apoleon provided Talma
with a pit of kings, with what effect on Talma's acting is not recorded.
As for me, what I have always wanted is a pit of philosophers; and this
is a play for such a pit.

I should make formal acknowledgment to the authors whom I have pillaged
in the following pages if I could recollect them all. The theft of the
brigand-poetaster from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is deliberate; and the
metamorphosis of Leporello into Enry Straker, motor engineer and New
Man, is an intentional dramatic sketch for the contemporary embryo of
Mr H. G. Wells's anticipation of the efficient engineering class
which will, he hopes, finally sweep the jabberers out of the way of
civilization. Mr Barrio has also, whilst I am correcting my proofs,
delighted London with a servant who knows more than his masters. The
conception of Mendoza Limited I trace back to a certain West Indian
colonial secretary, who, at a period when he and I and Mr Sidney
Webb were sowing our political wild oats as a sort of Fabian Three
Musketeers, without any prevision of the surprising respectability
of the crop that followed, recommended Webb, the encyclopedic and
inexhaustible, to form himself into a company for the benefit of the
shareholders. Octavius I take over unaltered from Mozart; and I hereby
authorize any actor who impersonates him, to sing "Dalla sua pace" (if
he can) at any convenient moment during the representation. Ann was
suggested to me by the fifteenth century Dutch morality called Everyman,
which Mr William Poel has lately resuscitated so triumphantly. I
trust he will work that vein further, and recognize that Elizabethan
Renascence fustian is no more bearable after medieval poesy than Scribe
after Ibsen. As I sat watching Everyman at the Charterhouse, I said to
myself Why not Everywoman? Ann was the result: every woman is not Ann;
but Ann is Everywoman.

That the author of Everyman was no mere artist, but an
artist-philosopher, and that the artist-philosophers are the only sort
of artists I take quite seriously, will be no news to you. Even Plato
and Boswell, as the dramatists who invented Socrates and Dr Johnson,
impress me more deeply than the romantic playwrights. Ever since, as
a boy, I first breathed the air of the transcendental regions at a
performance of Mozart's Zauberflote, I have been proof against the
garish splendors and alcoholic excitements of the ordinary stage
combinations of Tappertitian romance with the police in