The Thoughts and Studies of G. Bernard Shaw: Personal Letters, Articles, Lectures & Essays. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
the dramatic method might be used for their gospel as effectively as the lyric or orchestral method, I was told that unless I could guarantee that the persons in my play actually existed, and the incidents had actually occurred, I, like Bunyan, would be regarded by the elderly soldiers in the army as no better than Ananias. As it was useless for me to try to make these simple souls understand that in real life truth is revealed by parables and falsehood supported by facts, I had to leave the army to its oratorical metaphors and to its popular songs about heartbroken women waiting for the footsteps of their drunken husbands, and hearing instead the joyous step of the converted man whose newly found salvation will dry all their tears. I had not the heart to suggest that these happy pairs were as little authentic as The Second Mrs. Tanqueray; for I spied behind the army’s confusion of truth with mere fact the old doubt whether anything good can come out of the theatre, a doubt as inveterate and neither more nor less justifiable than the doubt of our Secularists whether anything good can come out of the gospels.
But I think Ibsen has proved the right of the drama to take scriptural rank, and his own right to canonical rank as one of the major prophets of the modern Bible. The sooner we recognize that rank and give up the idea of trying to make a fashionable entertainment of his plays the better. It ends in our not performing them at all, and remaining in barbarous and dangerous ignorance of the case against idealism. We want a frankly doctrinal theatre. There is no more reason for making a doctrinal theatre inartistic than for putting a cathedral organ out of tune: indeed all experience shews that doctrine alone nerves us to the effort called for by the greatest art. I therefore suggest that even the sciolists and voluptuaries who care for nothing in art but its luxuries and its executive feats are as strongly interested in the establishment of such a theatre as those for whom the What is always more important than the How, if only because the How cannot become really magical until such magic is indispensable to the revelation of an all-important What.
I do not suggest that the Ibsen theatre should confine itself to Ibsen any more than the Established Church confines itself to Jeremiah. The post-Ibsenists could also be expounded there; and Strindberg should have his place, were it only as Devil’s Advocate. But performances should be in the order of academic courses, designed so as to take audiences over the whole ground as Ibsen and his successors took them; so that the exposition may be consecutive. Otherwise the doctrine will not be interesting, and the audiences will not come regularly. The efforts now being made to regenerate the drama are often wasted through lack of doctrinal conviction and consequent want of system, the net result being an irresolute halting between the doctrinal and the merely entertaining.
For this sort of enterprise an endowment is necessary, because commercial capital is not content in a theatre with reasonable interest: it demands great gains even at the cost of great hazards. Besides, nobody will endow mere pleasure, whereas doctrine can always command endowment. It is the foolish disclaiming of doctrine that keeps dramatic art unendowed. When we ask for an endowed theatre we always take the greatest pains to assure everybody that we do not mean anything unpleasantly serious, and that our endowed theatre will be as bright and cheery (meaning as low and common) as the commercial theatres. As a result of which we get no endowment. When we have the sense to profit by this lesson and promise that our endowed theatre will be an important place, and it will make people of low tastes and tribal or commercial ideas horribly uncomfortable by its efforts bring conviction of sin to them, we shall get endowment as easily as the religious people who are not foolishly ashamed to ask for what they want.
The Impossibilities Of Anarchism (1895)
Anarchists and Socialists
Some years ago, as the practical policy of the Socialist party in England began to shape itself more and more definitely into the program of Social-Democracy, it became apparent that we could not progress without the gravest violations of principles of all sorts. In particular, the democratic side of the program was found to be incompatible with the sacred principle of the Autonomy of the Individual. It also involved a recognition of the State, an institution altogether repugnant to the principle of Freedom. Worse than that, it involved compromise at every step; and principles, as Mr. John Morley once eloquently showed, must not be compromised. The result was that many of us fell to quarrelling; refused to associate with one another; denounced each other as trimmers or Impossibilists, according to our side in the controversy; and finally succeeded in creating a considerable stock of ill-feeling. My own side in the controversy was the unprincipled one, as Socialism to me has always meant, not a principle, but certain definite economic measures which I wish to see taken. Indeed, I have often been reproached for limiting the term Socialism too much to the economic side of the great movement towards equality. That movement, however, appears to me to be as much an Individualist as a Socialist one; and though there are Socialists, like Sir William Harcourt, to whom Socialism means the sum total of humanitarian aspiration, in which the transfer of some millions of acres of property from private to public ownership must seem but an inessential and even undesirable detail, this sublimer shade of Socialism suffers from such a lack of concentration upon definite measures, that, but for the honor and glory of the thing, its professors might as well call themselves Conservatives. Now what with Socialists of this sort, and persons who found that the practical remedy for white slavery was incompatible with the principle of Liberty, and the practical remedy for despotism incompatible with the principle of Democracy, and the practical conduct of politics incompatible with the principle of Personal Integrity (in the sense of having your own way in everything), the practical men were at last driven into frank Opportunism. When, for instance, they found national and local organization of the working classes opposed by Socialists on the ground that Socialism is universal and international in principle; when they found their Radical and Trade Unionist allies ostracized by Socialists for being outside the pale of the Socialist faith one and indivisible; when they saw agricultural laborers alienated by undiscriminating denunciations of allotments as “individualistic”; then they felt the full force of the saying that Socialism would spread fast enough if it were not for the Socialists. It was bad enough to have to contend with the conservative forces of the modern unsocialist State without also having to fight the seven deadly virtues in possession of the Socialists themselves. The conflict between ideal Socialism and practical Social-Democracy destroyed the Chartist organization half a century ago, as it destroyed the Socialist League only the other day. But it has never gone so far as the conflict between Social-Democracy and Anarchism. For the Anarchists will recommend abstention from voting and refusal to pay taxes in cases where the Social-Democrats are strenuously urging the workers to organize their votes so as to return candidates pledged to contend for extensions of the franchise and for taxation of unearned incomes, the object of such taxation being the raising of State capital for all sorts of collective purposes, from the opening of public libraries to the municipalization and nationalization of our industries. In fact, the denunciation of Social-Democratic methods by Anarchists is just as much a matter of course as the denunciation of Social-Democratic aims by Conservatives. It is possible that some of the strangers present may be surprised to hear this, since no distinction is made in the