. (In _John Bull's Other Island_ I take
Larry Doyle as the hero.) The hero is a man who on every possible
occasion either gets up and argues with extraordinary fluency and good
sense as if he were a very brilliant young man in a debate, or else is
forced into the sort of action which that brilliant debater would have
advocated. Broadbent, in _John Bull's Other Island_, is not a person
at all; he is a brilliantly conceived caricature of English stupidity;
he is a general idea, not an individual. Even Keegan, who has been
extolled as a romantic and unusual figure among the Shavian _dramatis
personae_, is a chorus rather than a character, and essentially Shavian
in that his ideals are vegetarian, and that his language is couched in
such terms as--

How will you drag our acres from the ferret's grip of Matthew
Haffigan? How will you persuade Cornelius Doyle to forego the
pride of being a small landowner? How will Barney Doran's
millrace agree with your motor-boats?... Perhaps I had better
vote for an efficient devil that knows his own mind and his own
business than for a foolish patriot who has no mind and no
business.

That is not the way in which priests, madmen, or idealists talk in
Ireland. It is the way they talk at the Fabian Society.

The present writer is fully aware of the great work which Mr. Shaw has
done. He yields to no one in his admiration for the strength of
character and the spirited eagerness which have made him so effective
in his onslaught upon pernicious illusions, in making people look
beyond the formula and refuse to be blinded by social taboos. But it
is just because his influence is so great and in many respects
beneficial that we ought to be on our guard against a man who may not
always mesmerise us to our advantage. And it is in the matter of the
drama and the fine arts in general that Mr. Shaw is proving a
dangerous Messiah. He has done much to cleanse the Augean stables of
the English theatre. He has discredited though he has not destroyed
the artificial "drawing-room play;" he has poured ridicule upon the
so-called "well-made play" which Scribe, Sardou, and their school
could concoct for the delight of Frenchmen; he has exposed the
insignificance of the accidents and catastrophes, and the coming down
of the curtain "on a hero slain or married." He has compelled sensible
people to look to the theatre for something more than sentiment,
romance, ingenuity; for somet