scene from Dostoieffsky already quoted. Or, if a stronger illustration of this theme in Russian is desired, it may be found in a tale of Leonid Andreyeff's which was the occasion of comment some ten or twelve years ago. In decency-shall I say, unfortunately? I can do no more than hint at the narration. We are to suppose, then, that a proper young man is walking through a lonely country with his betrothed. They are attacked by a party of tramps, and the girl is killed. After the departure of the tramps the young man, by yielding to his bestial instincts, comes to realize that he is essentially of the same stuff as the outcasts of society, and that in the lowest depths of the heart is the common meeting-place of humanity. It used to be held that the peculiar bond and unity of mankind was to be sought in the higher plane of reason, with its law of self-restraint, whereas by the passions we were united with the unreasoning beasts; it has remained for certain doctors of modern literature to teach us otherwise. There may seem to be a great gulf between such a writer as Andreyeff and the socialistic wits now entertaining London. There is, indeed, a gulf — and yet! Strip off the rags of decorum which Bernard Shaw, despite his protests, still wears as an Englishman; look at the real meaning of the thing, and you will find that the moral of Fanny's First Play, for example, which our kindly good folk enjoy so innocently, is not very different from that of the more barbarously logical Russians. What else does Bernard Shaw's laughter mean, when he represents a girl of modest upbringing as awakened to the hypocrisy of convention and the solidarity of mankind by getting arrested at night in the streets of London for disorderly conduct? It is the comedian's way of saying that spirituality is the product of vice, and that the uniting bond of society is the revolt against restraint. Mr. Shaw is a delightful humourist. Some one should suggest to him, as a subject amazingly suited to his genius, the state of life in a communistic society made up of such x effronteries of egotism as himself. Perhaps I am myself eccentric in this, but, after all, I can read with less insult to my reason the rather childishly flaunted paradoxes of the naughty decade, and am inclined to think their perversion less insidiously dangerous, than the smug prurience of Mr. Galsworthy and the other bourgeois wits who are to-day taken with a certain seriousness as critics of our social conventions. I write "to-day," and to-morrow the thunder of these men may be rolling as dimly about the horizon as is now the revolutionary noise of the "Rhymers," and these happenings I record may seem as ancient as the wickedness of Nineveh. But other men, and this is the whole charge against decadent wit, will be forgetting that art, so long as it is human, must concern itself with the portrayal of character- triumphant or defeated, still character - just as surely as religion is concerned with the creation of character. The truth of it is summed up in the sentence of Whichcote, one of the great divines who were preaching when Milton was writing his poems: "For we all say, that which doth not proceed from the judgement of the mind, and the choice of the will, is not an human act, though the act of a man." THE END |