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HEARTBREAK HOUSE: A FANTASIA IN THE RUSSIAN MANNER ON ENGLISH THEMES
by BERNARD SHAW
1913-1916
HEARTBREAK HOUSE AND HORSEBACK HALL
Where Heartbreak House Stands
Heartbreak House is not merely the name of the play which follows
this preface. It is cultured, leisured Europe before the war.
When the play was begun not a shot had been fired; and only the
professional diplomatists and the very few amateurs whose hobby
is foreign policy even knew that the guns were loaded. A Russian
playwright, Tchekov, had produced four fascinating dramatic
studies of Heartbreak House, of which three, The Cherry Orchard,
Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull, had been performed in England.
Tolstoy, in his Fruits of Enlightenment, had shown us through it
in his most ferociously contemptuous manner. Tolstoy did not
waste any sympathy on it: it was to him the house in which Europe
was stifling its soul; and he knew that our utter enervation and
futilization in that overheated drawingroom atmosphere was
delivering the world over to the control of ignorant and soulless
cunning and energy, with the frightful consequences which have
now overtaken it. Tolstoy was no pessimist: he was not disposed
to leave the house standing if he could bring it down about the
ears of its pretty and amiable voluptuaries; and he wielded the
pickaxe with a will. He treated the case of the inmates as one of
opium poisoning, to be dealt with by seizing the patients roughly
and exercising them violently until they were broad awake.
Tchekov, more of a fatalist, had no faith in these charming
people extricating themselves. They would, he thought, be sold up
and sent adrift by the bailiffs; and he therefore had no scruple
in exploiting and even flattering their charm.
The Inhabitants
Tchekov's plays, being less lucrative than swings and
roundabouts, got no further in England, where theatres are only
ordinary commercial affairs, than a couple of performances by the
Stage Society. We stared and said, "How Russian!" They did not
strike me in that way. Just as Ibsen's intensely Norwegian plays
exactly fitted every middle and professional class suburb in
Europe, these intensely Russian plays fitted all the country
houses in Europe in which the pleasures of music, art,
literature, and the theatre had supplanted hunting, shooting,
fishing, flirting, eating, and drinking. The same nice people,
the same utter futility. The nice people could read; some of them
could write; and they were the sole repositories of culture who
had social opportunities of contact with our politicians,
administrators, and newspaper proprietors, or any chance of
sharing or influencing their activities. But they shrank from
that contact. They hated politics. They did not wish to realize
Utopia for the common people: they wished to realize their
favorite fictions and poems in their own lives; and, when they
could, they lived without scruple on incomes which they did
nothing to earn. The women in their girlhood made themselves look
like variety theatre stars, and settled down later into the types
of beauty imagined by the previous generation of painters. They
took the only part of our society in which there was leisure for
high culture, and made it an economic, political and; as far as
practicable, a moral vacuum; and as Nature, abhorring the vacuum,
immediately filled it up with sex and with all sorts of refined
pleasures, it was a very delightful place at its best for moments
of relaxation. In other moments it was disastrous. For prime
ministers and their like, it was a veritable Capua.
Horseback Hall
But where were our front benchers to nest if not here? The
alternative to Heartbreak House was Horseback Hall, consisting of
a prison for horses with an annex for the ladies and gentlemen
who rode them, hunted them, talked about them, bought them and
sold them, and gave nine-tenths of their lives to them, dividing
the other tenth between charity, churchgoing (as a substitute for
religion), and conservative electioneering (as a substitute for
politics). It is true that the two establishments got mixed at
the edges. Exiles from the library, the music room, and the
picture gallery would be found languishing among the stables,
miserably discontented; and hardy horsewomen who slept at the
first chord of Schumann were born, horribly misplaced, into the
garden of Klingsor; but sometimes one came upon horsebreakers and
heartbreakers who could make the best of both worlds. As a rule,
however, the two were apart and knew little of one another; so
the prime minister folk had to choose between barbarism and
Capua. And of the two atmospheres it is hard to say which was the
more fatal to statesmanship.
Revolution on the Shelf
Heartbreak House was quite familiar with revolutionary ideas on
paper. It aimed at being advanced and freethinking, and hardly
ever went to church or kept the Sabbath except by a little extra
fun at weekends. When you spent a Friday to Tuesday in it you
found on the shelf in your bedroom not only the books of poets
and novelists, but of revolutionary biologists and even
economists. Without at least a few plays by myself and Mr
Granville Barker, and a few stories by Mr H. G. Wells, Mr Arnold
Bennett, and Mr John Galsworthy, the house would have been out of
the movement. You would find Blake among the poets, and beside
him Bergson, Butler, Scott Haldane, the poems of Meredith and
Thomas Hardy, and, generally speaking, all the literary
implements for forming the mind of the perfect modern Socialist
and Creative Evolutionist. It was a curious experience to spend
Sunday in dipping into these books, and the Monday morning to
read in the daily paper that the country had just been brought to
the verge of anarchy because a new Home Secretary or chief of
police without an idea in his head that his great-grandmother
might not have had to apologize for, had refused to "recognize"
some powerful Trade Union, just as a gondola might refuse to
recognize a 20,000-ton liner.
In short, power and culture were in separate compartments. The
barbarians were not only literally in the saddle, but on the
front bench in the House of commons, with nobody to correct their
incredible ignorance of modern thought and political science but
upstarts from the counting-house, who had spent their lives
furnishing their pockets instead of their minds. Both, however,
were practised in dealing with money and with men, as far as
acquiring the one and exploiting the other went; and although
this is as undesirable an expertness as that of the medieval
robber baron, it qualifies men to keep an estate or a business
going in its old routine without necessarily understanding it,
just as Bond Street tradesmen and domestic servants keep
fashionable society going without any instruction in sociology.
The Cherry Orchard
The Heartbreak people neither could nor would do anything of the
sort. With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G.
Wells as the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the
anticipations of Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the
drudgery of politics, and would have made a very poor job of it
if they had changed their minds. Not that they would have been
allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through the accident of being a
hereditary peer can anyone in these days of Votes for Everybody
get into parliament if handicapped by a serious modern cultural
equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a vacuum
would have left them helpless end ineffective in public affairs.
Even in private life they were often helpless wasters of their
inheritance, like the people in Tchekov's Cherry Orchard. Even
those who lived within their incomes were really kept going by
their solicitors and agents, being unable to manage an estate or
run a business without continual prompting from those who have to
learn how to do such things or starve.
>From what is called Democracy no corrective to this state of
things could be hoped. It is said that every people has the
Government it deserves. It is more to the point that every
Government has the electorate it deserves; for the orators of the
front bench can edify or debauch an ignorant electorate at will.
Thus our democracy moves in a vicious circle of reciprocal
worthiness and unworthiness.
Nature's Long Credits
Nature's way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is
unfortunately not one that compels us to conduct a solvent
hygiene on a cash basis. She demoralizes us with long credits and
reckless overdrafts, and then pulls us up cruelly with
catastrophic bankruptcies. Take, for example, common domestic
sanitation. A whole city generation may neglect it utterly and
scandalously, if not with absolute impunity, yet without any evil
consequences that anyone thinks of tracing to it. In a hospital
two generations of medical students way tolerate dirt and
carelessness, and then go out into general practice to spread the
doctrine that fresh air is a fad, and sanitation an imposture set
up to make profits for plumbers. Then suddenly Nature takes her
revenge. She strikes at the city with a pestilence and at the
hospital with an epidemic of hospital gangrene, slaughtering
right and left until the innocent young have paid for the guilty
old, and the account is balanced. And then she goes to sleep
again and gives another period of credit, with the same result.
This is what has just happened in our political hygiene.
Political science has been as recklessly neglected by Governments
and electorates during my lifetime as sanitary science was in the
days of Charles the Second. In international relations diplomacy
has been a boyishly lawless affair of family intrigues,
commercial and territorial brigandage, torpors of
pseudo-goodnature produced by laziness and spasms of ferocious
activity produced by terror. But in these islands we muddled
through. Nature gave us a longer credit than she gave to France
or Germany or Russia. To British centenarians who died in their
beds in 1914, any dread of having to hide underground in London
from the shells of an enemy seemed more remote and fantastic than
a dread of the appearance of a colony of cobras and rattlesnakes
in Kensington Gardens. In the prophetic works of Charles Dickens
we were warned against many evils which have since come to pass;
but of the evil of being slaughtered by a foreign foe on our own
doorsteps there was no shadow. Nature gave us a very long credit;
and we abused it to the utmost. But when she struck at last she
struck with a vengeance. For four years she smote our firstborn
and heaped on us plagues of which Egypt never dreamed. They were
all as preventable as the great Plague of London, and came solely
because they had not been prevented. They were not undone by
winning the war. The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies
of the victors.
The Wicked Half Century
It is difficult to say whether indifference and neglect are worse
than false doctrine; but Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall
unfortunately suffered from both. For half a century before the
war civilization had been going to the devil very precipitately
under the influence of a pseudo-science as disastrous as the
blackest Calvinism. Calvinism taught that as we are
predestinately saved or damned, nothing that we can do can alter
our destiny. Still, as Calvinism gave the individual no clue as
to whether he had drawn a lucky number or an unlucky one, it left
him a fairly strong interest in encouraging his hopes of
salvation and allaying his fear of damnation by behaving as one
of the elect might be expected to behave rather than as one of
the reprobate. But in the middle of the nineteenth century
naturalists and physicists assured the world, in the name of
Science, that salvation and damnation are all nonsense, and that
predestination is the central truth of religion, inasmuch as
human beings are produced by their environment, their sins and
good deeds being only a series of chemical and mechanical
reactions over which they have no control. Such figments as mind,
choice, purpose, conscience, will, and so forth, are, they
taught, mere illusions, produced because they are useful in the
continual struggle of the human machine to maintain its
environment in a favorable condition, a process incidentally
involving the ruthless destruction or subjection of its
competitors for the supply (assumed to be limited) of subsistence
available. We taught Prussia this religion; and Prussia bettered
our instruction so effectively that we presently found ourselves
confronted with the necessity of destroying Prussia to prevent
Prussia destroying us. And that has just ended in each destroying
the other to an extent doubtfully reparable in our time.
It may be asked how so imbecile and dangerous a creed ever came
to be accepted by intelligent beings. I will answer that question
more fully in my next volume of plays, which will be entirely
devoted to the subject. For the present I will only say that
there were better reasons than the obvious one that such sham
science as this opened a scientific career to very stupid men,
and all the other careers to shameless rascals, provided they
were industrious enough. It is true that this motive operated
very powerfully; but when the new departure in scientific
doctrine which is associated with the name of the great
naturalist Charles Darwin began, it was not only a reaction
against a barbarous pseudo-evangelical teleology intolerably
obstructive to all scientific progress, but was accompanied, as
it happened, by discoveries of extraordinary interest in physics,
chemistry, and that lifeless method of evolution which its
investigators called Natural Selection. Howbeit, there was only
one result possible in the ethical sphere, and that was the
banishment of conscience from human affairs, or, as Samuel Butler
vehemently put it, "of mind from the universe."
Hypochondria
Now Heartbreak House, with Butler and Bergson and Scott Haldane
alongside Blake and the other major poets on its shelves (to say
nothing of Wagner and the tone poets), was not so completely
blinded by the doltish materialism of the laboratories as the
uncultured world outside. But being an idle house it was a
hypochondriacal house, always running after cures. It would stop
eating meat, not on valid Shelleyan grounds, but in order to get
rid of a bogey called Uric Acid; and it would actually let you
pull all its teeth out to exorcise another demon named Pyorrhea.
It was superstitious, and addicted to table-rapping,
materialization seances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing
and the like to such an extent that it may be doubted whether
ever before in the history of the world did soothsayers,
astrologers, and unregistered therapeutic specialists of all
sorts flourish as they did during this half century of the drift
to the abyss. The registered doctors and surgeons were hard put
to it to compete with the unregistered. They were not clever
enough to appeal to the imagination and sociability of the
Heartbreakers by the arts of the actor, the orator, the poet, the
winning conversationalist. They had to fall back coarsely on the
terror of infection and death. They prescribed inoculations and
operations. Whatever part of a human being could be cut out
without necessarily killing him they cut out; and he often died
(unnecessarily of course) in consequence. From such trifles as
uvulas and tonsils they went on to ovaries and appendices until
at last no one's inside was safe. They explained that the human
intestine was too long, and that nothing could make a child of
Adam healthy except short circuiting the pylorus by cutting a
length out of the lower intestine and fastening it directly to
the stomach. As their mechanist theory taught them that medicine
was the business of the chemist's laboratory, and surgery of the
carpenter's shop, and also that Science (by which they meant
their practices) was so important that no consideration for the
interests of any individual creature, whether frog or
philosopher, much less the vulgar commonplaces of sentimental
ethics, could weigh for a moment against the remotest off-chance
of an addition to the body of scientific knowledge, they operated
and vivisected and inoculated and lied on a stupendous scale,
clamoring for and actually acquiring such legal powers over the
bodies of their fellow-citizens as neither king, pope, nor
parliament dare ever have claimed. The Inquisition itself was a
Liberal institution compared to the General Medical Council.
Those who do not know how to live must make a Merit of Dying
Heartbreak House was far too lazy and shallow to extricate itself
from this palace of evil enchantment. It rhapsodized about love;
but it believed in cruelty. It was afraid of the cruel people;
and it saw that cruelty was at least effective. Cruelty did
things that made money, whereas Love did nothing but prove the
soundness of Larochefoucauld's saying that very few people would
fall in love if they had never read about it. Heartbreak House,
in short, did not know how to live, at which point all that was
left to it was the boast that at least it knew how to die: a
melancholy accomplishment which the outbreak of war presently
gave it practically unlimited opportunities of displaying. Thus
were the firstborn of Heartbreak House smitten; and the young,
the innocent, the hopeful, expiated the folly and worthlessness
of their elders.
War Delirium
Only those who have lived through a first-rate war, not in the
field, but at home, and kept their heads, can possibly understand
the bitterness of Shakespeare and Swift, who both went through
this experience. The horror of Peer Gynt in the madhouse, when
the lunatics, exalted by illusions of splendid talent and visions
of a dawning millennium, crowned him as their emperor, was tame
in comparison. I do not know whether anyone really kept his head
completely except those who had to keep it because they had to
conduct the war at first hand. I should not have kept my own (as
far as I did keep it) if I had not at once understood that as a
scribe and speaker I too was under the most serious public
obligation to keep my grip on realities; but this did not save me
from a considerable degree of hyperaesthesia. There were of
course some happy people to whom the war meant nothing: all
political and general matters lying outside their little circle
of interest. But the ordinary war-conscious civilian went mad,
the main symptom being a conviction that the whole order of
nature had been reversed. All foods, he felt, must now be
adulterated. All schools must be closed. No advertisements must
be sent to the newspapers, of which new editions must appear and
be bought up every ten minutes. Travelling must be stopped, or,
that being impossible, greatly hindered. All pretences about fine
art and culture and the like must be flung off as an intolerable
affectation; and the picture galleries and museums and schools at
once occupied by war workers. The British Museum itself was saved
only by a hair's breadth. The sincerity of all this, and of much
more which would not be believed if I chronicled it, may be
established by one conclusive instance of the general craziness.
Men were seized with the illusion that they could win the war by
giving away money. And they not only subscribed millions to Funds
of all sorts with no discoverable object, and to ridiculous
voluntary organizations for doing what was plainly the business
of the civil and military authorities, but actually handed out
money to any thief in the street who had the presence of mind to
pretend that he (or she) was "collecting" it for the annihilation
of the enemy. Swindlers were emboldened to take offices; label
themselves Anti-Enemy Leagues; and simply pocket the money that
was heaped on them. Attractively dressed young women found that
they had nothing to do but parade the streets, collecting-box in
hand, and live gloriously on the profits. Many months elapsed
before, as a first sign of returning sanity, the police swept an
Anti-Enemy secretary into prison pour encourages les autres, and
the passionate penny collecting of the Flag Days was brought
under some sort of regulation.
Madness in Court
The demoralization did not spare the Law Courts. Soldiers were
acquitted, even on fully proved indictments for wilful murder,
until at last the judges and magistrates had to announce that
what was called the Unwritten Law, which meant simply that a
soldier could do what he liked with impunity in civil life, was
not the law of the land, and that a Victoria Cross did not carry
with it a perpetual plenary indulgence. Unfortunately the
insanity of the juries and magistrates did not always manifest
itself in indulgence. No person unlucky enough to be charged with
any sort of conduct, however reasonable and salutary, that did
not smack of war delirium, had the slightest chance of acquittal.
There were in the country, too, a certain number of people who
had conscientious objections to war as criminal or unchristian.
The Act of Parliament introducing Compulsory Military Service
thoughtlessly exempted these persons, merely requiring them to
prove the genuineness of their convictions. Those who did so were
very ill-advised from the point of view of their own personal
interest; for they were persecuted with savage logicality in
spite of the law; whilst those who made no pretence of having any
objection to war at all, and had not only had military training
in Officers' Training Corps, but had proclaimed on public
occasions that they were perfectly ready to engage in civil war
on behalf of their political opinions, were allowed the benefit
of the Act on the ground that they did not approve of this
particular war. For the Christians there was no mercy. In cases
where the evidence as to their being killed by ill treatment was
so unequivocal that the verdict would certainly have been one of
wilful murder had the prejudice of the coroner's jury been on the
other side, their tormentors were gratuitously declared to be
blameless. There was only one virtue, pugnacity: only one vice,
pacifism. That is an essential condition of war; but the
Government had not the courage to legislate accordingly; and its
law was set aside for Lynch law.
The climax of legal lawlessness was reached in France. The
greatest Socialist statesman in Europe, Jaures, was shot and
killed by a gentleman who resented his efforts to avert the war.
M. Clemenceau was shot by another gentleman of less popular
opinions, and happily came off no worse than having to spend a
precautionary couple of days in bed. The slayer of Jaures was
recklessly acquitted: the would-be slayer of M. Clemenceau was
carefully found guilty. There is no reason to doubt that the same
thing would have happened in England if the war had begun with a
successful attempt to assassinate Keir Hardie, and ended with an
unsuccessful one to assassinate Mr Lloyd George.
The Long Arm of War
The pestilence which is the usual accompaniment of war was called
influenza. Whether it was really a war pestilence or not was made
doubtful by the fact that it did its worst in places remote from
the battlefields, notably on the west coast of North America and
in India. But the moral pestilence, which was unquestionably a
war pestilence, reproduced this phenomenon. One would have
supposed that the war fever would have raged most furiously in
the countries actually under fire, and that the others would be
more reasonable. Belgium and Flanders, where over large districts
literally not one stone was left upon another as the opposed
armies drove each other back and forward over it after terrific
preliminary bombardments, might have been pardoned for relieving
their feelings more emphatically than by shrugging their
shoulders and saying, "C'est la guerre." England, inviolate for
so many centuries that the swoop of war on her homesteads had
long ceased to be more credible than a return of the Flood, could
hardly be expected to keep her temper sweet when she knew at last
what it was to hide in cellars and underground railway stations,
or lie quaking in bed, whilst bombs crashed, houses crumbled, and
aircraft guns distributed shrapnel on friend and foe alike until
certain shop windows in London, formerly full of fashionable
hats, were filled with steel helmets. Slain and mutilated women
and children, and burnt and wrecked dwellings, excuse a good deal
of violent language, and produce a wrath on which many suns go
down before it is appeased. Yet it was in the United States of
America where nobody slept the worse for the war, that the war
fever went beyond all sense and reason. In European Courts there
was vindictive illegality: in American Courts there was raving
lunacy. It is not for me to chronicle the extravagances of an
Ally: let some candid American do that. I can only say that to us
sitting in our gardens in England, with the guns in France making
themselves felt by a throb in the air as unmistakeable as an
audible sound, or with tightening hearts studying the phases of
the moon in London in their bearing on the chances whether our
houses would be standing or ourselves alive next morning, the
newspaper accounts of the sentences American Courts were passing
on young girls and old men alike for the expression of opinions
which were being uttered amid thundering applause before huge
audiences in England, and the more private records of the methods
by which the American War Loans were raised, were so amazing that
they put the guns and the possibilities of a raid clean out of
our heads for the moment.
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