Books: Heartbreak House
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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW >> Heartbreak House
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And yet, what is there to say except that war puts a strain on
human nature that breaks down the better half of it, and makes
the worse half a diabolical virtue? Better, for us if it broke it
down altogether, for then the warlike way out of our difficulties
would be barred to us, and we should take greater care not to get
into them. In truth, it is, as Byron said, "not difficult to
die," and enormously difficult to live: that explains why, at
bottom, peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more
arduous. Did any hero of the war face the glorious risk of death
more bravely than the traitor Bolo faced the ignominious
certainty of it? Bolo taught us all how to die: can we say that
he taught us all how to live? Hardly a week passes now without
some soldier who braved death in the field so recklessly that he
was decorated or specially commended for it, being haled before
our magistrates for having failed to resist the paltriest
temptations of peace, with no better excuse than the old one that
"a man must live." Strange that one who, sooner than do honest
work, will sell his honor for a bottle of wine, a visit to the
theatre, and an hour with a strange woman, all obtained by
passing a worthless cheque, could yet stake his life on the most
desperate chances of the battle-field! Does it not seem as if,
after all, the glory of death were cheaper than the glory of
life? If it is not easier to attain, why do so many more men
attain it? At all events it is clear that the kingdom of the
Prince of Peace has not yet become the kingdom of this world. His
attempts at invasion have been resisted far more fiercely than
the Kaiser's. Successful as that resistance has been, it has
piled up a sort of National Debt that is not the less oppressive
because we have no figures for it and do not intend to pay it. A
blockade that cuts off "the grace of our Lord" is in the long run
less bearable than the blockades which merely cut off raw
materials; and against that blockade our Armada is impotent. In
the blockader's house, he has assured us, there are many
mansions; but I am afraid they do not include either Heartbreak
House or Horseback Hall.
Plague on Both your Houses!
Meanwhile the Bolshevist picks and petards are at work on the
foundations of both buildings; and though the Bolshevists may be
buried in the ruins, their deaths will not save the edifices.
Unfortunately they can be built again. Like Doubting Castle, they
have been demolished many times by successive Greathearts, and
rebuilt by Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, by Feeble Mind and
Much Afraid, and by all the jurymen of Vanity Fair. Another
generation of "secondary education" at our ancient public schools
and the cheaper institutions that ape them will be quite
sufficient to keep the two going until the next war. For the
instruction of that generation I leave these pages as a record of
what civilian life was during the war: a matter on which history
is usually silent. Fortunately it was a very short war. It is
true that the people who thought it could not last more than six
months were very signally refuted by the event. As Sir Douglas
Haig has pointed out, its Waterloos lasted months instead of
hours. But there would have been nothing surprising in its
lasting thirty years. If it had not been for the fact that the
blockade achieved the amazing feat of starving out Europe, which
it could not possibly have done had Europe been properly
organized for war, or even for peace, the war would have lasted
until the belligerents were so tired of it that they could no
longer be compelled to compel themselves to go on with it.
Considering its magnitude, the war of 1914-18 will certainly be
classed as the shortest in history. The end came so suddenly that
the combatant literally stumbled over it; and yet it came a full
year later than it should have come if the belligerents had not
been far too afraid of one another to face the situation
sensibly. Germany, having failed to provide for the war she
began, failed again to surrender before she was dangerously
exhausted. Her opponents, equally improvident, went as much too
close to bankruptcy as Germany to starvation. It was a bluff at
which both were bluffed. And, with the usual irony of war, it
remains doubtful whether Germany and Russia, the defeated, will
not be the gainers; for the victors are already busy fastening on
themselves the chains they have struck from the limbs of the
vanquished.
How the Theatre fared
Let us now contract our view rather violently from the European
theatre of war to the theatre in which the fights are sham
fights, and the slain, rising the moment the curtain has fallen,
go comfortably home to supper after washing off their rose-pink
wounds. It is nearly twenty years since I was last obliged to
introduce a play in the form of a book for lack of an opportunity
of presenting it in its proper mode by a performance in a
theatre. The war has thrown me back on this expedient. Heartbreak
House has not yet reached the stage. I have withheld it because
the war has completely upset the economic conditions which
formerly enabled serious drama to pay its way in London. The
change is not in the theatres nor in the management of them, nor
in the authors and actors, but in the audiences. For four years
the London theatres were crowded every night with thousands of
soldiers on leave from the front. These soldiers were not
seasoned London playgoers. A childish experience of my own gave
me a clue to their condition. When I was a small boy I was taken
to the opera. I did not then know what an opera was, though I
could whistle a good deal of opera music. I had seen in my
mother's album photographs of all the great opera singers, mostly
in evening dress. In the theatre I found myself before a gilded
balcony filled with persons in evening dress whom I took to be
the opera singers. I picked out one massive dark lady as Alboni,
and wondered how soon she would stand up and sing. I was puzzled
by the fact that I was made to sit with my back to the singers
instead of facing them. When the curtain went up, my astonishment
and delight were unbounded.
The Soldier at the Theatre Front
In 1915, I saw in the theatres men in khaki in just the same
predicament. To everyone who had my clue to their state of mind
it was evident that they had never been in a theatre before and
did not know what it was. At one of our great variety theatres I
sat beside a young officer, not at all a rough specimen, who,
even when the curtain rose and enlightened him as to the place
where he had to look for his entertainment, found the dramatic
part of it utterly incomprehensible. He did not know how to play
his part of the game. He could understand the people on the stage
singing and dancing and performing gymnastic feats. He not only
understood but intensely enjoyed an artist who imitated cocks
crowing and pigs squeaking. But the people who pretended that
they were somebody else, and that the painted picture behind them
was real, bewildered him. In his presence I realized how very
sophisticated the natural man has to become before the
conventions of the theatre can be easily acceptable, or the
purpose of the drama obvious to him.
Well, from the moment when the routine of leave for our soldiers
was established, such novices, accompanied by damsels (called
flappers) often as innocent as themselves, crowded the theatres
to the doors. It was hardly possible at first to find stuff crude
enough to nurse them on. The best music-hall comedians ransacked
their memories for the oldest quips and the most childish antics
to avoid carrying the military spectators out of their depth. I
believe that this was a mistake as far as the novices were
concerned. Shakespeare, or the dramatized histories of George
Barnwell, Maria Martin, or the Demon Barber of Fleet Street,
would probably have been quite popular with them. But the novices
were only a minority after all. The cultivated soldier, who in
time of peace would look at nothing theatrical except the most
advanced postIbsen plays in the most artistic settings, found
himself, to his own astonishment, thirsting for silly jokes,
dances, and brainlessly sensuous exhibitions of pretty girls. The
author of some of the most grimly serious plays of our time told
me that after enduring the trenches for months without a glimpse
of the female of his species, it gave him an entirely innocent
but delightful pleasure merely to see a flapper. The reaction
from the battle-field produced a condition of hyperaesthesia in
which all the theatrical values were altered. Trivial things
gained intensity and stale things novelty. The actor, instead of
having to coax his audiences out of the boredom which had driven
them to the theatre in an ill humor to seek some sort of
distraction, had only to exploit the bliss of smiling men who
were no longer under fire and under military discipline, but
actually clean and comfortable and in a mood to be pleased with
anything and everything that a bevy of pretty girls and a funny
man, or even a bevy of girls pretending to be pretty and a man
pretending to be funny, could do for them.
Then could be seen every night in the theatres oldfashioned
farcical comedies, in which a bedroom, with four doors on each
side and a practicable window in the middle, was understood to
resemble exactly the bedroom in the flats beneath and above, all
three inhabited by couples consumed with jealousy. When these
people came home drunk at night; mistook their neighbor's flats
for their own; and in due course got into the wrong beds, it was
not only the novices who found the resulting complications and
scandals exquisitely ingenious and amusing, nor their equally
verdant flappers who could not help squealing in a manner that
astonished the oldest performers when the gentleman who had just
come in drunk through the window pretended to undress, and
allowed glimpses of his naked person to be descried from time to
time.
Heartbreak House
Men who had just read the news that Charles Wyndham was dying,
and were thereby sadly reminded of Pink Dominos and the torrent
of farcical comedies that followed it in his heyday until every
trick of that trade had become so stale that the laughter they
provoked turned to loathing: these veterans also, when they
returned from the field, were as much pleased by what they knew
to be stale and foolish as the novices by what they thought fresh
and clever.
Commerce in the Theatre
Wellington said that an army moves on its belly. So does a London
theatre. Before a man acts he must eat. Before he performs plays
he must pay rent. In London we have no theatres for the welfare
of the people: they are all for the sole purpose of producing the
utmost obtainable rent for the proprietor. If the twin flats and
twin beds produce a guinea more than Shakespeare, out goes
Shakespeare and in come the twin flats and the twin beds. If the
brainless bevy of pretty girls and the funny man outbid Mozart,
out goes Mozart.
Unser Shakespeare
Before the war an effort was made to remedy this by establishing
a national theatre in celebration of the tercentenary of the
death of Shakespeare. A committee was formed; and all sorts of
illustrious and influential persons lent their names to a grand
appeal to our national culture. My play, The Dark Lady of The
Sonnets, was one of the incidents of that appeal. After some
years of effort the result was a single handsome subscription
from a German gentleman. Like the celebrated swearer in the
anecdote when the cart containing all his household goods lost
its tailboard at the top of the hill and let its contents roll in
ruin to the bottom, I can only say, "I cannot do justice to this
situation," and let it pass without another word.
The Higher Drama put out of Action
The effect of the war on the London theatres may now be imagined.
The beds and the bevies drove every higher form of art out of it.
Rents went up to an unprecedented figure. At the same time prices
doubled everywhere except at the theatre pay-boxes, and raised
the expenses of management to such a degree that unless the
houses were quite full every night, profit was impossible. Even
bare solvency could not be attained without a very wide
popularity. Now what had made serious drama possible to a limited
extent before the war was that a play could pay its way even if
the theatre were only half full until Saturday and three-quarters
full then. A manager who was an enthusiast and a desperately hard
worker, with an occasional grant-in-aid from an artistically
disposed millionaire, and a due proportion of those rare and
happy accidents by which plays of the higher sort turn out to be
potboilers as well, could hold out for some years, by which time
a relay might arrive in the person of another enthusiast. Thus
and not otherwise occurred that remarkable revival of the British
drama at the beginning of the century which made my own career as
a playwright possible in England. In America I had already
established myself, not as part of the ordinary theatre system,
but in association with the exceptional genius of Richard
Mansfield. In Germany and Austria I had no difficulty: the system
of publicly aided theatres there, Court and Municipal, kept drama
of the kind I dealt in alive; so that I was indebted to the
Emperor of Austria for magnificent productions of my works at a
time when the sole official attention paid me by the British
Courts was the announcement to the English-speaking world that
certain plays of mine were unfit for public performance, a
substantial set-off against this being that the British Court, in
the course of its private playgoing, paid no regard to the bad
character given me by the chief officer of its household.
Howbeit, the fact that my plays effected a lodgment on the London
stage, and were presently followed by the plays of Granville
Barker, Gilbert Murray, John Masefield, St. John Hankin, Lawrence
Housman, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, John Drinkwater, and
others which would in the nineteenth century have stood rather
less chance of production at a London theatre than the Dialogues
of Plato, not to mention revivals of the ancient Athenian drama
and a restoration to the stage of Shakespeare's plays as he wrote
them, was made economically possible solely by a supply of
theatres which could hold nearly twice as much money as it cost
to rent and maintain them. In such theatres work appealing to a
relatively small class of cultivated persons, and therefore
attracting only from half to three-quarters as many spectators as
the more popular pastimes, could nevertheless keep going in the
hands of young adventurers who were doing it for its own sake,
and had not yet been forced by advancing age and responsibilities
to consider the commercial value of their time and energy too
closely. The war struck this foundation away in the manner I have
just described. The expenses of running the cheapest west-end
theatres rose to a sum which exceeded by twenty-five per cent the
utmost that the higher drama can, as an ascertained matter of
fact, be depended on to draw. Thus the higher drama, which has
never really been a commercially sound speculation, now became an
impossible one. Accordingly, attempts are being made to provide a
refuge for it in suburban theatres in London and repertory
theatres in the provinces. But at the moment when the army has at
last disgorged the survivors of the gallant band of dramatic
pioneers whom it swallowed, they find that the economic
conditions which formerly made their work no worse than
precarious now put it out of the question altogether, as far as
the west end of London is concerned.
Church and Theatre
I do not suppose many people care particularly. We are not
brought up to care; and a sense of the national importance of the
theatre is not born in mankind: the natural man, like so many of
the soldiers at the beginning of the war, does not know what a
theatre is. But please note that all these soldiers who did not
know what a theatre was, knew what a church was. And they had
been taught to respect churches. Nobody had ever warned them
against a church as a place where frivolous women paraded in
their best clothes; where stories of improper females like
Potiphar's wife, and erotic poetry like the Song of Songs, were
read aloud; where the sensuous and sentimental music of Schubert,
Mendelssohn, Gounod, and Brahms was more popular than severe
music by greater composers; where the prettiest sort of pretty
pictures of pretty saints assailed the imagination and senses
through stained-glass windows; and where sculpture and
architecture came to the help of painting. Nobody ever reminded
them that these things had sometimes produced such developments
of erotic idolatry that men who were not only enthusiastic
amateurs of literature, painting, and music, but famous
practitioners of them, had actually exulted when mobs and even
regular troops under express command had mutilated church
statues, smashed church windows, wrecked church organs, and torn
up the sheets from which the church music was read and sung. When
they saw broken statues in churches, they were told that this was
the work of wicked, godless rioters, instead of, as it was, the
work partly of zealots bent on driving the world, the flesh, and
the devil out of the temple, and partly of insurgent men who had
become intolerably poor because the temple had become a den of
thieves. But all the sins and perversions that were so carefully
hidden from them in the history of the Church were laid on the
shoulders of the Theatre: that stuffy, uncomfortable place of
penance in which we suffer so much inconvenience on the
slenderest chance of gaining a scrap of food for our starving
souls. When the Germans bombed the Cathedral of Rheims the world
rang with the horror of the sacrilege. When they bombed the
Little Theatre in the Adelphi, and narrowly missed bombing two
writers of plays who lived within a few yards of it, the fact was
not even mentioned in the papers. In point of appeal to the
senses no theatre ever built could touch the fane at Rheims: no
actress could rival its Virgin in beauty, nor any operatic tenor
look otherwise than a fool beside its David. Its picture glass
was glorious even to those who had seen the glass of Chartres. It
was wonderful in its very grotesques: who would look at the
Blondin Donkey after seeing its leviathans? In spite of the
Adam-Adelphian decoration on which Miss Kingston had lavished so
much taste and care, the Little Theatre was in comparison with
Rheims the gloomiest of little conventicles: indeed the cathedral
must, from the Puritan point of view, have debauched a million
voluptuaries for every one whom the Little Theatre had sent home
thoughtful to a chaste bed after Mr Chesterton's Magic or
Brieux's Les Avaries. Perhaps that is the real reason why the
Church is lauded and the Theatre reviled. Whether or no, the fact
remains that the lady to whose public spirit and sense of the
national value of the theatre I owed the first regular public
performance of a play of mine had to conceal her action as if it
had been a crime, whereas if she had given the money to the
Church she would have worn a halo for it. And I admit, as I have
always done, that this state of things may have been a very
sensible one. I have asked Londoners again and again why they pay
half a guinea to go to a theatre when they can go to St. Paul's
or Westminster Abbey for nothing. Their only possible reply is
that they want to see something new and possibly something
wicked; but the theatres mostly disappoint both hopes. If ever a
revolution makes me Dictator, I shall establish a heavy charge
for admission to our churches. But everyone who pays at the
church door shall receive a ticket entitling him or her to free
admission to one performance at any theatre he or she prefers.
Thus shall the sensuous charms of the church service be made to
subsidize the sterner virtue of the drama.
The Next Phase
The present situation will not last. Although the newspaper I
read at breakfast this morning before writing these words
contains a calculation that no less than twenty-three wars are at
present being waged to confirm the peace, England is no longer in
khaki; and a violent reaction is setting in against the crude
theatrical fare of the four terrible years. Soon the rents of
theatres will once more be fixed on the assumption that they
cannot always be full, nor even on the average half full week in
and week out. Prices will change. The higher drama will be at no
greater disadvantage than it was before the war; and it may
benefit, first, by the fact that many of us have been torn from
the fools' paradise in which the theatre formerly traded, and
thrust upon the sternest realities and necessities until we have
lost both faith in and patience with the theatrical pretences
that had no root either in reality or necessity; second, by the
startling change made by the war in the distribution of income.
It seems only the other day that a millionaire was a man with
œ50,000 a year. To-day, when he has paid his income tax and super
tax, and insured his life for the amount of his death duties, he
is lucky if his net income is 10,000 pounds though his nominal
property remains the same. And this is the result of a Budget
which is called "a respite for the rich." At the other end of the
scale millions of persons have had regular incomes for the first
time in their lives; and their men have been regularly clothed,
fed, lodged, and taught to make up their minds that certain
things have to be done, also for the first time in their lives.
Hundreds of thousands of women have been taken out of their
domestic cages and tasted both discipline and independence. The
thoughtless and snobbish middle classes have been pulled up short
by the very unpleasant experience of being ruined to an
unprecedented extent. We have all had a tremendous jolt; and
although the widespread notion that the shock of the war would
automatically make a new heaven and a new earth, and that the dog
would never go back to his vomit nor the sow to her wallowing in
the mire, is already seen to be a delusion, yet we are far more
conscious of our condition than we were, and far less disposed to
submit to it. Revolution, lately only a sensational chapter in
history or a demagogic claptrap, is now a possibility so imminent
that hardly by trying to suppress it in other countries by arms
and defamation, and calling the process anti-Bolshevism, can our
Government stave it off at home.
Perhaps the most tragic figure of the day is the American
President who was once a historian. In those days it became his
task to tell us how, after that great war in America which was
more clearly than any other war of our time a war for an idea,
the conquerors, confronted with a heroic task of reconstruction,
turned recreant, and spent fifteen years in abusing their victory
under cover of pretending to accomplish the task they were doing
what they could to make impossible. Alas! Hegel was right when he
said that we learn from history that men never learn anything
from history. With what anguish of mind the President sees that
we, the new conquerors, forgetting everything we professed to
fight for, are sitting down with watering mouths to a good square
meal of ten years revenge upon and humiliation of our prostrate
foe, can only be guessed by those who know, as he does, how
hopeless is remonstrance, and how happy Lincoln was in perishing
from the earth before his inspired messages became scraps of
paper. He knows well that from the Peace Conference will come, in
spite of his utmost, no edict on which he will be able, like
Lincoln, to invoke "the considerate judgment of mankind: and the
gracious favor of Almighty God." He led his people to destroy the
militarism of Zabern; and the army they rescued is busy in
Cologne imprisoning every German who does not salute a British
officer; whilst the government at home, asked whether it
approves, replies that it does not propose even to discontinue
this Zabernism when the Peace is concluded, but in effect looks
forward to making Germans salute British officers until the end
of the world. That is what war makes of men and women. It will
wear off; and the worst it threatens is already proving
impracticable; but before the humble and contrite heart ceases to
be despised, the President and I, being of the same age, will be
dotards. In the meantime there is, for him, another history to
write; for me, another comedy to stage. Perhaps, after all, that
is what wars are for, and what historians and playwrights are
for. If men will not learn until their lessons are written in
blood, why, blood they must have, their own for preference.
The Ephemeral Thrones and the Eternal Theatre
To the theatre it will not matter. Whatever Bastilles fall, the
theatre will stand. Apostolic Hapsburg has collapsed; All Highest
Hohenzollern languishes in Holland, threatened with trial on a
capital charge of fighting for his country against England;
Imperial Romanoff, said to have perished miserably by a more
summary method of murder, is perhaps alive or perhaps dead:
nobody cares more than if he had been a peasant; the lord of
Hellas is level with his lackeys in republican Switzerland; Prime
Ministers and Commanders-in-Chief have passed from a brief glory
as Solons and Caesars into failure and obscurity as closely on
one another's heels as the descendants of Banquo; but Euripides
and Aristophanes, Shakespeare and Moliere, Goethe and Ibsen
remain fixed in their everlasting seats.
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