e officer, the
butt of the mess, becomes by the last act as high and hopeless a lover
as Dante. Or a vulgar and violent pork-butcher remembers his own youth
before the curtain goes down. The first thing that Bernard Shaw did when
he stepped before the footlights was to reverse this process. He
resolved to build a play not on pathos, but on bathos. The officer
should be heroic first and then everyone should laugh at him; the
curtain should go up on a man remembering his youth, and he should only
reveal himself as a violent pork-butcher when someone interrupted him
with an order for pork. This merely technical originality is indicated
in the very title of the play. The _Arma Virumque_ of Virgil is a
mounting and ascending phrase, the man is more than his weapons. The
Latin line suggests a superb procession which should bring on to the
stage the brazen and resounding armour, the shield and shattering axe,
but end with the hero himself, taller and more terrible because unarmed.
The technical effect of Shaw's scheme is like the same scene, in which a
crowd should carry even more gigantic shapes of shield and helmet, but
when the horns and howls were at their highest, should end with the
figure of Little Tich. The name itself is meant to be a bathos;
arms--and the man.

It is well to begin with the superficial; and this is the superficial
effectiveness of Shaw; the brilliancy of bathos. But of course the
vitality and value of his plays does not lie merely in this; any more
than the value of Swinburne lies in alliteration or the value of Hood in
puns. This is not his message; but it is his method; it is his style.
The first taste we had of it was in this play of _Arms and the Man_; but
even at the very first it was evident that there was much more in the
play than that. Among other things there was one thing not unimportant;
there was savage sincerity. Indeed, only a ferociously sincere person
can produce such effective flippancies on a matter like war; just as
only a strong man could juggle with cannon balls. It is all very well to
use the word "fool" as synonymous with "jester"; but daily experience
shows that it is generally the solemn and silent man who is the fool. It
is all very well to accuse Mr. Shaw of standing on his head; but if you
stand on your head you must have a hard and solid head to stand on. In
_Arms and the Man_ the bathos of form was strictly the incarnation of a
strong satire in the idea. The play opens i