Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/72

46 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW Shaw first beheld the race of man ; and his views of life were largely formed to fit this fascinating vision. Let me give one example of the way he generalized, of the way he accepted a suburban experience as a symbolical episode and framed a law on the strength of it which he promptly applied to the rest of creation. Let it be his theory of the relation of the sexes — of woman as the huntress and man as the prey. It reappears constantly, for it is one of the several steel- yard rules which he can handle easier than golden ones ; but its first appearance is in The Philanderer. Now we have the assurance of Mr. Shaw's biographer that The Philanderer exhibits an attitude towards women induced in Shaw by "unpleasant personal relations with women prior to the time at which the play was written. . . . The first act is a more or less accurate replica of a scene in Mr. Shaw's own life." There you have it ! The core of Man and Superman is simply a twisted point of view manufactured out of the shoddy and unreliable material circumstances brought him when he had to take what he got to make opinions. Not all the adroit- ness in Ireland could overcome that initial drawback. He may declare that " Ann is Every woman " as loudly as he will, and swear that her demonstration, that the initiative in sex transactions remains with women, is a piece of pure impartial drama, the result of "a creative process over which I have no control." We know better. Falsified from the commencement, the piece had to be a fantasy. It is one of the most delightful variety entertainments ever witnessed on the stage, but it holds no mirror up to life. What it reflects is an impatient youth of genius being impeded by a pack of spinsters who can't spin, the female in- tellectuals peculiar to a little patch of London (and a patch which has by now been ploughed and broken), and deciding that his predicament must be typical of Everyman's, that he has discovered a Universal