gels when they are not
devils; that they are better looking than men; that their part in
courtship is entirely passive; and that the human female form is the
most beautiful object in nature. Schopenhauer wrote a splenetic essay
which, as it is neither polite nor profound, was probably intended to
knock this nonsense violently on the head. A sentence denouncing the
idolized form as ugly has been largely quoted. The English critics have
read that sentence; and I must here affirm, with as much gentleness as
the implication will bear, that it has yet to be proved that they have
dipped any deeper. At all events, whenever an English playwright
represents a young and marriageable woman as being anything but a
romantic heroine, he is disposed of without further thought as an echo
of Schopenhauer. My own case is a specially hard one, because, when I
implore the critics who are obsessed with the Schopenhaurian formula to
remember that playwrights, like sculptors, study their figures from
life, and not from philosophic essays, they reply passionately that I
am not a playwright and that my stage figures do not live. But even so,
I may and do ask them why, if they must give the credit of my plays to
a philosopher, they do not give it to an English philosopher? Long
before I ever read a word by Schopenhauer, or even knew whether he was
a philosopher or a chemist, the Socialist revival of the
eighteen-eighties brought me into contact, both literary and personal,
with Mr Ernest Belfort Bax, an English Socialist and philosophic
essayist, whose handling of modern feminism would provoke romantic
protests from Schopenhauer himself, or even Strindberg. As a matter of
fact I hardly noticed Schopenhauer's disparagements of women when they
came under my notice later on, so thoroughly had Mr Bax familiarized me
with the homoist attitude, and forced me to recognize the extent to
which public opinion, and consequently legislation and jurisprudence,
is corrupted by feminist sentiment.

But Mr Bax's essays were not confined to the Feminist question. He was
a ruthless critic of current morality. Other writers have gained
sympathy for dramatic criminals by eliciting the alleged "soul of
goodness in things evil"; but Mr Bax would propound some quite
undramatic and apparently shabby violation of our commercial law and
morality, and not merely defend it with the most disconcerting
ingenuity, but actually prove it to be a positive duty that nothing but