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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,[241] 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),[242] 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 ru
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 i
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[246] in the madhouse, when the lunatics, exalted by illusions of splendid talent and visions of a dawning mille
241
Reference to Back to Methuselah (1921), a cycle of five plays by Shaw that revisit the themes of evolution and human destiny.
242
Composers of symphonic poems, such as Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908).
243
Like the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 — 1822), Shaw was a vegetarian.
244
Gum disease.
245
Opening from the stomach into the intestine.
246
Eponymous hero of Henrik Ibsen’s Faustian verse drama of 1867.
247
Abnormal physical or emotional sensitivity.
248
As a warning to others; literally, “to encourage others” (French).