Man and Superman
EPISTLE DEDICATORY TO ARTHUR BINGHAM
WALKLEY
My dear Walkley:
You once asked me why I did not write a Don Juan
play. 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. Its profits, like
its labor, 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 of that time, we two, cradled in the same new sheets,
made an epoch in the criticism of the theatre and the opera house
by making it a 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. Yon meant me to epater le bourgeois; 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: they increase, even as your days do grow. No mere
pioneering journal dares meddle with them now: the stately Times
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. 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 e tre 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 favorite 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. 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: 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. I really cannot help it.
In the preface to my Plays for Puritans 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
dramatically. 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 mainspring of
the action. That is why we insist on beauty in our performers,
differing herein from the countries our friend William Archer holds
up as examples of seriousness to our childish theatres. There the
Juliets and Isoldes, the Romeos and Tristans, 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 about novelet-made love,
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.
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