BERNARD SHAW 
 
 A- C RITI C AL • STU D Y • BY 
 
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 DRAMATIC 
 PORTRAITS 
 
 " A new force in dramatic criticism. Clever, fear- 
 less, shrewdly analytical, splendidly irreverent 
 where the supposed dramatic gods are concerned, 
 yet paying generous tribute to those who practise 
 the dramatic art according to its highest canons, 
 Mr. Howe offers us a volume which is refreshing in 
 its style, exhilarating in its clearness of vision, and 
 finely satirical in its rejection of the mere fustian 
 of the theatre." Globe. 
 
 " A notable addition to dramatic criticism of to- 
 day." Standard. 
 
 " Good, serious criticism, as all Mr. Howe's is." 
 Manchester Guardian. 
 
 " He talks delightfully about our principal dramatic 
 authors— Sir Arthur Pinero, Mr. Henry Arthur 
 Jones, Mr. Hubert Henry Davies, Mr. Granville 
 Barker, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. John Galsworthy; 
 and he talks the best kind of sense — sense 
 tempered with taste and a feeling for all that 
 matters and all that is sincere in the people he 
 discusses." Saturday Review. 
 
 " We know of no recent work which is calculated 
 to stimulate the spirit of criticism in so wholesome 
 a manner as Mr. Howe's, and to place theatrical 
 criticism on a more lofty plane than it at present 
 occupies." New York Dramatic Mirror. 
 
 '* They do not differ in plan from ordinary dram- 
 atic criticism, but excel most of it in scholarship, 
 in felicity of style, in aptness of quotation and 
 illustration, in ingenuity of special pleading, and 
 general consistency. Mr. Howe has the modern 
 drama at his fingers' ends." 
 
 New York Nation. 
 
 Crown 8vo. Price Five Shillings Net. 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME. 
 
 W. B. YEATS 
 
 By Forrest Reid 
 
 J. M. SYNGE 
 By p. p. Howe 
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 By Ford Madox Hceffer 
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 By R. Ellis Roberts 
 
 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 By Lascelles Abercrojibie 
 
 WALTER PATER 
 By Edward Thomas 
 
 WALT WHITMAN 
 
 By Basil de Selincourt 
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 By Frank Swiknerton 
 
 R. L. STEVENSON 
 
 By Frank Swinnerton 
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 By Cyril Falls 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 By John Drinkwater 
 
 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 By Edward Thomas 
 
 ROBERT BRIDGES 
 
 By F. E. Brett Youns 
 
 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 By Una Taylor 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY 
 
 BY 
 
 P. P. HOWE 
 
 LONDON 
 
 MARTIN SECKER 
 
 NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET 
 
 A D E L P H I 
 
 MCiMXV 
 
" Bernard Shaw ? I never heard of him. He's 
 a Methodist preacher, I suppose " 
 
 THE DOCTORS DILEMMA 
 
^7 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. INTRODUCTION IN DEFIANCE OF 
 
 POSTERITY 9 
 
 II. ECONOMICS 21 
 
 III. ESTHETICS 47 
 
 IV. DRAMATICS 81 
 V. THE SECRET IN THE POET'S HEART 138 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 167 
 
INTRODUCTION IN 
 DEFIANCE OF POSTERITY 
 
 There is a singular modern heresy, sprung 
 from one does not quite know where, according 
 to which it is not possible to speak the truth 
 about a WTiter until that writer is dead; nor 
 can the truth be then immediately spoken, for 
 in the record of the dead, as is well known, we 
 must see nothing but the good. The result of 
 this double inhibition is curious but frequently 
 observed : it is to shift the burden of critical 
 appraisal on to the shoulders of posterity. 
 There was once a man, we are told, who 
 refused to do anything for posterity on the 
 ground that posterity had done nothing for 
 him ; but now we find his saw of little might. 
 In the field at least of literary judgment, we are 
 becoming accustomed to leave to posterity a 
 very delicate and a very difficult duty. Pos- 
 terity to-day is very far from doing nothing for 
 us ; posterity is in the habit of making up our 
 minds. 
 
 9 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Now criticism will do well, on any ground, 
 to offer its opposition to this modern attitude 
 of deference towards posterity, at least in its 
 more extreme manifestations. At the outset of 
 a labour such as the present one, the subject of 
 which happens to be happily far from dead, 
 criticism has flatly to refuse to be intimidated. 
 It might begin with a " Far be it from the 
 present writer to usurp the functions of 
 posterity," or a " We are too near the subject 
 of this study to see his work in a just perspec- 
 tive " ; but, while the preliminary and liberal 
 use of these phrases would gain for their user 
 great credence — since the majority of readers, 
 and one's self among them, are ever open to 
 the familiar pleasure of the incantation — the 
 loss would be more effective than the gain. 
 One cannot for ever be saying " perhaps " ; 
 the polite labour is intolerable. It might be 
 different if the subject of the present study 
 were to be treated here to a biographical 
 explication. A man's personal deeds, a man's 
 private reactions from and upon his con- 
 temporaries, the varying amounts of a man's 
 bank balance, have all their relevance, even 
 their artistic relevance, when his life comes to 
 be written ; and it is perfectly true, indeed it 
 is obvious, that a man's life cannot be written 
 until the life has been lived — although the 
 
 10 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 attempt sometimes is made. (It has been 
 made in the case of our own subject.) Here, if 
 you Hke, is a function for posterity, although 
 not necessarily for a posterity indefinitely 
 removed. 
 
 But with the public works of a creative 
 artist it is different. I know of no real distinc- 
 tion in kind which should make it any more 
 impossible for us to know what we think, and 
 to say it, in regard to a man's just-finished 
 play or picture than in regard to St. Paul's 
 Cathedral, which also is finished. You may 
 speak of the difficulty of getting the work into 
 a just perspective ; but then the difficulty of 
 getting St. Paul's Cathedral into a just perspec- 
 tive was no more and no less on the day it was 
 completed than it is to-day — if anything, 
 indeed, it was less difficult, because you had 
 not the irrelevant accretions which interfere 
 with the view. You had, of course, to step 
 back to do it. Now this act of stepping back 
 is, or should be, a commonplace of criticism ; 
 its achievement is what is known as an attitude 
 of detachment. By all means criticism should 
 be detached. Let us suppose this attitude to 
 be difficult, and you will then know your 
 critic by his ability to achieve it ; but you will 
 not of necessity postpone all critical absolutes 
 until the attitude of detachment is mechani- 
 
 11 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 cally inevitable through passage of time. 
 There is small credit in the act of stepping back 
 from an object which has already receded into 
 a comfortable middle distance. You do not 
 praise a man for his attitude of detachment in 
 regard to the train which has left him behind 
 on the platform. And the criticism of posterity 
 is in this position of vantage, that its attitude 
 of detachment is found ready made. This 
 would amount to a positive and an inherent 
 superiority, worthy perhaps of all the deference 
 which our day is ready to pay to it, if it were 
 not for the fact that works of art are all the 
 same age. There are changes in taste that are 
 cyclical, but these again it is part of the elemen- 
 tary business of criticism to allow for, as a 
 skilful golfer allows for the wind. 
 
 If there were any absolute critical windfall, as 
 it were, which "fell in" to posterity, we should 
 expect every utterance made at this distance of 
 time about Shakespeare to be laden with riches ; 
 while the plain truth is that it is as easy to-day 
 to write nonsense about Shakespeare as it is to 
 write nonsense about Mr. Shaw. No sooner is 
 Shakespeare's self-criticism in terms of marble 
 and the gilded monuments of princes excluded 
 (on the ground that no man can achieve an 
 attitude of detachment in regard to his own 
 works), than the contemporary judgment of 
 
 12 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Ben Jonson, which betrayed a regrettable 
 unwillingness to stand aside and let posterity 
 have the last word, is seen to have proved 
 disturbingly near to the mark. If distance in 
 itself, which lends enchantment to the view, 
 were the creator in addition of some absolute 
 value, we should have to conclude that Mr. 
 Shaw's criticism of Shakespeare, for example, 
 must be juster than Hazlitt's in the exact ratio 
 of three to two — that being the degree in 
 which the astigmatism had been corrected. 
 But the fact is, of course, that the whole 
 of the contributory value of criticism, the 
 benefit accruing from a just appraisal, lies 
 in the critic's eye — in the normality of 
 the personal vision. Regarded as objective 
 material for the exercise of that vision, there is 
 not the smallest difference between the text of 
 Homer and the text of Mr. Hardy, between a 
 play by Shakespeare and a play by Mr. Shaw. 
 Hamlet defined an excellent play as one well 
 digested in the scenes and set down with as 
 much modesty as cunning ; and if you are 
 willing to adopt that as your standard of 
 judgment, or at least to admit that it is a 
 recognizable standard of judgment, there is no- 
 thing to prevent its application to Mr. Shaw's 
 plays as well as to the play in which Hamlet 
 himself appears. It would be different if it 
 
 13 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 were the absolute truth that personal criticism 
 pretended to speak ; for since truth is only to 
 be found in the accumulation of judgments, 
 we might then have to waive our own right of 
 judgment, as we are so often invited to do, in 
 favour of the " judgment of time." But a 
 criticism which has learned the A B C of its 
 business does not pretend it is the absolute 
 truth it is speaking. It pretends to speak the 
 truth that is in it ; and what more, if we 
 demand for it a single mouthpiece, can poor 
 posterity do ? 
 
 II 
 
 Now the subject of this study, as it happens, 
 has had something to say about the normality 
 of the critical vision, as well as about the part 
 properly played by posterity. The subject of 
 this study has had something to say about 
 most things. As regards normal vision, Mr. 
 Shaw has narrated one of the most justly 
 celebrated of his anecdotal reminiscences. The 
 story goes that he went to the oculist to 
 have his eyesight reported upon, and was 
 profoundly dashed, as a lifelong believer in his 
 own eccentricity, when told that it was 
 " normal " ; a temporary disappointment from 
 which our subject quickly recovered, however, 
 when he learned that the eyesight of only five 
 
 14 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 per cent, or fifteen per cent, or whatever the 
 proportion is of the population, was normal. 
 At this fresh evidence that he was one of a 
 good swingeing minority — a minority which he 
 has since publicly estimated at the proportion 
 of one to forty-eight millions — our subject was 
 correspondingly elated ; and, being elated, he 
 wrote a preface about it. With the aid of this 
 clinical misnomer for analogy, our subject 
 established conclusively, to his own satisfac- 
 tion, that he it was alone who saw life steadily 
 and saw it whole, while the rest of his fellows — 
 the " abnormal " herd of the forty-eight 
 millions — were unfortunate enough to see it 
 asquint. The importance of this event in the 
 career of our subject can hardly be over- 
 estimated ; for since we all of us wish to be 
 normal, and since Mr. Shaw alone among us is 
 normal, or almost alone — the five or the fifteen 
 per cent might be regarded, at a generous 
 estimate, as the members of the Fabian 
 Society — it follows of necessity that he has had 
 to do his best to teach us to see with his eyes 
 ever since. Our subject is far too thorough a 
 humanitarian to have endured, beyond his 
 twenty-fourth year or so, the spectacle of the 
 blind leading the blind. Fortunately for us, 
 and in the mercy of Providence, our subject 
 has seen it on the whole as a comic spectacle. 
 
 15 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Waggery, as he says, has been his medium. 
 But our subject has hved to deplore that what 
 he has uttered in jest we have not taken in 
 earnest ; and it is in this regard that he has 
 lent himself to the appeal to posterity. Of 
 course, since the forty-eight millions of us are 
 in enjoyment of a vision which is aberred, our 
 opinion of what precisely our subject has been 
 up to can hardly be worth taking. But the 
 appeal to posterity has been made by our 
 subject not only by what one might call the 
 authority of the Census (a census of folly which 
 Carlyle was the first to take), but also by the 
 light of philosophy ; f or " a jest," he has 
 declared, " is an earnest in the womb of time." 
 Now Hamlet, if he did not say that, said 
 something very much like it, and the thought 
 has been long enough in the world for one to 
 have, on general grounds, no quarrel with it. 
 Twenty years ago, when our subject was 
 writing the ripest of his stage comedies, the 
 motor-car was a jest which had to proceed, 
 under statutory enactment, at a walking pace 
 with a man with a red flag in front of it. To 
 have proposed in the year 1894, from your 
 place in the House, that the legal limit for 
 motor-cars should be what it is at present, 
 would have been to run serious risk of being 
 unseated on petition as a jester. The jest of a 
 
 16 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 legal limit of twenty miles an hour has now for 
 some time been an earnest (and a shameful 
 thing it should be so low ! — that is what wc 
 to-day are saying) ; if Mr. Shaw tells us that 
 twenty years ago it was a jest which was an 
 earnest in the womb of time, we shall understand 
 him quite perfectly. For centuries in England 
 it was a jest to say that pigs might fly, and 
 pigs may fly to-day any afternoon they are 
 taken to Hendon. On general grounds, then, 
 no quarrel is possible with our subject's utter- 
 ance, that a jest is an earnest in the womb of 
 time. But on the particular ground of Mr. 
 Shaw's own jests, we have to refuse very 
 positively one inference from this utterance, or 
 else this study cannot possibly be proceeded 
 with. For one inference is that a jest of Mr. 
 Shaw's cannot fairly be the subject of criticism 
 until it has issued from the womb of time in 
 good earnest. In other words, we may not say 
 that we think Mr. Shaw wrong until we have 
 given Time time to prove him right. We may 
 not say that we think Mr. Shaw right for fear 
 that posterity should know him to be wrong. 
 If Mr. Shaw prophesies the full working 
 beauties of Social Democracy in England (as 
 he does, if only we miserable forty-eight 
 millions have the will), we may not say whether 
 we should personally fancy Social Democracy 
 B 17 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 until we find ourselves in the middle of it. 
 In other words, we are to get it, and then to 
 have full liberty to say whether we are happy 
 or not. We are not to say whether we like the 
 Superman until we find ourselves Supermen — 
 or until our posterity find that they are 
 nothing of the sort. 
 
 Now this is the negation of criticism, and, 
 ridiculous as it may appear, it is yet not far 
 from what is sometimes, implicitly or ex- 
 plicitly, put forward. We may not say whether 
 we should like posterity to regard Mr. Shaw 
 as a great man or not, and in what particulars, 
 until posterity has had an opportunity for 
 declaring for itself in the matter. Far be it 
 from the present writer to usurp the functions 
 of posterity ; but there is one function which 
 posterity cannot perform, and that is to add to 
 the illumination of the present. To-morrow's 
 moon may have shaken off its attendant clouds, 
 but to-morrow's moon won't help us home 
 to-night to supper, and we had far better be 
 guided by the light of our own horn lantern. 
 Our subject has complained that he has 
 written plays to explain his views, and has 
 written prefaces to explain his plays, and that 
 he could quite well explain the prefaces if he 
 chose, only the result would be that people 
 who have misunderstood the plays and the 
 
 18 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 prefaces would misunderstand the further 
 explanations ten times more. If this statement 
 of affairs were the plain truth, this book would 
 have to look no further for its justification ; 
 on the analogy of the national game (which one 
 is sure our subject must dislike extremely) one 
 might advocate a change of bowling. But 
 though our subject has spoken the truth that 
 is in him, no man more gallantly, it cannot be 
 described as the plain truth. When Mr. Shaw 
 seems to assert (if he can forgive the metaphor) 
 that he has bowled his heart out and failed to 
 reach the wicket, the assertion is excessive. 
 No man of letters has taken the middle stump 
 of his generation more successfully, but while 
 he has been attacking in earnest the defenders 
 have insisted upon regarding it as only a game. 
 Now that has its tragic aspects ; and it is 
 apparent already that the task of this study 
 will be nine parts that of reconciliation. " I 
 shall desire you of more acquaintance, good 
 Master Cobweb." Only if our subject is 
 disappointed in contemporaneity because it 
 has taken the jest and left the earnest, not- 
 withstanding that our age, as he says, " walks 
 visibly pregnant with it," we cannot leave it 
 to posterity to settle their difference. If this 
 task becomes a study in embryotomy, we shall 
 have to go through with it. 
 
 19 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 III 
 Let us assert, then, at the outset of this task, 
 that since its subject has issued to the world a 
 considerable body of work it is possible to 
 know, and to say, what we think of that body 
 of work. In face of the fact that that body of 
 work has patently not been without influence 
 on its generation, let us assert that the time has 
 come when it is possible to appraise that 
 influence. Let us even assert the belief that, 
 added to as we hope that work will be, its 
 total value will not now be considerably 
 augmented or modified ; coupling with this 
 belief another, that that work's influence has 
 at this moment reached a point at which it is 
 singularly susceptible of at least approximate 
 estimation. In both these regards posterity 
 will enjoy a natural advantage over us ; but we 
 need not be discouraged on that account. Let 
 us add, in conclusion of these critical prelimi- 
 naries, that the natural advantages posterity 
 will enjoy in the matter of biographical expli- 
 cation posterity is hereby left in undisputed 
 possession of; for biographical explication is no 
 part of the intention of the present study. The 
 deprivation may be suffered all the more will- 
 ingly since the subject of our study, we may 
 be sure, will continue to be his own biographer. 
 
 20 
 
II 
 
 ECONOMICS 
 
 If we turn in this section of this study to 
 the consideration of Mr. Shaw as pohtical 
 economist, it is with no wish to surprise that we 
 do so. For if we come to think about it, it was 
 to pohtical economy that Mr. Shaw himself 
 turned first, if we neglect for the moment (but 
 only for the moment) his almost but not 
 entirely negligible novels. And if we do not 
 think about it, if we have not, that is to say, the 
 sequential order of our subject's career as 
 clearly before us as we should have if it were his 
 biography we were engaged on, do we not then 
 with equal ease deduce the economist from the 
 dramatist ? It will be some part of the purpose 
 of this study to do so. We shall find that Mr. 
 Shaw, in his capacity as dramatist (and that, 
 after all, is only one of his capacities), has built, 
 not on the human heart, as Browning's Sordello 
 exhorted the poet to do, but on the " economic 
 man " of the economists. And if my word is 
 not conclusive, as, at this stage, it can hardly 
 
 21 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 be expected to be, we have the word of Mr. 
 Shaw himself, who wrote in a letter to 
 Professor Henderson, " In all my plays my 
 economic studies have played as important a 
 part as a knowledge of anatomy does in the 
 works of Michael Angelo." 
 
 II 
 
 There is no man who prides himself more on 
 the normality of his vision than the economist ; 
 indeed, he is often a man who thinks that no 
 other men have any vision at all. Political 
 economy is the only game you may engage in 
 (except perhaps politics) with forty-e?^ht million 
 pawns, and have for your board the national 
 exchequer. At the same time it is one of the 
 most secret of vices ; more secret than politics, 
 in which you have occasionally to meet your 
 opponent at the poll, although you need never 
 meet his arguments. But the political econo- 
 mist may go on playing his own game in his own 
 corner, awarding us our income under his pet 
 law of wages, which he terms an "iron" law, 
 and disposing of it to his own satisfaction ; and 
 we, who make our living and spend it — or who 
 spend it without making it — may not be aware 
 of his existence. I suppose there are not ten 
 men at this moment in the City of London, 
 
 22 
 
ECONOMICS 
 
 engaged in bringing us our bread, who have the 
 smallest grasp of the economic theory, as 
 distinct from the business principle, of what 
 they are doing. This is neither to their credit 
 nor their discredit ; the unreality of the econ- 
 omist is almost a point of faith in England. 
 Partly the reason is that the orthodox econo- 
 mists have contented themselves with " ex- 
 plaining " the system by which we live, and 
 as their explanation has always amounted to 
 one hundred good reasons why that system 
 cannot possibly be different in any respect, it 
 is no surprise that we have not taken the 
 trouble to read them. For the system by 
 which one lives, the iron laws, that is to say, 
 which govern the fact that one's particular 
 slice of bread and butter is no bigger, is not a 
 thing one wants to read about — merely to 
 learn that one's slice can be no bigger. It is not 
 a thing like the theory of music, without some 
 study of which one cannot be a musician ; or 
 the theory of literary technique, without which 
 one cannot write good novels (despite a very 
 general belief to the contrary). By the sweat 
 of one's brow to earn one's bread is partly an 
 instinct and partly a stern necessity ; and there 
 is small blame to the plain man if he think 
 neither his instincts nor his necessities a proper 
 subject for theoretic study. 
 
 23 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 But the Socialists altered all this, because 
 they said to the plain man if you study the 
 theory of the system by which you live you will 
 see that your slice may be, nay ought to be, 
 bigger. The Socialists thus provided the first 
 definite inducement in the history of the world 
 (for the study is as old as Aristotle) for the 
 plain man to read the economists. He would 
 read the orthodox economists, that is to say, to 
 find them out ; to detect in their writings 
 what Bentham called the sinister interest — to 
 convict them of canonizing a system merely 
 because it was the system that was current. 
 The Socialists he would read to obtain a glimpse 
 of an ideal system ; or to learn how, by a 
 catastrophic upheaval of the simplest kind, he 
 might increase the size of his own slice of bread 
 and butter. Unfortunately the Socialists, when 
 they were economists, were not very good 
 artists, and when they were artists, were not very 
 good economists ; and frequently they were 
 neither. How charming a picture Fourier 
 might have made of the phalanstery, if he had 
 had one quarter of the art of Sir Thomas More ; 
 but he had not any at all, merely the vocabu- 
 lary of his calling, which was that of a com- 
 mercial traveller. How persuasive Marx might 
 have been, if his explanation that all values are 
 only definite masses of congealed labour-time, 
 
 24 
 
ECONOMICS 
 
 and therefore the sole property of the plain 
 man, had not been more positively unreadable 
 than the explanations of the orthodox econo- 
 mists, in addition to being less accurate. With 
 what eagerness we should have thrown our- 
 selves into the Utopia of Morris, if the limpid 
 and beautiful book had contained any more 
 precise instructions for its attainment than 
 the conversion of the Houses of Parliament 
 into a municipal dung-heap. But it didn't ; 
 and even though England for once had grown a 
 Socialist, instead of importing him — Fourier, 
 Saint-Simon, Engels, Marx — the system went 
 on working, and the orthodox economists went 
 on explaining it to the entire satisfaction of 
 themselves and of the very few people who 
 wanted to listen. 
 
 Ill 
 
 That was the position when our subject made 
 his double discovery, that his eyesight was 
 normal and that the population of these 
 islands were mostly fools. (Both these dis- 
 coveries are undated, but I think we may take 
 them as occurring not long after 1856, in which 
 year Mr. Shaw was born in Dublin. I am 
 aware that News from Nowhere did not make 
 its appearance until 1890, fourteen years after 
 Mr. Shaw came to London, and a year later 
 
 25 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 than Fabian Essays.) I think it probable that 
 a third discovery antedated these two by a 
 little, and that was our subject's discovery that 
 he was a good hand at an explanation ; indeed, 
 if it were the custom to record as religiously the 
 first words of great men as it is their last — a 
 custom which presents unfortunate difficulties 
 since there is no way of knowing a great man 
 in his cradle — we may be pretty sure that the 
 first words of our subject would prove to be, 
 " Let me explain." Once more, whether this 
 were so or whether this were not so (and it is 
 a domestic scene which, if it occurred, Mr. 
 Shaw has omitted unaccountably from his 
 so carefully presented reminiscences), we should 
 be inclined to deduce it from our subject's 
 work in general ; in which, whether dramatic 
 or extra-dramatic, no three words have en- 
 joyed more frequent recurrence. For every 
 reason, then, of destination and of choice, the 
 field of the political economist was open to 
 our subject. He found it for the first time in 
 the history of English letters an arena in which 
 a man who was bent upon catching the eye of 
 his generation might seriously think of suc- 
 ceeding. Ruskin had Thackeray to thank for 
 a good deal when he found Unto this Last too 
 shocking for the Cornhill ; but Ruskin wrote 
 before the Socialists had rendered the explana- 
 
 26 
 
ECONOMICS 
 
 tions of the orthodox economists really in- 
 teresting to the general public, and he had 
 made his name in other fields before he turned 
 to teaching political economy to young ladies' 
 academies and to long-suffering and hypo- 
 thetical working men. It is impossible to 
 assert that the physiocratic sentimentalism of 
 Ruskin, in spite of the eloquence of its ex- 
 pression, has very much influence in England 
 at this moment. But our subject found in the 
 orthodox economist a prime instance of the 
 " hopelessly private person " for whom, doubt- 
 less by nature, he had an antipathy. He 
 found a sufficient number of persons — shall we 
 say that he found the newspapers ? — willing 
 to give their attention to the phenomenon of 
 tlie Socialists turning upon the system of 
 society the guns they had wrested from the 
 hands of its trusted if neglected defenders, 
 the economists. He found within his own 
 person an exceptional brain, quite equal to 
 doing rather better in any field of public 
 activity that it chose than most of its con- 
 temporaries. Add to this a severe and duti- 
 ful sobriety of character which religiously 
 kept that brain working when the nearest 
 rivals among those contemporaries happened 
 to be taking a holiday ; and a gift of " effective 
 assertion " (which is our subject's definition 
 
 27 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 of style), a gift already disciplined to the 
 writing of his quartette of voluble novels. 
 And add to this again the artless pleasure of 
 the undergraduate in mere ratiocination. What 
 better field for these things to cut a figure 
 in, in the English 'eighties at any rate, than 
 that of the economists ? Our subject soon 
 was busy cutting it. Within a very small 
 number of years he was delivering an address 
 to the Economic Section of the British Asso- 
 ciation — putting them into their own corner, as 
 it were, and saying, " Let me explain." 
 
 IV 
 
 It is not without significance that what Mr. 
 Shaw undertook to explain to the economists 
 was The Transition to Social Democracy, for 
 that is what the members of The Fabian 
 Society have been explaining to one another 
 ever since. I do not wish, in saying this, to be 
 misunderstood. The Fabian Society, a body 
 of persons of both sexes who have met together 
 once a fortnight for a quarter of a century to 
 listen to Mr. Shaw, and have left before his 
 speech was over if the duration of its interest 
 conflicted with the departure of their train 
 for the suburbs, are only of significance to the 
 subject of our present study in so far as their 
 
 28 
 
ECONOMICS 
 
 history is his history. In themselves, and 
 apart from the admirable special activities of 
 Mr, and Mrs. Sidney Webb and others of the 
 platform figures, they may be described as 
 the passionate friends of the unreality of the 
 economist. For a quarter of a century they 
 have discussed how they will behave, how we 
 shall all behave, how they will allow us to 
 behave, " under Socialism." It is an amiable 
 hobby, like another, and they have pursued 
 it with the diligent single-mindedness with 
 which another body of persons might discuss 
 how vegetables behave under glass. I propose 
 to assert that Mr. Shaw the borough councillor, 
 the apostle of the cart and trumpet, the cogent 
 advocate of municipal trading, has all the 
 time been a sufferer from the unreality of the 
 economist. He cleared the economists out of 
 their corner just as, later on, he cleared the 
 dramatists out of the theatre, and for the same 
 reason — to make room for some goods of his 
 own which he had all ready for delivery. For 
 the unreality of the orthodox economists he 
 substituted, in the name of reality, a new 
 unreality ; just as for the unreality of the 
 orthodox dramatists he went on to substitute, 
 in the name of reality, a new unreality again. 
 But we must not get on too fast. 
 
 What is, in actual fact, the outcome of our 
 29 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 subject's series of treatises — the Fabian Essays 
 of 1889, The Impossibilities of Anarchism, 
 Socialism for Millionaires, Socialism and 
 Superior Brains, Fabianism and the Empire, 
 Fabianism and the Fiscal Question, The Com- 
 monsense of Municipal Trading, The Case for 
 Equality of 1914 ? 
 
 It is a very delightful series, displaying at 
 every point the tongue of the ready debater as 
 well as the pen of the ready writer. In the 
 series, one would say, lives the athletic charm 
 of our subject's public figure, as it has talked 
 down to its generation from a hundred 
 platforms. That, in itself, is very delightful. 
 One is sure that the series has been read 
 by very many people who have not read 
 any other kind of economist at all. They 
 have imbibed a very great deal of perfectly 
 sound economic theory, and they have not 
 imbibed any nonsense. Our subject's first 
 effort in this particular field was to offer 
 a pronounced opposition to the theory of 
 Marx ; partly, no doubt, moved by an instinct 
 to throw out of the field the biggest occupying 
 figure he found in it ; partly because our 
 subject has at any time given really very little 
 quarter to other people's nonsense. On the 
 subject of Value, he threw out Marx and allied 
 himself to the late Mr. Stanley Jevons, an 
 
 30 
 
ECONOMICS 
 
 orthodox economist. This annoyed the 
 Sociahsts ; but Mr. Shaw has always dcUghted 
 in annoying those people whose attachment 
 to an idea is by means of a sentiment. Along 
 this line, if it were any part of om^ immediate 
 business, we might discover in him a great 
 deal of aesthetic as well as intellectual integrity. 
 He annoyed the friends of the little peoples 
 by his advocacy, because of its superior 
 efficiency, of British ascendancy in South 
 Africa ; when the Americanized trust then 
 known as the Times Book Club promised 
 superior efficiency, he annoyed the friends of 
 the freedom of letters by giving the enterprise 
 his support. In fact, I suppose our subject 
 has always been more than anything else in 
 love with efficiency. " Become efficient at 
 your own particular trade or profession," has 
 been his advice to the young Fabians, " and 
 then tell everyone you are a Socialist." That 
 has been his policy of peaceful permeation ; in 
 contradistinction to the jolly umbrella-shaking 
 of Mr. Hyndman amongst the lions in Trafalgar 
 Square, and the distinguished hidalgoism of 
 Mr. Cunninghame Graham in the same setting. 
 It is advice with which it is not possible to 
 quarrel. 
 
 And our subject's love of efficiency is the 
 real reason why he dislikes the poor so much. 
 
 31 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 The one actual outcome of all these treatises — 
 oh yes, and of a round dozen of prefaces 
 which I haven't forgotten — is our subject's 
 intense dislike for the poor. That is something 
 new in the science of political economy. Be- 
 cause it is a very early utterance which remains 
 absolutely personal and characteristic, I pro- 
 pose to quote here a fairly long passage from 
 the Fabian Essays : 
 
 But indeed the more you degrade the workers, 
 robbing them of all artistic enjoyment, and all chance 
 of respect and admiration from their fellows, the more 
 you throw them back, reckless, on the one pleasure and 
 the one human tie left to them — the gratification of 
 their instinct for producing fresh supplies of men. 
 You will applaud this instinct as divine until at last 
 this excessive supply becomes a nuisance : there 
 comes a plague of men ; and you suddenly discover 
 that the instinct is diabolic, and set up a cry of 
 " over population." But your slaves are beyond 
 caring for your cries : they breed like rabbits ; and 
 their poverty breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, 
 disease, obscenity, drunkenness and murder. In 
 the midst of the riches which their labour piles up 
 for you, their misery rises up too and stifles you. 
 You withdraw in disgust to the other end of the town, 
 from them ; you set your life apart from theirs by 
 every class barrier you can devise ; and yet they 
 swarm about you still : your face gets stamped with 
 your habitual loathing and suspicion of them : your 
 
 32 
 
ECONOMICS 
 
 ears get so filled with the language of the vilest of 
 them that you break into it when you lose your self- 
 control : they poison your life as remorselessly as 
 you have sacrificed theirs heartlessly. You begin to 
 believe intensely in the devil. Then comes the terror 
 of their revolting ; the drilling and arming of bodies 
 of them to keep down the rest ; the prison, the 
 hospital, paroxysms* of frantic coercion, followed by 
 paroxysms of frantic charity. And in the meantime, 
 the population continues to increase ! 
 
 And to place against that passage, for your 
 edification, I give you another from the 
 preface to the Major Barbara of nearly twenty 
 years later : 
 
 Now what does this Let Him Be Poor mean ? It 
 means let him be weak. Let him be ignorant. Let him 
 become a nucleus of disease. Let him be a standing 
 exhibition and example of ugliness and dirt. Let 
 him have rickety children. Let him be cheap and 
 let him drag his fellows down to his price by selling 
 himself to do their work. Let his habitations turn our 
 cities into poisonous congeries of slums. Let his 
 daughters infect our young men with the diseases of 
 the streets and his sons revenge him by turning the 
 nation's manhood into scrofula, cowardice, cruelty, 
 hypocrisy, political imbecility, and all the other fruits 
 of oppression and malnutrition. Let the undeserving 
 become still less deserving ; and let the deserving lay 
 up for himself, not treasures in heaven, but horrors in 
 C 33 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 hell upon earth. This being so, is it really wise to let 
 him be poor ? Would he not do ten times less harm 
 as a prosperous burglar, incendiary, ravisher or 
 murderer, to the utmost limits of humanity's com- 
 paratively negligible impulses in these directions ? 
 Suppose we were to abolish all penalties for such 
 activities, and decide that poverty is the one thing we 
 will not tolerate — that every adult with less than, say, 
 £365 a year, shall be painlessly but inexorably killed, 
 and every hungry half-naked child forcibly fattened 
 and clothed, would not that be an enormous improve- 
 ment on our existing system, which has already 
 destroyed so many civilizations, and is visibly 
 destroying ours in the same way ? 
 
 Now the voice of those two utterances is 
 demonstrably the same voice, which has gone 
 on saying the same things with an iteration 
 which cannot possibly be condemned. It is 
 the voice, I think, of a man who does not like 
 our old world at all, who pushes it away with 
 the tips of gloved fingers, with the request 
 that it will kindly make itself clean and tidy 
 before presenting itself again for attention. 
 It is a voice that is attenuated, almost into 
 shrillness, by its burden of aesthetic disgust. 
 How enormously (we may conceive that voice 
 saying) how enormously much more I should 
 like you people if you presented a uniform 
 face ; a face, above all, that was uniformly 
 
 34 
 
ECONOMICS 
 
 clean ! Blanche Sartorius, in Mr. Shaw's first 
 play, spoke in much this tone when she said : 
 " Oh, I hate the poor. At least, I hate those 
 dirty, drunken, disreputable people who live 
 like pigs." And in one of the latest of Mr. 
 Shaw's plays— the play which was on no 
 longer ago than the other day — one of the 
 statements of a quarter of a century earlier 
 was illustrated : the statement that our ears 
 get so filled with the language of the vile 
 that we break into it when we lose our self- 
 control. 
 
 But it is the message, and not the tone, of 
 the voice which is to the point for the moment. 
 The way to a uniform cleanness of face and of 
 character is by means of a uniform income. 
 That is Mr. Shaw's economico-psychologic dis- 
 covery. That is the actual outcome of our 
 subject's series of treatises. It is hinted at in 
 Fabian Essays^ ; it is presented for Mr. 
 Mallock's consideration in Socialism and 
 
 1 At that point in Mr. Shaw's second essay at which it is sug- 
 gested that "rent of managerial ability might in course of time 
 become negative," that is to say that the manager should receive 
 le^s for his work than the artisan, the captain less than the cabin- 
 boy, because, "under Socialism," of the honour of superior service- 
 That, in the precise spirit of the undergraduate who suggests to his 
 tutor in political economy that interest should be negative — that is 
 to say, a payment demanded for capital conserved instead of a pay- 
 ment conceded for capital used — is the genesis of Mr. Shaw's 
 discovery. 
 
 35 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Superior Brains ; it is affirmed in the preface 
 to Major Barbara ; it is reaffirmed in The 
 Case for Equality. Incomes for All is the one 
 positive contribution to the science of political 
 economy made by our subject. It is the 
 Shavian theory of distribution, as you might 
 say the Jevonian theory of value or the 
 Ricardian theory of rent. It is the categoric 
 alternative to Let Him Be Poor. It is the 
 means by which *' all the detestable fruits of 
 inequality of condition " (see The Impossibili- 
 ties of Anarchism) are to be nipped off in the 
 bud.i 
 
 * If this were primarily an economic study we might pause to 
 see how Mr. Shaw has proved himself to be^ with this single ex- 
 ception, an orthodox economist ; or rather, an orthodox economist 
 with a Socialist bias — with the orthodox Socialist bias. For 
 example, we might read in our Mill : " To make the public pay 
 much that the treasury may receive a little, is not an eligible 
 mode of obtaining a revenue. In the case of manufactured articles 
 the doctrine involves a palpable inconsistency. The object of the 
 duty as a means of revenue, is inconsistent with its affording, even 
 incidentally, any protection. It can only operate as protection in 
 so far as it prevents importation ; and to whatever degree it pre- 
 vents importation, it affords no revenue." Now that is precisely 
 what Mr. Shaw himself has put forward from one thousand plat- 
 forms ; it has been taken to be one of his daringly sudden simplifi- 
 cations. That, for example, among other things, is Fabianism and 
 the Fiscal question. . . . But this is not primarily an economic 
 study. It will not be irrelevant to have noted here our subject's 
 pleasure in making any kind of a point, whether it is his own 
 or another's ; for that, in its essence, is the debater's pleasure. 
 He has done nothing as a constructive economist to be compared 
 with Mr. J. A. Hobson's analysis of the industrial system, for 
 example. 
 
 36 
 
ECONOMICS 
 
 What the Fabians discovered, in actual fact, 
 was that it was much more amusing to talk 
 about Socialism than to achieve it. That has 
 very little to do with Quintus Fabius ; but 
 we need not trouble ourselves about that. I 
 think it was Mr. Chesterton who, having 
 taken off his hat to our subject's superior 
 brain, took it off again to the fact that our 
 subject had devoted his superior brain to talk- 
 ing about drain-pipes. Now we may be all for 
 taking off our hats to our subject, and yet not 
 be unaware that he has enjoyed himself talk- 
 ing about drain-pipes. Mr. Shaw has enjoyed 
 talking about everything. It is not as though 
 Mr. Shaw particularly promised himself the 
 pleasure of talking about something else, and 
 gave it up in order to talk about drain-pipes 
 from a stern sense of duty. The stern sense of 
 duty is there plain enough in our subject, but 
 I do seriously suggest that we see it in a better 
 perspective if we admit that a drain-pipe is a 
 peculiarly pleasant thing to juggle with to a 
 man of Mr. Shaw's temperament. In the first 
 place a drain-pipe is " real," a real solid fact, 
 with no nonsensical romance about it ; and 
 in the second place there are very few men who 
 
 37 
 
BERNARD S HA W 
 
 can balance a" drain-pipe. No one would have 
 expected the late Oscar Wilde, for example, 
 to make a very good performance with a drain- 
 pipe ; and sure enough when at one point in 
 his career he too caught the Fabian fever (for 
 he was particularly impressionable, far more 
 so than our subject), it was not drain-pipes 
 that he wrote about, but the soul of man, 
 " under Socialism." 
 
 The Soul of Man under Socialism has not 
 hitherto, so far as one is aware, been regarded 
 as a Fabian essay ; but that is what it is in 
 reality. For the moment, Wilde permitted 
 himself the amusement of granting that Utopia 
 had, indeed, been added to our dominions ; and 
 he made for himself in it, along with the other 
 artists, a haven of artificial seclusion in which, 
 with beautiful pens and fair white paper before 
 him, the artist would sit down and would look 
 out over a garden at the high wall which saved 
 him from the rude stresses of a competitive 
 world, and would produce — one may be quite 
 sure, nothing. Now if Mr. Chesterton meant 
 that Mr. Shaw would rather have written 
 about the place of the artist " under Socialism " 
 than about drain-pipes, I think he made a mis- 
 take. Did not Mr. Shaw himself write, as 
 we shall find in the next chapter, an exposure 
 of the current nonsense about artists being 
 
 38 
 
ECONOMICS 
 
 degenerate ? If artists were not degenerate in 
 the highly competitive and distressing year 
 1895, after having to put up with all but five 
 years of what Mr. Shaw has asserted posterity 
 will call " the wicked century," it is surely a fair 
 inference that in our subject's opinion Utopia 
 is not necessary on their account. As a matter 
 of fact, our subject has steadfastly refused to 
 talk any of the current nonsense about artists ; 
 he has worn his hygienic mantle with the most 
 complete absence of affectedness, and that is 
 one of the most charming things about him. 
 He has put on his gloves and balanced a drain- 
 pipe, because — as he has said of the writing of 
 prefaces — he can. And when he came to the 
 writing of plays, he did not immediately drop 
 his drain-pipe, as Wilde dropped his Utopianism 
 and submitted himself to the impress of the 
 highly competitive West End managers — he 
 wrote plays about drain-pipes. 
 
 Our subject, then, has been happy with his 
 drain-pipe : that is the precise spectacle pre- 
 sented by, let us say, The Commonsense of 
 Municipal Trading. If he had not been happy, 
 we should not have read it ; and I suppose we 
 all have done that. But while Mr. Shaw has 
 been busy explaining — with the aid of a great 
 deal of sound economic theory, with a wit 
 which refuses to be frowned off the field of the 
 
 39 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 dullards, and with an incurable zest in the 
 mere processes and triumphs of debate — the 
 precise advantages of the fact that our drain- 
 pipes have been municipalized, he has talked 
 himself into a curious delusion. He has talked 
 himself into the delusion that all this time he 
 has been " pointing out " and " clearing up '' 
 he has escaped the unreality of the other 
 economists. Of Life he has said, " Only by 
 intercourse with men and women can we learn 
 anything about it " — with the obvious implica- 
 tion that it is by this means that he himself has 
 learned all about Life. And yet it is the hard 
 fact that the Fabian Society and the cart and 
 trumpet are not intercourse with men and 
 women in the completest of possible senses. 
 If we were to take our subject at his 
 own valuation, he would appear as one of 
 those who, in Plato's phrase, " have gained a 
 knowledge of each thing in its reality." By 
 becoming elected to a Borough Council one 
 gains a knowledge of a Borough Council in its 
 reality, and that is admirable ; but one does 
 not of necessity gain a knowledge of men and 
 women other than Borough Councillors. I 
 propose to point the reader to those passages 
 quoted on pp. 32, 33, and to assert that they do 
 not betray a knowledge of life gained primarily 
 by intercourse with men and women. I will 
 
 40 
 
ECONOMICS 
 
 even go so far as to say that they are the words 
 of a man to whom any kind of ordinary mixed 
 public intercourse — say, at the Oval, or at a 
 Socialist meeting, unless he were on the plat- 
 form — would be extremely distasteful. The 
 fact is that our subject is a platform figure, 
 whose principal intercourse with men and 
 women, we should say from his works, has been 
 by means of talking about them. 
 
 VI 
 
 We shall find when we come to Mr. Shaw's 
 plays, with their machinery of the preface, that 
 his procedure is just what we should expect. It 
 is an a priori procedure, from the general to the 
 particular ; from " the millions of poor people, 
 dirty people, abject people," for example, of 
 whom one reads in the preface to Major Bar- 
 bar a, to West Ham, and not vice versa. It is 
 as though Mr. Shaw, having written a letter to 
 The Times establishing that poverty is a 
 crime, had then paid a visit to a Salvation 
 Army shelter, and found there everything 
 which he had expected to find. His observa- 
 tion, that is to say, does not begin with 
 Rummy Mitchens, and Snobby Price, and Bill 
 Walker ; it begins in the economist's own 
 corner, and only condescends, in a humorous 
 
 41 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 and delightful manner, to make itself concrete 
 in Rummy and Snobby and Co. And now 
 perhaps it will be as well to substitute for the 
 word " economist " the word " publicist." 
 Our subject has only sometimes been the 
 economist, he has been the publicist all the 
 time. In one sense, of course, every artist is a 
 publicist ; if he does not find his matter in 
 what people happen to be interested in, he 
 hopes that people will happen to be interested 
 in his matter. But the true publicist, whether 
 he is an artist or not, wants to be interesting 
 people in his own particular brand of goods all 
 the time. If he is an artist, he will interest them 
 by means of his art, and he will want to interest 
 them outside of his art as well — by means of 
 his opinions on every conceivable subject, by 
 means of his personality and person, by means 
 even of the fact that his telegraphic address is 
 " Socialist, London." We may as well sum it 
 all up by saying, as our subject has done, " I 
 want to change the ideas of the people of this 
 country." How that desire and aim consorts 
 with artistic principles, how, indeed, it con- 
 ditions them, we shall better understand when 
 we have devoted a chapter to the aesthetics of 
 our subject. But the difference between Mr. 
 Shaw and, let us say, Mr. Conrad, is apparent ; 
 Mr. Conrad who, when his books have spoken 
 
 42 
 
ECONOMICS 
 
 for him, really has nothing else that he particu- 
 larly wants to tell us, or Mr. James, who has no 
 views at all, positively no views at all that any 
 reader ever discovered, but only a view of the 
 world. The first kind of artist (he who is not 
 consciously a publicist) does not understand the 
 second kind of artist ; Mr. Conrad has ex- 
 pressed this mistrust in his ironic tale of The 
 Informer. " Does a man of that — of that — 
 persuasion still remain an anarchist when alone, 
 quite alone and going to bed, for instance ? 
 Does he lay his head on the pillow, pull his 
 bedclothes over him, and go to sleep with the 
 necessity of the chambardement general, as the 
 French slang has it, of the general blow-up, 
 always present to his mind? And if so, how 
 can he ? " Our subject is not an anarchist — 
 has he not pointed out, and explained, and 
 generally and sufficiently cleared up, the im- 
 possibility of being one ? But our subject is 
 all for the chambardement general — oh yes, a 
 purely intellectual blow-up, a change of ideas. 
 For he is a humane man, who even though he 
 wishes that the adult poor might be " in- 
 exorably " killed, is yet careful to explain that 
 the thing should be " painlessly " done, and 
 the orphans forcibly fattened. . . . That is the 
 kind of thing we must conceive our subject as 
 taking to bed with him, and giving voice to, 
 
 43 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 with pathos, with humour, and with a variety 
 of effective assertion, the next morning. He is 
 a man " of that — of that — persuasion." 
 
 There is a penalty for being a publicist, and 
 that penalty is the publicist's unreality. It 
 would be perfectly easy to define the unreality 
 of the publicist, to go on defining it (for that is 
 what, if it amounts to anything, this chapter 
 amounts to) ; but what is the use, since Hazlitt 
 has done it already, far better than anyone 
 else could possibly do it, in his character of 
 Mr. Cobbett ? That passage from On Know- 
 ledge of the World may well stand at the end 
 of this chapter : 
 
 As I have brought Mr. Cobbett in here by the neck 
 and shoulders [says Hazlitt], I may add that I do not 
 think he belongs properly to the class, either of 
 philosophical speculators, or men of the world. He 
 is a political humorist. He is too much taken up 
 with himself either to attend to right reason or to 
 judge correctly of what passes around him. He 
 mistakes strength of purpose and passion, not only 
 for truth, but for success. Because he can give fifty 
 good reasons for a thing, he thinks it not only ought 
 to be, but must be. Because he is swayed so entirely 
 by his wishes and humours, he believes others will be 
 ready to give up their prejudices, interests and 
 resentments to oblige him. He persuades himself 
 that he is the fittest person to represent Westminster 
 in Parliament, and he considers this point (once 
 
 44 
 
ECONOMICS 
 
 proved) tantamount to his return. He knows no more 
 of the disposition or sentiments of the people of 
 Westminster than of the inhabitants of the moon 
 (except from what he himself chooses to say or write 
 of them), and it is this want of sympathy which, as 
 much as anything, prevents his being chosen. The 
 exclusive force and bigotry of his opinions deprives 
 them of half their influence and effect, by allowing 
 no toleration to others, and consequently setting them 
 against him. . . . 
 
 A knowledge of mankind ... is less an intellectual 
 acquirement than a natural disposition. . . . 
 
 I do not know whether that gave the picture 
 of Mr. Cobbett to his contemporaries : it most 
 certainly gave, and gives, the picture of one 
 kind of man. It gives the picture of the pub- 
 licist. One would not wish to make too much 
 of the comparison ; when one thinks of the 
 subject of this study as a kind of social institu- 
 tion, as it were, one thinks of Godwin at least 
 as often as one thinks of Cobbett. But per- 
 haps he is, as near as we can get to him, the 
 Mr. Cobbett of his age— that Mr. Cobbett of 
 the pure and trenchant English style who 
 wondered how Paradise Lost could have been 
 tolerated by a people conversant with as- 
 tronomy, navigation, and chemistry, and who 
 found some things in Shakespeare to please 
 him but much more that he did not like ; that 
 
 45 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Mr. Cobbett who was as well known as any 
 man in England, down to the minutest circum- 
 stances in his character, habits, and opinions, 
 including the colour of his waistcoat. Mr. 
 Shaw has never stood for Westminster, but he 
 has stood for St. Pancras for the County Coun- 
 cil. And if one searched one's mind and heart 
 for a phrase to cover those activities of our 
 subject which this present chapter has feebly 
 and hopelessly limped after, " political 
 humorist " would be the phrase one would 
 come back to. " Because he can give fifty good 
 reasons for a thing, he thinks it not only ought 
 to be, but must be." 
 
 46 
 
Ill 
 
 ESTHETICS 
 
 If we have some sort of a perception then, 
 however rudimentary, of that " economic 
 basis " on which our subject has reared his 
 master- works, and of which he has never tired of 
 speaking, we may fairly consider we have come 
 in on the ground floor, and begin to look out at 
 the windows. It is a wide prospect that is 
 presented, the whole of which has been sub- 
 mitted by our subject to a kind of cadastral 
 survey. Our subject has surveyed mankind 
 from the Balkans to the Far West, he has 
 associated on familiar terms with Napoleon 
 after Lodi, with Burgoyne before Saratoga, 
 with Caesar in Egypt, with Shakespeare at 
 Whitehall, and he has personally conducted 
 a party of tourists from Richmond to Hell. 
 At least two visions of Heaven he has given 
 us, one (in the essay on Church-Going, and 
 again from the lips of Tom Broadbent) " a 
 drawing-room in blue tabinet " and one the 
 dream of a madman. He has written novels 
 
 47 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 in his nonage, essays in philosophic criticism 
 in the lustiness of his manhood, plays in his 
 maturity, and prefaces all the time. He 
 has made spirited personal sorties against the 
 materialism of Marx and of Darwin, and has 
 lived to enjoy the spectacle of a world " seeth- 
 ing with the reaction of Ibsen's ideas." He has 
 run with the Nietzschean hares, and hunted 
 with the anti-Nietzschean hounds. He has 
 explained the Wagnerian movement in music 
 in terms of economic allegory. And goodness 
 alone knows what he has not done to the 
 collectivist movement in politics, ethics and 
 sociology ! There is only one word for him, 
 and that is the word of the hero of the anti- 
 romantic comedy : " What a man ! What a 
 man ! " 
 
 Now if we were to take some of these activities 
 of our subject, and call them artistic, and to 
 take other activities of our subject, and call 
 them extra-artistic, we should be doing some- 
 thing which might be all very well in the case 
 of another man — (Sterne, for example, who 
 was a preacher of sermons on Sundays and a 
 receiver of secular sensations on every other 
 day of the week ; or Mr. Walkley, who is an 
 assistant to Mr. Hobhouse when he is not giving 
 to the drama's patrons the drama's laws) — but 
 which would not be the thing in the case of our 
 
 48 
 
ESTHETICS 
 
 subject at all. For all the time he has been one 
 man, doing the same thing ; and that is the 
 secret — the often very well-kept secret — of his 
 sincerity. The one thing he has been doing is 
 changing the ideas of the people of this country; 
 and that is a man's job for a lifetime, with quite 
 enough employment to keep him from going 
 off duty. 
 
 As a matter of fact, our subject has nothing 
 at all to say for a kind of art which does 
 not concern itself with a change of ideas. That 
 has led him into some strange positions : into 
 saying that Sophocles was a great artist, for 
 example, because he wrote about incest ; and 
 into claiming that Monsieur Brieux is the 
 equal of Moliere on the ground that La Foi and 
 Les Avaries are exercises in "the highest 
 function that man can perform." But in 
 general our subject's position is clear ; he has 
 told us himself. (He has always told us him- 
 self !) "I have, I think," he says, "always 
 been a Puritan in my attitude towards Art. 
 I am as fond of fine music and handsome 
 building as Milton was, or Cromwell, or 
 Bunyan ; but if I found that they were 
 becoming the instruments of a systematic 
 idolatry of sensuousness, I would hold it good 
 statesmanship to blow every cathedral in the 
 world to pieces with dynamite, organ and all, 
 D 49 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 without the least heed to the screams of the art 
 critics and cultured voluptuaries." That is one 
 of the most celebrated of our subject's utter- 
 ances, and we may behold in it the chambarde- 
 ment general again. Mr. Shaw, in the name of 
 good statesmanship, in the name of good 
 morals, in the name of good economics, has 
 blown all sorts of cathedrals to pieces, organ 
 and all. Fortunately for us, they have gener- 
 ally been bad cathedrals, for Mr. Shaw's critical 
 sense, so long as it has been happily employed 
 with the dynamite, has been tolerably unerring. 
 It is in the cathedrals that have been set up in 
 the name of good statesmanship, in the name 
 of good morals, in the name of good economics, 
 in the name of the religion of the future, in the 
 name of anything but good art, and that have 
 received his consecration, that the trouble 
 comes in. Take the theatre for example — he 
 blew the commercially stereotyped idolatry of 
 silly sensuousness out of that pretty effectively, 
 more effectively than any man of his generation 
 (not that it is not still there) ; but he did it in 
 order to open it to some strange kind of things 
 in the name of the drama. But we shall come 
 to all that presently. 
 
 Observe, for the moment, our subject the 
 Puritan treading his way through the decadent 
 'nineties. The Time Spirit was strong then, we 
 
 50 
 
ESTHETICS 
 
 are told — strong as the dying hold of a drown- 
 ing man. Our subject did not cry for madder 
 music and for stronger wine ; he explained the 
 economic basis of the Ring of the Niblungs, and 
 pointed out the comparative intoxicative values 
 in the art of the age of brandy, lager beer, and 
 tea. He was not desolate and sick of any old 
 passion ; but he gave in to the Time Spirit at 
 last, and wrote an essay for the Savoy. And the 
 title of that essay was On Going to Church. It 
 was a thoroughly Puritan essay. 
 
 II 
 
 Perhaps it is always the part of the Puritan 
 to assist in confusing the age-long contention 
 between science and art. You may find out 
 the man who is not an artist, Mr. Shaw has said, 
 by his habit of regarding Art as a " quaint and 
 costly ring in the nose of Nature." But Art, if 
 you come to think of it, is rather like a quaint 
 and costly ring in the nose of Nature — to the 
 Puritan. Nature herself can do very well 
 without it. The true Puritan demand went to 
 America with the Mayflower, and has flourished 
 there ever since : it is that you should " deliver 
 the goods." Nature delivers her goods ; she is 
 not in the least like a poem on Nature. Nature 
 was the first Puritan ; and the Souldier's 
 
 51 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Catechisme of Cromwell, which presents the 
 bare words of command and reply, is a more 
 typically Puritan work than The Pilgrim's 
 Progress. If Bunyan had been more of a 
 Puritan than an artist he would have written a 
 primer on the Christian ethic. For is not the 
 scientific primer the archetype of Puritan 
 literary expression ? It says what has to be 
 said, and is not all else vanity of vanities ? It 
 delivers the goods. What is there to be said, in 
 strict Puritanism, for the Tolstoy an " infec- 
 tion " ? What is there, in particular, that can 
 possibly differentiate it from the stimulative 
 effect of drinking a cup of tea, a noggin of 
 brandy, or a glass of lager beer? Mr. Shaw 
 asserted in the essay on Church-Going that he 
 could do without these things ; but then, art 
 is a thing we could do perfectly well without. 
 It is the first of the statutory luxuries. Mr. 
 Shaw himself, as we have seen, who has ever 
 been a lover of art, would himself forgo it in- 
 stantly at the behest of good statesmanship. Is 
 not the demand that the facts of the primer, the 
 assertions of the catechism, should have form 
 " put on them " — is not that a weakness of the 
 flesh, a giving in to softness, tantamount precisely 
 to the tea-drinking ? John Bunyan's Pilgrim's 
 Progress, we should say, is better art than 
 Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health, 
 
 52 
 
ESTHETICS 
 
 With a Key to the Scriptures; but the readers of 
 the latter work, who are in a state of exaltation 
 to begin with, do not say so. They do not want 
 to be infected by the literary power of the artist 
 before they can surrender themselves to re- 
 ceive the goods which the writer has to deliver. 
 The Puritan should surely refuse every stimu- 
 lant, on the demonstrable ground that he can 
 refuse it. And is not the form of a work of art 
 simply the most demonstrable stimulant and 
 grant in aid to his receptive faculties which the 
 Puritan will find if he keeps on looking for a 
 week of Sundays ? 
 
 These are questions for the Puritan to answer. 
 It will be enough for our present purpose if 
 their mere posing has served to suggest the 
 direction in which we may look for our subject's 
 aesthetic theory, and the nature of the basis 
 on which the whole superstructure of his 
 creative works has been reared. 
 
 Let us take first the question of style. Now 
 style, to our Puritan, is, in itself, something 
 quite abhorrent : to find pleasure in the style 
 of a work of art as apart from its meaning is as 
 intolerable as to find pleasure in marriage as 
 apart from its offspring. The purpose of 
 marriage, as Mr. Shaw has asserted on one 
 thousand occasions, is the procreation of 
 children : the Book of Common Prayer, in 
 
 53 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 affirming its secondly and thirdly (and par- 
 ticularly its secondly), is a pandar compared to 
 him. And the purpose of art, as Mr. Shaw has 
 asserted on one thousand further occasions, is 
 the procreation of ideas : art is " the living word 
 of a man delivering a message to his own time." 
 It therefore comes about, in the most natural 
 manner in the world, that to Mr. Shaw the 
 question of style is the question of effective 
 assertion. And that, so to speak, is not a 
 question at all ; it admits of no question. If 
 you have anything to say to your time, if you 
 have any goods to deliver, the value of the 
 manner of delivery will be the value of the 
 goods, one and inseparable. In a word, 
 " Effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and 
 Omega of style." But let us have the whole 
 passage. It is from the vehemently Puri- 
 tanical epistle by means of which Man and 
 Superman was dedicated to Mr. Walkley, and 
 let us hope in passing that Mr. Walkley en- 
 joyed it : 
 
 No doubt I must recognize [says our subject], as 
 even the Ancient Mariner did, that I must tell my 
 story entertainingly if I am to hold the wedding guest 
 spellbound in spite of the siren sounds of the loud 
 bassoon. But " for art's sake " alone I would not 
 face the toil of writing a single sentence. I know that 
 there are men who, having nothing to say and nothing 
 
 54 
 
ESTHETICS 
 
 to write, are nevertheless so in love with oratory and 
 with literature that they delight in repeating as much 
 as they can understand of what others have said or 
 written aforetime. I know that the leisurely tricks 
 which their want of conviction leaves them free to 
 play with the diluted and misapprehended message 
 supply them with a pleasant parlour game which they 
 call style. I can pity their dotage and even sympathize 
 with their fancy. But a true original style is never 
 achieved for its own sake : a man may pay from a 
 shilling to a guinea, according to his means, to see, 
 hear, or read another man's act of genius ; but he 
 will not pay with his whole life and soul to become a 
 mere virtuoso in literature, exhibiting an accomplish- 
 ment which will not even make money for him, like 
 fiddle playing. Effectiveness of assertion is the 
 Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to 
 assert has no style and can have none : he who has 
 something to assert will go as far in power of style as 
 its momentousness and his conviction will carry 
 him. . . . 
 
 Now if it were any ^ part of the intention of 
 this present slight book — as it is not — to go 
 through all that our subject has ever said and 
 to substitute our opinion for his own in regard 
 to some sentence of it, it might at this point 
 be asserted, with or without style but cer- 
 tainly with conviction, that to have something 
 to say is not at all the same thing as to have the 
 power of saying it beautifully. Take the 
 
 55 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Speeches which our ministers make up, for 
 example, and then foist upon the King to 
 dehver ; they have something perfectly plain to 
 assert, but they do not always succeed in assert- 
 ing it plainly. If they do not bristle with broken 
 syntax as a wall with glass, they present, as 
 likely as not, some other barrier equally 
 insurmountable by those interested. Impos- 
 sible to attribute the thing in every instance 
 to a lack of conviction. The world is full of 
 convinced political enthusiasts who do not 
 speak beautifully, of convinced religious en- 
 thusiasts who do not preach beautifully, and 
 of convinced taxpayers who do not write 
 beautiful letters to The Times — as Mr. Shaw 
 himself has done, on every occasion. (Those 
 letters, in due time, will be well worth collect- 
 ing : let us hope that his publishers will collect 
 them.) And in every instance for the word 
 beautiful you may substitute the word effec- 
 tive, without the smallest alteration in sense. 
 But it is no part of this book's business, as I 
 say, to provide a running commentary on the 
 works of Mr. Shaw, or marginally to annotate 
 them, as it were, with blessings and curses. It 
 is our present intention to detect in those works 
 the unifying voice of their creator, and not, as 
 soon as he speaks, to out-shout him. And in 
 the passage which has just been quoted there 
 
 56 
 
ESTHETICS 
 
 is to be heard, if you listen for it, the essential 
 voice of our subject. 
 
 If you choose to call his characteristic 
 manner of literary utterance his " style," 
 then you have it there : you may observe 
 the surface appearance of lucidity on the whole 
 of it, and even on that sentence beginning, " I 
 
 know that the leisurely tricks ", although, 
 
 as a matter of fact, if you have not the spirit 
 of good fortune at your elbow you will find 
 yourself having to read that sentence three 
 times before you make out its head from its 
 tail. The sentences of our subject have some- 
 times this Trinculo-baiting quality (such is the 
 power of their conviction). Of course our 
 subject is a delightfully good writer, with no 
 nonsense about him. But there is a par- 
 ticular nemesis which attends upon the writer 
 who aims at an exterior appearance of extreme 
 lucidity, and that is the achievement of an 
 ultimate effect which is the negation of lucidity. 
 In Mr. Shaw's case it is entirely a consequence 
 of his desire to sweep us along ; and sweep us 
 along he does, although at the end of the 
 journey we are not always quite perfectly clear 
 as to the details of the country through which 
 he has carried us. For example, when we read 
 in The Revolutionist'' s Handbook : 
 
 The mere transfiguration of institutions, as from 
 military and priestly dominance to commercial and 
 
 57 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 scientific dominance, from commercial dominance to 
 proletarian democracy, from slavery to serfdom, from 
 serfdom to capitalism, from monarchy to repub- 
 licanism, from polytheism to monotheism, from 
 monotheism to atheism, from atheism to pantheistic 
 humanitarianism, from general illiteracy to general 
 literacy, from romance to realism, from realism to 
 mysticism, from metaphysics to physics, are all but 
 changes from Tweedledum to Tweedledee : plus fa 
 change, plus c'est la meme chose 
 
 — when we read that, a sentence which might 
 be recognized at sight as from the pen of our 
 subject, we are aware that words are not 
 merely being thrown about (as in the case of 
 anotker writer we might have suspected), but 
 we are equally aware, if we pause at just that 
 point for our breath to rejoin us, that our 
 revolutionist no more subscribes to our gram- 
 mar than he subscribes to the rest of our con- 
 ventions. Sometimes it is a metaphor which 
 evades us, as in the flight in which the respec- 
 tive qualities of Shakespeare's Caesar and Mr. 
 Shaw's are made clear to us : 
 
 The tragedy of disillusion and doubt, of the 
 agonized struggle for a foothold on the quicksand 
 made by an observation striving to verify its vain 
 attribution of morality and respectability to Nature, 
 of the faithless will and the keen eyes that the faith- 
 less will is too weak to blind : all this will give you a 
 
 58 
 
.ESTHETICS 
 
 Hamlet or a Macbeth, and win you great applause 
 from literary gentlemen ; but it will not give you a 
 Julius Csesar. 
 
 There are moments, then, in Mr. Shaw's 
 writing which one expects are all right ; but 
 whether they are all right or not may be left 
 to the decision of the literary gentlemen. In 
 his zeal for effective assertion, our subject does 
 not always spare us some hardship. It is a 
 case of he who runs may write, and we who 
 read must perforce run after him. If this were 
 the proper place for it, we might note a similarly 
 occasional hardship inflicted on the excellent 
 people whose business and pleasure it is to 
 speak our subject's prose in the theatres. '' It 
 will lay his wife's life waste," is what Sir 
 Patrick Ridgeon has to say at a critical junc- 
 ture ; and one remembers with indulgence the 
 actor who rendered that with several hard-won 
 variants. 
 
 But these are merely the occasional defects 
 of a style whose qualities are frankly dialecti- 
 cal, and, interesting as might prove complete 
 essays on the Shavian antithesis and a Shavian 
 conjunction, the present chapter is no place 
 for them. For now that I have put down on 
 paper that passage dedicated to Mr. Walkley, 
 it is clear to me that it really has all sorts of 
 
 59 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 ramifications, some of which lead quite im- 
 mediately into the business we are consider- 
 ing. Take, for instance, the admission of Mr. 
 'f Shaw that he must tell his story, that he 
 must deliver his goods, " entertainingly." You 
 will remember the advice given to Don Juan 
 later on in the play which, in the author's 
 good time, comes after the epistle : the advice 
 that he should " put his philosophy in the form 
 of entertaining anecdotes." Now it is not 
 without significance that that advice is given 
 by the Devil. For if we have not been wrong 
 in our reading of his character, the Puritan 
 does regard the need to be entertaining as the 
 Devil. The place where such advice was given 
 was not the lowest depth of Hell ; the lowest 
 depth of the Puritan's aesthetic Hell is where 
 art is made entertaining for art's sake, and 
 you will observe that here it is art which is to 
 be made entertaining for philosophy's sake — a 
 very different thing. But still it is, in strictest 
 Puritanism, Hell all the same. For how 
 keenly would the Puritan like to deliver the 
 goods without the silver paper, the philosophy 
 without the anecdote ! — only he dare not do 
 it, for fear that the assertion would not be 
 " effective." It is like selling a portion of his 
 own soul, and he doesn't want to do it. In 
 consequence the Puritan sells just that neces- 
 
 60 
 
ESTHETICS 
 
 sary portion, and keeps a good tight hold on 
 the rest. That, really, is the explanation of all 
 kinds of things. It is the explanation of Mr. 
 Shaw's prefaces, in which he is keeping tight 
 hold of his own soul and hating to surrender 
 it until the very last moment to the indignity 
 of impersonal utterance in the dramatic form ; 
 it is the explanation of how, even then, he 
 never does quite surrender it ; it is the ex- 
 planation, finally, of why the creative works of 
 our subject are somehow all secondary to the 
 utterances in his own person. To put on the 
 form of art is the last indignity, in strict 
 reasoning, to the message which Puritanism 
 has to deliver ; and that is why the plays of 
 Mr. Shaw never quite put it on, as we shall find 
 in a subsequent chapter. 
 
 Ill 
 
 To go back to our passage. We have es- 
 tablished the contention, for what it is worth, 
 that to the Puritan the condescension from 
 explicit to implicit utterance does not come 
 easily. It is really the second fall. It is a case 
 of irifacilis est descensus Averno. We are able to 
 appreciate the point of view, although not yet 
 in its full significance, from which the plays of 
 Mr. Shaw are seen to be the plays of a man who 
 
 61 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 wrote prefaces which no one would read. We 
 may even gUmpse him, with the assistance of 
 that earHer chapter, as an over-serious man 
 whose wit is the conscious and rather shame- 
 faced reaction against his own over-seriousness. 
 We have yet to follow up one more ramification 
 from our subject's definition of style as effec- 
 tive assertion. Again it is in a direction which 
 leads the true Puritan into self-scarification. 
 But Mr. Shaw is a Utilitarian-Puritan. Having 
 postulated that all that is necessary to the 
 effective expression of one's message to one's 
 time is a convinced belief in the originality and 
 desirability of that message, he next proceeds 
 to add a rider. It appears that to be convinced 
 is after all not enough ; you must also be 
 irritating. " In this world," he says, " if you 
 do not say a thing in an irritating way, you 
 may just as well not say it at all, since nobody 
 will trouble themselves about anything that 
 does not trouble them." Now to be irritating 
 may perfectly well be a Puritan virtue ; it 
 will at any rate be a consequence of Puritanism 
 so long as there is a majority of non-Puritans 
 in this world. But when the advice is here 
 given to put your philosophy into an irritating 
 form, it is not a case, as it was before, of the 
 Devil being his own advocate. Here quite 
 plainly it is the Utilitarian in Mr. Shaw — the 
 
 62 
 
ESTHETICS 
 
 Fabian if you like — peacefully permeating 
 the Puritan. The Puritan Mr. Shaw knows 
 that the pure milk of the word is enough ; 
 ' but the Utilitarian Mr. Shaw says, " Include 
 an irritant whenever you get the opportunity." 
 We might say that the advice amounted to 
 putting a drop of gin in the gingerbeer, if the 
 metaphor were not too shocking in this con- 
 nection. That anyhow is what Mr. Shaw has 
 done, and the Utilitarian has squared it up 
 with the Puritan. The probable line the 
 Utilitarian took was to point out that, after 
 all, the postulate may be taken to include the 
 rider ; there can be no true effectiveness of 
 assertion, that is to say, without a measure of 
 the irritating quality. The Utilitarian would 
 have had no difficulty in putting forward 
 tolerable analogies. There is Hazlitt's defence 
 of the writer, for example ; a defence on 
 different ground, but against much the same 
 charge of a lapse from absolute sincerity, 
 extrinsic as well as intrinsic. " A person," he 
 said, " who does not endeavour to seem more 
 than he is, will generally be thought nothing 
 of. We habitually make such large deduc- 
 tions for pretence and imposture, that no merit 
 will stand against them. It is necessary to set 
 off our good qualities with a certain air of 
 plausibility and self-importance, as some atten- 
 
 63 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 tion to fashion is necessary to decency." Well, 
 Mr. Shaw having settled his internal differences, 
 made up his mind to set off his good qualities 
 with a certain — a very certain — air of plausi- 
 bility and self-importance. It need not be 
 said that he made up his mind very early ; 
 quite at the beginning, indeed, of the public 
 career we are studying. 
 
 On the other hand, there is David Copper- 
 field. " It has always been in my observation of 
 human nature," says David Copperfield, " that 
 a man who has any good reason to believe in 
 himself never flourishes himself before the 
 faces of other people in order that they may 
 believe in him." Mr. Shaw has yielded to no 
 man in his admiration for Dickens (to be sure, 
 an un-Puritanical admiration), but it cannot 
 be too plainly asserted that in this respect Mr. 
 Shaw is outside David Copperfield's observa- 
 tion of human nature. With the best of good 
 reason to believe in himself, flourish himself 
 before the face of other people in order that 
 they may believe in him is just what he has 
 done. That is the principal form his specific 
 of irritation has taken. Indeed you might say 
 that that is his style. But here the Puritan, 
 who is never far from the Utilitarian's elbow, 
 comes in again. The Utilitarian having con- 
 ceded this trick of style — ^the air of plausi- 
 
 64 
 
ESTHETICS 
 
 bility and self-importance — in the interest of 
 effectiveness of assertion, enters the Puritan to 
 sanctify the concession ; nay, to acclaim it. 
 For in the act of irritation the Puritan has 
 discovered not a grace or an expedient, but a 
 duty. The Puritan is ready with a whole 
 aesthetic of the shocking. You might imagine, 
 at first glance, that Major Barbara's use of the 
 sacred words or Eliza Doolittle's of the profane 
 — to take two instances at random of what has 
 been held in our subject's works to be shocking 
 — was the work of the Utilitarian ; that they 
 were instances of the trick-shocking, things 
 said in an irritating way, that is to say, on the 
 theory that nobody would trouble themselves 
 about Mr. Shaw's particular message if there 
 was not something in the manner of that 
 message's delivery to trouble them. But if 
 you imagine that, the Puritan is soon at hand 
 to enlighten you. It is for your good, you will 
 learn, that those things are there. It is not 
 merely good for you that your ear should be 
 caught for the reception of Mr. Shaw's message, 
 it is good for you to receive a shock, qua shock. 
 The Utilitarian and the Puritan are united 
 again ; the value of the goods and the value 
 of their manner of delivery once more are one 
 and inseparable. 
 
 " The difficulty on the stage at present is 
 E Q5 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 not to save audiences from being shocked, but 
 to induce managers and actors to shock them 
 when it is for their good and that of society 
 that they should be shocked, as it generally 
 is in England about three times a week on 
 one subject or another." ^ Sophocles, MoUere, 
 Wagner, Ibsen, Brieux, Strindberg, Mr. Shaw 
 — all these distinguished writers are shockers 
 in the strict and Puritan sense of that term. 
 That was what our subject went to the room 
 at Westminster prepared to assert "in an 
 irritating way " to the little group of Parlia- 
 mentary gentlemen who were sitting on the 
 question of the English Dramatic Censor ; and 
 that was the Puritan aesthetic by which the 
 Parliamentary gentlemen declined to be irri- 
 tated. They refused to allow his fifty good 
 reasons for the freedom of the theatre to go 
 down on their minutes, and that is how we 
 come to have the happiness of reading them in 
 the form of a preface instead of in the form of 
 a Blue Book. 
 
 IV 
 
 But if the happiness has not been Mr. Shaw's 
 of contributing to a Blue Book, the happiness 
 has been his, as a Puritan, of writing the 
 
 1 The Solution of the Censorship Problem. Academy, June 29, 
 1907. 
 
 66 
 
ESTHETICS 
 
 scientific primer. He has delivered the 
 goods. The primers of economics we have 
 already glanced at, and there are also the 
 primers of " philosophic criticism " — The 
 Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), The Sanity of 
 Art (1895), The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), and 
 the weekly Dramatic Opinions and Essays 
 reprinted from the Saturday Review (1895-8). 
 In addition, every one of the prefaces is a 
 scientific primer : a primer of marriage, a 
 primer of medicine, a primer of politics, a 
 primer of Shakespeare study, and so on. 
 These, I have submitted, for what the theory 
 is worth, are the direct delivery of Mr. Shaw's 
 message to his own time, while the plays are 
 that message's indirect and almost reluctant 
 delivery. The primers and the prefaces are 
 thus the favourite offspring of our subject, 
 while the plays, since they are philosophy in 
 the form of entertaining anecdotes, are the 
 fruit of a composition with the Puritan's Devil. 
 But the primers and the prefaces also contain, 
 as we have seen, a concession to the weakness 
 of the human flesh ; they consent to address 
 us in an irritating way, or, as we should prefer 
 to say, they do not refuse to take their author's 
 natural wit into alliance. Now that is very 
 jolly. " If a habit of jesting lowers a man," 
 says Hazlitt, " it is to the level of humanity." 
 
 67 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Our subject has altered the title of a famous 
 picture, and appears as the Laughing Round- 
 head. Perhaps he is the only Puritan in the 
 history of that race who has adopted waggery 
 as a medium. We may be very glad that he 
 has infected us with his joUity ; certainly the 
 momentousness of some of the things he has had 
 to say to us, even when his conviction is added, 
 would not have carried him so far if it were not 
 for the natural wit which is part of his style — or, 
 as he would prefer us to say, part of his power 
 of effective assertion. But we have come to the 
 point at which we have to look deeper for the 
 evidence of the Puritan. With possibly some 
 success we have reconciled the manner of the 
 Puritan with the manner of the jester, and 
 now it will be our business to look for the 
 matter of the Puritan. That will not be 
 nearly so difficult. 
 
 We have indulged a fancy that the real 
 bent of the Puritan is towards science rather 
 than towards art. Now it is a very remarkable 
 thing that from the first moment Mr. Shaw 
 began to talk about art he talked about it in 
 terms of science. In the primer attached to 
 his very first volume of plays (a primer of 
 Himself) we find our subject deploring on 
 Shakespeare's account that that dramatist 
 " could not afford to pursue a genuinely 
 
 68 
 
ESTHETICS 
 
 scientific method in his studies of character 
 and society." In the primer attached to his 
 Pleasant Plays our subject included a passage 
 which is so important to his proper under- 
 standing that I propose to reproduce it here : — 
 
 At all events [he said], I do not see moral chaos and 
 anarchy as the alternative to romantic convention ; 
 and I am not going to pretend I do merely to please 
 the people who are convinced that the world is only 
 held together by the force of unanimous, strenuous, 
 eloquent, trumpet-tongued lying. To me the tragedy 
 and comedy of life lie in the consequences, sometimes 
 terrible, sometimes ludicrous, of our persistent 
 attempts to found our institutions on the ideals 
 suggested to our imaginations by our half-satisfied 
 passions, instead of on a genuinely scientific natural 
 history. 
 
 And with that hint as to what he was driving 
 at, our subject withdrew reluctantly and rang 
 up the curtain. 
 
 Nor is this all. In the primer attached to 
 Man and Superman, Mr. Shaw says, " Every 
 man who records his illusions is providing 
 data for the genuinely scientific psychology 
 which the world still waits for. I plank down 
 my view of the existing relations of men to 
 women in the most highly civilized society," 
 he goes on, " for what it is worth. It is a view 
 like any other view and no more, neither true 
 
 69 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 nor false, but, I hope, a way of looking at the 
 subject which throws into the familiar order 
 of cause and effect a sufficient body of fact 
 and experience to be interesting to you [Mr. 
 Walkley], if not to the play going public of 
 London." In a word, " I am not a professional 
 liar," as Mr. Shaw said in that earlier primer, the 
 one attached to the American edition of Love 
 Among the Artists. 
 
 The point for the moment is, however, our 
 subject's widespread desire for a genuinely 
 scientific this, a genuinely scientific that, 
 and a genuinely scientific the other. I have 
 given three instances, and I have no doubt 
 that the reader will have no hesitation in 
 providing himself, out of his own superior 
 knowledge of our subject, with three dozen 
 others. Mr. Shaw has very badly wanted, 
 the whole of his life, to turn art into a science. 
 And why has he wanted to do that ? For the 
 ordinary Puritan reason : that art for its own 
 sake is a snare for the mind and a delusion to 
 the senses. " The English cry of ' Amuse us : 
 take things easily : dress up the world prettily 
 for us,' seems mere cowardice to the strong 
 souls that dare look facts in the face." You 
 will remember what our subject was willing 
 to do to the cathedrals, organs and all, in the 
 name of good statesmanship ; and there is no 
 
 70 
 
ESTHETICS 
 
 end to the chamhardement general he will 
 perform in the name of a genuinely scientific — 
 that is to say, a genuinely Puritan — system of 
 morals. He has taken down the sign of art for 
 art's sake, and put up the sign of art for 
 science's sake in its place. And what then is 
 the enemy, to be attacked in this genuinely 
 scientific manner ? The enemy is Romance. 
 " I am not a professional liar," says our 
 subject, with the implication that that is what 
 the other artists are — Sophocles, Moliere, 
 Bunyan, Hogarth, Wagner, Ibsen, Butler, 
 Strindberg, Tolstoy, and some few others 
 excepted. Romance is " the great heresy to 
 be swept off from art and life — the food of 
 modern pessimism and the bane of modern 
 self-respect." And Idealism, " which is only 
 a flattering name for romance in politics and 
 morals," is as obnoxious to our subject as 
 romance in ethics or religion. Away with 
 them : forward with a genuinely scientific 
 psychology. 
 
 How Mr. Shaw proceeded to put these prin- 
 ciples into practice, with what skill he has put 
 the Romantic Idealist into the position of the 
 enemy and kept him there, in what degree he 
 has managed to fall himself into the pit he 
 had digged for his enemy, we shall read in a 
 subsequent chapter. In the meantime we find 
 
 71 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 our subject asserting, " The function of comedy- 
 is nothing less than the destruction of old- 
 established morals." That is precisely what 
 we should expect our subject to assert. What 
 kind of a comedy that principle led to, what 
 kind of a tragedy and comedy of life has lain 
 in the sometimes terrible and sometimes ludi- 
 crous consequences of our persistent refusal to 
 be genuinely scientific, it will be our business 
 in due course to consider. But there is one 
 other principle which has gone to make the 
 shape of our subject's dramatic work, and I 
 suppose the proper place for it is the present 
 chapter. 
 
 A great deal has been made of the indebted- 
 ness of our subject to the late Samuel Butler ; 
 but then a great deal has been made of the 
 indebtedness of our subject to a good many 
 people. The fact that the superman of our sub- 
 ject is not in the least like the superman an- 
 nounced by Zarathustra, the fact that the drama 
 of our subject is not in the least like the drama 
 of Ibsen, the fact that the philosophy of our 
 subject is not in the least like the philosophy of 
 Schopenhauer — all these facts will not for one 
 moment put a stop to the current habit of 
 putting forward Nietzsche, Ibsen or Schopen- 
 
 72 
 
^ESTHETICS 
 
 hauer as petitioning creditor in the alleged 
 intellectual bankruptcy of our subject. And 
 Mr. Shaw, on purely technical grounds, is not 
 in the least like the late Samuel Butler, 
 in that the late Samuel Butler put the 
 whole of his satire into a single work of 
 art while Mr. Shaw has never chosen to put 
 the whole of his satire into a work of art, but 
 has left the bulk of it hanging out in a preface. 
 The late Samuel Butler planked down his view 
 of the existing relations of men to women in 
 the most highly civilized society in the form of 
 a novel, and he called that novel The Way of 
 All Flesh. If the whole of the Notebooks of 
 Butler had never been published, it really 
 would not have mattered to the completeness 
 of our understanding of that view. But when 
 our subject planks down his Man and Super- 
 man, the notebook at the end and the notebook 
 at the beginning and the notebook in the middle 
 are found to be really essential to our complete 
 understanding. If anybody doubts that, he 
 has only to remember the popular play of that 
 name as performed in the theatres, with its 
 unmistakable appearance of being a comedy 
 which has left its philosophy in the cloak-room. 
 Butler, that is to say, in so far as he was 
 concerned with a " message," delivered that 
 message in the form of a work of art, while Mr. 
 
 73 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Shaw has never quite brought himself to that 
 ultimate betrayal of the Puritan principle. Mr. 
 Shaw has confessed to the highest possible enjoy- 
 ment of Butler, an enjoyment which he has 
 done a great deal to bring this present generation 
 to share. If any very portentous claim were 
 to be marked out on Mr. Shaw's behalf around 
 the view point from which he has regarded 
 English society, it might be necessary to 
 remark that the late Samuel Butler had been 
 there before him. But if the question is that 
 of " likeness " in method between the two 
 writers, it is only possible to find them essen- 
 tially and irretrievably divided. Between 
 The Way of All Flesh, regarded as a novel, and 
 Man and Superman, regarded as a play, there 
 is all the difference between the satiric method 
 which is implicit and the satiric method which 
 is explicit ; between the view of life which is 
 " planked down," that is to say, in the sense that 
 a plank may be built into a structure, and the 
 view of life which is "planked down" in the 
 sense that a plank may be one step to a 
 platform. 
 
 If we must be in the fashion, however, and 
 talk about likenesses, let us see how our 
 subject (not is influenced by, or indebted to, 
 but) has some points of contact with William 
 Godwin, the inquirer concerning Political Jus- 
 
 74 
 
ESTHETICS 
 
 tice, and the father-in-law of the poet Shelley. 
 The circumstance that both are by way of being 
 novelists and dramatists, the one more of the 
 one and the other more of the other, is the least 
 part of the parallel. It is more to the point that 
 both are rather reluctantly so, each in the 
 intervals from being generally and calmly 
 subversive. Godwin's " Beware of reverence " 
 is extremely like the guiding principle of our 
 subject. " Marriage as now understood," said 
 Godwin, " is a monopoly and the worst of mon- 
 opolies." And when he said, "Morality itself 
 is nothing but a calculation of consequences," 
 he really came very near to Mr. Shaw's 
 " morals being mostly only social habits and 
 circumstantial necessities " — an utterance 
 which is to-day, I suppose, far more famous. 
 But none of these things is the point. We 
 come nearer the point when we remember the 
 failure of Godwin's one excellent novel to 
 achieve the implicit satire of things as they 
 were which was its object. He actually called 
 his novel Things As They Are, very much as 
 Butler called his The Way of All Flesh ; and 
 posterity has called it ever since by its sub- 
 title, which was The Adventures of Caleb 
 Williams. Now why has posterity called 
 Godwin's quite excellent novel by its sub- 
 title ? Simply because the author's purpose — 
 
 75 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 which was, as he explained in a preface, to 
 " comprehend a general review of the modes 
 of domestic and unrecorded despotism by 
 which man becomes the destroyer of man " — 
 never quite succeeded in imposing itself on the 
 narrative : it got left in the preface. The 
 consequent occasional inassimilability of the 
 narrative, due to the fact that the very 
 explicit philosopher of Political Justice is 
 not quite completely forgotten, is the sole 
 reason why Caleb Williams is a fiction of the 
 second rank. It is surprising that Mr. Shaw, 
 whose eagerness to explain English literature 
 to us has been at least the equal of his other 
 eagernesses, has not, so far as one remembers, 
 ever said anything about the author of Caleb 
 Williams and his once even more celebrated 
 Inquiry. Once again, however, our surprise 
 at this circumstance is not the point : the sole 
 and only point of which I wish to make any- 
 thing at all in this connection is that Godwin 
 did happen to enunciate quite perfectly the 
 principle which has animated our subject in all 
 his activities. He did not enunciate it as an 
 aesthetic principle, but that is what our subject 
 has made of it. From the blameless seclusion 
 of his library Godwin looked out at the world 
 and said : " What I should desire is, not by 
 violence to change its institutions, but by 
 
 76 
 
ESTHETICS 
 
 discussion to change its ideas." And from the 
 blameless seclusion of his platform, that is 
 exactly what our subject has said. 
 
 VI 
 
 You will read in The Quintessence of Ihsenism 
 of the consequences, sometimes terrible and 
 sometimes ludicrous, of a conduct of life 
 founded on the ideas which at present rule in 
 the world. That work was the first, and it still 
 is the principal, primer of that subject. But 
 our purpose in turning to it at this precise 
 point is not so much for general edification as 
 for particular illumination. We want to know, 
 I take it, just what our subject's major aesthetic 
 principle amounts to in regard to the drama. 
 When Mr. Shaw put his little work forward for 
 the first time in the year 1891 he did so with 
 a reminder that it was not a critical essay on 
 the poetic beauties of Ibsen— (as this present 
 slight book is, for example, a critical essay on 
 the poetic beauties of Mr. Shaw)— but simply 
 an exposition of Ibsenism ; or an exposition of 
 just so much in Ibsen as suited Mr. Shaw's 
 purposes, as we should prefer to say. When 
 Mr. Shaw put the work forward for the second 
 time in the year 1913, he newly completed it 
 to the death of Ibsen and he played just the 
 same trick upon him. He triumphantly found 
 
 77 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 embedded in his subject, that is to say, not this 
 time his own opinions in general (they remained 
 as before) but the aesthetic principle on which 
 he had written his own plays. He called the 
 chapter in which he performed this feat The 
 Technical Novelty in Ibsen's Plays. And this 
 is the manner of it : — 
 
 This, then, is the extension of the old dramatic 
 form effected by Ibsen. Up to a certain point in the 
 last act, A Doll's House is a play that might be turned 
 into a very ordinary French drama by the excision of 
 a few lines, and the substitution of a sentimental 
 happy ending for the famous last scene : indeed the 
 very first thing the theatrical wiseacres did with it 
 was to effect exactly this transformation, with the 
 result that the play thus pithed had no success and 
 attracted no notice worth mentioning. But at just 
 that point in the last act, the heroine very unexpect- 
 edly (by the wiseacres) stops her emotional acting and 
 says : " We must sit down and discuss all this that 
 has been happening between us." And it was by this 
 new technical feature : this addition of a new move- 
 ment, as musicians would say, to the dramatic form, 
 that A Doll's House conquered Europe and founded 
 a new school of dramatic art. 
 
 Now it would be perfectly possible, indeed it 
 would be the easiest thing in the world, to say 
 several things at this point. It would be easy, 
 for example, to point out that since Nora's next 
 
 78 
 
.ESTHETICS 
 
 remark is that this is their first discussion in 
 eight years, all of Mr. Shaw's plays cannot 
 possibly consist of discussion without running 
 the Technical Novelty to disaster. It would be 
 even easier to ask, since the scene between 
 Isabella and Claudio in the prison or Orlando 
 and Rosalind's interchange of remarks in the 
 forest is certainly, each in its separate kind, a 
 " discussion," in what respect the Technical 
 Novelty is a novelty. One might even assert, 
 with a reasonable expectation of escaping 
 contradiction, that A Doll's House happens to 
 be a play which as logically requires this 
 particular discussion for its artistic completion 
 as the preparations of the hen require to 
 eventuate in the egg. The story of Torvald 
 and Nora is a story whose climax is a discus- 
 sion as inevitably as the story of Othello and 
 Desdemona is a story whose climax is a murder. 
 It is no more sensible to say that all plays must 
 be discussions because A Doll's House is a play 
 about a discussion, than it would be to say 
 that all plays must be about murders because 
 Othello is a play about a murder. ... But 
 we will assert none of these things. We happen 
 not to be discussing the point with our sub- 
 ject, but noting his own triumphant discovery 
 of it. The drama is discussion. It is discus- 
 sion with one end and one only, and that end is 
 a public change of ideas. Its word is Pistol's : 
 
 79 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 " Discuss unto me." That is what Mr. Shaw 
 has Hved for, and worked for, and jested for, 
 and sold himself to the Puritan's Devil for. 
 That is why Mr. Shaw has addressed us from a 
 thousand platforms, including the theatre plat- 
 form. That, indeed, is the reason why Mr. 
 Shaw had to carry that particular platform at 
 the point of the pen snatched from the hand of 
 the inert dramatic critics : to wrest it from the 
 amusement-caterers, from all the horde of pro- 
 fessional liars, and to devote it to its high and 
 sacred purpose. In the light of that discovery, 
 we do not any longer hesitate to understand the 
 sense in which the function of comedy is the 
 destruction of old-established morals. It is no 
 longer with surprise that we hear that Shake- 
 speare was a poor sort of a dramatist, with 
 much to show and nothing to teach — not one, 
 in a word, of the artist-philosophers. Do we 
 not read in this same primer, newly completed 
 as it is to the death of Ibsen, that Othello 
 " would be a prodigiously better play if it were 
 a serious discussion of the highly interesting 
 problem of how a simple Moorish soldier got 
 on witlf a supersubtle Venetian lady of fashion 
 if he married her " ? We do. And with that 
 hint as to what our subject has been driving at, 
 we really may withdraw and let him ring up 
 his curtain. 
 
 80 
 
IV 
 
 DRAMATICS 
 
 Mr. Shaw's novels are four, and Mr. Shaw's 
 plays are twenty-seven up to the present. His 
 novels are not marked by any of the specific 
 qualities which are held in our day to distinguish 
 the modern novel ; nor are his plays marked 
 by any of the specific qualities which are held 
 to distinguish the modern play. But when we 
 have said that we are only at the beginning of 
 the task of this present chapter, and not at the 
 end of it. 
 
 It has been a favourite thing with the latter- 
 day publicists to assert that the only reason 
 why all the great writers have not favoured 
 the theatre is that the theatre has been 
 unworthy of them. That is a very fair instance 
 of the unreality of the publicist. Starting, 
 perhaps, with the moral desire, or the politi- 
 cal desire, or the intellectual desire, to abolish 
 the Censorship, they have pressed this argu- 
 ment among others into their service. There 
 F 81 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 may be some basis of fact for the argument 
 to rest upon, but one does not fancy it to 
 be a very secure basis. This is the sort of 
 a priori argument that may spring fully 
 armed from the head of the born publicist on 
 any day of the week. The publicist, having 
 conceived it, will straightway address all the 
 writers of novels with a question as to why they 
 are not writers of plays also or writers of plays 
 instead ; and all the writers of novels, hating 
 to disappoint their counsel particularly when 
 his leading question is in a flattering sense, will 
 straightway reply that the existence of a 
 dramatic censorship is positively the only 
 reason why they are not all writers of plays. 
 There is no harm done, no harm whatsoever; 
 but you might just as well address a question to 
 all the writers of plays and ask them why they 
 are not all writers of novels. If you did, they 
 might reply that they wrote for the theatre 
 because it was the vastest reservoir of Art, 
 or with some other Hugoist rhetoric ; or they 
 might reply that they made more money at it, 
 which would probably be true. But if they 
 were quite completely honest they would reply 
 that they wrote what they could and thanked 
 God for their sustenance. 
 
 All this is entirely without reference to the 
 question of the Censorship, which the reader 
 
 82 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 may sufficiently study in the works of our sub- 
 ject if he happens to be interested. It is not, 
 however, without reference to our subject. 
 Mr. Shaw is a writer who might equally well 
 have taken to the novel or the play. He is 
 one of the few artists of undoubted eminence 
 whom one can picture as determining the 
 form of art to adopt by the toss of a coin — 
 (if that were not in itself, of course, an un- 
 economic procedure). Perhaps he did toss 
 up, and it came down heads for the novel. 
 Well, he wrote four novels ; and then he 
 tossed up again and it came down tails for 
 the play, and he has written plays ever since. 
 And he has not only written plays ever since, 
 but he has been a notable cause of plays in 
 others. Really his is the attitude that Carlyle 
 or Mill or anybody else might have written 
 plays if they had wanted to. I do not think that 
 Mr. Shaw has ever lent himself to the humour- 
 less nonsense by which it is made out that the 
 reason why Carlyle and Mill did not write plays 
 was because Mr. William Bodham Donne or 
 somebody would not let them. But what he 
 has lent himself to is the modern movement 
 for evoking plays from anybody and everybody, 
 on the ground that a play is rather a jolly sort 
 of thing to write. That is the genesis, for 
 example, of the Incorporated Stage Society. 
 
 83 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 One really is not certain that one has not 
 heard our subject boasting that it was he who 
 set off Lady Gregory a-play-writing at her 
 time of life ; or if he has not done that, 
 he has claimed her in some fashion for that 
 paradise for artists which Social Democracy 
 is to be, in which none of us shall consume any 
 happiness without making as much as we 
 consume. All this is very charming in our 
 subject; for there is no quality so rare as the 
 willingness to admit that the particular talent 
 which distinguishes us is equally present in our 
 friends. 
 
 Now the one thing, we may be sure, our 
 subject would not do with his talent would be 
 to bury it. If you ask me the precise point at 
 which he determined to re-invest it — to with- 
 draw it from the novel, that is to say, and to 
 put it into plays — I am afraid I am not ready 
 with my answer. One thing, I think, is certain, 
 and that is that Mr. Shaw was not a dramatist 
 by predestination. Nor in any ordinary sense 
 did the hour make the man. There was not a 
 theatre waiting in London for the plays of Mr. 
 Shaw as, later on, there was a theatre waiting 
 in Dublin for the plays of Lady Gregory. The 
 whole history of Mr. Shaw's connection with the 
 theatre in a critical capacity is the history of 
 his efforts to turn the then occupiers out ; 
 
 84 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 and, having turned them out, he went into 
 occupation himself rather from a sense of duty 
 than because the theatre made any particu- 
 larly irresistible appeal to him as an eligible 
 residence. It was good enough for his purpose ; 
 he was a clever enough man to capture it, and 
 a clever enough man to make a perfectly good 
 show in it when it was his. More than this, the 
 theatre did happen to provide a natural outlet 
 for the most specific of Mr. Shaw's talents. Our 
 subject was born a talker. In one of his early 
 novels a young lady objects to the modern 
 novel that it is all talk. Certainly the novels of 
 our subject are not quite all talk— they would 
 be even more enjoyable if they were. They 
 are the novels of a very young man who could 
 not find in the home-circle or the debating 
 society an audience wide enough for the many 
 ideas with which he was bursting. In them- 
 selves they are the strangest things, these 
 novels, filled with people whose existence 
 and identity it is much easier to forget than 
 to remember, until in dialectical combats 
 they come to sudden unaccountable life. The 
 author himself has confessed to the greatest 
 difficulty, while he was writing them, in 
 remembering what they were meant to be 
 about ; and it is impossible for the reader not 
 to have sympathy with him. 
 
 85 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 II 
 
 The novels of Mr. Shaw's nonage are The 
 Irrational Knot (1880), Love Among the Artists 
 (1881), Cashel Byron's Profession (1882), and 
 An Unsocial Socialist (1883). 
 
 When one says that one does not remember 
 what is in the novels of Mr. Shaw's nonage, of 
 course one does not mean that there was not 
 an idea in them. Of course the idea of the 
 first of them was that marriage was all wrong ; 
 of the second, that the conventional apprecia- 
 tion of art was all wrong ; of the third, that 
 modern prize-fighting was all wrong (although 
 neither we nor the author minded that in the 
 least) ; and of the fourth, that everything was 
 all wrong (not that, while we were reading 
 An Unsocial Socialist, we minded that very 
 much either). For their narrative method 
 was as follows : Mr. Shaw's carefully un- 
 conventional hero has just lost his wife (in 
 a scene of carefully calculated unconven- 
 tionality) and, in the face of the family's 
 assurance that " Death is a serious thing," 
 he agrees to put up a tombstone : — 
 
 Trefusis now encountered a difficulty. He wished 
 to pay the mason the just value of his work, no more 
 
 86 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 and no less. But this he could not ascertain. The 
 only available standard was the market price, and this 
 he rejected as being fixed by competition among 
 capitalists who could only secure profit by obtaining 
 from their workmen more products than they paid 
 them for, and could only tempt customers by offering a 
 share of the unpaid-for part of the products as a 
 reduction in price. Thus he found that the system 
 of withholding the indispensable materials for pro- 
 duction and subsistence from the labourers, except 
 on condition of their supporting an idle class whilst 
 accepting a lower standard of comfort for themselves 
 than for that idle class, rendered the determination of 
 just ratios of exchange, and consequently the practice 
 of honest dealing, impossible. . . . 
 
 and so on, and so on. It is no wonder that the 
 personal drama of Mr. Shaw's novels shrinks in 
 the memory. Our economist-novelist's treat- 
 ment of the final theme was so thorough that 
 it was only by means of appending a letter from 
 the principal character to the author that he 
 could get rid of the impression which was rife 
 among his readers that Socialism was all wrong ; 
 readers, too, who were Socialists every one of 
 them, by reason of the periodical in which 
 the novel made its first or serial appearance. 
 Thus the probable truth is, or one possible way 
 of expressing the probable truth would be to 
 say, that these novels had not got any tech- 
 
 87 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 nique. Perhaps it was that our young man 
 was too intent on the " ideas " he was propa- 
 gating — (mainly, it is true, among pubhshers' 
 readers, a class that is greatly in need of them) 
 — to spare much attention to the form of his 
 anecdotes. 
 
 That is why, at an earlier stage of these 
 proceedings, these novels were described as 
 nearly negligible. But not quite. It would 
 be impossible to neglect them for the reason, if 
 there were no other reason, that they are the 
 practising ground, not only of the economist, 
 but of the dramatist. Their mode of expres- 
 sion is facile but various. They are at one 
 moment like the " realistic " novels of Mr. 
 George Moore (with which they were closely 
 contemporary), rather like Wilde the next 
 moment, and exactly like Dickens the moment 
 after that. But at certain moments they are 
 like nothing at all but our subject's own plays. 
 These are always the moments of more ani- 
 mated discussion. Suppose we try the simple 
 experiment of taking one of these novels, of 
 opening it quite at random, and then of trans- 
 posing the dialogue from the narrative form 
 into the dramatic. This would be the kind of 
 result : — 
 
 Agatha. Do marry me, Mr. Trefusis. Pray do. 
 Trefusis {determinedly). Thank you. I will. 
 
 88 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 Agatha. I am very sure you shan't. {She gathers her 
 skirt as if to run away.) You do not sup- 
 pose I was in earnest, do you ? 
 
 Trefusis. Undoubtedly I do. / am in earnest. 
 
 Agatha. Take care. I may ehange my mind and be in 
 earnest, too ; and then how will you feel, 
 Mr. Trefusis ? 
 
 Trefusis. I think, under our altered relations, you had 
 better call me Sidney. 
 
 Agatha. I think we had better drop the joke. It was 
 in rather bad taste, and I should not have 
 made it, perhaps. 
 
 Trefusis. It would be an execrable joke ; therefore I 
 have no intention of regarding it as one. 
 You shall be held to your offer, Agatha. 
 Are you in love with me ? 
 
 Agatha. Not in the least. Not the very smallest bit in 
 the world. I do not know anybody vnth 
 whom I am less in love or less likely to be 
 in love. 
 
 Trefusis. Then you must marry me. If you were in love 
 with me, I should run away. 
 
 Now is not that sufficiently like a scene 
 between Valentine and Gloria, between Tanner 
 and Miss Whitefield, between Charteris and 
 Julia, to justify us in our experiment ? Let us 
 pursue it a little further. 
 
 Our subject was born a talker, but he came 
 into this world, like his own Cokane, with the 
 pen of ready writer. The dramatic form offers 
 every advantage with regard to dialogue that 
 
 89 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 is offered by the form of the novel ; indeed it 
 has the superior advantage in this respect that 
 a play is, if superficially regarded, nothing but 
 talk. That might appear to cut off from the 
 dramatist the pleasant opportunities for de- 
 scriptive writing — for knocking off in a few 
 well-chosen words a scene or a character. But 
 our subject soon got over that : he made 
 opportunities in his plays for just such descrip- 
 tive pieces as these early novels show him to 
 have the knack of. Take Mr. Jansenius in An 
 Unsocial Socialist. " Having discovered early 
 in his career that his dignified person and fine 
 voice caused people to stand in some awe of 
 him, and to move him into the chair at public 
 meetings, he has grown so accustomed to 
 deference that any approach to familiarity or 
 irreverence disconcerts him exceedingly." Or 
 Mrs. Douglas in The Irrational Knot. " Sholto's 
 mother is a widow lady older than Mr. Lind, 
 with a rather glassy eye and shaky hand, who 
 would look weak and shiftless in an almshouse, 
 but who, with plenty of money, unlimited 
 domestic service, and unhesitating deference 
 from attendants who are all trained artists in 
 their occupation, makes a fair show of being a 
 dignified and interesting old lady." That is 
 what we read in the novels, with the sole 
 and the single exception that, for the pur- 
 
 90 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 poses of our demonstration, the tense has been 
 altered. 
 
 It is the same with the pieces of scenic de- 
 scription. This account of a room, for ex- 
 ample : " The walls are whitewashed, and at 
 about four feet from the ground a dark band 
 appears, produced by pencil memoranda and 
 little sketches scribbled on the whitewash. 
 One end of the apartment is unfurnished, 
 except by the gymnastic apparatus, a photog- 
 rapher's camera, a ladder in the corner, and 
 a common deal table with oil cans and paint 
 pots upon it. At the other end a comparatively 
 luxurious show is made by a large bookcase, an 
 elaborate combination of bureau and writing- 
 desk, a rack with a rifle, a set of foils, and an 
 umbrella in it, several folio albums on a table, 
 some comfortable chairs and sofas, and a thick 
 carpet under foot. Close by, and seeming 
 much out of place, is a carpenter's bench with 
 the usual implements and a number of boards 
 of various thicknesses." 
 
 That is the novelist's account of it, after his 
 tense has been transposed into the historic or 
 dramatic present. And is not that just pre- 
 cisely the account of numberless interiors 
 which our subject, unwilling to surrender any 
 of the enjoyable liberties of the novelist, has 
 put into the mouth of those supernaturally 
 
 91 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 observant sparrows on the window-sill who 
 are wont to impart his stage directions 
 to us? 
 
 Ill 
 
 When Mr. Shaw came back to The Irrational 
 Knot not long ago in order to write a preface 
 about it, he found, on venturing to look into 
 the book, that it was " a fiction of the first 
 order." Its morality, that was to say, was 
 original and not ready-made. W^e have not 
 paused, I am afraid, very long over the 
 morality of the novels of Mr. Shaw's nonage ; 
 but we may say at this point, for the better 
 understanding of those who do not know 
 those novels, or whose memory has not suc- 
 ceeded in holding their . substance (as Mr. 
 Shaw confesses that his own has not), that 
 The Irrational Knot is the story of the marriage 
 of a plebeian expert in electrical dynamics with 
 the niece of an earl. (One thinks that Marian 
 was the niece of the earl, but would not like 
 to be sure.) Conolly's principal business in 
 the book is being rude to everybody— that of 
 an uncivil engineer, as you might say ; he is 
 the enfant terrible of Mr. Shaw's literary and 
 dramatic machinery, first cousin of the Welsh 
 composer in the novel about the artists and 
 
 92 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 of Trefusis, the Unsocial Socialist, and first 
 cousin once removed from the long family of 
 John Tanner. He marries Marian, who leaves 
 him, and flies to America with another. There 
 — where one does not believe his creator, on 
 evidence either internal or external, to have 
 been — one remembers a particularly resolute 
 handling of the end made by Conolly's sister, 
 who was of the variety profession, and who 
 had, unfortunately, taken to drink. The 
 two women found themselves, in the large 
 city of New York, occupying adjacent floors 
 in the same boarding house — that earliest of 
 Mr. Shaw's " coincidences " one remembers, 
 although what the scene of the death of the 
 engineer's sister can have been doing in the 
 novel is not certain, unless it was to provide 
 the author with his earliest opportunity of 
 being resolute in the face of death. After- 
 wards, when Marian was rather expecting 
 him to take her back, Conolly turned on his 
 heel and left her with an epigram, an incident 
 that one faintly remembers to have been the 
 best in the book. At any rate, The Irrational 
 Knot was a fiction of the first order in the sense 
 that it was " an early attempt on the part of 
 the Life Force to write A Doll's House in 
 English by the instrumentality of a very 
 immature writer aged twenty-four." Now 
 
 93 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 that was not very economical of the Life 
 Force, since A Doll's House had been written 
 already in Norwegian, and there was Mr. 
 William Archer standing by ready to translate 
 it. Torvald and Nora might have joined in 
 the chorus of the lost boys in Sir James 
 Barrie's pantomime, and have told the Life 
 Force that they had been " made before." 
 They had been made before and, the particular 
 point is, they had been made differently. For 
 however Mr. Shaw may dazzle our intelligences 
 with a pure pedigree for the form of his drama 
 by the Time Spirit out of Ibsen, the fact 
 remains that no two dramatists, in every 
 technical respect, are greater strangers to one 
 another. Mr. Shaw, by implication, has offered 
 us the common ground between Ibsen's Torvald 
 and Nora and his own Conolly and Marian as 
 a suitable field for comparison ; but, not- 
 withstanding the fact that we have established 
 a certain general kinship between the novels of 
 our subject and his plays, we may prefer a 
 field where a more direct comparison is possible. 
 Take Ghosts and Mrs. Warren's Profession, 
 for example. You may read Ghosts, or you 
 may witness it, and never for a moment be 
 aware that anything at all is being " discussed " 
 in Mr. Shaw's sense of the word. The one thing 
 that will strike you, if you happen to think about 
 
 94 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 it, is the enormous pains the dramatist has been 
 at to personalize his problem. Indeed problem, 
 qua problem, is the last thing that would 
 suggest itself in regard to this drama, so careful 
 has the dramatist been to merge the intellectual 
 in the emotional, the general in the particular. 
 There is nothing, positively nothing at all, in 
 the material of the drama which is not caught 
 up and sufficiently conveyed in Oswald's two 
 utterances, " What sort of life have you given 
 me ? " and " I shall never be able to work 
 again." Each of those moments is, in its 
 turn, tremendously moving, and why ? — 
 simply because every ounce of the dramatist's 
 strength has gone into the work of preparing 
 those moments. 
 
 Now our subject has publicly decried the 
 work of dramatic preparation. It may, he 
 says, " be left to those infortunate play- 
 wrights who, being unable to make any- 
 thing really interesting happen on the stage, 
 have to acquire the art of continually per- 
 suading the audience that it is going to 
 happen presently." In his primer of Ibsenism 
 he omitted to make the one point that may be 
 made against Ibsen, indeed that must be made 
 in any examination that is even decently 
 technical : namely, that his anxiety to give 
 pictorial representation to his dramatic mo- 
 
 95 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 tives (his so-called " symbolism ") is carried 
 to such lengths as to retard the imaginative 
 acceptance of his works instead of facili- 
 tating it. Thus the excesses of the late 
 Mr. Alving must have their actual and 
 concrete memorial, by a rather cumbersome 
 irony, in a Home for Orphans ; the Home for 
 Orphans must be uninsured in order, by an 
 irony equally cumbersome, to hoist the good 
 Pastor with his own petard when it catches fire 
 as a result of his prayer-meeting ; and the 
 lurid light of the building in flames must 
 visibly illumine the theme that '' everything 
 is burning " as five minutes later the light of 
 dawn must do the same service for Oswald's 
 demand for the sun. It was not necessary to 
 have the drama of Hauptmann and Tchekov 
 before we might make the discovery that all this 
 superior stage "business" is not in the least 
 essential to the real drama of Ghosts. Not only 
 is it not essential, not only would the play be a 
 perfectly good play in the theatre without it, 
 the play would be a better play, since it is the 
 property of imaginative aids, if carried beyond 
 a certain point, to become a hindrance instead of 
 a blessing. It is the consciousness of all this 
 dexterity which is the disturbance ; Ibsen's is 
 not quite completely the art which conceals art. 
 It is the same with the death of Hedwig ; the 
 
 96 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 pathos of that most moving scene is not really 
 assisted by its elaborate compliance with the 
 ritual of the wild duck in the attic. It is the 
 same with the Master Builder, at the end of 
 which play it really seems to have been Ibsen's 
 wish that his audiences should visibly and 
 actually see a human body falling from a 
 church-tower — a piece of stage business at 
 which a whole generation of English stage 
 producers, who have as a rule no particular 
 misgivings with regard to this kind of thing, 
 have quailed. This kind of thing finally got 
 such a hold of him that he wrote a play in 
 which, in order that we might properly 
 appreciate what he was getting at, it was 
 necessary that we should sit by while half the 
 characters were carried away in an avalanche ; 
 and the irony of the situation is that Ibsen's 
 " symbolism " really took its rise in nothing at 
 all but his desire to reduce everything within 
 terms of the theatre. 
 
 But now for Mrs. Warren's Profession. You 
 may admire that play as much as you please, 
 you may praise its author for the good he has 
 done, for the pleasure his intellectual indig- 
 nation has given you, or for the sometimes 
 humorous and always spirited quality of the 
 dialogue ; the fact remains that in it he has 
 done exactly what he defined Ibsenism as 
 G 97 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 doing, but what Ibsen did not do, and that is 
 he has made Society the principal protagonist 
 in the drama. There is not a word in Ghosts 
 of abstract or theoretic discussion : not the 
 smallest suggestion that the fixture of the 
 evening is Mr. Ibsen versus The Social System. 
 Here are five people, it says ; from their 
 action and interaction in the twelve hours 
 the dramatist has chosen you may take 
 away what you will in pleasure or profit. 
 Really, if Ibsen had written a preface to that 
 play (because, as our subject would say, he 
 could) those dozen words are the whole num- 
 ber of which it need have consisted. There 
 was nothing to say, because everything had 
 been said which the dramatist cared in the 
 least about saying. But in Mrs. Warren's Pro- 
 fession everything has not been said. There is 
 no reason why the author should not take a 
 couple of prefaces to lead up to it, and half a 
 dozen treatises to lead down ; we know, and he 
 knows, how well he can do them, and there is 
 not the smallest supposition on either side 
 that their interest is any less in kind or degree 
 than the play which happens to come in the 
 middle. Our pulse during that interregnum of 
 reason will move neither faster nor slower than 
 while reason was reigning before or when 
 reason begins to reign after. But because the 
 
 98 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 author is aware that we shall expect our pulse 
 to move faster, he has included some business 
 with a rifle, a concession to our morbid desire 
 that " something interesting " shall be made to 
 happen. The business with the rifle, it is to be 
 observed, does not serve at all the same 
 purpose as the effects we may find Ibsen 
 preparing ; it does not point and underline the 
 revelation of the consanguinity of Frank and 
 Vivie as Ibsen's elaborate leading up to the 
 cork-drawing episode points and underlines 
 the consanguinity of Oswald and Regina. It 
 is just there for its own sake, in the belief that 
 we like it, and if the author himself doesn't 
 much like it, there is the readiest possible 
 consolation for him in the reflection that it is 
 by the originality of its morality that a fiction 
 enters the first order, with no objection offered 
 if the rest is ready-made. In a sentence, 
 our subject has got the consanguinity in ; 
 surely he may be allowed to play the usual 
 tricks with a rifle ! 
 
 Now that is the kind of play Mrs. Warren's 
 Profession is. It is the kind of play, I think, 
 we should expect from the Puritan turned 
 playwright. Its message is a grave message, 
 but its author " has not been sparing of such 
 lighter qualities as I could endow the book 
 with for the sake of those who ask nothing 
 
 99 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 j from a play but an agreeable pastime."^ It 
 has all its author's intellectual integrity, but 
 none of the aesthetic integrity of Ibsen. 
 " Nothing would please our sanctimonious 
 British public more than to throw the whole 
 guilt of Mrs. Warren's profession on Mrs. 
 Warren herself. Now the whole aim of my 
 play," says the author, "is to throw that 
 guilt on the British public itself." But Ibsen 
 never did modify thus his plays from within 
 outwards ; the peculiar " tightness " of his 
 conception of the dramatic form, with its 
 advantages and its limitations, is the conse- 
 quence of his craftsmanlike desire to relate 
 the smallest external part to the centre. 
 Thus in Ghosts his sole absorbing wish (so far 
 as it is concerned with the throwing of guilt at 
 all,which would be a strange way of putting it) 
 is to throw the guilt on the late Mr. Alving. 
 The Norwegian public may blame themselves 
 for the cheerless environment which their 
 social system awarded the late Mr. Alving if it 
 pleases them. But essentially the procedure of 
 Ibsen is a procedure from the particular to the 
 general. " This is the history of the Alving 
 family," says Ibsen in effect ; " I daresay you 
 may not be wrong if you choose to find this 
 sitting-room a microcosm." 
 
 ' Foreword to Popular Edition of Man and Svperman (1911) 
 
 100 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 IV 
 
 But to our author, it is already apparent, the 
 play is not the thing; it is in the message, and 
 not in the play, that the social conscience is to 
 be caught. The message is limed, as it were, 
 with all those lighter qualities of which this 
 author has no mean endowment. Indeed those 
 lighter qualities are present in such quantity 
 that before Mrs. Warren's Profession they suf- 
 ficed Mr. Shaw to write two of the most amus- 
 ing comedies in the English language, and after 
 Mrs. Warren's Profession, when the contem- 
 porary fashion of trying to write plays in the 
 Ibsen manner had passed over him, they have 
 served him to deck out his philosophy in 
 theatrical form as well as to give him a number 
 of opportunities for minor relaxation. 
 
 Thus Mrs. Warren's Profession, which was 
 written in 1894, will serve us as some kind of 
 a touchstone. Apart from the circumstance 
 that it has happened to crop up, it will serve 
 us better than Widowers' Houses, a play of 
 which the grave message — that, in regard to 
 slum property, " the dirtier a place is the 
 more rent you get, and the decenter it is, the 
 more compensation you get " — is less clearly 
 the raison d'etre. On one side of Mrs. Warren's 
 
 101 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Profession we may group the comedies written 
 entirely out of those Hghter qualities of which 
 our subject is master : the comedies of which 
 Arms and the Man and You Never Can Tell 
 are the type perfect. Then come the plays 
 which conform more or less to the Mrs. Warren, 
 or pseudo-Ibsen, period : plays in which the 
 lighter qualities set off and render acceptable 
 the grave message. These plays are various, 
 and might be held to range from the Candida 
 of 1894-5 to The Doctor's Dilemma of 1911. 
 Finally, and indeed all the time, emerges the 
 third group of plays, in which the lighter 
 qualities, freed from the bondage to theatrical 
 craftsmanship, gambol no more for their own 
 delight, however, but in the service of the 
 grave message naked and unashamed. These 
 are the plays of " discussion," beginning, I 
 suppose, with Man and Superman, embracing 
 John Bull's Other Island, Major Barbara, 
 Getting Married, Misalliance, and ending — 
 Mr. Shaw knows where. 
 
 That, then, or something like that, is the 
 progress presented by our subject's drama, 
 to a view that does not claim to be anything 
 more than approximate. If we wished to be 
 subtle, we might regard Arms and the Man 
 and You Never Can Tell as the Puritan's 
 attempt to capture the theatre for his pur- 
 
 102 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 poses by means of a preliminary demonstra- 
 tion that those pm*poses were no different 
 from the theatre's own. Mr. Shaw has him- 
 self told us how he deliberately compounded 
 the second of them out of the well-used 
 ingredients — an if-possible-comic waiter, a little 
 eating and drinking and dancing. The theatre 
 once his, we may see Mr. Shaw behaving to 
 the public precisely as St. Thomas a Becket 
 behaved to the King ; the ear he had won by 
 jests he proceeded to preach into. But Mr. 
 Shaw did not drop all at once the pretence that 
 it was the theatre he really was interested in, 
 as the Archbishop dropped his interest in the 
 world ; he not only wrote for a little longer 
 pleasant comedies such as Captain Brass- 
 bound's Conversion which conform to the first 
 of our groups, but he continued up to the very 
 end, as we have seen, to take the lighter 
 qualities into partnership. — Thus Mr. Shaw's 
 early division of his plays into " pleasant " and 
 " unpleasant " is too simple : it is to be 
 likened exactly to his discovery that in the 
 change from the second group of plays to the 
 third he had been actuated by a love of the pure 
 Greek form. We shall be nearer the truth if 
 we look upon the transition as from the 
 Puritan's or alio obliqua into the Puritan's 
 oratio recta. All the time, according to our 
 
 103 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 portrait — even at the time of those early Httle 
 masterpieces in which the utilitarian triumphed 
 astonishingly — Mr. Shaw did want more than 
 anything else to use the theatre to talk in. 
 First he captured it ; then he began to talk 
 through the crevices of the ordinary stage 
 framework ; finally he threw that framework 
 out of the theatre, and gave the theatre over to 
 open debate between the manifold projections 
 of his own personality. 
 
 To complete our sketch, it will be necessary 
 to make provision here for one fourth or sub- 
 sidiary group of plays — the plays for Puritans 
 self -announced. This will not be in any sense 
 an exact group, but, regarding Ccesar and 
 Cleopatra (1898) as the archetype, we may 
 include in it the plays in which Mr. Shaw has 
 handled history. These are full of enlighten- 
 ment as to the kind of drama our subject's is 
 and is not ; but they do not indicate any 
 emergence of his specific talents different from 
 that we should have expected, and have 
 already allowed for. 
 
 In the first place, then, let us credit the plays 
 of Mr. Shaw with all the debating virtues. We 
 have seen that his aptitude for quick, spirited 
 speech was a natural one ; his early novels, 
 
 104 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 which are quite without a genuine basis of 
 imaginative existence, have only to run against 
 some topic to be raised to a state of intellectual 
 excitement which precipitates itself in dialogue. 
 We know in what manner this natural aptitude 
 was trained and disciplined by the experience 
 of the platform. It would be hard to say in 
 what degree our pleasure in Mr. Shaw's theatre 
 is contributed by its readiness in retort alone. 
 A thousand instances will come crowding in 
 upon even the least diligent of his playgoers : 
 Major SwindonV " What do you expect me to 
 think of that speech, Mr. Anderson ? " and 
 Mr. Anderson's *' I never expect a soldier to 
 think, sir " ; Felix Drinkwater's " Orn maw 
 grenfawther's tombstown, it is," and Captain 
 Brassbound's " It will be on your own tomb- 
 stone, presently, if you cannot hold your 
 tongue " ; in Major Barbara the poor man's 
 " I wouldn't have your conscience, not for all 
 your income," followed inevitably by the rich 
 man's, " I wouldn't have your income, not for 
 all your conscience, Mr. Shirley. "(.^^his is the 
 typical Shaw " laugh " ; it is for moments such 
 as these that we must for ever be indebted to 
 the comedy of our subject. Mere impulsive- 
 ness and excess of speech have never ceased to 
 delight him. 
 
 Mr. Shaw has admitted that there are 
 105 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 counsels which are vahd " for plays in which 
 there is nothing to discuss." But, he adds : 
 " They may be disregarded by the play- 
 wright who is a moralist and a debater as 
 well as a dramatist. From him, within the 
 inevitable limits set by the clock and by the 
 physical endurance of the human frame, people 
 will stand anything as soon as they are matured 
 enough and cultivated enough to be susceptible 
 to the appeal of his particular form of art." 
 , That people will stand anjrthing which succeeds 
 I in giving them pleasure is perfectly true ; it is 
 the firm basis of common sense in all that our 
 subject has said, and the more that he has 
 implied, regarding the negligibility of artistic 
 technique. But the point is, not what the 
 public will stand, but what the artist wishes 
 to give them. Mr. Shaw wishes to give them 
 morals and he employs quite naturally the 
 ' means of the skilled and delightful debater. If 
 he has been too long, the public have left before 
 the end as remorselessly as the Fabians have 
 left him a quarter of an hour before the 
 inevitability of the Millennium was demon- 
 strated ; but they have both enjoyed them- 
 selves. That all this dramatic debating is on 
 the surface of things, however, is proved by 
 referring for one moment to any other dramatist 
 you like who is in the enjoyment of a simi- 
 
 106 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 larly European reputation. We will not say- 
 Ibsen, because Ibsen has come into this chapter 
 already, to render first aid at another critical 
 juncture. Let us take a dramatist, for the 
 better achievement of our parallel, who is 
 something at least of a moralist and who has 
 shown himself to be not the most negligible kind 
 of debater, although he has chosen to be this 
 in other works than his dramatic. Let us take 
 M. Maeterlinck. 
 
 It really does not matter in the least what 
 play of M. Maeterlinck's we take, but we will 
 say Monna Vanna. Now the whole distin- 
 guishing character of the first act of Monna 
 Vanna, the whole of our subject's " some- 
 thing really interesting," consists not in what 
 we see, nor in the amusing, or the witty, or 
 the conspicuously poetic quality of the words 
 that are spoken ; it consists simply in the 
 progressive creation of illusion. That is what 
 the dramatist wants to do ; and in order 
 that the public may " stand " what he wants 
 to do, he calls to his aid his own particular 
 mastery over the theatre's own particular 
 powers. The first act of Monna Vanna is for 
 three-fourths of its length a dialogue between 
 two persons : that is what the dramatist wants, 
 and since a dialogue of this length between two 
 persons is not an easy thing for the public to 
 
 107 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 stand, and recruitment of their number by 
 aeroplane or other means is outside his scheme 
 of things, he proves himself a dramatist by 
 rendering this conversation interesting. Now 
 there are two ways of rendering dramatic con- 
 versation interesting (if the matter may be 
 put so crudely) : one is to be judged by the 
 number of things you stick on to it, the other 
 by the number of things you catch up in it. 
 Wilde was a practitioner in the first kind, Ibsen 
 in the second, Shakespeare in both, but when 
 in the second kind, the more Shakespeare 
 he. The dramatist may catch up the little 
 trivialities of general life with an intensive 
 purpose, as Shakespeare did in the conversa- 
 tion of Shallow and Silence in the second part 
 of King Henry the Fourth ; or he may catch up 
 something of profound inner suggestiveness, as 
 when Shakespeare threw into Hamlet's pro- 
 phecy of long life for the married the sudden con- 
 ditioning clause, " all but one.'' What Maeter- 
 linck is doing in this particular act is catching 
 up into his dialogue all the things that are 
 necessary to the imaginative understanding 
 of his fable. He is positing his problem. 
 He is " preparing " (oh horrible words !) his 
 " situation." He is creating, in this particular 
 play, for the events of which it happens that 
 our belief is to be asked, the illusion of reality. 
 
 108 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 In another play it might be another illusion, 
 as Congreve and Vanbrugh beget the illusion 
 of amorality before plunging us into the love- 
 chase of Millamant and Mirabell or Loveless 
 and Berinthia. This particular business, this 
 part of your task which consists in employing 
 the theatre's subtlest means to achieve the 
 theatre's plainest ends, does seem, whatever 
 you may call it, to be part of the business 
 of the dramatist. 
 
 And now let us see in what manner, and to 
 what extent, Mr. Shaw performs this part of 
 the dramatist's business. Do not let us take 
 the drama of discussion in its most extreme 
 and self-announced manifestations ; do not 
 let us take Getting Married or Misalliance, 
 which are a " debate " and a " conversation " 
 respectively — let us rather take The Doctor's 
 Dilemma, which is a " tragedy." What is 
 that highly diverting first act, as a matter of 
 plain truth, all about ? It is about the medical 
 profession. And what is It preparing us for ? 
 Well, it is preparing us for more about the 
 medical profession — for as much more about 
 the medical profession as, within the inevit- 
 able limits set by the clock, we shall be likely 
 to stand. Is it, in any very profound sense, 
 preparing us for the story of Louis Dubedat 
 and Jennifer, as Maeterlinck was preparing us 
 
 109 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 for the story of Prinzivalle and Vanna ? We 
 really cannot say that it is. And when we 
 come to the story of Dubedat, to the tragic 
 story of the man of genius who was not also 
 a man of honour, can it really be said that we 
 have been persuaded into the most suitable 
 possible mood for the reception of that story ? 
 Again one does not think that that can be 
 said. The confession of Mr. Shaw's failure is 
 to be found asserted by himself. And the 
 point is that it is not a failure in what we 
 wanted him to do (supposing we were so 
 foolish), but a failure in what he himself 
 wanted to do. We cannot be too clear that 
 to ask Mr. Shaw to impart his morality by 
 means of the implicit method of Maeterlinck, 
 and to condemn him because he has not done 
 so, would be very bad criticism ; indeed it 
 would be the negation of criticism, whose only 
 business is to detect what a man has wanted 
 to do and to judge him according to the 
 success with which he has done it. Mr. Shaw 
 has wanted us to believe that his Jennifer 
 was " heartbroken," and we do not believe 
 that she was heartbroken. Mr. Shaw has 
 wanted us to understand that B. B.'s feeling, 
 when he misquoted Shakespeare at the death- 
 bed, " absurdly expressed as it is, is too sin- 
 cere and humane to be ridiculed." And that 
 
 110 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 is something that we do not understand. We 
 have laughed, and that has been good ; but we 
 have laughed, and that is all. And the complete- 
 ness of Mr. Shaw's self-assertion of failure is 
 rounded and perfect when he tells us that to 
 laugh is the one thing he did not want us to do. 
 Let us then here make the assertion and have 
 done with it, that in all the sensitive and patient 
 finesses that go to fit dramatic means to 
 dramatic ends, that go, I suppose, to build up 
 great drama, our subject is no kind of a 
 dramatist at all. This, at the end of a first 
 act that is all profession-baiting, that is all 
 idea-mongering, that is Anti-Vivisection and 
 Anti-Vaccination and Jane Marsh's arm, is 
 the positing of the dramatic problem : — 
 
 Sir Patrick. Well, Mr. Saviour of Lives, which is it to be ? 
 that honest, decent man Blenkinsop, or 
 that rotten blackguard of an artist, eh ? 
 
 RiDGEON. It's not an easy case to judge, is it ? 
 
 Blenkinsop's an honest decent man ; 
 but is he any use ? Dubedat's a rotten 
 blackguard ; but he's a genuine source 
 of pretty and pleasant and good things. 
 
 Sir Patrick. What will he be a source of for that poor 
 innocent wife of his, when she finds him 
 out? 
 
 RiDGEON. That's true. Her hfe will be a hell. 
 
 Sir Patrick. And tell me this. Suppose you had this 
 choice put before you : either to go 
 
 111 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 through life and find all the pictures 
 bad but all the men and women good, 
 or to go through life and find all the 
 pictures good and all the men and 
 women rotten. Which would you 
 choose ? 
 RiDGEON. That's a devilishly difficult question, 
 Paddy. The pictures are so agreeable 
 and the good people so infernally dis- 
 agreeable and mischievous, that I really 
 can't undertake to say offhand which I 
 should prefer to do without. . . . 
 
 It is posited with the highest kind of debating 
 effectiveness, it has all the air of " something 
 interesting," we have stood with delight what 
 went before and (although we shall probably 
 leave before the curtain falls) we shall stand 
 with delight what follows afterwards. But 
 that need not blind us to the fact that it is a 
 pretty jejune kind of thing as drama. The 
 play is not really about Dubedat ; the play is 
 really about the medical profession. The 
 most tragic thing in the world may be (as 
 Ridgeon says) a man of genius who is not 
 also a man of honour; but the fact remains 
 that The Doctor's Dilemma is not the most 
 tragic thing in the world. It is a peg to hang a 
 treatise upon. And because the treatise will 
 not all get on to the peg, you will find the rest 
 of it in the preface. 
 
 112 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 VI 
 
 We thus arrive at the preface as the dis- 
 tinguishing feature of Mr. Shaw's drama. It 
 is the general which is never quite forgotten 
 in the particular. It is the dramatic overplus 
 which is not worked in. It is the excess of the 
 philosophy over the anecdote. It is the 
 Puritan fact on which the Utilitarian fiction is 
 founded. 
 
 Let us do our best to remember these fre- 
 quently melodramatic prefaces — (" the excited 
 reader," you will find yourself) — these always 
 delightful prefaces, of our subject. Do we not 
 remember the care and enthusiasm with which 
 they give us the facts ? Once upon a time 
 Mr. Shaw had to write articles in which to 
 give us the facts, and to depend upon the 
 journals to publish them. He wrote a paper 
 entitled A Dramatic Realist to His Critics, 
 which was a delightfully witty paper, and 
 which was entirely devoted to adducing the 
 facts in evidence of his chocolate cream 
 soldier. He quoted the Duke of Wellington 
 and the modern strategists, and he completely 
 proved to his o^vn satisfaction that chocolate 
 creams were just what a really efficient soldier 
 would carry in his ammunition wallet. Not that 
 H 113 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 that added to, or subtracted from, our delight 
 in the anti-romantic comedy ; but Mr. Shaw 
 enjoyed the exercise. Now that state of affairs 
 is changed, and if he has any knowledge to 
 air he airs it in a preface. 
 
 Mr. Shaw has reason to suspect that certain 
 young women get married without being in- 
 formed by their criminally timid or neglectful 
 parents of what is expected of young women 
 when they get married. Perhaps someone has 
 told him so. At any rate, he hears somewhere 
 of an isolated case which would seem to lend 
 colour to his suspicion, and in it goes to a 
 Preface on Parents and Children, with the 
 remark that " apparently it does happen." 
 A boy has been birched by a schoolmaster : 
 " I had intended to give the particulars," writes 
 our subject. On how many occasions has he 
 carried the intention into tolerable practice ! 
 It was not for our good that we should enjoy 
 Thomas Broadbent before we had been given 
 the particulars of Denshawai. The preface 
 to Mrs. Warren's Profession is so complete 
 and explicit a treatise that it renders any play 
 on the subject quite unnecessary. The Doctors 
 Dilemma is but a pale shadow of the Preface 
 on Doctors. The preface to Caesar and Cleo- 
 patra, in which the facts about Caesar appear, 
 is a much more impressive production than 
 
 114 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 Ccesar and Cleopatra, in which Caesar appears. 
 Do we not remember the extreme and almost 
 unprincipled efforts of these prefaces to get 
 us into a state of convinced receptivity, so 
 that the theatre (which is a church) might 
 preach to converted men ? Mr. Shaw would 
 state in one place that the human impulses to 
 murder, burglary, etc., were negligible (we 
 found him doing so on page 34 of this study), 
 being then bent upon shocking us into a proper 
 penitence for our sins of commission. He 
 would then frequently proceed, the business 
 now being to flagellate our sins of omission, to 
 the basing of a case on some instance of just 
 such negligible isolation. " Nobody worth 
 counting believes directly, frankly, and in- 
 stinctively that when a person commits a 
 murder and is put into prison for twenty years 
 for it, the free and innocent husband or wife of 
 that murderer should remain bound by the 
 marriage." In short (as our subject would 
 say), nobody worth counting commits any 
 murders — our barbarian penal code may be 
 scrapped ; but on the other hand so many 
 people commit murders that the hardship 
 imposed on free and innocent persons through 
 the deprivation of conjugal rights is appalling 
 — our monstrous divorce laws are a disgrace. 
 It cannot be necessary to multiply instances 
 
 115 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 of the truly characteristic manner in which 
 our subject has had it both ways. There have 
 been times at which even those who know no 
 pleasure in life like being convinced must 
 have agreed with Socrates ; that truly, Glau- 
 con, the power of the art of controversy is a 
 very extraordinary one. 
 
 But we have not come so far in this study 
 without getting " up " to Mr. Shaw. We are 
 not going to enter an objection to the prefaces 
 of our subject because they are calculated to 
 throw dust in the eyes of the jury. It is no 
 part of our purpose to throw any guilt at all. 
 There are people who reprobate Mr. Shaw's 
 prefaces on the ground that their author gave 
 up to politics what was meant for mankind — 
 that he put into prefaces, that is to say, the 
 emotional and intellectual vigour he ought to 
 have kept unimpaired for the plays. But the 
 purpose of this chapter is a purely demonstra- 
 tive purpose, and we will content ourselves 
 therefore with pointing to the manner in 
 which, as a matter of fact, the institution of 
 the preface erects itself in the middle of our 
 dramatist's record, and divides his works for 
 the theatre into precisely the two classes we 
 have already arrived at (p. 103), If the reader 
 cares at this point to turn to the works of Mr. 
 Shaw on his shelf, he will find that Arms and 
 
 116 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 the Man and You Never Can Tell, together 
 with Candida, had eighteen pages of preface 
 to their three hundred and twenty of play. 
 If now he moves his hand along a yard or so 
 and takes down Misalliance, he will find that 
 the pages of preface are one hundred and 
 nineteen and the pages of play ninety-nine. 
 Mr. Shaw, that is to say, had first of all to 
 get his work into the theatre, and with that 
 end in view he shaped it as well as he could. 
 Interpreting the characteristic task of the 
 dramatist, on its technical side, as the in- 
 vention of " anecdote," he gave the whole of 
 his exceptional intelligence to the invention of 
 really delightful anecdotes. But when Mr. 
 Shaw had got his work into the theatre, he 
 paid very little further attention to anecdote 
 but went on delivering his philosophic goods in 
 the thinnest and lightest of fictional disguises. 
 That is the explanation of why Mr. Shaw has 
 not advanced one single step upon Arms and 
 the Man in any direction that has anything at 
 all to do with the technical mastery of the 
 theatre. That is the explanation of the great 
 part which repetition plays in the theatre of our 
 subject. Dryden said of Ben Jonson, " One 
 cannot say that he wanted wit, but rather that 
 he was frugal of it." Mr. Shaw has neither 
 wanted wit nor been frugal of it. But if one 
 
 117 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 cannot say that he has wanted invention, one 
 may certainly say — well, that he has been 
 frugal of it. 
 
 And it is precisely here that enlightenment 
 comes as to the part Mr. Shaw has played as 
 critic, and particularly as self-critic. All his life 
 he has only had to see a thing in a particular 
 way himself to be certain immediately of twelve 
 good reasons why no man who was not a fool 
 could possibly see it in any other way. It was 
 so with the drama. He found himself with a 
 natural aptitude for debate, an aptitude 
 humorous, pointed and searching ; he found 
 " no limit to his power of conjuring up imagin- 
 ary people in imaginary places, and finding 
 pretexts for theatrical scenes between them." 
 For the imaginative groundwork of drama it 
 is probable that he had no great natural 
 aptitude. And so what the artist did with 
 greatest ease, the critic came in and asserted 
 to be the artist's only worthy activity. Mr. 
 Shaw was a natural hand at discussion, and so 
 he defined the drama as discussion. In his 
 first drama of discussion, Candida, there is still 
 some attempt at the creation of dramatic 
 illusion. We really believe in its " imaginary 
 people " as we believe most astonishingly in 
 Raina and her chocolate cream soldier. But 
 because we leave off just as ignorant as Candida 
 
 118 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 and her husband of what the secret in the 
 poet's heart precisely is, because, that is to say, 
 there is some failure in the task of the drama- 
 tist, Mr. Shaw calls Candida a mystery, and 
 converts at one stroke a defect into a quality. 
 If Mr. Shaw had written this play later on, he 
 would not have left us to guess at the secret in 
 the poet's heart ; he would have told us flatly 
 in a preface. Candida thus stands at the 
 _^ \ parting of our subject's dramatic ways. It 
 marks the last of his attempts to make the 
 play the complete and self-sufficient vehicle of 
 the " ideas " — the anecdote of the philosophy. 
 After this he may achieve the pure technical 
 feat once more in The Shewing-up of Blanco 
 Posnet, but it will have the appearance of an 
 accident. The most characteristic and mature 
 theatre of our subject had its beginning after 
 Candida was written. In his next play Mr. 
 Shaw came to praise Caesar ; but he wrote a 
 preface which buried him. 
 
 VII 
 
 It has been contended that the measure of 
 Mr, Shaw's ability as a writer of prefaces is 
 the measure of his inability as a writer of 
 plays. Sometimes Mr. Shaw's prefaces have 
 certainly made it very hard for Mr. Shaw's 
 
 119 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 plays to follow them. " Into the blackest 
 depths of this violation of children's souls ..." 
 we read, and we read on and get Misalliance. 
 Misalliance is all very well ; but the one is so 
 very much more profound an affair than the 
 other. On other occasions it is instructive to 
 note the statements of the preface when we 
 remember that they are the basis of the illus- 
 trative comedy which is to follow. For ex- 
 ample, in the preface to Getting Married we 
 read : " There is nothing more wounding to 
 our sense of human dignity than the husband 
 hunting that begins in every family when the 
 daughters become marriageable ; but it is 
 inevitable under existing circumstances ; and 
 the parents who refuse to engage in it are bad 
 parents, though they may be superior in- 
 dividuals." And we read again : *' Under the 
 influence of the emotion thus manufactured 
 [by the convention that the natural relation 
 between husband and wife or parent and 
 child is one of intense affection] the most 
 detestable people are spoilt with entirely un- 
 deserved deference, obedience, and even affec- 
 tion whilst they live, and mourned when they 
 die by those whose lives they wantonly or 
 maliciously made miserable." We may read 
 those grave statements, and be distantly 
 aware that there is a comedy to follow. But 
 
 120 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 the question is, What kind of a comedy ? 
 What kind of a comedy of husband-hunting, 
 what kind of a comedy of parents and children 
 — (good subjects both, for the Comic Spirit) — 
 can follow those statements ? 
 
 Comedy's function, Mr. Shaw says, is the 
 destruction of old-established morals. It is one 
 definition of comedy's function ; it is Mr. 
 Shaw's own gloss upon the function which 
 M. Bergson has brilliantly expounded, having 
 no difficulty so long as he holds fast by the 
 comedies of Moliere, but, like a wise man, 
 giving the comedies of Shakespeare a wide 
 berth. Comedy, according to M. Bergson, is 
 " a kind of social ragging " ; laughter is a social 
 gesture, having for function the punishment 
 of any " special lack of adaptability to society." 
 Well, it is possible to regard our laughter at 
 Sganarelle, who argues that there is something 
 wonderful in man which does what it wills with 
 his body and who falls down in turning, as a 
 punishment of the poor man for his special 
 lack of adaptability to the stone he stubs his 
 toe against. Don Juan's " Good, so your 
 argument has broken your nose," is a concise 
 social gesture on the part of the Comic Spirit. 
 But transplant M. Bergson's theory of the 
 comic from the other side of the Channel, where 
 it may perhaps explain our laughter at Sgan- 
 
 121 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 arelle, or at Arnolphe, or at Orgon under the 
 table, and it has but Httle help to give us in the 
 case of our laughter at Square and Adams, and 
 none at all when we laugh with Falstaff. 
 Greater help it has to give perhaps in the case 
 of Raina and Sergius, of Octavius and Ann, of 
 Broadbent and Haffigan, of Rummy and 
 Snobby, of Mrs. Whitefield and Lady Britomart 
 and Roebuck Ramsden and Sir Ralph Bloom- 
 field Bonnington. And that is why we need 
 not seriously quarrel with another French 
 critic for his discovery in our subject of the 
 English Moliere. Arms and the Man is as 
 economical and decisive a social gesture as Le 
 Tartuffe, and " the monstrous conceit which 
 it is the business of romance to flatter " is 
 pricked and subsides at one and the same 
 moment in which the heroine sinks to the 
 ottoman. " Ce Monsieur Loyal porte un air 
 bien deloyal ! " says Moliere ; and Mr. Shaw's 
 pleasure, from the time he wrote novels and 
 called his lady pianist Szczymplica, to the 
 time he wrote plays and called his lady acrobat 
 Szczepanowska, has been unfailing in the 
 humorous opportunities of a name. 
 
 We may give the French critic his English 
 Moliere. But Mr. Shaw, in his work of de- 
 stroying our old-established morals, has not 
 always been so economical and decisive as we 
 
 122 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 found him in Arms and the Man. In our 
 subject there is a great deal of the privileged 
 talker, to whom the more we listen the less care 
 he takes in what he says. Really when we get 
 to Great Catherine we are inclined to fancy that 
 the only Englishman who still sees the joke of 
 the Englishman abroad is Mr. Shaw himself. 
 There are mechanics if you like in the laughter- 
 making of Molicre : you may derive as an 
 induction from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme 
 that a man should not be too ambitious, from 
 Le Misanthrope that he should not be too 
 difficult to please, from L'Ecole des Femmes 
 that he should not be too mechanical, from 
 L'Amour Medecin or Le Medecin Malgre Lui 
 that he should not trust the doctors too com- 
 pletely. You may find in such a typically 
 English humorist as Fielding a chapter en- 
 titled, " In which the gentleman descants on 
 bravery and heroic virtue, till an unlucky 
 accident puts an end to the discourse," and 
 fancy you have come upon the proof-perfect 
 of the Bergsonian theory. But there is a 
 difference to be observed in the comedy of our 
 subject. 
 
 It could hardly happen but that Mr. Shaw's 
 primary intimacy with the general and his 
 only secondary interest in the particular 
 should leave their mark upon his comic crea- 
 
 123 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 tions. They have been called into being by a 
 hypothesis. In an earlier page of this study 
 we found Mr. Shaw proceeding from the 
 statement that " there are millions of poor 
 people, dirty people, abject people " to the 
 shelter in which Major Barbara ministered at 
 West Ham. That is exactly what one means 
 by a procedure from the general to the particu- 
 lar. The postulation of a person by intellectual 
 necessity, as it were, and then the subsequent 
 diligent humanization of that person, is a 
 good way of artistic creation : it is Mr. Shaw's 
 way. His people bear the burden of proof upon 
 them. They carry the heavy ^ responsibility 
 that there are, a ^priori, a million just like them 
 in the world. That is what one means by the 
 " type." Mr. Shaw's people are a perpetual 
 reference back. They bear the endorsement 
 " refer to drawer." They live less for their 
 own sakes than for the sake of the argument. 
 But you would not expect to meet a million 
 Falstaffs in the world. That is to say that 
 there is another way of artistic creation, which 
 is not Mr. Shaw's way. 
 
 " But suppose Shakespeare," says our sub- 
 ject, " had begun where he left off ! Suppose 
 he had been born at a time when, as the result 
 of a long propaganda of health and temperance, 
 sack had come to be called alcohol, alcohol had 
 
 124 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 come to be called poison, corpulence had come 
 to be regarded as either a disease or a breach 
 of good manners, and a conviction had spread 
 throughout society that the practice of con- 
 suming ' a halfpenny worth of bread to an 
 intolerable deal of sack ' was the cause of so 
 much misery, crime, and racial degeneration 
 that whole States prohibited the sale of potable 
 spirits altogether, and even moderate drinking 
 was more and more regarded as a regrettable 
 weakness ! Suppose (to drive the change well 
 home) the women in the great theatrical 
 centres had completely lost that amused 
 indulgence for the drunken man which still 
 exists in some out-of-the-way places, and felt 
 nothing but disgust and anger at the conduct 
 and habits of Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch ! 
 Instead of Henry IV and The Merry Wives of 
 Windsor, we should have something like Zola's 
 L'x^ssommoir." There we are, back at the 
 Statesman and at the Puritan again. We may 
 think that, from Shakespeare, we should not 
 have had anything in the least like Zola's 
 L'Assommoir. We may think that the change 
 is exaggerated ; or rather that it is the differ- 
 ence between Mr. Shaw and Shakespeare, not be- 
 tween Mr. Shaw's world and Shakespeare's world. 
 It is the difference, I suppose, between 
 laughter for its own sake and laughter with a 
 
 125 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 purpose ; between that divine, unconscious 
 laughter which plays about Falstaff in the 
 tavern, and that laughter which renders some- 
 how curiously mean and depressing the drunken 
 scene in Candida, It is the difference between 
 the laughter which draws the chariot and 
 the laughter which comes in at the cart's 
 tail. Somehow even the happiest of the comic 
 creations of our subject do seem, in the memory, 
 to occupy that penitentiary position. Mr. Shaw 
 spoke the final truth about himself when 
 he said that he had adopted waggery as a 
 medium. His is a grave message : it would 
 issue gravely if it were not for the instinct of 
 absurdity which has never deserted him. 
 
 We might have paused earlier in this chapter 
 during our consideration of the most sternly 
 didactic of Mr. Shaw's novels, and refreshed 
 ourselves with the absurdity of the following : 
 
 " Why on earth do you call yourself Smilash ? " 
 " I confess that the name has been a failure. I 
 took great pains, in constructing it, to secure a plea- 
 sant impression. It is not a mere invention, but a 
 compound of the words smile and eyelash. A smile 
 suggests good humour ; eyelashes soften the expres- 
 sion and are the only features that never blemish a 
 face. Hence Smilash is a sound that should cheer 
 and propitiate. Yet it exasperates. It is really very 
 odd that it should have that effect. ..." 
 
 126 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 One does not know why one likes that so 
 much ; but hke it one does. It is what Mr. 
 Shaw has called " the great artist's delight in 
 playing with his ideas, his materials, and his 
 readers " : it is part of " the enormous fund 
 of joyousness which is the secret of genius." 
 Mr. Shaw's delight in playing with his ideas 
 has led us into some strange places. But that 
 is not the point. Never has he penned the 
 gravest part of his message without being 
 promptly rather ashamed of himself and 
 turning it to fun. That is very fortunate for us. 
 The demand that we should not laugh at his 
 fun, on the ground that that also is " either a 
 disease or a breach of good manners," need not 
 be taken very seriously, because it is merely 
 more of his fun, and not the grave demand of 
 the grave man that we should attend gravely 
 to his grave message. When B. B. quotes 
 Shakespeare, as a fitting thing to do with Death 
 in the room, it is a shocking thing that he 
 himself in his best professional manner should 
 have committed the murder ; but is an absurd 
 thing that he should mix Shakespeare so 
 delightfully. Mr. Shaw knows that as well as 
 we do ; he knows that the mere mechanical 
 concatenation of the phrases is an automatic 
 producer of laughter, although none of us 
 perhaps, not M. Bergson nor Herr Freud even, 
 
 127 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 knows why. But he remembers the gravity of 
 his message, the thought of having a preface 
 to live up to comes over him, and he asks us not 
 to laugh. He would prefer us in the melting 
 mood. " When a comedy is performed, it is 
 nothing to me that the spectators laugh : any 
 fool can make an audience laugh. I want to 
 see how many of them, laughing or grave, are 
 in the melting mood." Well, perhaps our 
 subject's tragedy is in that, for the melting 
 mood is one which has evaded him always. 
 But the instinct of absurdity has never 
 deserted him. That, in the service of the 
 Puritan's grave message, has given us a drama 
 for which we may be completely thankful. 
 Mr. Shaw's instinct of absurdity is something 
 as completely his own as Shakespeare's or 
 Fielding's great unifying faculty of laughter. 
 Do not let us look at it ungraciously, or pre- 
 tend that it has not delighted us. There is, 
 however, one possible sense in which we may 
 take Mr. Shaw's demand that we should not 
 laugh as something more than his fun. Deep 
 down in our consciousness, and perhaps in his, 
 lies the knowledge that he has wanted us to do 
 something more than laugh — and we have 
 not done it. We think we know what he 
 means by the melting mood, and we think 
 we know that, please us as he has, divert 
 
 128 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 us as he has, instruct us as he has, he 
 has not brought us to it. What he has really 
 aimed at is a change of heart, only that 
 is a consummation which to his particular 
 temperament has presented itself as a change 
 of ideas. He has adopted waggery as his 
 medium, and while we have taken the waggery 
 we have left the ideas. In the work of our 
 subject there is that possibility of a selective 
 rejection, as there is not in the work of the 
 English comic masters. There is a passage in 
 Fielding which will illustrate the unity of the 
 true comic spirit as well as another ; it is the 
 passage in Joseph Andrews in which Parson 
 Adams and Mr. Pounce, in the chariot, discuss 
 the virtue of charity : 
 
 " Sir," said Adams, " my definition of charity is, 
 a generous disposition to relieve the distressed." — 
 " There is something in that definition," answered 
 Peter, " which I like well enough ; it is, as you say, 
 a disposition, and does not so much consist in the 
 act as in the disposition to do it. But, alas ! Mr. 
 Adams, who are meant by the distressed ? Believe 
 me, the distresses of mankind arc mostly imaginary, 
 and it would be rather folly than goodness to relieve 
 them." — " Sure, sir," replied Adams, " hunger and 
 thirst, cold and nakedness, and other distresses which 
 attend the poor can never be said to be imaginary 
 evils." — " How can any man complain of hunger," 
 said Peter, " in a country where such excellent salads 
 
 I 129 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 are to be gathered in almost every field ? or of thirst, 
 when every river and stream produce such delicious 
 potations ? And as for cold and nakedness, they are 
 evils introduced by luxury and custom. A man 
 naturally wants clothes no more than a horse or any 
 other animal ; and there are whole nations who go 
 without them ; but these are things perhaps which 
 
 you, who do not know the world " " You will 
 
 pardon me, sir," returned Adams ; "I have read of 
 the Gymnosophists." — " A plague of your Jehosa- 
 phats ! " cried Peter ; " the greatest fault in our 
 constitution is the provision made for the poor, 
 except that perhaps made for some others. Sir, I 
 have not an estate which doth not contribute almost 
 as much again to the poor as to the land-tax ; and I 
 do assure you I expect to come myself to the parish 
 in the end." 
 
 Mr. Pounce is our subject's hopelessly private 
 person. Is not his word precisely that of 
 Mr. Shaw's Sartorius : "No gentlemen : when 
 people are very poor, you cannot help them, 
 no matter how much you may sympathize 
 with them." Parson Adams is — well, one 
 does not think our subject has drawn a Parson 
 Adams. He has not drawn a figure at whom 
 we laugh, and from whom we learn as we laugh. 
 Mr. Shaw's Parson Adams is Father Keegan ; 
 a Parson Adams for Puritans. There is no 
 Keegan-Broadbent, to whom we listen and 
 with whom we laugh. In order that we may 
 
 130 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 learn from Father Keegan, Mr. Shaw has to 
 ask us not to laugh at Tom Broadbent. That 
 is the Puritan's tragedy. That is how those 
 " lighter qualities " take their revenge. 
 
 VIII 
 
 There are, says the old Doctor in Mr. 
 Chesterton's play, the things that are beauti- 
 ful and the things that are there. Well, 
 the plays of our subject are there ; and 
 it has not seemed necessary in the course 
 of this chapter to pause upon each one in 
 order to recall its anecdote, its philosophy, 
 and its characters. The philosophy, as a 
 matter of fact, will have a chapter to itself in 
 a moment, but the anecdotes and the charac- 
 ters are well able to take care of themselves. 
 If this chapter has advanced certain general 
 propositions with regard to them, if, in the 
 aggregate, it has viewed the drama of our 
 subject from the angle at which the earlier 
 chapters seemed to have placed us, that is all 
 that can possibly be claimed for it ; it is left 
 for the reader to apply those general proposi- 
 tions to the memories with which his mind is 
 peopled, and to form his own opinion as to 
 where, if anywhere, they have their application. 
 
 The point has come, however, at which it 
 131 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 would be well to see the ultimate outcome in 
 practice of the principles which, according to 
 our portrait, have actuated Mr. Shaw as 
 dramatist. We have seen already what hap- 
 pened to The Doctor's Dilemma, in which 
 play Mr. Shaw faced death and found that 
 life did not cease to be funny. Since we did 
 not believe ourselves to be in the face of 
 death, and since that was what Mr. Shaw 
 wished, as one at least among his several 
 dramatic purposes, that we should believe, 
 it was impossible not to conclude that there 
 was some failure from full mastery in the 
 achievement of those purposes. It was Mr. 
 ShaAv, and not life — we were forced to con- 
 clude — that had not ceased to be funny. 
 That was the other side, in regard to Mr. 
 Shaw's " tragedy," to the adoption of waggery 
 as a medium. In Mrs, Warren's Profession 
 we saw that the " lighter qualities " were 
 not so much present as indispensable traits in 
 the picture as in the form of additional touches, 
 — high lights lent to a gloomy genre piece in 
 the purely utilitarian intention of rendering 
 its message more widely acceptable. We 
 found that discovery to be destructive of Mr. 
 Shaw's integrity as an artist, but were careful 
 to say no word against the integrity of his 
 opinions. As to how Mr. Shaw's mixed 
 
 138 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 practices work out in regard to the looser and 
 more free form of composition of which John 
 BulVs Other Island may be taken as type, we 
 have seen very little ; but that is because 
 they obviously would work out in a simpler 
 equation. What we have seen is that, even 
 in the form at which Mr. Shaw has arrived 
 by a process of cancelling out the difficulties, 
 there is a degree of inassimilability in his 
 comedy which places it lower than the highest. 
 Like Man and Superman, it is a mixed delivery 
 of goods — " a comedy and a philosophy." 
 The way-bill is made out for two articles, and 
 it is for such that we render acceptance. 
 
 And in the end we come to Androcles and 
 the Lion. Mr. Shaw has his ups and downs, 
 with the least of us ; but the fatal fact is that 
 Androcles and the Lion is the logical outcome 
 of Mr. Shaw's aesthetic principles. What 
 those principles amount to is that Mr. Shaw 
 wants the drama to be serious, but his 
 way of getting us to accept a serious drama 
 is by means of being funny. Or put the 
 case, if you like, the other way : Mr. Shaw 
 wants the drama to be funny, but his con- 
 science will only allow him to be funny 
 in the course of being serious. Rather than 
 in either one of those statements, it is pos- 
 sible that somewhere between those two 
 
 133 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 statements the real trouble lies. But in either 
 case, or in both, the fact is that Mr. Shaw 
 has distrusted his medium. Here, in this 
 play, in what we may perhaps regard as the 
 final issue of his most deeply held opinions, 
 he has employed laughter, but he has not 
 trusted laughter ; he has wished to be serious, 
 but he has not had the courage of his serious- 
 ness. The wonders of reality are the subject- 
 matter — the wonders of reality, " when it 
 comes close." Here is our subject's call to us 
 to look life in the face, to seize each thing in 
 its reality, by the free exercise of our living 
 wills to secure the highest ends of the creative 
 purpose. Lavinia has that happiness within 
 herself, — but Lavinia is less than the lion. 
 Mr. Shaw has looked at the central mysteries 
 of the Christian faith at a crisis in their history, 
 and he has seen the comicalities of the arena. 
 He has employed the one to expound the 
 other. The result is that failure in aesthetic 
 unity which this chapter has been all about. 
 For the intended reality does not " come 
 close." The ultimate issue of Mr. Shaw's 
 theatre is a pantomime lion. Mr. Shaw 
 would like to have melted us, and the Life 
 Force has seen to it that he shall only make 
 us laugh. 
 
 184 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 IX 
 
 For the only dramatic secrets of which Mr. 
 Shaw has the command are the secrets of 
 speech, and there is more power to bring 
 us to the melting mood in Desdemona's " I 
 cannot speak of this " than in all Portia's 
 skilled pleading. Our subject's notion of the 
 manner in which to improve upon her is to 
 make her the equal in discussion of lago, and 
 the superior of the " simple Moorish soldier." 
 Well, that would be another play and a 
 different. For one kind of eloquence the 
 skilled debater is not the man to go to, and 
 that is the eloquence of silence. '' It is not 
 words that matter," another English dramatist 
 has said. That, to our subject, would be the 
 supreme heresy ; a kind of blasphemy against 
 the Holy Ghost. 
 
 In a sense, really in the final sense, all 
 Mr. Shaw's people are talkers. We may 
 divide them into three classes. There is a 
 small class which consists of the people who 
 talk with difficulty, of which Cholly is the 
 representative with his " certain amount of 
 tosh," and they are sublimely ridiculous. 
 There is a very much larger class who are the 
 apt and ready mouthpieces of their kind or 
 
 135 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 their class. Mr. Shaw runs gaily and lightly 
 up and down the social scale, and his skill with 
 Felix Drinkwater, with Enry Straker, with 
 Peter Shirley, with Bohun and Bonnington and 
 Boxer, with Napoleon and Caesar and Lady 
 Britomart and General Burgoyne, with Rams- 
 den and Tarleton and MaComas and Cokane 
 and Gilbey and Knox, with William and Marzo 
 and the Newspaper Man, with Darling Dora 
 and Eliza Doolittle and Rummy and Snobby, 
 never deserts him. They are sufficiently 
 personalized, and have in addition a grant in 
 aid from their creator's own readiness of 
 repartee and deadliness of retort. But there is 
 a third class of talkers who have this ultimate 
 importance, that in them we may hear, without 
 distortion and without dilution, their master's 
 voice. These are the talkers by vocation, the 
 apostles of the gospel, the priests of the cult. 
 These are the figures who still hold the stage, 
 when all the other puppets hang limp and 
 depleted, with their virtue gone out of them. 
 These are the real pillars of the theatre of dis- 
 cussion — these gigantic male caryatides, these 
 huge spouting figures, which support the only 
 true church and most characteristic temple of 
 our subject's dramatic achievement. There is 
 a pathos but no shame in Undershaft's " My 
 dear : I have no other way of conveying my 
 
 136 
 
DRAMATICS 
 
 ideas." But what place for pathos is there, 
 what place for shame, in the colossal conception 
 of John Tanner ? — who will vindicate the dig- 
 nity and honour of his manhood, who will 
 continue to speak out the happiness that is 
 within himself, who will hold to the last plank 
 of his platform, though the seas rise and the 
 heavens fall ; who will "go on talking " in 
 the face of a universe which rocks with laughter. 
 
 137 
 
V 
 
 THE SECRET IN 
 THE POET'S HEART 
 
 " /r would be quite easy to make England a 
 paradise, according to our present ideas, in a 
 few years. There is no mystery about it ; the 
 way has been pointed out over and over again. 
 The difficulty is not the way but the will. And 
 we have no will because the -first thing done 
 with us in childhood was to break our will " 
 (Preface, Misalliance). 
 
 So there we are : — " unsound citizens of an 
 unsound nation, without sense enough to be 
 ashamed or unhappy about it " (Preface, The 
 Doctor^s Dilemma). Mr. Shaw's own stream is 
 Hearing the sea, he says ; and that is the mud- 
 bank he leaves us stranded upon. We could 
 if we would — but we won't. And we won't, 
 because we can't; because of those wicked 
 parents and schoolmasters of ours, who have 
 broken our will. It is a vicious circle. 
 
 But perhaps it is not quite so vicious. Mr. Shaw 
 is so excessive. Perhaps as the lively stream of 
 
 138 
 
THE POET'S HEART 
 
 his works is near its debouchment, he really is 
 not quite so unhappy about us. The way has 
 been pointed out over and over again : it is 
 Mr. Shaw who has pointed it. Over and over 
 again, in the course of the few pages of this 
 inadequate study, have we not paused to 
 admire him pointing it ? But we have not 
 been unconscious, I suppose, that the direction 
 he has been pointing is the direction he has 
 been wanting to go. " According to our 
 present ideas " means according to the ideas 
 of our subject at the moment of writing — 
 just that and nothing more. He wants us to 
 have the will to realize his will, if we may put 
 it that way. And for the rest of us there is 
 the lethal chamber. That is not very good 
 philosophy, but from the political humorist 
 it comes well enough. Mr. Shaw's Paradise 
 may perfectly well not be everybody's paradise, 
 just as Blake's Heaven was the Calvinist's 
 Hell, and just as Broadbent's Heaven was 
 not Keegan's Heaven, for the matter of 
 that. But Keegan's Hell was this present 
 earth, if we remember correctly, and there 
 are others of us who do not think so badly 
 of this present earth. Of one thing we may 
 be very certain, and that is that if Mr. Shaw's 
 Paradise is not our paradise, the will to 
 our paradise will not be the will to Mr. Shaw's 
 
 139 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 paradise. Our virtues may thus very well be 
 Mr. Shaw's vices ; indeed, the lack of will to 
 Mr. Shaw's paradise, which appeared in the 
 paragraph at the opening of this chapter, must 
 itself be a vice. 
 
 Poor old Falstaff will be the first to go. Mr. 
 Shaw is going to put up with men's vices, as he 
 is going to put up with their illnesses, " until 
 they give more trouble than they are worth, 
 at which point we should, with many apologies 
 and expressions of sympathy, and some gener- 
 osity in complying with their last wishes, place 
 them in the lethal chamber and get rid of them." 
 He has explained all this in that preface to 
 Major Barbara which was alluded to in an 
 earlier chapter. If you ask who the " we " is, 
 there is only one answer, and that is Mr. Shaw ; 
 but really Mr. Shaw is under no kind of neces- 
 sity of answering such questions — that is one of 
 the pleasures of being irresponsible. (And the 
 publicist is irresponsible by definition.) Fal- 
 staff would go, because of what (as we saw) the 
 ladies of the new theatrical centres think of 
 his manners and customs. St. Francis would 
 go, because the vice of poverty is a criminal 
 vice. The late Mr. Herbert Spencer would go, 
 because his opinions upon Man and the 
 Socialist State would give more trouble than 
 they were worth. " The majority of men at 
 
 140 
 
THE POET'S HEART 
 
 present in Europe," says Mr. Shaw in The 
 Perfect Wagnerite, " have no business to be 
 alive." That is a terrible picture, but, as the 
 hymn says, 
 
 Alleluia cannot always 
 
 Be our song while here below. 
 
 Our subject has preached so long from the 
 text that happiness is within ourselves that we 
 must not lose sight of the consequences of its 
 realization. In the place of happiness, in the 
 hedonists' sense, he has put will ; and in the 
 place of reason, in the Hegelian sense, he has 
 put will. That is why our parents and school- 
 masters are guilty of such heinousness when 
 they break it. But in both cases the will is, in 
 the ultimate analysis, his own. Of course it 
 could not be otherwise. Every artist, as well 
 as every philosopher, re-makes Heaven and 
 Earth in his own image. That is what our 
 subject has done, in both capacities. He has 
 drawn a full-length picture of the will to our 
 happiness which is within himself, and he has 
 called it the Life Force. 
 
 With the subject of this study it is impossible 
 to argue. One just has baldly to assert. I 
 trust that nothing in the nature of argument 
 will creep into this final chapter, or has crept 
 already into those which have preceded it. 
 
 141 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 II 
 
 One thing is evident, and that is that it will 
 not have to be a very long chapter. For our 
 subject's philosophy, now that we have come 
 to it, is not very formidable. It is a philosophy 
 by courtesy, as it were. It consists of what has 
 been in the air ; he does not himself make any 
 very serious claim to have originated it. What 
 he has done is to make its expression quite 
 triumphantly his own — and that he has done 
 by means of the anecdotes. If we have called it 
 a philosophy, it is for convenience, because 
 that is what Mr. Shaw has called it. Remember- 
 ing that Cokane was moral without being a 
 moralist, let us employ the distinction in 
 defining our subject as philosophical without 
 being a philosopher. And then, in the interests 
 of exact statement, and remembering our 
 Republic, let us make one further refinement, 
 and call him philodoxical rather than philo- 
 sophical. For what was Plato's distinction 
 between the two kinds of people ? We may 
 as well have the whole passage : — 
 
 But what, on the other hand, must we say of those 
 who contemplate things as they are in themselves, and 
 as they exist ever permanent and immutable ? Shall 
 we not speak of them as knowing, not opining ? 
 
 142 
 
THE POET'S HEART 
 
 That also is a necessary inference. 
 
 Then shall we not assert that such persons admire 
 and love the objects of knowledge — the others, the 
 objects of opinion ? . . . Shall we commit any fault 
 if we call these people philodoxical rather than 
 philosophical, that is to say, lovers of opinion rather 
 than lovers of wisdom ? And will they be very much 
 offended with us for telling them so ? 
 
 No, not if they will take my advice : for it is wrong 
 to be offended with the truth. 
 
 Those therefore that set their affections on that 
 which in each case really exists, we must call not 
 philodoxical, but philosophical ? 
 
 Yes, by all means. 
 
 Now has our subject set his affections " on 
 that which in each case really exists " ? I do 
 not think we can say so. Do we come thus near 
 to the end of a study of Mr. Shaw's works 
 with the conviction growing and swelling 
 within us that Mr. Shaw is one of those " who 
 contemplate things as they are in themselves, 
 and as they exist ever permanent and im- 
 mutable " ? No, by no means. But what Mr. 
 Shaw really has loved is the obj'^cts of opinion. 
 It is extremely hard to say what he would have 
 done without them. As an economist he has 
 opined that we should all be extremely happy 
 with a statutory income of £365 a year. As a 
 
 143 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 critic he has opined that art is great in the 
 degree in which " ideas " enter into its subject- 
 matter. As a sociologist he has opined that the 
 family is the worst enemy of the State. As a 
 psychologist he has opined that " there are 
 many women of admirable characters, strong, 
 capable, independent, who dislike the domestic 
 habits of men ; have no natural turn for 
 mothering and coddling them ; and find the 
 concession of conjugal rights to any person 
 under any conditions intolerable by their self- 
 respect " — and things of that kind. And as a 
 dramatist he has dispensed with characteriza- 
 tion and put in its place the allocation of 
 opinions. 
 
 Philodoxical, then, and not philosophical. 
 And that is a very excellent thing to be, when 
 so many philosophers are dull fellows whom no 
 one reads, unless he is another philosopher. 
 Mr. Shaw's philodoxy we have not only read ; 
 we have listened to it in the theatre. Out of the 
 mouths of Mrs. Knox and Peter Keegan has 
 come wisdom. Major Barbara has successfully 
 imparted to us her teleological conception. 
 Blanco Posnet has been converted into a 
 convinced kind of dualist, not untouched by 
 mysticism, before our eyes. The manufacturer 
 of explosives has taught us by analogy with his 
 worn-out engines what we ought to do with 
 
 144 
 
THE POET'S HEART 
 
 our worn-out religions and moralities. Napo- 
 leon himself has been impressed to the service 
 of teaching us that " happiness, little woman, 
 is the most tedious thing in the world " — unless 
 it is that happiness which comes to each man 
 who does " the will of Heaven that is in 
 himself." That is the lesson the Irish priest 
 read to the English candidate for Parlia- 
 ment. That is the power by which Major 
 Barbara surmounted her " hour of trial," that 
 is the power by which Mrs. Knox surmounted 
 hers, that is the power by which the Devil's 
 Disciple surmounted his. Mr. Shaw's drama 
 is rich in hours of trial ; they are the Puritan's 
 peripety. "What I did last night," says Dick, 
 " I did in cold blood, caring not half so much 
 for your husband, or for you, as I do for 
 myself. I had no motive and no interest : all 
 I can tell you is that when it came to the point 
 whether I would take my neck out of the 
 noose and put another man's into it, I could 
 not do it. I don't know why not : I see myself 
 as a fool for my pains ; but I could not and I 
 cannot." God had "a cinch on" Richard, in 
 the phrase of Blanco ; the Life Force just 
 picked him up by the scruff of his little neck, 
 in the way Valentine and Gloria, and Tanner 
 and Ann, were treated. And what does it all 
 amount to ? Well, I suppose it all amounts to 
 K 145 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Major Barbara's " let God's work be done for 
 its own sake : the work He had to create us to 
 do because it cannot be done except by living 
 men and women." I suppose it all amounts to 
 what Blanco got on to the table to tell to the 
 boys : 
 
 . . . Yah ! What about the croup ? It was early 
 days when He made the croup, I guess. It was the 
 best He could think of then ; but when it turned out 
 wrong on His hands He made you and me to fight the 
 croup for Him. You bet He didn't make us for 
 nothing ; and He wouldn't have made us at all if He 
 could have done His work without us. By gum, that 
 must be what we're here for ! He'd never have made 
 us to be rotten drunken blackguards like me, and good- 
 for-nothing rips like Feemy. He made me because He 
 had a job for me. He let me run loose till the job was 
 ready ; and then I had to come along and do it, 
 hanging or no hanging. And I tell you it didn't feel 
 rotten : it felt bully, just bully. . . . 
 
 I suppose it all amounts to the secret in the 
 poet's heart. 
 
 " There are larger loves and diviner dreams 
 than the fireside ones," says Major Barbara. 
 Those were what Mr. Shaw's poet was in 
 danger of — the fireside loves and the fireside 
 dreams. He flew into the night, if one re- 
 members correctly. That is why he is the true 
 
 146 
 
THE POET'S HEART 
 
 hero of our subject's drama. And Barbara is 
 the true heroine. If Candida, who was con- 
 tented with the fireside loves and the fireside 
 dreams, is Mr. Shaw's Everywoman, Barbara is 
 his woman in a thousand. Barbara ended her 
 hour of trial by going in for " reality." Mr. 
 Shaw is all for going in for reality. When 
 Margaret Knox went in for reality she knocked 
 two teeth out of a policeman. When Ferrovius 
 went in for reality he killed seven of the 
 Emperor's picked gladiators. And they both 
 felt just as bully as Blanco about it. 
 
 Ill 
 
 If Mr. Shaw had happened to want an old 
 name for his principal comedy instead of a 
 new one, he might have called it after Dekker's 
 If this be not a Good Play, the Devil is in It. 
 For the third act of Man and Superman, in 
 which the Devil appears and hangs the action 
 up considerably, is above all else that our 
 subject has written the primer of the poet's 
 heart. Mr. Shaw's Hell is the place where one 
 merely amuses one's self : Mr. Shaw's Heaven 
 is " the home of the masters of reality." If 
 one wished to appreciate the whole of the 
 difference between the humane destructive 
 talent of M. Anatole France, and the humane 
 
 147 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 destructive talent of our subject (to be sure, a 
 national difference) one might read the third 
 act of Man and Superman immediately after 
 reading the last chapter of La Revolt e des Anges. 
 M. France depicts Hell and he depicts Heaven, 
 and the suggestion of his picture rather is that 
 he would not give a snap of the fingers for the 
 difference between them. But Mr. Shaw gives 
 Hell, in the strictest scriptural sense, to the 
 hopelessly private persons. His Heaven is re- 
 served for those who live and work instead of 
 playing and pretending. He discriminates by 
 means of his wit, but he discriminates accord- 
 ing to his Puritan prepossessions. 
 
 The truth is there never was a more ro- 
 mantic admirer of reality than our subject. 
 His religion is a romantic anthropomorph- 
 ism : what more romantic theological con- 
 cept could there possibly be than that of 
 " a young God with his future before him " ? 
 His philosophy is a romantic protest against 
 the evolutionary monism of Darwin and 
 Haeckel. He is all for Lamarck's giraffe, 
 provided it is agreed that it grew its neck 
 out of the happiness within itself, and because 
 the Life Force had a job for its long neck to 
 do. His economics are a romantic protest 
 against the materialism of Marx, and a per- 
 petual exhibition of the glorious excitement 
 
 148 
 
THE POET'S HEART 
 
 of a life among " hard facts." His aesthetics are 
 a romantic onslaught upon the morals of 
 yesterday, in the romantic name of to-morrow. 
 His novels are romances : in three of them 
 there is a man with his back against the wall — 
 (what figure is there more romantic than the 
 one against forty-eight millions ?) — and the 
 fourth has a professional pugilist for hero. His 
 drama is one long exhibition of the part played 
 by romance in the world of ideas. Love, in his 
 drama, is the electrical experience of a Valen- 
 tine in face of his Gloria. Marriage, in his 
 drama, is not for the homely purposes ordained 
 by the Prayer Book, but for the procreation 
 of the Superman. " And sweet religion makes 
 a rhapsody of words " — it is a tremendous 
 affair, which Blanco discovers with the aid of 
 a rainbow and Major Barbara with the aid 
 of explosives. 
 
 Finally, has not our subject's whole conduct 
 of this earthly adventure been romantic ? 
 Romance is the artificial inducement of glam- 
 our. In this sense of the word, it was the 
 enemy. Our subject proposed to destroy 
 romance. It was the great heresy to be swept 
 away from art and life. No more glamour, he 
 said, no more glamour — and proceeded to 
 induce an aura of glamour around his own 
 person. " It would be far better for everyone, 
 
 149 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 as well as far honester, if young people were 
 taught that what they call love is an appetite 
 which, like all other appetites, is destroyed 
 for the moment by its gratification ; that no 
 profession, promise, or proposal made under 
 its influence should bind anybody. . . ." There 
 was to be no more glamour about love and 
 marriage ; but there might be glamour about 
 Mr. Shaw. It is extraordinary how our 
 subject has beglamoured the age he has lived 
 in ! He has lived in a world " seething with 
 the reaction of Ibsen's ideas " — that has been a 
 very remarkable experience for him. And all 
 his friends and acquaintances have been the 
 most remarkable fellows. They have all 
 attained to the dignity of mention in his 
 prefaces or incorporation in his plays ; and this 
 has redounded not only to their honour 
 but to his own. No picture of our subject 
 would be complete which did not take account 
 of this veiled or spreading egotism. When 
 posterity sits down to read straight through the 
 works of our subject, the profession of letters 
 in the end of the nineteenth century and the 
 beginning of the twentieth will appear a 
 tremendously big adventure. And yet the 
 truth is that our old world has not seethed. 
 The profession of letters has been the usual 
 comfortable or uncomfortable jog-trot. The 
 
 150 
 
THE POET'S HEART 
 
 things which exist ever permanent and im- 
 mutable have existed permanent and immut- 
 able still. The truth is that our subject, for 
 the purposes of effective assertion, has in- 
 vented one ultimate anecdote ; and that 
 anecdote is the anecdote of G. B. S. 
 
 " Whenever a person tells us that he has 
 fallen in with a man who is acquainted with 
 all the crafts, and who sums up in his own 
 person all the knowledge possessed by other 
 people singly, to a degree of accuracy which no 
 one can surpass, — we must reply to our in- 
 formant," says Plato in his Republic, " that 
 he is a silly- fellow, and has apparently fallen 
 in with a juggler and mimic." Well, Mr. Shaw 
 fell in with a juggler and mimic, but he was not 
 taken in. " The legend of the superlative 
 brilliance of G. B. S.," he has said, " is all my 
 eye." What our subject has given he has not 
 failed, with that even administration of laugh- 
 ter which is the best of his powers, to take 
 away. He would agree with the late Samuel 
 Butler, that the advantage of doing one's 
 praising for one's self is that one can lay it on 
 so thick and in exactly the right places. 
 Having created the Superman — or had we 
 better say, in reverence for those terrible 
 fellows the Nietzscheans, having taken out for 
 the Superman papers of naturalization in 
 
 151 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 England — our subject has laughed at the 
 Superman as " a kind of good-looking, philoso- 
 pher-athlete," if one remembers correctly. 
 Having baptized the Life Force, he has laughed 
 at the Life Force, for sounding (as, to be sure, 
 it does sound) like the Life Guards. And in the 
 same way, having created Mr. George Bernard 
 Shaw by a sedulous care and devotion that are 
 without a parallel in our contemporary literary 
 history, he has laughed at Mr. George Bernard 
 Shaw. There is no surer sign of the indwelling 
 presence of the comic spirit than this ability of 
 a man to laugh at himself, as well as at the 
 forty-eight millions. But that is not the point 
 for the moment. The point for the moment 
 is that while our subject believes confidently 
 that Mr. George Bernard Shaw will not be 
 found out by the present, he believes with an 
 equal confidence that Mr. George Bernard 
 Shaw will be found out by the future. " The 
 fact," he says, " that in all the professions 
 there is one first favourite means no more than 
 the fact that there is only one editor of The 
 Times. It is not the man who is singular, but 
 the position. The public imagination demands 
 a best man everywhere ; and if Nature does 
 not supply him the public invents him. The 
 art of humbug is the art of getting invented in 
 this way. Every generation invents great 
 
 152 
 
THE POET'S HEART 
 
 men at whom posterity laughs when some 
 accident makes it aware of them." That 
 passage from an obscure economic pamphlet — 
 (if we dare call obscure any economic pamphlet 
 which our subject has written) — will serve as 
 an instance of Mr. Shaw's regard for the 
 future. It is a thoroughly romantic regard. 
 
 IV 
 
 To some slight extent the task of this book 
 has been the uninvention of Mr. George 
 Bernard Shaw, whom our subject has so 
 diligently and artistically invented. Its task 
 has been to get in ahead of posterity, and 
 that is why it was necessary at the beginning 
 to declare as modestly as might be for the 
 rights of contemporary judgment. And now 
 the only task which remains is the estimation 
 of influence. 
 
 Mr. Shaw has edified and delighted his age, 
 but he has not profoundly affected it. His 
 usefulness has been the usefulness of the man 
 who, in face of our complacent assurance that 
 our garments are white, has gone on reiterating 
 his assertion that they are black, until we have 
 looked at them and found that in places they 
 have turned a bit greyish. His temperament 
 does not know any half-measures. He is like 
 
 153 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Falstaff in this, that he " had as Hef they 
 would put ratsbane in his mouth as offer to 
 stop it with security." His unflagging good 
 spirits, with their consequent excessiveness of 
 utterance, while they have been the truest 
 friend of his comic style, have been the worst 
 enemy of his opinions. " A person who talks 
 with equal vivacity on every subject," says 
 Hazlitt, " excites no interest in any. Repose is 
 as necessary in conversation as in a picture." 
 It is the beauties of repose that have evaded 
 Mr. Shaw's conversation. His first instinct, 
 when he has got hold of an idea, has been to 
 run out and tell us about it. All his life he has 
 told us everything that came into his head — 
 every single thing that came into his quite 
 exceptional head. He has been like a busy 
 salesman with a demand on his shop, so 
 heavily engaged in handing out his goods 
 that he has not been able to spare much 
 attention to the manner of their ^vrapping. He 
 has had so many ideas, and he has run out into 
 the street so often, that his appearances, like 
 those of the boy who called wolf, have affected 
 his hearers less deeply than they ought to have 
 done. In his presence, we have been in the 
 position of the Duchess's baby in Alice, at 
 whom the cook threw the saucepans : " the 
 baby was howling so much already, that it 
 
 154 
 
THE POET'S HEART 
 
 was quite impossible to say whether the 
 blows hurt it or not." He has given us 
 a very great deal, but he somehow has not 
 always given us just what we felt disposed to 
 assimilate at the moment. In all the works of 
 our subject there is a hint of the indiscreet 
 helper, who does better than the scriptural 
 injunction by giving us a cupful when we ask 
 for half a cup. And Mr. Shaw has even given 
 us some in the saucer. 
 
 Nevertheless the person who can look into 
 those works without being aware that Mr. 
 Shaw wields the best everyday style of his 
 generation is a person without judgment. In 
 the best sense Mr. Shaw's has been the pen of 
 the ready writer, a pen apt, humorous, and 
 colloquial — even on occasion eloquent. He 
 has thrown the sheets over his left shoulder 
 with the rapidity of Count Fosco, but the most 
 genuine labour has gone to their composition. 
 Our subject is a great man, it cannot be too 
 flatly or simply asserted, just in the degree, 
 and just by reason of the fact, that he is a good 
 writer. In the same manner in which we would 
 rather have him philodoxical than that he had 
 taken the degree of Ph.D. in all the colleges of 
 Germany and America, so would we rather have 
 his own first thoughts than the second thoughts 
 of men who are duller. Everything he has 
 
 155 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 written has radiated a very splendid kind of 
 intelligence, even if it has not always revealed 
 the profoundest sort of understanding. The 
 person who can look into Arms and the Man or 
 Man and Superman, or even into Fanny's 
 First Play, and not be aware of this, is a person 
 whose opinion is not worth taking upon the 
 qualities of diction in comic drama. Concern- 
 ing Mr. Shaw's drama in the bulk, you may 
 assert that it is no more than good dialogue 
 cut up into lengths, and that drama, in the 
 full sense, is something more than good dialogue 
 cut up into lengths. You may (quoting Mr. 
 Shaw's Devil) sum up his plays as " interest- 
 ing chats about things in general." You will 
 have every appearance of justice in making 
 the assertion. But it is not open to you to 
 assert, if you wish your powers of comparative 
 analysis as well as of instantaneous enjoy- 
 ment to be respected, that Mr. Shaw's dialogue 
 is not good comic dialogue. Similarly you 
 may be as certain as you are of your faith or 
 your pleasures that drama is made great by 
 the grandeur or intensity of its emotion, and 
 by no other quality at all. Again you will 
 more than probably be right. But that 
 will not justify you in denying all value 
 to Mr. Shaw's drama because it is entirely 
 without emotional value. When, however, 
 
 156 
 
THE POET'S HEART 
 
 you find Mr. Shaw asserting, in his capacity as 
 judge, that drama is made great by the 
 quantity and originahty of its ideas, — then, ah 
 then, you may fall upon him and slay him. 
 You will slay the critic, but you will not slay 
 the artist. The artist is what he has made, 
 and Mr. Shaw has made a number of creatures, 
 call them what you will, of which any honest 
 man would be proud, in whatsoever aesthetic 
 belief he had constructed them. 
 
 The case of our subject is thus all kinds of a 
 case. One looks in retrospect along that 
 lengthy line of his works — each in its jacket of 
 a jaegerized Lincoln-green seeming equally to 
 stand for good taste and good hygiene — and 
 one despairs of having done them any kind of 
 justice ; one despairs of having given any 
 kind of account of them at all. At least we 
 have not done them the popular injustice 
 contained in the assertion that they have 
 " made us think." It is the tragic nemesis 
 of Mr. Shaw as artist that he, the opponent 
 of " reason," the ceaseless advocate of that 
 happiness which is the living will's, should 
 be held in high estimation by the young 
 on every hand because he has " made them 
 think." He is a strange fellow, he must 
 be allowed his joke, he must be suffered 
 to stand everything on its head, for, my 
 
 157 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 goodness, how in the process he makes us 
 think ! That is an unhappy ending for one of 
 the strong souls who has had the will and 
 courage to look facts in the face — and who 
 would only have had us equally strong in order 
 that we might look with him. It is Mr. Shaw's 
 particular romanticism which is to blame for 
 the misunderstanding ; the romanticism of the 
 ant i -romantic. He has so loved the " facts " ; he 
 has so rushed at them ; he has so omitted to in- 
 fect us with his own happiness regarding them. 
 Take the one question of marriage. " There 
 is no magic in marriage," Mr. Shaw says. But 
 all this means is that Mr. Shaw sees no magic 
 in marriage. He has not stopped long enough 
 to see it. Turgenev defined the heart of 
 another as a dark forest. That is the kind 
 of attitude of mind that one would some- 
 how expect in the artist. But Mr. Shaw sees 
 right straight clean through the forest. The 
 whole of his attitude consists in the ability to 
 see right straight clean through it. Of the 
 romance of finding in the human heart the 
 wonder of a dark forest Mr. Shaw knows 
 nothing ; his is the romance of denying the 
 dark forest. He takes one look at the forest 
 and he sees all the trees. Thus when the topic 
 of marriage presents itself to his imagination, 
 he becomes aware of a number of what one 
 
 158 
 
THE POET'S HEART 
 
 might call its minor considerations. He sees, 
 for example, with unerring swiftness and 
 decisiveness of vision, the practical difficulty of 
 agreement between the partners to the con- 
 tract as to how many clothes are to be 
 on the bed. . . . About this point he promptly 
 writes two comedies and a preface, and what 
 they all amount to is, " You are wrong : there 
 is no magic in marriage." 
 
 Thus our subject's is all kinds of a case. He 
 took up the English novel, and did nothing at 
 all to assist it to the position which even then 
 it was just slowly beginning to regain. He 
 took up the English drama, and while he could 
 not fail (in the circumstances) to write the 
 most intelligent plays that had been written in 
 England for a century, he will leave no path 
 for the English drama to advance upon. The 
 drama of discussion — (in technical form a genus 
 of opera without music) — is too purely personal 
 a product to have any future before it, or for 
 us to wish that it may have any future apart 
 from Mr. Shaw's future. As a critic of the 
 arts, he has written about plays, and he has 
 written about music, and he has written about 
 pictures, in a manner supremely intelligent 
 and delightful. But it is probable that, in his 
 criticism of the theatre at least, there is 
 too much of the impatience of the man who 
 
 159 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 wants to get on to the job himself for these 
 writings to rank amongst the best of their 
 kind. Of the patient watchfulness which will 
 wait, even as the artist's, upon perfection, of 
 the instantaneous emotional responsiveness 
 with which perfection in any kind is greeted, 
 there is almost nothing in the criticism of Mr. 
 Shaw. It was always an intellectual re- 
 sponsiveness he had to offer. Mr. Shaw found 
 that he could only laugh at The Importance 
 of Being Earnest, and the reason why that 
 was not enough was because other people 
 were doing it. " Give me your ablest critic," 
 says Mr. Shaw, " and I will criticize his head 
 off." He has criticized as many heads off as 
 Alice's Duchess, but he has not always 
 criticized the heart out of a work. Mr. Shaw 
 is extremely fond of music, but about the 
 last idea the stranger would gain, I suppose, 
 from his treatise of Wagnerism, would be the 
 idea that Wagner was a man who made 
 music. 
 
 In all Mr. Shaw's work in the arts, critical 
 and creative, a part is thus played by the 
 irrelevant motive. Never very far from the 
 centre of his mind are " all the detestable 
 fruits of inequality of condition." In this life 
 there are secular hardships and anomalies 
 enough for correction, God knows ; but the 
 
 160 
 
THE POET'S HEART 
 
 artist, qua artist, does not find, I suppose, 
 the fruits of inequality of condition detest- 
 able. For him they rather add to the fun 
 of the human spectacle. But Mr. Shaw is 
 out to alter all that. What Mr. Shaw wants, 
 more than anything else, is to change our 
 ideas ; and art is a weapon in the chambarde- 
 ment general. He condescends to the fun 
 of the human spectacle, not for its own sake, 
 but to point a moral. Just as the persons 
 of his drama are logical abstractions to whom, 
 to aid in their acceptance, a surface humanity 
 is added, so is his drama itself a secondary 
 image of his picture of the world. He sees 
 men as ideas walking. He sees art as a con- 
 flict of ideas. A thousand lovable, intimate, 
 humorous, ridiculous, recognizable traits he 
 sees, and he makes a pastiche of them for his 
 purposes. They do not result in the comic 
 vision. (Impossible, when the whole stretch 
 of his work is remembered, to say that they 
 result in that !) They do not result in the 
 tragic vision. " The very same thing, don't 
 you see," says Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, 
 " may be looked at tragically, and turned 
 into misery, or it may be looked at simply 
 and even humorously." Impossible to assert 
 that Mr. Shaw has turned things into misery. 
 All the time one remembers Trefusis, that 
 L 161 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 hero of his early novel, whose " sympathies 
 were kept awake and his indignation main- 
 tained at an exhilarating pitch by the suffer- 
 ings of the poor." Mr. Shaw's vision is so 
 composed of mind and heart that it has 
 maintained his indignation " at an exhilarating 
 pitch." It is the publicist's vision. 
 
 Thus it comes about that the final estimation 
 of our subject must be ideological. " Nothing 
 is more certain," said Mill, " than that improve- 
 ment in human affairs is wholly the work of 
 the uncontented characters." Our subject is a 
 thoroughly uncontented character. He has a 
 special faculty for putting the world in the 
 wrong. He cannot think of the human species 
 with patience. He is the antithesis of that 
 character whom one remembers in one of Mr. 
 Henry James's novels (and indeed, who might 
 have occurred in any one of them) who " looked 
 about him like a man to whom everything 
 suggested a cheerful interpretation." He has 
 delighted us with man, he has delighted us 
 with woman, but finally and profoundly man 
 has not delighted him, nor woman neither. 
 
 162 
 
THE POET'S HEART 
 
 That is why he has called for the Superman. 
 He has expressed from all the platforms in the 
 park an explicit detestation of the fruits of 
 inequality of condition ; he has written a 
 matter of thirty plays with the expressed 
 purpose of destroying our old - established 
 morals ; and now, as his stream nears the sea, 
 he finds himself " driven to offer to young 
 people in our suburbs the desperate advice : 
 do something that will get you into trouble " 
 (Preface, Fanny's First Play). I suppose, since 
 an improvement in human affairs is a business 
 that takes time to show itself, that the con- 
 temporary measure of the success of an 
 uncontented character is the number of the 
 uncontented characters he has made. As 
 regards the actual influence of our subject on his 
 generation, there has been a good deal of " bear- 
 ing " on the part of those who share Mr. Shaw's 
 belief that the public demands a best man 
 everywhere, and who rather fancy (although 
 they do not perhaps make the admission even in 
 private) that they themselves are the man. 
 There has been a good deal of " bulling " 
 on the part of those who are actually as 
 youthful in years as Mr. Shaw has remained 
 in spirit. His reputation will find its own 
 level about midway between those two points, 
 as reputations do, after the market has been 
 
 163 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 higgled. All Mr. Shaw's higgling of his own 
 market will not matter at all. That is merely 
 a trait in the portrait ; that is merely the 
 particular cry with which he has brought 
 his goods to market. Let us hope that our 
 subject has made a very great number of 
 uncontented characters. Let us hope that the 
 suburbs are filled with young people of both 
 sexes who have taken his desperate advice ; 
 who nurse, each one of them, the secret in 
 the poet's heart. Let us hope that they are 
 Eugenes and Major Barbaras, every one of 
 them. 
 
 And with that hope expressed, one sur- 
 renders again the pen explanatory into the 
 hand in which it is so much more amusing — 
 into the hand one wishes may go on wielding 
 it for ever. We have been, during these few 
 pages, no more than that " Voice " at the 
 political meeting which interpolates its remark 
 between the remarks of the principal speaker ; 
 that " Voice " whose function it is to contribute 
 to the successfulness of the meeting, and whose 
 immortality it is to see itself in print the next 
 morning. Perhaps, in however small a degree, 
 we have contributed to the successfulness of 
 Mr. Shaw's meeting. And if we have not, then 
 this will be a suitable point at which to retire 
 from it ; f o r, frankly and finally, the business 
 
 164 
 
THE POET'S HEART 
 
 of estimating the effective influence of a man on 
 his generation is a business one despairs of 
 achieving. Mr. Shaw has on so many occasions 
 piped unto us, and we have not danced ; he 
 has mourned unto us, and we have not 
 lamented. He has expressed his distaste for 
 the scorched corpses of animals, and we con- 
 tinue to eat meat with our bread. He has 
 commented with all his force upon the de- 
 terioration in the figure and character of 
 Falstaff, and we continue to drink beer with 
 our meat. He has held up his hands in horror 
 at the British double bed, and we continue to 
 sleep in it. He has proved that there is not 
 a single credible established religion in the 
 world, and we continue to believe in it. He 
 has mined with his absurdity and blown up 
 with his wrath the institution of the family, 
 and the institution of the family continues to 
 exist and is daily refortified. He has pointed 
 the finger of ridicule at our very own indis- 
 pensable mothers, and we have laughed at the 
 ridiculousness which Mr. Shaw has seen and 
 we have seen something else besides. All his 
 life he has been like King Cole ; he has called 
 for this, and he has called for that, and some 
 of the things for which he has called we have 
 brought him, and some we have not brought 
 him. On behalf of the generation he has 
 
 165 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 adorned and illuminated, " We now call for 
 the Superman," he says. Do not let the 
 last words of this book assert that there will 
 be no answer. 
 
 August, 1914. 
 
 166 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The following list is in illustration of the text. It 
 does not pretend to be exhaustive. 
 
 1880 The Irrational Knot (composed). Serial pub- 
 
 lication in " Our Corner," 1885-7. American 
 edition, with preface, Brentano, New York, 
 1905. English edition, Constable, 1905 ; 
 cheap edition, 1914. 
 
 1881 Love Among the Artists (composed). Serial 
 
 publication in " Our Corner," 1887-8. Amer- 
 ican edition, with preface, Herbert S. Stone 
 and Co., Chicago, 1900 ; English cheap 
 edition. Constable, 1914. 
 
 1882 Cashel Byron's Profession (composed). Serial 
 
 publication in " To-day," 1885-6. English 
 edition, 1886 ; new edition revised (The 
 Novocastrian Novels), 1889 ; newly revised 
 (Novels of His Nonage, No. 4, with The 
 Admirable Bashville and a Note on Modern 
 Prize-Fighting), 1901 ; cheap edition, 1914. 
 
 1883 An Unsocial Socialist (composed). Serial 
 
 pubHcation in "To-day," 1884. English 
 edition, Sonnenschein, 1887 ; cheap edition, 
 Constable, 1914. 
 
 169 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 1889 Fabian Essays (edited and with two essays 
 
 by). 
 
 1891 The Quintessence of Ihsenism. 'Ditto, now com- 
 
 pleted to the death of Ibsen, 1913. 
 
 The Legal Eight Hours Question. A public 
 debate between Mr. George Bernard Shaw 
 and Mr. J. W. Foote. 
 
 The Impossibilities of Anarchism (tract). Re- 
 printed with Foreword in " Sociahsm and 
 Individuahsm," Fabian SociaUst Series, 1908. 
 
 1892 The Fabian Society : Its Early History (tract). 
 
 Gronlund's " Co-operative Commonwealth " 
 (Bellamy library, No. 7), edited by G. B. 
 Shaw. 
 
 1893 Widowers' Houses (Independent Theatre Series 
 
 of Plays, No. 2), with Preface. 
 
 1894 Socialism and Superior Brains (in " Fort- 
 
 nightly Review," April). Fabian tract, 1909, 
 with Preface. 
 
 A Dramatic Realist to his Critics (in " New 
 Review," September). 
 
 1896 Socialism for Millionaires {in "Contemporary 
 Review," February). Fabian tract, 1901, 
 with Prefatory Note. 
 
 On Going to Church (in " Savoy," January). 
 Reprinted, Boston, J. W. Luce and Co., 1909. 
 
 170 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 1898 The Perfect Wagnerite : A Commentary on the 
 Niblung's Ring. Second edition, with new 
 Preface, 1901. 
 
 Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. The First 
 Volume, containing the three Unpleasant 
 Plays (Grant Richards) : 
 
 Widowers' Houses (composed 1885-92, 
 produced 1892) ; The Philanderer (com- 
 posed — , produced 1907) ; Mrs. Warrens 
 Profession (composed 1894, produced 
 1902). With Preface, Mainly About My- 
 self. 
 
 The Second Volume, containing the four 
 Pleasant Plays (Grant Richards) : 
 
 Arms and the Man (composed 1894, pro- 
 duced 1894) ; Candida (composed 1894-5, 
 produced 1897) ; The Man of Destiny 
 (composed 1895, produced 1897) ; You 
 Never Can Tell (composed 1896, produced 
 1900). With Preface. 
 
 1900 Fabianism and the Empire. Edited by, 
 
 with Preface. 
 
 The Dynamitards of Science (London Anti- 
 Vivisection Society pamphlet). 
 
 1901 Three Plays for Puritans : 
 
 The DeviVs Disciple (composed 1897, pro- 
 duced 1899) ; Ccesar and Cleopatra (com- 
 posed 1898, produced 1899) ; Captain Brass- 
 bound's Conversion (composed 1899, pro- 
 
 171 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 duced 1902). With Prefaces, Why for 
 Puritans ? ; On Diabolonian Ethics ; Better 
 than Shakespeare ? 
 
 Who I Am, and What I Think (in " Candid 
 Friend," May 11). 
 
 1 902 Mrs. Warren^ s Profession, Stage Society edition. 
 
 With the Author's apology. 
 
 1903 Man and Superman : A Comedy and a Phil- 
 
 osophy. With Epistle dedicatory. The Revo- 
 lutionist's Handbook, and Maxims for Revo- 
 lutionists. Popular edition, with Foreword, 
 1911. 
 
 1904 Fabianism and the Fiscal Question. 
 
 The Commonsense of Municipal Trading. With 
 new Preface, 1908. 
 
 1905 The Theatre of the Future (in " Grand Maga- 
 
 zine," February). 
 
 1907 Dramatic Opinions and Essays. (Reprinted 
 
 from the " Saturday Review," 1895-8.) 
 
 John Bull's Other Island (composed 1904, 
 produced 1904), and Major Barbara (com- 
 posed 1905, produced 1905) : also How He 
 Lied to Her Husband (composed 1904, pro- 
 duced 1905). With Prefaces ; for Politicians, 
 and First Aid to Critics. 
 
 1908 The Sanity of Art : An Exposure of the Current 
 
 Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate. 
 
 172 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 (First published under title " A Degenerate's 
 View of Nordau," in New York " Liberty," 
 1896.) 
 
 The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. By 
 William H. Davies. With a Preface by 
 Bernard Shaw. 
 
 1909 Press Cuttings : A Topical Sketch compiled 
 from the editorial and correspondence columns 
 of the Daily Papers. 
 
 The Unmentionable Case for Women's Su^rage 
 (in the " Englishwoman," March). 
 
 1911 The Doctor's Dilemma (composed 1906, pro- 
 
 duced 1906) ; Getting Married (composed 
 1908, produced 1908) ; and The Shewing-up 
 of Blanco Posnet (composed 1909, produced 
 1909). With Prefaces; On Doctors, On 
 Marriage and Divorce, and On Censorship. 
 
 Three Plays by Brieux. With a Preface by 
 Bernard Shaw. 
 
 1912 John BulVs Other Island. Home Rule Edition, 
 
 with Preface. 
 
 Overruled (produced). 
 
 1913 The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Now Completed 
 
 to the Death of Ibsen. With Preface : 1913. 
 
 Hard Times (Waverley Edition of the works 
 of Dickens). With an Introduction by 
 Bernard Shaw. 
 
 173 
 
BERNARD SHAW 
 
 John BulVs Other Island (revived). Letter to 
 the audience on Laughter. 
 
 Androcles and the Lion (produced). Prefatory 
 note to programme. 
 
 Great Catherine (produced). 
 
 1914 Misalliance (composed 1910, produced 1910), 
 The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (composed 
 1910, produced 1910), and Fanny's First 
 P/a?/ (composed 1911, produced 1911). With 
 a Treatise on Parents and Children. And 
 Preface on Shakespeare. 
 
 Pygmalion (produced). 
 
 The Music Cure (produced). 
 
 KilHng for Sport. By Henry S. Salt, etc. With 
 a Preface by Bernard Shaw. 
 
 The Case for Equality. An Address to the 
 PoHtical and Economic Circle of the National 
 Liberal Club, with some further letters to 
 the Press on the subject. 
 
 WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LIMITED 
 PRINTERS, PLYiMOUTH 
 
FORTHCOMING VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES 
 
 W. B. YEATS By Forrest Reid 
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER By Gilbert Cannan 
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING By Cyril Falls 
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH By Orlo Williams 
 
MARTIN SECKER 
 
 HIS COMPLETE CATALOGUE. MCMXV 
 
The Books in this list should he obtainable 
 from all Booksellers and Libraries, and if 
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 tvill be glad to be irif armed of the fact. He 
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 coming books from Number Five John 
 Street, will send their names and addresses 
 to him for this purpose. Any book in this 
 list may be obtained on approval through the 
 booksellers, or direct from the Publisher, on 
 remitting him the published price, plus the 
 postage. 
 
 Telephone City \']1<^ 
 Telegraphic Address : 
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PART ONE S'° 
 
 INDEX OF AUTHORS iTh^""^ 
 
 Published at 
 ABERCROMBIE, LASCELLES ^^rnber 
 
 Speculative Dialogues. Wide Crown %vo. 5^. Five John 
 net ^^^^^^ 
 
 Thomas Hardy : A Critical Study. Demy %vo. ^ ^ P '^ 
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 The Epic {7he Art and Craft of Letters). F'cap 
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 AFLALO, F. G. 
 
 Behind the Ranges. Wide Demy 8fo. ioj. 6d. 
 
 net. 
 
 Regilding the Crescent. Demy '&vo. ioj. 6d. 
 
 net. 
 
 Birds in the Calendar, Crown %vo. 3/. 6d. net. 
 
 ALLSHORN, LIONEL 
 
 Stupor Mundi. Medium Octavo. i6s. net. 
 
 APPERSON, G. L. 
 
 The Social History of Smoking. Post %vo. 
 6s. net. 
 
 ARMSTRONG, DONALD 
 
 The Marriage of Quixote. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 
 ARTZIBASHEF, MICHAEL 
 
 Sanine. Preface by Gilbert Cannan. CrownSvo. 6s. 
 The Millionaire. Introduction by the Author. 6s. 
 
 BARRINGTON, MICHAEL 
 
 Grahame of Claverhouse. Imperial Svo. 30/. 
 net. Edition de Luxe 63/. net. 
 
 BENNETT, ARNOLD 
 
 Those United States. Post Svo. is. 6d. net. 
 
 3 
 
Martin 
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 The Linleys of Bath. Medium 8w. i6s. net. 
 The Cumberland Letters. Medium ^vo. i6s. 
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 BOULGER, D. C. 
 
 The Battle of the Boyne. 
 
 BOTTOME, PHYLLIS 
 The Common Chord. 
 
 BROWN, IVOR 
 
 Years of Plenty. 
 
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 Crown Svo. 6s. 
 
 Crown Svo. 6s. 
 
 BURROW, C. KENNETT 
 
 Carmina Varia. F'cap Svo. is. 6d. net. 
 
 CALDERON, GEORGE (With St. John Hankin) 
 Thompson : A Comedy. Sq. Cr. Svo. is. net. 
 
 CANNAN, GILBERT 
 
 Round the Corner. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 
 Old Mole. Crown 8w. 6s, 
 
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 Samuel Butler : A Critical Study. Demy Svo. 
 
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 Satire {The Art and Craft of Letters). F^cap %vo. 
 
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 CHESTERTON, G. K. 
 
 Magic : A Fantastic Comedy. Sq. Cr. 8f o. is. net. 
 
 CLAYTON, JOSEPH 
 
 The Underman. Crown 8w. 6s. 
 
 Leaders of the People. De^ny ^vo. lis. 6d. net. 
 Robert Kett and the Norfolk Rising. Demy 
 Svo. 8j. 6d. net. 
 
 COKE, DESMOND 
 
 The Art of Silhouette. Demy Svo. los. 6d. net. 
 
F\ap %vo. 6s. 
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 CRAVEN, A. SCOTT 
 
 The Fool's Tragedy. 
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 DRINKWATER, JOHN 
 
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 Nooks and Corners of Old England. Small 
 
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 FRANCIS, RENE 
 
 Egyptian Esthetics. Wide Demy 8w. js. 6d. net. 
 FREEMAN, A. M. 
 
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 IS. net. 
 
 Martin 
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 Published at 
 Number 
 Five John 
 Street 
 Adelphi 
 
 Crown %vo. 6s. 
 A Critical Study. Demy 
 
Martin 
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 Catalogue of 
 Books 
 
 Published at 
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 Street 
 Adelphi 
 
 2s. net. 
 2s. net. 
 Sq. Cr. 
 
 25. net. 
 Crozvn 
 
 6s. 
 6s. 
 6s. 
 
 HANKIN, ST. JOHN 
 
 The Dramatic Works, with an Introduction by 
 
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 Edition in Three Volumes. 2^s. net. 
 
 The Return of the Prodigal. Sq. Cr. Svo 
 
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 The Constant Lover, etc. .S^. Cr. Svo. 
 
 HAUPTMANN, GERHART 
 
 The Complete Dramatic Works. 6 vols. 
 Svo. 5j. net -per volume. 
 
 HEWLETT, WILLIAM 
 
 Telling the Truth. Crozvn Svo. 
 
 Uncle's Advice: A Novel in Letters. Cr. Svo 
 The Child at the Windovs^. Crozvn 8w. 
 
 HORSNELL, HORACE 
 The Bankrupt. 
 
 HOWE, P.P. 
 
 The Repertory Theatre. 
 
 Dramatic Portraits. 
 
 Bernard Shaw: A Critical Study. Demy Svo. 
 
 js. 6d. net. 
 
 J. M. Synge : A Critical Study. Demy Svo. 
 
 js. 6d. net. 
 
 Criticism {The Art and Craft of Letters). F^cap 
 
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 HUEFFER, FORD MADOX 
 
 Henry James : A Critical Study. Demy Svo. 
 
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 IBSEN, HENRIK 
 
 Peer Gynt. A New Translation by R. Ellis 
 
 Roberts. Wide Crozvn Svo. 5/. net. 
 JACOB, HAROLD 
 
 Perfumes of Araby. TFide Demy Svo. ys. 6d. net. 
 6 
 
 Crozvn Svo. 6s. 
 
 Cr. Svo. 2s. 6d. net. 
 Crozvn Svo. 5/. net. 
 
JAMES, HENRY 
 
 The Turn of the Screw. 
 
 The Aspern Papers. 
 
 The Lesson of the Master. 
 
 Daisy Miller. 
 
 The Death of the Lion. 
 
 The Coxon Fund. 
 
 The Reverberator. 
 
 The Altar of the Dead. 
 
 Each F^cap Svo. 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 JOHNSON, OWEN 
 
 The Salamander. Crozvn Svo. 6s. 
 
 LAMONT, l. m. 
 
 A Coronal : An Anthology. F'cap Svo. is. 6d. 
 
 net. 
 
 Thomas Armstrong, C.B. : A Memoir. Demy 
 
 ^vo. los. 6d. net. 
 LLUELLYN, RICHARD 
 
 The Imperfect Branch. Crown 8fo. 
 
 LOW, IVY 
 
 The Questing Beast. Crozvn 8w. 
 
 MACHEN, ARTHUR 
 
 Hieroglyphics : A Note upon 
 
 Literature. F^cap Svo 
 
 MACKENZIE, COMPTON 
 
 Carnival. Crown Svo. 
 
 Sinister Street. Volume I. Crozvn ^vo. 
 
 Sinister Street. Volume II. Crozvn Svo. 
 
 The Passionate Elopement. Crown ^vo. 
 
 and 2s. net. 
 
 Kensington Rhymes. Crown \to. ^s. 
 
 MAKOWER, S. V. 
 
 The Outward Appearance. Crown %vo. 
 
 MAVROGORDATO, JOHN 
 
 Letters from Greece. F'cap %vo. is. net. 
 
 Cassandra in Troy. Small /\.to. ^s. net. 
 
 Martin 
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 6s. 
 6s. 
 
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 6s. 
 
 6s. 
 6s. 
 6s. 
 
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Martin 
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 10/. 6d. net. 
 
 
 
 
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 Lot Barrow. 
 
 
 Crown ^vo. 
 
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 Modern Lovers, 
 
 
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 Crown %vo. 
 
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 NORTH, LAURENCE 
 
 
 
 
 Impatient Griselda, 
 
 
 Crown %vo. 
 
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 The Golightlys : Fatheb 
 
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 6s. 
 
 ONIONS, OLI\^R 
 
 
 
 
 Widdershins. 
 
 
 Crown %vo. 
 
 6s. 
 
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 . 6s. 
 
 The Debit Account. 
 
 
 Crown %vo. 
 
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 Crown ^vo. 
 
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 PAIN, BARRY 
 
 One Kind and Another. Crown %vo. 6s. 
 
 The Short Story {The Art and Craft of Letters). 
 
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 PALMER, JOHN 
 
 Peter Paragon. Crown 8w. 6s. 
 
 Comedy {The Art and Craft of Letters). F^cap %vo. 
 
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 The Art of Ballet. Demy %vo. 15/. net. 
 
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 9 
 
 
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 Demy %vo. 
 
 Demy 8w. 
 
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 Feminine Influence on the Poets. 
 
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 A. C. Swinburne : A Critical Study 
 
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 An Australasian 
 
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 Fortitude. 
 
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 10 
 
PART TWO : CLASSIFIED MarUn 
 
 Secker^s 
 
 INDEX OF TITLES c./.^../ 
 
 Books 
 Published at 
 
 General Literature Number 
 
 Five John 
 Street 
 Armstrong, Thomas, C.B, A Memoir. Reminis- Jdelphi 
 
 cences of Du Maurier and Whistler. Edited by 
 
 L. M. Lamont. 
 
 Art of Ballet, The. By Mark E. Perugini. 
 Art of Silhouette, The. By Desmond Coke. 
 Australasian Wander- Year, An. By H. M. Vaughan. 
 Battle of the Boyne, The. By D. C. Boulger. 
 Behind the Ranges. By F. G. Aflalo. 
 Birds in the Calendar. By F. G. Aflalo. 
 Camille Desmoulins. By Violet Methley. 
 Carmina Varia. By C. Kennett Burrow. 
 Carriages and Coaches. By Ralph Straus. 
 Christmas Card, A. By Fihon Toung. 
 Coronal, A. A New Anthology. By L. M. Lamont. 
 Cumberland Letters, The. By Clementina Black. 
 D'EoN DE Be.\umont. Translated by Alfred Rieu. 
 Dramatic Portraits. By P. P. Howe. 
 Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann. 6 vols. 
 Egyptian ^Esthetics. By Rene Francis. 
 Feminine Influence on the Poets. By Edzcard 
 
 Thomas. 
 Fountains in the Sand. By Norman Douglas. 
 Grahame of Claverhouse. By Michael Barrington. 
 
 Hieroglyphics. By Arthur Machen. 
 
 II 
 
Martin 
 Seeker's 
 Catalogue of 
 Books 
 
 Published at 
 Number 
 Five John 
 Street 
 Adelfhi 
 
 History of the Harlequinade, The. By Maurice 
 Sand. 
 
 Kensington Rhymes. By Compton Mackenzie. 
 
 Leaders of the People. By Joseph Clayton. 
 
 Letters from Greece. By John Mavrogordato. 
 
 LiNLEYs of Bath, The. By Clementina Black. 
 
 Mary Wollstonecraft. By G. R. Stirling Taylor. 
 
 Moulinavent. By Gilbert Cannan. 
 
 New Leaves. By Filson Toung. 
 
 Nooks and Corners of Old England. By Allan Tea. 
 
 Old Calabria. By Norman Douglas. 
 
 Old English Houses. By Allan Fea. 
 
 People and Questions. By G. S. Street. 
 
 Perfumes of Araby. By Harold Jacob. 
 
 Personality in Literature. By R. A. Scott-James, 
 
 Psychology of the Great War. By Stirling Taylor. 
 
 Real Captain Cleveland, The. By Allan Fea. 
 
 Regilding the Crescent. By F. G. Aflalo. 
 
 Repertory Theatre, The. By P. P. Howe. 
 
 Robert Kett and the Norfolk Rising. By Joseph 
 Clayton. 
 
 Social History of Smoking, The. By G. L. Apperson. 
 
 Some Eccentrics and a Woman. By Lewis Melville. 
 
 Speculative Dialogues. By Lascelles Ahercromhie. 
 
 Stupor Mundi. By Lionel Allshorn. 
 
 Tenth Muse, The. By Edward Thomas. 
 
 Those United States. By Arnold Bennett. 
 
 Vie de Boheme. By Orlo Williams. 
 
 12 
 
Drama 
 
 Cassandra in Troy. By John Mavrogordato. 
 Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann. 
 Dramatic Works of St. John Hankin. 
 Magic. By G. K. Chesterton. 
 Peer Gynt. Translated by R. Ellis Roberts. 
 Thompson. By St. John Hankin and G. Calderon 
 
 Martin 
 Seeker's 
 Catalogue of 
 Books 
 6 vols. Published at 
 
 3 vols. ^""'^^^ 
 ^ Five John 
 
 Street 
 
 Adel-phi 
 
 Martin Seeker s Series of 
 Critical Studies 
 
 Robert Bridges. By F. E. Brett Tonng. 
 Samuel Butler. By Gilbert Cannan. 
 George Gissing. By Frank Swinnerton. 
 Thomas Hardy. By Lascelles Abercrombie. 
 Henrik Ibsen. By R. Ellis Roberts. 
 Henry James. By Ford Madox Hueffer. 
 Maurice Maeterlinck. By Una Taylor. 
 George Meredith. By Orlo Williams. 
 William Morris. By John Drinkwater. 
 Walter Pater. By Edward Thomas. 
 D. G. RossETTi. By John Drinkwater. 
 Bernard Shaw. By P. P. Howe. 
 R. L. Stevenson. By Frank Swinnerton. 
 A. C. Swinburne. By Edward Thomas. 
 
 13 
 
Martin 
 Seeker's 
 Catalogue of 
 Books 
 
 Published at 
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 Five John 
 Street 
 Adelphi 
 
 J. M. Synge. By P. P. Howe. 
 Leo Tolstoi. By R. Ellis Roberts. 
 Walt Whitman. By Basil de Selincourt. 
 W. B. Yeats. By Forrest Reid. 
 
 The Art and Craft of Letters 
 
 Ballad, The. By Frank Sidgwick. 
 Comedy. By John Palmer. 
 Criticism. By P. P. Howe. 
 Epic, The. By Lascelles Abercrombie. 
 History. By R. H. Gretton. 
 Lyric, The. By John Drinkwater. 
 Parody. By Christopher Stone. 
 Punctuation. By Filson Toung. 
 Satire. By Gilbert Cannan. 
 Short Story, The. By Barry Pain. 
 
 Fiction 
 
 Above Your Heads. By Frederick Niven, 
 
 Altar of the Dead, The, By Henry James. 
 
 AsPERN Papers, The. By Henry James. 
 
 Bankrupt, The. By Horace Horsnell. 
 
 Battles of Life. By Austin Philips. 
 
 Burnt House, The. By Christopher Stone. 
 
 Carnival. By Compton Mackenzie. 
 H 
 
Columbine. By Viola Meynell. 
 
 Common Chord, The. By Phyllis Bottome. 
 
 CoxoN Fund, The. By Henry James. 
 
 Daisy Miller. By Henry James. 
 
 Dead Men's Bells, By Frederick Niven. 
 
 Death of the Lion, The. By Henry James. 
 
 Debit Account, The. By Oliver Onions. 
 
 Deep Sea. By F. Brett Toung. 
 
 Duchess of Wrexe, The. By Hugh Walfole. 
 
 Fool's Tragedy, The. By A. Scott Craven. 
 
 Fortitude. By Hugh Walpole. 
 
 GoLiGHTLYs, The. By Laurence North. 
 
 Hands Up ! By Frederick Niven. 
 
 House of Sands, The. By L. M. Watt. 
 
 Impatient Griselda. By Laurence North. 
 
 Imperfect Branch, The. By Richard Lluellyn. 
 
 In Accordance with the Evidence. By Oliver 
 Onions. 
 
 Lesson of the Master, The. By Henry James. 
 
 Lot Barrow. By Viola Meynell. 
 
 Marriage of Quixote, The. By Donald Armstrong. 
 
 Millionaire, The. By Michael Artzibashef. 
 
 Modern Lovers. By Viola Meynell. 
 
 Old Mole. By Gilbert Cannan. 
 
 One Kind and Another. By Barry Pain. 
 
 Outward Appearance, The. By Stanley V. Makozver. 
 
 Passionate Elopement, The. By Compton Mackenzie. 
 
 15 
 
 Martin 
 Seeker's 
 Catalogue of 
 Books 
 
 Published at 
 Number 
 Five John 
 Street 
 Adelphi 
 
Martin 
 Seeker's 
 Catalogue of 
 Books 
 
 Published at 
 Number 
 Five John 
 Street 
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 Peter Paragon. By John Palmer. 
 
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