and Superman

first page (here)

second page

Categories:

Drama

Philosophy

index pages:
authors
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Man and Superman, described as “a comedy and a philosophy,” has several parts.

The Epistle Dedicatory is directed to Arthur Bingham Walkley, who had once asked why Shaw did not write a Don Juan play. The original query was apparently intended as a stinging comment—although I am not certain how cordial Shaw’s and Walkley’s relationship might have been—and the dedication is in itself a lengthy essay in reply.

Acts I, II, and IV of the play itself are the portions most often performed. The contemporary descendant of Don Juan Tenorio is Jack Tanner, who frequently takes on added responsibilities as Shaw’s mouthpiece.

Act III uses a bit of subplot, involving an encounter with brigands in Spain, as a transition to a lengthy dream sequence.

See the second page for the rest.

Man and Superman

A Comedy and a Philosophy

Copyright © 1903 by George Bernard Shaw
Renewal Copyright © 1932 by George Bernard Shaw

Epistle Dedicatory The only moral force you condescend to parade is the force of your wit: the only demand you make in public is the demand of your artistic temperament for symmetry, elegance, style, grace, refinement, and the cleanliness which comes next to godliness if not before it. But my conscience is the genuine pulpit article: it annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin.

Topic:

Conscience

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.

Topic:

Artists

It does not occur to them that if women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race. Is there anything meaner than to throw necessary work upon other people and then disparage it as unworthy and indelicate? We laugh at the haughty American nation because it makes the negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the negro by the fact that he is a shoeblack; but we ourselves throw the whole drudgery of creation on one sex, and then imply that no female of any womanliness or delicacy would initiate any effort in that direction. There are no limits to male hypocrisy in this matter.

Topic:

Hypocrisy

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.
If you study the electric light with which I supply you in that Bumbledonian public capacity of mine over which you make merry from time to time, 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 intensely insusceptible, intensely resistant material; 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 most intensely refractory person, liable to go out and to go wrong at inconvenient moments, and with incendiary possibilities.

Topic:

Writing

Man and Superman Act I

Tanner:
Yes, a lifetime of happiness. If it were only the first half hour’s happiness, Tavy, I would buy it for you with my last penny. But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

Ramsden:
[...] You pose as an advanced man. Let me tell you that I was an advanced man before you were born.

Tanner:
I knew it was a long time ago.

Topic:

Insults

Whether Ann is good-looking or not depends upon your taste; also and perhaps chiefly on your age and sex. To Octavius she is an enchantingly beautiful woman, in whose presence the world becomes transfigured, and the puny limits of individual consciousness are suddenly made infinite by a mystic memory of the whole life of the race to its beginnings in the east, or even back to the paradise from which it fell. She is to him the reality of romance, the inner good sense of nonsense, the unveiling of his eyes, the freeing of his soul, the abolition of time, place and circumstance, the etherealization of his blood into rapturous rivers of the very water of life itself, the revelation of all the mysteries and the sanctification of all the dogmas. To her mother she is, to put it as moderately as possible, nothing whatever of the kind.

Topics:

Love

Romance

Tanner:
[...] Vitality in a woman is a blind fury of creation. She sacrifices herself to it: do you think she will hesitate to sacrifice you?

Octavius:
Why, it is just because she is self-sacrificing that she will not sacrifice those she loves.

Tanner:
That is the profoundest of mistakes, Tavy. It is the self-sacrificing women that sacrifice others most recklessly. Because they are unselfish, they are kind in little things. Because they have a purpose which is not their own purpose, but that of the whole universe, a man is nothing to them but an instrument of that purpose.

Octavius:
Don’t be ungenerous, Jack. They take the tenderest care of us.

Tanner:
Yes, as a soldier takes care of his rifle or a musician of his violin.

Tanner:
[...] But you, Tavy, are an artist: that is, you have a purpose as absorbing and as unscrupulous as a woman’s purpose.

Octavius:
Not unscrupulous.

Tanner:
Quite unscrupulous. The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his.

Tanner:
[...] Good Heavens, man, what are you crying for? Here is a woman we all supposed to be making bad water-color sketches, practising Grieg and Brahms, gadding about to concerts and parties, wasting her life and her money. We suddenly learn that she has turned from these sillinesses to the fulfilment of her highest purpose and greatest function—to increase, multiply, and replenish the earth. And instead of admiring her courage and rejoicing in her instinct; instead of crowning the completed womanhood and raising the triumphal strain of “Unto us a child is born: unto us a son is given”, here you are—you who have been as merry as grigs in your mourning for the dead—all pulling long faces and looking as ashamed and disgraced as if the girl had committed the vilest of crimes.

Tanner:
My dear Tavy, your pious English habit of regarding the world as a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your character in, occasionally leads you to think about your own confounded principles when you should be thinking about other people’s necessities.

Topic:

Principles

Ann:
Our moral sense controls passion, Jack. Don’t be stupid.

Tanner:
Our moral sense! 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 passions, all the other passions would sweep it away like a leaf before a hurricane. It is the birth of that passion that turns a child into a man.

Topic:

Morality

Tanner:
[...] Construction cumbers the ground with institutions made by busybodies. Destruction clears it and gives us breathing space and liberty.

Ann:
It’s no use, Jack. No woman will agree with you there.

Tanner:
That’s because you confuse construction and destruction with creation and murder.

Act II

Octavius:
[...] I believe most intensely in the dignity of labor.

Straker:
That’s because you never done any, Mr Robinson. My business is to do away with labor. You’ll get more out of me and a machine than you will out of twenty laborers, and not so much to drink either.

Tanner:
For Heaven’s sake, Tavy, don’t start him on political economy. He knows all about it; and we don’t. You’re only a poetic Socialist, Tavy: he’s a scientific one.

Topic:

Labor

Octavius:
I cannot write without inspiration. And nobody can give me that except Ann.

Tanner:
Well, hadn’t you better get it from her at a safe distance? Petrarch didn’t see half as much of Laura, nor Dante of Beatrice, as you see of Ann now; and yet they wrote first-rate poetry—at least so I’m told. They never exposed their idolatry to the test of domestic familiarity; and it lasted them to their graves. Marry Ann; and at the end of a week you’ll find no more inspiration in her than in a plate of muffins.

Octavius:
You think I shall tire of her!

Tanner:
Not at all: you don’t get tired of muffins. But you don’t find inspiration in them; and you won’t in her when she ceases to be a poet’s dream and becomes a solid eleven stone wife. You’ll be forced to dream about somebody else; and then there will be a row.

Violet:
We can’t afford it. You can be as romantic as you please about love, Hector, but you mustn’t be romantic about money.

Act III When a man who is born a poet refuses a stool in a stockbroker’s office, and starves in a garret, sponging on a poor landlady or on his friends and relatives sooner than work against his grain; or when a lady, because she is a lady, will face any extremity of parasitic dependence rather than take a situation as cook or parlormaid, we make large allowances for them. To such allowances the ablebodied pauper, and his nomadic variant the tramp, are equally entitled.

Further, the imaginative man, if his life is to be tolerable to him, must have leisure to tell himself stories, and a position which lends itself to imaginative decoration. The ranks of unskilled labor offer no such positions. We misuse our laborers horribly; and when a man refuses to be misused, we have no right to say that he is refusing honest work.

Mendoza:
[...] I am a brigand: I live by robbing the rich.

Tanner:
I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor. Shake hands.

Straker:
Socialism must be lookin’ up a bit if your chaps are taking to it.

Mendoza:
That is true, sir. A movement which is confined to philosophers and honest men can never exercise any real political influence: there are too few of them. Until a movement shows itself capable of spreading among brigands, it can never hope for a political majority.

Tanner:
But are your brigands any less honest than ordinary citizens?

Mendoza:
Sir: I will be frank with you. Brigandage is abnormal. Abnormal professions attract two classes: those who are not good enough for ordinary bourgeois life and those who are too good for it. We are dregs and scum, sir: the dregs very filthy, the scum very superior.

text checked (see note S) Feb 2005

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Background graphic copyright © 2004 by Hal Keen