Spintho [groans and again hides his face].!!!...
Lavinia. Does the Emperor ever interfere?
The Editor. Oh yes; he turns his thumb up fast enough if the vestal virgins want to have one of his pet fighting men killed.
Androcles and the Lion
(c) His Defects. As a dramatist Mr. Shaw has many faults. When he is anxious to expound one of his opinions he subordinates the dramatic interest and permits his characters to become merely the mouthpieces of his views. Jack Tanner, the chief character in Man and Superman, is the stock example of such a personage. Nearly all his characters, moreover, though they are galvanically active, hardly impress the reader as being actually alive. Like Dickens, Mr. Shaw is skillful in the creation of freaks and oddities, but he is weak in the presentation of living and ordinary people.
(d) His Opinions. Like Mr. Wells, Mr. Shaw holds decided views on many subjects, from phonetics to the construction of the universe, and he is not backward in expressing them. More than once he has declared that he would never have written a word if he had not some message to convey. He has, however, a curious method of exposition, which he has purposely developed in order to shock his opponents into attention: a jesting, paradoxical mishandling of the truth, often glaringly personal, and stated with almost brutal clearness. As a result Mr. Shaw rarely finds himself taken seriously by the superficial reader, though the deep underlying seriousness of his opinions is nearly always perceptible to the attentive mind. It has often been urged that his opinions are purely destructive; and his efforts to provide alternatives to the institutions he condemns are not always of the happiest.
(e) His Style. Like his great fellow-countryman Swift, Mr. Shaw has a powerful and logical mind, with the same fierce satiric purpose and (it may be added) the same type of Irish nationalism. His prose is more amusing, less destructive, more diffuse, and less simple than that of the great Dean. In his dramatic dialogue, however, Mr. Shaw is pithy, direct, and absolutely clear. The example already given shows its character.
We add a brief specimen of his expository prose. It is the peroration to a long preface, and therefore somewhat more elevated in style than the average. It contains a characteristic mock-serious personal reference which sheds light on Mr. Shaw’s own opinion of his work.
I now find myself inspired to make a second legend of Creative Evolution without distractions and embellishments. My sands are running out; the exuberance of 1901 has aged into the garrulity of 1920; and the war has been a stern intimation that the matter is not one to be trifled with. I abandon the legend of Don Juan with its erotic associations, and go back to the legend of the Garden of Eden. I exploit the eternal interest of the philosopher’s stone which enables men to live for ever. I am not, I hope, under more illusion than is humanly inevitable as to the crudity of this my beginning of a Bible for Creative Evolution. I am doing the best I can at my age. My powers are waning; but so much the better for those who found me unbearably brilliant when I was in my prime. It is my hope that a hundred apter and more elegant parables by younger hands will soon leave mine as far behind as the religious pictures of the fifteenth century left behind the first attempts of the early Christians at inconography. In that hope I withdraw and ring up the curtain.
Preface to “Back to Methuselah”