nce
the beginning of his career. It was to no purpose that the earlier
Bernard Shaw said that romance was all moonshine. The moonshine that
ripens love is now as practical as the sunshine that ripens corn. It was
vain to say that sexual chivalry was all rot; it might be as rotten as
manure--and also as fertile. It is vain to call first love a fiction;
it may be as fictitious as the ink of the cuttle or the doubling of the
hare; as fictitious, as efficient, and as indispensable. It is vain to
call it a self-deception; Schopenhauer said that all existence was a
self-deception; and Shaw's only further comment seems to be that it is
right to be deceived. To _Man and Superman_, as to all his plays, the
author attaches a most fascinating preface at the beginning. But I
really think that he ought also to attach a hearty apology at the end;
an apology to all the minor dramatists or preposterous actors whom he
had cursed for romanticism in his youth. Whenever he objected to an
actress for ogling she might reasonably reply, "But this is how I
support my friend Anne in her sublime evolutionary effort." Whenever he
laughed at an old-fashioned actor for ranting, the actor might answer,
"My exaggeration is not more absurd than the tail of a peacock or the
swagger of a cock; it is the way I preach the great fruitful lie of the
life-force that I am a very fine fellow." We have remarked the end of
Shaw's campaign in favour of progress. This ought really to have been
the end of his campaign against romance. All the tricks of love that he
called artificial become natural; because they become Nature. All the
lies of love become truths; indeed they become the Truth.

The minor things of the play contain some thunderbolts of good thinking.
Throughout this brief study I have deliberately not dwelt upon mere wit,
because in anything of Shaw's that may be taken for granted. It is
enough to say that this play which is full of his most serious quality
is as full as any of his minor sort of success. In a more solid sense
two important facts stand out: the first is the character of the young
American; the other is the character of Straker, the chauffeur. In these
Shaw has realised and made vivid two most important facts. First, that
America is not intellectually a go-ahead country, but both for good and
evil an old-fashioned one. It is full of stale culture and ancestral
simplicity, just as Shaw's young millionaire quotes Macaulay and piously
worsh