MR. SHAW'S NEW PREFACES.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1114, 29 April 1911, Page 9

MR. SHAW'S NEW PREFACES.

Mr. 0. E. Montagu, tho brilliant novelist, who is tho dramatic critic of tho "Manchester Guardian'," has already a reputation for work as good of its kind as "G.B.S.'s" "Saturday Review" criticisms. Shavians will therefore bo glad to read his review of Mr. Shaw's new volume,-which--contains "Tho Doctor's Dilemma," "Tho Show-ing-up of Blanco "Getting Married," together wifli'the customary long and provocative prefaces. Mr. Montagu's review follows: —

A writer can try to'make a thing tell in any-one,of three ways. Ho can over- ' stato it, fetching you a kind of clout on :ho car with the surprising bigness of lis words; for a clout on the car does riako you look, at any rate. Or he can inderstato it —put it with ail ironic . uoderation that interests you in his tato of mind; for it is always intercstng to see a. mind, or a body, working asily within its full strength. Or ho an state it with a finished precision hat tickles you as good Quaker speech locs in contrast with tho speech of leated non-Quakers, or —for tho fascinaiion is not moral, but aesthetic —as you ire tickled by the minute exactitude tnd delicate timing of Gray's losing lazards at billiards, or Tyldesley's late nits. Between these technical methods here is not the difference between sinicrity and two modes of insincerity. They arc all quito sincerely used by :heir best practitioners. Any amount of Sastern poetry and prose, all the writngs of Macaulay, all the Burke and ■frattan school of eloquence, nearly all Hr. Balfour's speeches on first readings if Government Bills are quito legitimate pecimens of artistic overstatement. Vlicn Macbeth says, "tho time has been hat when the brains are out the man vould die," and when a schoolboy calls ;amo ecstatic enjoyment "pretty de:ont," their craftsmanship, too, is ilameless. And in some of Lord Moroy's critical essays you find that an irfc which neither overstates nor underrates but walks lightly balanced be- : Ween the two can hold your attention. is a rope-walker can, by the,charm of heer nicety of equilibrium. It is just i choice between threo modes of liquancy, all of them quito permissible. Of tho first of iiieso modes Mr. Shaw s now the foremost English practiioncr, and tho prefaces to his new 'olume aro tho best quite recent cximples. In tho preface to "The Doctor's dilemma" ho brings an ardour like .Micro's to tho exposition of medical allibility. His chief points are tho ommon*ones:.(l) That surgeons operate oo much, (2) that vivisection is in[cfoiisiblo, (3) that a State medical scr'ico should tako the place of private nterpriso. The questions arc momentms enough, in all conscience, but even heir importance is momentarily for;otten by the interest of Mr. Shaw's cchnique. The controversy concerning accitiation "has really nothing to do i'ith science" ; tho defence of vivisection s "imbecilo casuistry"- and "brazen ying" ; one of its motives is the primiivo chief's or medicine man's belief hat, to keen his hold on the imaginaion of his tribe, lie "must terrify or re•olt them from time to time by acts ;f hideous cruelty or disgusting _un-i.-ituralness" ; those who defend vivisecion aro said to "assure us that there s no ether key to knowledge except ruclty," excluding even such inquiries c led to the discovery of the liontgen ays; "nine out of ten clergymen have :o religions convictions" ; the "incyitble forfeiture" by any and every vivicctor of all claim "to have his word elieveii" is "obvious" ; defenders of ivisection "begin by alleging that in he cause of science all the customary thical obligations (which include the bligation to tell the truth) aro uspended"; at the fame time he "sensual villeiiiies'aml cur-throats's asuistries" of vivisection are not tho ault of tlio doctors but of tho British

public who "in their paroxysms of cowardice and selfishness • . . force the doctors to humour thoir folly and ignorance" ; our whole time, in fact, is mastered b.v "a paroxysm of littleness and terror, in which nothing is active except concupiscence and the fear of death, playing on which any trader can filch a fortune, any blackguard gratify his cruelty, and any tyrant make us his staves." How often one has seen the method used by minor practitioners— sometimes by brisk voting men of science who will sum up all tin's vivisection conInvorsv for vou liv rnvinn that "II anti-,iv.;.v,'.i„,-t •,',■,. ">.;.,!:iH'' i;.,1;..ri1,..: '' or •'hMlleswh.iroirr'far-i'x-l.;''lL M.'iui''":- i: m;',':::-,

but read Jlr. Shaw; especially read, l'crhapr., the preface here to ''Getting Married," where the method is most itself. Mr. Shaw's contention is the rational and humane o«c that divorce should bo more easily obtainable in cases whore to withhold it is. destructive of character as well as of happiness. On the way to this conclusion he tells ns that whereas there used sometimes to be ten in a family, "wo no longer have largo families; ail the families arc tco small to give the children the necessary sccial training," that the Church of England has beer, "reduced to a cipher except for tho purposes of a petulantly irreligious, social, and political club," that "all women are in furious secret rebellion'' against the" annexation of permanent wifehood to the right to motherhood, and that "it is difficult to see anything in our sex institutions except a police clo moeurs keeping the held for a competition as to which sex shall corrupt the other most."

Boyish as the thinking may seem in detached scraps like these, tho whole of each preface—there is a third one on the Dramatic Censorship—is really a very curious and difficult piece of. workmanship. Let anyone who does not think so begin an argumentative essay of eighty or ninety pages on the confident schoolboy note of ""Why, you mad idiot, don't you sec," etc., and try to keep it up right through without any effect of failing positiveuess, and yet without monotony or.loss of effervescence, and even leave a reader at tho end with the idea that there is really something to be considered in what tho flourishing and fanfaronading writer has tosay.as a whole, though most of the things ho has said in detail are clearly and almost exultantly contrary to evidence. You have the same sensation when a skilful Parliamentary speaker gets up and says of some humdrum Bill, neither very good nor very bad, that it is the most grotesque exhibition of legislative ineptitude h© has ever seen in a long Parliamentary experience, that if it were passed it would stultify our national past, jeopardise our entiro future, and make us a byword for many ages throughout the civilised world—and yet does somehow convey to you that the Bill might bo improved. It is tho technics of overstatement used with knowledge. Perhaps one feels rather more battered about tho ears by these three last prefaces of Mr. Shaw's than by any. earlier batch. And one always has the uneasy feeling that the next batch may triumphantly and derisively assail any ; positive conclusion drawn from this batch by one's simple mind. "With a clover turn of the hand," savs Mr. Shaw, of the British home, "this holy of holies can be exposed as an Augean stable, so filthy "that it would seem more hopeful to burn it down than to attempt to sweep it out." And could not a clever turn of the ,hand that shaped these prefaces turn *heir arguments inside out? One may go to Sir. Shaw for entertainment, for mental excitement, for the raw material of humane ideas, for warnings against intellectual indolence, for incentives to keep on examining one's "principles" and to make sure that they have 'not suffered fatty degeneration, and become phrases, but not for inspiration in a fuller sense than that, nor for leadership. And yet, in their own vociferous way, the prefaces are most skilfully shouted.