George Bernard Shaw, his life and works

by Archibald Henderson

CHAPTER XII

Man and Superman inaugurates another cycle of Shaw's theatre, and first presents Shaw to the world as a conscious philosopher. By reason of its bi-partite nature—it is sub-entitled A Comedy and a Philosophy—this play furnishes the natural link between Shaw the dramatist and Shaw the creator of a new form of stage entertainment. It is worth recalling that at the time this play appeared Shaw had not yet won the favour of the “great public” in England. He had, however, won the attention and the enthusiastic, yet tempered, praise of one of the ablest dramatic critics in England. Mr. William Archer pronounced Mrs. Warren's Profession a “masterpiece—yes, with all reservations, a masterpiece,” and as each one of Shaw's plays appeared, he discussed it in the fullest and most impartial way, bespoke for it the attention of the British public, and roundly berated the managers of the large West End theatres for letting slip through their fingers the golden opportunities afforded by the brilliant works of the witty Irishman.[181] For that matter, Shaw was not wanting in appreciative students of his plays among the dramatic critics of the day; and even Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. A. B. Walkley, though temperamentally Shaw's opposites, took the liveliest interest in the Shavian drama.

Indeed, it was Mr. Walkley who asked Shaw to write a Don Juan play; and the fulfilment of this request was Man and Superman. Ab initio, Shaw realized that there are no modern English plays in which the natural attraction of the sexes for one another is made the mainspring of the action. The popular contemporary playwrights, thinking to emulate Ibsen, had produced plays cut according to a certain pattern, i.e., plays preoccupied with sex, yet really devoid of all sexual interest. In plays, of which The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is the type illustration, the woman through indiscretion is brought in conflict with the law which regulates the relation of the sexes, while the man by marriage is brought in conflict with the social convention that discountenances the woman. Such dramas, portraying merely the conflict of the individual with society, Shaw had railed at in the preface to his Three Plays for Puritans; such “senseless evasions” of the real sex problem serve in part to explain Shaw's partial lack of sympathy with Pinero during Shaw's Saturday Review period. Shaw was in no mind to treat his friend Walkley to a lurid play of identical import; nor did the Don Juan of tradition, literature and opera, the libertine of a thousand bonnes fortunes, suit his wants any better. The prototypic Don Juan of sixteenth-century invention, Molière's persistently impenitent type of impiety, and Mozart's ravishingly attractive enemy of God had all served their turn; whilst in Byron's Don Juan, Shaw saw only a vagabond libertine, a sailor with a wife in every port. Even that spiritual cousin of Don Juan, Goethe's Faust, although he had passed far beyond mere love-making to altruism and humanitarianism, was still almost a century out of date.

This reductio ad absurdum process finally gave Shaw the clue to the mystery; the other types being perfected, and in a sense exhausted, a Don Juan in the philosophic sense alone remained. The modern type of Don Juan “no longer pretends to read Ovid, but does actually read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead of for the freedom of his own instincts.” Confronted with the stark problem of the duel of sex, Shaw solved it with the striking conclusion that Man is no longer, like Don Juan, the victor in that duel. Though sharing neither the prejudices of the homoist nor the enthusiasms of the feminist, Shaw found it easy to persuade himself that woman has become dangerous, aggressive, powerful. The rôles established by romantic convention, and evidenced in the hackneyed phrase “Man is the hunter, woman the game,” are now reversed: Woman takes the initiative in the selection of her mate. Thus is Don Juan reincarnated; once the headlong huntsman, he is now the helpless quarry. Man and Superman, in Shaw's own words, is “a stage projection of the tragi-comic love chase of the man by the woman.”

Program of Man and Superman.

Hudson Theatre, N. Y. May 21st, 1906. Second Season.

Shaw's solution of the problem was generally regarded as audaciously novel and original. And yet, as Shaw points out in the Dedicatory Epistle, and as I have indicated in a former chapter, the notion is very far from novel. Beaumont and Fletcher's The Wild Goose Chase furnishes the interesting analogy of Mirabell, a travelled Italianate gentleman and cynical philanderer, pursued by Oriana, the “witty follower of the chase,” who employs a number of more or less crude and coarse artifices to entrap him; when the ingenuity of the dramatists is exhausted, Mirabell succumbs to Oriana's wiles.[182] And those who have a passion for attributing all Shaw's ideas to Nietzsche, might find some support in that passage in A Genealogy of Morals: “The philosopher abhors wedlock and all that would fain persuade to this state, as being an obstacle and fatality on his road to the optimum. Who among the great philosophers is known to have been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer—they were not; nay, we cannot even so much as conceive them as married. A married philosopher is a figure of comedy....”

The attitude toward woman exhibited by Shaw in Man and Superman has won for him the appellation, “the most ungallant of dramatists.” Mr. Huneker has ventured to assert that Shaw is “practically the first literary man who has achieved the feat of making his heroines genuinely disagreeable persons.” Now to Wilde and to Strindberg, woman is an inferior being, the history of woman being the history of tyranny in its harshest form, i.e., the tyranny of the weak over the strong. Shaw is quite as far from misogyny on the one hand as from gynolatry on the other. From the beginning of his literary career, Shaw has been imbued with the conviction that, to use his own words, “women are human beings just like men, only worse brought up, and consequently worse behaved.” In Shaw's plays it is a toss-up between the men and the women as to which are the worse behaved. The women in Shaw's plays seem always deliberately to challenge the conventional ideal of the womanly Woman. As a dramatist, Shaw rebelled from the very first against the long-established custom of making all heroines perfect, all heroes chivalrous and gallant, all villains irretrievably wicked. Stock characters, in Shaw's view, must be swept off from dramatic art along with romance, the womanly woman, the ideal heroine, and all the other useless lumber that so fatally cumbered the British stage. In Shaw's first play, he confessedly “jilted the ideal lady for a real one,” and predicted that he would probably do it again and again, even at the risk of having the real ones mistaken for counter-ideals. Shaw has kept his promise, and has been jilting the ideal lady ever since.

M. Filon finds Shaw's “galerie de femmes” nothing short of astonishing in the veracity and vitality of the likenesses. Ann Whitefield, whom Shaw once pronounced his “most gorgeous female,” is really one of his least successful portraits. “As I sat watching Everyman at the Charterhouse,” says Shaw, “I said to myself, 'Why not Everywoman?' Ann was the result; every woman is not Ann; but Ann is Everywoman.” Thus the play takes on the character of a “morality,” and purports to adumbrate a deep, underlying truth of nature. Unfortunately, Shaw is not a flesh painter; Ann is not a successful portrait of a woman who is “an unscrupulous user of her personal fascination to make men give her what she wants.” She is deficient in feminine subtlety—the obscurer instincts and emotions of sex. The strong, heedless, unquestioning voice of fruitful nature voices its command, not through the passion of a “mother woman,” but through the medium of the comic loquacity of a laughing philosopher![183] In the master works of that sovereign student of human nature, Thomas Hardy, the Life Force holds full sway; Wedekind's Erdgeist reveals the omnivorous, man-eating monster, devouring her human prey with all the ferocity of a she-lioness. Inability to portray sexual passion convincingly is a limitation of Shaw's art. And yet in the present instance we must not forget that, as Mr. Archer reminds us, “no doubt the logic of allegory demanded that the case should be stated in its extremest form, and that the crudest femineity should, in the end, conquer the alertest and most open-eyed masculinity.” While concerned with the problem of sex, Man and Superman remains a drama of ideas. And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, had the Life Force in Ann been supreme, Maeterlinck would have been vindicated by her in his fine saying: “The first kiss of the betrothed is but the seal which thousands of hands, craving for birth, have impressed upon the lips of the mother they desire.”

Man and Superman is the most pervasively brilliant of all Shaw's comedies. And in spite of the fact that the idea-plot is intricate and requires to be disengaged from the action-plot the comedy, as I saw it produced in both New York and London, gave rise to an almost unbroken burst of merriment on the part of the audience. It is customary to identify Shaw with Tanner; and in the first production of Man and Superman at the Court Theatre, Tanner (Mr. Granville Barker) was “made up” to represent Shaw. As a matter of fact, Mr. Shaw once told me that in Tanner, with all his headlong loquacity, is satirized Mr. H. M. Hyndman, the great Socialist orator. One other detail in the play is noteworthy—the extrinsically irrelevant incident which leaves everyone at the end of the first act “cowering before the wedding-ring.” It is an illustration of a curious device once or twice employed by Shaw—a sort of comic “sell” of the audience, appearing beside the mark because its relation with the action is ideological, not dramatic. In general, the effect of Man and Superman is to make one wish that Shaw would write a comedy of matrimony furnishing the lamentable spectacle pictured by Nietzsche of the married philosopher. Mr. Robert Loraine has actually written a clever sketch upon this theme, entitled The Reformer's Revenge; or, the Revolutionist's Reconciliation to Reality;[184] and Mr. William Archer publicly urged Shaw to complete his “Morality” and (following the precedent of Lord Dundreary Married and Settled) give us John Tanner Married and Done For.

The play just discussed is the society comedy, as it appears in the printed book, with the omission of the Shavio-Socratic scene in hell, and one or two alterations and omissions in the printed play itself. The dream in hell—Act III. of the printed book—is the ultimate form of Shaw's drama of discussion, and has actually been successfully presented at the Court Theatre, London. When I saw it produced there, I was surprised to note the favour with which it was received, the brilliancy and wit of the dialogue compensating in great measure for the absence of all action and the exceptional length of the speeches. At last Shaw's dream of long speeches, Shavian rhetoric, and a pit of philosophers was realized. Upon the average popular audience, the effect would doubtless have been devastating; and even under the most favourable circumstances, the audience was partially seduced into appreciative interest by well-executed scenic effects, exquisite costumes specially designed by Charles Ricketts, and a long synopsis of Don Juan in Hell, especially prepared by the author.[185]

The year 1904 marks a turning-point in the career of Bernard Shaw. The average age at which artists create their greatest work is forty-six to forty-seven, according to Jastrow's table; and so, practically speaking, John Bull's Other Island is chronologically announced as Shaw's magnum opus. In the technical, no less than in the popular sense, this path-breaking play registers the inauguration of a new epoch in Shaw's career. In this new phase we find him breaking squarely with tradition, and finding artistic freedom in nonconformity. A true drama of national character, John Bull's Other Island portrays the conflict of racial types and exhibits its author as a descendant of Molière, a master of comic irony, and at heart a poet.

Originally designed for production by Mr. W. B. Yeats under the auspices of the Irish Literary Theatre, this play was found unsuited both to the resources of the new Abbey Theatre and to the temper of the neo-Gaelic movement.[186] Temperamentally incapable of visionarily imagining Ireland as “a little old woman called Kathleen ni Hoolihan,” Shaw drew a bold and uncompromising picture of the real Ireland of to-day; and the sequel was the production of the play, not at the Abbey, but at the Royal Court Theatre, London. That interesting experiment in dramatic production inaugurated by Messrs. J. E. Vedrenne and H. Granville Barker at the Royal Court Theatre in 1904, furnishes material for the most interesting chapter in the history of the development of the contemporary English drama.[187] The companies trained by Mr. Barker, an able actor and already a promising dramatist, wrought something very like a revolution in the art of dramatic production in England. The unity of tone, the subordination of the individual, the general striving for totality of effect, the constant changes of bill, the abolition of the “star” system—all were noteworthy features of these productions. There were given nine hundred and eighty-eight performances of thirty-two plays by seventeen authors; seven hundred and one of these performances were of eleven plays by one author—Bernard Shaw. Plays of other authors—notably of Mr. Barker himself—were produced, and often with noticeable success. But in the main the whole undertaking may be regarded as a monster Shaw Festspiel, prolonged over three years. Mr. Barker, Mr. Galsworthy, the late Mr. Hankin, Miss Elizabeth Robins and Mr. Masefield, all came prominently into public notice as dramatists of the “new” school. The Court was not, in the strict sense, a repertory theatre; rather it furnished a tentative compromise between the théâtre à coté and the actor-managed theatre backed by a syndicate of capitalists. The Vedrenne-Barker enterprise did the imperatively needed pioneer work of breaking ground for the repertory theatre idea; created a public of intelligent playgoers with literary tastes, who had long since lost interest in the theatre of commerce; developed a whole “school” of playwrights, with Mr. Barker at their head; and brought to the English public at large a belated consciousness of the greatness of Bernard Shaw.

H. Granville Barker.

Alvin Langdon Coburn. From the original monochrome, made in 1908.

Coming at a political Sturm und Drang period, John Bull's Other Island achieved an immediate and immense success. Leading figures in public life, including Mr. Arthur Balfour and the late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, again and again heard the play with unmitigated delight; and, finally, King Edward “commanded” a special performance. The gods of English society, upon whose knees ever rests the ultimate fate of the British artist, suddenly awoke at last to the realization of the fact that a genius was living in their midst. John Bull's Other Island marked a new stage in Shaw's career; for whilst the play itself is the fine fleur of Shavian dramaturgy, the characters are set firmly upon solid ground. In Shaw's former plays, as a rule, the locality was not strikingly material, the characters often supra-natural, and the ideas deftly bandied about at times, much as a juggler manipulates glass balls. This new play exhibited nothing short of a new type of drama. Emotion is subsidiary to idea, action is less important than character, and conflict of ideas replaces the conflict of wills of the dramatic formula.

In the Shavian Anschauung, the action and reaction of national types inevitably takes precedence over the purely human problem of the love story. The study in emotional psychology is the incidental underplot to the larger study of England versus Ireland; here we see the line of cleavage between Shaw and the conventional dramatist. Shaw's hand, so deft in the handling of national types, the portrayal of racial traits, failed him in the delicate task of the exhibition of vital emotion. “I do not accuse Mr. Shaw of dealing in symbols,” says Mr. John Corbin, “but I shall not, I am sure, misinterpret him radically in saying that Nora is Kathleen ni Hoolihan—the embodiment of his idea of Ireland. The real drama of the piece centres in the story of how the Irishman loses Nora and the Briton wins her.... In his heart Larry loves his countrywoman, as she has always loved him, and she has no real affection for the Briton. Here lies the comic irony of the dénouement, the very essence of Shaw's comment on his problem.”[188] The “real drama,” one rather feels, is the death struggle of nations. Ireland and England are the antagonist and protagonist, respectively, of the drama; and the dramatic characters, in a broad sense, are both individualized human beings and concrete impersonations of racial traits. It seems to me quite improbable that John Bull's Other Island will “cross frontiers” as readily as many of Shaw's other plays. For, despite the signal merits of the character-drawing, the problem is essentially unique, and, as the title implies, peculiar to the British Isles.

Roscullen, the scene of the play, is a segment of the living Ireland, and here are encountered all those conflicting elements which have made a hopeless enigma of the Irish question for so many generations. In this miniature Ireland we find jostling each other the dreamer and the bigot, the superstitious and the unilluded. Instead of the great landowner, there is a group of small proprietors, who treat their employees and tenants with a harshness and industrial cruelty that can only result in the latter's ruin. Religion continues to be the dominant force in the community; and the clergy exhibit that profound political sagacity and that unscrupulousness in playing upon the superstition of the credulous peasants which are such defining marks of the Roman Catholic priesthood. Ireland's sense of her oppression and bitter wrongs has not succeeded in destroying her sense of humour, her passion for mysticism, and her native charm. These qualities we observe in the ineffable merriment of the peasants over the comic spectacle of Broadbent as an unconscious humorist; in the fascinating figure of the Irish St. Francis, chatting amicably with the grasshopper and breaking his heart over Ireland; and in Nora Reilly, quintessence of graceful coquetry, larmoyant piquancy and Celtic charm.

Thomas Broadbent, Shaw's conception of the typical Englishman, approximates quite closely to Napoleon's description of the Englishman in The Man of Destiny. To Mr. A. B. Walkley's characterization of John Bull's Other Island as a “Shavian farrago,” Shaw replied, “Walkley is too thorough an Englishman to be dramatically conscious of what an Englishman is, and too clever and individual a man to identify himself with a typical averaged English figure. I delight in Walkley: he has the courage of his esprit; and it gives me a sense of power to be able to play with him as I have done in a few Broadbent strokes which are taken straight from him.”[189] And in a letter to Mr. James Huneker, of date January 4th, 1904, Shaw says, “I tell you, you don't appreciate the vitality of the English.... Cromwell said that no man goes farther than the man who doesn't know where he is going.” In that you have the whole secret of the “typical averaged English figure.” Endowed with the stolid density and exaggerated self-confidence of the average Englishman, Broadbent resolves to study the apparently insoluble Irish question “on the ground”; but his incurable ignorance of Ireland's plight stands revealed in his declared faith that the panacea for all of Ireland's ills is to be found in the “great principles of the great Liberal party.” Ireland irresistibly appeals to his sentimentalities through its traditional charms—the Celtic melancholy, the Irish voice, the rich blarney, the poetic brogue. “Of the evils you describe,” he says to Keegan, “some are absolutely necessary for the preservation of society and others are encouraged only when the Tories are in office.” ... “I see no evils in the world—except, of course, natural evils—that cannot be remedied by freedom, self-government, and English institutions. I think so, not because I am an Englishman, but as a matter of common sense.” With blundering shrewdness, Broadbent announces himself as a candidate for the parliamentary seat, on the ground that he is a Home Ruler, a Nationalist, and Ireland's truest friend and supporter. “Reform,” he announces, “means maintaining these reforms which have already been conferred on humanity by the Liberal party, and trusting for future developments to the free activity of a free people on the basis of these reforms.” In Shaw's description, he (Broadbent) is “a robust, full-blooded, energetic man in the prime of life, sometimes eager and credulous, sometimes shrewd and roguish, sometimes portentously solemn, sometimes jolly and impetuous, always buoyant and irresistible, mostly likable, and enormously absurd in his most earnest moments.”

Broadbent is a great comic figure, destined to take high rank in the portrait-gallery of English letters. His foil, the Irishman, Larry Doyle, without being less interesting, is less convincingly portrayed. Doyle is cursed with the habitual self-questioning and disillusionment of the self-expatriated Irishman. Realizing the charm of Ireland's dreams and the brutality of English facts, Doyle longs discontentedly for “a country to live in where the facts are not brutal and the dreams not unreal.” His hope for a Greater Ireland is based on his own dream of Irish intellectual lucidity mated with English push, the Irishman's cleverness and power of facing facts grafted on the Englishman's indomitable perseverance and high efficiency. And yet, he has absorbed the English view of his own race; this “clear-headed, sane Irishman,” so “hardily callous to the sentimentalities and susceptibilities and credulities,” if we accept Shaw's estimate of the typical Irishman, thus describes his own countrymen:

“Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never-satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! No debauchery that ever coarsened and brutalized an Englishman can take the worth and usefulness out of him like that dreaming. An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality, nor deal with it, nor handle it, nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to strangers,' like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets. It's all dreaming, all imagination. He can't be religious. The inspired churchman that teaches him the sanctity of life and the importance of conduct is sent away empty, while the poor village priest that gives him a miracle or a sentimental story of a saint has cathedrals built for him out of the pennies of the poor. He can't be intelligently political: he dreams of what the Shan Van Vocht said in '98. If you want to interest him in Ireland you've got to call the unfortunate island Kathleen ni Hoolihan and pretend she's a little old woman. It saves thinking. It saves working. It saves everything except imagination, imagination, imagination; and imagination's such a torture that you can't bear it without whiskey.”

A noticeable feature of the play's construction is its slow beginning; the first act might more properly be called a prologue. The remainder of the play, although it has little or no story worth recounting, is constructed with unusual care; the interest inheres chiefly in the dialogue and the traits of the principal characters. When Shaw was charged with throwing all attempt at construction overboard, he vehemently replied:

“I never achieved such a feat of construction in my life. Just consider my subject—the destiny of nations! Consider my characters—personages who stalk on the stage impersonating millions of real, living, suffering men and women. Good heavens! I have had to get all England and Ireland into three hours and a quarter. I have shown the Englishman to the Irishman and the Irishman to the Englishman, the Protestant to the Catholic and the Catholic to the Protestant. I have taken that panacea for all the misery and unrest of Ireland—your Land Purchase Bill—as to the perfect blessedness of which all your political parties and newspapers were for once unanimous; and I have shown at one stroke its idiocy, its shallowness, its cowardice, its utter and foredoomed futility. I have shown the Irish saint shuddering at the humour of the Irish blackguard—only to find, I regret to say, that the average critic thought the blackguard very funny and the saint very unpractical. I have shown that very interesting psychological event, the wooing of an unsophisticated Irishwoman by an Englishman, and made comedy of it without one lapse from its pure science. I have even demonstrated the Trinity to a generation which saw nothing in it but an arithmetical absurdity. I have done all this and a dozen other things so humanely and amusingly that an utterly exhausted audience, like the wedding guest in the grip of the Ancient Mariner, has waited for the last word before reeling out of the theatre as we used to reel out of the Wagner Theatre at Bayreuth after Die Götterdämmerung. And this they tell me is not a play. This, if you please, is not constructed.”[190]

Not the least noticeable feature of the play is the omission of the character which, in former plays, appeared as Shaw in disguise. The characters are sharply individualized, each is a personality as well as a type. Moreover, Shaw has seized the situation with the hand of a master; we discern an Irish Molière revelling in the comic irony of character-reactions, and observing the rigid impartiality of the true dramatist. This very fairness allows Shaw a free play of intellect that partisanship would have stifled; every situation is transfused with the Shavian ironic consciousness. I once asked Mr. William Archer which play he regarded as Shaw's magnum opus. “I suppose Man and Superman is Shaw's most popular play,” said Mr. Archer, “but I have always regarded it, somehow, as beneath—unworthy of—Shaw. I should be inclined to rate John Bull's Other Island as Shaw's greatest dramatic work.” I remember remarking to Mr. Shaw one day that John Bull's Other Island revealed greater solidity of workmanship and greater self-restraint than any of his former plays. “Yes, that is quite true,” replied Mr. Shaw; “my last plays, beginning with John Bull, are set more firmly upon the earth. They have ceased to be fantastic, and tend to grow more solid and more human.” The cleverest and truest remark about John Bull was made by W. B. Yeats: “John Bull's Other Island is the first play of Bernard Shaw's that has a genuine geography.”

While no character in the play can be called essentially Shavian, it is noteworthy that Keegan, the unfrocked parish priest, is the “ideal spectator”; in his mouth Shaw places his own poignant criticisms penetrating to the heart of the situation. At last the mystic in Shaw's temperament utters his noble message. And the true poet, vaguely shadowed forth in that essentially romantic figure Marchbanks, speaks from the heart of Bernard Shaw in the accents of Keegan, the mystic:

“In my dreams heaven is a country where the State is the Church and the Church the people: three in one and one in three. It is a commonwealth in which work is play and play is life: three in one and one in three. It is a temple in which the priest is the worshipper and the worshipper the worshipped: three in one and one in three. It is a godhead in which all life is human and all humanity divine: three in one and one in three. It is, in short, the dream of a madman.”

Program of Candida.

The Princess Theatre, New York, Director: Arnold Daly. December 8th, 1903.
The first professional performance in the United States.

In Major Barbara, Shaw's next play, we discover a reversion to the earlier economic tone of Mrs. Warren's Profession combined with a more specific elaboration of the “Shavian dramaturgy.” This “Discussion in three acts” has aroused so much discussion as to its meaning and purpose that the story of its genesis may throw some light upon its obscurities. Mr. Shaw once related to me the circumstances under which the germ ideas of the play first took form in his mind. It seems that, while spending some time at his county place, Ayot St. Lawrence, in Hertfordshire, he formed an acquaintance with a young man who was a near neighbour, Mr. Charles McEvoy, the author of a play entitled David Ballard, produced under the auspices of the London Stage Society. At the close of the War between the States in America, Mr. McEvoy's father, who had fought on the side of the Confederacy, and was a most gentle and humane man, established a factory for the manufacture of torpedoes and various high-power explosives. The idea of this grey-haired gentleman, of peculiarly gentle nature and benignant appearance, manufacturing the most deadly instruments for the destruction of his fellow-creatures appealed to Shaw as the quintessence of ironic contrast. Here, of course, we have the germ idea of Andrew Undershaft. The contrast of the mild-mannered professor of Greek with the militant armourer occurred to Shaw as the result of his acquaintance with a well-known scholar, Professor Gilbert Murray, admirably kodaked by Shaw in the stage description: “Cusins is a spectacled student, slight, thin-haired and sweet voiced.... His sense of humour is intellectual and subtle, and is complicated by an appalling temper. The lifelong struggle of a benevolent temperament and a high conscience against impulses of inhuman ridicule and fierce impatience has set up a chronic strain which has visibly wrecked his constitution. He is a most implacable, determined, tenacious, intolerant person, who, by mere force of character, presents himself as—and actually is—considerate, gentle, explanatory, even mild and apologetic, capable possibly of murder, but not of cruelty or coarseness.”

In 1902, when Mrs. Warren's Profession was produced in London, Shaw said in the Author's Apology affixed to the Stage Society edition of that play, “So well have the rescuers (of fallen and social outcasts) learnt that Mrs. Warren's defence of herself and indictment of society is the thing that most needs saying, that those who know me personally reproach me, not for writing this play, but for wasting my energies on 'pleasant plays' for the amusement of frivolous people, when I can build up such excellent stage sermons on their own work.” Major Barbara marks a return to Shaw's earlier preoccupation with economic themes and is a profound study of some of the greatest social and economic evils of the contemporary capitalistic régime. In conversation, Mr. Shaw gave me the reasons which led him to write this play.

“For a long time,” he said, “I had had the idea of the religious play in mind; and I always saw it as a conflict between the economic and religious views of life.

“You see, long ago, I wrote a novel called Cashel Byron's Profession, in which I showed the strange anomaly of a profession which has the poetry and romance of fighting about it reduced to a perfectly and wholly commercial basis. Here we see the pressure of economics upon the profession of prize-fighting.

“After a while, I wrote a play which I called Mrs. Warren's Profession. I showed that women were driven to prostitution, not at all as the result of excessive female concupiscence, but because the economic conditions of modern capitalistic society forced them into a life from which, in another state of society, they would have shrunk with horror. Here we see the pressure of economics upon the profession of prostitution.

“Finally, there came Major Barbara. Perhaps a more suitable title for this play, save for the fact of repetition, would have been Andrew Undershaft's Profession. Here we see the pressure of economics upon the profession of dealing in death and destruction to one's fellow-creatures. I have shown the conflict between the naturally religious soul, Barbara, and Undershaft, with his gospel of money, of force, of power and his doctrine not only that money controls morality, but that it is a crime not to have money. The tragedy results from the collision of Undershaft's philosophy with Barbara's.”

Major Barbara is Shaw's presentment, as Socialist, of the problem of social determinism. Undershaft began as an East Ender, moralizing and starving, until he swore that he would be a full-fed free man at all costs. “I said, 'Thou shalt starve ere I starve'; and with that word I became free and great.” As in the case of Mrs. Warren, “Undershaft is simply a man who, having grasped the fact that poverty is a crime, knows that when society offered him the alternative of poverty or a lucrative trade in death and destruction, it offered him not a choice between opulent villainy and humble virtue, but between energetic enterprise and cowardly infamy.” The doctrine of the direct functionality of money and morality is no new doctrine. Colonel Sellers maintained that every man has his price. Becky Sharp averred that any woman can be virtuous on five thousand pounds a year. The penniless De Rastignac on the heights of Montmartre, shaking his fist at the city that never sleeps, bitterly exclaimed: “Money is morality.” Shaw has declared again and again in the public prints and on the platform, that money controls morality, that money is the most important thing in the world, and that all sound and successful personal and social morality should have this fact for its basis. So Undershaft, asked if he calls poverty a crime, replies:

“The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtue beside it: all the other dishonours are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities: spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill-fed, ill-clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society; they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty. Pah! you talk of your half-saved ruffian in West Ham; you accuse me of dragging his soul back to perdition. Well, bring him to me here; and I will drag his soul back again to salvation for you. Not by words and dreams; but by thirty-eight shillings a week, a sound house in a handsome street, and a permanent job. In three weeks he will have a fancy waistcoat; in three months a tall hat and a chapel sitting; before the end of the year he will shake hands with a duchess at a Primrose League meeting, and join the Conservative party.... It is cheap work converting starving men with a Bible in one hand and a slice of bread-and-butter in the other. I will undertake to convert West Ham to Mahommedanism on the same terms.... I had rather be a thief than a pauper. I had rather be a murderer than a slave. I don't want to be either; but if you force the alternative on me, then, by Heaven! I'll choose the braver and more moral one. I hate poverty and slavery worse than any other crime whatsoever. And let me tell you this. Poverty and slavery have stood up for centuries to your sermons and leading articles: they will not stand up to my machine guns. Don't preach at them: don't reason with them. Kill them.”

Now it is patent on reflection that poverty per se is not a crime, but frequently an incentive to crime; poverty is an evil that must be remedied by social reforms.[191] The casuistry of Undershaft's arguments lies in the assumption that good ends justify the worst of crimes; but the very strongest case can be made out against this materialist Socialism, inasmuch as it leaves out of consideration all sense of individual integrity and personal honour. The implication of Major Barbara is that the summum bonum vitæ is not virtue, or honour, or goodness, or personal worth, but material well-being, if not worldly prosperity. Undershaft expresses the doctrine of those industrial captains of the predatory rich class whom Mr. Roosevelt has entitled “malefactors of great wealth.” Mr. John D. Rockefeller is publicly quoted as preaching to his Sunday School class that it is every man's religious duty to make as much money as he possibly can—adding the sardonic parenthesis, “honestly, of course.” Undershaft, whose motto is “Unashamed,” finds the parenthesis superfluous—his expressed doctrine is to acquire money at all hazards—recte si possit, si non, quocumque modo rem. He would displace the Christian doctrine of submission with the Shavian doctrine of self-assertion. If the present practice of the Christian religion is found inadequate to modern social conditions, Undershaft asserts, why, scrap the Christian morality, and try another—the Undershaft morality, say, faute de mieux. But with that comic irony which never deserts Shaw even in treating the characters most akin to himself in temperament, he betrays the discrepancy in Undershaft's position: the lack of connection between his “tall talk” and his perfectly legitimate actions. There is no evidence that Undershaft employed dishonest means in the acquisition of his wealth, or committed any violence in the furtherance of his commercial ambition. Lady Britomart acutely pricks the bubble in the assertion that she could not get along with Undershaft because he gave the most immoral reasons for the most moral conduct!

Shaw suffered the customary fate of the dramatist in having Undershaft's Nietzschean doctrine of the “will to power” laid at his own door. It is an historic fact that Shaw once dissuaded a mob from going on another window-smashing excursion in the West End, by convincing them of its futility: and yet in the preface to Major Barbara he says, “The problem being to make heroes out of cowards, we paper apostles and artist magicians have succeeded only in giving cowards all the sensations of heroes whilst they tolerate every domination, accept every plunder, and submit to every oppression.” As a Fabian, Shaw is a strict advocate of procedure by constitutional means; he constitutionally agitated for Old Age Pensions, threatening the Liberal Party all the while with speedy dissolution if this measure were not carried into effect. It is quite evident that in Major Barbara, Shaw is endeavouring to awake public thought and arouse public sentiment in England upon the momentous problems of poverty and the unemployed. To rich and poor alike, he quite consistently and impartially preaches Socialism, finding this to be most effectively accomplished by putting in the mouths of his dramatic characters extremes of opinion expressed in the extremest ways. Shaw advises the malefactor of great wealth, after acquiring a swollen fortune, to turn Socialist and, emulating the examples of Carnegie and Rhodes in educational and other fields, to employ his wealth in improving the conditions of life for the working classes.[192] To the poor, Shaw points out the inadequacy of the “paper apostles and artist magicians,” and the imperative necessity of militant opposition to oppression, revolt against subjection and poverty. In speaking of Undershaft's “hideous gospel,” Sir Oliver Lodge pertinently says, “Perhaps, after all, it is only the wealthy cannon-maker's gospel that is being preached to us; why should we take it as the gospel of Shaw himself? Shaw must have a better gospel than that in the future, and some day he will tell it us, but not yet. As yet, perhaps, it has not dawned clearly on him.... In nearly all Bernard Shaw's writings ... the background of strenuous labour, of poverty and overwork, which constitutes the foundation of modern society, is kept present to the consciousness all the time, is borne in upon the mind even of the most thoughtless: it is not possible to overlook it, and that is why his writings are so instructive and so welcome.”[193]

From the dramatic standpoint, Major Barbara is the most remarkable demonstration yet given by Shaw of the vitality of a type of entertainment in complete contradistinction to the classical model. Shaw has created a form of stage representation, not differing externally from the conventional form of drama, in which material action attains its irreducible minimum, and the conflict takes place absolutely within the minds and souls of the characters. Major Barbara consists in a succession of logical demonstrations, flowing from conflicting reactions set up in the souls of the leading characters by the simplest actions, externally trivial but subjectively of vital significance. In this play Shaw fully justifies his cardinal tenet of dramatic criticism that illumination of life is the prime function of the dramatist, and that the life of drama is not merely the passion of sexual excitement, but the social, religious and humanitarian passions. The drama of the future will concern itself with the passion of humanity for all great ends.

Major Barbara is epoch-making in virtue of its theme: the evolutional struggle of the religious consciousness in a single personality. The stage upon which the drama is enacted is the soul of the Salvation Army devotee. “Since I saw the Passion Play at Oberammergau,” said Mr. W. T. Stead in writing of Major Barbara, “I have not seen any play which represented so vividly the pathos of Gethsemane, the tragedy of Calvary.”[194] I do not see how anyone can read this story of a soul's tragedy, or see the play upon the stage, without a quickening of the nobler emotions, and a realization that Bernard Shaw is a man of profound feeling and of sentiment, in the best sense. The second act is the acme of great art, alike in the validity of its emotive power and the marvellous portraiture of true practical Christianity in the character of Major Barbara. The sanity and sweetness of her noble nature, the positive divination of her religious sense which inspires her to sink self and go straight to the heart of the religious problem, are revelations in the art of character-portrayal. Her loss of faith appears insufficiently motived in the play; her conversion in the last act is even less convincing. Undershaft's intellectuality dominates Barbara's emotionality; slight reflection might well have convinced her that the Salvation Army accepted Undershaft's and Bodger's “tainted money” without explicit or tacit obligation of any sort whatsoever.[195] But perhaps she saw—as Shaw intends us to see—that the Salvation Army is foredoomed to failure so long as its chief means of support is derived from the very class against which it animadverts. If the Salvation Army goes so far as actually to threaten the incomes of the predatory rich, it will at once discover that its means of support derived from that quarter, will be forthcoming no longer.

Not without its significance is the fact that, in Major Barbara, leading dramatic critics found fantastic and absurd what leading publicists found momentous and profound. To Mr. Walkley, Major Barbara was a “farrago,” to Mr. Archer, a play in which there are “no human beings.” On the other hand, Sir Oliver Lodge and Mr. W. T. Stead were immensely impressed with this play as a vital study of contemporary religious and social manifestations. These contrasted views tend to emphasize the facts that the plot of Major Barbara is quite obviously fantastic, and Undershaft a mystic whose ideas are dangerously unpractical. And yet the separate characters in the play, with the exception of Undershaft—and even in his case, we should remember that no character is impossible in a world which holds a Bernard Shaw—are all perfectly natural and perfectly comprehensible. Shaw's practically unlimited acquaintance with all ranks of society enables him to exhibit characters so diametrically diverse as Bill Walker and Major Barbara, Lady Britomart and Mrs. Baines, Undershaft and Cusins, Lomax and “Snobby” Price. The play's greatest faults are the fantastic plot, the exaggerated discursiveness degenerating toward the close into rather wearisome prolixity, and the lack of conviction inspired by Barbara's “conversion” to Undershaftism at the close. The seriousness of the theme is everywhere lightened by the brilliancy of the dialogue, the deadly accuracy of the paradoxes, and the satiric portraiture of social types. But Shaw's incorrigible dialecticism leaves something to be desired; and we feel toward Shaw the playwright much as Lady Britomart felt towards Undershaft. “Stop making speeches, Andrew,” she says. “This is not the place for them”; to which Undershaft (punctured) replies: “My dear, I have no other way of conveying my ideas.”

Shaw recently asserted that the “way to get the real English public into the theatre was to give them plenty of politics, to suffuse the politics with religion, and have as many long speeches as possible. I knew this because I was in the habit of delivering long speeches to British audiences myself.” At the Court Theatre, and later at the Savoy, Shaw drew the real English public to the theatre with the politics of John Bull's Other Island, the religion of Major Barbara, and the long speeches of these two and Man and Superman. In his next play, which he told me he regarded as his most human and most rational drama, Shaw's active and long-continued interest in modern medicine found full vent. “The theme of my new play is modern serumpathy; and the hero is a doctor,” he wrote me while engaged upon the first act of The Doctor's Dilemma.

One day in the summer of 1906, during a visit to the Shaws at Mevagissey on the seacoast of Cornwall, Mr. Granville Barker told Mrs. Shaw about a friend of his, a Dr. W——, who had recently been treated for tuberculosis at a London hospital. Mrs. Shaw was struck by the recital, which prompted the consideration of the vast pains often taken by medical scientists to preserve the lives of people who, unlike Dr. W——, were quite useless to the world. Such people, whose constitutions were hopelessly undermined, should not be dabbled over for endless time to no purpose: it was agreed that they ought to be put into the lethal chamber.

“Why, yes,” exclaimed Mrs. Shaw in a moment of inspiration, “there's a play in that!”

Mr. Shaw replied: “Sure enough, I believe you are right. Hand me my tablet and I will go to work on it at once.” The necessary writing materials were immediately handed him; this was the beginning of The Doctor's Dilemma.

Upon the leading motive of the play hinges the principal criticism which might be directed against Shaw as a realist. Almost everyone is inclined to maintain that, whereas problems of the most serious ethical significance confront even the most ordinary practitioner, the dilemma in which Ridgeon finds himself placed is one that would never arise in actual experience. The truth of the matter is that the play is based upon an actual incident; and Mr. Shaw once related the story to me in detail. One day he was at St. M——'s Hospital, London, visiting a famous physician, Sir A—— W——. The size of the hospital admitted of only a few patients for treatment, say fifteen all told. In the course of the conversation, an assistant came in to report to the head of the hospital that some unknown man had made an urgent request to be taken in as a patient at the hospital. “Is he worth it?” asked the eminent physician. “This gave me the clue to The Doctor's Dilemma, you see,” explained Mr. Shaw. “A choice between those worthy and those unworthy to be treated, and presumably saved, was an ethical question inevitably arising in virtue of the cramped facilities of the hospital. The question whether the patient was physically worthless or not was in no sense an inhuman question; and my own treatment, you see, is in no sense either freakish or inhuman.”

After Ibsen's death Shaw wrote a critical appreciation of Ibsen's work, in the course of which he said: “Ibsen seems to have succumbed without a struggle to the old notion that a play is not really a play unless it contains a murder, a suicide, or something else out of the Police Gazette.... The Brand infant and Little Eyolf are as tremendously effective as a blow below the belt; but they are dishonourable as artistic devices, because they depend on a morbid horror of death and a morbid enjoyment of horror.”[196] Loyally championing Ibsen and the fundamental principles of drama—for the above quotation appeared to be nothing short of an attack upon tragedy—Mr. William Archer characterized Shaw's charge as “the æstheticism of the fox without a tail ... the instinctive self-justification of the dramatist fatally at the mercy of his impish sense of humour.” In a challenging tone he went on to aver that Shaw “eschews those profounder revelations of character which come only in crises of tragic circumstance. He shrinks from that affirmation and consummation of destiny which only death can bring. Death is, after all, one of the most important incidents of life, not only to him or her who dies, but to those who survive.... If, in Mr. Shaw's own phrase, 'the illumination of life' is the main purpose of drama, what illuminant, we may ask, can be more powerful than death?... It is not the glory but the limitation of Mr. Shaw's theatre that it is peopled by immortals.”[197]

A few weeks later—as Mr. Archer himself has recorded[198]—a paragraph appeared in the Tribune, “from an unexceptionable source,” announcing the practical completion of The Doctor's Dilemma. This was its substance:

“Mr. Bernard Shaw has been taking advantage of his seaside holidays in Cornwall to write a new play.... It is the outcome of the article in which Mr. William Archer penned a remarkable dithyramb to Death, and denied that Mr. Shaw could claim the highest rank as a dramatist until he had faced the King of Terrors on the stage. Stung by this reproach from his old friend, Mr. Shaw is writing a play all about death.... He has not evaded the challenge by a quip; the play is in five acts, with the fatal situation in the correct position—at the end of the fourth. The death scene will be unlike any ever before represented.”

The conversation at Mevagissey and the incident at the hospital in London prior thereto were the real clues to the creation of The Doctor's Dilemma. Mr. Archer's “challenge,” as Mr. Shaw assured me, happened to fit in conveniently with his already formulated dramatic plan. When the play was actually produced, Mr. Archer triumphantly declared that Shaw had ingeniously evaded his challenge to “keep a straight face long enough to write a scene of pathos or of tragedy.” He explained that “death, of all things, requires to be approached in humility of spirit, and that humility has been omitted from Mr. Shaw's moral equipment. He must always be superior to every character, every emotion, every situation he portrays.... If the 'King of Terrors' thinks he can perturb or overawe the cool, clear, quizzical intelligence of G. B. S., his majesty is very much mistaken.... As he (Mr. Shaw) is superior to life, there is no reason in the world why he should not be superior to death.”[199] In a later article Mr. Archer maintained that Shaw had “doctored” the situation of Dubedat's death. Moreover, Mr. Archer gave his case away in the words: “He has not treated death soberly, seriously, naturally, or, in a word, with a straight face. He has chosen an extremely exceptional case, and has treated it realistically in outward detail; ironically in spirit and effect. It was not realism I demanded—it was poetry!”[200] Now, to expect a man quintessentially an ironic and comedic dramatist to throw around death a halo of imaginative poetry is to commit the critical blunder of complaining of one author that he does not write like another—say, that Shaw does not write like Shakespeare. If there is anything that Shaw abhors, it is the spectacle of death made stage-sublime. And it is quite unreasonable not to expect a man who does not believe in personal immortality to be “superior to death”; and Shaw once said, as I have remarked elsewhere, that he was looking for a race of men who were not afraid to die. Death is approached in The Doctor's Dilemma with neither awe nor humility; not by the doctors who are professionally callous, or by the amoral atheist, Dubedat. We are made to realize Jennifer's anguish during Dubedat's dissolution; her action following Dubedat's death—the action of a Ouida or a Laurence Hope—is both logical and psychological. It is quite true that Shaw has not complied with Mr. Archer's unreasonable and extravagant request; but he has treated the scene, allowing for the indispensable “heightening for dramatic effect,” with acute psychological penetration, with wonderful art, and with absolute consistency to his own view of life—an eminently honest and square course to pursue.

Various other incidents in the play, branded unqualifiedly by numerous critics as impish, in execrable taste, or frankly impossible, are based upon actual occurrences; the names of the parties concerned and the details are quite well known to others besides Shaw himself. For example, Dubedat's disgraceful suggestion about the worthless cheque, which of necessity must eventually be paid by Jennifer to avert Dubedat's disgrace, is an exact record of a similar proposal once made to Shaw himself by a man whose name, because of its association with that of one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, is known all over the world. Dubedat's lack of any sense of obligation to finish pictures paid for before execution is paralleled in an episode in the life of a well-known sculptor. The incident of the reporter's suggestion to interview the artist's widow five minutes after bereavement on “How it feels to be a widow,” is founded on fact. “A few years ago,” Shaw recounts, “when Mrs. Patrick Campbell's husband died in South Africa, a leading London paper sent a man up on the instant to interview her. Of course, she didn't see him, and next morning the editor of the paper in his story of the death actually expressed grieved surprise at her lack of hospitality.” There is a scene in the play in which Dubedat attempts to justify his conduct on the ground that he is a disciple of Bernard Shaw, whom he calls “the most advanced man now living.” To remove any misapprehension in the public mind on the subject, Shaw recently told the following story:

“Some people have thought that by allowing the immoral artist to say he was my disciple, I have virtually admitted that all my disciples die immoral and that immorality is what my teachings amount to. Of course, that is not what I meant. The incident, as I say, was founded on fact. About six months ago a scampish youth tried to blackmail his own father, and the old gentleman, a most respectable person, was actually forced to prosecute him. At his trial the youth excused himself just as the dying artist in my play attempted to excuse himself—by asserting that he was a 'follower of Bernard Shaw.' Then the youth said some irreligious things that scandalized the judge, and finally got sent to prison, where he actually expected me to go to visit him and act as a sort of chaplain to him.”[201]

Lastly, there is the creed of the dying artist, beginning with the words: “I believe in Michelangelo, Velásquez, and Rembrandt”—universally deplored as impossible, to say nothing of its being in execrable taste. “This creed of the dying artist,” Shaw found himself forced to explain, “which has been reprobated on all hands as a sally of which only the bad taste of a Bernard Shaw could be capable, is openly borrowed with gratitude and admiration by me from one of the best known prose writings of the most famous man of the nineteenth century. In Richard Wagner's well-known story, dated 1841, and translated under the title, An End in Paris, by Mr. Ashton Ellis (Vol. VII. of his translation of Wagner's prose works), the dying musician begins his creed with 'I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven.'”[202]

In The Doctor's Dilemma medical quackery and humbug are portrayed with a satiric verve truly Molièresque. The long first act does little to further the action beyond indicating that “to put a tube of serum into Bloomfield-Bonington's hands is murder—simple murder,” and suggesting that Ridgeon has a temporary “idiosyncrasy” to fall in love with the first pretty woman that comes along. The real purpose of the first act is to portray the state of modern medical science; the quackeries of M. Purgon and Mr. Diafoirus come at once to mind, and one feels that the picture drawn by Shaw is done much as Molière would have done it, had he been alive to-day. In Dubedat Mr. Max Beerbohm has discovered a strong resemblance to the Roderick Hudson of Henry James. One catches here and there, too, a suggestion of the Oscar Wilde who said: “If one love art at all, one must love it beyond all things in the world, and against such love the reason, if one listened to it, would cry out. There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is something entirely too splendid to be sane. Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world to be pure visionaries.” This figure of a clever young artist, of rare charm of temperament and phenomenal executive skill, who came to an early, untimely end through disease had several prototypes in actual life; but on the whole Dubedat must be regarded as a composite picture, and not a portrait.” Dubedat raises the eternal question as to how far genius is a morbid symptom.[203] The most notable passage in the play is the discussion between Sir Colenso Ridgeon and Sir Patrick Cullen as to the worthlessness of Dubedat, and the value of Blenkinsop.

“Well, Mr. Saviour of Lives,” asks Sir Patrick, “which is it to be—that honest man, Blenkinsop, or that rotten blackguard of an artist, eh?”

Playbill of The Doctor's Dilemma.

Schauspielhaus, Cologne. January 23d, 1910. One hundred and sixty-first performance.

Playbill of Arms and the Man.

Schauspielhaus, Frankfurt. October 6th, 1906. First performance at this theatre.

“It's not an easy case to judge, is it?” queries Ridgeon. “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.”

“What will he be a source of for that poor innocent wife of his, when she finds him out?”

“That's true. Her life is a hell.”

“And tell me this: Suppose you had this choice put before you: Either to go 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 the men and women rotten. Which would you choose?”

“That's a devilish difficult question, Paddy. The pictures are so agreeable, and the good people so infernally disagreeable and mischievous, that I really can't undertake to say off-hand which I should prefer to do without.”

“Come, come! none of your cleverness with me: I'm too old for it. Blenkinsop isn't that sort of good man; and you know it.”

“It would be simpler if Blenkinsop could paint Dubedat's pictures.”

“It would be simpler still if Dubedat had some of Blenkinsop's honesty. The world isn't going to be made simpler for you, my lad: you must take it as it is.”

After further discussion, Sir Patrick finally poses the issue in clear-cut terms:

“It's a plain choice between men and pictures.”

“It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture,” parries Ridgeon.

“Colly, when you live in an age that runs to pictures and statues and plays and brass bands, because its men and women are not good enough to comfort its poor aching soul, you should thank Providence that you belong to a high and great profession, because its business is to heal and mend men and women.”

“In short, as a member of a high and great profession, I am to kill my patient.”

“Don't talk wicked nonsense. You can't kill him. But you can leave him in other hands.”

“In B. B.'s, for instance, eh?” queries Ridgeon, looking at Sir Patrick significantly.

“Sir Ralph Bloomfield-Bonington is a very eminent physician.”

“He is,” accedes Ridgeon.

“I'm going for my hat,” adds Sir Patrick, with conclusive finality.

Whilst all the characters are admirably drawn and sharply individualized, Shaw's inspiration is singularly displayed in making of Jennifer a native of Cornwall, that land of rhapsodic faith and splendid religious enthusiasm. She is a true child of nature, impulsive and romantic, to whom belief in Dubedat's genius, much more than love for his personality, has become nothing short of a religion. To engarb herself in the “purple pall of tragedy,” the instant Dubedat is dead, is a perfectly characteristic action. “Jennifer is an impossible person to live with, I grant you,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me, “but it is clear to me that her impulsiveness and her unquestioning fidelity to Dubedat's memory must find immediate expression in fulfilment of the dying injunction of her King of Men. Even if I had been writing a novel, in which the treatment is more leisurely”—this in answer to my question—“I should have made her act precisely as she did.”

The first three acts of The Doctor's Dilemma are as able in treatment and solid in workmanship as anything Shaw has ever achieved. The pervasive comic irony is tremendous; and if in the latter part of the play there is a regrettable drop into farce-comedy, one should remember that this is a fault shared in by the plays of Sheridan and Molière. The anti-climax of the epilogue is banal—“a sell” of the true Shavian brand. It is exceedingly amusing to the dispassionate onlooker to note the discomfiture of the dismayed audience over the discovery that the enigmatic author regards the identity of Jennifer's second husband as a quite pointless secret between Jennifer and Bernard Shaw![204]

“I have just finished a crude melodrama in one act—the crudity and melodrama both intentional,” Mr. Shaw wrote me on March 15th, 1909, “which I should say will be played by Tree if it were not that my plays have such an extraordinary power of getting played by anybody in the world rather than by the people for whom they were originally intended.” Even then, it seems, Mr. Shaw dimly foresaw the banning of his play by the King's Reader of Plays, and the enforced alteration of plans for its production entailed by that decision. Promised initial production by Sir (then Mr.) H. Beerbohm Tree, “the first of our successful West End managers to step into the gap left by the retirement of Messrs. Vedrenne and Barker from what may be called National Theatre work with his Afternoon Theatre,” Blanco Posnet was driven away to far-off Dublin, where it first saw the light of production. Upon no play of Shaw's, with the single exception of Mrs. Warren's Profession, are we so fully “documented”—primarily due in both cases to the interdict of the Censorship. Fortunately a letter which Shaw wrote to Tolstoy in the autumn of 1909 gives a detailed account of the genesis of the play. Tolstoy had been reading Shaw's plays, and evinced much interest in the plot of Blanco Posnet as it had come to his ears. He expressed a wish to read the play, says Mr. Aylmer Maude in his biography of Tolstoy, “because, as he said, to many people the working of man's conscience is the only proof of the existence of a God.”[205] When Mr. Maude repeated this conversation to Mr. Shaw, the latter sent Tolstoy a copy of the play with the following letter (quoted in part):

“My dear Count Tolstoy,—I send you herewith, through our friend, Aylmer Maude, a copy of a little play called The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet. 'Showing up' is American slang for unmasking a hypocrite. In form it is a very crude melodrama, which might be played in a mining camp to the roughest audience.

“It is, if I may say so, the sort of play you do extraordinarily well. I remember nothing in the whole range of drama that fascinated me more than the old soldier in your Power of Darkness. One of the things that struck me in that play was the feeling that the preaching of the old man, right as he was, could never be of any use—that it could only anger his son and rub the last grains of self-respect out of him. But what the pious and good father could not do, the old rascal of a soldier did as if he was the voice of God. To me that scene where the two drunkards are wallowing in the straw, and the older rascal lifts the younger one above his cowardice and his selfishness, has an intensity of effect that no merely romantic scene could possibly attain; and in Blanco Posnet I have exploited in my own fashion this mine of dramatic material which you were the first to open up to modern playwrights.

“I will not pretend that its mere theatrical effectiveness was the beginning and end of its attraction for me. I am not an 'Art-for-Art's sake' man, and would not lift my finger to produce a work of art if I thought there was nothing more than that in it. It has always been clear to me that the ordinary methods of inculcating honourable conduct are not merely failures, but—still worse—they actually drive generous and imaginative persons into a dare-devil defiance of them. We are ashamed to be good boys at school, ashamed to be gentle and sympathetic instead of violent and revengeful, ashamed to confess that we are very timid animals instead of reckless idiots, in short, ashamed of everything that ought to be the basis of our self-respect. All this is the fault of the teaching which tells men to be good without giving them any better reason for it than the opinion of men who are neither attractive to them, nor respectful to them, and who, being much older, are to a great extent not only incomprehensible to them, but ridiculous. Elder Daniels will never convert Blanco Posnet: on the contrary, he perverts him, because Blanco does not want to be like his brother; and I think the root reason why we do not do as our fathers advise us to do is that we none of us want to be like our fathers, the intention of the Universe being that we should be like God.”

It is inconceivable that this play should have been banned by the Censorship.[206] It is a story of religious conversion, told with sincerity and depth of conviction. So far is it from being irreverent that it may, with truth, be described as the most sincerely religious of all of Shaw's plays. “Like flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods,” says Shakespeare: “they kill us for their sport.” Like pawns in the great game of life are we to God, says Shaw; He uses us for His own great purpose. “There's no good and bad,” says Posnet in his puncheon-bench sermon; “but by Jiminy, gents, there's a rotten game, and there's a great game. I played the rotten game; but the great game was played on me; and now I'm for the great game every time. Amen.” It is the final expression in Shaw of that neo-Protestantism which had already found more or less adequate expression in The Devil's Disciple and Major Barbara. It needs no exposition here—especially after Shaw's expository letter to Tolstoy.[207] One word only as to the play's “crudity.” To an American, familiar with the scenes and conditions described, its pseudo-realism is grotesque in its unreality. Fortunately the import of the play is in no wise impaired by the fact that Shaw has been unsuccessful in assimilating Bret Harte.

During the latter part of March, and the month of April, 1909, Mr. Shaw, accompanied by Mrs. Shaw, went for his health on a motoring tour through Algeria. His next play, which he had been requested to write on the chosen subject by Mr. Forbes Robertson, was written at odd moments during this trip. The play, described by Mr. Shaw as an “ordinary skit,” was aptly entitled Press Cuttings: A Topical Sketch compiled from the Editorial and Correspondence Columns of the Daily Papers. In form, it is very like, though superior in characterization, to a Paris revue; Julius Bab has pronounced it vastly above the contemporary German Witzblatt. Its appearance just at the time when the activities of the “militant” suffragettes were at their height, was peculiarly à propos. Once again, the Censorship intervened to ban one of Shaw's plays—this time on the ground that Mr. Shaw was guilty, not of blasphemy, but of employing “personalities, expressed or implied.” The Civic and Dramatic Guild was immediately created to evade the interdict of the Censorship, and the play was produced for the first time at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on July 9th, 1909.[208] The indignation aroused among dramatic authors and critics by the banning of two of Mr. Shaw's plays in succession at last focussed the opposition to the Censorship; and the dissatisfaction with its operation, which had made itself felt vigorously, but more or less intermittently, for a number of years thitherto, finally crystallized. A special committee, from both Houses, was appointed by Parliament, to examine into and report on the operation of the Censorship, and, if necessary, to make recommendations as to its powers and functions for the future. Many sittings were held, and a large number of the leading men of letters in Great Britain, including Mr. Shaw himself, actors, theatre-managers, bishops, men of various shades of opinion, gave evidence before the committee. One result of the sittings of that committee[209] has been the establishment of an advisory board in connection with the Censorship. In many quarters hopes are expressed that a Bill will be passed by Parliament for the purpose of ameliorating the hardships of dramatic authors under the present operation of the Censorship, and of giving greater encouragement to the free development of a national English drama in the future.

Playbill of Press Cuttings.

The Kingsway Theatre, London. June 21st, 1910.
National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. Direction of Actresses' Franchise League.

Press Cuttings is the most perfectly amusing thing Shaw has written in many years. It recalls the days of delightful irresponsibility, which seemed to have passed for ever—the days of Arms and the Man and You Never Can Tell. The adverse decision of the Censorship is inconceivable, in the light of the sanction of Mr. Barrie's Josephine, in which Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Balfour were “caricatured,” and even a number of their public utterances put in the mouths of the characters obviously impersonating them. Mr. Shaw's Balsquith (Balfour-Asquith) and Mitchener (Milner-Kitchener) bear not the faintest resemblance to any of the personages suggested by their names—representing merely, in a light of broadly farcical-comedy, a prime minister and a head of the army. From the situation arising from reversing the rôles of man and woman, due to the agitation of the “militant suffragettes”—woman developing all the “manly” qualities of pugnacity and overbearing insolence, man developing the “womanly” qualities of timidity and indecision—Shaw has extracted a comedy that is breezily, devastatingly comical. But, even in a topical sketch, Shaw from time to time “puts away childish things” and shows us the serious sides of several subjects. Those who indulge in the futile claim that men are more useful to the world than women will find food for serious reflection in the passage in Shaw's play in which General Mitchener tries to excuse himself for giving way to profanity. He is sternly reproved by the Irish charwoman, Mrs. Farrell—admirably played by that remarkable character-actress, Miss Agnes Thomas.

“When a man has risked his life on eight battlefields, Mrs. Farrell,” pleads the General in extenuation, “he has given sufficient proof of his self-control to be excused a little strong language.”

“Would you put up with strong language from me,” queries Mrs. Farrell pertinently, “because I've risked me life eight times in childbed?”

“My dear Mrs. Farrell,” expostulates the General, “you surely would not compare a risk of that harmless kind to the fearful risks of the battlefield?”

“I wouldn't compare risks run to bear livin' people into the world to risks run to blow them out of it,” replies Mrs. Farrell conclusively. “A mother's risk is jooty; a soldier's is nothin' but divilment.”

The popular hysteria in the fear of German invasion is reflected with great cleverness in the discussions between Mitchener and Balsquith, and Mitchener's vigorous asseveration caps the climax.

“Let me tell you, Balsquith, that in these days of aeroplanes and Zeppelin airships the question of the moon is becoming one of the greatest importance. It will be reached at no very distant date. Can you, as an Englishman, tamely contemplate the possibility of having to live under a German moon?”

Shaw's admirable art in character-creation is portrayed in the figure of the orderly, a very minor part. In a brief scene or two, he shows us a definite, clear-cut character, full of humour, consistency and point. The orderly, with the sharpened vision of common sense, has penetrated the great drawback to military service in England. The National Service League might well ponder Shaw's words: “With regard to military service, the only real objection to it in this country is the fact that at present the man who enlists as a soldier loses all his civil rights and becomes simply an abject slave. Sooner than submit to such conditions, which are wholly unnecessary and mischievous, the country, I consider, would be perfectly justified in resisting any such measure by violent revolution.

“On the other hand, there is no reason why a man should not be compelled to do military service just as he is compelled to serve on a jury or to pay his taxes, provided that his civil rights are unimpaired.”

FOOTNOTES:

[181] In a subsequent volume will be indicated in detail Mr. Archer's intimate relation to the growth of popular interest in Shaw's plays.

[182] This parallel was called to my attention by Professor William Lyon Phelps, of Yale University. Compare, for example, Tanner's long outburst against the chains of wedlock with Mirabell's, “I must not lose my liberty, dear lady, and like a wanton slave cry for more shackles,” etc., etc. In reply to a question of mine in regard to indebtedness, Mr. Shaw replied: “Why, I never thought of such a thing! As a matter of fact, the old English comedies are so artificial and mechanical, that I always forget them before I have finished reading them.”

[183] Compare the novel, The Confounding of Camellia, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick, concretely imaging the thesis of Shaw's play. The pursuit of man is portrayed in its natural colours, the pursuer and temptress being a seductive siren who exploits all the intricate wiles and complex arts of personal fascination to ensnare her struggling prey.

[184] The Actor's Society Monthly Bulletin, Christmas, 1905.

[185] “As this scene may prove puzzling at a first hearing,” reads the leaflet, “to those who are not to some extent skilled in modern theology, the Management have asked the Author to offer the Court audience the same assistance that concert-goers are accustomed to receive in the form of an analytical programme.” Follows the synopsis:

“The scene, an abysmal void, represents hell; and the persons of the drama speak of hell, heaven and earth, as if they were separate localities, like 'the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth.' It must be remembered that such localizations are purely figurative, like our fashion of calling a treble voice 'high' and the bass voice 'low.' Modern theology conceives heaven and hell, not as places, but as states of the soul; and by the soul it means, not an organ like the liver, but the divine element common to all life, which causes us 'to do the will of God' in addition to looking after our individual interests, and to honour one another solely for our divine activities and not at all for our selfish activities.

“Hell is popularly conceived not only as a place, but as a place of cruelty and punishment, and heaven as a paradise of idle pleasure. These legends are discarded by the higher theology, which holds that this world, or any other, may be made a hell by a society in a state of damnation: that is, a society so lacking in the higher orders of energy that it is given wholly to the pursuit of immediate individual pleasure, and cannot even conceive the passion of the divine will. Also that any world can be made a heaven by a society of persons in whom that passion is the master passion—a 'communion of saints' in fact.

“In the scene represented to-day hell is this state of damnation. It is personified in the traditional manner by the devil, who differs from the modern plutocratic voluptuary only in being 'true to himself'; that is, he does not disguise his damnation either from himself or others, but boldly embraces it as the true law of life, and organizes his kingdom frankly on a basis of idle pleasure seeking, and worships love, beauty, sentiment, youth, romance, etc., etc.

“Upon this conception of heaven and hell the author has fantastically grafted the seventeenth century legend of Don Juan Tenorio, Don Gonzalo, of Ulloa, Commandant of Calatrava, and the Commandant's daughter, Dona Ana, as told in the famous drama by Tirso de Molina and in Mozart's opera. Don Gonzalo, having, as he says, 'always done what it was customary for a gentleman to do,' until he died defending his daughter's honour, went to heaven. Don Juan, having slain him, and become infamous by his failure to find any permanent satisfaction in his love affairs, was cast into hell by the ghost of Don Gonzalo, whose statue he had whimsically invited to supper.

“The ancient melodrama becomes the philosophic comedy presented to-day, by postulating that Don Gonzalo was a simple-minded officer and gentleman who cared for nothing but fashionable amusement, whilst Don Juan was consumed with a passion for divine contemplation and creative activity, this being the secret of the failure of love to interest him permanently. Consequently we find Don Gonzalo, unable to share the divine ecstasy, bored to distraction in heaven; and Don Juan suffering amid the pleasures of hell an agony of tedium.

“At last Don Gonzalo, after paying several reconnoitring visits to hell under colour of urging Don Juan to repent, determines to settle there permanently. At this moment his daughter, Ana, now full of years, piety, and worldly honours, dies, and finds herself with Don Juan in hell, where she is presently the amazed witness of the arrival of her sainted father. The devil hastens to welcome both to his realm. As Ana is no theologian, and believes the popular legends as to heaven and hell, all this bewilders her extremely.

“The devil, eager as ever to reinforce his kingdom by adding souls to it, is delighted at the accession of Don Gonzalo, and desirous to retain Dona Ana. But he is equally ready to get rid of Don Juan, with whom he is on terms of forced civility, the antipathy between them being fundamental. A discussion arises between them as to the merits of the heavenly and hellish states, and the future of the world. The discussion lasts more than an hour, as the parties, with eternity before them, are in no hurry. Finally, Don Juan shakes the dust of hell from his feet, and goes to heaven.

“Dona Ana, being a woman, is incapable both of the devil's utter damnation and of Don Juan's complete supersensuality. As the mother of many children, she has shared in the divine travail, and with care and labour and suffering renewed the harvest of eternal life; but the honour and divinity of her work have been jealously hidden from her by man, who, dreading her domination, has offered her for reward only the satisfaction of her senses and affections. She cannot, like the male devil, use love as mere sentiment and pleasure; nor can she, like the male saint, put love aside when it has once done its work as a developing and enlightening experience. Love is neither her pleasure nor her study: it is her business. So she, in the end, neither goes with Don Juan to heaven nor with the devil and her father to the palace of pleasure, but declares that her work is not yet finished. For though by her death she is done with the bearing of men to mortal fathers, she may yet, as Woman immortal, bear the Superman to the Eternal Father.”

[186] In W. B. Yeats's Collected Works, Vol. IV., p. 109 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1908), appears a statement (dated 1903), with reference to “the play which Mr. Bernard Shaw has promised us.” The appended footnote reads: “This play was John Bull's Other Island. When it came out in the spring of 1905, we felt ourselves unable to cast it without wronging Mr. Shaw. We had no Broadbent, or money to get one.”

[187] In a subsequent volume, dealing with the dramatic movement inaugurated by Mr. Shaw, the production of his plays at the Court Theatre will be fully discussed.

[188] Bernard Shaw and His Mannikins, in the New York Sun, October 15th, 1905.

[189] George Bernard Shaw: A Conversation, in The Tatler, November 16th, 1904.

[190] George Bernard Shaw: A Conversation, in The Tatler, November 16th, 1904.

[191] Several years ago, in a public address, Mr. Andrew Carnegie made the remarkable statement: “You hear a good deal these days about poverty. People wish it abolished. The saddest day civilization will ever see will be that in which poverty does not prevail. Fortunately we are assured that the poor are always to be with us. It is upon the evil of poverty that virtue springs!”

[192] In the Fabian tract, Socialism for Millionaires, Shaw preaches much the same gospel to the millionaire. This paper was first published in the Contemporary Review, February, 1896.

[193] 'Major Barbara,' G. B. S., and Robert Blatchford, by Sir Oliver Lodge; in the Clarion (London), December 29th, 1905.

[194] Impressions of the Theatre.—XIV. Mr. Bernard Shaw's 'Major Barbara,' in the Review of Reviews (London), January 27th, 1906.

[195] Commissioner Nicol, of the Salvation Army, has pointed out that a “real” Barbara, before sending in her resignation, would have consulted General Booth as to the Army's policy in the matter of accepting “tainted money.” He relates (the Star, November 29th, 1905), that General Booth accepted one hundred pounds from the Marquess of Queensberry for his “Darkest England” project. A Christian friend was astonished that he took the “dirty money.” Said the General: “We'll wash it clean in the tears of the widow and orphan, and consecrate it on the altar of humanity for Humanity's good.” It is quite clear that Shaw's “Barbara” prefers to do her own thinking; if she had let General Booth do it for her, there would have been no play.

[196] Ibsen, by G. Bernard Shaw; in the Clarion, June, 1906.

[197] About the Theatre, by William Archer; in the Tribune (London), July 14th, 1906.

[198] About the Theatre: 'The Doctor's Dilemma' by William Archer; in the Tribune (London), December 29th, 1906.

[199] This very able and profound discussion, in which Mr. Archer gave the very fairest exposition of his real opinion of Shaw as personality and dramatist, revealed the fundamental issues of the vexed question at issue without in the least settling them.

[200] About the Theatre: The Dissolution of Dubedat, by William Archer; in the Tribune (London), January 19th, 1907.

[201] The New York Times, December 30th, 1906.

[202] 'The Doctor's Dilemma,' in the Standard (London), November 22d, 1906. Shaw's comment is characteristic: “It is a curious instance of the enormous Philistinism of English criticism that this passage should not only be unknown among us, but that a repetition of its thought and imagery sixty-five years later should still find us with a conception of creative force so narrow that the association of Art with Religion conveys nothing to us but a sense of far-fetched impropriety.” It is needless to remark that Dubedat omits God's name for the obvious reason that he does not believe in God.

[203] Shaw recently said: “I do not see how any observant student of genius from the life can deny that the Arts have their criminals and lunatics as well as their sane and honest men ... and that the notion that the great poet and artist can do no wrong is as mischievously erroneous as the notion that the King can do no wrong, or that the Pope is infallible, or that the power which created all three did not do its own best for them. In my last play, The Doctor's Dilemma, I recognized this by dramatizing a rascally genius, with the disquieting result that several highly intelligent and sensitive persons passionately defended him, on the ground, apparently, that high artistic faculty and an ardent artistic imagination entitled a man to be recklessly dishonest about money, and recklessly selfish about women, just as kingship in an African tribe entitles a man to kill whom he pleases on the most trifling provocation. I know no harder practical question than how much selfishness one ought to stand from a gifted person for the sake of his gifts or the chance of his being right in the long run.”—The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate, by Bernard Shaw, pp. 11-12; The New Age Press (London), 1908. This brochure is also published by Benjamin R. Tucker, New York.

[204] I have had the privilege of reading Mr. Shaw's copy of The Doctor's Dilemma. Consideration of Getting Married, Misalliance and The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, all unpublished in English at this time (November, 1910), is postponed for a subsequent edition of the present work.

[205] The Life of Tolstoy: Later Years, by Aylmer Maude; Constable and Co., 1910.

[206] The Censor objected to two passages; the second passage Mr. Shaw was perfectly willing to alter, but not so the first—Blanco's story of his conversion, so reminiscent of the style of Job, in which he describes how God “caught him out at last.” This first passage, which Mr. Shaw rightly considered to embody the crux and central meaning of the play, he refused point-blank to alter. The play was next promised production by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. A certain passage which was subject to misinterpretation was willingly altered by Mr. Shaw at the suggestion of Lady Gregory; and the phrase, “Dearly beloved brethren,” and the use of the word “immoral” in description of Feemy's relations with the men of the village, were omitted in deference to the wishes of the Lord-Lieutenant. The directors of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory and Mr. W. B. Yeats, were warned by the Lord-Lieutenant that their patent for the theatre might be withdrawn in case the play offended popular and religious sentiment in Ireland. Despite these warnings, the play was successfully produced on August 25th, 1909. “The audience took it in a very friendly manner,” wrote the dramatic critic of the Times (London), “laughing heartily at its humours, passing over its dangerous passages with attentive silence, calling loudly but in vain for the author at the close.” There was no sensation and no excitement—and no cause for any. The Irish Times said that if ridicule were as deadly in England and Ireland as it is in France, the Censorship would be “blown away in the shouts of laughter that greeted Blanco Posnet.” In September, 1909, the play was once again presented to the Censor for consideration—in the meantime the author having rewritten an important passage after it had been tested in rehearsal. Miss Horniman wished to produce it at her Repertory Theatre in Manchester. “What the Censorship has actually done,” said Mr. Shaw in comment on the decision, “exceeds the utmost hopes of those who, like myself, have devoted themselves to its destruction. It has licensed the play, and endorsed on the licence specific orders that all its redeeming passages shall be omitted in representation. I may have my insolent prostitute, my bloodthirsty, profane backwoodsmen, my atmosphere of coarseness, of savagery, of mockery, and all the foul darkness which I devised to make the light visible; but the light must be left out. I may wallow in filth, ferocity and sensuality, provided I do not hint that there is any force in Nature higher and stronger than these.” Subsequently the play was successfully produced under the auspices of the Incorporated Stage Society, at the Aldwych Theatre, London, December 5th and 6th, 1909, by the Irish National Theatre Society's Company from the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.

[207] For detailed and excellent expositions of the purport of the play—particularly helpful at the time of the banning by the Censorship—compare The Incorrigible Censorship, in the Nation, July 29th, 1909; and an open letter to the Spectator of September 4th, 1909, by George A. Birmingham.

[208] The play was subsequently produced successfully at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, October 18th, 1909, and at the Kingsway Theatre, London, June 21st, 1910, at a benefit matinée organized by the Actresses' Franchise League. The Reader of Plays allowed the production of the play after the change of the names of “Balsquith” and “Mitchener” to “Johnson” and “Bones,” respectively.

[209] Report of the Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons on the Stage Plays (Censorship), together with the Proceedings of the Committee, and Minutes of Evidence; Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1909. The many questions which intimately concern the free development of the national drama in England, arising in connection with the investigation of the Censorship, fall outside the scope of the present work. They will be considered in detail in a subsequent volume dealing with the movements in dramatic art associated with Mr. Shaw's name. Mr. Shaw, desiring to have his full views on the Censorship included in the printed report, had a volume printed at his own expense which he filed with the committee. The committee decided by vote not to allow this printed evidence to be printed in their report. This volume, entitled Statement of the Evidence in Chief of George Bernard Shaw before the Joint Committee on Stage Plays (Censorship and Theatre Licensing), printed privately and marked “Confidential,” constitutes a remarkable indictment against the Censorship, and an elaborate exposition of grounds for the abolition of the Censorship as at present constituted.

THE TECHNICIAN

“Like all dramatists and mimes of genuine vocation, I am a natural-born mountebank.”—On Diabolonian Ethics. Preface to Three Plays for Puritans.