devoting protector of the helpless; like the whole angelic host, she was spotless.

Not one of these virtues has Bernard Shaw left to the women of his plays. Whisky-drinking, cigar-smoking Vivie Warren, has a heart harder than that of her prostitute mother, who after all her wanderings can still feel love for her offspring. Lady Cicely and Grace Tranfield are about as quiet as a fire cracker after the application of the spark. Candida scoffs at the very name of obedience, as do Julia Craven and her ridiculous young sister. I should as soon fancy Blanche Sartorius in a nursery or a sick room as I should Bluntschli in the trenches of France. While from Louka to Ann Whitefield, you may run the gamut for a single woman who does not hunt down her mate and entrap him with devices more than feline.

If modesty is the capital feminine sin, Mr. Shaw's heroines are quite ready for their aureola. If devotion for women is a capital masculine vice, Mr. Shaw's heroes are on the high road to canonization. The cruel warring of Julia and Grace over the philandering Chatteris is a sight so revolting as to explain in large measure that contemptible male's utter unfaithfulness toward women. The wiles of Ann Whitefield, the frank seductions of Hypatia Tarleton and Blanche Sartorius, the ultimate advances of Gloria Clandon succeed in landing their unwilling mates; but they are still more effectual in killing all respect for Bernard Shaw's ideal of womanhood.

The gay and hideous paradox of woman the pursuer, man the pursued, is one of the most topsy-turvy things in all the Shavian philosophy, a purposeful contradiction of the actual course of nature. Yet it is consistent with Mr. Shaw's theory of the ever active Life Force. Woman is the sanctuary of the world's future generations, and her one idea is the propagation of this spark of Life that has been trusted to her care. Man, in the Shavian idea, is never a companion, a protector, a lover; he is the physically necessary complement of her nature. Woman's quest for a mate, like the mating of beast with beast, has no other basis than the "biological imperative." Woman traps man because she needs him for her life's work. Man flies from woman because for him, as for Tanner and Chatteris and Bluntschli, marriage means slavery to the will of his mate. Even in the world beyond-whatever in the conception of Mr. Shaw that may be-woman cannot cease from labor. Ann, flying alike from heaven and hell, rushes forth in quest of a father for the Superman.

And since this propagation of the Life Force is the one important work of woman, Mr. Shaw repudiates the idea of binding any woman to a single man. She should be free to mate as her infallible instinct to procreate directs. Marriage he pronounces the most licentious of institutions, or, as Tanner puts it: "The maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity." Mr. Shaw cannot rest until it is abolished, and children so placed that there "will be some adequate defence of the comparative quiet and order of adult life against the comparative noise, racket, untidiness, inquisitiveness, restlessness, fretfulness, shiftlessness, dirt, destruction, and mischief which are healthy and normal for children." Farewell, then, to marriage and the home. This is Socialistic indeed.

Sentiment. I hold no brief for sentiment nor for the tawdry lovemaking that stultifies the fiction of the present, and makes possible the vast flux of erotic filth that besmirches youthful and, for that matter, mature minds. I loathe it, I flatter myself, even more than does Mr. Shaw. I loathe it not only because it offends my taste, but because it offends my God. But because "the Duchess" brand of sentiment disgusts me and the mad infatuations of licentious novelists and poets are hideously untrue, I do not blindly cry: “There is no such thing as love and devotion and romance." On the contrary, I know that there are.

I know that between men and women whose minds are clean and whose souls have learned love in that youthful school of affection, the home, which Mr. Shaw derides, there springs up a devotion and love deeper than ever poet's plummet sounded. God, our God, not the blind, unreasoning Life Force, wills that man and woman should coöperate with Him in the creation of future generations. But He has made sweet that labor not by any brutish "biological imperative," but by filling a father's heart with a masterful devotion for his wife, and by arousing in the mother's heart a love great enough to cover the frailties of her spouse, and unite her with all her heart to him as the father of her children. God never intended marriage to be so blissfully perfect that in the delights of connubial bliss man and woman should forget their state of probation. But the love of husband and wife He destined to last as long as nature's laws, which are His laws left intact. And to enshrine that love, God made the home. The home has its defects; that is part of our heritage of sin. as far above the universal asylum advocated by Mr.

Yet it is Shaw as a

mother's love is above the love of a prison warden for his charges. When Christ, our God, chose His earthly dwelling, He could find no better substitute for the heaven He had left behind than the holy home of Nazareth.

Romance. Since poets first sang, their lays, dedicated first to the praises of their God, have chanted a triple theme: the love of man for woman, the love of man for the hero of battles, and the love of man for his country. And men have always felt that the voice of the poet spoke from the common heart of mankind. Not so Mr. Shaw. Down with romance! cries he. Rhapsodist and troubadour, poet and dramatist, Homer and Petrarch were all wrong. The triple theme is a phantom of poetic fancy, bodied forth with an eye rolling in fine frenzy, but blind as a bat for all that.

This singular and incurable romanticism of poets the world over, from India to the lands farthest north, in centuries that wrote on clay cylinders and in centuries that write on Irish linen, Mr. Shaw has set himself to correct. The love of man for woman, he simply ignores, whenever his men and women woo and win. The love of man for the hero of battles he ridicules in Arms and the Man. The love of man for his country he has practically disproved in John Bull's Other Island, and recently in his utterances on the war.

The world-wide question of romanticism is not going to be settled in these few brief paragraphs. I only intend to show from the writings of Mr. Shaw himself, compared with the reality of life, that his absolute dogmatism has not come within a thousand miles or lines of settling the fate of romance. It is left for another writer in the dim and unlikely future to walk triumphantly over its prostrate corpse.

Mr. Shaw has been accused by those who slay with paradoxes of being incurably romantic. In a sense he is. No one but the most blissful romancer could accept for a moment that most absurd of all romances, Nietzsche's Superman. His Socialistic ideal is a dream not unlike in its unreality Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Mr. Shaw prides himself on being a realist. In a sense he is. His stage settings are models of verisimilitude. But if the standpoint of character-drawing or the keen perception of motive is considered, Mr. Shaw is neither romanticist nor realist. He is merely an incorrigible unrealist.

When Stevenson, the beloved, read Mr. Shaw's first novel,

he was impressed with its literary promise. But his astonished cry to their mutual friend, Mr. Archer, was: "My God, Archer; what women!" Echoing the cry of Stevenson, the reader of Mr. Shaw cries: "And what lovers!" In their veins runs a mildly diluted carbolic acid; their hearts are the temperature of freshly-opened oysters. No lovers since Eden ever talked or acted as they. I frankly grant you that no youth and maiden in the throes of their first or last love ever talked as Romeo and Juliet talked. But if youths and maidens had Shakespeare's power of words they would.

Personally, I am firmly convinced that our modern tendency is vastly to overestimate the power of man's love for a woman. Fiction of a sort would have us fancy that there is no other spring of great deeds. Yet though love for a woman may make a besotted Antony throw away a world, and though great deeds have been done by men who carried a token on their arms, seldom indeed have the really tremendous issues of history been swayed by a man's love for a woman. Does that mean that the romance of love does not in fact exist? If there were no fiction in the world to tell us of it, if there were no poets to sing of it, we would still know that it is a fact as certain as dawn and dusk, harvest and summer storm. The passionate period of love may be brief; its effect may be largely personal and felt in but a circumscribed sphere, but it is certainly real, so real that for a time it befogs all other issues of life, makes the man see an angel where once walked a woman, and the woman see a demi-god in the flimsy disguise of mortal man.

To disprove a fact so palpably self-evident, Mr. Shaw has imported from the regions of the moon, or some land where the temperature is always below zero, a race of lovers who bandy frapped epigrams, who laugh at what is to lovers the most serious thing in the world, their own love, and who disprove the axiom that love is blind by picking flaws in the object of their own affection. Lovers like Valentine and Gloria, Trench and Blanche, Tanner and Ann are not lovers at all. They are chemical atoms combining in a strictly impersonal molecule. And they have really gone the atoms one better; for they show not the slightest signs of warmth or affinity.

The present terrible war has blasted in large measure the poetry of battle; but it has not obscured the poetry of personal heroism. "No more hoary superstition survives," says one of Mr.

VOL. CIII.-3

Shaw's admirers, "than that the donning of a uniform changes the nature of a man." This thesis, Arms and the Man and The Man of Destiny strive to prove in truly comic opera style.

If donning a uniform were a simple process like changing a frock coat for evening dress, the commentator's remark would be absolutely correct. In the case of most mercenary soldiers, such as Bluntschli, it frequently means no more than what donning an apron means to a butcher or putting on overalls to a carpenter. Yet there are times when donning a uniform means the taking up of principles for which one is ready to die. It may mean entering the struggle to preserve home from ruins and loved ones from rape. It may mean the shedding of one's blood for personal liberty, or entering upon the road of military conquest. And in cases like these, while the uniform does not change the wearer's nature, it very considerably modifies, ennobles or, perhaps, debases it. This is the element of war which Mr. Shaw's dramatic thesis leaves untouched; and this is the very element which the real romancers of literature have found when they sang of the love of man for the hero of battles.

Tell me that "chocolate soldiers" fought in the trenches around Richmond for a cause that was already dead; that Andreas Hofer's soldiers, men of the same mountains from which Bluntschli comes, felt no heroic swelling of their hearts at their leader's call to battle; that Gordon's mad raid into Africa was a mere matter of business, and you must forgive my indignant denial. And I can recall as well a certain battalion of heroic mercenaries from Bluntschli's own nation who met death at the hands of a Paris mob defending a French king in his palace. There is the truth of romance in Thorwaldsen's Lion of Lucerne.

Mr. Shaw's thesis is also too comprehensive. The calm, cool planning of staff-room and commissariat is vastly important, but not so important as to make the real student of humanity overlook man's willingness to die for his home and his country, and for a bit of metal shaped like a cross.

Mr. Shaw does not believe in patriotism. That is an accident of Mr. Shaw's birth. The small class of bitter Protestants from which Mr. Shaw comes, had, as he affirms, nothing but contempt and disdain for the Papists who make up the vast body of IrishIrish Protestantism, he states frankly, is not a religious belief, but a side in a political faction. And that side is quite out of touch with all the traditions and aspirations of the largest part of

men.