The Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw - 60 Titles in One Edition (Illustrated Edition) - GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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and the essence of good manners is to conceal a yawn. A yawn may be defined as a silent yell. The power which the young pessimist of that time showed in this direction would have astonished anyone but him. He yawned so wide as to swallow the world. He swallowed the world like an unpleasant pill before retiring to an eternal rest. Now the last and best glory of Shaw is that in the circles where this creature was found, he is not. He has not been killed (I don’t know exactly why), but he has actually turned into a Shaw idealist. This is no exaggeration. I meet men who, when I knew them in 1898, were just a little too lazy to destroy the universe. They are now conscious of not being quite worthy to abolish some prison regulations. This destruction and conversion seem to me the mark of something actually great. It is always great to destroy a type without destroying a man. The followers of Shaw are optimists; some of them are so simple as even to use the word. They are sometimes rather pallid optimists, frequently very worried optimists, occasionally, to tell the truth, rather cross optimists: but they not pessimists; they can exult though they cannot laugh. He has at least withered up among them the mere pose of impossibility. Like every great teacher, he has cursed the barren fig-tree. For nothing except that impossibility is really impossible.

      I know it is all very strange. From the height of eight hundred years ago, or of eight hundred years hence, our age must look incredibly odd. We call the twelfth century ascetic. We call our own time hedonist and full of praise and pleasure. But in the ascetic age the love of life was evident and enormous, so that it had to be restrained. In an hedonist age pleasure has always sunk low, so that it has to be encouraged. How high the sea of human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now only know by the colossal walls that they built to keep it in bounds. How low human happiness sank in the twentieth century our children will only know by these extraordinary modern books, which tell people that it is a duty to be cheerful and that life is not so bad after all. Humanity never produces optimists till it has ceased to produce happy men. It is strange to be obliged to impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men to a banquet with spears. But this shall be written of our time: that when the spirit who denies besieged the last citadel, blaspheming life itself, there were some, there was one especially, whose voice was heard and whose spear was never broken.

       THE END

      Shaw wrote many of his works in this summer house in his garden.

      Shaw’s ashes were scattered in his garden in Hertfordshire

       Widowers’ Houses (1892)

       Table of Contents

       ACT I

       ACT II

       ACT III

      ACT I

       Table of Contents

       In the garden restaurant of a hotel at Remagen on the Rhine, on a fine afternoon in August in the eighteen-eighties. Looking down the Rhine towards Bonn, the gate leading from the garden to the riverside is seen on the right. The hotel is on the left. It has a wooden annex with an entrance marked Table d’Hote. A waiter is in attendance.

      A couple of English tourists come out of the hotel. The younger, Dr Harry Trench, is about 24, stoutly built, thick in the neck, close-cropped and black in the hair, with undignified medical-student manners, frank, hasty, rather boyish. The other, Mr William de Burgh Cokane, is older probably over 40, possibly 50 an ill-nourished, scanty-haired gentleman, with affected manners; fidgety, touchy, and constitutionally ridiculous in uncompassionate eyes.

      COKANE [on the threshold of the hotel, calling peremptorily to the waiter] Two beers for us out here. [The waiter goes for the beer.] Cokane comes into the garden]. We have got the room with the best view in the hotel, Harry, thanks to my tact. We’ll leave in the morning and do Mainz and Frankfurt. There is a very graceful female statue in the private house of a nobleman in Frankfurt. Also a zoo. Next day, Nuremberg! finest collection of instruments of torture in the world.

      TRENCH All right. You look out the trains, will you? [He takes out a Continental Bradshaw, and tosses it on one of the tables].

      COKANE [baulking himself in the act of sitting down] Pah! the seat is all dusty. These foreigners are deplorably unclean in their habits.

      TRENCH [buoyantly] Never mind : It dont matter, old chappie. Buck up, Billy, buck up. Enjoy yourself. [He throws Cokane into the chair, and sits down opposite him, taking out his pipe, and singing noisily]

      Pour out the Rhine wine: let it flow

      Like a free and bounding river

      COKANE [scandalized] In the name of common decency, Harry, will you remember that you are a gentleman and not a coster on Hampstead Heath on Bank Holiday? Would you dream of behaving like this in London?

      TRENCH Oh, rot! Ive come abroad to enjoy myself. So would you if youd just passed an examination after four years in the medical school and walking the hospital. [He again bursts into song.]

      COKANE [rising] Trench: either you travel as a gentleman, or you travel alone. This is what makes Englishmen unpopular on the Continent. It may not matter before the natives; but the people who came on board the steamer at Bonn are English. I have been uneasy all the afternoon about what they must think of us. Look at our appearance.

      TRENCH Whats wrong with our appearance?

      COKANE Negligé, my dear fellow, negligé. On the steamboat a little negligé was quite en regie; but here, in this hotel, some of them are sure to dress for dinner; and you have nothing but that Norfolk jacket. How are they to know that you are well connected if you do not shew it by your manners?

      TRENCH Pooh! the steamboat people were the scum of the earth Americans and all sorts. They may go hang themselves, Billy. I shall not bother about them. [He strikes a match, and proceeds to light his pipe.]

      COKANE Do drop calling me Billy in public, Trench. My name is Cokane. I am sure they were persons of consequence: you were struck with the distinguished appearance of the father yourself.

      TRENCH [sobered at once] What! those people? [He blows out the match and puts up his pipe.]

      COKANE [following up his advantage triumphantly] Here, Harry, here: at this hotel. I recognized the father’s umbrella in the hall.

      TRENCH [with a touch of genuine shame] I suppose I ought to have brought a change. But a lot of luggage is such a nuisance; and [rising abruptly] at all events we can go and have a wash. [He turns to go into the hotel, but stops in consternation, seeing some people coming up to the riverside gate]. Oh, I say! Here they are.

      A lady and gentleman, followed by a porter with some light parcels, not luggage, but shop purchases, come into the garden. They are apparently father and daughter. The gentleman is 50, tall, well preserved, and of upright carriage. His incisive, domineering utterance and imposing style, with his strong aquiline nose and resolute clean-shaven mouth, give him an air of importance. He wears a light grey frock-coat with silk linings, a white hat, and a fieldglass slung in a new leather case. A self-made man, formidable to servants, not easily accessible to anyone. His daughter is a well-dressed, well-fed, goodlooking, strongminded young woman, presentably ladylike, but still her father’s daughter. Nevertheless fresh and attractive, and none the worse for being vital and energetic rather than delicate and refined.

      COKANE [quickly taking the arm of Trench, who is staring as if transfixed] Recollect yourself, Harry: presence of mind, presence

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