The Good Poem According to

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The Good Poem According to Philodemus
The Good Poem
According
to Philodemus
M IC HA E L Mc O SK E R

1
 3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McOsker, Michael, author.
Title: The good poem according to Philodemus / Michael McOsker.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021016477 (print) | LCCN 2021016478 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190912819 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190912833 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Philodemus, approximately 110 B.C.-approximately 40 B.C. On poems. |
Poetics—History—To 1500. | Greek poetry—History and criticism—Theory, etc. |
LCGFT: Literary criticism.
Classification: LCC PA4271.P4 M36 2021 (print) | LCC PA4271.P4 (ebook) |
DDC 808.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016477
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016478

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190912819.001.0001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
To my parents, Liz and Paul.
 Contents

Preface  xi
Abbreviations xv
Introduction: Philodemus and His Prolēpsis of the Good Poem  1
§1 Introduction to Philodemus’ Works  1
§2 The Structure and Content of the On Poems  3
§3 Background and Method of This Study  5
§4 Conclusions  8
§5 Kanonikē and the Canon  11
§6 The Prolēpsis of Poetry and the Possibility of an Epicurean Theory
of Poetry  16
§7 The Hypographē of “Poem”  23
§8 The Problem of Meter  31
1. Epicurean Poetics before Philodemus  38
§1 Introduction  38
§2 Epicurus  39
§3 Metrodorus  50
§4 Hermarchus, Polyaenus, and the Other Third-​and
Second-​Century Epicureans  52
§5 Colotes  53
§6 Demetrius Laco  56
§7 Zeno of Sidon  60
§8 Siro  61
§9 Conclusion  61
2. Philodemus’ Terminology and Opponents  64
§1 Introduction  64
§2 A Partial Hellenistic Literary-​Critical Lexicon  65
§3 Crates and the Critics in His Treatise  69
§3a Megaclides  70
§3b Andromenides  71
§3c Heracleodorus  74
§3d Heracleodorus and Philodemus on Cookery and Poetry  77
§3e Pausimachus  84
§3f Crates of Mallos  89
§3g The Kritikoi, the “Philosophers,” and Crates  94
§4 “Critic A” of Book III  97
viii Contents

§5 Aristotle  98
§6 Heraclides of Pontus  99
§7 The Critics in Philomelus  102
§7a The Anonymous Critics in Philomelus  103
§7b Praxiphanes of Miletus  103
§7c Demetrius of Byzantium  104
§8 Neoptolemus of Parium  107
§9 The Stoics  110
§9a Diogenes of Babylon  113
§9b The Anonymous Stoic (Formerly Known as Aristo)  117
§10 The Anonymous Doxai in Zeno  120
§11 Conclusion  121
3. Poetry as Technē and the Use of Poetry  123
§1 Introduction  123
§2 The Hypographē of Technē and the “Technicity of Rhetoric”  124
§3 The Technicity of Poetry  130
§4 The Utility of the Technē of Poetry  137
§5 The Utility of Poems  139
§6 Conclusion  149
4. Form and Content  150
§1 Introduction  150
§2 ὑποτεταγμένη διάνοια in Philodemus  151
§3 The Interrelation between Form and Content  157
§4 Form and Content in Practice  164
§5 The Goal for Content  170
§6 The Goal for Form  174
§7 Form and Content in Philodemus’ Poetry  180
§8 Conclusion  186
5. The Judgment of Poems and Their Psychological Effect  188
§1 Introduction  188
§2 Intellectualist Poetics  188
§3 The Judgment of Poems  191
§4 “Further Thoughts”  197
§5 Light from Rhetoric III and the Pleasure of Poetry  202
§6 Psychagōgia and Pleasure in Philodemus’ Epigrams  211
§7 Conclusion  216
 onclusion: Philodemus the Epicurean on the Arts 
C 218
§1 Philodemus’ Poetics: A Look Back  218
§2 What’s Epicurean about Philodemus’ Views on the Fine Arts?  220
 ppendix: An Epicurean Critical Miscellany 
A 227
§1 Introduction  227
 Contents ix

§2 Music and Poetry  227

§3 Rhetoric and Poetry  233
§4 τὸ πρέπον: Characterization, Verisimilitude, and the
Suspension of Disbelief  235
§5 The Prolēpsis of the Genres  239
§6 Genre in Philodemus’ Epigrams  245
§7 The Imitation of Things  249
§8 The Imitation of Earlier Poets  254
§9 The “Ban” on Metathesis  257

Bibliography  261
Index Locorum 277
Index Verborum Graecorum Potiorum 289
Subject Index  299
 Preface

It is perhaps a measure of how poetry-​focused Classics, or at least the Hellenic

half of it, is that Philodemus’ On Poems is one of, if not the, best studied work
from Herculaneum. (Its only real competition is Epicurus’ On Nature.) There
are a few causes: hope (now largely abandoned) for extensive new fragments
of poetry and prejudice (also largely abandoned) against Epicureanism must
rank high among them, not to mention the paucity of Herculaneumists and the
staggering amount of work left to do.
I continue the trend of favoring Epicurus’ epigonos, Philodemus of Gadara.
The bulk of this book is dedicated primarily to explaining Philodemus’ poetics
and, in a far distant second place, situating them in the realms of Epicurean
philosophy and Hellenistic literary criticism. This can finally be done with
some security, since the texts are well edited and unlikely to cause seismic
disturbances under the feet of future scholars.1 But just because they are well
edited does not mean that they are straightforward or easy to read. On the con-
trary, Philodemus’ prose is not simple at the best of times, and he does not
honor modern scholarly conventions of straightforward citation or clarity in
argumentation, which makes simply sorting out who said what a good deal of
work for his modern readers. It is here that I hope to make my main contribu-
tion: to put future students of Philodemus’ poetics on reasonably solid footing
by describing as complete and coherent a picture of his views (and at least a
summary of his opponents’ views) as possible. If along the way I manage to say
something of interest to students of ancient literary criticism, Epicurean phi-
losophy, or ancient poetry, all the better.
Translations of the On Music, most of the On Rhetoric, and other Epicureans
are usually based on those published in the editions, though I have silently inter-
vened in many cases. This is most visible in Sider’s translations of Philodemus’
epigrams, which I’ve rewritten quite freely according to my taste and to empha-
size features I think are interesting in light of Philodemus’ theories. My alter-
ations to Janko’s and Armstrong’s translations of the On Poems (Janko for I–​IV;

1 It must be said that the On Poems has received the majority of editorial and interpretive work.

The On Music, because it is the least extensively preserved of the three treatises on the fine arts, is
also in good editorial shape. The Rhetoric has received some, but not nearly as much, and it is much
more extensively preserved. Even so, students of Philodemus’ aesthetic theories are at a comparative
advantage over students of his ethics, since most of the ethical works have not received more than
a single edition from 1800 onwards (the On Death, On Anger, On Frank Speech, and On Household
Management are notable exceptions).
xii Preface

Armstrong for V), as well as Smith’s Lucretius, are less extensive. I have used
Chandler’s translations of Rhetoric I and II similarly.
The Greek printed is quoted from the editions named; any changes to the text
itself are noted ad loc. (I do not always record changes to punctuation.) I have left
the orthography of the papyri unchanged, but occasionally noted weirder forms.
The Leiden conventions for printing papyrological texts are followed with the
following adjustment: any letter which is clearly transmitted (whether on the
papyrus, in a digital photograph, or on a disegno), but nevertheless changed by
an editor, is marked by an under-​asterisk, like so: τ͙ὴν will be printed when the
papyrus or other primary source for the text clearly reads πην. This is because
the papyri were copied so soon after their composition that many feel that even
minor editorial interference ought to be signaled to the readers.2 I agree with
them and so follow the convention. Note also that under-​dots are used only in
cases when the reading is doubtful—​that is, when it could be a different letter—​
but not in cases of a damaged, but clearly legible, letter. The test is purely pa-
leographic: for example, I print τὴ̣ν even when the only other reading possible
is τπν, even if τπν is complete nonsense. I have silently eliminated most other
marks, whether on the papyrus or editorial, including vacats, space fillers, and
most ancient punctuation (which usually corresponds to modern punctuation
anyway). I have privileged the legibility of the text as much as possible, but tried
not to hide the difficulty of the papyri. I do not attempt to provide an apparatus
for any of the texts. For details, see the editions.
I have represented the texts in columns as they are on papyri, rather than run-
ning the text together. I personally find this easier to read—​I find long lines hard
on my eyes when they are burdened with additional papyrological sigla—​and it
makes patterns of damage more apparent, which is useful for judging possible
supplements and corrections. The line numbers are also easier to track when
discussing details. When words are divided across lines, I mark this with a hy-
phen, which does not correspond to anything on the original text and is purely
editorial. Lower half-​brackets (˻αβγ˼) mark text supplied from a parallel source,
either a second manuscript of the same text (e.g., in the case of On Rhetoric III)
or a quotation that survives more completely in another source. For complete
details as to the constitution of the text and readings, as well as citations for
emendations, see the editions.
This book, like so many, began life as a doctoral dissertation. That dis-
sertation began life as a presentation, in Ewen Bowie’s Garland of Philip sem-
inar, given when he visited the University of Michigan for a semester in spring

2 In so doing I follow the practice of, for example, Richard Janko and Giuliana Leone. The specific

siglum varies by time and publisher (e.g., Leone’s edition of On Nature II, from Bibliopolis, uses ˹α˺
to mark that a letter has been changed into an alpha). Further, precise conventions for the use of the
under-​asterisk vary by editor; for example, Obbink only uses it to mark a changed disegno.
 Preface xiii

2010. I attempted without much success to ferret out a connection between

Philodemus’ theorizing and his epigrams, and the resulting paper was . . . not
very good. I owe a great deal to Ewen and to Matts Cohn and Newman for their
initial comments and the suggestion that there might still be a “there” there, de-
spite the dull thud the paper made when it hit my audience. Thanks to them,
I shelved rather than trashed the project and expected to write my thesis on the
Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite.
After that project was scooped, I came back to that seminar paper. Since, at
the time, about three-​fifths of the primary source material—​books II–​IV of the
On Poems—​existed only as draft editions that Richard Janko was willing to make
available to me, I felt confident that I wouldn’t get scooped again. My initial pro-
spectus, treated with kindness and fully deserved skepticism by its readers, had
me sorting out Philodemus’ poetics in one chapter and then going on to treat
Callimachus and basically all the other important Hellenistic poets and theorists
in another two or three chapters. Obviously, in hindsight, that was not going to
be the case. Philodemus’ share ballooned and eventually became the whole dis-
sertation. (Maybe one day I’ll get around to Callimachus.)
My debts to the studies of Nicola Pace and Anastasia Tsakiropoulou-​
Summers, and above all to Nathan Greenberg, will be obvious to those who
know their work. Likewise, I learned a great deal from Liz Asmis’ and David
Armstrong’s articles. While a grad student, after my work was somewhat ad-
vanced, I had the privilege of spending a year and a half in Naples as a fellow at
the Centro internazionale per lo studio dei papiri ercolanesi (CISPE). CISPE later
gave me another borsa to return to Naples for a month. That tirocino represented
a quantum leap in my knowledge of the texts and their problems. I owe a debt to
Paolo Asso for his tutoring in Italian (and Neapolitan) and the occasional meal;
to Francesca Longo Auricchio, Giovanni Indelli, Giuliana Leone, Gianluca del
Mastro, Matilde Fiorillo, and Antonio Parisi, for their warm welcome, help, and
friendship. Special thanks go to Mariacristina Fimiani and the other denizens of
Casa Caracciolo.
My dissertation committee consisted of Victor Caston, Francesca Schironi,
and Ruth Scodel, with Richard Janko as chair. For their help and criticism, and
for being models of scholarship, I thank them all, but Richard deserves special
thanks. It’s a cliché of the “preface” genre that a dissertation would not have been
possible without the advisor, but in my case the work really would have been
impossible had Richard not made a tremendous amount of work available to me
in draft form years (in one case, more than a decade) before it would appear in
print. I valued and value his help and guidance more than I can say.
The book continued its gestation after my defense, and I continued to incur
debts. A nigh mythological trio of Davids (Armstrong, Blank, and Kaufman)
answered questions, read drafts, discussed problems at conferences and over
xiv Preface

phone calls, and gave me material ahead of publication—​one even coauthored a

different book with me, and one was a press reader for this book. The Fondation
Hardt gave me a fellowship for a three-​week stay, during which I was able to make
a good deal of progress in a short period of time in outstanding circumstances
with very pleasant and learned people. Jeffrey Fish has been a wonderful friend,
discussed problems with me, and made his draft edition of On the Good King
According to Homer available to me. David Armstrong and Jeffrey Fish gave me
their draft edition of On Poems V, which was extremely useful and for which
I am very grateful. The Würzburgers, Michael Erler, Holger Essler, Jan Heßler,
and Kilian Fleischer, have supported me and my work in many ways over the
years. Marty Hipsky, Jackie Murray, Jason Nethercut all read chapters; David
Armstrong did so over and over again; and Richard Janko continued to do so
even after he had finished his duty as my supervisor. Richard Sammartino helped
read the proofs.
Lee Fratantuono and Don Lateiner (quondam magistri, nunc conlegae), Mark
Allison, Ellen Arnold, Amy Butcher, Erin Flynn, and Carol Neuman de Vegvar
have been supportive friends and helpful interlocutors at the beginning of my
career. As I begin a new phase of my career at the Universität zu Köln, I’d like
to thank Prof. Jürgen Hammerstaedt and the Institut für Altertumskunde for
hosting me and the staff of the Bibliothek des Instituts for their help in difficult
circumstances.
I regret that the ongoing pandemic made it difficult for me to access books and
articles during the final phases of this project. I hope the slips are not too bad.
“Last but not least” is my family—​ parents Liz and Paul, sister Emily,
grandparents Bob and Judy and Don and Jean, cousins galore—​who have
supported me through everything. Molly McOsker remains δῖα γυναικῶν. The
dissertation was dedicated to my grandmother Leota Lyne (Brower) McOsker (*
9 May 1929 Alva, Oklahoma, † 10 Dec. 2009 Cincinnati, Ohio). Now the book is
dedicated to my parents.
 Abbreviations

CA Collectanea Alexandrina, J. U. Powell, Oxford 1925

CErc Cronache ercolanesi
FHG Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, K. Müller, Paris 1828
GE Glossario epicureo, H. Usener, eds. M. Gigante and W. Schmid, Rome 1980
KD Kyriae Doxai
L.A. Φιλοδήμου Περὶ Ῥητορικῆϲ libros primum et secundum, F. Longo Auricchio,
Naples 1977
SH Supplementum Hellenisticum, H. Lloyd-​Jones and P. J. Parsons, Berlin 1983
SVF Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, H. von Armin, Stuttgart 1903
Us. Epicurea, H. Usener, Leipzig 1887
VS Vaticanae Sententiae
 Introduction
Philodemus and His Prolēpsis
of the Good Poem

§1 Introduction to Philodemus’ Works

Philodemus’ philosophical work ranges widely.1 He wrote an introductory

or protreptic work, “[On Choices and Avoidances],”2 as well as more advanced
treatises on ethics, which are either focused on doctrinal debates or on removing
vices and replacing them with virtues. Here the ten-​book series “On Vices
and Their Corresponding Virtues” is the major work.3 He shows an interest in
teaching, found in the On Anger and especially the On Frank Speech. He wrote
on epistemology (the On Signs in multiple books4 and the [On Sensations])
and the history of philosophy (the Syntaxis mentioned by Diogenes Laertius at
X.15, of which several books survive), and especially the Epicurean school (On
Epicurus in at least two books and the “Pragmateiai”). Additionally, he wrote ex-
tensively on aesthetic topics: On Poems (five books), On Music (four books), and
On Rhetoric (probably eight books). Of these, the On Poems will be my primary
focus, but several other works will be discussed in the course of the investigation.
The aesthetic works are not technical manuals, but are about beliefs and
attitudes towards their topics. For example, among the issues under discus-
sion in the fourth book of the On Music (dedicated mostly to refuting Diogenes
of Babylon, an early Stoic) are the definition of music, which is conceived
of se­parately from the lyrics of a song; the role of hearing in the experience of
music; whether music is educational; and whether it adds to the experience of
divine worship. Nowhere are instructions for writing music given, and it was not
Philodemus’ intent to give them nor, as Delattre (2007: 11) points out, was that

1 See Asmis (1990a) for a broader view.

2 The square brackets indicate that the title is a restoration; it does not survive on the papyrus, but
seems likely. We know that Philodemus wrote a book by this title and it describes the content accu-
rately. It was edited most recently by Tsouna and Indelli and is sometimes called the “Comparetti
Ethics” (or L’ etica Comparetti) because Domenico Comparetti was the first to edit it. In “Hiatus in
Epicurean Authors” (2017), I strengthen the case for Philodemus’ authorship.
3 Tsouna (2007) explores Philodemus’ ethics at length.
4 PHerc. 1065, the work edited by De Lacy and De Lacy (19782) under the title “Philodemus: On

Methods of Inference” turns out to be book III; Delattre successfully read the subscription and
so we now know the title was On Signs and Sign-​Inferences and that this was book III. Del Mastro
(2014: 154–​55) identifies PHerc. 671 as another book in the On Signs group.
2 The Good Poem According to Philodemus

Diogenes’ goal either.5 Similarly, the On Poems contains discussions of the effects
of rhythm and meter, but no listing of meters nor any discussion of how to write
metrically. Examples are used from time to time to illustrate practical or philo-
sophical points, not as models for imitation or objects of study, like Simonides’
poem in Plato’s Protagoras was.
The On Rhetoric, of which a great deal survives,6 started from a discussion of the
technicity of rhetoric directed against heterodox Epicureans, that is, the questions
“What is rhetoric?” and “Is rhetoric as a whole a technē? If not, what parts of it are?”
Philodemus’ discussion of the question is very interesting from a methodological
point of view, especially since he occasionally links poetics and rhetoric; hence this
work will be discussed as well.7
Philodemus’ On Poems all but certainly consisted of five books, of which much
survives (three books quite substantially and some remains of the other two).8
The work is a polemical refutation of other theoreticians of poetry and poetics.
Philodemus proceeds by summarizing his opponents’ positions, then systemati-
cally refuting their arguments in a variety of ways. The larger organization of the
work is not obvious; it is clearly not chronological, but probably thematic (I sug-
gest a theory below). Opponents include the Kritikoi, also known as the euphonic
theorists (Megaclides of Athens, Andromenides, Heracleodorus, and Pausimachus,
as well as Crates of Mallos to a certain extent), who thought that good sound or good
verbal composition was the sole or main criterion of good poetry. They come under
attack in books I and II. Books III and IV are poorly preserved, but Aristotle’s lost
dialogue On Poets (or related Peripatetic views) is apparently the object of part of the
surviving section of book IV and the beginning of book V and Crates reappears in
book III. Book V evidently contains a miscellany; opponents included Heraclides
of Pontos, Crates again (on a different topic: meaning and its relationship to lan-
guage), an anonymous Stoic (the Stoic formerly thought to be Aristo), Neoptolemus
of Parium (the alleged source for Horace’s Ars Poetica), and brief doxographies col-
lected by an unknown Philomelus and a Zeno (perhaps—​but probably not—​Zeno
of Sidon, Philodemus’ teacher and head of the Garden in Athens).
Philodemus’ argumentative strategy is now reasonably well understood.9 It
is clear enough from the reasonably complete reconstructed works that he first
summarized the views of an opponent or opponents, then refuted them; there

5 See Delattre (2007: 1–​20) for a summary of Diogenes’ views.

6 The ensemble has been variously reconstructed but it was probably complete in eight books.
I–​IV and VIII are firmly attested (books II–​IV in multiple copies) and several additional books,
probably VI and VII, survive. See also appendix §3.
7 It is interesting historically as well, since his debate is with heterodox Epicureans.
8 The initial reconstruction was laid out in Janko (1991) and see also (1995); it has been continu-

ously updated. See the introductions to the various editions for specific details.
9 The briefest introduction to Philodemus’ argumentative strategy is Neubecker (1983), who

focuses on arguments in the On Music; more expansive is Delattre (1996) on the On Music as well
as the On Signs and Sign-​Inference. He discusses the organization of the whole book with special
 Philodemus and His Prolēp s i s of the Good Poem 3

may have been a transitional passage, perhaps a résumé to help the memory,
between them. Sometimes, he (re-​)reports the views of his opponent at length
during the part of the treatise otherwise dedicated to refutation.10 It is safe to
assume that the opponent and his treatise were clearly identified at the begin-
ning of the summary; however, no such indication survives. In his refutations, he
commonly accuses opponents of inconsistency, lack of specificity, making errors
of fact or logic, as well as misunderstanding or misrepresenting real phenomena.
Furthermore, he makes some objections based on Epicurean standards. Once he
has refuted one part of an opponent’s argument, further aspects which depend
on that first part may also come in for mockery. Jokes, polemical overstatement
(perhaps for comic effect), and sarcasm are all common. Nowhere is there a trace
of the modern “principle of charity,” except in discussions of earlier Epicureans,
who could write no wrong. Further, for Philodemus, because of the Epicurean
doctrine of prolēpsis, the statement “this is simply not what people mean when
they say X,” if true, is a compelling refutation of any argument or assertion, since
it reveals that the opponent is confused or discussing something imaginary or
off-​topic.
Generally, there is a very brief conclusion at the end of each book; these are
usually less than a single column in length. It is absent when the discussion con-
tinues across the book boundary. In some cases, it clearly signals a transition to
the next topic (e.g., On Signs and Sign-​Inferences III, which signals the transition
to a discussion of the Empirical school of physicians, presumably the topic of
the lost book IV); in others, Philodemus might include a brief mopping up of
a related topic (like at the ends of Music IV and Poems V). That brief refutation
then serves as the conclusion of the whole ensemble (e.g., On Music IV and On
Poems V).

§2 The Structure and Content of the On Poems

In 1955, Nathan Greenberg put forward a very tentative reconstruction of the

work, which turns out to be correct in many particulars: specifically, book II is
concerned with the euphonists, book IV with a criticism of Aristotelian theories
of genre (in part), and V with the division between form and content and with
the judgment of poems.11 His survey was vitiated by incomplete information, but
it was remarkably perceptive, especially given the terrible state of the editions

attention to matters of punctuation and sign-​posting in the text. Discussions of the structures of indi-
vidual works can generally be found in the introductions to their editions.

10 I owe this observation to David Blank.

11 Greenberg (1990: 269–​70). See also Janko (2011: 228–​29).
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of George
Bernard Shaw: His Plays
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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Title: George Bernard Shaw: His Plays

Author: H. L. Mencken

Release date: May 31, 2022 [eBook #68209]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: John W. Luce & Co, 1905

Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman, Charlie Howard, and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GEORGE

BERNARD SHAW: HIS PLAYS ***
George Bernard
Shaw
his plays
BY
HENRY L. MENCKEN

BOSTON AND LONDON

JOHN W. LUCE & CO.
1905
 Copyright, 1905, by
John W. Luce & Company
Boston, Mass., U. S. A.
The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
 CONTENTS
Preface.
By Way of Introduction.
The Shaw Plays:
Mrs. Warren’s Profession.
Arms and the Man.
The Devil’s Disciple.
Widowers’ Houses.
The Philanderer.
Captain Brassbound’s Conversion.
Cæsar and Cleopatra.
A Man of Destiny.
The Admirable Bashville.
Candida.
How He Lied to Her Husband.
You Never Can Tell.
Man and Superman.
John Bull’s Other Island.
Major Barbara.
The Novels and Other Writings:
The Irrational Knot, Love Among the Artists, Cashel
Byron’s Profession, An Unsocial Socialist, On
 Going to Church, The Quintessence of Ibsenism,
etc.
Biographical and Statistical.
Shakespeare and Shaw.
 PREFACE
This is a little handbook for the reading tables of Americans
interested enough in the drama of the day to have some curiosity
regarding the plays of George Bernard Shaw, but too busy to give
them careful personal study or to read the vast mass of reviews,
magazine articles, letters to the editor, newspaper paragraphs and
reports of debates that deal with them. Every habitual writer now
before the public, from William Archer and James Huneker to “Vox
Populi” and “An Old Subscriber” has had his say about Shaw. In the
pages following there is no attempt to formulate a new theory of his
purposes or a novel interpretation of his philosophies. Instead, the
object of this modest book is to bring all of the Shaw commentators
together upon the common ground of admitted fact, to exhibit the
Shaw plays as dramas rather than as transcendental treatises, and
to describe their plots, characters, and general plans simply and
calmly, and without reading into them anything invisible to the naked
eye.
The order in which the plays are considered is not the
chronological one, and some readers may think that it is not the
logical one. Inasmuch as an exposition of the reasons that urged its
adoption would waste a great deal of space, the point will not be
argued. The brief biography of the dramatist is based upon the most
accurate available eulogies, denunciations, reminiscences, and
manuscripts. So, too, the historical data regarding the plays and
other publications.
The reputation of Mr. Shaw as a playwright has so far exceeded
his renown as a novelist, a socialist, a cart-tail orator, a journeyman
reformer, a vegetarian, and a critic of literature and the arts, that his
novels and other minor works have been noticed but briefly. But this
is not to be taken as evidence that they do not merit acquaintance.
Even the worst of Shaw is well worth study.
 BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION
What else is talent but a name for experience, practice,
appropriation, incorporation, from the times of our forefathers?
—Friedrich Nietzsche.

A century is a mere clock-tick in eternity, but measured by human

events it is a hundred long years. Napoleon Bonaparte, born in 1768,
became an officer of artillery and gravedigger for an epoch. Born in
1868, he might have become a journeyman genius of the
boulevards, a Franco-Yankee trust magnate, or the democratic boss
of Kansas City. And so, contrariwise, George Bernard Shaw, born in
1756 instead of 1856, might have become a gold-stick-in-waiting at
the Court of St. James or Archbishop of Canterbury. The accident
that made him what he is was one of time. He saw the light after,
instead of before Charles Darwin.
Darwin is dead now, and the public that reads the newspapers
remembers him only as the person who first publicly noted the fact
that men look a great deal like monkeys. But his soul goes marching
on. Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer, like a new Ham and a new
Shem, spent their lives seeing to that. From him, through Huxley, we
have appendicitis, the seedless orange, and our affable indifference
to hell. Through Spencer, in like manner, we have Nietzsche,
Sudermann, Hauptmann, Ibsen, our annual carnivals of catechetical
revision, the stampede for church union, and the aforesaid George
Bernard Shaw. Each and all of these men and things, it is true, might
have appeared if Darwin were yet unborn. Ibsen might have written
“A Doll’s House,” and a rash synod or two might have turned
impertinent search-lights upon the doctrine of infant damnation. It is
possible, certainly, but it is supremely, colossally, and
overwhelmingly improbable.
 Why? Simply because before Darwin gave the world “The Origin
of Species” the fight against orthodoxy, custom, and authority was
perennially and necessarily a losing one. On the side of the defense
were ignorance, antiquity, piety, organization, and respectability—
twelve-inch, wire-wound, rapid-fire guns, all of them. In the hands of
the scattered, half-hearted, unorganized attacking parties there were
but two weapons—the blowpipe of impious doubt and the bludgeon
of sacrilege. Neither, unsupported, was very effective. Voltaire, who
tried both, scared the defenders a bit and for a while there was a
great pother and scurrying about, but when the smoke cleared away
the walls were just as strong as before and the drawbridge was still
up. One had to believe or be damned. There was no compromise
and no middle ground.
And so, when Darwin bobbed up, armed with a new-fangled
dynamite gun that hurled shells charged with a new shrapnel—facts
—the defenders laughed at the novel weapon and looked forward to
slaying its bearer. Spencer, because he ventured to question
Genesis, lost his best friend. Huxley, for an incautious utterance, was
barred from the University of Oxford. And then of a sudden, there
was a deafening roar and a blinding flash—and down went the walls.
Ramparts of authority that had resisted doubts fell like hedge-rows
before facts, and there began an intellectual reign of terror that
swept like a whirlwind through Europe, America, Asia, Africa, and
Oceania. For six thousand years it had been necessary, in defending
a doctrine, to show only that it was respectable or sacred. Since
1859, it has been needful to prove its truth.
It will take the perspective of centuries to reveal to us the exact
metes and bounds of Darwin’s influence. He himself probably gave
little thought to it. His own business in life was the investigation of
biological phenomena and he was too busy at that to take an interest
in politics or ethics. But his new method of assailing tradition
appealed to men laboring in far distant vineyards, and soon there
was in progress a grand assault-at-arms that left orthodoxy and
custom dying on the field. Huxley led the physicians and Spencer the
metaphysicians. Every time the former overturned an old theory of
matter, the latter pricked an old maxim of ethics. And so the search
for the ultimate verities, which had been a pariah hiding in cellars,
like anarchism or polygamy, became the spirit of the times.
Whenever custom or tradition reared one of its hydra-heads, there
was a champion ready to strike it down.
The practical result of this was that seekers after the truth,
growing bold with success, began attacking virtues as well as vices.
And herein you will find the fundamental difference between the
philosophers before Darwin and those after him. The Spectator, in
the ’teens of the eighteenth century, inveighed against marital
infidelity—an amusement counted among the scarlet sins since the
days of Moses. Ibsen, a century and a half later, asked if there might
not be evil, too, in unreasoning fidelity. If you pursue this little inquiry
to its close, you will observe that George Bernard Shaw, in nearly all
of his plays and novels, follows Ibsen rather than Addison.
Sometimes he lends his ear to one of the two classes of pioneers he
mentions in “The Quintessence of Ibsen,” and sometimes to the
other, but it is always to the pioneers. Either he is exhibiting a virtue
as a vice in disguise, or exhibiting a vice as a virtue in vice’s clothing.
In this fact lies the excuse for considering him a world-figure. He
stands in a sense as an embodiment of the welt-geist, which is a
word invented by the Germans to designate world-spirit or tendency
of the times.

II
Popular opinion and himself to the contrary notwithstanding,
Shaw is not a mere preacher. The function of the dramatist is not
that of the village pastor. He has no need to exhort, nor to call upon
his hearers to come to the mourners’ bench. All the world expects
him to do is to picture human life as he sees it, as accurately and
effectively as he can. Like the artist in color, form, or tone, his
business is with impressions. A man painting an Alpine scene
endeavors to produce, not a mere record of each rock and tree, but
an impression upon the observer like that he would experience were
he to stand in the artist’s place and look upon the snow-capped
crags. In music it is the same. Beethoven set out, with melody and
harmony, to arouse the emotions that stir us upon pondering the
triumphs of a great conqueror. Hence the Eroica Symphony.
Likewise, with curves and color, Millet tried to awaken the soft
content that falls upon us when we gaze across the fields at eventide
and hear the distant vesper-bell—and we have “The Angelus.”
The purpose of the dramatist is identical. If he shows us a
drunken man on the stage it is because he wants us to experience
the disgust or amusement or envy that wells up in us on
contemplating such a person in real life. He concerns himself, in
brief, with things as he sees them. The preacher deals with things as
he thinks they ought to be. Sometimes the line of demarcation
between the two purposes may be but dimly seen, but it is there all
the same. If a play has what is known as a moral, it is the audience
and not the playwright that formulates and voices it. A sermon
without an obvious moral, well rubbed in, would be no sermon at all.
And so, if we divest ourselves of the idea that Shaw is trying to
preach some rock-ribbed doctrine in each of his plays, instead of
merely setting forth human events as he sees them, we may find his
dramas much easier of comprehension. True enough, in his prefaces
and stage directions, he delivers himself of many wise saws and
elaborate theories. But upon the stage, fortunately, prefaces and
stage directions are no longer read to audiences, as they were in
Shakespeare’s time, and so, if they are ever to discharge their
natural functions, the Shaw dramas must stand as simple plays.
Some of them, alackaday! bear this test rather badly. Others, such
as “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” and “Candida,” bear it supremely well.
It is the dramatist’s business, then, to record the facts of life as
he sees them, that philosophers and moralists (by which is meant
the public in meditative mood) may deduce therefrom new rules of
human conduct, or observe and analyze old rules as they are
exhibited in the light of practice. That the average playwright does
not always do so with absolute accuracy is due to the fact that he is
merely a human being. No two men see the same thing in exactly
the same way, and there are no fixed standards whereby we may
decide whether one or the other or neither is right.
Herein we find the element of individual color, which makes one
man’s play differ from another man’s, just as one artist’s picture of a
stretch of beach would differ from another’s. A romancist, essaying
to draw a soldier, gave the world Don Cesar de Bazan. George
Bernard Shaw, at the same task, produced Captain Bluntschli. Don
Cesar is an idealist and a hero; Bluntschli is a sort of refined day
laborer, bent upon earning his pay at the least possible expenditure
of blood and perspiration. Inasmuch as no mere man—not even the
soldier under analysis himself—could ever hope to pry into a fighting
man’s mind and define and label his innermost shadows of thought
and motive with absolute accuracy, there is no reason why we
should hold Don Cesar to be a more natural figure than Captain
Bluntschli. All that we can demand of a dramatist is that he make his
creation consistent and logical and, as far as he can see to it, true. If
we examine Bluntschli we will find that he answers these
requirements. There may be a good deal of Shaw in him, but there is
also some of Kitchener and more of Tommy Atkins.
This is one of the chief things to remember in studying the
characters in the Shaw plays. Some of them are not obvious types,
but a little inspection will show that most of them are old friends,
simply viewed from a new angle. This personal angle is the
possession that makes one dramatist differ from all others.

III
Sarcey, the great French critic, has shown us that the essence of
dramatic action is conflict. Every principal character in a play must
have a complement, or as it is commonly expressed, a foil. In the
most primitive type of melodrama, there is a villain to battle with the
hero and a comic servant to stand in contrast with the tearful
heroine. As we go up the scale, the types are less strongly marked,
but in every play that, in the true sense, is dramatic, there is this
same balancing of characters and action. Comic scenes are
contrasted with serious ones and for every Hamlet you will find a
gravedigger.
In the dramas of George Bernard Shaw, which deal almost
wholly with the current conflict between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, it
is but natural that the characters should fall broadly into two general
classes—the ordinary folks who represent the great majority, and the
iconoclasts, or idol-smashers. Darwin made this war between the
faithful and the scoffers the chief concern of the time, and the sham-
smashing that is now going on, in all the fields of human inquiry,
might be compared to the crusades that engrossed the world in the
middle ages. Everyone, consciously or unconsciously, is more or
less directly engaged in it, and so, when Shaw chooses conspicuous
fighters in this war as the chief characters of his plays, he is but
demonstrating his comprehension of human nature as it is
manifested to-day. In “Man and Superman,” for instance, he makes
John Tanner, the chief personage of the drama, a rabid adherent of
certain very advanced theories in social philosophy, and to
accentuate these theories and contrast them strongly with the more
old-fashioned ideas of the majority of persons, he places Tanner
among men and women who belong to this majority. The effect of
this is that the old notions and the new—orthodoxy and heterodoxy
—are brought sharply face to face, and there is much opportunity for
what theater goers call “scenes”—i. e. clashes of purpose and will.
In all of the Shaw plays—including even the farces, though here
to a less degree—this conflict between the worshipers of old idols
and the iconoclasts, or idol-smashers, is the author’s chief concern.
In “The Devil’s Disciple” he puts the scene back a century and a half
because he wants to exhibit his hero’s doings against a background
of particularly rigid and uncompromising orthodoxy, and the world
has moved so fast since Darwin’s time that such orthodoxy scarcely
exists to-day. Were it pictured as actually so existing the public would
think the picture false and the playwright would fail in the first
business of a maker of plays, which is to give an air of reality to his
creations. So Dick Dudgeon, in “The Devil’s Disciple” is made a
contemporary of George Washington, and the tradition against which
he struggles seems fairly real.
In each of the Shaw plays you will find a sham-smasher like
Dick. In “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” there are three of them—Mrs.
Warren herself, her daughter Vivie and Frank Gardner. In “You Never
Can Tell” there are the Clandons; in “Arms and the Man” there is
Bluntschli, and in “Man and Superman” there are John Tanner and
Mendoza, the brigand chief, who appears in the Hell scene as the
Devil. In “Candida” and certain other of the plays it is somewhat
difficult to label each character distinctly, because there is less
definition in the outlines and the people of the play are first on one
side and then on the other, much after the fashion of people in real
life. But in all of the Shaw plays the necessary conflict is essentially
one between old notions of conduct and new ones.
Dramatists of other days, before the world became engaged in
its crusade against error and sham, depicted battles of other sorts. In
“Hamlet” Shakespeare showed the prince in conflict with himself,
and in “The Merchant of Venice” he showed Shylock combatting
Antonio, or, in other words, the ideals of the Jew at strife with
Christian ideals of charity and mercy. Of late, the most important
plays have much resembled those of Shaw. Ibsen, except in his
early poetical dramas, deals chiefly with the war between new
schemes of human happiness and old rules of conduct. Nora Helmer
fights the ancient idea that a married woman should love, honor and
obey her husband, no matter what the provocation to do otherwise,
just as Mrs. Warren defies the mandate that a woman should
preserve her virtue, no matter how much she may suffer thereby.
Sudermann, in “Magda,” shows his heroine in revolt against the
patriarchal German doctrine that a father’s authority over his children
is without limit, and Hauptmann, another German of rare talents,
depicts his chief characters in similar situations. Shaw is frankly a
disciple of Ibsen, but he is far more than a mere imitator. In some
things, indeed—such, for instance, as in fertility of wit and invention
—he very greatly exceeds the Norwegian.
 IV
As long as a dramatist is faithful to his task of depicting human
life as he sees it, it is of small consequence whether the victory, in
the dramatic conflict, goes to the one side or the other. In Pinero’s
play, “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” the heroine loses her battle with
convention and her life pays the forfeit. In Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” the
contest ends with the destruction of all concerned; in Hauptmann’s
“Friedensfest” there is no conclusion at all, and in Sudermann’s
“Johnnisfeuer,” orthodox virtue triumphs. The dramatist, properly
speaking, is not concerned about the outcome of the struggle. All he
is required to do is to draw the two sides accurately and
understandingly and to show the conflict naturally. In other words, it
is not his business to decide the matter for his audience, but to make
those who see his play think it out for themselves.
“Here,” he says, as it were, “I have set down certain human
transactions and depicted certain human beings brought face to face
with definite conditions, and I have tried to show them meeting these
conditions as persons of their sort would meet them in real life. I
have endeavored, in brief, to exhibit a scene from life as real people
live it. Doubtless, there are lessons to be learned from this scene—
lessons that may benefit real men and women if they are ever
confronted with the conditions I have described. It is for you, my
friends, to work out these lessons for yourselves, each according to
his ideas of right and wrong.”
That Shaw makes such an invitation in each of his plays is very
plain. The proof lies in the fact that they have, as a matter of
common knowledge, caused the public to do more thinking than the
dramas of any other contemporary dramatist, with the sole exception
of Ibsen. Pick up any of the literary monthlies and you will find a
disquisition upon his technique, glance through the dramatic column
of your favorite newspaper and you will find some reference to his
plays. Go to your woman’s club, O gentle reader! and you will hear
your neighbor, Mrs. McGinnis, deliver her views upon “Candida.”
Pass among any collection of human beings accustomed to even
rudimentary mental activity—and you will hear some mention, direct
or indirect, and some opinion, original or cribbed, of or about the wild
Irishman. All of this presupposes thinking, somewhere and by
somebody. Mrs. McGinnis’ analysis of Candida’s soul may be
plagiarized and in error, but it takes thinking to make errors, and the
existence of a plagiarist always proves the existence of a plagiaree.
Even the writers of reviews in the literary monthlies, and the press
agents who provide discourses upon “You Never Can Tell” for the
provincial dailies are thinkers, strange as the idea, at first sight, may
seem. And so we may take it for granted that Shaw tries to make us
think and that he succeeds.

V
“My task,” said Joseph Conrad the other day, in discussing the
aims of the novelist, “is, by the power of the written word, to make
you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—
and no more....”
“All that I have composed,” said Hendrik Ibsen, in an address to
the Ladies’ Club of Christiania, “has not proceeded from a conscious
tendency. I have been more the poet and less the social philosopher
than has been believed.... Not alone those who write, but also those
who read, compose, and very often they are more full of poetry than
the poet himself....”
“The poet,” said Schopenhauer, “brings pictures of life and
human character and situations before the imagination, sets
everything in motion and leaves it to everyone to think into these
pictures as much as his intellectual power will find for him therein.”
Let us suppose, for instance, that “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” is
given a performance and that 2000 average citizens pay to see it. Of
the 2000 it is probable that 1900 will be persons who accept
unquestioningly and without even a passing doubt the legal and
ecclesiastical maxim that the Magdalen was a sinner, whom mercy
might save from her punishment but not from her sin. A thousand,
perhaps, will sit through the play without progressing any further; it
will appeal to them merely as an entertainment and those who are
not vastly delighted by its salaciousness, will condemn its immorality.
But the 900, let us say, will slowly awaken to the strange fact that
there is something to be said against as well as for the ancient
maxim. Eight hundred of them, perhaps, after debating the matter in
their minds, will decide that the arguments for it overwhelm those
against it, and one hundred will leave the playhouse convinced to the
contrary or in more or less doubt. But the eight hundred, though they
have left harboring the same opinion that was theirs before they
came, will have made an infinite step forward. Instead of being
unthinking endorsers of a doctrine they have never even examined,
they will have become, in the true sense, original thinkers.
Thereafter, when they condemn the Magdalen, it will be, not because
a hundred popes did so before them, but because on hearing her
defense, they found it unconvincing.
In this will be seen the truth of the statement purposely
reiterated: that Shaw is in no sense a preacher. His private opinions,
very naturally, greatly color his plays, but his true purpose, like that
of every dramatist worth while, is to give a more or less accurate and
unbiased picture of some phase of human life, that persons
observing it may be led to speculate and meditate upon it. In
“Widowers’ Houses” he attempts, by setting forth a series of
transactions between a given group of familiar Englishmen, to show
that capitalism, as a social force, is responsible for the oppression
that slum landlords heap upon their tenants, and that, in
consequence, every other man of the capitalistic class, no matter
what his own particular investments and activities may be, shares, to
a greater or less extent, in the landlords’ offense. A capitalist reading
this play may conclude with some justice that the merit of
husbanding money—or, as Adam Smith calls it, the virtue of
abstinence—outweighs his portion of the burden of this sin, or that it
is, in a sense, inevitable and so not properly a sin at all; but whatever
his conclusion, if he has honestly come to it after a consideration of
the facts, he is a far better man than when he accepted the maxims
of the majority unquestioningly and without analysis.