The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (13 page)

In
Rosmersholm
can be found similarities with Santayana’s work in that the play—bleak and despairing as it is—is about
joy
, about the norm of life being joy, not in the sense that it is the standard, everyday state of man, but
what he is born for
.
16
Rosmer is an apostate, trying to embrace change and effect political reform in Norway, even though it means supporting developments that go against the traditional interests of the aristocracy, of which he is a member. He sees himself as someone innocent and pure who is trying to do good
in a disinterested way. Rebekka, the friend of his wife, Beata, who committed suicide a year ago, still lives in the Rosmer household because she is in love with Rosmer, sharing his political sympathies and actions. As the play unfolds it becomes clear that Rosmer may not be quite so pure as he imagines, or pretends to himself to be; that he is and has been in love with Rebekka. When Professor Kroll, Rosmer’s brother-in-law, learns of his political plans, he is outraged at the class betrayal and begins to sabotage Rosmer’s aims by publishing innuendoes in the local newspaper about what really happened concerning Beata’s death—hinting that it wasn’t suicide due to mental illness, as originally supposed, but to Rosmer and Rebekka having an affair. Rebekka admits that there is some truth to this, a confession that places a terrible burden on both of them.

Ibsen’s message here is that to experience “goodness,” and to value it above personal happiness, “is to experience the meaning of joy.” He highlights this, typically perhaps, with the encroaching tragedy—the fact that neither Rosmer nor Rebekka can live with the guilt that is now exposed, that their relationship
was
to blame for Beata’s suicide. Together they kill themselves, in the same way that Beata died, by jumping into the millrace. “They die for the right reasons,” says Durbach, “to reassert the moral
will, to free their love of guilt, and to establish once again the primacy of human values in the world of ordinary experience. They die in joy, in that complete fulfillment and realization of self in the love of the other which, in the language of an earlier dispensation, would be synonymous with blessedness and grace. . . . They will die as a fusion of autonomous spiritual powers, a single consciousness, a genuine cosmology of two.” “Is it you who goes with me, or I with you?” Rebekka asks.
17
“We go together, Rebekka, I with you, you with me. . . . For now we two are one.”

Joy, which is the aim and purpose of life in Ibsen, comes from the power of moral perception. This is the only eternal value in a desolate world, “even at the cost of life and happiness.”
18
Ibsen’s wide range gave his moral vision great authority.

DESIRE AND CRUELTY

Of Johan August Strindberg it has been said that “there is a shorter distance between blood and ink” than with Ibsen. Indeed, Strindberg’s dramatizations of what he saw as “the awful human impasse” were more urgent than either Ibsen’s or Chekhov’s. As mentioned earlier, Strindberg went through life “afraid and hurrying” and ridden with guilt. He took personally the moral decay that he saw all around him, and this to an extent fueled his “quarrel with God,” which was, as Otto Reinert put it, a much more ambiguous enterprise than Ibsen’s. Fascinated by the new metapsychologies of Freud and Jung (Strindberg and Freud gained the allegiance of the German literary world at much the same time), his object in his plays was to continually expose the self of the alienated modern man, “crawling between heaven and earth, desperately trying to pluck some absolutes from a forsaken universe.” He was determined to make war on God—with Nietzsche he shared a contempt for Christianity—while searching for something new, and he identified with the rebels against God—Cain, Prometheus, Ishmael. Yet he admitted at one point, “I have looked for God and found the devil”; “Our highest achievement [is] . . . the concealment of our vileness”; and “My life adds up as a warning for the improvement of others.”
19

His most characteristic tone is found in his plays
Easter
,
A Dream Play
,
Miss Julie
and
The Ghost Sonata.
Each concerns existential revolt directed against the meaninglessness and contradictions of human existence. For Strindberg, in a world of elusive truth, “only the self has any real validity.”
20
An ardent disciple of Darwin and Nietzsche (he exchanged several letters with the philosopher), Strindberg admitted, “I myself found the joy of life in its strong and cruel struggles,” and in his explorations of the cult of the self he presents us with the argument that it is only Dionysian vitality that carries us along.
21
He himself had a Dionysian vitality, at one stage conducting psychological and drug-induced experiments on his own person, and exploring botany, chemistry and optics in addition to writing sixty plays, thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history and politics, as well as producing the more than sixty paintings exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London in 2005.

He shared certain ideas with the pragmatists and phenomenologists. He was convinced the “world process” is a whirling chaos of flux and yet more flux, and his work is marked, above all, by his impatience with fixity of character. A fatal error of classical theatre, he felt, was “its commitment to constant characterization.” The truth is, as revealed in
Miss Julie
, for example, that man never stops developing and contradicting himself, and the only true picture of him is one that reveals “the multitude of inconsistencies and contradictions” of his soul.
22
Strindberg confirmed that he had lived “multifariously” the lives of all the people he described in his work, and that his plays were an “unending dialectic” between his “many selves.”

At the same time (and contrariwise) he had a “metaphysical hunger,” and though lacking a mystic’s temperament he had a mystic’s impulse toward some single comprehensive experience of reality, an
Anschluss mit Jenseits
, a union with the beyond. His demands on the ultimate were preposterous but he never learned to reduce them. And this helped bring about a profound change in him. Very possibly the real roots of Strindberg’s “preposterous demands” were sexual and pathological. This is certainly one way of understanding what he called his “Inferno crisis” in 1894, a number of terrifying paranoiac psychotic episodes lasting two years, after which he rejected his earlier atheistic position and came to
accept the semi-mystical views of Emanuel Swedenborg and others, who maintained that life is controlled by “powers” or supernatural agents, and that there are “correspondences” between the transcendental world and the real world; that there is, in some mysterious way, an “Absolute” unifying all experience.

Until that point, however, Strindberg had accepted—more than had Ibsen—the almost classic Nietzschean position: that we are many selves, that we are what we make of these selves, and that is why Dionysian vitality is so important. And only by means of that vitality can we maintain our appetite for experimentally exploring each of these selves until we settle on one that we find fulfilling, always acknowledging that life cannot remain static, either, and that once we find one self that makes us seem whole, life may change again soon enough.

But he also occupied a Freudian position in that he thought that the
expression
of what could be “dredged up,” uncensored, from the unconscious was the only way to achieve wholeness, the only way to “de-restrict” desire and “complete” what the self is. But even when these epiphanies occurred, Strindberg didn’t expect them to last forever; the flux of life continued, the Darwinian struggle—as often as not containing cruel elements—never stopped.

“MOZARTIAN JOY” IS THE AIM

George Bernard Shaw, the Irish author of some sixty plays, co-founder of the London School of Economics, an early, prominent member of the Fabian Society and the only person to win both the Nobel Prize in Literature and an Oscar (for his work on
Pygmalion
), both was and wasn’t religious—depending on how you define that term. He thought that Darwin had “dealt a mortal blow to Christianity,” but he was much influenced by Bergson’s “creative evolution.” He wrote a book entitled
The Quintessence of Ibsenism
in which he set out a lot of his own interpretations of Ibsen: that he had sought to rescue his generation from materialism; that the aim of life is self-improvement, self-fulfillment; that morality is not fixed but evolves; that standards can never be eternal; that modern European liter
ature is more important in teaching us how to live than the Bible; and that “Mozartian joy” is the aim.
23

Shaw thought that life and “reality” were essentially experimental, that individuals were themselves experiments. Traditional religions, he thought, were intellectually dishonest and inflexible in their inability to take account of evolution and its many implications, the most important of which was and is the indefiniteness and the mutability of reality itself. Given the uncertainty built into reality by evolution, there could be no permanent, unchanging moral imperative built into life, nor could there be any transcendent validity to anything. At the same time, “We must have a religion if we are to do anything worth doing. If anything is to be done to get our civilization out of the horrible mess in which it is now, it must be done by men who have got a religion.”
24
How he reconciled these two views is part of his achievement.

Shaw was obsessed by change in life, by the possibility—and hope—of improvement, which is why he was as interested and as involved in politics as he was in the theatre. There was no “golden rule” for him—the way we lead our lives must be judged by its
effect
on life itself, on ourselves and others, rather than by conformity to any rules or ideal. “Life consists in the fulfillment of the will, which is constantly growing, and cannot be fulfilled today under the conditions which secured its fulfillment yesterday.”
25

It followed for Shaw that there is more to life than happiness. “There is nothing so insufferable as happiness, except perhaps unhappiness.” Having the leisure to
bother
about whether you are happy or not, he thought, was a guarantee of miserableness—“A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.” But he didn’t idealize work any more than anything else—because he didn’t
trust
idealization. Whereas happiness for him was “self-centered, transient, sterile and uncreative,” he worshipped creativity. With Captain Shotover in
Heartbreak House
he feared “the accursed happiness . . . of yielding and dreaming, instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.”
26

If he had any motto or maxim, it was “Use is life.” He reiterated time and again that “he could find no mighty purpose” in the pursuit of either personal happiness or personal virtue. But he often spoke about finding his sense of life in “use”; he even said he believed himself “used” by an
unspecified force for mighty purposes—he was a follower of Bergson and this is how, for him,
élan vital
worked, perhaps. Traditionally, such feelings might originally have involved reverence for some form of deity, but Shaw argued that the conventional understanding of the Christian God was just another form of idealism.

He expressed this better in words he put into Don Juan’s mouth in
Man and Superman
: “Religion [had been reduced] for me to a mere excuse for laziness, since it had set up a God who looked at the world and saw that it was good, against the instinct in me that looked through my eyes at the world and saw that it could be improved.” From this it naturally followed that the life to come, for Shaw, was not “an eternity spent . . . in a sort of bliss which would bore any active person to a second death,” but “a better life to come for the whole world.”
27
The overlap with the pragmatists here is clear.

In 1895, he wrote to his friend Frederick Evans, a London bookseller and amateur photographer, “I want to write a big book of devotion for modern people, bringing all the truths latent in the old religious dogmas into contact with real life—a gospel of Shawianity, in fact . . . I have been described as a man laughing in the wilderness. That is correct enough, if you accept me as preparing the way for better things.” This, then, was Shaw’s aim, to create “an awareness of something better and the will to bring it into existence.”
28
And this, too, is where Bergson came in. In writing the preface to
Back to Methuselah
(1920), Shaw says: “I had always known that civilization needs a religion as a matter of life or death; and as the concept of Creative Evolution developed I saw that we were at last within reach of a faith which complied with the first condition of all religions that have ever taken hold of humanity; namely, that it must be first and foremost a religion of metabiology. I believe myself to be a servant and instrument of Creative Evolution. God is will. . . . But will is useless without hands and brain. . . . That evolutionary process to me is God.”
29

In looking forward, Shaw was drawn to the superman idea, but his enthusiasm was tempered by two practical concerns: experience showed that if salvation was to be achieved in this world and not the next (which is what he believed, despite his religious feelings), it would have to be available for everyone, not just the Nietzschean few. He also eschewed
the Nietzschean apocalyptic view of salvation: Darwin had taught that human progress toward whatever salvation is would come in “infinitesimal increments.” Here, Shaw’s philosophy and his politics came together: in his socialism and his Fabianism he was a gradualist, an evolutionist rather than a revolutionary.

But he wasn’t entirely in thrall to Darwin. He accepted that human beings can have no life “except a share in the life of the community”; but he thought natural selection wasteful and indirect and that politics represented a more direct form of adaptation to our circumstances, nothing less—in his words—than the mechanism we have devised for fulfilling what he saw, in a Hegelian sense, as the will of the world.
30
A whole raft of characters in his plays—Lady Cicely Waynflete, Undershaft, Caesar, Saint Joan, to name a few—identify with some “essential vitality and will outside themselves.” For Shaw the
giving
of oneself was the central act of faith in life, not as an act of self-abnegation or self-sacrifice, as Christianity would have it, but as a creative duty. The will was central, too, because “The progress of knowledge and civilization does not mend matters; it simply brings with it new needs and, with them, new sufferings and new forms of selfishness. Therefore, the will is still needed.”
31