 Preface of the Quintessence of Ibsenism This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Gesine for Anita. The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Barnett Shaw Preface In the spring of 1890, the Fabian Society, finding itself at a loss for a course of lectures to occupy its summer meetings, was compelled to make shift with a series of papers put forward under the general heading Socialism in Contemporary Literature. The Fabian essayists, strongly pressed to do something or other, for the most part shook their heads, but in the end Sidney Olivia consented to take Zola, I consented to take Ibsen, and Hubert Bland undertook to read all the socialist novels of the day, an enterprise the desperate failure of which resulted in the most amusing paper of the series. William Morris asked to read a paper on himself, flatly declined, but gave us one on Gothic architecture. Stepniak also came to the rescue with the lecture on modern Russian fiction, and so the Society tidied over the summer without having to close its doors, but also without having added anything whatever to the general stock of information on Socialism in Contemporary Literature. After this I cannot claim that my paper on Ibsen, which was duly read at the St. James's Restaurant on the 18th of July 1890, under the presidency of Mrs. Annie Besant, and which was the first form of this little book, is an original work in the sense of being the result of a spontaneous internal impulse on my part. Having purposely couched it in the most provocative terms, of which traces may be found by the curious in its present state. I did not attach much importance to the somewhat lively debate that arose upon it, and I had laid it aside as a pièce d'occasion which had served its turn, when the production of Rossmer's Home at the Vaudeville Theatre by Miss Fah, the inauguration of the Independent Theatre by Mr. J. T. Grayne with the performance of Ghosts, and the sensation created by the experiment of Miss Robbins and Miss Lee with Hedda Gabler, started a frantic newspaper controversy, in which I could see no sign of any of the disputants having ever been forced by circumstances, as I had, to make up his mind definitely as to what Ibsen's plays meant, and to defend his view face to face with some of the keenest debaters in London. I allowed you wait to the fact that Ibsen himself has not enjoyed this advantage, see page 56, but I have also shown that the existence of a discoverable and perfectly definite thesis in a poet's work, by no means depends on the completeness of his own intellectual consciousness of it. At any rate the controversialists, whether in the abusive stage or the apologetic stage or the hero-worshiping stage, by no means made clear what they were abusing or apologizing for or going into ecstasies about, and I came to the conclusion that my explanation might as well be placed in the field until the better could be found. With this account of the origin of the book and a reminder that it is not a critical essay on the poetic beauties of Ibsen, but simply an exposition of Ibsenism, I offered to the public to make what they can of. London, June 1891. End of preface. The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw Chapter One The Two Pioneers That is, pioneers of the march to the planes of heaven, so to speak. The second, whose eyes are in the back of his head, is the man who declares that it is wrong to do something that no one has here the two seen any harm in. The first, whose eyes are very wrong-sighted, and in the usual place, is the man who declares that it is right to do something hitherto regarded as infamous. The second is treated with great respect by the army. They give him testimonials, name him the good man, and hate him like the devil. The first is stoned and shrieked at by the whole army. They call him all manner of approprious names, grudge him his bare bread and water, and secretly adore him as their saviour from utter despair. Let me take an example from life of my pioneer. Shelly was a pioneer and nothing else. He did both first and second pioneer's work. Now compare the effect produced by Shelly as abstinence preacher, or second pioneer, with that which he produced as indulgence preacher, or first pioneer, for example. Second pioneer proposition, it is wrong to kill animals and eat them. First pioneer proposition, it is not wrong to take your sister as your wife. Here the second pioneer appears as a gentle humanitarian, and the first as an unnatural corruptor of public morals and family life. So much easier is it to declare the right wrong than the wrong right in a society with a guilty conscience, to which, as to Dickens detective, any possible move is a probable move provided it's in the wrong direction. Just as the liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else, so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent. The English newspaper which best represents the guilty conscience of the middle class, or dominant factor in society today, is the Daily Telegraph. If we can find the Daily Telegraph speaking of Ibsen as the quarterly review used to speak of Shelly, it will occur to us at once that there must be something of the first pioneer about Ibsen. Mr. Clement Scott, dramatic critic to the Daily Telegraph, a good natured gentleman, not a pioneer but emotional, impressionable, zealous and sincere, accuses Ibsen of dramatic impotence, ludicrous amateurishness, nastiness, vulgarity, egotism, coarseness, absurdity, uninteresting verbosity and suburbannity, declaring that he has taken ideas that would have inspired a great tragic poet and vulgarized and debased them in dull, hateful, loathsome, horrible plays. This criticism, which occurs in a notice of the first performance of ghosts in England, is to be found in the Daily Telegraph for the 14th of March 1891 and is supplemented by a leading article which compares the play to an open drain, a loathsome sore, unbandaged, a dirty act done publicly, or a lasar house with all its doors and windows open. Beastial, cynical, disgusting, poisonous, sickly, delirious, indecent, loathsome, fetid, literary, carrion, crappulous stuff, clinical confessions, all of these epithets are used in the article as descriptive of Ibsen's work. Realism, says the writer, is one thing, but the nostrils of the audience must not be visibly held before a play can be stamped as true to nature. It is difficult to expose, in decorous words, the gross and almost putrid indecorum of this play. As the performance of ghosts took place on the evening of the 13th of March and the criticism appeared next morning, it is evident that Mr. Scott must have gone straight from the theatre to the newspaper office and there, in an almost hysterical condition, penned his share of this extraordinary protest. The literary workmanship bears marks of haste and disorder, which, however, only heighten the expression of the passionate horror produced in the writer by seeing ghosts on the stage. He calls on the authorities to cancel the licence of the theatre, and declares that he has been exhorted to laugh at honour, to disbelieve in love, to mock at virtue, to distrust friendship and to deride fidelity. If this document were at all singular, it would rank as one of the curiosities of criticism exhibiting, as it does, the most seasoned playgoer in the world, thrown into convulsions by a performance which was witnessed with approval and even with enthusiasm by many persons of approved moral and artistic conscientiousness. But Mr. Scott's criticism was hardly distinguishable in tone from hundreds of others which appeared simultaneously. His opinion was the vulgar opinion. Mr. Alfred Watson, critic to the standard the leading Tory daily paper, proposed that proceedings should be taken against the theatre under Lord Campbell's Act for the Suppression of Disorderly Houses. Clearly Mr. Scott and his editor, Sir Edwin Arnold, with whom rests the responsibility for the article which accompanied the criticism, may claim to represent a considerable party. How then is it that Ibsen, a Norwegian playwright of European celebrity, attracts one section of the English people so strongly that they hail him as the greatest living dramatic poet and moral teacher, whilst another section is so revolted by his works that they describe him in terms which they themselves admit are by the necessities of the case all but obscene. This phenomenon which has occurred throughout Europe wherever Ibsen's plays have been acted, as well as in America and Australia, must be exhaustively explained, before the plays can be described, without danger of reproducing the same confusion in the reader's own mind. Such an explanation, therefore, must be my first business. Understand, at the outset, that the explanation will not be an explaining away. Mr. Clement Scott's judgment has not misled him in the least, as to Ibsen's meaning. Ibsen means all that most revolts his critic. For example, in Ghosts, the play in Question, a clergyman and a married woman fall in love with one another. The woman proposes to abandon her husband and live with a clergyman. He recalls her to her duty and makes her behave as a virtuous woman. She afterwards tells him that this was a crime on his part. Ibsen agrees with her and has written the play to bring you round to his opinion. Mr. Clement Scott does not agree with her and believes that when you are brought round to her opinion, you will be morally corrupted. By this conviction, he is impelled to denounce Ibsen as he does, Ibsen being equally impelled to propagate the convictions which provoke the attack. Which of the two is right? Cannot be decided until it is ascertained whether a society of persons holding Ibsen's opinions would be higher or lower than a society holding Mr. Clement Scott's. There are many people who cannot conceive this as an open question. To them, a denunciation of any of the recognized virtues is an incitement to unsocial conduct, and every utterance in which an assumption of the eternal validity of those virtues is not implicit is a paradox. Yet all progress involves the beating of them from that position. By way of illustration, one may rake up the case of Proudhon, who nearly half a century ago denounced property as theft. This was thought the very maddest paradox that ever man hazarded. It seemed obvious that a society which countenance such a proposition would speedily be reduced to the condition of a sacked city. Today schemes for the confiscation by taxation of mining royalties and ground rents are common places of social reform, and the honesty of the relation of our big property holders to the rest of the community is challenged on all hands. It would be easy to multiply instances, though the most complete are now ineffective through the triumph of the original paradox having obliterated all memory of the opposition it first had to encounter. The point to seize is that social progress takes effect through the replacement of old institutions by new ones. And since every institution involves a recognition of the duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every step. If the Englishman had not repudiated the duty of absolute obedience to his king, his political progress would have been impossible. If women had not repudiated the duty of absolute submission to their husbands and defied public opinion as to the limits set by modesty to their education, they would never have gained the protection of the Married Women's Property Act or the power to qualify themselves as medical practitioners. If Luther had not trampled on his duty to the head of his church and on his vow of chastity, our priests would still have to choose between celibacy and profligacy. There is nothing new then in the defiance of duty by the reformer. Every step of progress means a duty repudiated and a scripture torn up. And every reformer is denounced accordingly. Luther as an apostate, Cromwell as a traitor, Mary Wollstonecraft as an unwomanly virago, Shelley as a Libertine, and Ibsen as all the things enumerated in the Daily Telegraph. This crab-like progress of social evolution, in which the individual advances by seeming to go backward, continues to elude us in spite of all the lessons of history. To the pious man, the newly made Freethinker, suddenly renouncing supernatural revelation and denying all obligation to believe the Bible and obey the commandments as such, appears to be claiming the right to rob and murder at large. But the Freethinker soon finds reasons for not doing what he does not want to do, and these reasons seem to him to be far more binding on the conscience than the precepts of a book of which the divine inspiration rationally proved. The pious man is at last forced to admit, as he was in the case of the late Charles Bradlaw, for instance, that the disciples of Voltaire and Tom Payne do not pick pockets or cup-throats oftener than your even Christian. He actually is driven to doubt whether Voltaire himself really screamed and saw the devil on his deathbed. This experience by no means saves the rationalist from falling into the same conservatism when the time comes for his own belief to be questioned. Footnote. I had better hear warned students of philosophy that I am speaking of rationalism not as classified in the books, but as apparent in men. End of footnote. No sooner has he triumphed over the theologian than he forthwith sets up as binding on all men the duty of acting logically with the object of securing the greatest good of the greatest number, with the result that he is presently landed in vivisection, contagious diseases acts, dynamite conspiracies and other grotesque but strictly reasonable abominations. Reason becomes Dagon, Moloch and Jehovah rolled into one. Its devotees exult in having freed themselves from the old slavery to a collection of books written by Jewish men of letters. To worship such books was, they can prove, manifestly as absurd as to worship sonatas composed by German musicians, as was done by the hero of Wagner's novelette, who sat up on his deathbed to say his creed beginning I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven. The Voltarian free thinker despises such a piece of sentiment, but it is not much more sensible to worship a sonata constructed by a musician than to worship constructed by a logician, since the sonata may at least inspire feelings of awe and devotion. This does not occur to the votary of reason and rationalist free thinking soon comes to mean syllogism worship with rights of human sacrifice. For just as a rationalist's pious predecessor thought that the man who scoffed at the Bible must infallibly yield without resistance to all his criminal propensities, so the rationalist in turn becomes convinced that when a man once loses his faith in Mr Herbert Spencer's data of ethics, he is no longer to be trusted to keep his hands off his neighbour's person, purse or wife. In process of time the age of reason had to go its way after the age of faith. In actual experience the first shock to rationalism came from the observation that though nothing could persuade women to adopt it their inaptitude for reasoning no more prevented them from arriving at right conclusions than the masculine aptitude for it saved men from arriving at the wrong ones. When this generalisation had to be modified in view of the fact that some women did at last begin to try their skill at racialization reason was not re-established on the throne, because the results of women's reasoning was that she began to fall into all the errors which men are just learning to mistrust. From the moment she set about doing things for reasons instead of merely finding reasons for what she wanted to do there was no saying what mystery if she would be at next. Since there are just as good reasons for burning a heretic at the state as for rescuing a shipwreck crew from drowning in fact there are better. One of the first and most famous utterances of rationalism would without further hearing had its full significance been seen at the time. Voltaire taking exception to the trash of some poetaster was met with the plea one must live I don't see the necessity replied Voltaire the evasion was worthy of the father of lies himself for Voltaire was faced to face with the very necessity he was denying must have known consciously or not that it was the universal postulate would have understood if he had lived today that since all human institutions are constructed to fulfill man's will and that his will is to live even when his reason teaches him to die logical necessity which was the sort Voltaire meant the other sort being visible enough can never be a motor in human action and is in short not necessity at all. But that was not brought to light in Voltaire's time and he died impenitent bequeathing to his disciples that most logical of agents the guillotine which also did not see the necessity in our own century the recognition of the will as distinct from the reasoning machinery began to spread shop and hour was the first among the moderns to appreciate the enormous practical importance of the distinction and to the physicians by concrete instances footnote I say the moderns because the will is our old friend the soul or spirit of man and the doctrine of justification not by works but by faith clearly derives its validity from the consideration that no action taken apart from the will behind it has any moral character for example the acts which make the murderer incendiary infamous are exactly similar to those which make the patriotic hero famous original sin is the will doing mischief divine grace is the will doing good our fathers unversed in the Hegelian dialectic could not conceive that these two each the negation of the other were the same shop and hours philosophy like that of all pessimists is really based on the old view of the will as original sin and on the 1750 to 1850 view that the intellect is the divine grace that is to save us from it it is as well to warn those who fancy that shop and hour is and is one and indivisible but acceptance of its metaphysics by no means involves endorsement of its philosophy end of footnote out of his teaching came the formulation of the dilemma that Voltaire shut his eyes to here it is rationally considered life is only worth living when its pleasures are greater than its pains now to a generation which has ceased to believe in heaven and has not yet learned that the degradation by poverty of four out of every five of its number is artificial and remediable the fact that life is not worth living is obvious it is useless to pretend that the pessimism of coalesce shakes be a Dryden and swift can be refuted if the world progresses solely by the destruction of the unfit and yet can only maintain its civilization by manufacturing the unfit in swarms of which that appalling proportion of four to one represents but the comparatively fit survivors plainly then the reasonable thing for the rationalists to do is to refuse to live but as none of them will commit suicide and obedience to this demonstration of the necessity for it there is an end of the notion that we live for reasons instead of in fulfillment of our will to live thus we are landed afresh in mystery for positive science gives no account whatever of this will to live indeed the utmost light that positive science throws is but feeble in comparison with the illumination that was looked forward to when it first began to dazzle us with its analysis of the machinery of sensation its searches into the nature of sound and the construction of the ear the nature of light and the construction of the eye its measurement of the speed of sensation its localization of the functions of the brain and its hints as to the possibility of producing a homunculus presently as the fruit of its chemical investigation of protoplasm the fact remains that when Darwin, Hegel, Helmholtz Young and the rest popularized here among the middle class by Tindall and Huxley and among the proletariat by the lectures of the national secular society have taught you all they need to know you are still as utterly at a loss to explain the fact of consciousness as you would have been in the days when you were satisfied with chambers vestiges of creation materialism in short only isolated the great mystery of consciousness by clearing away several petty mysteries with which we had confused it just as rationalism isolated the great mystery of the will to live the isolation made both more conspicuous than before we thought we had escaped forever from the cloudy region of metaphysics and we were only carried farther into the heart of them footnote the correlation between rationalism and materialism in this process has some immediate practical importance those who give up materialism whilst clinging to rationalism generally either relapse into abject submission to the most paternal of the churches or are caught by the attempts constantly renewed of mystics to found a new faith by rationalizing on the hollowness of materialism the hollowness has nothing in it and if you have come to grief as a materialist by reasoning about something you are not likely as a mystic to improve matters by reasoning about nothing end of footnote we have not yet worn off the strangeness of the position to which we have now been led only the other day our highest boast was that we were reasonable human beings today we laugh at that conceit and see ourselves as willful creatures ability to reason accurately is as desirable as ever since it is only by accurate reasoning that we can calculate our actions so as to do what we intend to do that is to fulfill our will but faith in reason as a primed motor is no longer the criterion of the sound mind any more than faith in the bible is the criterion of righteous intention at this point accordingly the illusion as to the retrogressive movement of progress recurs as strongly as ever just as the beneficent step from theology to rationalism seems to the theologist a growth of impiety does the step from rationalism to the recognition of the will as the primed motor strike the rationalist as a lapse of common sanity so that to both theologist and rationalist progress at last appears alarming threatening hideous because it seems to tend towards chaos the dais, Svoltaire and Tompain were to the divines of their day predestined devils tempting mankind hellward to dais and divines alike Ferdinand LaSalle the godless self-worshipper and man-worshipper would have been a monster yet many who today echo LaSalle's demand that economic and political institutions should be adapted to the poor man's will to eat and drink his fill out of the product of his own labour are revolted by Ibsen's acceptance of the impulse towards greater freedom the sufficient ground for the creation of any customary duty however sacred that conflicts with it society where it even as free as LaSalle's Social Democratic Republic must, it seems to them go to pieces when conduct is no longer regulated by inviolable covenants for what during all these over-throwings of things sacred and things infallible has been happening to that pre-eminently sanctified thing man's duty evidently it cannot have come off scadeless first there was man's duty to God with the priest as assessor that was repudiated and then came man's duty to his neighbour with society as the assessor will this too be repudiated and be succeeded by man's duty to himself assessed by himself and if so what will be the effect on the conception of duty in the abstract let us see I have just called LaSalle a self-worshipper in doing so I cast no reproach on him for this is the last step in the evolution of the conception of duty duty arises at first a gloomy tyranny out of man's helplessness his self-mistrust in a word his abstract fear he personifies all that he abstractly fears as God and straight away becomes the slave of his duty to God he imposes that slavery fiercely on his children threatening them with hell and punishing them for their attempts to be happy when becoming bolder he ceases to fear everything and dares to love something this duty of his to what he fears evolves into a sense of duty to what he loves sometimes he again personifies what he loves as God and the God of wrath becomes the God of love sometimes he at once becomes a humanitarian an altruist acknowledging only his duty to his neighbour this stage is correlative to the rationalist stage in the evolution of philosophy and the capitalist phase in the evolution of industry but in it the emancipated slave of God falls under the dominion of society which having just reached a phase in which all the love is ground out of it by the competitive struggle for money and the forcelessly crushes him until in due course of the further growth of his spirit or will a sense at last arises in him of his duty to himself and when this sense is fully grown which it hardly is yet the tyranny of duty is broken for now the man's God is himself and he self-satisfied at last ceases to be selfish the evangelist of this last step must therefore preach the repudiation of duty this to the unprepared of his generation is indeed the wanton masterpiece of paradox what after all that has been said by men of noble life as to the secret of all right conduct being only duty duty duty is he now to be told that duty is the primal curse from which we must redeem ourselves before we can advance another step on the road along which as we imagine having forgotten the repudiation made by our fathers duty and duty alone has brought us thus far but why not God was once the most sacred of our conceptions and he had to be denied then reason became the infallible pope only to be deposed in turn is duty more sacred than God or reason having now arrived at the prospect of the repudiation of duty by man I shall make a digression on the subject of ideals and idealists as treated by Ibsen I shall go round in a loop and come back to the same point by way of the repudiation of duty by woman and then at last I shall be in a position to describe the plays without risk of misunderstanding End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of the quintessence of Ibsenism This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Suman Bharua Toronto, Ontario The quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw Chapter 2 Ideals and Idealists We have seen that as man grows through the ages he finds himself bolder by the growth of his spirit if I may so name the unknown and dares more and more to love and trust instead of to fear and fight but his courage has other effects he also raises himself from mere consciousness to knowledge by daring more and more to face facts and tell himself the truth for in his infancy of helplessness and terror he could not face the inexorable and facts being of all things the most inexorable he masked all the threatening ones as fast as he discovered them so that now every mask requires a hero to tear it off the king of terrors death was the arch inexorable man could not bear the dread of that thought he must persuade himself that death could be propitiated, circumvented abolished how he fixed the mask of immortality on the face of death for this purpose we all know and he did the like with all disagreeables as long as they remained inevitable otherwise he must have gone mad with terror of the grim shapes around him headed by the skeleton with the scythe and hourglass the masks were his ideals as he called them and what he would ask would life be without ideals thus he became an idealist and remained so until he dared to begin pulling the masks off and looking the spectres in the face dared that is to be more and more a realist but all men are not equally brave and the greatest terror prevailed whenever some realist bolder than the rest laid hands on a mask which they did not yet dare to do without we have plenty of these masks around still some of them more fantastic than any of the sandwich islanders masks in the british museum in our novels and romances especially we see the most beautiful of all the masks those devised to disguise the brutalities of the sexual instinct in the earlier stages of its development and to soften the rigorous aspect of the iron laws by which society regulates its gratification when the social organism becomes bent on civilization it has to force marriage and family life on the individual because it can perpetuate itself in no other way while love is still known only by fitful glimpses the basis of sexual relationship being in the main mere physical appetite under these circumstances men try to graft pleasure on necessity by desperately pretending that the institution forced upon them is a congenial one giving it a point of public decency to assume always that men spontaneously love their kindred better than their chance acquaintances and that the woman once desired is always desired also that the family is woman's proper sphere and that no really womanly woman ever forms an attachment or even knows what it means until she is requested to do so by a man who once childhood has been embittered by the dislike of his mother and the ill temper of his father if his wife has ceased to care for him and he is heartily tired of his wife if his brother is going to law with him over the division of the family property and his son acting in study defines of his plans and wishes it is hard for him to persuade himself that passion is eternal and that blood is thicker than water yet if he tells himself the truth all his life seems a waste and a failure by the light of it it comes then to this that his neighbors must either agree with him that the whole system is a mistake and discard it for a new one which cannot possibly happen until social organization so far outgrows the institution that society can perpetuate itself without it or else they must keep him in countenance by resolutely making believe that all the illusions with which it has been masked are realities for the sake of precision let us imagine a community of a thousand persons organized for the perpetuation of the species on the basis of the British family as we know it at present seven hundred of them we will suppose find the British family arrangement quite good enough for them two hundred and ninety nine find it a failure but must put up with it since they are in a minority the remaining person occupies a position to be explained presently the two ninety nine failures will not have the courage to face the fact that they are failures irremediable failures since they cannot prevent the seven hundred satisfied ones from coercing them into conformity with the marriage law they will accordingly try to persuade themselves that whatever their own particular domestic arrangements may be the family is a beautiful and holy natural institution for the fox not only declares that the grapes he cannot get are sour he also insists that the slows he can get are sweet now observe what has happened the family as it really is is a conventional arrangement legally enforced which the majority because it happens to suit them think good enough for the minority whom it happens not to suit at all the family as a beautiful and holy natural institution is only a fancy picture of what every family would have to be if everybody was to be suited invented by the minority as a mask for the reality which in its nakedness is intolerable to them we call this sort of fancy picture an ideal and the policy of forcing individuals to act on the assumption that all ideals are real and to recognize and accept such action as standard moral conduct absolutely valid under all circumstances contrary conduct or any advocacy of it being discounted and punished as immoral may therefore be described as the policy of idealism our 299 domestic failures are therefore become idealist as to marriage and in proclaiming the ideal infiction poetry, pulpit and platform oratory and serious private conversation they will far outdo the 700 who comfortably accept marriage as a matter of course never dreaming of calling it an institution much less a holy and beautiful one and being pretty plainly of opinion that idealism is a crack brain fuss about nothing the idealists hurt by this will retort by calling them Philistines we then have our society classified as 700 Philistines and 299 idealists living one man unclassified he is the man who is strong enough to face the truth that the idealists are shirking he says flatlier of marriage this thing is a failure for many of us it is insufferable that two human beings having entered into relations which only warm affection can render tolerable should be forced to maintain them after such affections have ceased to exist or in spite of the fact that they have never arisen the alleged natural attractions and repulsions upon which the family idealist base do not exist and it is historically false that the family was founded for the purpose of satisfying them let us provide otherwise for the social ends which the family subserves and then abolish its compulsory character altogether what will be the attitude of the rest to this outspoken man the Philistines will simply think him mad but the idealists will be terrified beyond measure at the proclamation of their hidden thought at the presence of the traitor among the conspirators of silence at the rending of the beautiful veal they and their poets have woven to hide the unbearable face of the truth they will crucify him, burn him violate their own ideals of family refaction by taking his children away from him ostracize him, brand him as immoral profligate, filthy and appeal against him to the despised Philistines specially idealized for the occasion as society how far they will proceed against him depends on how far his courage exceeds theirs at his worst they call him cynic and paradoxa at his best they do their at most to ruin him if not to take his life thus per blindly courageous moralists like Mandeville and LaRouche Foucauld who merely state unpleasant facts without denying the validity of current ideals and who indeed depend on those ideals to make their statements pecan't get off with nothing worse than this name of cynic the free use of which is a familiar mark of the zealous idealist but take the case of the man who has already served us as an example Shelly the idealists did not call Shelly a cynic they called him a fiend until they invented a new illusion to enable them to enjoy the beauty of his lyrics said illusion being nothing less than the pretence that since he was at bottom an idealist himself his ideals must be identical with those of Tennyson and Longfellow neither of whom ever wrote a line in which some highly respectable ideal was not implicit footnote the following are examples of the two stages of Shelly criticism we feel as if one of the darkest of the fiends had been clothed with a human body to enable him to gratify his enmity against the human race and as if the supernatural atrocity of his hate were only heightened by his power to do injury so strongly has this impression dwelt upon our minds that we absolutely rashed a friend who had seen this individual to describe him to us as if a cloven hoof or horn the flames from the mouth must have marked the external appearance of so bitter an enemy of mankind literary gazette 19th may 1821 a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain Matthew Arnold in his preface to the selection of poems by Byron dated 1881 the 1881 opinion is much more than the 1821 opinion further samples will be found in the articles of Henry Salt one of the few writers on Shelly who understand his true position as a social pioneer end of footnote here the admission that Shelly the realist was an idealist too seems to spoil the whole argument and it certainly spoils its verbal consistency for we unfortunately use this word ideal indifferently to denote both the institution which the ideal masks and the mask itself thereby producing desperate confusion of thought since the institution may be an effete and poisonous one whilst the mask may be and indeed generally raise an image of what we would feign have in its place if the existing facts with their masks on are to be called ideals and the future possibilities which the masks depict are also to be called ideals if again the man who is defending existing institutions by maintaining their identity with their masks is to be confounded under one name with the man who is striving to realize the future possibilities by tearing the mask and the thing must asunder then the position cannot be intelligibly described by mortal pen you and I, reader will be at cross purposes at every sentence unless you allow me to distinguish pioneers like Shelly and Ibsen as realists from the idealists of my imaginary community of one thousand if you ask why I have not allotted the terms the other way and called Shelly and Ibsen idealists and the conventionalists I reply that Ibsen himself though he has not formally made the distinction has so repeatedly harped on conventions and conventionalists as ideals and idealists that if I were now perversely to call them realities and realists I should confuse readers of the wild duck and rose-macheau more than I should help them doubtless I shall be reproached by puzzling people by thus limiting the meaning of the term ideal but what I ask is that inevitable passing perplexity compared to the inextricable tangle I must produce if I follow the custom and use the word indiscriminately in its too violently incompatible senses if the term realist is objected to on account of some of its modern associations I can only recommend you if you must associate it with something else than my own description of its meaning I do not deal in definitions to associate it not with Zola and more percent but with Plato now let us return to our community of 700 Philistines 299 idealists and one realist the mere verbal ambiguity against which I have just provided is as nothing beside that to express the relations of these three sections simple as they are in terms of the ordinary systems of reason and duty the idealist, higher in the ascent of evolution than the Philistine yet hates the highest and strikes at him with a dread and ranker of which the easy going Philistine is guiltless the man who has risen above the danger and the fear that his acquisitiveness lead him to theft his temper to murder and his affections to debauchery this is he who is denounced as an arts scoundrel and libertine and thus confounded with the lowest because he is the highest and it is not the ignorant and stupid who maintain this era but the literate and the cultured when the true prophet speaks he is proved to be both rascal and idiot not by those who have never read of how foolishly such learned demonstrations have come off in the past but by those who have themselves written volumes on the crucifixions the burnings, the stonings the headings and hangings the Siberia transportations the calumny and ostracism which have been the lot of the pioneer as well as of the camp follower it is from men of established literary reputation that we learn that William Blake was mad that Shelly was spoiled by living in a low set that Robert Owen was a man who did not know the world that Ruskin is incapable of comprehending political economy that Zola is a mere black art and that Ibsen is a Zola with a wooden leg the great musician accepted by the unskill listener is vilified by his fellow musicians it was the musical culture of Europe that pronounced Wagner the inferior of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer the great artist finds his foes among the painters and not among the men in the street it is the royal academy which places Mr. Marcus Stone not to mention Mr. Hudson above Mr. Byrne Jones it is not rational that it should be so but it is so for all that the realist at last loses patience with ideals all together and sees in them only something to blind us something to numb us something to murder self in us something whereby instead of resisting death we can disarm it by committing suicide the idealist who has taken refuge with the ideals because he hates himself and is ashamed of himself thinks that all this is so much the better the realist who has come to have a deep respect for himself and faith in the validity of his own will thinks it so much the worse to the one human nature naturally corrupt is only held back from the excesses of the last years of the Roman Empire by self-denying conformity to the ideals to the other these ideals are only swaddling clothes which man has outgrown and which insufferably impede his movements and other two cannot agree the idealist says realism means egotism and egotism means depravity the realist declares that when a man abnegates the will to live and be free in a world of the living and free seeking only to conform to ideals for the sake of being not himself but a good man then he is morally dead and rotten and must be left unheeded to abide his resurrection if that by good luck arrive before his bodily death unfortunately this is the sort of speech that nobody but a realist understands it will be more amusing as well as more convincing to take an actual example of an idealist criticizing a realist End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of The Quintessence of Ibsenism This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Suman Bharua, Toronto, Ontario The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw Chapter 3 The Womanly Woman Everybody remembers the diary of Marie Bashkertsev an outline of it with a running commentary was given in the review of reviews June 1890 by the editor Mr. William Stett a sort of modern Julian the Apostate who, having gained an immense following by a public service in rendering which he had to perform a realistic feat of a somewhat scandalous character entered upon a campaign with the objective establishing the ideal of sexual purity as a condition of public life as he retains his best qualities faith in himself willfulness conscientious unscrupulousness he can always make himself heard prominent among his ideals is an ideal of womanliness in support of that ideal he will, like all idealists make and believe any statement however obviously and grotesquely and real when he found Marie Bashkertsev's account of herself utterly incompatible with the account of a woman's mind given to him by his ideal he was confronted with the dilemma that either Marie was not a woman or else his ideal did not correspond to nature he actually accepted the former alternative of the distinctively womanly he says there is in her but little trace she was the very antithesis of a true woman Mr. Stead's next difficulty was that self-control being a leading quality in his ideal could not have been possessed by Marie otherwise she would have been more like his ideal nevertheless he had to record that she, without any compulsion from circumstances made herself a highly skilled artist by working 10 hours a day for six years let anyone who thinks that this is no evidence of self-control just try it for six months Mr. Stead's verdict nevertheless was no self-control however his fundamental quarrel with Marie came out in the following lines Marie he said was artist, musician, wit, philosopher, student anything you like but a natural woman with a heart to love and a soul to find its supreme satisfaction in sacrifice for lover or for child now all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under pretence that she likes it and if she ventures to contradict the pretence declaring her no true woman in India they carried this piece of idealism to the length of declaring that her wife could not bear to survive her husband but would be prompted by her own faithful, loving, beautiful nature to offer up her life on the pyre which consumed his dead body the astonishing thing is that women sooner than be branded as unsexed wretches allowed themselves to be stupefied with drink and in that unwomanly condition she would not survive British Philistinism put down widow idealizing with the strong hand and Sati is abolished in India the English form of it still survives and Mr. Stead the rescuer of the children is one of its high priests imagine his feelings on coming across this entry in a woman's diary I love myself or this by the passion of Christ by myself that in four years I will be famous the young woman was positively proposing to exercise for her own sake all the powers that were given her in Mr. Stead's opinion solely that she might sacrifice them for her lover or child no wonder he is driven to exclaim again she was very clever no doubt now observe this notable result Marie E. B. Kertseff instead of being a less agreeable person than the ordinary female conformer to the ideal of womanliness was conspicuously the reverse Mr. Stead himself wrote as one infatuated with her mere diary and pleased himself by representing her as a person who fascinated everybody and was a source of delight to all about her by the mere exhilaration and hope giving atmosphere of her willfulness the truth is that in real life a self-sacrificing woman or as Mr. Stead would put it a womanly woman is not only taken advantage of but disliked as well for her pains no man pretends that his soul finds its supreme satisfaction in self-sacrifice such an affectation would stamp him as a coward and weakling the manly man is he who takes the B. Kertseff view of himself but men are not the less loved on this account no one ever feels helpless by the side of the self-helper whilst the self-sacrificer is always a drag a responsibility a reproach an everlasting and unnatural trouble with whom no really strong soul only those who have helped themselves know how to help others and to respect their right to help themselves although romantic idealists generally insist on self-surrender as an indispensable element in true womanly love its repulsive effect is well known and feared in practice by both sexes the extreme instance is the reckless self-abandonment seen in the infatuation of passionate sexual desire everyone who becomes the object of that infatuation shrinks from it instinctively love loses its charm when it is not free and whether the compulsion is that of custom and law or of infatuation the effect is the same it becomes valueless the desire to give inspires no affection unless there is also the power to withhold and the successful wooer in both sexes alike is the one who can stand out for honorable conditions and failing them go without such conditions are evidently not offered to either sex by the legal marriage of today for it is the instance repugnance inspired by the compulsory character of the legalized conjugal relation that leads first to the idealization of marriage whilst it remains indispensable as a means of perpetuating society then to its modification by divorce and by the abolition of penalties for refusal to comply with judicial orders for restitution of conjugal rights and finally to its disuse and disappearance as the responsibility for the maintenance and education of the rising generation is shifted from the parent to the community footnote a dissertation on the anomalies and impossibilities of the marriage law at its present stage would be too far out of the main course of my argument to be introduced in the text above but it may well to point out in passing to those who regard marriage as an inviolable and inviolate institution that necessity has already forced us to tamper with it to such an extent that at this moment the highest court in the kingdom is face to face with a husband and wife the one demanding whether a woman may saddle him with all the responsibilities of a husband and then refuse to live with him and the other asking whether the law allows her husband to commit abduction imprisonment and rape upon her if the court says yes to the husband marriage is made intolerable for men if it says yes to the wife marriage is made intolerable and as this exhausts the possible alternatives it is clear that provision must be made for the dissolution of such marriages if the institution is to be maintained at all which it must be until its social function is otherwise provided for marriage is thus by force of circumstances compelled to by extension of life by extension of divorce much as if a fugitive should to delay a pursuing wolf by throwing portions of his own heart to it end of footnote although the growing repugnance to face the church of England marriage service has led many celebrants to omit those passages which frankly explain the object of the institution we are not lightly to dispense with legal ties and obligations and trust wholly to the permanence of love until the continuity of society no longer depends on the private nursery love as a practical factor in society is still a mere appetite that higher development of it which Ibsen shows us occurring in the case of Rebecca West in Ros-Machon is only known to most of us by the descriptions of great poets who themselves as their biographies prove have often known it not by sustained experience but only by brief glimpses and it is never a first fruit of their love affairs Tan Heuser may die in the conviction that one moment of the emotion he felt with Saint Elizabeth was fuller and happier than all the hours of passion he spent with Venus but that does not alter the fact that love began for him with Venus and that its earlier attempts towards the final goal were attended with relapses now Tan Heuser's passion for Venus is a development of the humdrum fondness of the bourgeois jack for his jail a development at once higher and more dangerous just as idealism is at once higher and more dangerous than Philistinism the fondness is the germ of the passion the passion is the germ of when Blake told men that through excess they would learn moderation he knew that the way for the present lay through the Venus Berg and that the race would assuredly not perish there as some individuals have and as the Puritan fears we all shall unless we find a way round also he no doubt foresaw the time when our children would be born on the other side of it and so we spared that fiery but the very facts that Blake is still commonly regarded as a crazy visionary and that the current criticism of Rosemar Schaum entirely fails even to notice the evolution of Rebecca's passion for Rosemar into her love for him much more to credit the moral transfiguration which accompanies it show how absurd it would be to pretend for the sake of edification that the ordinary marriage of today is a reunion between a William Blake and a Rebecca West or that it would be possible even if it were enlightened policy to deny the satisfaction of the sexual appetite to persons who have not reached that stage an overwhelming majority of such marriages as are not purely the covenants are entered into for the gratification of that appetite either in its crudest form or veiled only by those idealistic illusions which the youthful imagination weaves so wonderfully under the stimulus of desire and which older people indulgently laugh at this being so it is not surprising that our society being directly dominated by men comes to regard women not as an end in herself like man but solely as a means of ministering to his appetite the ideal wife is one who does everything that the ideal husband likes and nothing else now to treat a person as a means instead of an end is to deny that persons right to live and to be treated as a means to such an end as sexual intercourse with those who deny one's right to live is insufferable to any human being a woman if she dares face the fact that she is being so treated must either loathe herself or else rebel as a rule when circumstances enable her to rebel successfully for instance when the accident of genius enables her to lose her character without losing her employment or cutting herself off from the society she values she does rebel but circumstances seldom do does she then loathe herself by no means she deceives herself in the idealist fashion by denying that the love which a suitor offers her is tainted with sexual appetite at all it is she declares a beautiful disinterested pure sublime devotion to another by which a man's life is exalted and purified and a woman's rendered blessed and of all the cynics the filthiest to her mind is the one who sees in the man making honourable proposals to his future wife nothing but the human world seeking his female the man himself keeps a confirmed in her illusion for the truth is unbearable to him too he wants to form an affectionate tie and not to drive a degrading bargain after all the germ of the highest love is in them both though as yet it is no more than the appetite they are disguising so carefully from themselves consequently every stockbroker who has just brought his business up to marrying point who's in terms of the romantic illusion and it is agreed between the two that their marriage shall realize the romantic ideal then comes the breakdown of the plan the young wife finds that her husband is neglecting her for his business that his interests his activities his whole life except that one part of it to which only a cynic ever referred before her marriage lies away from home and that her business is to sit there and mope until she is wanted then what can she do if she complains he the self helper can do without her whilst she is dependent on him for her position her livelihood her place in society her home her name her very bread all this is brought home to her by the first burst of displeasure her complaints provoke fortunately things do not remain forever at this point perhaps the most wretched in a woman's life the self respect she has lost as a wife she regains as a mother in which capacity her use and importance to the community compare favourably with those of most men of business she's wanted in the house wanted in the market wanted by the children and now instead of weeping because her husband is aware in the city thinking of stocks and shares instead of his ideal woman she would regard his presence in the house all day as an intolerable nuisance and so though she is completely disillusioned on the subject of ideal love yet since it has not turned out so badly after all she countenances the illusion still from the point of view that it is a useful and harmless means of getting boys and girls to marry and settle down and this conviction is the stronger in her because she feels that if she had known as much about marriage the day before her wedding as she did six months after it would have been extremely hard to induce her to get married at all this prosaic solution is satisfactory only within certain limits it depends all together upon the accident of the woman having some natural vocation for domestic management and the care of children as well as on the husband being fairly good natured and liveable with hence arises the idealist illusion that a vocation for domestic management and the care of children is natural to women and that women who lack them are not women at all but members of the third or bushkirtsef sex even if this were true it is obvious that if the bushkirtsefs are to be allowed to live they have a right to suitable institutions just as much as men and women but it is not true the domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men although it may be necessary that every able-bodied woman should be called on to risk her life in child-bed just as it may be necessary that every man should be called on to risk his life in the battlefield it is of course quite true that the majority of women are kind to children and prefer their own to other peoples exactly the same thing is true of the majority of men who nevertheless do not consider that their proper sphere is the nursery the case may be illustrated more grotesquely by the fact that the majority of women who have dogs are kind to them and prefer their own dogs to other peoples yet it is not proposed that women should restrict their activities to the rearing of puppies if we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot because they have never seen one anywhere else no doubt there are Philistine parrots who agree with their owners that it is better to be in a cage than out so long as there is plenty of hemp seed and Indian corn there there may even be idealist parrots who persuade themselves that the mission of a parrot is to minister to the happiness of a private family by whistling and saying pretty poly and that it is in the sacrifice of its liberty to this altruistic pursuit that a true parrot finds the supreme satisfaction of its soul I will not go so far as to affirm that there are theological parrots who are convinced that imprisonment is the will of God because it is unpleasant but I am confident that there are rationalist parrots who can demonstrate that it would be a cruel kindness to let a parrot out to fall or pray to cats or at least to forget its accomplishments and cause in its naturally delicate fibers in an unprotected struggle for existence still the only parrot a free soul person can sympathize with is the one that insists on being let out as the first condition of its making itself agreeable a selfish bird you may say one that puts its own gratification before that of the family which is so fond of it before even the greatest happiness of the greatest number one that in aping the independent spirit of a man has an parroted itself and become a creature that has neither the home loving nature of a bird nor the strength and enterprise of a mastiff all the same you respect that parrot of your conclusive reasoning and if it persists you will have either to let it out or kill it the sum of the matter is that unless a woman repudiates her womanliness her duty to her husband to her children to society to the law and to everyone but herself she cannot emancipate herself but her duty to herself is no duty at all since a debt is cancelled and there are the same person its payment is simply a fulfillment of the individual will upon which all duty is a restriction founded on the conception of the will as naturally malign and devilish therefore woman has to repudiate duty altogether in that repudiation lies her freedom for it is false to say that woman is now directly the slave of man she is the immediate slave of duty and as man's path to freedom is true and with the wreckage of the duties and ideals he has trampled on so must hers be she may indeed mask her iconoclasm by proving in rationalist fashion as man has often done for the sake of a quiet life that all these discarded idealist conceptions will be fortified instead of shattered by her emancipation to a person with a turn for logic such proofs are as easy as playing the piano is to Paderevsky but it will not be true a whole basket full of ideals of the most sacred quality will be smashed by the achievement of equality for women and men those who shrink from such a clatter and breakage may comfort themselves with the reflection that the replacement of the broken goods will be prompt and certain it is always the case of the ideal is dead long live the ideal and the advantage of the work of destruction is that every new ideal is less of an illusion than the one it has supplanted so that the destroyer of ideals though denounced as an enemy of society is in fact sweeping the world clear of lies my digression is now over having traversed my loop as I promised and come back to man's repudiation of duty by way of moments I may at last proceed to give some more particular account of Ibsen's work without further preoccupation with Mr. Clement Scott's protest or many others of which it is the type for we now see that the pioneer must necessarily provoke such outcry as he repudiates duties, tramples on ideals profane what was sacred sanctifies what was infamous always driving this plow through gardens of pretty weeds in spite of the laws made against trespasses for the protection of the worms which feed on the roots letting in light and air to hasten the putrefaction of decaying matter and everywhere proclaiming that the old beauty is no longer beautiful the new truth is no longer true he can do no less and what more and what else he does it is not given to the tradition to understand and if any man does not understand and cannot foresee the harvest what can he do but cry out in old sincerity against such destruction until at last we come to know the cry of the blind like any other street cry and to bear with it as an honest cry will be it a false alarm End of chapter 3 Chapter 4 of the Quintessence of Ibsenism This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Reading by Asterix The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw Chapter 4 The Plays Brand We are now prepared to learn without misgiving that a typical Ibsen play is one in which a leading lady is an unwomanly woman and a villain an idealist It follows that the leading lady is not a heroine of the Drury Lane type nor does the villain forge or assassinate since he is a villain by virtue of his determination to do nothing wrong Therefore readers of Ibsen, not play-goers have sometimes so far misconceived him to suppose that his villains are examples rather than warnings and that the mischief and ruin which attend their actions are but the tribulations from which the soul comes out purified as gold from the furnace In fact, the beginning of Ibsen's European reputation was the edification with which the pious of Scandinavia received his great dramatic poem Brand the priest is an idealist of heroic earnestness strength and courage He declares himself the champion not of things as they are nor of things as they can be made but of things as they ought to be things as they ought to be mean for him things as ordered by men conformed to his ideal of the perfect Adam who again is not man as he is or can be man conformed to all the ideals man as it is his duty to be In insisting on this conformity Brand spares neither himself nor anyone else Life is nothing Self is nothing The perfect Adam is everything The imperfect Adam does not fall in with these views A peasant whom he urges to cross a glacier in a fog because it is his duty to visit his dying daughter not only flatly declines but endeavours forcibly to prevent Brand from risking his own life Brand knocks him down and sermonises him with fierce earnestness and scorn presently Brand has to cross a fjord in a storm to reach a dying man who, having committed a series of murders wants consolation from a priest Brand cannot go alone Someone must hold the rudder of his boat whilst he manages the sale The fish of folk in whom the old Adam is strong do not adopt his estimate of the gravity of the situation and refuse to go A woman fascinated by his heroism and idealism goes That ends in their marriage and in the birth of a child to which they become deeply attached Then Brand aspiring from height to height of devotion to his ideal plunges from depth to depth of murderous cruelty First the child must die from the severity of the climate because Brand must not flinch from the post of duty and leave his congregation exposed to the peril of getting an inferior preacher in his place Then he forces his wife to give the clothes of the dead child to the gypsy whose baby needs them The bereaved mother does not grudge the gift but she wants to hold back only one little garment as a relic of her darling But Brand sees in this reservation the imperfections of the imperfect Eve He forces her to regard the situation as a choice between the relic and his ideal She sacrifices the relic to the ideal brokenhearted Having killed her and thereby placed himself beyond ever daring to doubt the idealism upon whose altar he has immolated her Having also refused to go to his mother's death bed because she compromises with his principles in disposing of her property he is hailed by the people as a saint and finds his newly built church too small for the congregation So he calls upon them to follow him to worship God in his own temple the mountains After a brief practical experience of disarrangement they change their minds and stone him The very mountains themselves stone him indeed for he is killed by an avalanche End of Chapter 4 Section 5 of the Quintessence of Ibsenism This is a Librivox recording All Librivox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit Librivox.org Reading by Asterix The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw Section 5 The Place Pierre Gint Brand Dizer Saint Having caused more intense suffering by his saintliness his talented sinner could possibly have done with twice his opportunities Ibsen does not leave this to be inferred In another dramatic poem he gives us an accomplished rascal named Pierre Gint an idealist who avoids Brand's errors by setting up as his ideal the realization of himself by the utter satisfaction of his will. In this he would seem to be on the path to which Ibsen himself points, and indeed or who know the two plays will agree that whether or know it was better to be Pierre Gint than Brand it was beyond all question better to be the mother or the sweetheart of Pierre scapegrace and lie as he was than mother or wife to the saintly Brand for all men and women Pierre Gint keeps his ideal for himself alone it is indeed implicit in the ideal itself that it should be unique that he alone should have the force to realize it For Pierre's first boyish notion of the self-realized man is not the saint but the demigod whose indomitable will is stronger than destiny the master the man whom no woman can resist the mighty hunter the knight of a thousand adventures the model in short of the lover in a lady's novel or the hero in a boy's romance now no such person exists or ever did exist or ever can exist the man who cultivates an indomitable will and refuses to make way for anything or any body soon finds that he cannot hold a street crossing against a tram-car much less a world against the whole human race only by plunging into illusions to which every fact gives the lie can he persuade himself that his will is a force that will overcome all other forces or that it is less conditioned by circumstances than a wheel-barrow however, pier-guint being imaginative enough to conceive his ideal is also imaginative enough to find illusions to hide its unreality and to persuade himself that pier-guint the shabby countryside loafer is pier-guint emperor of himself as he writes over the door of his hut in the mountains his hunting feats are invented his military genius has no solider foundation than a street-fight with a smith and his reputation as an adventurous dare-devil he has to gain by the bravado of carrying off the bride from a wedding at which the guests snub him only in the mountains can he enjoy his illusions undisturbed by ridicule yet even in the mountains he finds obstacles which he cannot force his way through obstacles which withstand him as spirits with voices telling him that he must go round but he will not he will go forward he will cut his path sword in hand in spite of fate all the same he has to go round for the world-will is without pier-guint as well as within him then he tries the supernatural only to find that it means nothing more than the transmogrifying of squalid realities by lies and pretenses still like our amateurs of Thormetergy he is willing to enter into a conspiracy of make-believe up to a certain point when the trolled king's daughter appears as a repulsive ragged creature riding on a pig he is ready to accept her a beautiful princess on a noble steed unconditioned that she accepts his mother's tumbledown farmhouse with the broken window-pains stopped up with old clout as a splendid castle he will go with her among the trolls and pretend that the gruesome ravine in which they hold their orgies is a glorious palace he will partake of their filthy food and declare it nectar and ambrosia he will applaud their obscene antics as exquisite dancing and their discordant din as divine music but when they finally propose to slit his eyes so that he may see and hear these things not as they are but as he has been pretending to see and hear them he draws back resolved to be himself even in self-deception he leaves the mountains as a prosperous man of business in America highly respectable and ready for any profitable speculation slave trade Bible trade whiskey trade missionary trade anything in this phase he takes to piety and persuades himself like Mr Stanley that he is under the special care of God this opinion is shaken by an adventure in which he is marooned by the African coast and it is not restored until the treacherous friends who marooned him are destroyed before his eyes by the blowing up of the steam-yacht they have just stolen from him when he utters his celebrated exclamation, ah God is a father to me after all but economical he certainly is not he finds a white horse in the desert and is accepted on its account as the Messiah by an Arab tribe a success which moves him to declare that now at last he is really worshiped for himself whereas in America people only respect at his breast-pin, the symbol of his money in commerce too he reflects his eminence was a mere matter of chance whilst as a prophet he is eminent by pure natural fitness for the post this is ended by his falling in love with a dancing girl who after leading him into every sort of undignified and ludicrous extravagance ranging from his hailing her as the eternal feminine of Goethe to the more practical folly of giving her his white horse and all his prophetic finery runs away with the spoil and leaves him once more helpless and alone in the desert he wonders until he comes to the great Sphinx beside which he finds a gentleman in great perplexity as to who the Sphinx is Peer Gynt seeing in that impassive immovable majestic figure a symbol of his own ideal is able to tell the German gentleman at once that the Sphinx is itself this explanation dazzles the German who after some further discussion of the philosophy of self-realization invites Peer Gynt to accompany him to a club in Cairo who are ripe for enlightenment on this very question Peer, delighted accompanies the German to the club which turns out to be a madhouse in which the lunatics have broken loose and locked up their keepers it is in this madhouse and by these madmen that Peer Gynt is at last crowned emperor of himself he receives their homage as he lies in the dust fainting with terror as an old man Peer Gynt, returning to the scenes of his early adventures is troubled with the prospect of meeting a certain button-molder who threatens to make short work of his realized self by melting it down into buttons in his crucible with a heap of other button material immediately the old exaltation of the self-realizer is changed into an unspeakable dread of the button-molder death to avoid whom Peer Gynt will commit any act even to pushing a drowning man from the spa he is clinging to in a shipwreck lest it should not suffice to support too at last he finds a deserted sweetheart of his youth still waiting for him and still believing in him in the imagination of this old woman he finds the ideal Peer Gynt whilst in himself the loafer, the braggart the confederate of sham magicians the charleston speculator the false prophet the dancing girl's dupe the bedlam emperor the selfish thruster of the drowning man into the waves there is nothing heroic nothing but commonplace self-seeking and shirking cowardice and sensuality failed only by the romantic fancies of the born liar with this crowningly unreal realization he is left to face the button-molder as best he can Peer Gynt has puzzled a good many people by Ibsen's fantastic and subtle treatment of its thesis it is so far a difficult play that the ideal of unconditional self-realization however familiar its suggestions may be to the ambitious reader is not at all understood by him much less formulated as a proposition in metaphysics when it is stated to him by someone who does understand it he unhesitatingly dismisses it as idiotic and it is because he is perfectly right in doing so because it is idiotic in the most accurate sense of the term that he finds such difficulty in recognizing it as the common ideal of his own prototype the pushing competitive success-loving man who is the hero of the modern world there is nothing novel in Ibsen's dramatic method of reducing these ideals to absurdity as Cervantes took the old ideal of chivalry and showed what came of a man attempting to act as if it were real so Ibsen takes the ideals of brand and peer-gint and treats them in the very same manner Don Quixote acts as if he were a perfect knight in a world of giants and distressed damsels instead of a country gentleman and a guard-keeper's and farm wenches brand acts as if he were the perfect Adam in a world where by resolute rejection of all compromise within perfection it was immediately possible to change the rainbow bridge between flesh and spirit into as enduring a structure as the Tower of Babel was intended to be thereby restoring man to the condition in which he walked with God in the garden and peer-gint tries to act as if he had in him a special force that could be concentrated so as to prevail over all other forces they ignore the real ignore what they are and where they are not only like Nelson shutting their eyes to the signals that a brave man may disregard but insanely steering straight on the rocks that no resolution can prevail against observe that neither Sevantes nor Ibsen is incredulous in the Philistine way as to the power of ideals over men Don Quixote Brand and peer-gint are all three men of action seeking to realize their ideals in deeds however ridiculous Don Quixote makes himself you cannot dislike or despise him unless think that it would have been better for him to have been a Philistine like Sancho and peer-gint, selfish rascal as he is, is not unlovable Brand, made terrible by the consequences of his idealism to others, is heroic Their castles in the air are more beautiful than castles of brick and mortar but one cannot live in them and they seduce men into pretending to hovel is such a castle just as peer-gint pretended that the trolled king's den was a palace End of Chapter 5 Section 6 of the Quintessence of Ibsenism This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Kay Hand The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw Section 6 The Place, Emperor and Galilean When Ibsen by merely giving the reign to the creative impulse of his poetic nature had produced Brand and peer-gint, he was nearly 40 His will in setting his imagination to work had produced a great puzzle for his intellect In no case does the difference between the will and the intellect come out more clearly than in that of the poet save only that of the lover Had Ibsen died in 1867 he, like many another great poet would have gone to his grave without having ever rationally understood his own meaning Nay, if in that year an intellectual expert a commentator, as we call him had gone to Ibsen and offered him the explanation of Brand which he himself must have arrived at and instructed Ghosts and the Wild Duck he would perhaps have repudiated it with as much disgust as a maiden would feel if anyone were brutal enough to give her the physiological rationale of her dreams of meeting a fairy prince It is only the naif who goes to the creative artist with absolute confidence in receiving an answer to his, what does this passage mean That is the very question which the poet's own intellect which had no part in the conception may be asking him and this curiosity of the intellect this restless life in it which differentiates it from dead machinery and which troubles our lessler artists but little is one of the marks of the greater sort Shakespeare and Hamlet made a drama of the self questioning that came upon him when his intellect rose up in alarm as well it might against the vulgar optimism of his Henry V and yet could mend it to no better purpose than by the equally vulgar pessimism of Troilus and Cressida Dante took pains to understand himself so did Goeth Richard Wagner, one of the greatest poets of our own day, has left us as many volumes of criticism of art and life as he has left musical scores and he has expressly described how the intellectual activity which he brought to the analysis of his music dramas was in abeyance during their creation and so do we find Ibsen after composing his two great dramatic poems entering on a struggle to become intellectually conscious of what he had done we have seen that with Shakespeare such an effort became itself creative and produced a drama of questioning with Ibsen the same thing occurred he harked back to an abandoned project of his and wrote two huge dramas on the subject of the apostasy of the Emperor Julian in this work we find him at first occupied with a piece of old fashioned free thinking the dilemma that moral responsibility presupposes free will and that free will sets man above God Cain who slew because he willed willed because he must and must have willed to slay because he was himself comes upon the stage to claim that murder is fertile and death the ground of life though he cannot say what is the ground of death Judas who betrayed under the same necessity as the other since the master chose him he chose him for knowingly this part of the drama has no very deep significance it is easy to invent conundrums which dogmatic evangelicalism cannot answer and no doubt whilst it was still a nine days wonder that evangelicalism could not solve all enigmas such invention seemed something much deeper than the mere intellectual chess play which it is seen to be now that the nine days are passed it is occasional weakness for such conundrums and later on in his harping on the hereditary transmission of disease we see Ibsen's active intellect busy not only with the problems peculiar to his own plays but with the fatalism and pessimism of the middle of our century when the typical advanced culture was attainable by reading Strauss's Lieben-Hesu the popularizations of Helmholtz and Darwin by Tyndall and Huxley and George Eliot's novels vainly protested against by Ruskin as peopled with the sweepings of a pentonville omnibus the traces of this period in Ibsen's writings show how well he knew the crushing weight with which the sordid cares of the ordinary struggle for money and respectability fell on the world when the romance of the creeds was discredited and progress seemed for the moment to mean not the growth of the spirit of men but an effect of the survival of the fittest brought about by the destruction of the unfit all the most frightful examples of this systematic destruction being thrust into the utmost prominence by those who are fighting the church with Mill's favorite dialectical weapon the incompatibility of divine omnipotence with the divine benevolence His plays are full of evidence of his overwhelming sense of the necessity for rousing the individual into self-assertion against this numbing fatalism and yet he never seems to have freed his intellect wholly from an acceptance of its scientific validity that it only accounted for progress at all on the hypothesis of a continuous increase in the severity of the conditions of existence that is on an assumption of just the reverse of what was actually taking place appears to have escaped Ibsen as completely as it has escaped Professor Huxley himself it is true that he did not allow himself to be stopped by this gloomy fortress of pessimism and materialism his genius pushed him past it but without intellectually reducing it and the result is that as far as one can guess he believes to this day that it is impregnable not dreaming that it has been demolished and that too with ridiculous ease by the mere march behind him of the working class which by its freedom from the characteristic bias of the middle classes has escaped their characteristic illusions and solved many of the enigmas which they found insoluble because they wished to find them so his prophetic belief in the spontaneous growth of the will makes him a mellerist reference to the operation of natural selection but his impression of the light thrown by physical and biological science on the facts of life seems to be the gloomy one of the period at which he must have received his education in these departments external nature often plays her most ruthless and destructive part in his works which have an extraordinary fascination for the pessimists of that school in spite of the incompatibility of his individualism with that mechanical utilitarian ethic of theirs which treats man as the sport of every circumstance and ignores his will altogether another inessential but very prominent feature in Ibsen's dramas will be understood easily by anyone who has observed how a change of religious faith intensifies our concern about our own salvation an ideal, pious or secular is practically used as a standard of conduct and whilst it remains unquestioned the simple rule of right is to conform to it in the theological stage when the bible is accepted as a revelation of God's will the pious man, when in doubt as to whether he is acting rightly or wrongly quiets his misgivings by searching the scripture until he finds a text which endorses his actions footnote, as such misgiving seldom arise except when the conscience revolts against the contemplated action an appeal to scripture to justify a point of conduct is generally found in practice to be an attempt to excuse a crime and footnote the rationalist for whom the bible has no authority brings his conduct to such tests as asking himself after Kant how it would be if everyone did as he proposes to do or by calculating the effect of his action on the greatest happiness of the greatest number or by judging whether the liberty of action he is claiming infringes the equal liberty of others etc etc most men are ingenious enough to pass examinations of this kind successfully in respect to everything they really want to do but in period of transition as for instance when faith in the infallibility of the bible is shattered and faith in that of a reason not yet perfected men's uncertainty as to the rightness and wrongness of their actions keeps them in a continual perplexity amid which causatory seems the most important branch of intellectual activity life as depicted by Ibsen is very full of it we find the great double drama of emperor and Galilean occupied at first with Julian's case regarded as a case of conscience it is compared in the manner already described with the cases of Cain and Judas the three men being introduced as cornerstones under the wrath of necessity great freedmen under necessity and so forth the qualms of Julian are theatrically effective in producing the most exciting suspense as to whether he will dare to choose between Christ and the imperial purple emperor exhibition of a man struggling between his ambition and his creed belongs to a phase of intellectual interest which Ibsen had passed even before the production of brand when he wrote his Kong's emern or the pretenders emperor and Galilean might have been appropriately if prosaically named the mistake of maximus the mystic it is maximus who forces the choice on Julian not as between ambition and principle between paganism and christianity between the old beauty that is no longer beautiful and the new truth that is no longer true but between Christ and Julian himself maximus knows that there is no going back to the first empire of pagan sensualism the second empire christian or self-abnegatory idealism is already rotten at the heart the third empire is what he looks for the empire of man asserting the eternal validity of his own will he who can see that not on Olympus not nailed to the cross but in himself is God he is the man to build brand's bridge between the flesh and the spirit establishing this third empire in which the spirit shall not be known nor the flesh starved nor the will tortured and baffled thus throughout the first part of the double drama we have Julian prompted step by step to this stupendous conviction that he and not the Galilean is God his final resolution to seize the throne is expressed in his interruption of the Lord's prayer which he hears intoned by worshipers in church as he wrestles in the gloom of the catacombs with his own fears and entreaties and threats of his soldiers urging him to take the final decisive step at the cue lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil he rushes into the church with his soldiers exclaiming for mine is the kingdom yet he halts on the threshold dazzled by the light as his followers solace points the declaration by adding and the kingdom and the power and the glory once on the throne Julian becomes a mere pedant tyrant trying to revive paganism mechanically by cruel enforcement of external conformity to its rights in his moments of exaltation he half grasps the meaning of maximus only to relapse presently and perverted into a grotesque mixture of superstition and monstrous vanity we have him making such speeches as this where they appear again at his most ludicrous has not Plato long ago enunciated the truth that only a god can rule over men what did he mean by that saying answer me what did he mean far be it from me to assert that Plato incomparable sage though he was had any individual even the greatest in his prophetic eye etc in this frame of mind Christ appears to him not as the prototype of himself as maximus would have him feel but as a rival god over whom he must prevail at all costs it galls him to think that the Galilean still reigns in the hearts of men whilst the emperor can only extort lip honor from them by brute force for in his wildest excesses of egotism he never so loses his saving sense of the realities of things as to mistake the trophies of persecution for the fruits of faith tell me who shall conquer he demands of maximus the emperor or the Galilean both the emperor and the Galilean shall succumb says maximus whether an hour time or in hundreds of years I know not but so it shall be when the right man comes who is the right man says julian he who shall swallow up both emperor and Galilean replies this year both shall succumb but you shall not therefore perish does not the child succumb in the youth and the youth in the man yet neither child nor youth perishes you know I have never approved of your policy as emperor you have tried to make the youth a child again the empire of the flesh is fallen at prey to the empire of the spirit but the empire of the spirit is not final any more than the youth is you have tried to hinder the youth from growing from becoming a man oh fool who have drawn your sword against that which is to be against the third empire in which the twin nature shall reign for him the Jews have a name call him messiah and are waiting for him still julian stumbles on the threshold of the idea without entering into it he is galled out of all comprehension by the rivalry of the Galilean and asks despairingly who shall break his power then maximus drives the lesson home maximus is it not written thou shall have none other gods but me julian yes yes yes maximus the seer of Nazareth did not preach this god or that he said god is I I am god julian and that is what makes the emperor powerless the third empire the messiah not the jews messiah but the messiah of the two empires the spirit and the world maximus the god emperor julian the emperor god maximus logos in pond pond in logos julian how has he begotten maximus he is self begotten in the man who wills but it is of no use maximus's idea is a synthesis of relations in which not only is christ god in exactly the same sense as that in which julian is god but julian is christ as well the persistence of julian's jealousy of the Galilean shoes that he had not comprehended the synthesis at all but only seized on that part of it egotism and since this part is only valid as a constituent of the synthesis and has no reality when isolated from it it cannot by itself convince julian in vain does maximus repeat his lesson in every sort of parable and in such pregnant questions as how do you know julian that you are not in him whom you now persecute he can only reek him to utter commands to the winds and to exclaim in the excitement of burning his fleet on the borders of persia and empire is here maximus i feel that the messiah of the earth lives within me the spirit has become flesh and the flesh spirit all creation lies within my will and power more than the fleet is burning and that glowing swirling the crucified Galilean is burning to ashes and the earthly emperor is burning with the Galilean but from the ashes shall arise phoenix like the god of earth and the emperor of the spirit in one in one at which point he is informed that the persian refugee whose information has emboldened him to burn his ships has fled from the camp and is a manifest spy from that moment he is a broken man it is next and last emergency when the persians fall upon his camp his first desperate exclamation is a vow to sacrifice to the gods to what gods oh fool cries maximus where are they and what are they i will sacrifice to this god and that god i will sacrifice to many he answers desperately one or other must surely hear me i must call on something without me and above me a flash of lightning seems to him in response from above and with this encouragement he throws himself into the fight clinging like mcbeth to an ambiguous oracle which leads him to suppose that only in the phirgian regions need he fear defeat he imagines he sees the nazarenes in the ranks of the enemy and in fighting madly to reach him he is struck down in the name of christ by one of his own soldiers then his one christian general jovian calls on his believing brethren to give Caesar what is Caesar's declaring that the heavens are open and the angels coming to the rescue with their swords of fire he rallies the gallo lands of whom julian has made slave soldiers the pagan free legions crying out that the god of the gallo lands is on the roman side and that he is the strongest follow jovian as he charges the enemy who fly in all directions whilst julian sinking back from a vain effort to rise exclaims thou has conquered oh gallo leon julian dies quietly in his tent avering in reply to a christian friend's inquiry that he has nothing to repent of the power which circumstances placed in my hands he says and which is an emanation of divinity i am conscious of having used to the best of my skill i've never wittingly wronged anyone if some should think that i have not fulfilled all expectations they should injustice reflect that there is a mysterious power outside us which in a great measure governs the issue of human undertakings he still does not see eye to eye with maximus though there is a flash of insight in his remark to him when he learns at the village where he felt is called the virgin region and that the world will has laid an ambush for him it was something for julian to have seen that the power which he found stronger than his individual will was itself will but in as much as he conceived it not as the whole of which his will was but a part but as a rival will he was not the man to found the third empire he had felt the god had in himself but not in others being only able to say with half conviction the kingdom of heaven is within me he had been utterly vanquished by the gallo leon who had been able to say the kingdom of heaven is within you but he was on the way to that full truth a man cannot believe in others until he believes in himself for his conviction of the equal worth of his fellows must be filled by the overflow of his conviction of his own worth against the spurious christianity of exeticism starving that indispensable prior conviction julian rightly rebelled and maximus rightly incited him to rebel but maximus could not fill the prior conviction even to fullness much less to overflowing for the third empire was not yet and is not yet still the tyrant dies with a peaceful conscience and maximus is able to tell the priest at the bedside that the world will shall answer for julian soul what troubles the mystic is his having misled julian by encouraging him to bring upon himself the fate of cain and judas as water can be boiled by fire man can be prompted and stimulated from without to assert his individuality but just as no boiling can fill a half empty well no external stimulus can enlarge the spirit of a man to the point at which he can self-beget the emperor got in himself by willing at that point to will is to have to will and it is with these words on his lips that maximus leaves the stage still sure that the third empire is to come it is not necessary to translate the scheme of emperor and Galilean into terms of the antithesis between idealism and realism julian in this respect is a reincarnation of pure gint all the difference is that the subject which was instinctively projected in the earlier poem is intellectually constructed as well in the later history julian plus maximus the mystic being pure plus one who understands him better than ipsin did when he created him the current interest of ipsin's interpretation of the original christianity is obvious the deepest sayings recorded in the gospels are now nothing but eccentric paradoxes to most of those who reject the superstitious view of christ's divinity those who accept that view often consider that such acceptance absolves them from attaching any sensible meaning to his words at all and so might as well pin their faith to a stock or a stone of these attitudes the first is superficial and the second stupid ipsin's interpretation whatever may be its validity will certainly hold the field long after the current cross-genity as it has been aptly called becomes unthinkable ipsin had now written three immense dramas all dealing with the effect of idealism on the individual egotists of exceptional imaginative excitability this he was able to do whilst his intellectual consciousness of his theme was yet incomplete by simply portraying sides of himself he has put himself into the skin of brand of pure gint and of julian and these figures have accordingly a certain direct vitality which belongs to none of his subsequent creations of the male sex there are flashes of it in relling in loveburg in elitist stranger from the sea but they are only flashes henceforth all his really vivid and solar figures are women for having at last completed his intellectual analysis of idealism he could now construct methodical illustrations of its social working instead of as before blindly projecting imaginary personal experiences which he himself had not yet succeeded in interpreting further now that he understood the matter he could see plainly the effect of idealism as a social force on people quite unlike himself that is to say on everyday people and everyday life on shipbuilders bank managers, parsons and doctors as well as on saints romantic adventurers and emperors with his eyes thus opened instances of the mischief of idealism crowded upon him so rapidly that he began deliberately to inculcate their moral by writing realistic prose plays of modern life abandoning all production of art for art's sake his skill as a playwright and his genius as an artist were then forthused only to secure attention and effectiveness for his detailed attack on idealism no more verse, no more tragedy for the sake of tears or comedy for the sake of laughter, no more seeking to produce specimens of art forms in order that literary critics might fill the public belly with the east wind the critics it is true soon declared that he had ceased to be an artist but he having something else to do with his talent than to fulfill critics definitions took no notice of them not thinking their ideal sufficiently important to write a play about End of section 6