hat he should not insist
that this use of the theatre is the only proper and legitimate use.

Mr. Shaw has not yet been able to use the theatre in this way, and
still less, Brieux. Brieux's influence in France is mainly due to the
fact that he is a brilliant and eloquent lecturer. Mr. Shaw's
influence in England is due to his essays, speeches, conversations,
personal vehemence, and ubiquity. People go to see his plays because
they are very witty; they understand them and think they are convinced
by them only when they have read and digested his far more convincing
Prefaces. The reason why it is impossible to be profoundly interested
in his plays is because he is not profoundly interested in them
himself. He evidently wrote them without being excited about his
persons, their experiences, or the emotions which the situation drew
from them; he was excited about his case, about the moral or social
truth which his puppets could be made to illustrate. There is much
ingenious arrangement, much plausible argument, and abundant wit. What
really does delight us is the often irrelevant wit of the
conversation, and this because Mr. Shaw himself delights in irrelevant
wit; it is only when he is writing wittily and irrelevantly that he is
disinterested, that he is doing something for its own sake, that he is
writing in the only way in which an artist can write effectively. But
in so far as he is aiming at something other than a significant
presentation of life--and he generally is--he is attempting to
"indict" society, to show up abuses, to expose political and social
sores; he is ceasing to be interested in his subject, his persons, his
play; he is forcing human nature out of itself; he is distorting it;
he is making it unreal; he is creating monsters--and no dramatist, no
artist of any kind, can deal effectively with monsters. When he writes
a play, Mr. Shaw attempts to do two completely different things at one
and the same time--to present life, and to deduce an arguable and
preconceived conclusion about life. If he has not completely failed,
that is because he has not completely lived up to his theories.

It is not Mr. Shaw's fault that so many of the cleverest younger
writers of the time allow themselves to be led away by his example. But
that they are so led away--not only in drama, but in the kindred art of
fiction--is a fact so important that it requires statement. Mr. Shaw is
entitled to his own opinion that "what we want a