“Here, no doubt,” observed Mr. Walkley of the Times, “Shaw is slyly taking a side glance at the usual English verdict on his own works. The verdict will need some slight modification in the case of ‘John Bull’s Other Island.’ For, in the first place, the play is not all rot. Further, it has some other qualities than mere brilliancy. It is at once a delight and a disappointment.... Shaw takes up the empty bladders of life, the current commonplaces, the cant phrases, the windbags of rodomontade, the hollow conventions, and the sham sentiments; quietly he inserts his pin; and the thing collapses with a pop.”
The play was given six special matinée performances at the London Court Theater in the latter part of 1904, and Arnold Daly has since presented it in America.
THE NOVELS AND OTHER WRITINGS
Shaw’s four published novels both suffer and gain by the widespread public interest in his plays; gain because this interest serves to keep them somewhat in the foreground, and suffer because, as the work of a very young man, they are ill-fitted to stand comparison with the literary offspring of his maturity. Of the four, “Love Among the Artists” is the best and “Cashel Byron’s Profession” the most popular. “An Unsocial Socialist” is a wild extravaganza that has lived its day and done its task, and “The Irrational Knot” is forgotten. The author’s first novel, written in his early twenties, has never seen the light. The publishers of that time would have none of it, and later on, when Shaw “copy” began to find a market and there even arose a mild demand for it, Shaw wisely decided that the yellowing manuscript should remain in the twilight of its tomb.
The hero of “Cashel Byron’s Profession” has become one of the most familiar characters of latter-day fiction. References to him are made in the newspapers frequently and every time a star of the roped arena marries a chorus girl the love making of Mr. Byron is recalled. He was not the first bruiser to grace the pages of an English romance—as admirers of “Pendennis” and The Spectator well know—but he has become, by long odds, the most conspicuous. It is to be deplored that Shaw did not save him for a play. “The Admirable Bashville,” a burlesque dramatization of the novel, does not answer. Cashel should be the hero of a melodrama a la “Arms and the Man.” What an opportunity he would give to our Greek god stars!
Cashel is the son of an actress and becoming tired of her variable moods and the exactions of his instructors, runs away from boarding school in England and journeys to Australia. There, by chance, he is taken into the household of Mr. “Ned” Skene, an eminent retired pugilist, as secretary and gymnasium assistant. The alert Skene discerns in him a rare “find” and before long he is back in England again, battling his way to fame and fortune.
Before long, through one Lord Worthington, a man of vast acquaintance and catholic taste, Cashel is introduced to the notice of Miss Lydia Carew, a young Englishwoman of huge fortune and most marvellous intellectuality. It is not until page 189—more than half way through the 330 page book—that Lydia learns that Cashel is a prize-fighter. Very naturally she recoils from him, but all the while, half-unconsciously, she has been falling desperately in love with him, and in the end, despite his profession, she marries him.
“I practically believe,” she explains to his rejected rival, “in the doctrine of heredity; and as my body is frail and my brain morbidly active, I think my impulse toward a man strong in body and untroubled in mind is a trustworthy one. You can understand that; it is a plain proposition in eugenics.”
And so Cashel retires from the ring and gradually, though never completely, takes on the polish of civilization. It is a union so happy that it soon descends into the commonplace.