they will know what to expect. You must always surprise your audience. When it has been advertised (sufficiently) that I am going to speak about the truth, for example, the audience comes here expecting me to speak about fiction. The only way to surprise them is to speak the truth and that I always do. Nothing surprises English people more than truth; they don’t like it; they don’t pay any attention to those (such as my friend Mr. H. G. Wells and myself) who trade in truth; but they listen and go away saying, ‘How very whimsical and paradoxical it all is,’ and ‘What a clever adventurer the fellow is, to be sure.’ ‘That was a good joke about duty and beauty being the same thing’—that was a joke I did not make. It is not my kind of joke—but when people begin ascribing to you the jokes of other people, you become a living—I was going to say statue—but I mean a living classic.
The Devil. I thought you disliked anything classic?
The Statue. Ahem! only dead classics—especially when they are employed to protect romanticism. Dead classics are the protective
tariffs put on all realism and truth by bloated idealism. In a country of plutocrats, idealism keeps out truth: idealism is more expensive, and therefore more in demand. In America, there are more plutocrats, and therefore more idealists . . . as Mr. Pember Reeves has pointed out in New Zealand . . .
The Devil. But I say, is this drama?
The Statue. Certainly not. It is a discussion taking place at a theatre. It is no more drama than a music-hall entertainment, or a comic opera, or a cinematograph, or a hospital operation, all of which things take place in theatres. But surely it is more entertaining to come to a discussion charmingly mounted by Ricketts—discussion too, in which every one knows what he is going to say—than to flaccid plays in which the audience always knows what the actors are going to say better often than the actors. The sort of balderdash which Mr. --- serves up to us for plays.
The Devil (peevish and old-fashioned). I wish you would define drama.
Hankin (advancing). Won’t you have tea, Commander? It’s not bad tea.
The Statue. I was afraid you were going to talk idealism.
Hankin (aside). Excuse my interrupting, but I want you to be particularly nice to the Princess Salomé. You know she was jilted by the Censor. She has brought her music.