Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw [hardest books to read txt] 📗

that for me. Love played its part in the earliest dreams and follies and romances I can remember⁠—may I say the earliest follies and romances we can remember?⁠—though we did not understand it at the time. No: the change that came to me was the birth in me of moral passion; and I declare that according to my experience moral passion is the only real passion. Ann All passions ought to be moral, Jack. Tanner Ought! Do you think that anything is strong enough to impose oughts on a passion except a stronger passion still? Ann Our moral sense controls passion, Jack. Don’t be stupid. Tanner Our moral sense! And is that not a passion? Is the devil to have all the passions as well as all the good times? If it were not a passion⁠—if it were not the mightiest of the passions, all the other passions would sweep it away like a leaf before a hurricane. It is the birth of that passion that turns a child into a man. Ann There are other passions, Jack. Very strong ones. Tanner All the other passions were in me before; but they were idle and aimless⁠—mere childish greedinesses and cruelties, curiosities and fancies, habits and superstitions, grotesque and ridiculous to the mature intelligence. When they suddenly began to shine like newly lit flames it was by no light of their own, but by the radiance of the dawning moral passion. That passion dignified them, gave them conscience and meaning, found them a mob of appetites and organized them into an army of purposes and principles. My soul was born of that passion. Ann I noticed that you got more sense. You were a dreadfully destructive boy before that. Tanner Destructive! Stuff! I was only mischievous. Ann Oh Jack, you were very destructive. You ruined all the young fir trees by chopping off their leaders with a wooden sword. You broke all the cucumber frames with your catapult. You set fire to the common: the police arrested Tavy for it because he ran away when he couldn’t stop you. You⁠— Tanner Pooh! pooh! pooh! these were battles, bombardments, stratagems to save our scalps from the red Indians. You have no imagination, Ann. I am ten times more destructive now than I was then. The moral passion has taken my destructiveness in hand and directed it to moral ends. I have become a reformer, and, like all reformers, an iconoclast. I no longer break cucumber frames and burn gorse bushes: I shatter creeds and demolish idols. Ann Bored. I am afraid I am too feminine to see any sense in destruction. Destruction can only destroy. Tanner Yes. That is why it is so useful. Construction cumbers the ground with institutions made by busybodies. Destruction clears it and gives us breathing space and liberty. Ann It’s no use, Jack. No woman will agree with you there. Tanner That’s because you confuse construction and destruction with creation and murder. They’re quite different: I adore creation and abhor murder. Yes: I adore it in tree and flower, in bird and beast, even in you. A flush of interest and delight suddenly clears the growing perplexity and boredom from her face. It was the creative instinct that led you to attach me to you by bonds that have left their mark on me to this day. Yes, Ann: the old childish compact between us was an unconscious love compact. Ann Jack! Tanner Oh, don’t be alarmed⁠— Ann I am not alarmed. Tanner Whimsically. Then you ought to be: where are your principles? Ann Jack: are you serious or are you not? Tanner Do you mean about the moral passion? Ann No, no; the other one. Confused. Oh! you are so silly; one never knows how to take you. Tanner You must take me quite seriously. I am your guardian; and it is my duty to improve your mind. Ann The love compact is over, then, is it? I suppose you grew tired of me? Tanner No; but the moral passion made our childish relations impossible. A jealous sense of my new individuality arose in me. Ann You hated to be treated as a boy any longer. Poor Jack! Tanner Yes, because to be treated as a boy was to be taken on the old footing. I had become a new person; and those who knew the old person laughed at me. The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me. Ann You became frightfully self-conscious. Tanner When you go to heaven, Ann, you will be frightfully conscious of your wings for the first year or so. When you meet your relatives there, and they persist in treating you as if you were still a mortal, you will not be able to bear them. You will try to get into a circle which has never known you except as an angel. Ann So it was only your vanity that made you run away from us after all? Tanner Yes, only my vanity, as you call it. Ann You need not have kept away from me on that account. Tanner From you above all others. You fought harder than anybody against my emancipation. Ann Earnestly. Oh, how wrong you are! I would have done anything for you. Tanner Anything except let me get loose from you. Even then you had acquired by instinct that damnable woman’s trick of heaping obligations on a man, of placing yourself so entirely and helplessly at his mercy that at last he dare not take a step without running to you for leave. I know a poor wretch whose one desire in life is to run away from his wife. She prevents him by threatening to throw herself in front of the engine of the train he leaves her in. That is what all women do. If we try to go where you do not want us to go there is no law to prevent us, but when we take the first step your breasts are