There is a kind of shy, embarrassed man of merit who cannot keep or even reach to his proper position in the world without making some sort of pretence about himself. Mr. Bernard Shaw is such a man. He has created his legend with such extraordinary skill that those who know him well have great difficulty in persuading the general public, which has neither the time nor the intelligence to understand a man of marked personality, to believe that the legend is a legend, that the reputed Bernard Shaw is not the real Bernard Shaw. The common notion is that he has an insatiable craving for publicity, is immensely conceited and self-centred, and does not care what folly of thought or conduct he commits if by so doing he draws attention to himself. The truth about him is that he is a shy and nervous man, singularly humble-minded and sincere, very courageous and full of quick, penetrating wisdom, and so generous and kindly that he may be said to be willing to do more for his friends than his friends will do for themselves. He is a Don Quixote without illusions. When he tilts at windmills, he does so because they are windmills in private ownership, and he wishes them to be driven by electricity and owned by the local authority. In print and on platforms, Mr. Shaw brags and boasts and lays claim to an omniscience that would scandalize most deities, but no one who has the ability to distinguish between sincerity and mere capering is in the least deceived by his platform conceit. He is one of the very few men in the world who can brag in public without being offensive to his auditors. He can even insult his audience without hurting its feelings. There is a quality of geniality and kindliness in his most violent and denunciatory utterance that reconciles all but the completely fat-headed to a patient submission to his chastisement; and his most perverse statements are so swiftly followed by things profoundly true and sincerely said that those who listen to him are less conscious of his platform tricks than are those who merely read newspaper reports of his speeches. This is largely due to the fact that the newspapers print only his flippant and fantastic stuff, and omit his vital matter. I have seen reporters at one of his meetings sitting with their pencils loosely dangling from their fingers while Mr. Shaw spoke wisely and deeply, and then, when he uttered some trivial or outrageous thing, coming to life and hastily scribbling the jape into their notebooks.

It is my purpose here to insist that Mr. Shaw is a shy man with a large element of the gawky school boy in him so that he is awkward and embarrassed when he comes suddenly into the presence of strangers without having been warned that strangers are to be encountered. I have seen him blush like a boy on finding people in a room which he had expected to find unoccupied, and when one meets him casually in the street he is at first nonplussed and without conversation or power to do more than smile amiably. It is not easy to make this shyness of his plain to those who have met him once or twice because he has remarkable powers of recovery and can cover up his initial embarrassment with very great skill; and also because his platform manners are very easy and his general social manners are exceedingly gracious. He has made many pretences in his life, but the one pretence that he has never succeeded in maintaining is the pretence that he is a bad-mannered man. There are stories told of him that seem to show him in a graceless, even cruel, character, but these are no more than might be expected from a man of nervous temperament who is being bothered excessively by the demands of people who have no right to make demands on him at all. Against those stories may be set far more stories of acts of exceptional kindliness to those who are in trouble or in need of advice and encouragement. Very few great men have given so generously of their time and strength to helping young men of talent to obtain recognition as Mr. Shaw has done.

His awkwardness of manner when taken unawares is very different from that of Mr. Yeats in similar circumstances. Mr. Shaw is shy and awkward with strangers, but Mr. Yeats, who has never been shy in his life, is only awkward. Mr. Shaw, because he is naturally gracious, recovers himself more quickly than Mr. Yeats, who has cultivated his graciousness; and it may be said of them that Mr. Shaw has the manners of a man instinctively gentle, whereas Mr. Yeats has the manners of a man who has practised deportment before a cheval glass.

II

It is obvious that a man so shy and easily embarrassed as Mr. Shaw is cannot hope to make a swift impression upon his contemporaries unless he commits an outrage upon his own nature. A world which regards modesty as a sign of incompetence, if not of actual imbecility, is slow to recognize the real merits of a man unless he lays claim to merits which he has not got. In the long run, the crowd pays tribute to great men, but Mr. Shaw was anxious that tribute should be paid to him immediately. Fame at the age of eighty offered few inducements to him, and posthumous fame offered no inducements at all. He had something to say to a world disinclined to listen to him, and he felt that he could not persuade it to do so unless he first of all performed some unusual platform tricks to catch its attention. Something of his principle seemed to be in the mind of a tipster whom I saw on Epsom racecourse before the war began. I was walking in the crowd on the course, which the police were not yet clearing, when suddenly a very well-dressed man in my neighbourhood seemed to go out of his mind. He whirled violently round, uttered a fierce yell, flung an expensive silk hat into the air and waved his gold-headed cane in a very disturbing fashion. He then began to chant in a manner not unlike the way in which Mr. Vachel Lindsay recites his poem on the Congo!... By the time he had finished this performance, a considerable crowd had collected around him. I was in the forefront of it, and while I was wondering how long it would be before the police arrived to take charge of the demented man, he recovered his sanity and proceeded to sell tips for the two-thirty race. I bought one of them. I put money that was rare and precious on the horse which he commended to my patronage. And the horse lost the race!... Mr. Shaw climbed on to platforms and into newspapers, shouting at the top of his voice, "I am better than Shakespeare" in the hope that he might convince the world that he had any merit at all. He performed tricks in public in order to make people believe that he could think in the theatre. He wore comic clothes and refused to shave and conducted a rebellion against evening dress and silk hats and boiled shirts. He declined to eat meat, to smoke tobacco or to drink wine. He said that he was an atheist and an immoral writer. He tried to train his eyebrows into the shape which is called Mephistophelian. He saw himself in the role of the Fat Boy in "Pickwick Papers" trying to make men's flesh creep, and was disgusted to find that the Fat Boy's most valuable asset, his obesity, had been denied to him and given to Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, who would not make any one's flesh creep for the value of the world! Finally, he announced that he was a Socialist. His Socialism was not a platform trick: it was his serious faith; but it became so associated in the public mind with his platform tricks that he had only to say in public that he was a Socialist and his audience would giggle as if that were the most amusing thing they had ever heard. This habit of performing platform tricks undoubtedly drew a large crowd to listen to him, and he did not fail to deliver himself of his peculiar faith to that crowd when he had collected it; but there were considerable drawbacks to his method of securing attention. The crowd could never quite rid itself of the belief that he was "one of those comic chaps." It admitted that he was a very clever "comic chap," but firmly at the back of the popular mind was the belief that he did not mean one half of what he said and was not entirely sincere about the remaining half. It liked to see him performing in public, and it paid large sums of money to hear him lecture in behalf of causes that were abhorrent to it. Duchesses, for example, contributed heavily to the funds of Socialist societies simply for the privilege of hearing him speak, and duchesses do not love Socialist societies. The crowd talked about him to a remarkable extent; it read his books; it attended performances of his plays; it went to hear him lecture ... but it insisted that what was important about him was, not his advocacy of this or that, but his power to excite laughter. When he was most in earnest, the crowd said, "He's so witty!" and left the matter there. That, perhaps, is why "Common Sense and the War" aroused so much wrath in England. The crowd, accustomed to tittering behind its hand or laughing outright at Mr. Shaw's wit, was disconcerted by the serious way in which he dealt with the War in that notorious pamphlet. It was so shocked by what he said that it professed to be indignant that any man could cut comic capers at so awful a moment. Mr. Shaw was not cutting any capers, comic or otherwise, but the crowd, trained by him to believe that he was a comedian, could not believe that he was capable of being anything else. That pamphlet, ill-timed, perhaps, in some respects, was yet well-timed in this respect, that it reminded the British people of their most priceless privilege, the right of free speech. The whole of the British press collapsed before the Press Censor, and editors were afraid to open their mouths about things which were scandalous. Mr. Shaw restored the freedom of the press. He said what he had to say and he said it with the utmost courage and force, and within a week or two from the date of publication of his pamphlet, the timid editors were rearing up their heads and daring to say "Bo!" to the political geese.

There were times, perhaps, when he seemed to be yielding to the mob's desire to be tickled, when the one thing apparently that moved him was his delight in making the crowd giggle and guffaw; and now and then his friends felt that he was overdoing the tricks, that he was monotonously informing people that he was "better than Shakespeare," a statement that seemed as idle as if Anatole France were to say that he was "better than" Victor Hugo, when in fact the men are so dissimilar that there is no means of comparing them. But the danger, such as it was, amounted to little, for when all the discount is made that can be made for possible charlatanry in his character, there remains this indisputable fact that he has left a mark on the thought and life not only of the English-speaking world, but of the whole of Western civilization, which cannot be eradicated. We may go to the theatre to laugh at Mr. Shaw, but we remain to think with him.

III

Oddly enough, there was another dramatist, also an Irishman, whose practice was precisely the opposite of Mr. Shaw's: a shy, nervous man who permitted himself to be cheated of a position of authority because of his modesty. John Millington Synge was what Mr. Shaw might have been had he allowed his nature to run off to dark corners and hide itself. Synge could not compel himself to climb on to platforms or make extravagant boasts. He may have had the desire to make boasts, but he had not the courage to do so. An excellent comrade for an individual on a country road, he was so nervous in the presence of an audience of more than six people that he was in danger of physical sickness, and he may be said to have died of sheer inability to assert himself. Had it not been that Mr. Yeats was by to do Synge's boasting for him, the world might never have heard of that singular man of twisted talent. Mr. Yeats, indeed, boasted so loudly of Synge's gifts that superficial persons began to believe that Synge was the greater man of the two, and I remember on one occasion hearing young women, fresh from Newnham, boldly declaring that Mr. Yeats's chief title to remembrance would lie in the fact that he had discovered Synge! I have never been able to convince myself that Synge was a great man of genius; it is not necessary to convince oneself that Mr. Yeats is a great man of genius: the fact is obvious. Synge was a man of peculiar and interesting talent whose work smelt too strongly of the medicine bottle to be of supreme merit. He was the sick man in literature, and he had the sick man's interest in cruelty and harshness and violent temperaments. He had the weak man's envy of strength and the weak man's tendency to mistake violence for strength. His plays are better than Mr. Yeats's plays—"Riders to the Sea" is immeasurably better than "Kathleen ni Houlihan"—but Mr. Yeats is a greater poet than Synge was a dramatist. I am disinclined to believe that Synge was a great dramatist. He brought a desirable element of bitterness and acrid beauty into the sticky mess of self-satisfaction and sentimentalism which is known as Irish Literature, but I feel that he was lacking in staying-power. He shot his bolt when he wrote "The Playboy of the Western World," the chief value of which lay in the fact that it ripped up the smugness of the Irish people, than whom there are no other people in the world so pleased with themselves on such slender grounds, and taught them the much-needed lesson that they are very like the rest of God's creatures. Synge portrayed the Irish people faithfully as he saw them: he put in the element of poetry in the Celtic character, but he also put in the element of cruelty; he put in the wit and generosity, but he also put in the dullness and the greed; he put in the gallantry, but he also put in the cowardice; he put in the nobility, but he also put in the gross brutality. In other words, he saw at the same time the idealism of Padraic Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh permeated by the incredible brutality of De Valera's ruffians. He knew the delicate sense of beauty which suffuses the poetry of Mr. Padraic Colum and he smelt the odour of the charnel-house that rises from the work of Mr. James Joyce, and had he been able to keep the two sides of Irish character justly poised, he would have been a great man of genius; but he was not able to keep the balance between them. He tended more and more to see merit in cruelty and harshness, and he turned away from the sensitive and delicate beauty of Mr. Colum to the sewer-revelations of Mr. Joyce, who may fitly be described as Rabelais after a nervous breakdown. People tell me that "Deirdre of the Sorrows," his unfinished play, is the greatest of all the plays that have been written about that unhappy and romantic lady; and perhaps what they say is true, for none of the plays that have been written about her, Mr. Herbert Trench's or "A. E.'s" or Mr. Yeats's, are in the great line, though all of them are interesting. But judged by itself or in relation to plays generally, it does not seem to me to be a great drama nor is it so meritable as some of Synge's own plays of earlier origin. It marks to me the limit of his range, and shows signs of drooping energy. Some may say that I am attributing to failing powers what should be attributed to sickness and the imminence of death, but I think I am dealing justly with this odd intruder into the realm of letters when I say that his talent was a small one and that had he lived for twice as many years as he actually did live, he would not have produced anything of greater note than he had written when he died.

IV

Platform tricks saved Mr. Shaw from falling to the Synge level. Contact with rude men and ruder women in public places kept him in familiar alliance with normal things, and so it came about that his genius, though it soared, never soared out of sight. He marched ahead of the crowd, but he never went so far ahead of it that it could not catch up with him. He urged reluctant men and women to follow him along the paths that were obscure and difficult, but he never urged them to try a path which he had not himself explored, or was unwilling to explore. Not all of his advice was accepted ... not all of it was worthy of acceptance ... but all of it, accepted or rejected, was listened to. He would have found a readier agreement to take his advice if he had been less logical in his arguments, but his mind governs his life so completely that he cannot make any allowances for the wayward character of the average man. He has given himself so completely to his mind that his feelings seem to have atrophied. He is incapable, apparently, of understanding the beauty and fascination of mere irrelevancy. A study of his work reveals no consciousness on his part of natural beauty. He seems not to know that a tree is a lovely thing, that its loveliness is entirely without moral or sociological significance. He would probably agree with Dr. Johnson that one field is very like another field, that water in one part of the world is identical with water in another part of the world ... and would be just as remote from the truth as Dr. Johnson was: for one field is not like another field, and water in one place can be very dissimilar in look from water in some other place. Mr. Shaw would not suffer one pang at the destruction of St. Paul's Cathedral if he felt that its destruction made the processes of life more convenient to the ordinary citizen. If he had to choose between Rheims Cathedral and an improved drainage system for France ... a thing which France very badly needs, as any one with a nose can tell ... he would choose the drainage system. The College of Cardinals is less lovely in the eyes of Mr. Shaw than the members of a Borough Council. He would rather possess a good fountain-pen than the first folio of Shakespeare's plays. There was a man in Dublin who singularly resembled him in everything except wit. Francis Sheehy Skeffington, who was wrongly executed in the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, had Mr. Shaw's logical faculty without Mr. Shaw's redeeming wit. He was a very honest, courageous, and personally attractive man, just as Mr. Shaw is, but he was also a very wrong-headed man and totally incapable of any sort of concerted action with other people. Mr. Shaw's wit brings him into more cordial relationship with other human beings than Sheehy Skeffington would ever have achieved. I remember, just before the war began, meeting Skeffington in North Wales. He, too, was insensible to natural beauty and was without respect for tradition or ancient institutions. I took him one evening to a lake in Anglesey where many reeds grew. I asked him to watch while I clapped my hands, and when I had done so, thousands of starlings flew out of the reeds with a great fluttering of wings, making a tremendous disturbance because they had been roused from their sleep. Skeffington gazed at these birds as if he had never seen a starling before. I judged by the look of astonishment in his face that if he could have persuaded himself to believe in magic, he would have regarded me as a magician. By merely smiting my hands, I had filled the air with fluttering birds! This experience so interested me that I decided to make other experiments with Skeffington, and so, on the following day, I took him to a field outside the village where some very fine druidical remains were to be seen. I led him up to the stones and waited to see what effect they would have upon him. He looked at them for a few moments, and then, quite unmoved by the fact that they had been standing there for more than a thousand years and were all that was left of an ancient religion, he took a piece of paper from his pocket and, murmuring in his high-pitched Ulster voice, "I think I'll do a little propaganda!" thrust it into a crevice of the old altar. The paper had VOTES FOR WOMEN on it! He was totally incapable of understanding why this act of his disgusted me. His mind was indifferent to such things as tradition; he simply could not visualize those stones as anything other than a remarkably useful hoarding on which to advertise his latest enthusiasm. I suppose that if he thought of the druids at all, he thought contemptuously of them as barbarians to whom had been denied the enlightenment that he enjoyed; and his desperately logical mind, working on the fact that many persons would visit these remains, suggested to him that here was an excellent opportunity of thrusting his propaganda upon the attention of people reluctant to give any heed to it!...

I cannot conceive of Mr. Shaw doing just that thing because his wit would save him from it; but I feel that if his wit were taken from him or had been denied to him, he would have behaved exactly as Sheehy Skeffington behaved then. It is his superb, spontaneous wit that keeps him in continuous contact with normal men. Synge had no wit, and because he had not, was thrust into solitude. Skeffington had no wit ... there never was on earth a man so destitute of a sense of humour as Francis Skeffington ... and because he had not, he lived a life of intellectual isolation from his fellows in spite of the fact that most people liked him. Skeffington's courage and honesty ... and I have known few men so courageous and honest as he was ... served him partly, but not wholly, as Mr. Shaw's wit serves him. Mr. Shaw has great intellectual courage and is a very honest man, but these qualities, though they win respect in the long run, have an isolating effect on a man in such a world as this, and were it not for his wit, he would be an Ishmael, too. Take the wit from Mr. Shaw and the courage from Sheehy Skeffington, substitute for them a fractious sense of beauty, and the result is ... John Millington Synge.

Mr. Chesterton has illustrated the peculiar quality of the English mind by comparing the roads of France with the roads of England; and the comparison might be used to illustrate the difference between the mind of Mr. Shaw and the mind of the average man. Mr. Chesterton, with that startling profundity that is to be discovered in much of his writing that seems at first merely to be conjuring stuff, asserts that the design of English and French roads, the first all winding and irregular, the second straight as if drawn with the aid of a ruler, shows a fundamental difference between the two races: the English as wayward and casual as their roads, going lazily and easily to their journey's end; the French as logical and well-defined as their roads, going without any circumlocution to their journey's end. Mr. Shaw's mind goes directly to its goal, and he tries to persuade the rest of mankind to follow his example. But the rest of mankind does not wish to go by the most direct route to any goal: it wants to dally on the ways; it wants to explore all the little bye-paths and hidden corners; it even wants to turn back on its course to examine again some place that it has already seen; and above all, it wants to waste time. When Mr. Shaw contemplates the world engaged in this careless way of living, he bursts into a passion of wit where less gifted men, such as Sheehy Skeffington, would burst into anger; and he lashes the world with his tongue. Mankind, because Mr. Shaw is a genius, listens to him, as mankind always has listened to men of genius, in a puzzled fashion, and even speculates on whether it ought not to follow his advice; but it is in the nature of man to be illogical, and so, after a little thought, man goes on being wayward and casual. Even in France, where logic has become an obsession, men are more illogical than Mr. Shaw would have them be; and it is a very curious commentary on his work that in so logical a country as France, his plays make far less stir than in any other country in Europe. I imagine that the French are so cursed with logic that their minds revolt from the extreme reasoning of Mr. Shaw as an overloaded stomach revolts from rich food. Once, in France, when my battalion was marching along a road towards a part of the country in which we had been some weeks before, I heard a soldier in my platoon saying to his comrade as we came to familiar places, "Thank God, they've cut down those bloody trees!" and immediately I understood why the French roads bored the British soldier. That inexorable logic, all that neatness, those terribly straight roads with the trees growing at regular intervals ... "dressing by the right" as the soldiers said, and looking as if the men who planted them had performed the operation according to some mathematical formula ... all these things, inhumanly tidy and well-ordered, nauseated the mind. I have done much walking on English and French roads, and I will wager that boredom will seize the traveller on a French road long before his interest on an English road has been exhausted. And in their unintellectual, instinctive, wayward fashion, the English are more right about life than the French are. Mr. Shaw, I imagine, is incapable of understanding the state of mind of my soldier who thanked God that the neatly-arranged trees on the neatly-designed French road had been cut down. To him it would seem right that if trees are to be grown at all, they should be grown according to formula. He sees something stupid and wrong in the English method of planting an acorn in any hole that is visible and letting the tree grow as it pleases.

VI

In the chapter on Mr. Wells, I have printed an account of Mr. Shaw's religious faith which ought properly to be printed here, but since the reader can more easily turn to the next chapter than I can re-write it, I will leave the account where it is and proceed with an account of the latest developments of this faith as set forth in "Heartbreak House" and "Back to Methusaleh." These two plays are notable for a growth of religious conviction in their author which has brought him to a condition resembling, in the eyes of some, that of John the Baptist and, in the eyes of others (as I heard a clergyman of the Church of Ireland angrily assert) that of a religious fanatic. They are also notable for a weakening of technical skill as a dramatist. Mr. Shaw has set himself so ably to the task of rejecting drama from his plays, that unconsciously he ruins the effect of his lines by an excess of garrulity. No one, reading and particularly seeing, "Heartbreak House" and "Back to Methusaleh" can escape from the belief that Mr. Shaw is using more words than are necessary to express his thought. Either he despises us as people who are not sufficiently intelligent to understand his meaning unless it is delivered to us in a variety of sentences or he has lost his artistic sense and cannot understand that a fine morning is not any finer for being described somewhat in this fashion: "A fine morning is one on which the sun shines from a blue sky in which occasional white clouds may be seen. This morning is such a morning as that. Therefore, this is a fine morning. What a fine morning!" The whole of that extravagant speech, invented by me, not by Mr. Shaw, is contained in the last four words. The rest is not only excess, but insult, for it implies an ignorance in the person listening to it which is not human. There are many passages in these two plays which are not unlike that invented passage of mine. There is a passage near the beginning of the second act of "Heartbreak House" which seems to me to indicate a real decline in Mr. Shaw's sense of the theatre. Ellie Dunn and Boss Mangan, to whom she is thinking of getting engaged, are discussing themselves and marriage. He has just described himself in terms which show that he is one of those financial ruffians who are the modern equivalent, (not of highwaymen, for they were gay and adventurous fellows,) but of slave-drivers:

Mangan. ... Now what do you think of me, Miss Ellie?

Ellie (dropping her hands): How strange! that my mother, who knew nothing at all about business, should have been quite right about you! She always said—not before papa, of course, but to us children—that you were just that sort of a man.

Mangan (sitting up much hurt): Oh! did she? And yet she'd have let you marry me.

Ellie: Well, you see, Mr. Mangan, my mother married a very good man—for whatever you may think of my father as a man of business, he is the soul of goodness—and she is not at all keen on my doing the same.

The parenthetical clause in each of Ellie's speeches is unnecessary, and in the second speech, it has the effect of ruining a very good "line." I assert, as a dramatist with some technical skill, that Ellie's second speech, minus the parenthetical clause, will rouse laughter every time it is spoken. I assert, with equal confidence, that this speech, with the parenthetical clause, will not provoke more than a strangled laugh and may not provoke any laughter at all. Mr. Shaw is entitled to reject laughter if he thinks it is likely to destroy the thought in his speech, but no one can believe that the parenthetical clause to which I object adds anything to Ellie's thought. It is mere redundance, and redundance is destructive of drama. It is also destructive of thought for a man is more likely to be irritated than to be stimulated by hearing a thing repeated to excess.

I may, perhaps, note another matter of technical interest to the student of the Shavian drama, namely, Mr. Shaw's economy in characters. He has or had a strong sense of the theatre which is almost as strong as that possessed by Mr. Galsworthy. The difficulty a critic has in estimating Mr. Shaw's sense of the theatre is increased by the wilfulness with which he rejects technique: one is not always able to decide whether the lack of technique in the later plays is the result of intention or weakness. Mr. Galsworthy is nearly the cleverest technician now writing for the English theatre. He cannot think as clearly as Mr. Shaw can, but he can construct much better. When Mr. Galsworthy treats a theme dramatic in itself, such as the theme of "Loyalties," and does not entangle the drama with arguments, he writes an uncommonly good play. "Loyalties" has been called a "crook" play and in a sense it is one, but the difference between it and such a piece as "The Bat" by Mrs. Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mr. Avery Hopwood is the difference between a crook play written in terms of reality and a crook play written in terms of trick. When, however, Mr. Galsworthy treats a theme not dramatic in itself, such as the theme of "Windows," and entangles any drama it has with much argument, the result is something extraordinarily diffuse and nebulous. Mr. Galsworthy leaves you with a sensation, not only that you do not know what he means, but also that he does not know what he means. Mr. Shaw, in his later pieces, leaves you with the sensation that he knows only too well what he means, but he will never admit that you are capable of understanding him. His economy in characters is a certain sign of his mysticism. Mr. Yeats told me on one occasion that when Sir Horace Plunkett invited "A. E." to take a prominent position in the organization of co-operative agriculture in Ireland, Mr. Arthur Balfour commended the choice on the ground that a mystic is the most practical of men since he is willing to use any instrument that will serve his purpose, whereas your plain, blunt business man, destitute of imagination and firm purpose, will quarrel with his tools and end up by botching his job. The mystic, moreover, serves his purpose more than himself, whereas your plain, blunt business man serves only himself. Mr. Shaw's method of working is singularly interesting as a demonstration of the way in which the mystic achieves his purpose. I do not know of any writer who is so thrifty with his means as Mr. Shaw. Shakespeare, compared with him, is a prodigal and a spendthrift. Mr. Shaw, compared with Shakespeare, is a miser, uniquely stingy. But it is not stinginess which has made Mr. Shaw so economical in his characters and even in his situations. It is his mysticism which makes him extraordinarily indifferent to his means. Any old plot, however disreputable it might be, would serve Shakespeare for drawing on to the stage a crowd of dissimilar persons and enriching their lives with his verse; and any old character, however remote from human semblance will serve Mr. Shaw as a vent for opinions. Shakespeare primarily was interested in people. Mr. Shaw primarily is interested in doctrine. The principal difference between a dramatist who is interested in people and a dramatist who is interested in doctrines, is that the former will delight in the creation of the greatest variety of characters whereas the latter will not trouble to create a new character if an old one will do. I doubt whether there are more than twelve distinct persons in the whole of Mr. Shaw's work. When he began his career as a dogmatist, he set himself to writing novels, but found after he had written five, of which only four have been published, that he could not use this instrument so effectively for his purpose as he could use the instrument of the play. And so he turned his attention to the stage. But he did not waste his novels: he dramatised them. He lifted passages from his books and put them into his plays. He took some of the novel-characters and, after he had tidied them and changed their names, forced them from between their covers on to the stage. There is little in the thirty-eight plays he has written which is not to be found, developed or suggested, in his four novels. He has preached one doctrine all his life, and has preached it with singular consistency. It is set out in the succeeding chapter to this one. The parsimoniousness with which it has been preached is remarkable. The whole of the first act of "Major Barbara" is almost identically a repetition of the first act of "You Never Can Tell." Lady Britomart Undershaft, of the first piece, is Mrs. Clandon, of the second, under another name. The situation of two women is nearly the same. They are living apart from their husbands whom they have not seen for a number of years. Lady Britomart and Mrs. Clandon have each two daughters and a son with the haziest or no recollections of their fathers. A meeting between the two parents and their children is arranged, in each case, on a flimsy pretext. Lady Britomart, like Mrs. Clandon, is one of those strong-minded, silly women who flourish, nowadays, more commonly in America than in England. (She is the sort of dense female who belongs to the Lucy Stone League and refuses to bear the name of the man she has chosen to be her husband although she is willing to bear the name of the man whom she did not choose to be her father!) Lady Britomart, like Mrs. Clandon, has abandoned her husband for a particularly fatuous cause. Mr. Crampton (for Mrs. Clandon is really Mrs. Crampton) was deprived of his wife's society (which was probably no great loss) and that of his children (which probably was) because he very properly spanked his elder daughter when she had been naughty. Lady Britomart left her husband because he declined to change the basis of his armaments-factory in the interests of his son. Her excuse for her behaviour was more natural than Mrs. Clandon's excuse for hers, for we are all susceptible to the attractions of primogeniture; but a more sensible woman might have achieved her purpose in being less headstrong. Barbara Undershaft, her elder daughter, is Gloria Clandon, a little older and less priggish. Sarah Undershaft, her younger daughter, is a chastened and spiritless Dolly Clandon. There is a difference, however, between Stephen Undershaft and Philip Clandon so remarkable that I can only surmise that Mr. Shaw in transferring the Clandon family into the Undershaft family mislaid Philip and, in searching for him, discovered another youth, this Stephen, who was the product of an illicit love affair between Mrs. Clandon and the austere Finch McComas! Adolphus Cusins, the Professor of Greek who beats the big drum in the Salvation Army so that he may be near to Barbara, is Valentine, the dentist, dragged out of "You Never Can Tell," after a brief and misguided career as John Tanner in "Man and Superman."

It is easy, I think, to trace the life of each one of the twelve Shavian characters in this fashion. Consider, for example, the vivid and very interesting career of that brutal ruffian, Bill Walker, in "Major Barbara." Bill began his life in "Widowers' Houses" under the name of Lickcheese and flourished so well as a speculative property-owner that he was able to climb into middle-class society, under the name of Burgess, and marry his daughter Candida to the Reverend James Mavor Morell. His association with the clergy, however, must have had a disastrous effect on him for we find him, in "Captain Brassbound's Conversion," leading an adventurous, but misunderstood, career under the name of Drinkwater. Religion had peculiar allurements for Drinkwater, understandably enough when one remembers his former association with his son-in-law, the clergyman, and we are not surprised, therefore, to find him in the Salvation Army's West Ham Shelter, now named Bill Walker and looking less than his years. He suffers terribly from the spiritual garrulity of Major Barbara. The reader who is familiar with the play will remember that Bill cruelly misused a little Salvation Army lass, called Jenny Hill, who would keep on praying for him and turning the other cheek. He struck her on the mouth and twisted her arm and almost tore her hair out by the roots. She cried with the pain, but she went on praying for him!... Then Major Barbara twisted Bill's heart for him as cruelly as he had twisted Jenny Hill's arm, by preaching with terrible iteration the doctrine of forgiveness and non-resistance. We know how Bill, at the penultimate moment, escaped from the penitent form, but few of us realise what happened to him after he had fled, precipitately and full of bitter cynicism, from that Salvation Army Shelter in West Ham. Who could have believed, after witnessing his behaviour in the presence of Barbara and snivelling Jenny Hill, that Jenny Hill herself would be the means of his undoing in the wilds of America to which he had hurried under the name of Blanco Posnet? And here we discover a characteristic example of Mr. Shaw's sardonic humour. For Bill was nabbed, not by the strong Barbara, not even by the weak, though willing, Jenny, but by Jenny's helpless, croup-stricken child. The lion is caught by the mouse; the strong are brought down by the weak; a little child shall lead them into a trap. God, in Mr. Shaw's religion, is not a just God: he is a God determined to have His own way and entirely indifferent to the desires of His creatures. If man will not help God to fulfil His purpose, then God will destroy man and invent another and more submissive instrument whereby He may do so. Such is the Shavian gospel. In what respect does it differ from the most devastating and blasting form of Calvinism? When I was a child in Belfast, I was taught that if I persisted in being a wicked boy, I would be roasted for ever in a red-hot hell. Is there any real difference between the Calvinist who tells a child that he will be burned for all eternity and Mr. Shaw who tells it that it will be scrapped for all eternity. There is one difference, in favour of the Calvinist. I was taught to believe in the All-Perfection of God. Even if I persisted in being a wicked child and thus damned myself for ever, my relatives could comfort themselves with the reflection that God would fulfil Himself in His own time. Somewhere, somewhen, there would be "peace, perfect peace." But Mr. Shaw's God offers no such guarantee. He cannot assure us, even if we help Him by every means in our power, that He will ever become perfect. He makes inexorable demands upon our service, but cannot offer us any hope that our labour will not be in vain. Serve me without question or be scrapped, says the Shavian God, but he will not assure us that we are not being bilked. And is not the desolation of desolations a religious faith in which there is no certainty and very little hope? I prefer the romantic delusions of my Ulster forefathers to the practical religion of Mr. Shaw. I dislike the thought that I may be roasted for ever in a red-hot hell, but I like even less the coal-black nullity with which Mr. Shaw threatens me if I persist in my evil courses. There will at least be colour and excitement in Calvin's hell, but there will be nothing whatever in Mr. Shaw's. And I am not sure, after all, that God, Perfect or Imperfect, will not prefer to spend eternity in the company of people like me who decline to accept life on any but their own terms, rather than in the society of servile instruments.

Mr. Shaw's thirty-eight plays are not thirty-eight separate plays but one long, continuous piece, in which his twelve characters, in every conceivable disguise and situation, strive to elude the hand of God but are nabbed by Him in the end. Twist how you may, He'll get you in the end, unless, indeed, He wearies of trying to make use of you, when, inexorably, without a pang, He will cast you on to the scrap-heap where you will perish utterly as your little brothers, the mammoth beasts, perished long ago.

VII

Mr. Shaw has some of Shakespeare's carelessness over details. I have sometimes wondered why Claudius succeeded to his brother's throne when Hamlet was alive to do so. There is an explanation of this curious succession in Frazer's "The Golden Bough," but I do not suppose that the facts cited by Sir James Frazer were known to Shakespeare and even if it were, he has not made the matter dramatically clear. Hamlet does not appear to resent his uncle's accession to the throne of Denmark. His resentment is roused by the marriage of his mother to her brother-in-law. He probably never liked his uncle, but he is willing to live in his castle as his heir. Shakespeare was always ready to sacrifice verisimilitude to dramatic effects. Ophelia, for example, is denied complete Christian burial because the Church authorities suspect her of having committed suicide, although the account of her death clearly establishes that she was accidentally drowned through the breaking of a branch. Hamlet, too, is unaware of Ophelia's death or dementia when he arrives in the graveyard where she is to be buried, although he has been in the company of Horatio for some time, and Horatio is fully acquainted with the circumstances of Ophelia's misfortunes and death and knows that there have been passages of love between Hamlet and her. Very little trouble was needed to put these minor matters right, but when a god is creating a universe, he is unlikely to trouble himself greatly about specks of dust. Mr. Shaw shows himself equally indifferent to details when they no longer serve his purpose. He has been charged with spoofing his audience on occasion, notably in the first act of "Man and Superman" where he trumps up a case of impending maternity for shocking effects, and then, his purpose achieved, says no more about it for the remainder of the play! He brings the Undershaft family together in the first act of "Major Barbara" in the pretence that they are about to discuss important questions of family finance which are never once discussed during the act! I do not believe that Mr. Shaw had any intention of spoofing his audience when he invented these situations. He simply did not bother about the details. He had used the effect for his purpose, and since it was no longer serviceable to him, he scrapped it without even troubling to clear away the debris—which, presumably, is what His God will do with us when He no longer needs us. Less happens in the first act of "Major Barbara" than in any other first act by Mr. Shaw. It is a protasis from which all mention of plot is deliberately omitted. Bottom, had he been at Mr. Shaw's elbow while the play was being written, might have begged him to "grow to a point," but Bottom would have had less success with Mr. Shaw than he had with Quince, for Bottom's point was a dramatic one, whereas Mr. Shaw's is doctrinal; and a propounder of doctrine pays little heeds to the laws of stagecraft or anything else. The mystic gets his way because he can neither be frightened nor disconcerted. Death and Tradition have no terrors for him. That is why, in face of the opposition of common sense and practical experience, he always does what he wants to do.

VIII

One might profitably compare Mr. Shaw to Cassius in "Julius CÆsar." Marcus Brutus, in that play, is surely the prototype of all muddlers and gentlemanly idiots. It was he who, against the pleas of Cassius, insisted that the life of Mark Anthony should be spared. It was he who, disregarding the dissuasions of Cassius, permitted Anthony to speak in the forum. It was he who, over-ruling the arguments of Cassius, ordered the disastrous march to Phillipi. Cassius was the wise man of the two, though his heart was made impotent by his asperities. The resemblance between him and Mr. Shaw must not be drawn too closely, but it is sufficient, as stated in Shakespeare's terms, to be interesting:

Cassius, of course, loved no plays and heard no music and smiled with difficulty; and these disabilities prevent him from complete ancestry to Mr. Shaw; but, if, like Cassius, Mr. Shaw sometimes feels that he has lived "to be but mirth and laughter to his Brutus," he can, like Cassius again, comfort himself with the thought that he was in the right when Brutus was in the wrong, and that he told him so. His Cassius mood is plainest in "Heartbreak House." This play is described as "a Fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes," and was written, presumably, after Mr. Shaw had witnessed performances of plays by Chekhov. That is not to say, however, that there is any resemblance between the work of Mr. Shaw and the Russian dramatist. There isn't. Mr. Shaw is as talkative as Chekhov was reticent. Chekhov's purpose is to make his people say as little as possible: Mr. Shaw's purpose is to make his people say a great deal more than necessary. Chekhov suggests inactivity through dialogue: Mr. Shaw suggests through argumentativeness. Chekhov writes drama: Mr. Shaw debates. No receptive person can come away from a performance of "The Cherry Orchard" unimpressed by a vision of life. A moderately-intelligent person, having seen this play with eyes of understanding, could write a true summary of the state of Russia in the last hundred years. I doubt whether as much can be said of "Heartbreak House," the whole action of which (though action is an inappropriate word to use about it) takes place in the course of an afternoon and evening, inside six or seven hours, in England soon after the outbreak of the War. There is, however, no mention of the War in the play, and the only link between them is the sudden interruption of the conversation in the last act by an air-raid, as a result of which two of the characters are blown to pieces. There is some clumsiness in the use of this device for ending the play, artistically at all events, though that is a consideration which is unlikely to move Mr. Shaw much, but, ethically and socially, it is not clumsy at all, for "Heartbreak House" is less a play than a parable. The bombs drop as suddenly, and with as little warning, on the gifted conversationalists sitting in the dusky garden as the War burst upon Europe in 1914. There we were, all of us, living pleasantly, as Burke begged us to live, and committing our affairs into the hands of men concerning whose abilities to conduct them we had no certificates—and suddenly the ship ran on to the rocks, the train went off the rails, the ceiling fell. "I'm always expecting something," says Ellie Dunn in the last act. "I don't know what it is; but life must come to a point some time." And while she and her companions are arguing about the responsibility for the mess in which the world is, bombs drop out of heaven and life comes to a full stop:

Hector: And this ship that we are all in? This soul's prison we call England?

Captain Shotover: The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditch-water; and the crew is gambling in the forcastle. She will strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?

Hector: Well, I don't mean to be drowned like a rat in a trap. I still have the will to live. What am I to do?

Captain Shotover: Do? Nothing simpler. Learn your business as an Englishman.

Hector: And what may my business as an Englishman be, pray?

Captain Shotover: Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and be damned.

In other words of Mr. Shaw's, if you do not help God to perfect Himself, He will scrap you. This play, in some respects the best that Mr. Shaw has written, is full of mad laughter, of bitter, self-mocking, torturing laughter. I knew a man who burst into shrieks of laughter when he saw a comrade blown into the air by a German shell; but if any one imagines that that man's terrible mirth came from an unkindly heart, he imagines without understanding; for "even in laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness." I feel about "Heartbreak House" exactly as I felt about my friend who laughed when his comrade was blown up and dismembered: that here is a depth of feeling which cannot be fathomed. Like Job, Mr. Shaw cries out, "changes and war are against me," but, unlike Job, he finds no comfort in the end. "If men will not learn until their lessons are written in blood, why, blood they must have, their own for preference." As for him, he throws up the sponge. Our culture is but the plaything of fribbles; our democracy is merely government of fools by fools. "The question is," said Boswell to Dr. Johnson and Mr. Cambridge, "which is worst, one wild beast or many?" And the answer, in Mr. Shaw's terms, is "Both!" He sees man, according to this play, refusing to help God to perfect Himself, deliberately thwarting God, and he almost sees him already on the scrap-heap.

In "Back to Methusaleh," he seems to me to have suffered a spiritual set-back, and to be preoccupied by material considerations. We are no longer concerned with Man's destiny and God's purpose, but with matters of mere longevity. "So much to do—so little time in which to do it!" If man could live for three hundred or three thousand or thirty thousand years, he would then have time in which to profit by his experience—so Mr. Shaw's argument seems to run. But would he? Do any of us profit by our experience? If we could go back to the beginning of our lives and start again with the knowledge we had acquired in the previous existence, we might be able to avoid this or that mistake. But we cannot do that. Each experience is a new one, and the wisdom we have gained from those through which we have passed is of little help to us in dealing with the new one, particularly if it comes upon us, as most of the critical events of life do come upon us, unexpectedly, without warning. There is not much difference, except physically, between the Mr. Shaw who wrote "Candida" and the Mr. Shaw who wrote "Back to Methusaleh," and I do not believe that he would be much, if any different, at the age of three hundred or thirty thousand from what he now is. Man may develop this or that aspect of himself more than another, but essentially he remains the same. It is not length of years that is important to us, but what we do in them. Keats and Shelley were young when they died: Tennyson was old; but the length of their years seems immaterial to their reputation. Mr. Shaw tells us that if we will hard enough, we can achieve longevity, but, apart from the fact that longevity first happens in his play to people who have not willed it, but had it thrust upon them, I am puzzled to understand how Mr. Shaw expects mankind to will a state of existence which, portrayed by him, is extraordinarily repellent. I do not wish to be born at the age of seventeen out of an egg so that I may become a He-Ancient and live for thousands of years in a state of inactive ratiocination. And if a life of thought without action does not attract my fancy, how can I be expected to aspire to it? I cannot find anything in the long lives of Mr. Shaw's characters which seems to me likely to excite the desire and hope of mankind. The He-Ancients and the She-Ancients are morose and sterile, ugly and unsociable, hairless and unhappy, liable to death by discouragement, long, lean and hopeless. I would rather be scrapped!... Nor is there any greater virtue in the long-lived than there is in us. In "The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman" (the fourth act of "Back to Methusaleh") where mankind is divided into two classes, the long-lived and the short-lived, we discover that the long-lived spend their three hundred years of existence in humbugging the short-lived.... Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower: he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one place; but, in spite of his misery and the shortness of his life, he gets more fun and satisfaction than are likely to be enjoyed by man that is born out of an egg.

IX

I remember very vividly the first occasion on which I saw and heard Mr. Shaw. He was lecturing on "Some Necessary Repairs to Religion" to a religious organization, now defunct, called "The Guild of St. Mathew." His lecture was extraordinarily startling to a young man, fresh from Belfast and still influenced by his fathers' faith, although in revolt against much of it. When the lecture was over, a lady asked him to say what his belief was about the Resurrection, and he replied, that if she would promise not to tell any one, he would say that he did not believe it ever took place. And then came one of those strange lapses from serious argument which are characteristic of him. Another questioner asked him if he believed in the Immaculate Conception. "Of course I do," he said. "I believe that all conceptions are immaculate!" The questioner was so paralysed by this reply that she sat down without pointing out to him that the Catholic Church believes in the Immaculate Conception on the assumption that all conceptions are not immaculate. On many occasions, Mr. Shaw has brilliantly dodged the point in that manner; but they are not occasions that need be remembered against him. Ever and always he has given his best and hardest thought to the service of mankind. He has practiced what he preaches, and if we are thrown on the scrap-heap, it will not be because Mr. Shaw has failed to do his uttermost to help God to realise Himself. What a shock it will be to him to find that the scrap-heap is a more likeable place than his God's heaven!

X

He is greatly generous to young men. Like most of my contemporaries I have imposed upon his good nature very often. I sent "Jane Clegg" and "John Ferguson" in manuscript to him and asked him if he would read them and tell me what his opinion of them might be. Probably a dozen or more young men were doing exactly the same thing with their MSS. He could spend the whole of his time reading other men's plays, if he were to let his good nature go uncontrolled. But he read my plays and wrote long, valuable letters of advice about them to me. I hesitate to mention this fact lest it should cause an avalanche of MSS. to fall upon him, but I am trying to draw his portrait, and unless I mention his generosity to young men, the portrait will not be a faithful one. I am under personal obligations to him of many sorts, and I do not know of any man who so freely helps his friends and says so little about it. He is now sixty-six years old, but there are no signs of age about him other than the fact that his hair and his beard, once red, have turned white. He still has the mind and eagerness of a young man. His walk is as springy and alert as it was when I first knew him, as I am sure it has always been. When I see him in the street sometimes, tall, lean, very tidy and almost foppish in an unusual way, walking with great assurance and ease, examining now and then his very shapely hands, and gazing about him with that queer, quizzical, kindly look in his pleasant eyes that is so significant of him, I feel that although he is thirty years older than I am, according to the official records, he is, in spirit, thirty years younger. He will never be old. If he lives to be a centenarian, he will still be talking like a young man; and perhaps it is his extraordinary youth and vitality, as much as his disrespect for established things, that draws young men inevitably to him. His fearless, challenging spirit attracted all those who were in revolt against stagnant beliefs; and even now, when the multitude seems to have caught up with him and his views are less startling than they were a few years ago, he still stimulates the minds of the young and the eager and sends them bounding forward. "You should so live," he once said, "that when you die, God is in your debt!" He bids men and women strive to put more into the common pool than they take out, and he asserts with something like moral fury that any one who is taking more from the common pool than he puts in, is cheating both God and man. There are querulous persons who say that his work will not live. Their forefathers probably said that Shakespeare's work would not live, that Cervantes's work would not live, that Fielding's work would not live, that Dickens's work would not live; and no doubt they produced sound arguments to support their faith. Who could have believed that "Don Quixote," a mere skit on contemporary novelettes, would win universal favor, or that "Pickwick Papers," mere verbiage for a set of pictures drawn by a popular artist, would live? Yet these local, topical, and very contemporary things will not perish. Mr. Shaw has indisputably affected the thoughts and lives of thinking men and women on two continents for thirty years. He is a very daring fellow who asks us to believe that this brilliant, original, forceful mind will not continue to affect the thoughts and lives of men and women for generations to come.