ips his wife. Second, he has pointed out in the character of
Straker that there has arisen in our midst a new class that has
education without breeding. Straker is the man who has ousted the
hansom-cabman, having neither his coarseness nor his kindliness. Great
sociological credit is due to the man who has first clearly observed
that Straker has appeared. How anybody can profess for a moment to be
glad that he has appeared, I do not attempt to conjecture.

Appended to the play is an entertaining though somewhat mysterious
document called "The Revolutionist's Handbook." It contains many very
sound remarks; this, for example, which I cannot too much applaud: "If
you hit your child, be sure that you hit him in anger." If that
principle had been properly understood, we should have had less of
Shaw's sociological friends and their meddling with the habits and
instincts of the poor. But among the fragments of advice also occurs the
following suggestive and even alluring remark: "Every man over forty is
a scoundrel." On the first personal opportunity I asked the author of
this remarkable axiom what it meant. I gathered that what it really
meant was something like this: that every man over forty had been all
the essential use that he was likely to be, and was therefore in a
manner a parasite. It is gratifying to reflect that Bernard Shaw has
sufficiently answered his own epigram by continuing to pour out
treasures both of truth and folly long after this allotted time. But if
the epigram might be interpreted in a rather looser style as meaning
that past a certain point a man's work takes on its final character and
does not greatly change the nature of its merits, it may certainly be
said that with _Man and Superman_, Shaw reaches that stage. The two
plays that have followed it, though of very great interest in
themselves, do not require any revaluation of, or indeed any addition
to, our summary of his genius and success. They are both in a sense
casts back to his primary energies; the first in a controversial and the
second in a technical sense. Neither need prevent our saying that the
moment when John Tanner and Anne agree that it is doom for him and death
for her and life only for the thing unborn, is the peak of his utterance
as a prophet.

The two important plays that he has since given us are _The Doctor's
Dilemma_ and _Getting Married_. The first is as regards its most amusing
and effective elements a throw-back to his ol