we may
say without any hesitation that this is the most serious play of the
most serious man alive.

The outline of the play is, I suppose, by this time sufficiently well
known. It has two main philosophic motives. The first is that what he
calls the life-force (the old infidels called it Nature, which seems a
neater word, and nobody knows the meaning of either of them) desires
above all things to make suitable marriages, to produce a purer and
prouder race, or eventually to produce a Superman. The second is that in
this effecting of racial marriages the woman is a more conscious agent
than the man. In short, that woman disposes a long time before man
proposes. In this play, therefore, woman is made the pursuer and man the
pursued. It cannot be denied, I think, that in this matter Shaw is
handicapped by his habitual hardness of touch, by his lack of sympathy
with the romance of which he writes, and to a certain extent even by his
own integrity and right conscience. Whether the man hunts the woman or
the woman the man, at least it should be a splendid pagan hunt; but Shaw
is not a sporting man. Nor is he a pagan, but a Puritan. He cannot
recover the impartiality of paganism which allowed Diana to propose to
Endymion without thinking any the worse of her. The result is that while
he makes Anne, the woman who marries his hero, a really powerful and
convincing woman, he can only do it by making her a highly objectionable
woman. She is a liar and a bully, not from sudden fear or excruciating
dilemma; she is a liar and a bully in grain; she has no truth or
magnanimity in her. The more we know that she is real, the more we know
that she is vile. In short, Bernard Shaw is still haunted with his old
impotence of the unromantic writer; he cannot imagine the main motives
of human life from the inside. We are convinced successfully that Anne
wishes to marry Tanner, but in the very process we lose all power of
conceiving why Tanner should ever consent to marry Anne. A writer with a
more romantic strain in him might have imagined a woman choosing her
lover without shamelessness and magnetising him without fraud. Even if
the first movement were feminine, it need hardly be a movement like
this. In truth, of course, the two sexes have their two methods of
attraction, and in some of the happiest cases they are almost
simultaneous. But even on the most cynical showing they need not be
mixed up. It is one thing to say that the mousetrap is