assumption to illogical, chimerical, or grotesque. The testimony of Morris, Walkley, Archer, Wells, Sidney Webb, and others who have toiled shoulder to shoulder with Shaw for a decade or more, counts for nothing. In one breath we are told that Shaw is the most glaring exponent of commercialism in letters, the most brazen and unscrupulous self-advertiser the history of literature has ever revealed. In the next we are loudly assured that his plays and books have never really been successful, and have never been accounted highly by any but a handful of longhaired or blue-stockinged devotees. On the basis of such premises, one might timidly rejoin that Mr. Shaw must be a poor business man indeed, and that he has plainly spent twenty-five years of his life in a very unprofitable pursuit. But it is admitted that he has gained some measure of conspicuousness, although it is declared that this is sheer notoriety and nothing more. As if present notoriety were not always the foundation for future fame! Still, it is obstinately re-echoed that Shaw is a nimble-witted jester dazzling his victims with that bewildering brilliancy which enables him to transmogrify the obvious and the commonplace into the fantastic and the bizarre with as much ease as ever Midas transmuted baser metal into gold. And when he is resting from these insidious labors, he is engaged in mesmerizing the lightminded with the facile pirouettings of (so-called) half-truths and in manufacturing scintillant comedies by the simple formula of taking accepted views and restating them wrong end foremost. The fact that those who hold to this last conviction make no attempt to out-Shaw Shaw, in view of the probable lucra tiveness of the process, says not a little for their self-denial. Until they prove their point by public demonstration, however, feeble-minded Shawites will continue to regard the playwright as an intensely serious man, none the less so if his sense of humor saves him from the blundering suppositions of his opponents, and even enables him, on occasion, to view his own desperate earnestness from a whimsical perspective.

It is indeed a little strange that the surface brilliancy of the Shavian writings should blind so many to the underlying current. In all ages, wit has been the spice of style; and whether it takes the form of the paradox in the days of Shaw, of the antithetical epigram in the time of Macaulay, of the balanced click-clack in the age of Pope, or of the incorrigible punning that raged in the epoch of Shakespeare himself, is an accident of environment and time. When the charge of cynical levity so often brought against Shaw is not due to dullness in grasping the function of wit in his style, it is generally due to a complete misapprehension of his premises. For instance, at the first performance of 'How He Lied to Her Husband,' a very general cry went up that here was another evidence of the author's inconsequential if

hose

brilliant frivolity. Was not the farce an obvious burlesque on 'Candida' itself, to say nothing of its being a skit on the sober-minded people who had been lured into taking the original play with respectful sobriety? who came to this conclusion and felt the deepest resentment for the outrage on their confidences, entirely missed the point of both the little plays. For the dramatic conflict in Candida' rages between the higher but vaguer, timider vision . . . and the incoherent unpracticalness' of the poet who is one of civilization's pioneers, and the clear, bold practicalness and ‘salutarily shortsighted' outlook of the priest who represents the perennial idealism of the conservative-liberal type. But the myopic spectator, his sense appetite whetted by a long course in contemporary, voluptuous playgoing, could see nothing more in Candida' than a struggle between the pretty heroine's head and heart, than her sinful vacillation between a husband who needed her devotion and an eighteen year old lover who was only awaiting the signal to throw himself into her arms. And when these spectators, on the basis of their romantic assumptions, not only rushed to the conclusion that the play was nothing more nor less than an incitement to every honest man to develop a passion for some other man's wife, but even proceeded to applaud this imaginary exhortation, who could blame the author if he pitied them in his admirable pasquinade?

A common criticism of Shaw's plays is that they are not plays at all. This position is usually supported by the assertion that they have a paucity of action and a proportionate superfluity of talk. Mr. Shaw himself does not deny the impeachment.' What no one has successfully shown to be a fault he has flatly declared a virtue by announcing each of his later plays as 'a discussion' or 'a conversation' in so many acts or parts. * We need not here be concerned with the playwright's iconoclasm in matters of technique. He repudiates the outworn conventions of his art as naturally as he establishes new and more serviceable canons: since he could not otherwise serve in liberating the social organism from its present chrysalis state and thus prove a precursor of the higher civilization. But in the detail of action his departure from the tradition of the master dramatists is far from radical. Talk has been the essential ingredient of dramatic works from the! dialogues of Sophocles to the histories' of Shakespeare and from the comedies of Molière to the static dramas of Maeterlinck. When critics condemn the Shavian plays because the action is lacking or insufficient, one cannot help condoling with them for their evident obsession by the elementary physical meaning involved in the term performance. In the days of savagery, to do was to walk, to climb, to pursue, and above all, to fight. In *Witress "The Doctor's Dile: ma: A Discussion in Three Acts," and "Getting Married: A Conversation."

these more cultured times, the tongue is mightier than the fist. A thousand complex ends are accomplished, and a tremendous, intricate social machinery is controlled by foresight and insight, by plan and design. And of these, talk is the effective instrument. Battles are won by orders pronounced in boards of strategy a thousand miles from the seat of war, empires are governed by debates in caucus, families are disrupted by a taunt or a jibe, and the mighty are exalted to still higher seats and those of low degree still more put down by the bidding of brokers on exchange. What, then, do the critics want? The capering of ghosts through enchanted ruins, the clash of swords in a duello, the loud hurrah of intoxicated mobs, the guilty leap behind the concealing screen, or the titillating click of military heels? They cannot really want these antiquated paraphernalia: they would certainly be the first to jeer them off the contemporary stage if any one imbecile enough could be found to put them on. As to the conflict of character and circumstance which is the real stuff of drama — there is plenty of that in Shaw. Every one of his plays presents the struggle which arises between conscience and conduct when the bitterly unromantic facts of life tear down the veil of romantic illusions. That is just the sort of conflict which motivates King Lear,' who assumes that his pseudo-operatic ideal of filial affection corresponds with life, so that when he is confronted with the stern actuality of his daughters' sentiments, he strives to combat the real on the basis of his illusory ideal and perishes in the fatuous attempt.

The methods by which the most flagrant misconceptions concerning our great men gain worldwide currency are perfectly familiar to the analytically gifted. We live in an age in which the only liberty not seriously endangered is the liberty of ignorance. Let a man be amiably ignorant on a special subject and costume his emptinesses in words expressive of great moral ardor, and he is not only tolerated, but is accepted as a leader of advanced' or enlightened thought. Such leaders view with suspicion the serious achievements of a unique, epochal writer. Too timid to investigate his ideas-which bode their leadership no good -they hide their terror in estimates of the author and judgments of the man, all as diverse and misrepresentative as the makers of them are numerous and inept. The chaos of discordant criticism, it is true, serves but to emphasize the harmonious unity of the genius. The very legends which are sown to choke his personality, prove mutually destructive and furnish nutriment for his fame. Not that this unexpected issue at all disconcerts those apostles of forlorn hopes, the leaders of the great bourgeoisie. Even the gods in all their splendor cannot dazzle the blind. And so with those dignified gentlemen who cultivate literature and the classics in the Academic Glades where Universal Wisdom is reputed

to reign, and who can be persuaded to pause from their onslaught on Baconia and other fantasies of old, only long enough to join hands with the Shavian mythmakers of to-day. They will continue to measure the contemporary stage with the yard stick of Freytag's analyses and Aristotle's poetics; and when they examine the technic of the drama of Shaw and find in it elements new to the playmaking craftsmanship, they will turn to the busts of Molière, Shakespeare, and Aristophanes with gasps of eloquent horror. In short, they will often repeat but never perceive that it is the business of genius to turn man's back on the past and his face to the future, and that the formula of each epoch-making artist must of necessity be different from all previous formulas, and therefore strange and startling to the epoch itself. This is a truth which each possessor of the inspiring fire' seeks to force upon a public that does not want to learn. His reward is that he is called a nasty fanatic like Ibsen, a pain-crazed madman like Nietzsche, or an inveterate jester like Shaw. He can only retort that his work is there like an open book for him who has eyes to see and brains to understand. Thus the sceptic is invited to penetrate the surface brilliancy of Shaw to the substantial kernel beneath. Or let him chew Shaw's Fabian tracts, digest the Preface for Politicians,' and assimilate the well-fed book on The Common Sense of Municipal Trading.' Then, if he does not feel the tremendous earnestness of the dramatist-philosopher, his case will be hopeless indeed, and he may, with a double significance, cry jester' to the last syllable of recorded time. At Shaw's egoism in expression only the congenitally captious will cavil. Even Shakespeare proclaimed that not marble nor the gilded throne of princes should outlive his powerful rime. And Shaw does not ask for that sort of fame! He sees the danger in great reputations, recognizes that they are the shackles which fetter us to the past. But if in hurrying us onward he points confidently to his own figure striding in advance, who shall deny him that privilege? Besides, the professionally humble are not more often the secret megalomaniacs than the frankly outspoken egoist is the essentially considerate man. And the testimony of many co-workers proclaims that Shaw has refused to maintain the supercilious aloofness and superior reserve which the merely talented man is so apt to assume. So that if to a lofty egotheism he joins an intelligent generosity, we must allow that the union adds piquancy to those versatile achievements which make him ‘a figure in the great dance of life' that delights and inspires the thoughtful spectator.

THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE NUT

BROWN MAID'

BY EUGENE C. DOLSON

HERE is something about the old ballad of ' The Nut-brown maid' something so simple and natural, and, at the same time so suggestive of refinement, that it seems to stand quite apart from all other English verse of the fifteenth century. Its simplicity separates it widely on one hand from the scholarly but stilted and pedantic work of such writers as Lydgate and Skelton, and on the other hand, its polish separates it from the popular ballad poetry of that era. of that era. Its author, evidently a person of culture, knew the value of simply expressed language.

The Nut-brown Maid' was first published anonymously in Arnold's Chronicle,' about the year 1502. There seems to be no earlier trace of this poem. Who wrote it has never been known and scarcely guessed at. Professor Morley states that some have been inclined to believe, from internal evidence, that this poem is the work of a lady.

Has any one, I wonder, ever thought of attributing this fine relic of ancient poetry to Sir Thomas More? In a footnote in 'Chambers's Cyclopedia of English Literature' a specimen of Sir Thomas More's juvenile poetry is given, and its resemblance to The Nut-brown Maid,' in rhyme, meter, and the peculiar swing and sound of the verse, is striking indeed. Try these two poems with the ear, and they sound as nearly alike as two of Swinburne's poems sound alike.

And the measure in which they were written, with rhymes in the middle of the lines, was not by any means common in those days. It was not used in any one of the three hundred and ten pieces in 'Tottel's Miscellany,' our earliest poetical anthology, which was first published in 1557, and contains the better part of all the poetry of sentiment from that date back

to 1500.

Let us take an extract from the poem which 'Chambers's Cyclopedia of English Literature' acknowledges to have been written by Sir Thomas More:

'He that hath lafte the hosier's crafte,

And fallth to makyng shone;