Heartbreak House

Heartbreak House

By George Bernard Shaw.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall
   1. Where Heartbreak House Stands
   2. The Inhabitants
   3. Horseback Hall
   4. Revolution on the Shelf
   5. The Cherry Orchard
   6. Nature’s Long Credits
   7. The Wicked Half Century
   8. Hypochondria
   9. Those Who Do Not Know How to Live Must Make a Merit of Dying
   10. War Delirium
   11. Madness in Court
   12. The Long Arm of War
   13. The Rabid Watchdogs of Liberty
   14. The Sufferings of the Sane
   15. Evil in the Throne of Good
   16. Straining at the Gnat and Swallowing the Camel
   17. Little Minds and Big Battles
   18. The Dumb Capables and the Noisy Incapables
   19. The Practical Business Men
   20. How the Fools Shouted the Wise Men Down
   21. The Mad Election
   22. The Yahoo and the Angry Ape
   23. Plague on Both Your Houses!
   24. How the Theatre Fared
   25. The Soldier at the Theatre Front
   26. Commerce in the Theatre
   27. Unser Shakespeare
   28. The Higher Drama Put Out of Action
   29. Church and Theatre
   30. The Next Phase
   31. The Ephemeral Thrones and the Eternal Theatre
   32. How War Muzzles the Dramatic Poet
4. Dramatis Personae
5. Heartbreak House
   1. Act I
   2. Act II
   3. Act III
6. Colophon
7. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall

Where Heartbreak House Stands

Heartbreak House is not merely the name of the play which follows this preface. It is cultured, leisured Europe before the war. When the play was begun not a shot had been fired; and only the professional diplomatists and the very few amateurs whose hobby is foreign policy even knew that the guns were loaded. A Russian playwright, Chekhov, had produced four fascinating dramatic studies of Heartbreak House, of which three, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull, had been performed in England. Tolstoy, in his Fruits of Enlightenment, had shown us through it in his most ferociously contemptuous manner. Tolstoy did not waste any sympathy on it: it was to him the house in which Europe was stifling its soul; and he knew that our utter enervation and futilization in that overheated drawing-room atmosphere was delivering the world over to the control of ignorant and soulless cunning and energy, with the frightful consequences which have now overtaken it. Tolstoy was no pessimist: he was not disposed to leave the house standing if he could bring it down about the ears of its pretty and amiable voluptuaries; and he wielded the pickaxe with a will. He treated the case of the inmates as one of opium poisoning, to be dealt with by seizing the patients roughly and exercising them violently until they were broad awake. Chekhov, more of a fatalist, had no faith in these charming people extricating themselves. They would, he thought, be sold up and sent adrift by the bailiffs; and he therefore had no scruple in exploiting and even flattering their charm.

The Inhabitants

Chekhov’s plays, being less lucrative than swings and roundabouts, got no further in England, where theatres are only ordinary commercial affairs, than a couple of performances by the Stage Society. We stared and said, “How Russian!” They did not strike me in that way. Just as Ibsen’s intensely Norwegian plays exactly fitted every middle and professional class suburb in Europe, these intensely Russian plays fitted all the country houses in Europe in which the pleasures of music, art, literature, and the theatre had supplanted hunting, shooting, fishing, flirting, eating, and drinking. The same nice people, the same utter futility. The nice people could read; some of them could write; and they were the sole repositories of culture who had social opportunities of contact with our politicians, administrators, and newspaper proprietors, or any chance of sharing or influencing their activities. But they shrank from that contact. They hated politics. They did not wish to realize Utopia for the common people: they wished to realize their favorite fictions and poems in their own lives; and, when they could, they lived without scruple on incomes which they did nothing to earn. The women in their girlhood made themselves look like variety theatre stars, and settled down later into the types of beauty imagined by the previous generation of painters. They took the only part of our society in which there was leisure for high culture, and made it an economic, political, and, as far as practicable, a moral vacuum; and as Nature, abhorring the vacuum, immediately filled it up with sex and with all sorts of refined pleasures, it was a very delightful place at its best for moments of relaxation. In other moments it was disastrous. For prime ministers and their like, it was a veritable Capua.

Horseback Hall

But where were our front benchers to nest if not here? The alternative to Heartbreak House was Horseback Hall, consisting of