affairs of the sportsman
Winkle and the Maestro Jimson. In Gloria's collapse before her bullying
lover there is something at once cold and unclean; it calls up all the
modern supermen with their cruel and fishy eyes. Such farces should
begin in a friendly air, in a tavern. There is something very symbolic
of Shaw in the fact that his farce begins in a dentist's.

The only one out of this brilliant batch of plays in which I think that
the method adopted really fails, is the one called _Widower's Houses_.
The best touch of Shaw is simply in the title. The simple substitution
of widowers for widows contains almost the whole bitter and yet
boisterous protest of Shaw; all his preference for undignified fact over
dignified phrase; all his dislike of those subtle trends of sex or
mystery which swing the logician off the straight line. We can imagine
him crying, "Why in the name of death and conscience should it be tragic
to be a widow but comic to be a widower?" But the rationalistic method
is here applied quite wrong as regards the production of a drama. The
most dramatic point in the affair is when the open and indecent
rack-renter turns on the decent young man of means and proves to him
that he is equally guilty, that he also can only grind his corn by
grinding the faces of the poor. But even here the point is undramatic
because it is indirect; it is indirect because it is merely
sociological. It may be the truth that a young man living on an
unexamined income which ultimately covers a great deal of house-property
is as dangerous as any despot or thief. But it is a truth that you can
no more put into a play than into a triolet. You can make a play out of
one man robbing another man, but not out of one man robbing a million
men; still less out of his robbing them unconsciously.

Of the plays collected in this book I have kept _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_ to the last, because, fine as it is, it is even finer and
more important because of its fate, which was to rouse a long and
serious storm and to be vetoed by the Censor of Plays. I say that this
drama is most important because of the quarrel that came out of it. If I
were speaking of some mere artist this might be an insult. But there are
high and heroic things in Bernard Shaw; and one of the highest and most
heroic is this, that he certainly cares much more for a quarrel than for
a play. And this quarrel about the censorship is one on which he feels
so strongly that in a boo