t there not converted--their
hatred was too bitter for that--but dumbfounded, while the rest of the
house cheered and laughed. In the silence that greeted the author after
the cry for a speech one man did indeed get his courage and boo loudly. "I
assure the gentleman in the gallery," was Shaw's answer, "that he and I
are of exactly the same opinion, but what can we do against a whole house
who are of the contrary opinion?" And from that moment Bernard Shaw became
the most formidable man in modern letters, and even the most drunken of
medical students knew it. My own play, which had been played with _The
Comedy of Sighs_, had roused no passions, but had pleased a sufficient
minority for Florence Farr to keep it upon the stage with _Arms and the
Man_, and I was in the theatre almost every night for some weeks. "Oh,
yes, the people seem to like _Arms and the Man_," said one of Mr Shaw's
players to me, "but we have just found out that we are all wrong. Mr Shaw
did really mean it quite seriously, for he has written a letter to say so,
and we must not play for laughs any more." Another night I found the
manager, triumphant and excited, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of
Edinburgh had been there, and the Duke of Edinburgh had spoken his dislike
out loud so that the whole stalls could hear, but the Prince of Wales had
been "very pleasant" and "got the Duke of Edinburgh away as soon as
possible." "They asked for me," he went on, "and the Duke of Edinburgh
kept on repeating, 'The man is mad,' meaning Mr Shaw, and the Prince of
Wales asked who Mr Shaw was, and what he meant by it." I myself was almost
as bewildered for though I came mainly to see how my own play went, and
for the first fortnight to vex my most patient actors with new lines, I
listened with excitement to see how the audience would like certain
passages of _Arms and the Man_. I hated it; it seemed to me inorganic,
logical straightness and not the crooked road of life and I stood aghast
before its energy as to-day before that of the Stone Drill by Mr. Epstein
or of some design by Mr Wyndham Lewis. He was right to claim Samuel Butler
for his master, for Butler was the first Englishman to make the discovery,
that it is possible to write with great effect without music, without
style, either good or bad, to eliminate from the mind all emotional
implication and to prefer plain water to every vintage, so much
metropolitan lead and solder to any tendril of the vine. Presentl