DEATH IS FOR MANY OF US THE GATE OF HELL; BUT WE ARE INSIDE ON THE WAY OUT, NOT OUTSIDE ON THE WAY IN.

When the Serpent assures Eve in the first part of Back to Methuselah that "Death is not an unhappy thing when you have learnt how to conquer it," we are puzzled by the implications these words have. For Shaw, at least at that time, death is nothing but a necessary incident in evolution that allows species to survive by avoiding overpopulation. However, that does not mean that we cannot conquer death. As the Serpent puts it, 

THE SERPENT. The serpent never dies. Some day you shall see me come out of this beautiful skin, a new snake with a new and lovelier skin. That is birth. 

But the words that triggered this post are to be found in the Preface to Misalliance ("A Treatise on Parents and Children"). Shaw's train of thought to arrive at this conclusion is quite straightforward: If you follow the teachings of Judeochristianity, "if you wish to live for ever you must be wicked enough to be irretrievably damned, since the saved are no longer what they were, and in hell alone do people retain their sinful nature: that is to say, their individuality."

That is why "Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in. Therefore let us give up telling one another idle stories, and rejoice in death as we rejoice in birth; for without death we cannot be born again; and the man who does not wish to be born again and born better is fit only to represent the City of London in Parliament, or perhaps the university of Oxford."

I particularly enjoy the last bit, don't you?

HELL IS A CITY MUCH LIKE SEVILLE

Temperatures are reaching 40ºC (or 105ªºF) in my hometown (Córdoba), and all I can think of is hell - both as a place and as an expletive. For me, hell is my kitchen, the only room in the house without air conditioning. But, what was hell for Shaw? Well, there are a few answers to that question in his plays, prefaces, and novels alone. 

Let's start with the quotation that I used for the title of this post. As you probably know, it belongs to the second scene of the third act of Man and Superman - "Don Juan in Hell." What you may not know is that it is a modified line from a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Specifically, it is the opening line of part three (Hell) of "Peter Bell the Third". 

Hell is a city much like London --

A populous and a smoky city;

There are all sorts of people undone,

                 And there is little or no fun done;                   

Small justice shown, and still less pity.

Substituting Seville for London makes sense in the context of the play, but does not say much about Shaw's notions about hell as a place of damnation and punishment. To begin with the lighter side, we also catch a glimpse of what Shaw thought of as hell in "Don Juan in Hell;" when the eponymous character says:

"Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned."

No wonder that, for a music critic, this should be quite an accurate approach to the concept of hell. 

"William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) - Dante And Virgil In Hell (1850)" by William-Adolphe Bouguereau - Unknown. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

If we look at the way hell is interpreted in folklore, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions," as the proverb goes. However, some Shavian characters beg to differ. First, Augustus (Augustus Does His Bit) refuses to believe in this proverb because he does not want to admit his own incompetence: 

AUGUSTUS. This is perfectly monstrous. Not in the least what I intended.

THE CLERK. Hell—

AUGUSTUS. Sir!

THE CLERK [explaining]. Hell, they says, is paved with good intentions.

AUGUSTUS [springing to his feet]. Do you mean to insinuate that hell is paved with MY good intentions—with the good intentions of His Majesty's Government?

Some years earlier, Shaw had also reinterpreted this proverb in his fifth and last novel (An Usocial Socialist) in rather different terms but with a similar underlying idea. In this case Smilash argues against Miss Wilson's prejudices that

"You seek to impose your ideas on others, ostracizing those who reject them. Believe me, mankind has been doing nothing else ever since it began to pay some attention to ideas. It has been said that a benevolent despotism is the best possible form of government. I do not believe that saying, because I believe another one to the effect that hell is paved with benevolence, which most people, the proverb being too deep for them, misinterpret as unfulfilled intentions."

In all, perhaps the best thing about hell as a deterrent concept is the fact that it is eternal and unavoidable. That is the way it is presented in "A Treatise on Parents and Children," the preface to Misalliance, in an attempt to demonstrate the impossibility of secular education (?)

"Secular education is an impossibility. Secular education comes to this: that the only reason for ceasing to do evil and learning to do well is that if you do not you will be caned. This is worse than being taught in a church school that if you become a dissenter you will go to hell; for hell is presented as the instrument of something eternal, divine, and inevitable: you cannot evade it the moment the schoolmaster's back is turned."

And yet, hell can be as "real as a turnip" for those who have experienced loss, anguish, or any other of the terrible feelings that make us human. As Margaret puts it in Fanny's First Play, 

MARGARET. It's no use, mother. I dont care for you and Papa any the less; but I shall never get back to the old way of talking again. Ive made a sort of descent into hell—

MRS KNOX. Margaret! Such a word!

MARGARET. You should have heard all the words that were flying round that night. You should mix a little with people who dont know any other words. But when I said that about a descent into hell I was not swearing. I was in earnest, like a preacher.

MRS KNOX. A preacher utters them in a reverent tone of voice.

MARGARET. I know: the tone that shews they dont mean anything real to him. They usent to mean anything real to me. Now hell is as real to me as a turnip; and I suppose I shall always speak of it like that. Anyhow, Ive been there; and it seems to me now that nothing is worth doing but redeeming people from it.

At any rate, I don't think we should trust any of our preconceived notions about hell. After all, as the Devil reminds us, we tend to take on faith second-hand opinions about hell from people who have never been there: 

DEVIL. [...] Hell is a place far above their comprehension: they derive their notion of it from two of the greatest fools that ever lived, an Italian and an Englishman. The Italian described it as a place of mud, frost, filth, fire, and venomous serpents: all torture. This ass, when he was not lying about me, was maundering about some woman whom he saw once in the street. The Englishman described me as being expelled from Heaven by cannons and gunpowder; and to this day every Briton believes that the whole of his silly story is in the Bible. What else he says I do not know; for it is all in a long poem which neither I nor anyone else ever succeeded in wading through.

I wonder who the Italian and the Englishman may be?

IF YOU WANT TO SUCCEED IN EXAMS, YOU MUST NOT LET YOURSELF GET INTERESTED IN THE SUBJECT.

One of the reasons why I haven't had the chance to update this blog for more than a week can be summed up in one word: exams. I have been making them, printing them, grading them, giving feedback on them - even crying over them. So, I thought I'd have a look at what Shaw had to say about exams, given that he had such scanty formal education, and that he did not think much of his school years, not to mention the educational system he had to endure. Perhaps the best piece of Shavian wit on exams can be found in one of the most precious items of my Shaw collection: THE SPOKEN WORD, a 2-CD set with a selection of his historic radio broadcasts. 

In a broadcast entitled "Talks for Sixth Forms: Modern Education," Shaw discusses everything he considers of interest for young children, including a piece of advice I've already mentioned in this blog. This audio extract used to be available online on the BBC website, but the link provided here is now broken. At least, Radio 4 still offers a nice audio clip with a decent account of Shaw's life and works. At any rate, perhaps one of the most amusing bits in this talk is the quotation I used for the title of this post: 

"If you want to succeed in exams, you must not let yourself get interested in the subject."

However paradoxical, it is true that for someone of Shaw's talent and imagination, Victorian schools must have been stifling, to say the least. I guess that is why he describes his school years as an "educationally null imprisonment" where "I learnt nothing from the curriculum, and at last forgot a good deal of what my uncle had taught me." These and similar remarks belong to the opening paragraphs of "Shame and Wounded Snobbery," one of his famous Sixteen Self Sketches. Perhaps you may want to read a review of the first edition in The Spectator. It's no wonder, then, that A Treatise on Parents and Children (the preface to Misalliance) should include another piece of Shavian wit deriding the type of schooling that children had to undergo in his lifetime: 

"...there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor."

Other people have endorsed similar views in later BBC broadcasts, but with very different aesthetic interests.