Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw (world of reading TXT) 📕

have done. But the English really do not seem to know when they are thoroughly miserable. An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable. The Statue In short, my daughter, if you go to Heaven without being naturally qualified for it, you will not enjoy yourself there. Ana And who dares say that I am not naturally qualified for it? The most distinguished princes of the Church have never questioned it. I owe it to myself to leave this place at once. The Devil Offended. As you please, Señora. I should have expected better taste from you. Ana Father: I shall expect you to come with me. You cannot stay here. What will people say? The Statue People! Why, the best people are here⁠—princes of the Church and all. So few go to Heaven, and so many come here, that the blessed, once called a Heavenly host, are a continually dwindling minority. The saints, the fathers, the elect of long ago are the cranks, the faddists, the outsiders of today. The Devil It is true. From the beginning of my career I knew that I should win in the long run by sheer weight of public opinion, in spite of the long campaign of misrepresentation and calumny against me. At bottom the universe is a constitutional one; and with such a majority as mine I cannot be kept permanently out of office. Don Juan I think, Ana, you had better stay here. Ana Jealously. You do not want me to go with you. Don Juan Surely you do not want to enter Heaven in the company of a reprobate like me. Ana All souls are equally precious. You repent, do you not? Don Juan My dear Ana, you are silly. Do you suppose Heaven is like Earth, where people persuade themselves that what is done can be undone by repentance; that what is spoken can be unspoken by withdrawing it; that what is true can be annihilated by a general agreement to give it the lie? No: Heaven is the home of the masters of reality: that is why I am going thither. Ana Thank you: I am going to Heaven for happiness. I have had quite enough of reality on Earth. Don Juan Then you must stay here; for Hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from Heaven, which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from Earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The Earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heros and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool’s paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer, “Make me a healthy animal.” But here you escape the tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on Earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. As our German friend put it in his poem, “the poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and the Eternal Feminine draws us ever upward and on”⁠—without getting us a step farther. And yet you want to leave this paradise! Ana But if Hell be so beautiful as this, how glorious must Heaven be! The Devil, the Statue, and Don Juan all begin to speak at once in violent protest; then stop, abashed. Don Juan I beg your pardon. The Devil Not at all. I interrupted you. The Statue You were going to say something. Don Juan After you, gentlemen. The Devil To Don Juan. You have been so eloquent on the advantages of my dominions that I leave you to do equal justice to the drawbacks of the alternative establishment. Don Juan In Heaven, as I picture it, dear lady, you live and work instead of playing and pretending. You face things as they are; you escape nothing but glamor; and your steadfastness and your peril are your glory. If the play still goes on here and on Earth, and all the world is a stage, Heaven is at least behind the scenes. But Heaven cannot be described by metaphor. Thither I shall go presently, because there I hope to escape at last from lies and from the tedious, vulgar pursuit of happiness, to spend my eons in contemplation⁠— The Statue Ugh! Don Juan Señor Commander: I do not blame your disgust: a picture gallery is a dull place for a blind man. But even as you enjoy the contemplation of such romantic mirages as beauty and pleasure; so would I enjoy the contemplation of that which interests me above all things namely, life: the force that ever strives to attain greater power of contemplating itself. What made this brain of mine, do you think? Not the need to move my limbs; for a rat with half my brains moves as well as I. Not merely the need to do, but the need to know what I do, lest in my blind efforts to live I should be slaying myself. The Statue You would have slain yourself in your blind efforts to fence but for my foot slipping, my friend. Don Juan Audacious ribald: your laughter will finish in hideous boredom before morning. The Statue Ha ha! Do you remember how I frightened you when I