Man and Superman and Three Other Plays by George Bernard Shaw Page A

I had timidly botched at thirty what newer men—Rudyard Kiplings, Max Beerbohms, Laurence Irvings b and their contemporaries—do now with gay confidence in their cradles. I listened to their vigorous knocks with exultation for the race, with penurious alarm for my own old age. When I talked to this generation, it called me Mister, and, with its frank, charming humanity, respected me as one who had done good work in my time. Mr. Pinero wrote a long play to show that people of my age were on the shelf; and I laughed at him with the wrong side of my mouth.
    It was at this bitter moment that my fellow citizens, who had previously repudiated all my offers of political service, contemptuously allowed me to become a vestryman c -me, the author of “Widowers’ Houses”! Then, like any other harmless useful creature, I took the first step rearward. Up to that fateful day I had never stopped pumping to spoon up the spilt drops of my well into bottles. Time enough for that when the well was empty. But now I listened to the voice of the publisher for the first time since he had refused to listen to me. I turned over my articles again; but to serve up the weekly paper of five years ago as a novelty—no: I had not yet fallen so low, though I see that degradation looming before me as an agricultural laborer sees the workhouse. So I said “I will begin with small sins: I will publish my plays.”
    How! you will cry—plays! What plays? Let me explain.
    One of the worst privations of life in London for persons of intellectual and artistic interests is the want of a suitable theatre. The existing popular drama of the day is quite out of the question for cultivated people who are accustomed to use their brains. I am fond of the theatre, and am, as intelligent readers of this preface will have observed, myself a bit of an actor. Consequently, when I found myself self coming across projects of all sorts for the foundation of a theatre which should be to the newly gathered intellectual harvest of the nineteenth century what Shakespear’s theatre was to the harvest of the Renascence, I was warmly interested. But it soon appeared that the languid demand of a small and uppish class for a form of entertainment which it had become thoroughly accustomed to do without could never provide the intense energy necessary for the establishment of the New Theatre (we of course called everything advanced “the New”: vide “The Philanderer”). That energy could only be supplied by the genius of the actor and manager finding in the masterpieces of the New Drama its characteristic and necessary mode of expression, and revealing their fascination to the public. Clearly the way to begin was to pick up a masterpiece or two. Masterpieces, however, do not grow on the bushes. The New Theatre would never have come into existence but for the plays of Ibsen, just as the Bayreuth Festival Playhouse would never have come into existence but for Wagner’s Nibelungen tetralogy. Every attempt to extend the repertory proved that it is the drama that makes the theatre and not the theatre the drama. Not that this needed fresh proof, since the whole difficulty had arisen through the drama of the day being written for the theatres instead of from its own inner necessity. Still, a thing that nobody believes cannot be proved too often.
    Ibsen, then, was the hero of the new departure. It was in 1889 that the first really effective blow was struck by the production of “A Doll’s House” by Mr. Charles Charrington and Miss Janet Achurch. Whilst they were taking that epoch making play round the world, Mr. Grein followed up the campaign in London with his “Independent Theatre.” It got on its feet by producing Ibsen’s “Ghosts”; but its search for native dramatic masterpieces, pursued by Mr. Grein with the ardor and innocence of a foreigner, was so complete a failure that at the end of 1892 he had