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Androcles and the Lion,
Overruled, Pygmalion.
By Bernard Shaw.

Constable and Company
Ltd. London: 19 16.

Copyright, George Bernard Shaiv, 19 16.
All rigkti rtierved.

ANDROCLES AND THE LION
XXIII

1912

PREFACE ON THE PROSPECTS
OF CHRISTIANITY

Why not give Christianity a Trial ?

The question seems a hopeless one after 2000 years of
resolute adherence to the old cry of "Not this man, but
Barabbas". Yet it is beginning to look as if Barabbas was
a failure, in spite of his strong right hand, his victories,
his empires, his millions of money, and his moralities and
churches and political constitutions. "This man" has not
been a failure yet ; for nobody has ever been sane enough to
try his way. But he has had one quaint triumph. Barabbas
has stolen his name and taken his cross as a standard. There
is a sort of compliment in that. There is even a sort of
loyalty in it, like that of the brigand who breaks every law
and yet claims to be a patriotic subject of the king who
makes them. We have always had a curious feeling that
though we crucified Christ on a stick, he somehow managed
to get hold of the right end of it, and that if we were
better men we might try his plan. There have been one
or two grotesque attempts at it by inadequate people, such
as the Kingdom of God in Munster, which was ended by a
crucifixion so much more atrocious than the one on Calvary
that the bishop who took the part of Annas went home and
died of horror. But responsible people have never made
such attempts. The moneyed, respectable, capable world
vii b

viii Androcles and the Lion

has been steadily anti-Christian and Barabbasque since the
crucifixion ; and the specific doctrine of Jesus has not in
all that time been put into political or general social practice.
I am no more a Christian than Pilate was, or you, gentle
reader ; and yet, like Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus to Annas
and Caiaphas ; and I am ready to admit that after con-
templating the world and human nature for nearly sixty
years, I see no way out of the world's misery but the way
which would have been found by Christ's will if he had
undertaken the work of a modern practical statesman.

Pray do not at this early point lose patience with me and
shut the book. I assure you I am as sceptical and scientific
and modern a thinker as you will find anywhere. I grant
you I know a great deal more about economics and politics
than Jesus did, and can do things he could not do. I am
by all Barabbasque standards a person of much better char-
acter and standing, and greater practical sense. I have no
sympathy with vagabonds and talkers who try to reform
society by taking men away from their regular productive
work and making vagabonds and talkers of them too; and
if I had been Pilate I should have recognized as plainly as
he the necessity for suppressing attacks on the existing
social order, however corrupt that order might be, by
people with no knowledge of government and no power to
construct political machinery to carry out their views, act-
ing on the very dangerous delusion that the end of the
world was at hand. I make no defence of such Christians
as Savonarola and John of Leyden : they were scuttling the
ship before they had learned how to build a raft; and it
became necessary to throw them overboard to save the
crew. I say this to set myself right with respectable
society; but I must still insist that if ]csus could i-«ave
worked out the practical problems of a Communist consti-
tution, an admitted obligation to deal with crime without
revenge or punishment, and a full assumption by humanity
of divine responsibilities, he would have conferred an in-
calculable benefit on mankind, because these distinctive

Preface ix

demands of his are now turning out to be good sense and
sound economics.

I say distinctive, because his common humanity and his
subjection to time and space (that is, to the Syrian life of
his period) involved his belief in many things, true and
false, that in no way distinguish him from other Syrians
of that time. But such common beliefs do not constitute
specific Christianity any more than wearing a beard, work-
ing in a carpenter's shop, or believing that the earth is flat
and that the stars could drop on it from heaven like hail-
stones. Christianity interests practical statesmen now be-
cause of the doctrines that distinguished Christ from the
Jews and the Barabbasques generally, including ourselves.

Why Jesus more than Another ?

I do not imply, however, that these doctrines were
pecuHar to Christ. A doctrine peculiar to one man would
be only a craze, unless its comprehension depended on a
development of human faculty so rare that only one excep-
tionally gifted man possessed it. But even in this case it
would be useless, because incapable of spreading. Christi-
anity is a step in moral evolution which is independent of
any individual preacher. If Jesus had never existed (and
that he ever existed in any other sense than that in which
Shakespear's Hamlet existed has been vigorously questioned)
Tolstoy would have thought and taught and quarrelled with
the Greek Church all the same. Their creed has been
fragmentarily practised to a considerable extent in spite of
the fact that the laws of all countries treat it, in effect, as
criminal. Many of its advocates have been militant atheists.
But for some reason the imagination of white mankind has
picked out Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ, and attributed
all the Christian doctrines to him ; and as it is the doctrine
and not the man that matters, and, as, besides, one symbol
is as good as another provided everyone attaches the same
meaning to it, I raise, for the moment, no question as to

X Androcles and the Lion

how far the gospels are original, and how far they consist
of Greek and Chinese interpolations. The record that Jesus
said certain things is not invalidated by a demonstration
that Confucius said them before him. Those who claim a
literal divine paternity for him cannot be silenced by the
discovery that the same claim was made for Alexander
and Augustus. And I am not just now concerned with
the credibility of the gospels as records of fact ; for I
am not acting as a detective, but turning our modern
lights on to certain ideas and doctrines in them which
disentangle themselves from the rest because they are
flatly contrary to common practice, common sense, and
common belief, and yet have, in the teeth of dogged
incredulity and recalcitrance, produced an irresistible im-
pression that Christ, though rejected by his posterity as an
unpractical dreamer, and executed by his contemporaries
as a dangerous anarchist and blasphemous madman, was
greater than his judges.

Was Jesus a Coward ?

I know quite well that this impression of superiority is
not produced on everyone, even of those who profess ex-
treme susceptibility to it. Setting aside the huge mass of
inculcated Christ-worship which has no real significance
because it has no intelligence, there is, among people who
are really free to think for themselves on the subject, a
great deal of hearty dislike of Jesus and of contempt for his
failure to save himself and overcome his enemies by personal
bravery and cunning as Mahomet did. I have heard this
feeling expressed far more impatiently by persons brought
up in England as Christians than by Mahometans, who
are, like their prophet, very civil to Jesus, and allow him
a place in their esteem and veneration at least as high as
we accord to John the Baptist. But this British bulldog
contempt is founded on a complete misconception of
his reasons for submitting voluntarily to an ordeal of tor-

Preface xi

ment and death. The modern Secularist is often so deter-
mined to regard Jesus as a man like himself and nothing
more, that he slips unconsciously into the error of as-
suming that Jesus shared that view. But it is quite clear
from the New Testament writers (the chief authorities for
believing that Jesus ever existed) that Jesus at the time of
his death believed himself to be the Christ, a divine per-
sonage. It is therefore absurd to criticize his conduct
before Pilate as if he were Colonel Roosevelt or Admiral
von Tirpitz or even Mahomet. Whether you accept his
belief in his divinity as fully as Simon Peter did, or reject
it as a delusion which led him to submit to torture and
sacrifice his life without resistance in the conviction that
he would presently rise again in glory, you are equally
bound to admit that, far from behaving like a coward or a
sheep, he shewed considerable physical fortitude in going
through a cruel ordeal against which he could have defended
himself as effectually as he cleared the moneychangers out
of the temple. " Gentle Jesus, meek and mild" is a snivel-
ling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels. St
Matthewwould as soon have thought of applying such adjec-
tives to Judas Maccabeus as to Jesus ; and even St Luke,
who makes Jesus polite and gracious, does not make him
meek. The picture of him as an English curate of the
farcical comedy type, too meek to fight a policeman, and
everybody's butt, may be useful in the nursery to soften
children ; but that such a figure could ever have become a
centre of the world's attention is too absurd for discussion :
grown men and women may speak kindly of a harmless
creature who utters amiable sentiments and is a helpless
nincompoop when he is called on to defend them ; but
they will not follow him, nor do what he tells them,
because they do not wish to share his defeat and disgrace.

xii Androcles and the Lion

Was Jesus a Martyr

It is important therefore that we should clear our minds
of the notion that Jesus died, as some of us are in the habit
of declaring, for his social and political opinions. There have
been many martyrs to those opinions ; but he was not one of
them, nor, as his words shew, did he see any more sense in
martyrdom than Galileo did. He was executed by the Jews
for the blasphemy of claiming to be a God; and Pilate, to
whom this was a mere piece of superstitious nonsense, let
them execute him as the cheapest way of keeping them
quiet, on the formal plea that he had committed treason
against Rome by saying that he was the King of the Jews.
He was not falsely accused, nor denied full opportunities
of defending himself. The proceedings were quite straight-
forward and regular ; and Pilate, to whom the appeal lay,
favored him and despised his judges, and was evidently
willing enough to be conciliated. But instead of denying
the charge, Jesus repeated the offence. He knew what
he was doing : he had alienated numbers of his own dis-
ciples and been stoned in the streets for doing it before.
He was not lying: he believed literally what he said. The
horror of the High Priest was perfectly natural : he was
a Primate confronted with a heterodox street preacher
uttering what seemed to him an appalling and impudent
blasphemy. The fact that the blasphemy was to Jesus a
simple statement of fact, and that it has since been accepted
as such by all western nations, does not invalidate the pro-
ceedings, nor give us the right to regard Annas and Caiaphas
as worse men than the Archbishop of Canterbury and the
Head Master of Eton. If Jesus had been indicted in a
modern court, he would have been examined by two
doctors; found to be obsessed by a delusion; declared
incapable of pleading; and sent to an asylum : that is the
whole difference. But please note that when a man is
charged before a modern tribunal (to take a case that

Preface xiii

happened the other day) of having asserted and maintained
that he was an officer returned from the front to receive
the Victoria Cross at the hands of the King, although he
was in fact a mechanic, nobody thinks of treating him as
afflicted with a delusion. He is punished for false pre-
tences, because his assertion is credible and therefore
misleading. Just so, the claim to divinity made by Jesus
was to the High Priest, who looked forward to the coming
of a Messiah, one that might conceivably have been true,
and might therefore have misled the people in a very
dangerous way. That was why he treated Jesus as an
impostor and a blasphemer where we should have treated
him as a madman.

The Gospels without Prejudice.

All this will become clear if we read the gospels without
prejudice. When I was young it was impossible to read
them without fantastic confusion of thought. The con-
fusion was so utterly confounded that it was called the
proper spirit to read the Bible in. Jesus was a baby ; and
he was older than creation. He was a man who could be
persecuted, stoned, scourged, and killed; and he was a
god, immortal and all-powerful, able to raise the dead and
call millions of angels to his aid. It was a sin to doubt either
view of him : that is, it was a sin to reason about him ; and
the end was that you did not reason about him, and read about
him only when you were compelled. When you heard the
gospel stories read in church, or learnt them from painters
and poets, you came outwith an impression of their contents
that would have astonished a Chinaman who had read the
story without prepossession. Even sceptics who were speci-
ally on their guard, put the Bible in the dock, and read the
gospels with the object of detecting discrepancies in the
four narratives to shew that the writers were as subject to
error as the writers of yesterday's newspaper.

All this has changed greatly within two generations.

xiv Androcles and the Lion

Today the Bible is so little read that the language of the
Authorized Version is rapidly becoming obsolete ; so that
even in the United States, where the old tradition of the
verbal infallibility of "the book of books " lingers more
strongly than anywhere else except perhaps in Ulster, re-
translations into modern English have been introduced per-
force to save its bare intelligibility. It is quite easy today
to find cultivated persons who have never read the New
Testament, and on whom therefore it is possible to try the
experiment of asking them to read the gospels and state
what they have gathered as to the history and views and
character of Christ.

The Gospels now unintelligible to
Novices.

But it will not do to read the gospels with a mind
furnished only for the reception of, say, a biography of
Goethe, You will not make sense of them, nor even be able
without impatient weariness to persevere in the task of going
steadily through them, unless you know something of the
history of the human imagination as applied to religion.
Not long ago I asked a writer of distinguished intellectual
competence whether he had made a study of the gospels
since his childhood. His reply was that he had lately tried,
but " found it all such nonsense that I could not stick it."
As I do not want to send anyone to the gospels with this
result, I had better here give a brief exposition of how much
of the history of religion is needed to make the gospels
and the conduct and ultimate fate of Jesus intelligible and
interesting.

Worldliness of the Majority.

The first common mistake to get rid of is that mankind
consists of a great mass of religious people and a few
eccentric atheists. It consists of a huge mass of worldly

Preface xv

people, and a small percentage of persons deeply interested
in religion and concerned about their own souls and other
people's ; and this section consists mostly of those who are
passionately affirming the established religion and those who
are passionately attacking it, the genuine philosophers being
very few. Thus you never have a nation of millions of
Wesleys and one Tom Paine. You have a million Mr
Worldly Wisemans, one Wesley, with his small congrega-
tion, and one Tom Paine, with his smaller congregation.
The passionately religious are a people apart ; and if they
were not hopelessly outnumbered by the worldly, they
would turn the world upside down, as St Paul was re-
proached, quite justly, for wanting to do. Few people can
number among their personal acquaintances a single atheist
or a single Plymouth Brother. Unless a religious turn in
ourselves has led us to seek, the little Societies to which
these rare birds belong, we pass our lives among people
who, whatever creeds they may repeat, and in whatever
temples they may avouch their respectability and wear
their Sunday clothes, have robust consciences, and hunger
and thirst, not for righteousness, but for rich feeding and
comfort and social position and attractive mates and ease
and pleasure and respect and consideration : in short, for
love and money. To these people one morality is as good
as another provided they are used to it and can put up with
its restrictions without unhappiness ; and in the mainten-
ance of this morality they will fight and punish and coerce
without scruple. They may not be the salt of the earth,
these Philistines; but they are the substance of civiliza-
tion ; and they save society from ruin by criminals and
conquerors as well as by Savonarolas and Knipperdollings.
And as they know, very sensibly, that a little religion is
good for children and serves morality, keeping the poor in
goodhumor or in awe by promising rewards in heaven or
threatening torments in hell, they encourage the religious
people up to a certain point: for instance, if Savonarola
only tells the ladies of Florence that they ought to tear ofF

xvi Androcles and the Lion

their jewels and finery and sacrifice them to God, they
offer him a cardinal's hat, and praise him as a saint ; but
if he induces them to actually do it, they burn him as a
public nuisance.

Religion of the Minority. Salvationism.

The religion of the tolerated religious minority has
always been essentially the same religion : that is why its
changes of name and form have made so little difference.
That is why, also, a nation so civilized as the English can
convert negroes to their faith with great ease, but cannot
convert Mahometans or Jews. The negro finds in civilized
Salvationism an unspeakably more comforting version of
his crude creed; but neither Saracen nor Jew sees any
advantage in it over his own version. The Crusader was
surprised to find the Saracen quite as religious and moral
as himself, and rather more than less civilized. The Latin
Christian has nothing to offer the Greek Christian that
Greek Christianity has not already provided. They are
all, at root, Salvationists.

Let us trace this religion of Salvation from its beginnings.
So many things that man does not himself contrive or de-
sire are always happening : death, plagues, tempests, blights,
floods, sunrise and sunset, growths and harvests and decay,
and Kant's two wonders of the starry heavens above us
and the moral law within us, that we conclude that some-
body must be doing it all, or that somebody is doing the
good and somebody else doing the evil, or that armies of
invisible persons, beneficent and malevolent, are doing it;
hence you postulate gods and devils, angels and demons.
You propitiate these powers with presents, called sacrifices,
and flatteries, called praises. Then the Kantian moral law
within you makes you conceive your god as a judge;
and straightway you try to corrupt him, also with presents
and flatteries. This seems shocking to us ; but our objec-

Preface xvii

tion to it is quite a recent development : no longer ago
than Shakespear's time it was thought quite natural that
litigants should give presents to human judges ; and the
buying off of divine wrath by actual money payments to
priests, or, in the reformed churches which discountenance
this, by subscriptions to charities and church building and
the like, is still in full swing. Its practical disadvantage is
that though it makes matters very easy for the rich, it cuts
off the poor from all hope of divine favor. And this quickens
the moral criticism of the poor to such an extent, that they
soon find the moral law within them revolting against the
idea of buying off the deity with gold and gifts, though
they are still quite ready to buy him off with the paper
money of praise and professions of repentance. Accord-
ingly, you will find that though a religion may last un-
changed for many centuries in primitive communities
where the conditions of life leave no room for poverty and
riches, and the process of propitiating the supernatural
powers is as well within the means of the least of the
members as within those of the headman, yet when com-
mercial civilization arrives, and capitalism divides the
people into a few rich and a great many so poor that they
can barely live, a movement for religious reform will arise
among the poor, and will be essentially a movement for
cheap or entirely gratuitous salvation.

To understand what the poor mean by propitiation, we
must examine for a moment what they mean by justice.

The Difference between Atonement and
Punishment.

The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge
and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both
sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and
that when a wrong has been done, it should be paid for by
an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine majority

xviii Androcles and the Lion

a matter of course that this compensating suiFering should
be inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its de-
terrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers; but a
moment's reflection will shew that this utilitarian applica-
tion corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the
shedding of innocent blood cannot be balanced by the shed-
ding of guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate
God for the murder of one of his righteous servants is like
sacrificing a mangy sheep or an ox with the rinderpest : it
calls down divine wrath instead of appeasing it. In doing
it we offer God as a sacrifice the gratification of our own
revenge and the protection of our own lives without cost
to ourselves ; and cost to ourselves is the essence of sacri-
fice and expiation. However much the Philistines have suc-
ceeded in confusing these things in practice, they are to
the Salvationist sense distinct and even contrary. The
Baronet's cousin in Dickens's novel, who, perplexed by the
failure of the police to discover the murderer of the baronet's
solicitor, said " Far better hang wrong fellow than no
fellow," was not only expressing a very common sentiment,
but trembling on the brink of the rarer Salvationist opinion
that it is much better to hang the wrong fellow : that, in
fact, the wrong fellow is the right fellow to hang.

The point is a cardinal one, because until we grasp it
not only does historical Christianity remain unintelligible
to us, but those who do not care a rap about historical
Christianity may be led into the mistake of supposing that
if we discard revenge, and treat murderers exactly as God
treated Cain : that is, exempt them from punishment by
putting a brand on them as unworthy to be sacrificed, and
let them face the world as best they can with that brand
on them, wc should get rid both of punishment and sacrifice.
It would not at all follow : on the contrary, the feeling
that there must be an expiation of the murder might quite
possibly lead to our putting some innocent person — the
more innocent the better — to a cruel death to balance the
account with divine justice.

Preface xix

Salvation at first a Class Privilege ;
and the Remedy.

Thus, even when the poor decide that the method of pur-
chasing salvation by offering rams and goats or bringing
gold to the altar must be wrong because they cannot afford
it, we still do not feel "saved" without a sacrifice and a
victim. In vain do we try to substitute mystical rites that
cost nothing, such as circumcision, or, as a substitute for
that, baptism. Our sense of justice still demands an expia-
tion, a sacrifice, a sufferer for our sins. And this leaves the
poor man still in his old difficulty; for if it was impossible
for him to procure rams and goats and shekels, how much
more impossible is it for him to find a neighbor who will
voluntarily suffer for his sins : one who will say cheerfully
" You have committed a murder. Well, never mind : I am
willing to be hanged for it in your stead"?

Our imagination must come to our rescue. Why not, in-
stead of driving ourselves to despair by insisting on a separate
atonement by a separate redeemer for every sin, have one
great atonement and one great redeemer to compound for
the sins' of the world once for all ? Nothing easier, nothing
cheaper. The yoke is easy, the burden light. All you have
to do when the redeemer is once found (or invented by the
imagination) is to believe in the efficacy of the transaction,
and you are saved. The rams and goats cease to bleed ; the
altars which ask for expensive gifts and continually renewed
sacrifices are torn down; and the Church of the single re-
deemer and the single atonement rises on the ruins of the
old temples, and becomes a single Church of the Christ.

Retrospective Atonement ; and the
Expectation of the Redeemer.

But this does not happen at once. Between the old
costly religion of the rich and the new gratuitous religion

XX Androcles and the Lion

of the poor there comes an interregnum in which the
redeemer, though conceived by the human imagination, is
not yet found. He is awaited and expected under the
names of the Christ, the Messiah, Baldur the Beautiful,
or what not; but he has not yet come. Yet the sinners
are not therefore in despair. It is true that they cannot
say, as we say, " The Christ has come, and has redeemed
us"; but they can say "The Christ will come, and will
redeem us," which, as the atonement is conceived as retro-
spective, is equally consoling. There are periods when
nations are seething with this expectation and crying aloud
with prophecy of the Redeemer through their poets. To
feel that atmosphere we have only to take up the Bible and
read Isaiah at one end of such a period and Luke and John
at the other.

Completion of the Scheme by Luther
and Calvin.

We now see our religion as a quaint but quite intelligible
evolution from crude attempts to propitiate the destructive
forces of Nature among savages to a subtle theology with a
costly ritual of sacrifice possible only to the rich as a luxury,
and finally to the religion of Luther and Calvin. And it must
be said for the earlier forms that they involved very real
sacrifices. The sacrifice was not always vicarious, and is
not yet universally so. In India men pay with their own
skins, torturing themselves hideously to attain holiness. In
the west, saints amazed the world with their austerities
and self-scourgings and confessions and vigils. But Luther
delivered us from all that. His reformation was a triumph
of imagination and a triumph of cheapness. It brought you
complete salvation and asked you for nothing but faith.
Luther did not know what he was doing in the scientific
sociological way in which we know it; but his instinct
served him better than knowledge could have done ; for it
was instinct rather than theological casuistry that made

Preface xxi

him hold so resolutely to Justification by Faith as the
trump card by which he should beat the Pope, or, as he
would have put it, the sign in which he should conquer.
He may be said to have abolished the charge for admission to
heaven. Paul had advocated this ; but Luther and Calvin
did it.

John Barleycorn.

There is yet another page in the history of religion which
must be conned and digested before the career of Jesus
can be fully understood. People who can read long books
will find it in Frazer's Golden Bough. Simpler folk will
find it in the peasant's song of John Barleycorn, now made
accessible to our drawingroom amateurs in the admirable
collections of Somersetshire Folk Songs by Mr Cecil Sharp.
From Frazer's magnum opus you will learn how the same
primitive logic which makes the Englishman believe today
that by eating a beefsteak he can acquire the strength and
courage of the bull, and to hold that belief in the face of
the most ignominious defeats by vegetarian wrestlers and
racers and bicyclists, led the first men who conceived God
as capable of incarnation to believe that they could acquire
a spark of his divinity by eating his flesh and drinking his
blood. And from the song of John Barleycorn you may
learn how the miracle of the seed, the growth, and the
harvest, still the most wonderful of all the miracles and
as inexplicable as ever, taught the primitive husbandman,
and, as we must now afiirm, taught him quite rightly, that
God is in the seed, and that God is immortal. And thus
it became the test of Godhead that nothing that you
could do to it could kill it, and that when you buried it, it
would rise again in renewed life and beauty and give man-
kind eternal life on condition that it was eaten and drunk,
and again slain and buried, to rise again for ever and ever.
You may, and indeed must, use John Barleycorn "right
barbarouslee," cutting him "ofFat knee " with your scythes,
scourging him with your flails, burying him in the earth ;

xxli Androcles and the Lion

and he will not resist you nor reproach you, but will rise
again in golden beauty amidst a great burst of sunshine and
bird music, and save you and renew your life. And from
the interweaving of these two traditions with the craving
for the Redeemer, you at last get the conviction that when
the Redeemer comes he will be immortal; he will give us
his body to eat and his blood to drink ; and he will prove
his divinity by suffering a barbarous death without resist-
ance or reproach, and rise from the dead and return to the
earth in glory as the giver of life eternal.

Looking for the End of the World.

Yet another persistent belief has beset the imagination
of the religious ever since religion spread among the poor,
or, rather, ever since commercial civilization produced a
hopelessly poor class cut off" from enjoyment in this world.
That belief is that the end of this world is at hand, and
that it will presently pass away and be replaced by a
kingdom of happiness, justice, and bliss in which the rich
and the oppressors and the unjust shall have no share. We
are all familiar with this expectation : many of us cherish
some pious relative who sees in every great calamity a sign
of the approaching end. Warning pamphlets arc in constant
circulation : advertisements are put in the papers and paid
for by those who are convinced, and who are horrified at
the indifference of the irreligious to the approaching doom.
And revivalist preachers, now as in the days of John the
Baptist, seldom fail to warn their flocks to watch and pray,
as the great day will steal upon them like a thief in the
night, and cannot be long deferred in a world so wicked.
This belief also associates itself with Barleycorn's second
coming; so that the two events become identified at last.

There is the other and more artificial side of this belief,
on which it is an inculcated dread. The ruler who appeals
to the prospect of heaven to console the poor and keep

Preface xxiii

them from insurrection also curbs the vicious by threaten-
ing them with hell. In the Koran we find Mahomet driven
more and more to this expedient of government; and ex-
perience confirms his evident belief that it is impossible to
govern without it in certain phases of civilization. We
shall see later on that it gives a powerful attraction to the
belief in a Redeemer, since it adds to remorse of conscience,
which hardened men bear very lightly, a definite dread of
hideous and eternal torture.

The Honor of Divine Parentage.

One more tradition must be noted. The consummation
of praise for a king is to declare that he is the son of no
earthly father, but of a god. His mother goes into the
temple of Apollo, and Apollo comes to her in the shape of
a serpent, or the like. The Roman emperors, following the
example of Augustus, claimed the title of God. Illogically,
such divine kings insist a good deal on their royal human
ancestors. Alexander, claiming to be the son of Apollo, is
equally determined to be the son of Philip. As the gospels
stand, St Matthew and St Luke give genealogies (the two
are difi^erent) establishing the descent of Jesus through
Joseph from the royal house of David, and yet declare
that not Joseph but the Holy Ghost was the father of
Jesus. It is therefore now held that the story of the Holy
Ghost is a later interpolation borrowed from the Greek
and Roman imperial tradition. But experience shews that
simultaneous faith in the descent from David and the con-
ception by the Holy Ghost is possible. Such double
beliefs are entertained by the human mind without un-
easiness or consciousness of the contradiction involved.
Many instances might be given : a familiar one to my
generation being that of the Tichborne claimant, whose
attempt to pass himself off as a baronet was supported by
an association of laborers on the ground that the Tichborne

c

xxiv Androcles and the Lion

family, in resisting it, were trying to do a laborer out of
his rights. It is quite possible that Matthew and Luke may
have been unconscious of the contradiction : indeed the
interpolation theory does not remove the difficulty, as the
interpolators themselves must have been unconscious of it.
A better ground for suspecting interpolation is that St Paul
knew nothing of the divine birth, and taught that Jesus
came into the world at his birth as the son of Joseph, but
rose from the dead after three days as the son of God.
Here again, few notice the discrepancy: the three views
are accepted simultaneously without intellectual discomfort.
We can provisionally entertain half a dozen contradictory
versions of an event if we feel either that it does not
greatly matter, or that there is a category attainable in which
the contradictions are reconciled.

But that is not the present point. All that need be noted
here is that the legend of divine birth was sure to be
attached sooner or later to very eminent persons in Roman
imperial times, and that modern theologians, far from dis-
crediting it, have very logically affirmed the miraculous
conception not only of Jesus but of his mother.

With no more scholarly equipment than a knowledge of
these habits of the human imagination, anyone may now
read the four gospels without bewilderment, and without
the contemptuous incredulity which spoils the temper of
many modern atheists, or the senseless credulity which some-
times makes pious people force us to shove them aside in
emergencies as impracticable lunatics when they ask us to
meet violence and injustice with dumb submission in the
belief that the strange demeanor of Jesus before Pilate was
meant as an example of normal human conduct. Let os
admit that without the proper clues the gospels are, to a
modern educated person, nonsensical and incredible, whilst
the apostles are unreadable. But with the clues, they are
fairly plain sailing. Jesus becomes an intelligible and con-

Preface xxv

sistent person. His reasons for going "like a lamb to the
slaughter" instead of saving himself as Mahomet did,
become quite clear. The narrative becomes as credible as
any other historical narrative of its period.

MATTHEW.

The Annunciation: the Massacre:
the Flight.

Let us begin w^ith the gospel of Matthew, bearing in
mind that it does not profess to be the evidence of an eye-
witness. It is a chronicle, founded, like other chronicles,
on such evidence and records as the chronicler could get
hold of. The only one of the evangelists who professes to
give first-hand evidence as an eyewitness naturally takes
care to say so; and the fact that Matthew makes no such
pretension, and writes throughout as a chronicler, makes it
clear that he is telling the story of Jesus as Holinshed told
the story of Macbeth, except that, for a reason to be given
later on, he must have collected his material and completed
his book within the lifetime of persons contemporary with
Jesus. Allowance must also be made for the fact that the
gospel is written in the Greek language, whilst the first-
hand traditions and the actual utterances of Jesus must
have been in Aramaic, the dialect of Palestine. These dis-
tinctions are important, asyou will find if you read Holinshed
or Froissart and then read Benvenuto Cellini. You do not
blame Holinshed or Froissart for believing and repeating
the things they had read or been told, though you cannot
always believe these things yourself. But when Cellini
tells you that he saw this or did that, and you find it im-
possible to believe him, you lose patience with him, and
are disposed to doubt everything in his autobiography. Do
not forget, then, that Matthew is Holinshed and not

xxvi Androcles and the Lion

Benvenuto. The very first pages of his narrative will put
your attitude to the test.

Matthew tells us that the mother of Jesus was betrothed
to a man of royal pedigree named Joseph, who was rich
enough to live in a house in Bethlehem to which kings
could bring gifts of gold without provoking any comment.
An angel announces to Joseph that Jesus is the son of the
Holy Ghost, and that he must not accuse her of infidelity
because of her bearing a son of which he is not the father;
but this episode disappears from the subsequent narrative :
there is no record of its having been told to Jesus, nor any
indication of his having any knowledge of it. The narra-
tive, in fact, proceeds in all respects as if the annunciation
formed no part of it.

Herod the Tetrarch, believing that a child has been born
who will destroy him, orders all the male children to be
slaughtered ; and Jesus escapes by the flight of his parents
into Egypt, whence they return to Nazareth when the
danger is over. Here it is necessary to anticipate a little by
saying that none of the other evangelists accepts this story,
as none of them except John, who throws over Matthew
altogether, shares his craze for treating history and biography
as mere records of the fulfilment of ancient Jewish pro-
phecies. This craze no doubt led him to seek for some
legend bearing out Hosea's " Out of Egypt have I called
my son," and Jeremiah's Rachel weeping for her children :
in fact, he says so. Nothing that interests us nowadays
turns on the credibility of the massacre of the innocents
and the flight into Egypt. We may forget them, and pro-
ceed to the important part of the narrative, which skips at
once to the manhood of Jesus.

John the Baptist.

At this moment, a Salvationist prophet named John is
stirring the people very strongly. John has declared that
the rite of circumcision is insufficient as a dedication of

Preface xxvii

the individual to God, and has substituted the rite of
baptism. To us, who are accustomed to baptism as a
matter of course, and to whom circumcision is a rather
ridiculous foreign practice of no consequence, the sensa-
tional effect of such a heresy as this on the Jews is not
apparent : it seems to us as natural that John should have
baptized people as that the rector of our village should do
so. But, as St Paul found to his cost later on, the discarding
of circumcision for baptism was to the Jews as startling a
heresy as the discarding of transubstantiation in the Mass
was to the Catholics of the XVI century.

Jesus joins the Baptists.

Jesus entered as a man of thirty (Luke says) into the
religious life of his time by going to John the Baptist and
demanding baptism from him, much as certain well-to-do
young gentlemen forty years ago "joined the Socialists."
As far as established Jewry was concerned, he burnt his
boats by this action, and cut himself off from the routine
of wealth, respectability, and orthodoxy. He then began
preaching John's gospel, which, apart from the heresy of
baptism, the value of which lay in its bringing the Gen-
tiles (that is, the uncircumcized) within the pale of salvation,
was a call to the people to repent of their sins, as the
kingdom of heaven was at hand. Luke adds that he also
preached the communism of charity; told the surveyors of
taxes not to over-assess the taxpayers ; and advised soldiers
to be content with their wages and not to be violent or lay
false accusations. There is no record of John going beyond
this.

The Savage John and the Civilized

Jesus.

Jesus went beyond it very rapidly, according to Matthew.
Though, like John, he became an itinerant preacher, he

xxviii Androcles and the Lion

departed widely from John's manner of life. John went
into the wilderness, not into the synagogues; and his
baptismal font was the river Jordan. He was an ascetic,
clothed in skins and living on locusts and wild honey,
practising a savage austerity. He courted martyrdom, and
met it at the hands of Herod. Jesus saw no merit either
in asceticism or martyrdom. In contrast to John he was
essentially a highly-civilized, cultivated person. According
to Luke, he pointed out the contrast himself, chaffing the
Jews for complaining that John must be possessed by
the devil because he was a teetotaller and vegetarian,
whilst, because Jesus was neither one nor the other,
they reviled him as a gluttonous man and a winebibber,
the friend of the officials and their mistresses. He told
straitlaced disciples that they would have trouble enough
from other people without making any for themselves, and
that they should avoid martyrdom and enjoy themselves
whilst they had the chance. " When they persecute you in
this city," he says, "flee into the next." He preaches in
the synagogues and in the open air indifferently, just as
they come. He repeatedly says, " I desire mercy and not
sacrifice," meaning evidently to clear himself of the in-
veterate superstition that suffering is gratifying to God.
" Be not, as the Pharisees, of a sad countenance," he says.
He is convivial, feasting with Roman officials and sinners.
He is careless of his person, and is remonstrated with for not
washing his hands before sitting down to table. The
followers of John the Baptist, who fast, and who expect to
find the Christians greater ascetics than themselves, are dis-
appointed at finding that Jesus and his twelve friends do
not fast; and Jesus tells them that they should rejoice in
him instead of being melancholy. He is jocular, and tells
them they will all have as much fasting as they want soon
enough, whether they like it or not. He is not afraid of
disease, and dines with a leper. A woman, apparently to
protect him against infection, pours a costly unguent on
his head, and is rebuked because what it cost might have

Preface xxix

been given to the poor. He poohpoohs that lowspirited
view, and says, as he said when he was reproached for not
fasting, that the poor are always there to be helped, but
that he is not there to be anointed always, implying that
you should never lose a chance of being happy when there is
so much misery in the world. He breaks the Sabbath ; is
impatient of conventionality when it is uncomfortable or ob-
structive ; and outrages the feelings of the Jews by breaches of
it. He is apt to accuse people who feel that way of hypocrisy.
Like the late Samuel Butler, he regards disease as a depart-
ment of sin, and on curing a lame man, says " Thy sins
are forgiven" instead of "Arise and walk," subsequently
maintaining, when the Scribes reproach him for assuming
power to forgive sin as well as to cure disease, that the
two come to the same thing. He has no modest affecta-
tions, and claims to be greater than Solomon or Jonah.
When reproached, as Bunyan was, for resorting to the art
of fiction when teaching in parables, he justifies himself on
the ground that art is the only way in which the people
can be taught. He is, in short, what we should call an
artist and a Bohemian in his manner of life.

Jesus not a Proselytist.

A point of considerable practical importance today is that
he expressly repudiates the idea that forms of religion, once
rooted, can be weeded out and replanted with the flowers of
a foreign faith. " If you try to root up the tares you will
root up the wheat as well." Our proselytizing missionary
enterprises are thus flatly contrary to his advice ; and their
results appear to bear him out in his view that if you con-
vert a man brought up in another creed, you inevitably
demoralize him. He acts on this view himself, and does
not convert his disciples from Judaism to Christianity. To
this day a Christian would be in religion a Jew initiated
by baptism instead of circumcision, and accepting Jesus as
the Messiah, and his teachings as of higher authority than

XXX Androcles and the Lion

those of Moses, but for the action of the Jewish priests,
who, to save Jewry from being submerged in the rising
flood of Christianity after the capture of Jerusalem and the
destruction of the Temple, set up what was practically a
new religious order, with new Scriptures and elaborate new
observances, and to their list of the accursed added one
Jeschu, a bastard magician, whose comic rogueries brought
him to a bad end like Punch or Til Eulenspiegel : an
invention which cost them dear when the Christians got
the upper hand of them politically. The Jew as Jesus,
himself a Jew, knew him, never dreamt of such things, and
could follow Jesus without ceasing to be a Jew.

The Teachings of Jesus.

So much for his personal life and temperament. His
public career as a popular preacher carries him equally far
beyond John the Baptist. He lays no stress on baptism or
vows, and preaches conduct incessantly. He advocates
communism, the widening of the private family with its
cramping tics into the great family of mankind under the
fatherhood of God, the abandonment of revenge and punish-
ment, the counteracting of evil by good instead of by a
hostile evil, and an organic conception of society in which
you are not an independent individual but a member of
society, your neighbor being another member, and each of
you members one of another, as two fingers on a hand,
the obvious conclusion being that unless you love your
neighbor as yourself and he reciprocates you will both be
the worse for it. He conveys all this with extraordinary
charm, and entertains his hearers with fables (parable;;) to
illustrate them. He has no synagogue or regular congrega-
tion, but travels from place to place with twelve men
whom he has called from their work as he passed, and
who have abandoned it to follow him.

Preface xxxi

The Miracles.

He has certain abnormal powers by which he can per-
form miracles. He is ashamed of these powers, but, being
extremely compassionate, cannot refuse to exercise them
when afflicted people beg him to cure them, when multi-
tudes of people are hungry, and when his disciples are
terrified by storms on the lakes. He asks for no reward,
but begs the people not to mention these powers of his.
There are two obvious reasons for his dislike of being
known as a worker of miracles. One is the natural objec-
tion of all men who possess such powers, but have far more
important business in the world than to exhibit them, to
be regarded primarily as charlatans, besides being pestered
to give exhibitions to satisfy curiosity. The other is that
his view of the effect of miracles upon his mission is ex-
actly that taken later on by Rousseau. He perceives that
they will discredit him and divert attention from his
doctrine by raising an entirely irrelevant issue between his
disciples and his opponents.

Possibly my readers may not have studied Rousseau's
Letters Written FromThe Mountain, which maybe regarded
as the classic work on miracles as credentials of divine
mission. Rousseau shews, as Jesus foresaw, that the miracles
are the main obstacle to the acceptance of Christianity,
because their incredibility (if they were not incredible
they would not be miracles) makes people sceptical as to
the whole narrative, credible enough in the main, in which
they occur, and suspicious of the doctrine with which they
are thus associated. "Get rid of the miracles," said Rousseau,
"and the whole world will fall at the feet of Jesus Christ."
He points out that miracles offered as evidence of divinity,
and failing to convince, make divinity ridiculous. He says,
in effect, there is nothing in making a lame man walk :
thousands of lame men have been cured and have walked

xxxii Androcles and the Lion

without any miracle. Bring me a man with only one leg
and make another grow instantaneously on him before my
eyes; and I will be really impressed; but mere cures of
ailments that have often been cured before are quite useless
as evidence of anything else than desire to help and power
to cure.

Jesus, according to Matthew, agreed so entirely with
Rousseau, and felt the danger so strongly, that when
people who were not ill or in trouble came to him and
asked him to exercise his powers as a sign of his mission,
he was irritated beyond measure, and refused with an
indignation which they, not seeing Rousseau's point, must
have thought very unreasonable. To be called "an evil
and adulterous generation " merely for asking a miracle
worker to give an exhibition of his powers, is rather a
startling experience. Mahomet, by the way, also lost his
temper when people asked him to perform miracles. But
Mahomet expressly disclaimed any unusual powers; whereas
it is clear from Matthew's story that Jesus (unfortunately
for himself, as he thought) had some powers of healing. It
is also obvious that the exercise of such powers would give
rise to wild talcs of magical feats which would expose their
hero to condemnation as an impostor among people whose
good opinion was of great consequence to the movement
started by his mission.

But the deepest annoyance arising from the miracles
would be the irrelevance of the issue raised by them.
Jesus's teaching has nothing to do with miracles. If his
mission had been simply to demonstrate a new method of
restoring lost eyesight, the miracle of curing the blind
would have been entirely relevant. But to say " You
should love your enemies ; and to convince you of this I
will now proceed to cure this gentleman of cataract" would
have been, to a man of Jesus's intelligence, the proposition
of an idiot. If it could be proved today that not one of
the miracles of Jesus actually occurred, that proof would
not invalidate a single one of his didactic utterances; and

Preface xxxlii

conversely, if it could be proved that not only did the
miracles actually occur, but that he had wrought a thousand
other miracles a thousand times more w^onderful, not a jot
of weight would be added to his doctrine. And yet the in-
tellectual energy of sceptics and divines has been wasted
for generations in arguing about the miracles on the
assumption that Christianity is at stake in the controversy
as to whether the stories of Matthew are false or true.
According to Matthew himself, Jesus must have known
this only too well ; for wherever he went he was assailed
with a clamor for miracles, though his doctrine created
bewilderment.

So much for the miracles! Matthew tells us further,
that Jesus declared that his doctrines would be attacked
by Church and State, and that the common multitude were
the salt of the earth and the light of the world. His dis-
ciples, in their relations with the political and ecclesiastical
organizations, would be as sheep among wolves.

Matthew imputes Bigotry to Jesus.

Matthew, like most biographers, strives to identify the
opinions and prejudices of his herewith his own. Although
he describes Jesus as tolerant even to carelessness, he draws
the line at the Gentile, and represents Jesus as a bigoted
Jew who regards his mission as addressed exclusively to
" the lost sheep of the house of Israel." When a woman
of Canaan begged Jesus to cure her daughter, he first re-
fused to speak to her, and then told her brutally that "It
is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to the
dogs." But when the woman said, "Truth, Lord; yet the
dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their master's table,"
she melted the Jew out of him and made Christ a Christian.
To the woman whom he had just called a dog he said, " O
woman, great is thy faith : be it unto thee even as thou
wilt." This is somehow one of the most touching stories
in the gospel ; perhaps because the woman rebukes the

xxxiv Androcles and the Lion

prophet by a touch of his own finest quality. It is certainly
out of character ; but as the sins of good men are always
out of character, it is not safe to reject the story as invented
in the interest of Matthew's determination that Jesus shall
have nothing to do with the Gentiles. At all events, there
the story is ; and it is by no means the only instance in
which Matthew reports Jesus, in spite of the charm of his
preaching, as extremely uncivil in private intercourse.

The Great Change.

So far the history is that of a man sane and interesting
apart from his special gifts as orator, healer, and prophet.
But a startling change occurs. One day, after the disciples
have discouraged him for a long time by their misunder-
standings of his mission, and their speculations as to whether
he is one of the old prophets come again, and if so, which,
his disciple Peter suddenly solves the problem by exclaim-
ing, "Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God." At
this Jesus is extraordinarily pleased and excited. He declares
that Peter has had a revelation straight from God. He
makes a pun on Peter's name, and declares him the founder
of his Church. And he accepts his destiny as a god by
announcing that he will be killed when he goes to Jerusalem;
for if he is really the Christ, it is a necessary part of his
legendary destiny that he shall be slain. Peter, not under-
standing this, rebukes him for what seems mere craven
melancholy ; and Jesus turns fiercely on him and cries, "Get
thee behind me, Satan."

Jesus now becomes obsessed with a conviction of his
divinity, and talks about it continually to his disciples, though
he forbids them to mention it to others. They begin to dis-
pute among themselves as to the position they shall occupy
in heaven when his kingdom is established. He rebukes
them strenuously for this, and repeats his teaching that
greatness means service and not domination ; but he him-
self, always instinctively somewhat haughty, now becomes

Preface xxxv

arrogant, dictatorial, and even abusive, never replying to
his critics without an insulting epithet, and even cursing a
fig-tree which disappoints him when he goes to it for fruit.
He assumes all the traditions of the folk-lore gods, and
announces that, like John Barleycorn, he will be barbarously
slain and buried, but will rise from the earth and return to
life. He attaches to himself the immemorial tribal ceremony
of eating the god, by blessing bread and wine and handing
them to his disciples with the words " This is my body : this
is my blood." He forgets his own teaching and threatens
eternal fire and eternal punishment. He announces, in
addition to his Barleycorn resurrection, that he will come
to the wforld a second time in glory and establish his king-
dom on earth. He fears that this may lead to the appear-
ance of impostors claiming to be himself, and declares
explicitly and repeatedly that no matter what wonders
these impostors may perform, his own coming will be un-
mistakable, as the stars will fall from heaven, and trumpets
be blown by angels. Further he declares that this will take
place during the lifetime of persons then present.

Jerusalem and the Mystical Sacrifice.

In this new frame of mind he at last enters Jerusalem
amid great popular curiosity ; drives the moneychangers and
sacrifice sellers out of the temple in a riot; refuses to in-
terest himself in the beauties and wonders of the temple
building on the ground that presently not a stone of it shall
be left on another; reviles the high priests and elders in
intolerable terms ; and is arrested by night in a garden to
avoid a popular disturbance. He makes no resistance, being
persuaded that it is part of his destiny as a god to be mur-
dered and to rise again. One of his followers shews fight,
and cuts off the ear of one of his captors. Jesus rebukes
him, but does not attempt to heal the wound, though he
declares that if he wished to resist he could easily summon
twelve million angels to his aid. He is taken before the

xxxvi Androcles and the Lion

high priest and by him handed over to the Roman governor,
who is puzzled by his silent refusal to defend himself in
any way, or to contradict his accusers or their witnesses,
Pilate having naturally no idea that the prisoner conceives
himself as going through an inevitable process of torment,
death, and burial as a prelude to resurrection. Before the
high priest he has also been silent except that when the
priest asks him is he the Christ, the Son of God, he replies
that they shall all see the Son of Man sitting at the right
hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven. He
maintains this attitude with frightful fortitude whilst they
scourge him, mock him, torment him, and finally crucify
him between two thieves. His prolonged agony of thirst
and pain on the cross at last breaks his spirit, and he dies
with a cry of " My God: why hast Thou forsaken me?"

Not this Man but Barabbas.

Meanwhile he has been definitely rejected by the people
as well as by the priests. Pilate, pitying him, and unable
to make out exactly what he has done (the blasphemy that
has horrified the high priest does not move the Roman),
tries to get him off by reminding the people that they have,
by custom, the right to have a prisoner released at that
time, and suggests that he should release Jesus. But they
insist on his releasing a prisoner named Barabbas instead,
and on having Jesus crucified. Matthew gives no clue to
the popularity of Barabbas, describing him simply as "a
notable prisoner." The later gospels make it clear, very
significantly, that his offence was sedition and insurrection ;
that he was an advocate of physical force ; and that he had
killed his man. The choice of Barabbas thus appears as a
popular choice of the militant advocate of physical force
as against the unresisting advocate of mercy.

Preface xxxvii

The Resurrection.

Matthew then tells how after three days an angel opened
the family vault of one Joseph, a rich man of Arimathea,
who had buried Jesus in it, whereupon Jesus rose and
returned from Jerusalem to Galilee and resumed his preach-
ing with his disciples, assuring them that he would now be
with them to the end of the world.

At that point the narrative abruptly stops. The story
has no ending.

Date of Matthew's Narrative.

One effect of the promise of Jesus to come again in glory
during the lifetime of some of his hearers is to date the
gospel without the aid of any scholarship. It must have
been written during the lifetime of Jesus's contemporaries:
that is, whilst it was still possible for the promise of his
Second Coming to be fulfilled. The death of the last person
who had been alive when Jesus said "There be some of
them that stand here that shall in no wise taste death til
they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom " destroyed
the last possibility of the promised Second Coming, and
bore out the incredulity of Pilate and the Jews. And as
Matthew writes as one believing in that Second Coming, and
in fact left his story unfinished to be ended by it, he must
have produced his gospel within a lifetime of the crucifixion.
Also, he must have believed that reading books would be one
of the pleasures of the kingdom of heaven on earth.

Class Type of Matthew's Jesus.

One more circumstance must be noted as gathered from
Matthew. Though he begins his story in such a way as to
suggest that Jesus belonged to the privileged classes, he
mentions later on that when Jesus attempted to preach in
his own country, and had no success there, the people said,

xxxviii Androcles and the Lion

"Is not this the carpenter's son?" But Jesus's manner
throughout is that of an aristocrat, or at the very least the
son of a rich bourgeois, and by no means a lowly-minded
one at that. We must be careful therefore to conceive
Joseph, not as a modern proletarian carpenter working for
weekly wages, but as a master craftsman of royal descent.
John the Baptist may have been a Keir Hardie; but the
Jesus of Matthew is of the Ruskin-Morris class.

This haughty characterization is so marked that if we
had no other documents concerning Jesus than the gospel
of Matthew, we should not feel as we do about him.
We should have been much less loth to say, " There
is a man here who was sane until Peter hailed him as the
Christ, and who then became a monomaniac." We should
have pointed out that his delusion is a very common de-
lusion among the insane, and that such insanity is quite
consistent with the retention of the argumentative cunning
and penetration which Jesus displayed in Jerusalem
after his delusion had taken complete hold of him. We
should feel horrified at the scourging and mocking and
crucifixion just as we should if Ruskin had been treated in
that way when he also went mad, instead of being cared
for as an invalid. And we should have had no clear per-
ception of any special significance in his way of calling the
Son of God the Son of Man. We should have noticed that
he was a Communist ; that he regarded much of what we
call law and order as machinery for robbing the poor under
legal forms; that he thought domestic ties a snare for the
soul ; that he agreed with the proverb " The nearer the
Church, the farther from God"; that he saw very plainly
that the masters of the community should be its servants
and not its oppressors and parasites; and that though he
did not tell us not to fight our enemies, he did tell us to
love them, and warned us that they who draw the sword
shall perish by the sword. All this shews a great power
of seeing through vulgar illusions, and a capacity for
a higher morality than has yet been established in any

Preface xxxix

civilized community; but it does not place Jesus above
Confucius or Plato, not to mention more modern philo-
sophers and moralists.

MARK.

The Women Disciples and the Ascension.

Let us see whether wq can get anything more out of
Mark, whose gospel, by the vay, is supposed to be older
than Matthew's. Mark is brief; and it does not take long
to discover that he adds nothing to Matthew except the
ending of the story by Christ's ascension into heaven, and
the news that many women had come with Jesus to Jeru-
salem, including Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast
seven devils. On the other hand Mark says nothing about
the birth of Jesus, and does not touch his career until his
adult baptism by John. He apparently regards Jesus as a
native of Nazareth, as John does, and not of Bethlehem, as
Matthew and Luke do, Bethlehem being the city of David,
from whom Jesus is said by Matthew and Luke to be
descended. He describes John's doctrine as " Baptism of
repentance unto remission of sins" : that is, a form of Salva-
tionism. He tells us that Jesus went into the synagogues
and taught, not as the Scribes but as one having authority:
that is, we infer, he preaches his own doctrine as an original
moralist instead of repeating what the books say. He de-
scribes the miracle of Jesus reaching the boat by walking
across the sea, but says nothing about Peter trying to do
the same. Mark sees what he relates more vividly than
Matthew, and gives touches of detail that bring the event
more clearly before the reader. He says, for instance, that
when Jesus walked on the waves to the boat, he was passing
it by when the disciples called out to him. He seems to
feel that lesus's treatment of the woman of Canaan requires

xl Androcles and the Lion

some apology, and therefore says that she was a Greek of
Syrophenician race, which probably excused any incivility
to her in Mark's eyes. He represents the father of the boy
whom Jesus cured of epilepsy after the transfiguration as
a sceptic who says " Lord, I believe : help thou mine un-
belief." He tells the story of the widow's mite, omitted by
Matthew. He explains that Barabbas was "lying bound
with them that made insurrection, men who in the insur-
rection had committed murder." Joseph of Arimathea, who
buried Jesus in his own tomb, and who is described by
Matthew as a disciple, is described by Mark as " one who
also himself was looking for the kingdom of God," which
suggests that he was an independent seeker. Mark earns
our gratitude by making no mention of the old prophecies,
and thereby not only saves time, but avoids the absurd im-
plication that Christ was merely going through a predeter-
mined ritual, like the works of a clock, instead of living.
Finally Mark reports Christ as saying, after his resurrec-
tion, that those who believe in him will be saved and those
who do not, damned; but it is impossible to discover
whether he means anything by a state of damnation beyond
a state of error. The paleographers regard this passage as
tacked on by a later scribe.

On the whole Mark leaves the modern reader where
Matthew left him.

LUKE.

Luke the Literary Artist.

When we come to Luke, we come to a later story-teller,
and one with a stronger natural gift for his art. Before you
have read twenty lines of Luke's gospel you are aware that
you have passed from the chronicler writing for the sake of
recording important facts, to the artist, telling the story

Preface xli

for the sake of telling it. At the very outset he achieves
the most charming idyll in the Bible : the story of Mary
crowded out of the inn into the stable and laying her
newly-born son in the manger, and of the shepherds abid-
ing in the field keeping watch over their flocks by night,
and how the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the
glory of the Lord shone around them, and suddenly there
was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host. These
shepherds go to the stable and take the place of the kings
in Matthew's chronicle. So completely has this story con-
quered and fascinated our imagination that most of us
suppose all the gospels to contain it ; but it is Luke's
story and his alone : none of the others have the smallest
hint of it.

The Charm of Luke's Narrative.

Luke gives the charm of sentimental romance to every
incident. The Annunciation, as described by Matthew, is
made to Joseph, and is simply a warning to him not to
divorce his wife for misconduct. In Luke's gospel it is made
to Mary herself, at much greater length, with a sense of the
ecstasy of the bride of the Holy Ghost. Jesus is refined and
softened almost out of recognition : the stern peremptory
disciple of John the Baptist, who never addresses a Pharisee
or a Scribe without an insulting epithet, becomes a con-
siderate, gentle, sociable, almost urbane person ; and the
Chauvinist Jew becomes a pro-Gentile who is thrown out
of the synagogue in his own town for reminding the con-
gregation that the prophets had sometimes preferred Gen-
tiles to Jews. In fact they try to throw him down from a
sort of Tarpeian rock which they use for executions; but
he makes his way through them and escapes : the only
suggestion of a feat of arms on his part in the gospels.
There is not a word of the Syrophenician woman. At the
end he is calmly superior to his sufferings ; delivers an
address on his way to execution with unruffled composure ;

xlii Androcles and the Lion

does not despair on the cross ; and dies with perfect dignity,
commending his spirit to God, after praying for the forgive-
ness of his persecutors on the ground that "They know not
what they do." According to Matthew, it is part of the
bitterness of his death that even the thieves who are crucified
with him revile him. According to Luke, only one of them
does this ; and he is rebuked by the other, who begs Jesus to
remember him when he comes into his kingdom. To which
Jesus replies, " This day shalt thou be with me in Paradise,"
implying that he will spend the three days of his death
there. In short, every device is used to get rid of the ruth-
less horror of the Matthew chronicle, and to relieve the
strain of the Passion by touching episodes, and by repre-
senting Christ as superior to human suffering. It is Luke's
Jesus who has won our hearts.

The Touch of Parisian Romance.

Luke's romantic shrinking from unpleasantness, and his
sentimentality, are illustrated by his version of the woman
with the ointment. Matthew and Mark describe it as
taking place in the house of Simon the Leper, where it is
objected to as a waste of money. In Luke's version the
leper becomes a rich Pharisee ; the woman becomes a Dame
aux Camellias; and nothing is said about money and the
poor. The woman washes the feet of Jesus with her tears
and dries them with her hair ; and he is reproached for
suffering a sinful woman to touch him. It is almost an
adaptation of the unromantic Matthew to the Parisian
stage. There is a distinct attempt to increase the feminine
interest all through. The slight lead given by Mark is
taken up and developed. More is said about Jesus's mother
and her feelings. Christ's following of women, just men-
tioned by Mark to account for their presence at his tomb,
is introduced earlier; and some of the women are named;
so that we are introduced to Joanna the wife of Chuza,
Herod's steward, and Susanna. There is the quaint little

Preface xlili

domestic episode between Mary and Martha. There is the
parable of the Prodigal Son, appealing to the indulgence
romance has always shewn to Charles Surface and Des
Grieux. Women follow Jesus to the cross ; and he makes
them a speech beginning " Daughters of Jerusalem."
Slight as these changes may seem, they make a great change
in the atmosphere. The Christ of Matthew could never
have become what is vulgarly called a woman's hero (though
the truth is that the popular demand for sentiment, as far
as it is not simply human, is more manly than womanly) ;
but the Christ of Luke has made possible those pictures
which now hang in many ladies' chambers, in which Jesus
is represented exactly as he is represented in the Lourdes
cinematograph, by a handsome actor. The only touch of
realism which Luke does not instinctively suppress for the
sake of producing this kind of amenity is the reproach
addressed to Jesus for sitting down to table without washing
his hands ; and that is retained because an interesting
discourse hangs on it.

Waiting for the Messiah.

Another new feature in Luke's story is that it begins in
a world in which everyone is expecting the advent of the
Christ. In Matthew and Mark, Jesus comes into a normal
Philistine world like our own of today. Not until the
Baptist foretells that one greater than himself shall come after
him does the old Jewish hope of a Messiah begin to stir again ;
and as Jesus begins as a disciple of John, and is baptized
by him, nobody connects him with that hope until Peter
has the sudden inspiration which produces so startling an
effect on Jesus. But in Luke's gospel men's minds, and
especially women's minds, are full of eager expectation of
a Christ not only before the birth of Jesus, but before the
birth of John the Baptist, the event with which Luke begins
his story. Whilst Jesus and John are still in their mothers'
wombs, John leaps at the approach of Jesus when the two

xliv Androcles and the Lion

mothers visit one another. At the circumcision of Jesus
pious men and women hail the infant as the Christ.

The Baptist himself is not convinced ; for at quite a late
period in his former disciple's career he sends two young
men to ask Jesus is he really the Christ. This is note-
worthy because Jesus immediately gives them a deliberate
exhibition of miracles, and bids them tell John what they
have seen, and ask him what he thinks nozv. This is in
complete contradiction to what I have called the Rousseau
view of miracles as inferred from Matthew. Luke shews all
a romancer's thoughtlessness about miracles : he regards
them as "signs": that is, as proofs of the divinity of the
person performing them, and not merely of thaumaturgic
powers. He revels in miracles just as he revels in parables :
they make such capital stories. He cannot allow the calling
of Peter, James, and John from their boats to pass without
a comic miraculous overdraft of fishes, with the net sinking
the boats and provoking Peter to exclaim, "Depart from
me ; for I am a sinful man, O Lord," which should probably
be translated, " I want no more of your miracles : natural
fishing is good enough for my boats."

There are some other novelties in Luke's version. Pilate
sends Jesus to Herod, who happens to be in Jerusalem just
then, because Herod had expressed some curiosity about
him ; but nothing comes of it : the prisoner will not speak
to him. When Jesus is ill received in a Samaritan village
James and John propose to call down fire from heaven and
destroy it; and Jesus replies that he is come not to destroy
lives but to save them. The bias of Jesus against lawyers is
emphasized, and also his resolution not to admit that he is
more bound to his relatives than to strangers. He snubs a
woman who blesses his mother. As this is contrary to the
traditions of sentimental romance, Luke would presumably
have avoided it had he not become persuaded that the
brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God are
superior even to sentimental considerations. The story of
the lawyer asking what are the two chief commandments

Preface xlv

is changed by making Jesus put the question to the lawyer
instead of answering it.

As to doctrine, Luke is only clear when his feelings are
touched. His logic is weak; for some of the sayings of
Jesus are pieced together wrongly, as anyone who has read
them, in the right order and context in Matthew will dis-
cover at once. He does not make anything new out of
Christ's mission, and, like the other evangelists, thinks that
the whole point of it is that Jesus was the long expected
Christ, and that he will presently come back to earth and
establish his kingdom, having duly died and risen again
after three days. Yet Luke not only records the teaching as
to communism and the discarding of hate, which have, of
course, nothing to do with the Second Coming, but quotes
one very remarkable saying which is not compatible with
it, which is, that people must not go about asking where
the kingdom of heaven is, and saying "Lo, here!" and
"Lo, there!" because the kingdom of heaven is within
them. But Luke has no sense that this belongs to a quite
different order of thought to his Christianity, and retains
undisturbed his view of the kingdom as a locality as definite
as Jerusalem or Madagascar.

JOHN.

A New Story and a New Character.

The gospel of John is a surprise after the others. Matthew,
Mark and Luke describe the same events in the same order
(the variations in Luke are negligible), and their gospels
are therefore called the synoptic gospels. They tell sub-
stantially the same story of a wandering preacher who at
the end of his life came to Jerusalem. John describes a
preacher who spent practically his whole adult life in the
capital, with occasional visits to the provinces. His circum-

xlvi Androcles and the Lion

stantial account of the calling of Peter and the sons of
Zebedee is quite different from the others; and he says
nothing about their being fishermen. He says expressly that
Jesus, though baptized by John, did not himself practise
baptism, and that his disciples did. Christ's agonized appeal
against his doom in the garden of Gethsemane becomes a
cold-blooded suggestion made in the temple at a much
earlier period. Jesus argues much more; complains a good
deal of the unreasonableness and dislike with which he is
met ; is by no means silent before Caiaphas and Pilate ; lays
much greater stress on his resurrection and on the eating of
his body (losing all his disciples except the twelve in con-
sequence) ; says many apparently contradictory and non-
sensical things to which no ordinary reader can now find
any clue; and gives the impression of an educated, not to say
sophisticated mystic, different both in character and school-
ing from the simple and downright preacher of Matthew
and Mark, and the urbane easy-minded charmer of Luke.
Indeed, the Jews say of him "How knoweth this man
letters, having never learnt?"

John the Immortal Eye Witness.

John, moreover, claims to be not only a chronicler but a
witness. He declares that he is "the disciple whom jesus
loved," and that he actually leaned on the bosom of Jesus
at the last supper and asked in a whisper which of them it
was that should betray him. Jesus whispered that he would
give a sop to the traitor, and thereupon handed one to Judas,
who ate it and immediately became possessed by the devil.
This is more natural than the other accounts, in which
Jesus openly indicates Judas without eliciting any protest
or exciting any comment. It also implies that Jesus deliber-
ately bewitched Judas in order to bring about his own
betrayal. Later on John claims that Jesus said to Peter
"If I will that John tarry til I come, what is that to thee ?" ;
and John, with a rather obvious mock modesty, adds that he

Preface xlvii

must not claim to be immortal, as the disciples concluded ^
for Christ did not use that expression, but merely re-
marked "If I will that he tarry til I come." No other
evangelist claims personal intimacy with Christ, or even pre-
tends to be his contemporary (there is no ground for identi-
fying Matthew the publican with Matthew the Evangelist) ;
and John is the only evangelist whose account of Christ's
career and character is hopelessly irreconcilable with
Matthew's. He is almost as bad as Matthew, by the way,
in his repeated explanations of Christ's actions as having
no other purpose than to fulfil the old prophecies. The
impression is more unpleasant, because, as John, unlike
Matthew, is educated, subtle, and obsessed with artificial
intellectual mystifications, the discovery that he is stupid
or superficial in so simple a matter strikes one with dis-
trust and dislike, in spite of his great literary charm, a good
example of which is his transfiguration of the harsh episode
of the Syrophenician woman into the pleasant story of the
woman of Samaria. This perhaps is why his claim to be
John the disciple, or to be a contemporary of Christ or even
of any survivor of Christ's generation, has been disputed,
and finally, it seems, disallowed. But I repeat, I take no
note here of the disputes of experts as to the date of the
gospels, not because I am not acquainted with them, but
because, as the earliest codices are Greek manuscripts of the
fourth century a.d., and the Syrian ones are translations
from the Greek, the paleographic expert has no difficulty
in arriving at whatever conclusion happens to suit his beliefs
or disbeliefs ; and he never succeeds in convincing the other
experts except when they believe or disbelieve exactly as
he does. Hence I conclude that the dates of the original
narratives cannot be ascertained, and that we must make
the best of the evangelists' own accounts of themselves.
There is, as we have seen, a very marked difference between
them, leaving no doubt that we are dealing with four
authors of well-marked diversity ; but they all end in an atti-
tude of expectancy of the Second Coming which they agree

xlviii Androcles and the Lion

in declaring Jesus to have positively and unequivocallv
promised within the lifetime of his contemporaries. Any
believer compiling a gospel after the last of these contem-
poraries had passed away, would either reject and omit the
tradition of that promise on the ground that since it was not
fulfilled, and could never now be fulfilled, it could not have
been made, or else have had to confess to the Jews, who
were the keenest critics of the Christians, that Jesus was
either an impostor or the victim of a delusion. Now all the
evangelists except Matthew expressly declare themselves to
be behevers ; and Matthew's narrative is obviously not
that of a sceptic. I therefore assume as a matter of common
sense that, interpolations apart, the gospels are derived
from narratives written in the first century a.d. I include
John, because though it may be claimed that he hedged
his position by claiming that Christ, who specially loved
him, endowed him with a miraculous life until the Second
Coming, the conclusion being that John is alive at this
moment, I cannot believe that a literary forger could hope
to save the situation by so outrageous a pretension. Also,
John's narrative is in many passages nearer to the realities
of public life than the simple chronicle of Matthew or the
sentimental romance of Luke. This may be because John
was obviously more a man of the world than the others,
and knew, as mere chroniclers and romancers never know,
what actually happens away from books and desks. But it
mav also be because he saw and heard what happened
instead of collecting traditions about it. The paleographers
and daters of first quotations may say what they please :
John's claim to give evidence as an eyewitness whilst the
others are only compiling history is supported by a certain
verisimilitude which appeals to me as one who has preached
a new doctrine and argued about it, as well as written
stories. This verisimilitude may be dramatic art backed
by knowledge of public life; but even at that we must not
forget that the best dramatic art is the operation of a
divinatory instinct for truth. Be that as it may, John was

Preface xlix

certainly not the man to believe in the Second Coming
and yet give a date for it after that date had passed. There
is really no escape from the conclusion that the originals
of all the gospels date from the period within which there
was still a possibility of the Second Coming occurring at
the promised time.

The Peculiar Theology of Jesus.

In spite of the suspicions roused by John's idiosyncrasies,
his narrative is of enormous importance to those who go to the
gospels for a credible modern religion. For it is John who
adds to the other records such sayings as that "I and my
father are one"; that "God is a spirit"; that the aim of
Jesus is not only that the people should have life, but that
they should have it "more abundantly" (a distinction much
needed by people who think a man is either alive or dead,
and never consider the important question how much alive
he is) ; and that men should bear in mind what they were
told in the 82nd Psalm : that they are gods, and are respon-
sible for the doing of the mercy and justice of God. The
Jews stoned him for saying these things, and, when he re-
monstrated with them for stupidly stoning one who had
done nothing to them but good works, replied "For a good
work we stone thee not ; but for blasphemy, because that
thou, being a man, makest thyself God." He insists (refer-
ring to the 82nd Psalm) that if it is part of their own religion
that they are gods on the assurance of God himself, it
cannot be blasphemy for him, whom the Father sanctified
and sent into the world, to say "I am the son of God."
But they will not have this at any price ; and he has to
escape from their fury. Here the point is obscured by the
distinction made by Jesus between himself and other men.
He says, in effect, "If you are gods, then, a fortiori, I am
a god." John makes him say this, just as he makes him say
"I am the light of the world." But Matthew makes him
say to the people "Ye are the light of the world." John has

1 Androcles and the Lion

no grip of the significance of these scraps which he has
picked up : he is far more interested in a notion of his own
that men can escape death and do even more extraordinary
things than Christ himself: in fact, he actually represents
Jesus as promising this explicitly, and is finally led into
the audacious hint that he, John, is himself immortal in the
flesh. Still, he does not miss the significant sayings alto-
gether. However inconsistent they may be with the doctrine
he is consciously driving at, they appeal to some sub-intel-
lectual instinct in him that makes him stick them in, like a
child sticking tinsel stars on the robe of a toy angel.

John does not mention the ascension ; and the end of
his narrative leaves Christ restored to life, and appearing
from time to time among his disciples. It is on one of these
occasions that John describes the miraculous draught of fishes
which Luke places at the other end of Christ's career, at
the call of the sons of Zebedee.

John agreed as to the Trial and
Crucifixion.

Although John, following his practice of shewing Jesus's
skill as a debater, makes him play a less passive part at his
trial, he still gives substantially the same account of it as all
the rest. And the question that would occur to any modern
reader never occurs to him, any more than it occurred to
Matthew, Mark, or Luke. That question is. Why on earth
did not Jesus defend himself, and make the people rescue
him from the High Priest ? He was so popular that they
w^ere unable to prevent him driving the moneychangers out
of the temple, or to arrest him for it. When they did arrest
him afterwards, they had to do it at night in a garden. He
could have argued with them as he had often done in the
temple, and justified himself both to the Jewish law and to
Caesar. And he had physical force at his command to back
up his arguments : all that was needed was a speech to rally

Preface H

his followers ; and he was not gagged. The reply of the
evangelists would have been that all these inquiries are idle,
because if Jesus had wished to escape, he could have saved
himself all that trouble by doing what John describes him
as doing : that is, casting his captors to the earth by an
exertion of his miraculous power. If you asked John why
he let them get up again and torment and execute him,
John would have replied that it was part of the destiny of
God to be slain and buried and to rise again, and that to
have avoided this destiny would have been to repudiate his
Godhead. And that is the only apparent explanation.
Whether you believe with the evangelists that Christ could
have rescued himself by a miracle, or, as a modern Secu-
larist, point out that he could have defended himself effectu-
ally, the fact remains that according to all the narratives
he did not do so. He had to die like a god, not to save
himself " like one of the princes." ^ The consensus on this
point is important, because it proves the absolute sincerity
of Jesus's declaration that he was a god. No impostor would
have accepted such dreadful consequences without an effort
to save himself. No impostor would have been nerved to
endure them by the conviction that he would rise from the
grave and live again after three days. If we accept the story
at all, we must believe this, and believe also that his pro-
mise to return in glory and establish his kingdom on earth
within the lifetime of men then living, was one which he
believed that he could, and indeed must fulfil. Two evan-
gelists declare that in his last agony he despaired, and re-
proached God for forsaking him. The other two represent
him as dying in unshaken conviction and charity with the
simple remark that the ordeal was finished. But all four

1 Jesus himself had referred to that psalm (lxxxii) in which men
who have judged unjustly and accepted the persons of the wicked (in-
cluding by anticipation practically all the white inhabitants of the British
Isles and the North American continent, to mention no other places)
are condemned in the words, " I have said, ye are gods j and all of ye are
children of the Most High; but ye shall die liice men, and fall like one
of the princes."

lii Androcles and the Lion

testify that his faith was not deceived, and that he actually
rose again after three days. And I think it unreasonable to
doubt that all four wrote their narratives in full faith that
the other promise would be fulfilled too, and that they
themselves might live to witness the Second Coming.

Credibility of the Gospels.

It will be noted by the older among my readers, who are
sure to be obsessed more or less by elderly wrangles as to
whether the gospels are credible as matter-of-fact narratives,
that I have hardly raised this question, and have accepted
the credible and incredible with equal complacency. I have
done this because credibility is a subjective condition, as
the evolution of religious belief clearly shews. Belief is not
dependent on evidence and reason. There is as much
evidence that the miracles occurred as that the battle of
Waterloo occurred, or that a large body of Russian troops
passed through England in 1914 to take part in the war on
the western front. The reasons for believing in the murder
of Pompey are the same as the reasons for believing in the
raising of Lazarus. Both have been believed and doubted by
men of equal intelligence. Miracles, in the sense of pheno-
mena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand : life
itself is the miracle of miracles. Miracles in the sense of
events that violate the normal course of our experience are
vouched for every day : the flourishing Church of Christ
Scientist is founded on a multitude of such miracles.
Nobody believes all the miracles : everybody believes some
of them. I cannot tell why men who will not believe that
Jesus ever existed yet believe firmly that Shakespear was
Bacon. I cannot tell why people who believe that angels
appeared and fought on our side at the battle of Mons, and
who believe that miracles occur quite frequently at Lourdes,
nevertheless boggle at the miracle of the liquefaction of the
blood of St Januarius, and reject it as a trick of priestcraft.

Preface liii

I cannot tell why people who will not believe Matthew's
story of three kings bringing costly gifts to the cradle of
Jesus, believe Luke's story of the shepherds and the stable.
I cannot tell why people, brought up to believe the Bible
in the old literal way as an infallible record and revelation,
and rejecting that view later on, begin by rejecting the
Old Testament, and give up the belief in a brimstone hell
before they give up (if they ever do) the belief in a heaven
of harps, crowns, and thrones. I cannot tell why people
who will not believe in baptism on any terms believe in
vaccination with the cruel fanaticism of inquisitors. I am con-
vinced that if a dozen sceptics were to draw up in parallel
columns a hst of the events narrated in the gospels which
they consider credible and incredible respectively, their
lists would be different in several particulars. Belief is
literally a matter of taste.

Fashions in Belief.

Now matters of taste are mostly also matters of fashion.
We are conscious of a difference between medieval fashions
in belief and modern fashions. For instance, though we are
more credulous than men were in the Middle Ages, and
entertain such crowds of fortune-tellers, magicians, miracle
workers, agents of communication with the dead, discoverers
of the elixir of life, transmuters of metals, and healers of all
sorts, as the Middle Ages never dreamed of as possible,
yet we will not take our miracles in the form that con-
vinced the Middle Ages. Arithmetical numbers appealed
to the Middle Ages just as they do to us, because they are
difficult to deal with, and because the greatest masters of
numbers, the Newtons and Leibnitzes, rank among the
greatest men. But there are fashions in numbers too. The
Middle Ages took a fancy to some familiar number like
seven ; and because it was an odd number, and the world
was made in seven days, and there are seven stars in
Charles's Wain, and for a dozen other reasons, they were

liv Androcles and the Lion

ready to believe anything that had a seven or a seven times
seven in it. Seven deadly sins, seven swords of sorrow in
the heart of the Virgin, seven champions of Christendom,
seemed obvious and reasonable things to believe in simply
because they were seven. To us, on the contrary, the
number seven is the stamp of superstition. We will believe
in nothing less than millions. A medieval doctor gained
his patient's confidence by telling him that his vitals were
being devoured by seven worms. Such a diagnosis would
ruin a modern physician. The modern physician tells his
patient that he is ill because every drop of his blood is
swarming with a million microbes ; and the patient believes
him abjectly and instantly. Had a bishop told William the
Conqueror that the sun was seventy-seven miles distant
from the earth, William would have believed him not only
out of respect for the Church, but because he would have
felt that seventy-seven miles was the proper distance. The
Kaiser, knowing just as little about it as the Conqueror,
would send that bishop to an asylum. Yet he (I presume)
unhesitatingly accepts the estimate of ninety-two and nine-
tenths millions of miles, or whatever the latest big figure
may be.

Credibility and Truth.

And here I must remind you that our credulity is not to
be measured by the truth of the things we believe. When
men believed that the earth was flat, they were not credu-
lous : they were using their common sense, and, if asked
to prove that the earth was flat, would have said simply,
"Look at it." Those who refuse to believe that it is round
are exercising a wholesome scepticism. The modern man
who believes that the earth is round is grossly credulous.
Flat Earth men drive him to fury by confuting him with
the greatest ease when he tries to argue about it. Confront
him with a theory that the earth is cylindrical, or annular,
or hour-glass shaped, and he is lost. The thing he believes

Preface Iv

may be true, but that is not why he believes it : he believes
it because in some mysterious way it appeals to his imagi-
nation. If you ask him why he believes that the sun is
ninety-odd million miles off, either he will have to confess
that he doesnt know, or he will say that Newton proved
it. But he has not read the treatise in which Newton
proved it, and does not even know that it was written in
Latin. If you press an Ulster Protestant as to why he re-
gards Newton as an infallible authority, and St Thomas
Aquinas or the Pope as superstitious liars whom, after his
death, he will have the pleasure of watching from his place
in heaven whilst they roast in eternal flame, or if you ask
me why I take into serious consideration Colonel Sir
Almroth Wright's estimates of the number of streptococci
contained in a given volume of serum whilst I can only
laugh at the earlier estimates of the number of angels that
can be accommodated on the point of a needle, no reason-
able reply is possible except that somehow sevens and
angels are out of fashion, and billions and streptococci
are all the rage. I simply cannot tell you why Bacon,
Montaigne, and Cervantes had a quite different fashion of
credulity and incredulity from the Venerable Bede and
Piers Plowman and the divine doctors of the Aquinas-
Aristotle school, who were certainly no stupider, and had
the same facts before them. Still less can I explain why,
if we assume that these leaders of thought had all reasoned
out their beliefs, their authority seemed conclusive to one
generation and blasphemous to another, neither generation
having followed the reasoning or gone into the facts of the
matter for itself at all.

It is therefore idle to begin disputing with the reader as
to what he should believe in the gospels and what he should
disbelieve. He will believe what he can, and disbelieve
what he must. If he draws any lines at all, they will be
quite arbitrary ones. St John tells us that when Jesus ex-
plicitly claimed divine honors by the sacrament of his body
and blood, so many of his disciples left him that their

e

Ivi Androcles and the Lion

number was reduced to twelve. Many modern readers will
not hold out so long : they will give in at the first miracle.
Others will discriminate. They will accept the healing
miracles, and reject the feeding of the multitude. To some
the walking on the water will be a legendary exaggeration
of a swim, ending in an ordinary rescue of Peter ; and the
raising of Lazarus will be only a similar glorification of a
commonplace feat of artificial respiration, whilst others will
scoff at it as a planned imposture in which Lazarus acted as
a confederate. Between the rejection of the stories as wholly
fabulous and the acceptance of them as the evangelists
themselves mean them to be accepted, there will be many
shades of belief and disbelief, of sympathy and derision. It
is not a question of being a Christian or not, A Mahometan
Arab will accept literally and without question parts of the
narrative which an English Archbishop has to reject or ex-
plain away ; and many Theosophists and lovers of the wisdom
of India, who never enter a Christian Church except as
sightseers, will revel in parts of John's gospel which mean
nothing to a pious matter-of-fact Bradford manufacturer.
Every reader takes from the Bible what he can get. In sub-
mitting a precis of the gospel narratives I have not implied
any estimate either of their credibility or of their truth.
I have simply informed him or reminded him, as the case
may be, of what those narratives tell us about their hero.

Christian Iconolatry and the Peril
of the Iconoclast.

J must now abandon this attitude, and make a serious
draft on the reader's attention by facing the question
whether, if and when the medieval and Methodist will-to-
believe the Salvationist and miraculous side of the gospel
narratives fails us, as it plainly has failed the leaders of
modern thought, there will be anything left of the mission
of Jesus: whether, in short, we may not throw the gospels

Preface Ivii

into the waste-paper basket, or put them away on the fiction
shelf of our libraries. I venture to reply that we shall be,
on the contrary, in the position of the man in Bunyan's
riddle who found that "the more he threw away, the more
he had." We get rid, to begin with, of the idolatrous or
iconographic worship of Christ. By this I mean literally
that worship which is given to pictures and statues of him,
and to finished and unalterable stories about him. The test
of the prevalence of this is that if you speak or write of Jesus
as a real live person, or even as a still active God, such
worshippers are more horrified than Don Juan was when the
statue stepped from its pedestal and came to supper with
him. You may deny the divinity of Jesus ; you may doubt
whether he ever existed ; you may reject Christianity for
Judaism, Mahometanism, Shintoism, or Fire Worship ; and
the iconolaters, placidly contemptuous, will only classify
you as a freethinker or a heathen. But if you venture to
wonder how Christ would have looked if he had shaved and
had his hair cut, or what size in shoes he took, or whether
he swore when he stood on a nail in the carpenter's shop,
or could not button his robe when he was in a hurry, or
whether he laughed over the repartees by which he baffled
the priests when they tried to trap him into sedition and
blasphemy, or even if you tell any part of his story in the
vivid terms of modern colloquial slang, you will produce
an extraordinary dismay and horror among the iconolaters.
You will have made the picture come out of its frame, the
statue descend from its pedestal, the story become real, with
all the incalculable consequences that may flow from this
terrifying miracle. It is at such moments that you realize
that the iconolaters have never for a moment conceived
Christ as a real person who meant what he said, as a fact, as
a force like electricity, only needing the invention of suit-
able political machinery to be applied to the affairs of
mankind with revolutionary effect.

Thus it is not disbelief that is dangerous in our society :
it is belief. The moment it strikes you (as it may any day)

Iviii Androcles and the Lion

that Christ is not the lifeless harmless image he has hitherto
been to you, but a rallying centre for revolutionary influ-
ences which all established States and Churches fight, you
must look to yourselves ; for you have brought the image to
life ; and the mob may not be able to bear that horror.

The Alternative to Barabbas.

But mobs must be faced if civilization is to be saved. It
did not need the present war to shew that neither the
iconographic Christ nor the Christ of St Paul has succeeded
in effecting the salvation of human society. Whilst I write,
the Turks are said to be massacring the Armenian Christians
on an unprecedented scale; but Europe is not in a position to
remonstrate ; for her Christians are slaying one another by
every device which civilization has put within their reach
as busily as they are slaying the Turks. Barabbas is
triumphant everywhere ; and the final use he makes of his
triumph is to lead us all to suicide with heroic gestures and
resounding lies. Now those who, like myself, see the Barab-
basque social organization as a failure, and are convinced
that the Life Force (or whatever you choose to call it) can-
not be finally beaten by any failure, and will even supersede
humanity by evolving a higher species if wc cannot master
the problems raised by the multiplication of our own
numbers, have always known that Jesus had a real message,
and have felt the fascination of his character and doctrine.
Not that we should nowadays dream of claiming any super-
natural authority for him, much less the technical authority
which attaches to an educated modern philosopher and
jurist. But when, having entirely got rid of Salvationist
Christianity, and even contracted a prejudice against Jesus
on the score of his involuntary connection with it, we
engage on a purely scientific study of economics, crimino-
logy, and biology, and find that our practical conclusions
are virtually those of Jesus, we are distinctly pleased and
encouraged to find that we were doing him an injustice.

Preface lix

and that the nimbus that surrounds his head in the pictures
may be interpreted some day as a light of science rather
than a declaration of sentiment or a label of idolatry.

The doctrines in which Jesus is thus confirmed are,
roughly, the following :

1. The kingdom of heaven is within you. You are the
son of God ; and God is the son of man. God is a spirit,
to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, and not an elderly
gentleman to be bribed and begged from. We are members
one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your
neighbor without injuring or helping yourself. God is your
father : you are here to do God's work ; and you and your
father are one.

2. Get rid of property by throwing it into the common
stock. Dissociate your work entirely from money payments.
If you let a child starve you are letting God starve. Get
rid of all anxiety about tomorrow's dinner and clothes,
because you cannot serve two masters : God and Mammon.

3. Get rid of judges and punishment and revenge. Love
your neighbor as yourself, he being a part of yourself. And
love your enemies : they are your neighbors.

4. Get rid of your family entanglements. Every mother
you meet is as much your mother as the woman who bore
you. Every man you meet is as much your brother as the
man she bore after you. Dont waste your time at family
funerals grieving for your relatives: attend to life, not to
death : there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out
of it, and better. In the kingdom of heaven, which, as
aforesaid, is within you, there is no marriage nor giving in
marriage, because you cannot devote your life to two
divinities : God and the person you are married to.

Now these are very interesting propositions ; and they
become more interesting every day, as experience and
science drive us more and more to consider them favor-
ably. In considering them, we shall waste our time unless
we give them a reasonable construction. We must assume
that the man who saw his way through such a mass of popular

Ix Androcles and the Lion

passion and illusion as stands between us and a sense of
the value of such teaching was quite aware of all the objec-
tions that occur to an average stockbroker in the first five
minutes. It is true that the world is governed to a consider-
able extent by the considerations that occur to stockbrokers
in the first five minutes; but as the result is that the world
is so badly governed that those who know the truth can
hardly bear to live in it, an objection from an average
stockbroker constitutes in itself a prima facie case for any
social reform.

The Reduction to Modern Practice of
Christianity.

All the same, we must reduce the ethical counsels and
proposals of Jesus to modern practice if they are to be of
any use to us. If we ask our stockbroker to act simply as
Jesus advised his disciples to act, he will reply, very justly,
"You are advising me to become a tramp." If we urge a
rich man to sell all that he has and give it to the poor, he
will inform us that such an operation is impossible. If he
sells his shares and his lands, their purchaser will continue
all those activities which oppress the poor. If all the rich
men take the advice simultaneously the shares will fall to
zero and the lands be unsaleable. If one man sells out and
throws the money into the slums, the only result will be to
add himself and his dependents to the list of the poor, and
to do no good to the poor beyond giving a chance few of
them a drunken spree. We must therefore bear in mind
that whereas, in the time of Jesus, and in the ages which
grew darker and darker after his death until the darkness,
after a brief false dawn in the Reformation and the Rena-
scence, culminated in the commercial night of the nine-
teenth century, it was believed that you could not make
men good by Act of Parliament, we now know that you
cannot make them good in any other way, and that a man

Preface Ixi

who is better than his fellows is a nuisance. The rich man
must sell up not only himself but his whole class ; and that
can be done only through the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The disciple cannot have his bread without money until
there is bread for everybody without money; and that re-
quires an elaborate municipal organization of the food
supply, rate supported. Being members one of another
means One Man One Vote, and One Woman: One Vote,
and universal suffrage and equal incomes and all sorts of
modern political measures. Even in Syria in the time of
Jesus his teachings could not possibly have been realized
by a series of independent explosions of personal righteous-
ness on the part of the separate units of the population.
Jerusalem could not have done what even a village com-
munity cannot do, and what Robinson Crusoe himself
could not have done if his conscience, and the stern com-
pulsion of Nature, had not imposed a common rule on the
half dozen Robinson Crusoes who struggled within him for
not wholly compatible satisfactions. And what cannot be
done in Jerusalem or Juan Fernandez cannot be done in
London, New York, Paris, and Berlin.

In short, Christianity, good or bad, right or wrong, must
perforce be left out of the question in human affairs until
it is made practically applicable to them by complicated
political devices ; and to pretend that a field preacher under
the governorship of Pontius Pilate, or even Pontius Pilate
himself in council with all the wisdom of Rome, could
have worked out applications of Christianity or any other
system of morals for the twentieth century, is to shelve the
subject much more effectually than Nero and all its other
persecutors ever succeeded in doing. Personal righteous-
ness, and the view that you cannot make people moral by
Act of Parliament, is, in fact, the favorite defensive resort
of the people who, consciously or subconsciously, are quite
determined not to have their property meddled with by
Jesus or any other reformer.

Ixii Androcles and the Lion

Modern Communism.

Now let us see what modern experience and modern
sociology has to say to the teaching of Jesus as summarized
on page lix. First, get rid of your property by throwing it
into the common stock. One can hear the Pharisees of
Jerusalem and Chorazin and Bethsaida saying, "My good
fellow, if you were to divide up the wealth of Judea equally
today, before the end of the year you would have rich and
poor, poverty and affluence, just as you have today; for
there will always be the idle and the industrious, the thrifty
and the wasteful, the drunken and the sober ; and, as you
yourself have very justly observed, the poor we shall have
always with us." And we can hear the reply, "Woe unto
you, liars and hypocrites ; for ye have this very day divided
up the wealth of the country yourselves, as must be done
every day (for man liveth not otherwise than from
hand to mouth, nor can fish and eggs endure for ever) ;
and ye have divided it unjustly; also ye have said that
my reproach to you for having the poor always with
you was a law unto you that this evil should persist and
stink in the nostrils of God to all eternity; wherefore I
think that Lazarus will yet see you beside Dives in hell."
Modern Capitalism has made short work of the primitive
pleas for inequality. The Pharisees themselves have organ-
ized communism in capital. Joint stock is the order of the
day. An attempt to return to individual properties as the
basis of our production would smash civilization more com-
pletely than ten revolutions. You cannot get the fields
tilled today until the farmer becomes a co-operator. Take
the shareholder to his railway, and ask him to point out to
you the particular length of rail, the particular seat in the
railway carriage, the particular lever in the engine that is
his very own and nobody elscs ; and he will shun you as a
madman, very wisely. And if, like Ananias and Sapphira,
you try to hold back your little shop or what not from the

Preface Ixiii

common stock, represented by the Trust, or Combine, or
Kartel, the Trust will presently freeze you out and rope you
in and finally strike you dead industrially as thoroughly as
St Peter himself. There is no longer any practical question
open as to Communism in production : the struggle today
is over the distribution of the product : that is, over the
daily dividing-up which is the first necessity of organized
society.

Redistribution.

Now it needs no Christ to convince anybody today that
our system of distribution is wildly and monstrously wrong.
We have million-dollar babies side by side with paupers
worn out by a long life of unremitted drudgery. One person
in every five dies in a workhouse, a public hospital, or a
madhouse. In cities like London the proportion is very
nearly one in two. Naturally so outrageous a distribution
has to be effected by violence pure and simple. If you
demur, you are sold up. If you resist the selling up you
are bludgeoned and imprisoned, the process being euphem-
istically called the maintenance of law and order. Iniquity
can go no further. By this time nobody who knows the
figures of the distribution defends them. The most bigoted
British Conservative hesitates to say that his king should
be much poorer than Mr Rockefeller, or to proclaim the
moral superiority of prostitution to needlework on the
ground that it pays better. The need for a drastic redistri-
bution of income in all civilized countries is now as obvious
and as generally admitted as the need for sanitation.

Shall He Who Makes, Own ?

It is when we come to the question of the proportions
in which we are to redistribute that controversy begins.
We are bewildered by an absurdly unpractical notion that
in some way a man's income should be given to him, not
to enable him to live, but as a sort of Sunday School Prize

Ixiv Androcles and the Lion

for good behavior. And this folly is complicated by a less
ridiculous but quite as unpractical belief that it is possible
to assign to each person the exact portion of the national
income that he or she has produced. To a child it seems
that the blacksmith has made a horse-shoe, and that there-
fore ihe horse-shoe is his. But the blacksmith knows that
the horse-shoe does not belong solely to him, but to his
landlord, to the rate collector and taxgatherer, to the men
from whom he bought the iron and anvil and the coals,
leaving only a scrap of its value for himself; and this scrap
he has to exchange with the butcher and baker and the
clothier for the things that he really appropriates as living
tissue or its wrappings, paying for all of them more than
their cost ; for these fellow traders of his have also their
landlords and moneylenders to satisfy. If, then, such simple
and direct village examples of apparent individual production
turn out on a moment's examination to be the products of an
elaborate social organization, what is to be said of such pro-
ducts as dreadnoughts, factory-made pins and needles, and
steel pens ? If God takes the dreadnought in one hand
and a steel pen in the other, and asks Job who made them,
and to whom they should belong by maker's right. Job must
scratch his puzzled head with a potsherd and be dumb,
unless indeed it strikes him that God is the ultimate maker,
and that all we have a right to do with the product is to
feed his lambs.

Labor Time.

So maker's right as an alternative to taking the advice of
Jesus would not work. In practice nothing was possible in
that direction but to pay a worker by labor time : so much
an hour or day or week or year. But how much? When
that question came up, the only answer was " as little as he
can be starved into accepting," with the ridiculous results
already mentioned, and the additional anomaly that the
largest share went to the people who did not work at all,
and the least to those who worked hardest. In England

Preface Ixv

nine-tenths of the wealth goes into the pockets of one-tenth
of the population.

The Dream of Distribution According
to Merit.

Against this comes the protest of the Sunday School
theorists "Why not distribute according to merit?" Here
one imagines Jesus, whose smile has been broadening down
the ages as attempt after attempt to escape from his teaching
has led to deeper and deeper disaster, laughing outright.
Was ever so idiotic a project mooted as the estimation of
virtue in money? The London School of Economics is, we
must suppose, to set examination papers with such questions
as, "Taking the money value of the virtues of Jesus as loo,
and of Judas Iscariot as zero, give the correct figures for,
respectively, Pontius Pilate, the proprietor of the Gadarene
swine, the widow who put her mite in the poor-box, Mr
Horatio Bottomley, Shakespear, Mr Jack Johnson, Sir Isaac
Newton, Palestrina, Offenbach, Sir Thomas Lipton, Mr
Paul Cinquevalli, your family doctor, Florence Nightingale,
Mrs Siddons, your charwoman, the Archbishop of Canter-
bury, and the common hangman." Or "The late Mr Barney
Barnato received as his lawful income three thousand times
as much money as an English agricultural laborer of good
general character. Name the principal virtues in which
Mr Barnato exceeded the laborer three thousandfold ; and
give in figures the loss sustained by civilization when Mr
Barnato was driven to despair and suicide by the reduction
of his multiple to one thousand." The Sunday School idea,
with its principle "to each the income he deserves," is
really too silly for discussion. Hamlet disposed of it three
hundred years ago. " Use every man after his deserts, and
who shall scape whipping?" Jesus remains unshaken as the
practical man ; and we stand exposed as the fools, the
blunderers, the unpractical visionaries. The moment you

Ixvi Androcles and the Lion

try to reduce the Sunday School idea to figures you find
that it brings you back to the hopeless plan of paying for
a man's time ; and your examination paper will read " The
time of Jesus was worth nothing (he complained that the
foxes had holes and the birds of the air nests whilst he had
not a place to lay his head). Dr Crippen's time was worth,
say, three hundred and fifty pounds a year. Criticize this
arrangement ; and, if you dispute its justice, state in pounds,
dollars, francs and marks, what their relative time wages
ought to have been." Your answer may be that the question
is in extremely bad taste and that you decline to answer
it. But you cannot object to being asked how many
minutes of a bookmaker's time is worth two hours of an
astronomer's ?

Vital Distribution.

In the end you are forced to ask the question you should
have asked at the beginning. What do you give a man an
income for? Obviously to keep him alive. Since it is
evident that the first condition on which he can be kept
alive without enslaving somebody else is that he shall pro-
duce an equivalent for what it costs to keep him alive, we
may quite rationally compel him to abstain from idling
by whatever means we employ to compel him to abstain
from murder, arson, forgery, or any other crime. The one
supremely foolish thing to do with him is to do nothing: that
is, to be as idle, lazy, and heartless in dealing with him as
he is in dealing with us. Even if we provided work for him
instead of basing, as we do, our whole industrial system on
successive competitive waves of overwork with their ensuing
troughs of unemployment, we should still sternly deny him
the alternative of not doing it; for the result must be that
he will become poor and make his children poor if he has
any; and poor people are cancers in the commonwealth,
costing far more than if they were handsomely pensioned
off as incurables. Jesus had more sense than to propose
anything of the sort. He said to his disciples, in effect,

Preface Ixvii

" Do your work for love ; and let the other people lodge
and feed and clothe you for love." Or, as we should put
it nowadays, "for nothing." All human experience and all
natural uncommercialized human aspiration point to this as
the right path. The Greeks said, "First secure an inde-
pendent income; and then practise virtue." We all strive
towards an independent income. We all know as well as
Jesus did that if we have to take thought for the morrow
as to whether there shall be anything to eat or drink it will
be impossible for us to think of nobler things, or live a
higher life than that of a mole, whose life is from beginning
to end a frenzied pursuit of food. Until the community is
organized in such a way that the fear of bodily want is
forgotten as completely as the fear of wolves already is in
civilized capitals, we shall never have a decent social life.
Indeed the whole attraction of our present arrangements
lies in the fact that they do relieve a handful of us from this
fear; but as the relief is effected stupidly and wickedly by
making the favored handful parasitic on the rest, they are
smitten with the degeneracy which seems to be the inevit-
able biological penalty of complete parasitism, and corrupt
culture and statecraft instead of contributing to them, their
excessive leisure being as mischievous as the excessive toil
of the laborers. Anyhow, the moral is clear. The two main
problems of organized society, how to secure the subsistence
of all its members, and how to prevent the theft of that
subsistence by idlers, should be entirely dissociated ; and the
practical failure of one of them to automatically achieve the
other recognized and acted on. We may not all have Jesus's
psychological power of seeing, without any enlightenment
from more modern economic phenomena, that they must
fail ; but we all have the hard fact before us that they do
fail. The only people who cling to the lazy delusion that
it is possible to find a just distribution that will work auto-
matically are those who postulate some revolutionary change
like land nationalization, which by itself would obviously
only force into greater urgency the problem of how to dis-

Ixviii Androcles and the Lion

tribute the product of the land among all the individuals
in the community.

Equal Distribution.

When that problem is at last faced, the question of the
proportion in which the national income shall be distributed
can have only one answer. All our shares must be equal.
It has always been so : it always will be so. It is true that
the incomes of robbers vary considerably from individual
to individual ; and the variation is reflected in the incomes
of their parasites. The commercialization of certain excep-
tional talents has also produced exceptional incomes,
direct and derivative. Persons who live on rent of land and
capital are economically, though not legally, in the category
of robbers, and have grotesquely different incomes. But in
the huge mass of mankind variation of income from indi-
vidual to individual is unknown, because it is ridiculously
impracticable. As a device for persuading a carpenter that a
judge is a creature of superior nature to himself, to be
deferred and submitted to even to the death, we may give
a carpenter a hundred pounds a year and a judge five
thousand ; but the wage for one carpenter is the wage for
all the carpenters : the salary for one judge is the salary
for all the judges.

The Captain and the Cabin Boy.

Nothing, therefore, is really in question, or ever has
been, but the differences between class incomes. Already
there is economic equality between captains, and economic
equality between cabin boys. What is at issue still is
whether there shall be economic equality between captains
and cabin boys. What would Jesus have said ? Presumably
he would have said that if your only object is to produce
a captain and a cabin boy for the purpose of transferring
you from Liverpool to New York, or to manoeuvre a fleet

Preface Ixlx

and carry powder from the magazine to the gun, then you
need give no more than a shilling to the cabin boy for every
pound you give to the more expensively trained captain.
But if in addition to this you desire to allow the two human
souls which are inseparable from the captain and the cabin
boy, and which alone differentiate them from the donkey-
engine, to develop all their possibilities, then you may find
the cabin boy costing rather more than the captain,
because cabin boy's work does not do so much for
the soul as captain's work. Consequently you will have
to give him at least as much as the captain unless you
definitely wish him to be a lower creature, in which case
the sooner you are hanged as an abortionist the better.
That is the fundamental argument.

The Political and Biological Objections
to Inequality.

But there are other reasons for objecting to class stratifi-
cation of income which have heaped themselves up since
the time of Jesus. In politics it defeats every form of
government except that of a necessarily corrupt oligarchy.
Democracy in the most democratic modern republics :
France and the United States for example, is an imposture
and a delusion. It reduces justice and law to a farce : law
becomes merely an instrument for keeping the poor in sub-
jection ; and accused workmen are tried, not byajuryof their
peers, but by conspiracies of their exploiters. The press is
the press of the rich and the curse of the poor : it becomes
dangerous to teach men to read. The priest becomes the
mere complement of the pohceman in the machinery by
which the countryhouse oppresses the village. Worst of all,
marriage becomes a class affair : the infinite variety of choice
which nature offers to the young in search of a mate is
narrowed to a handful of persons of similar income ; and
beauty and health become the dreams of artists and the
advertisements of quacks instead of the normal conditions

Ixx Androcles and the Lion

of life. Society is not only divided but actually destroyed
in all directions by inequality of income between classes :
such stability as it has is due to the huge blocks of people
between whom there is equality of income.

Jesus as Economist.

It seems therefore that we must begin by holding the
right to an income as sacred and equal, just as we now
begin by holding the right to life as sacred and equal. In-
deed the one right is only a restatement of the other. To
hang me for cutting a dock laborer's throat after making much
of me for leaving him to starve when I do not happen to
have a ship for him to unload is idiotic ; for as he does far
less mischief with his throat cut than when he is starving,
a rational society would esteem the cutthroat more highly
than the capitalist. The thing has become so obvious, and
the evil so unendurable, that if our attempt at civilization
is not to perish like all the previous ones, we shall have to
organize our society in such a way as to be able to say to
every person in the land, "Take no thought, saying What
shall we eat ? or What shall we drink } or Wherewithal
shall we be clothed .?" We shall then no longer have a race
of men whose hearts are in their pockets and safes and at
their bankers. As Jesus said, where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also. That was why he recommended
that money should cease to be a treasure, and that we should
take steps to make ourselves utterly reckless of it, setting our
minds free for higher uses. In other words, that we should
all be gentlemen and take care of our country because our
country takes care of us, instead of the commercialized cads
we are, doing everything and anything for money, and
selling our souls and bodies by the pound and the inch after
wasting half the day haggling over the price. Decidedly,
whether you think Jesus was God or not, you must admit
that he was a first-rate political economist.

Preface Ixxi

Jesus as Biologist.

He was also, as we now see, a first-rate biologist. It
took a century and a half of evolutionary preachers, from
BufFon and Goethe to Butler and Bergson, to convince us
that we and our father are one ; that as the kingdom of
heaven is within us we need not go about looking for it
and crying Lo here ! and Lo there ! ; that God is not a
picture of a pompous person in white robes in the family
Bible, but a spirit; that it is through this spirit that we
evolve towards greater abundance of life; that we are the
lamps in which the light of the world burns : that, in
short, we are gods though we die like men. All that is
today sound biology and psychology; and the efforts of
Natural Selectionists like Weismann to reduce evolution to
mere automatism have not touched the doctrine of Jesus,
though they have made short work of the theologians who
conceived God as a magnate keeping men and angels as
Lord Rothschild keeps buffaloes and emus at Tring.

Money the Midwife of Scientific
Communism.

It may be asked here by some simple-minded reader why
we should not resort to crude Communism as the disciples
were told to do. This would be quite practicable in a village
where production was limited to the supply of the primitive
wants which nature imposes on all human beings alike.
We know that people need bread and boots without wait-
ing for them to come and ask for these things and offer to
pay for them. But when civilization advances to the point
at which articles are produced that no man absolutely
needs and that only some men fancy or can use, it is
necessary that individuals should be able to have things
made to their order and at their own cost. It is safe to
provide bread for everybody because everybody wants and

/

Ixxii Androcles and the Lion

eats bread ; but it would be absurd to provide microscopes
and trombones, pet snakes and polo mallets, alembics and
test tubes for everybody, as nine-tenths of them would be
wasted ; and the nine-tenths of the population who do not
use such things would object to their being provided at all.
We have in the invaluable instrument called money a
means of enabling every individual to order and pay for
the particular things he desires over and above the things
he must consume in order to remain alive, plus the things
the State insists on his having and using whether he wants
to or not : for example, clothes, sanitary arrangements,
armies and navies. In large communities, where even the
most eccentric demands for manufactured articles average
themselves out until they can be foreseen within a negligible
margin of error, direct communism (Take what you want
without payment, as the people do in Morris's News From
Nowhere) will, after a little experience, be found not only
practicable but highly economical to an extent that now
seems impossible. The sportsmen, the musicians, the phy-
sicists, the biologists will get their apparatus for the asking as
easily as their bread, or, as at present, their paving, street
lighting, and bridges; and the deaf man will not object to
contribute to communal flutes when the musician has to
contribute to communal ear trumpets. There are cases (for
example, radium) in which the demand may be limited to
the merest handful of laboratory workers, and in which
nevertheless the whole community must pay because the
price is beyond the means of any individual worker. But
even when the utmost allowance is made for extensions of
communism that now seem fabulous, there will still remain
for a long time to come regions of supply and demand
in which men will need and use money or individual
credit, and for which, therefore, they must have individual
incomes. Foreign travel is an obvious instance. We are
so far from even national communism still, that we shall
probably have considerable developments of local com-
munism before it becomes possible for a Manchester man

Preface Ixxili

to go up to London for a day without taking any money
with him. The modern practical form of the communism
of Jesus is therefore, for the present, equal distribution of
the surplus of the national income that is not absorbed by
simple communism.

Judge Not.

In dealing with crime and the family, modern thought
and experience have thrown no fresh light on the views of
Jesus. When Swift had occasion to illustrate the corrup-
tion oF our civilization by making a catalogue of the types of
scoundrels it produces, he always gave judges a conspicuous
place alongside of them they judged. And he seems to have
done this not as a restatement of the doctrine of Jesus, but
as the outcome of his own observation and judgment. One
of Mr Gilbert Chesterton's stories has for its hero a judge
who, whilst trying a criminal case, is so overwhelmed by
the absurdity of his position and the wickedness of the
things it forces him to do, that he throws off the ermine
there and then, and goes out into the world to live the life
of an honest man instead of that of a cruel idol. There
has also been a propaganda of a soulless stupidity called
Determinism, representing man as a dead object driven
hither and thither by his environment, antecedents, circum-
stances, and so forth, which nevertheless does remind us
that there are limits to the number of cubits an individual
can add to his stature morally or physically, and that it is
silly as well as cruel to torment a man five feet high for
not being able to pluck fruit that is within the reach of men
of average height. I have known a case of an unfortunate
child being beaten for not being able to tell the time after
receiving an elaborate explanation of the figures on a clock
dial, the fact being that she was short-sighted and could
not see them. This is a typical illustration of the absurdi-
ties and cruelties into which we are led by the counter-
stupidity to Determinism : the doctrine of Free Will. The
notion that people can be good if they like, and that you

Ixxiv Androcles and the Lion

should give them a powerful additional motive for goodness
by tormenting them when they do evil, would soon reduce
itself to absurdity if its application were not kept within the
limits which nature sets to the self-control of most of us.
Nobody supposes that a man with no ear for music or no
mathematical faculty could be compelled on pain of death,
however cruelly inflicted, to hum all the themes of Bee-
thoven's symphonies or to complete Newton's work on
fluxions.

Limits to Free Will.

Consequently such of our laws as are not merely the
intimidations by which tyrannies are maintained under
pretext of law, can be obeyed through the exercise of a
quite common degree of reasoning power and self-control.
Most men and women can endure the ordinary annoyances
and disappointments of life without committing murderous
assaults. They conclude therefore that any person can re-
frain from such assaults if he or she chooses to, and proceed
to reinforce self-control by threats of severe punishment.
But inthistheyare mistaken. There are people, someof them
possessing considerable powers of mind and body, who can
no more restrain the fury into which a trifling mishap throws
them than a dog can restrain himself from snapping if he is
suddenly and painfully pinched. People fling knives and
lighted paraffin lamps at one another in a dispute over a
dinner-table. Men who have suffered several long sentences
of penal servitude for murderous assaults will, the very day
after they are released, seize their wives and cast them
under drays at an irritating word. We have not only people
who cannot resist an opportunity of stealing for the sake of
satisfying their wants, but even people who have a specific
mania for stealing, and do it when they are in no need of
the things they steal. Burglary fascinates some men as
sailoring fascinates some boys. Among respectable people
how many are there who can be restrained by the warnings
of their doctors and the lessons of experience from eating

Preface Ixxv

and drinking more than is good for them? It is true that
between self- controlled people and ungovernable people
there is a narrow margin of moral malingerers who can be
made to behave themselves by the fear of consequences;
but it is not worth while maintaining an abominable system
of malicious, deliberate, costly and degrading ill-treatment
of criminals for the sake of these marginal cases. For prac-
tical dealing with crime, Determinism or Predestination is
quite a good working rule. People without self-control
enough for social purposes may be killed, or may be kept in
asylums with a view to studying their condition and ascer-
taining whether it is curable. To torture them and give
ourselves virtuous airs at their expense is ridiculous and
barbarous ; and the desire to do it is vindictive and cruel.
And though vindictiveness and cruelty are at least human
qualities when they are frankly proclaimed and indulged,
they are loathsome when they assume the robes of Justice.
Which, I take it, is why Shakespear's Isabella gave such a
dressing-down to Judge Angelo, and why Swift reserved the
hottest corner of his hell for judges. Also, of course, why
Jesus said "Judge not that ye be not judged " and " If any
man hear my words and believe not, I judge him not"
because "he hath one that judgeth him": namely, the
Father who is one with him.

When we are robbed we generally appeal to the criminal
law, not considering that if the criminal law were effective
we should not have been robbed. That convicts us of
vengeance.

I need not elaborate the argument further. I have dealt
with it sufficiently elsewhere. I have only to point out that
we have been judging and punishing ever since Jesus told
us not to ; and I defy anyone to make out a convincing case
for believing that the world has been any better than it
would have been if there had never been a judge, a prison,
or a gallows in it all that time. We have simply added the
misery of punishment to the misery of crime, and the cruelty
of the judge to the cruelty of the criminal. We have taken

Ixxvi Androcles and the Lion

the bad man, and made him worse by torture and degrada-
tion, incidentally making ourselves worse in the process.
It does not seem very sensible, does it? It would have been
far easier to kill him as kindly as possible, or to label him
and leave him to his conscience, or to treat him as an in-
valid or a lunatic is now treated (it is only of late years, by
the way, that madmen have been delivered from the whip,
the chain, and the cage) ; and this, I presume, is the form
in which the teaching of Jesus could have been put into
practice.

Jesus on Marriage and the Family.

When we come to marriage and the family, we find Jesus
making the same objection to that individual appropriation
of human beings which is the essence of matrimony as to
the individual appropriation of wealth. A married man, he
said, will try to please his wife, and a married woman to
please her husband, instead of doing the work of God.
This is another version of "Where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also." Eighteen hundred years later we
find a very different person from Jesus, Talleyrand to wit,
saying the same thing. A married man with a family, said
Talleyrand, will do anything for money. Now this, though
not a scientifically precise statement, is true enough to be
a moral objection tomarriage. As long as a man has a right to
risk his lifeor his livelihood forhis idcashe needs only courage
and conviction to make his integrity unassailable. But he
forfeits that right when he marries. It took a revolution to
rescue Wagner from his Court appointment at Dresden;
and his wife never forgave him for being glad and feeling
free when he lost it and threw her back into poverty.
Millet might have gone on painting potboiling nudes to
the end of his life if his wife had not been of a heroic turn
herself. Women, for the sake of their children and parents,
submit to slaveries and prostitutions that no unattached
woman would endure.

Preface Ixxvii

This was the beginning and the end of the objection of
Jesus to marriage and family ties, and the explanation of
his conception of heaven as a place where there should be
neither marrying nor giving in marriage. Now there is no
reason to suppose that when he said this he did not mean
it. He did not, as St Paul did afterwards in his name, pro-
pose celibacy as a rule of Hfe ; for he was not a fool, nor,
when he denounced marriage, had he yet come to believe,
as St Paul did, that the end of the world was at hand and
there was therefore no more need to replenish the earth.
He must have meant that the race should be continued
without dividing with women and men the allegiance the
individual owes to God within him. This raises the prac-
tical problem of how we are to secure the spiritual freedom
and integrity of the priest and the nun without their barren-
ness and uncompleted experience. Luther the priest did
not solve the problem by marrying a nun : he only testified
in the most convincing and practical way to the fact that
celibacy was a worse failure than marriage.

Why Jesus did not Marry.

To all appearance the problem oppresses only a few ex-
ceptional people. Thoroughly conventional women married
to thoroughly conventional men should not be conscious of
any restriction : the chain not only leaves them free to do
whatever they want to do, but greatly facilitates their doing
it. To them an attack on marriage is not a blow struck in
defence of their freedom but at their rights and privileges.
One would expect that they would not only demur vehe-
mently to the teachings of Jesus in this matter, but object
strongly to his not having been a married man himself.
Even those who regard him as a god descended from his
throne in heaven to take on humanity for a time might
reasonably declare that the assumption of humanity must
have been incomplete at its most vital point if he were
a celibate. But the facts are flatly contrary. The mere

Ixxvili Androcles and the Lion

thought of Jesus as a married man is felt to be blasphemous
by the most conventional believers; and even those of us
to whom Jesus is no supernatural personage, but a prophet
only as Mahomet was a prophet, feel that there was some-
thing more dignified in the bachelordom of Jesus than in
the spectacle of Mahomet lying distracted on the floor of
his harem whilst his wives stormed and squabbled and
henpecked round him. We are not surprised that when
Jesus called the sons of Zebedee to follow him, he did not
call their father, and that the disciples, like Jesus himself,
were all men without family entanglements. It is evident
from his impatience when people excused themselves from
following him because of their family funerals, or when
they assumed that his first duty was to his mother, that he
had found family ties and domestic affections in his way at
every turn, and had become persuaded at last that no man
could follow his inner light until he was free from their
compulsion. The absence of any protest against this tempts
us to declare that on this question of marriage there are no
conventional people; and that everyone of us is at heart a
good Christian sexually.

Inconsistency of the Sex Instinct.

But the question is not so simple as that. Sex is an ex-
ceedingly subtle and complicated instinct ; and the mass of
mankind neither know nor care much about freedom of
conscience, which is what Jesus was thinking about, and
are concerned almost to obsession with sex, as to which
Jesus said nothing. In our sexual natures we are torn by
an irresistible attraction and an overwhelming repugnance
and disgust. We have two tyrannous physical passions :
concupiscence and chastity. We become mad in pursuit of
sex : we become equally mad in the persecution of that
pursuit. Unless we gratify our desire the race is lost :
unless we restrain it we destroy ourselves. We are thus led
to devise marriage institutions which will at the same time

Preface Ixxix

secure opportunities for the gratification of sex and raise
up innumerable obstacles to it; which will sanctify it and
brand it as infamous; which will identify it with virtue
and with sin simultaneously. Obviously it is useless to look
for any consistency in such institutions ; and it is only by
continual reform and readjustment, and by a considerable
elasticity in their enforcement, that a tolerable result can
be arrived at. I need not repeat here the long and elaborate
examination of them that I prefixed to my play entitled
Getting Married. Here I am concerned only with the
views of Jesus on the question ; and it is necessary, in order
to understand the attitude of the world towards them, that
we should not attribute the general approval of the decision
of Jesus to remain unmarried as an endorsement of his
views. We are simply in a state of confusion on the sub-
ject; but it is part of the confusion that we should con-
clude that Jesus was a celibate, and shrink even from
the idea that his birth was a natural one, yet cling
with ferocity to the sacredness of the institution which
provides a refuge from celibacy.

For Better for Worse.

Jesus, however, did not express a complicated view of
marriage. His objection to it was quite simple, as we have
seen. He perceived that nobody could live the higher life
unless money and sexual love were obtainable without
sacrificing it; and he saw that the effect of marriage as it
existed among the Jews (and as it still exists among our-
selves) was to make the couples sacrifice every higher con-
sideration until they had fed and pleased one another. The
worst of it is that this dangerous preposterousness in mar-
riage, instead of improving as the general conduct of
married couples improves, becomes much worse. The
selfish man to whom his wife is nothing but a slave, the
selfish woman to whom her husband is nothing but a scape-
goat and a breadwinner, are not held back from spiritual or

Ixxx Androcles and the Lion

any other adventures by fear of their eiFect on the welfare
of their mates. Their wives do not make recreants and
cowards of them : their husbands do not chain them to the
cradle and the cooking range when their feet should be
beautiful on the mountains. It is precisely as people become
more kindly, more conscientious, more ready to shoulder
the heavier part of the burden (which means that the
strong shall give way to the weak and the slow hold back
the swift), that marriage becomes an intolerable obstacle
to individual evolution. And that is why the revolt against
marriage of which Jesus was an exponent always recurs
when civilization raises the standard of marital duty and
affection, and at the same time produces a greater need for
individual freedom in pursuit of a higher evolution.

The Remedy.

This, fortunately, is only one side of marriage ; and the
question arises, can it not be eliminated ? The reply is re-
assuring : of course it can. There is no mortal reason in the
nature of things why a married couple should be economic-
ally dependent on one another. The Communism advo-
cated by Jesus, whichwe have seen to be entirely practicable,
and indeed inevitable if our civilization is to be saved from
collapse, gets rid of that difficulty completely. And with the
economic dependence will go the force of the outrageous
claims that derive their real sanction from the economic
pressure behind them. When a man allows his wife to turn
him from the best work he is capable of doing, and to sell
his soul at the highest commercial prices obtainable; when
he allows her to entangle him in a social routine that is
wearisome and debilitating to him, or tie him to her apron
strings when he needs that occasional solitude which is
one of the most sacred of human rights, he does so because
he has no right to impose eccentric standards of expenditure
and unsocial habits on her, and because these conditions
have produced by their pressure so general a custom of

Preface Ixxxi

chaining wedded couples to one another that married people
are coarsely derided when their partners break the chain.
And when a woman is condemned by her parents to wait
in genteel idleness and uselessness for a husband when all
her healthy social instincts call her to acquire a profession
and work, it is again her economic dependence on them
that makes their tyranny effective.

The Case for Marriage.

Thus, though it would be too much to say that every-
thing that is obnoxious in marriage and family life will be
cured by Communism, yet it can be said that it will cure
what Jesus objected to in these institutions. He made no
comprehensive study of them : he only expressed his own
grievance with an overwhelming sense that it is a grievance
so deep that all the considerations on the other side are as dust
in the balance. Obviously there are such considerations,
and very weighty ones too. When Talleyrand said that a
married man with a family is capable of anything, he meant
anything evil ; but an optimist may declare, with equal half
truth, that a married man is capable of anything good ;
that marriage turns vagabonds into steady citizens ; and that
men and women will, for love of their mates and children,
practise virtues that unattached individuals are incapable of.
It is true that too much of this domestic virtue is self-
denial, which is not a virtue at all ; but then the following
of the inner light at all costs is largely self-indulgence,
which is just as suicidal, just as weak, just as cowardly as
self-denial. Ibsen, who takes us into the matter far more
resolutely than Jesus, is unable to find any golden rule :
both Brand and Peer Gynt come to a bad end ; and though
Brand does not do as much mischief as Peer, the mischief
he does do is of extraordinary intensity.

Ixxxii Androcles and the Lion
Celibacy no Remedy.

We must, I think, regard the protest of Jesus against
marriage and family ties as the claim of a particular kind
of individual to be free from them because they hamper
his own work intolerably. When he said that if we are to
follow him in the sense of taking up his work we must
give up our family ties, he was simply stating a fact; and
to this day the Roman Catholic priest, the Buddhist lama,
and the fakirs of all the eastern denominations accept the
saying. It is also accepted by the physically enterprising,
the explorers, the restlessly energetic of all kinds: in short,
by the adventurous. The greatest sacrifice in marriage is the
sacrifice of the adventurous attitude towards life : the being
settled. Those who are born tired may crave for settle-
ment; but to fresher and stronger spirits it is a form of
suicide.

Now to say of any institution that it is incompatible
with both the contemplative and adventurous life is to dis-
grace it so vitally that all the moralizings of all the Deans
and Chapters cannot reconcile our souls to its slavery. The
unmarriedjesusand the unmarried Beethoven, the unmarried
Joan of Arc, Clare, Teresa, Florence Nightingale seem as
they should be ; and the saying that there is always some-
thing ridiculous about a married philosopher becomes inevit-
able. And yet the celibate is still more ridiculous than the
married man : the priest, in accepting the alternative of
celibacy, disables himself; and the best priests are those
who have been men of this world before they became men
of the world to come. But as the taking of vows does not
annul an existing marriage, and a married man cannot
become a priest, we are again confronted with the absurdity
that the best priest is a reformed rake. Thus does marriage,
itself intolerable, thrust us upon intolerable alternatives.
The practical solution is to make the individual economically
independent of marriage and the family, and to make

Preface Ixxxiii

marriage as easily dissoluble as any other partnership : in
other words, to accept the conclusions to which experience
is slowly driving both our sociologists and our legislators.
This will not instantly cure all the evils of marriage, nor
root up at one stroke its detestable tradition of property in
human bodies. But it will leave Nature free to effect a
cure; and in free soil the root may wither and perish.

This disposes of all the opinions and teachings of Jesus
which are still matters of controversy. They are all in line
with the best modern thought. He told us what we have
to do ; and we have had to find the way to do it. Most
of us are still, as most were in his own time, extremely
recalcitrant, and are being forced along that way by painful
pressure of circumstances, protesting at every step that
nothing will induce us to go ; that it is a ridiculous way, a
disgraceful way, a socialistic way, an atheistic way, an
immoral way, and that the vanguard ought to be ashamed
of themselves and must be made to turn back at once.
But they find that they have to follow the vanguard all
the same if their lives are to be worth living.

After the Crucifixion.

Let us now return to the New Testament narrative ; for
what happened after the disappearance of Jesus is instructive.
Unfortunately, the crucifixion was a complete political
success. I remember that when I described it in these
terms once before, I greatly shocked a most respectable
newspaper in my native town, the Dublin Daily Express,
because my journalistic phrase shewed that I was treating
it as an ordinary event like Home Rule or the Insurance
Act : that is (though this did not occur to the editor), as a
real event which had really happened, instead of a portion
of the Church service. I can only repeat, assuming as I am
that it zvas a real event and did actually happen, that it
was as complete a success as any in history. Christianity as
a specific doctrine was slain with Jesus, suddenly and

Ixxxiv Androcles and the Lion

utterly. He was hardly cold in his grave, or high in his
heaven (as you please), before the apostles dragged the
tradition of him dow^n to the level of the thing it has
remained ever since. And that thing the intelligent heathen
may study, if they would be instructed in it by modern
books, in Samuel Butler's novel, The Way of All Flesh.

The Vindictive Miracles and the
Stoning of Stephen.

Take, for example, the miracles. Of Jesus alone of all
the Christian miracle workers there is no record, except
in certain gospels that all men reject, of a malicious or
destructive miracle. A barren fig-tree was the only victim of
his anger. Every one of his miracles on sentient subjects
was an act of kindness. John declares that he healed the
wound of the man whose ear was cut off (by Peter, John
says) at the arrest in the garden. One of the first things
the apostles did with their miraculous power was to strike
dead a wretched man and his wife who had defrauded
them by holding back some money from the common
stock. They struck people blind or dead without remorse,
judging because they had been judged. They healed the
sick and raised the dead apparently in a spirit of pure dis-
play and advertisement. Their doctrine did not contain a
ray of that light which reveals Jesus as one of the redeemers
of men from folly and error. They cancelled him, and
went back straight to John the Baptist and his formula
of securing remission of sins by repentance and the rite of
baptism (being born again of water and the spirit). Peter's
first harangue softens us by the human touch of its exordium,
which was a quaint assurance to his hearers that they
must believe him to be sober because it was too early in
the day to get drunk; but of Jesus he had nothing to say
except that he was the Christ foretold by the prophets as
coming from the seed of David, and that they must believe
this and be baptized. To this the other apostles added

Preface Ixxxv

incessant denunciations of the Jews for having crucified
him, and threats of the destruction that would overtake
them if they did not repent : that is, if they did not join
the sect which the apostles were now forming. A quite
intolerable young speaker named Stephen delivered an
oration to the council, in which he first inflicted on them
a tedious sketch of the history of Israel, with which they
were presumably as well acquainted as he, and then reviled
them in the most insulting terms as "stiftnecked and un-
circumcized." Finally, after boring and annoying them to
the utmost bearable extremity, he looked up and declared
that he saw the heavens open, and Christ standing on the
right hand of God. This was too much : they threw him
out of the city and stoned him to death. It was a severe
way of suppressing a tactless and conceited bore ; but it
was pardonable and human in comparison to the slaughter
of poor Ananias and Sapphira.

Paul.

Suddenly a man of genius, Paul, violently anti-Christian,
enters on the scene, holding the clothes of the men
who are stoning Stephen. He persecutes, the Christians
with great vigor, a sport which he combines with the
business of a tentmaker. This temperamental hatred of
Jesus, whom he has never seen, is a pathological symptom
of that particular sort of conscience and nervous constitu-
tion which brings its victims under the tyranny of two
delirious terrors : the terror of sin and the terror of death,
which may be called also the terror of sex and the terror of
life. Now Jesus, with his healthy conscience on his higher
plane, was free from these terrors. He consorted freely
with sinners, and was never concerned for a moment, as far
as we know, about whether his conduct was sinful or not ;
so that he has forced us to accept him as the man without
sin. Even if we reckon his last days as the days of his
delusion, he none the less gave a fairly convincing exhibi-

Ixxxvi Androcles and the Lion

tion of superiority to the fear of death. This must have
both fascinated and horrified Paul, or Saul, as he was first
called. The horror accounts for his fierce persecution of
the Christians. The fascination accounts for the strangest
of his fancies: the fancy for attaching the name of Jesus
Christ to the great idea which flashed upon him on the
road to Damascus, the idea that he could not only make a
religion of his two terrors, but that the movement started
by Jesus offered him the nucleus for his new Church. It
was a monstrous idea ; and the shock of it, as he afterwards
declared, struck him blind for days. He heard Jesus calling
to him from the clouds, " Why persecute me ?" His natural
hatred of the teacher for whom Sin and Death had no
terrors turned into a wild personal worship of him which
has the ghastliness of a beautiful thing seen in a false
light.

The chronicler of the Acts of the Apostles sees nothing
of the significance of this. The great danger of conversion
in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind
is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its
fascination without understanding it, and being incapable
of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.
Years ago I said that the conversion of a savage to
Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.
The conversion of Paul was no conversion at all : it was
Paul who converted the religion that had raised one man
above sin and death into a religion that delivered millions
of men so completely into their dominion that their own
common nature became a horror to them, and the religious
life became a denial of life. Paul had no intention of
surrendering either his Judaism or his Roman citizenship
to the new moral world (as Robert Owen called it) of
Communism and Jesuism. Just as in the XIX century
Karl Marx, not content to take political economy as he
found it, insisted on rebuilding it from the bottom upwards
in his own way, and thereby gave a new lease of life to the
errors it was just outgrowing, so Paul reconstructed the old

Preface Ixxxvii

Salvationism from which Jesus had vainly tried to redeem
him, and produced a fantastic theology which is still the
most amazing thing of the kind known to us. Being in-
tellectually an inveterate Roman Rationalist, always dis-
carding the irrational real thing for the unreal but ratiocin-
able postulate, he began by discarding Man as he is, and
substituted a postulate which he called Adam. And when
he was asked, as he surely must have been in a world not
wholly mad, what had become of the natural man, he
replied "Adam is the natural man." This was confusing
to simpletons, because according to tradition Adam was
certainly the name of the natural man as created in the
garden of Eden. It was as if a preacher of our own time had
described as typically British Frankenstein's monster, and
called him Smith, and somebody, on demanding what about
the man in the street,had been told " Smith is the man in the
street." The thing happens often enough; for indeed the
world is full of these Adams and Smiths and men in the
street and average sensual men and economic men and
womanly women and what not, all of them imaginary Atlases
carrying imaginary worlds on their unsubstantial shoulders.
The Eden story provided Adam with a sin : the " original
sin" for which we are all damned. Baldly stated, this seems
ridiculous ; nevertheless it corresponds to something actually
existent not only in Paul's consciousness but in our own.
The original sin was not the eating of the forbidden fruit,
but the consciousness of sin which the fruit produced. The
moment Adam and Eve tasted the apple they found them-
selves ashamed of their sexual relation, which until then
had seemed quite innocent to them ; and there is no getting
over the hard fact that this shame, or state of sin, has
persisted to this day, and is one of the strongest of our
instincts. Thus Paul's postulate of Adam as the natural
man was pragmatically true ; it worked. But the weakness
of Pragmatism is that most theories will work if you put
your back into making them work, provided they have some
point of contactwith human nature. Hedonism will pass the

Ixxxviii Androcles and the Lion

pragmatic test as well as Stoicism. Up to a certain point
every social principle that is not absolutely idiotic works :
Autocracy works in Russia and Democracy in America ;
Atheism works in France, Polytheism in India, Monotheism
throughout Islam, and Pragmatism, or No-ism, in England.
Paul's fantastic conception of the damned Adam, repre-
sented by Bunyan as a pilgrim with a great burden of sins
on his back, corresponded to the fundamental condition of
evolution, which is, that life, including human life, is con-
tinually evolving, and must therefore be continually ashamed
of itself and its present and past. Bunyan's pilgrim wants
to get rid of his bundle of sins ; but he also wants to reach
"yonder shining light" ; and when at last his bundle falls
off him into the sepulchre of Christ, his pilgrimage is still
unfinished and his hardest trials still ahead of him. His
conscience remains uneasy ; "original sin" still torments
him ; and his adventure with Giant Despair, who throws
him into the dungeon of Doubting Castle, from which he
escapes by the use of a skeleton key, is more terrible than
any he met whilst the bundle was still on his back. Thus
Bunyan's allegory of human nature breaks through the
Pauline theology at a hundred points. His theological
allegory, The Holy War, with its troops of Election
Doubters, and its cavalry of "those that rode Reformadoes,"
is, as a whole, absurd, impossible, and, except in passages
where the artistic old Adam momentarily got the better of
the Salvationist theologian, hardly readable.

Paul's theory of original sin was to some extent idiosyn-
cratic. He tells us definitely that he finds himself quite
well able to avoid the sinfulness of sex by practising
celibacy; but he recognizes, rather contemptuously, that in
this respect he is not as other men are, and says that they
had better marry than burn, thus admitting that though
marriage may lead to placing the desire to please wife or
husband before the desire to please God, yet preoccupation
with unsatisfied desire may be even more ungodly than pre-
occupation with domestic affection. This view of the case

Preface Ixxxix

inevitably led him to insist that a wife should be rather a
slave than a partner, her real function being, not to engage
a man's love and loyalty, but on the contrary to release
them for God by relieving the man of all preoccupation
with sex just as in her capacity of housekeeper and cook
she relieves his preoccupation with hunger hy the simple
expedient of satisfying his appetite. This slavery also
justifies itself pragmatically by working effectively ; but it
has made Paul the eternal enemy of Woman. Incidentally
it has led to many foolish surmises about Paul's personal
character and circumstances, by people so enslaved by sex
that a celibate appears to them a sort of monster. They
forget that not only whole priesthoods, official and unofficial,
from Paul to Carlyle and Ruskin, have defied the tyranny
of sex, but immense numbers of ordinary citizens of both
sexes have, either voluntarily or under pressure of circum-
stances easily surmountable, saved their energies for less
primitive activities.

Howbeit, Paul succeeded in stealing the image of
Christ crucified for the figure-head of his Salvationist vessel,
with its Adam posing as the natural man, its doctrine of
original sin, and its damnation avoidable only by faith in
the sacrifice of the cross. In fact, no sooner had Jesus
knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly
set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus.

The Confusion of Christendom.

Now it is evident that two religions having such con-
trary effects on mankind should not be confused as they are
under a common name. There is not one word of Pauline
Christianity in the characteristic utterances of Jesus. When
Saul watched the clothes of the men who stoned Stephen,
he was not acting upon beliefs which Paul renounced.
There is no record of Christ's having ever said to any man :
"Go and sin as much as you like : you can put it all on
me." He said " Sin no more," and insisted that he was

xc Androcles and the Lion

putting up the standard of conduct, not debasing it, and
that the righteousness of the Christian must exceed that of
the Scribe and Pharisee. The notion that he was shedding
his blood in order that every- petty cheat and adulterator
and libertine might wallow in it and come out whiter than
snow, cannot be imputed to him on his own authority. "I
come as an infallible patent medicine for bad consciences "
is not one of the sayings in the gospels. If Jesus could have
been consulted on Bunyan's allegory as to that business of
the burden of sin dropping from the pilgrim's back when he
caught sight of the cross, we must infer from his teaching that
he would have told Bunyan in forcible terms that he had
never made a greater mistake in his life, and that the busi-
ness of a Christ was to make self-satisfied sinners feel the
burden of their sins and stop committing them instead of
assuring them that they could not help it, as it was all
Adam's fault, but that it did not matter as long as they
were credulous and friendly about himself. Even when he
believed himself to be a god, he did not regard himself as
a scapegoat. He was to take away the sins of the world by
good government, by justice and mercy, by setting the
welfare of little children above the pride of princes, by
casting all the quackeries and idolatries which now usurp
and malversate the power of God into what our local
authorities quaintly call the dust destructor, and by riding
on the clouds of heaven in glory instead of in a thousand-
guinea motor car. That was delirious, if you like; but it
was the delirium of a free soul, not of a shamebound one
like Paul's. There has really never been a more monstrous
imposition perpetrated than the imposition of the limitations
of Paul's soul upon the soul of Jesus.

The Secret of Paul's Success.

Paul must soon have found that his followers had gained
peace of mind and victory over death and sin at the cost
of all moral responsibility; for he did his best to reintro-

Preface xci

duce it by making good conduct the test of sincere belief,
and insisting that sincere belief was necessary to salvation-
But as his system was rooted in the plain fact that as what
he called sin includes sex and is therefore an ineradic-
able part of human nature (why else should Christ
have had to atone for the sin of all future generations ?)
it was impossible for him to declare that sin, even in its
wickedest extremity, could forfeit the sinner's salvation if
he repented and believed. And to this day Pauline Christi-
anity is, and owes its enormous vogue to being, a premium
on sin. Its consequences have had to be held in check by
the worldlywise majority through a violently anti-Christian
system of criminal law and stern morality. But of course
the main restraint is human :nture, which has good im-
pulses as well as bad ones, and refrains fro:-, theft and
murder and cruelty, even when it is taught that it can
commit them all at the expense of Christ and go happily
to heaven afterwards, simply because it does not always
want to murder or rob or torture.

It is now easy to understand why the Christianity of
Jesus failed completely to establish itself politically and
socially, and was easily suppressed by the police and the
Church, whilst Paulinism overran the whole western civil-
ized world, which was at that time the Roman Empire,
and was adopted by it as its official faith, the old avenging
gods falling helplessly before the new Redeemer. It still re-
tains, as we may see in Africa, its power of bringing to
simple people a message of hope and consolation that no
other religion offers. But this enchantment is produced by
its spurious association with the personal charm of Jesus,
and exists only for untrained minds. In the hands of a logical
Frenchman like Calvin, pushing it to its utmost conclusions,
and devising "institutes" for hardheaded adult Scots and
literal Swiss, it becomes the most infernal of fatalisms ; and
the lives of civilized children are blighted by its logic whilst
negro piccaninnies are rejoicing in its legends.

xcii Androcles and the Lion

Paul's Qualities.

Paul, however, did not get his great reputation by mere
imposition and reaction. It is only in comparison with
Jesus (to whom many prefer him) that he appears common
and conceited. Though in The Acts he is only a vulgar
revivalist, he comes out in his own epistles as a genuine
poet, though by flashes only. He is no more a Christian
than Jesus was a Baptist: he is a disciple of Jesus only as
Jesus was a disciple of John. He does nothing that Jesus
would have done, and says nothing that Jesus would have
said, though much, like the famous ode to charity, that he
would have admired. He is more Jewish than the Jews,
more Roman than the Romans, proud both ways, full of
startling confessions and self- revelations that would not
surprise us if they were slipped into the pages of Nietzsche,
tormented by an intellectual conscience that demanded an
argued case even at the cost of sophistry, with all sorts of fine
qualities and occasional illuminations, but always hopelessly
in the toils of Sin, Death, and Logic, which had no power
over Jesus. As we have seen, it was by introducing this
bondage and terror of his into the Christian doctrine
that he adapted it to the Church and State systems which
Jesus transcended, and made it practicable by destroying
the specifically Jesuist side of it. He would have been
quite in his place in any modern Protestant State ; and
he, not Jesus, is the true head and founder of our Reformed
Church, as Peter is of the Roman Church. The followers
of Paul and Peter made Christendom, whilst the Nazarenes
were wiped out.

The Acts of the Apostles.

Here we may return to the narrative called The Acts of
the Apostles, which we left at the point where the stoning
of Stephen was followed by the introduction of Paul. The

Preface xciii

author of The Acts, though a good story-teller, like Luke,
was (herein also like Luke) much weaker in power of
thought than in imaginative literary art. Hence we find
Luke credited with the authorship of The Acts by people
who like stories and have no aptitude for theology, whilst
the book itself is denounced as spurious by Pauline theo-
logians because Paul, and indeed all the apostles, are repre-
sented in it as very commonplace revivalists, interesting us
by their adventures more than by any qualities of mind or
character. Indeed, but for the epistles, we should have a
very poor opinion of the apostles. Paul in particular is de-
scribed as setting a fashion which has remained in continual
use to this day. Whenever he addresses an audience, he
dwells with great zest on his misdeeds before his pseudo con-
version, with the effect of throwing into stronger relief his
present state of blessedness ; and he tells the story of that
conversion over and over again, ending with exhortations
to the hearers to come and be saved, and threats of the
wrath that will overtake them if they refuse. At any
revival meeting today the same thing may be heard,
followed by the same conversions. This is natural enough;
but it is totally unlike the preaching of Jesus, who never
talked about his personal history, and never "worked up"
an audience to hysteria. It aims at a purely nervous effect ;
it brings no enlightenment; the most ignorant man has
only to become intoxicated with his own vanity, and
mistake his self-satisfaction for the Holy Ghost, to become
qualified as an apostle ; and it has absolutely nothing to
do with the characteristic doctrines of Jesus. The Holy
Ghost may be at work all round producing wonders ,of
art and science, and strengthening men to endure all sorts
of martyrdoms for the enlargement of knowledge, and the
enrichment and intensification of life ("that ye may have
life more abundantly") ; but the apostles, as described in
The Acts, take no part in the struggle except as persecutors
and revilers. To this day, when their successors get the
upper hand, as in Geneva (Knox's "perfect city of Christ")

xciv Androcles and the Lion

andin Scotland and Ulster, every spiritual activity but money-
making and churchgoing is stamped out ; heretics are ruth-
lessly persecuted ; and such pleasures as money can purchase
are suppressed so that its possessors are compelled to go on
making money because there is nothing else to do. And
the compensation for all this privation is partly an insane
conceit of being the elect of God, with a reserved seat in
heaven, and partly, since even the most infatuated idiot
cannot spend his life admiring himself, the less innocent
excitement of punishing other people for not admiring
him, and the nosing out of the sins of the people who,
being intelligent enough to be incapable of mere dull
self-righteousness, and highly susceptible to the beauty
and interest of the real workings of the Holy Ghost, try
to live more rational and abundant lives. The abominable
amusement of terrifying children with threats of hell is
another of these diversions, and perhaps the vilest and most
mischievous of them. The net result is that the imitators
of the apostles, whether they are called Holy Willies or
Stigginses in derision, or, in admiration, Puritans or saints,
are, outside their own congregations, and to a consider-
able extent inside them, heartily detested. Now nobody
detests Jesus, though many who have been tormented
in their childhood in his name include him in their
general loathing of everything connected with the word
religion ; whilst others, who know him only by misrepre-
sentation as a sentimental pacifist and an ascetic, include
him in their general dislike of that type of character. In
the same way a student who has had to "get up" Shake-
spear as a college subject may hate Shakespear; and people
who dislike the theatre may Include Moliere in that dislike
without ever having read a line of his or witnessed one
of his plays ; but nobody with any knowledge of Shakespear
or Moliere could possibly detest them, or read without pity
and horror a description of their being insulted, tortured,
and killed. And the same is true of Jesus. But it requires
the most strenuous effort of conscience to refrain from

Preface xcv

crying " Serve him right " when we read of the stoning
of Stephen ; and nobody has ever cared twopence about
the martyrdom of Peter : many better men have died worse
deaths : for example, honest Hugh Latimer, who was
burned by us, was worth fifty Stephens and a dozen Peters.
One feels at last that when Jesus called Peter from his
boat, he spoiled an honest fisherman, and made nothing
better out of the wreck than a salvation monger.

The Controversies on Baptism and
Transubstantiation.

Meanwhile the inevitable effect of dropping the peculiar
doctrines of Jesus and going back to John the Baptist, was
to make it much easier to convert Gentiles than Jews; and
it was by following the line of least resistance that Paul
became the apostle to the Gentiles. The Jews had their
own rite of initiation : the rite of circumcision ; and they
were fiercely jealous for it, because it marked them as the
chosen people of God, and set them apart from the Gen-
tiles, who were simply the uncircumcized. When Paul,
finding that baptism made way faster among the Gentiles
than among the Jews, as it enabled them to plead that they
too were sanctified by a rite of later and higher authority
than the Mosaic rite, he was compelled to admit that cir-
cumcision did not matter; and this, to the Jews, was an
intolerable blasphemy. To Gentiles like ourselves, a good
deal of the Epistle to the Romans is now tedious to un-
readableness because it consists of a hopeless attempt by
Paul to evade the conclusion that if a man were baptized
it did not matter a rap whether he was circumcized or not.
Paul claims circumcision as an excellent thing in its way
for a Jew; but if it has no efficacy towards salvation, and
if salvation is the one thing needful — and Paul was com-
mitted to both propositions — his pleas in mitigation only
made the Jews more determined to stone him.

xcvi Androcles and the Lion

Thus from the very beginning of apostolic Christianity,
it was hampered by a dispute as to whether salvation was
to be attained by a surgical operation or by a sprinkling of
water: mere rites on which Jesus would not have wasted
twenty words. Later on, when the new sect conquered the
Gentile west, where the dispute had no practical applica-
tion, the other ceremony — that of eating the god — pro-
duced a still more disastrous dispute, in which a difference
of belief, not as to the obligation to perform the ceremony,
but as to whether it was a symbolic or a real ingestion of
divine substance, produced persecution, slaughter, hatred,
and everything that Jesus loathed, on a monstrous scale.

But long before that, the superstitions which had fastened
on the new faith made trouble. The parthenogenetic
birth of Christ, simple enough at first as a popular
miracle, was not left so simple by the theologians. They
began to ask of what substance Christ was made in the
womb of the virgin. When the Trinity was added to the
faith the question arose, was the virgin the mother of God
or only the mother of Jesus ? Arian schisms and Nestorian
schisms arose on these questions ; and the leaders of the
resultant agitations rancorously deposed one another and
excommunicated one another according to their luck in
enlisting the emperors on their side. In the IV century
they began to burn one another for differences of opinion
in such matters. In the VIII century Charlemagne made
Christianity compulsory by killing those who refused to
embrace it; and though this made an end of the volun-
tary character of conversion, Charlemagne may claim to
be the first Christian who put men to death for any point
of doctrine that really mattered. From his time onward
the history of Christian controversy reeks with blood and
fire, torture and warfare. The Crusades, the persecu-
tions in Albi and elsewhere, the Inquisition, the "wars of
religion " which followed the Reformation, all presented
themselves as Christian phenomena ; but who can doubt
that they would have been repudiated with horror by Jesus ?

Preface xcvii

Our own notion that the massacre of St Bartholomew's
was an outrage on Christianity, whilst the campaigns of
Gustavus Adolphus, and even of Frederick the Great, were
a defence of it, is as absurd as the opposite notion that
Frederick was Antichrist and Torquemada and Ignatius
Loyola men after the very heart of Jesus. Neither they
nor their exploits had anything to do with him. It is prob-
able that Archbishop Laud and John Wesley died equally
persuaded that he in whose name they had made them-
selves famous on earth would receive them in Heaven with
open arms. Poor Fox the Quaker would have had ten times
their chance ; and yet Fox made rather a miserable business
of life.

Nevertheless all these perversions of the doctrine of
Jesus derived their moral force from his credit, and so had
to keep his gospel alive. When the Protestants translated
the Bible into the vernacular and let it loose among the
people, they did an extremely dangerous thing, as the mis-
chief which followed proves; but they incidentally let loose
the sayings of Jesus in open competition with the sayings of
Paul and Koheleth and David and Solomon and the authors
of Job and the Pentateuch ; and, as wc have seen, Jesus
seems to be the winning name. The glaring contradiction
between his teaching and the practice of all the States and
all the Churches is no longer hidden. And it may be that
though nineteen centuries have passed since Jesus was
born (the date of his birth is now quaintly given as 7 B.C.,
though some contend for 100 B.C.), and though his Church
has not yet been founded nor his political system tried, the
bankruptcy of all the other systems when audited by our
vital statistics, which give us a final test for all political
systems, is driving us hard into accepting him, not as a
scapegoat, but as one who was much less of a fool in prac-
tical matters than we have hitherto all thought him.

xcviii Androcles and the Lion

The Alternative Christs.

Let us now clear up the situation a little. The New
Testament tells two stories for two different sorts of readers.
One is the old story of the achievement of our salvation by
the sacrifice and atonement of a divine personage who was
barbarously slain and rose again on the third day : the story
as it was accepted by the apostles. And in this story the
political, economic, and moral views of the Christ have no
importance : the atonement is everything; and we are saved
by our faith in it, and not by works or opinions (other than
that particular opinion) bearing on practical affairs.

The other is the story of a prophet who, after expressing
several very interesting opinions as to practical conduct,
both personal and political, which are now of pressing im-
portance, and instructing his disciples to carry them out in
their daily life, lost his head ; believed himself to be a crude
legendary form of god ; and under that delusion courted
and suffered a cruel execution in the belief that he would
rise from the dead and come in glory to reign over a re-
generated world. In this form, the political, economic, and
moral opinions of Jesus, as guides to conduct, are interesting
and important : the rest is mere psychopathy and supersti-
tion. The accounts of the resurrection, the parthenogenetic
birth, and the more incredible miracles are rejected as in-
ventions ; and such episodes as the conversation with the
devil are classed with similar conversations recorded of St
Dunstan, Luther, Bunyan, Swedenborg, and Blake.

Credulity no Criterion.

This arbitrary acceptance and rejection of parts of the
gospel is not peculiar to the Secularist view. We have
seen Luke and John reject Matthew's story of the massacre
of the innocents and the flight into Egypt without ceremony.
The notion that Matthew's manuscript is a literal and

Preface xcix

infallible record of facts, not subject to the errors that
beset all earthly chroniclers, would have made John stare,
being as it is a comparatively modern fancy of intel-
lectually untrained people w^ho keep the Bible on the
same shelf with Napoleon's Book of Fate, Old Moore's
Almanack, and handbooks of therapeutic herbalism. You
may be a fanatical Salvationist and reject more miracle
stories than Huxley did; and you may utterly repudiate
Jesus as the Savior and yet cite him as a historical witness
to the possession by men of the most marvellous thauma-
turgical powers. "Christ Scientist" and Jesus the Mahatma
are preached by people whom Peter would have struck dead
as worse infidels than Simon Magus ; and the Atonement
is preached by Baptist and Congregationalist ministers whose
views of the miracles are those of Ingersoll and Bradlaugh.
Luther, who made a clean sweep of all the saints with their
million miracles, and reduced the Blessed Virgin herself to
the status of an idol, concentrated Salvationism to a point
at which the most execrable murderer who believes in it
when the rope is round his neck, flies straight to the arms of
Jesus, whilst Tom Paine and Shelley fall into the bottom-
less pit to burn there to all eternity. And sceptical physicists
like Sir William Crookes demonstrate by laboratory experi-
ments that " mediums " like Dunglas Home can make the
pointer of a spring-balance go round without touching the
weight suspended from it.

Belief in Personal Immortality no
Criterion.

Nor is belief in individual immortality any criterion.
Theosophists, rejecting vicarious atonement so sternly that
they insist that the smallest of our sins brings its Karma,
also insist on individual immortality and metempsychosis
in order to provide an unlimited field for Karma to be
worked out by the unredeemed sinner. The belief in the"
prolongation of individual life beyond the grave is far more

c Androcles and the Lion

real and vivid among table-rapping Spiritualists than among
conventional Christians. The notion that those who reject
the Christian (or any other) scheme of salvation by atone-
ment must reject also belief in personal immortality and in
miracles is as baseless as the notion that if a man is an atheist
he will steal your watch.

I could multiply these instances to weariness. The main
difference that set Gladstone and Huxley by the ears is not
one between belief in supernatural persons or miraculous
events and the sternest view of such belief as a breach of
intellectual integrity : it is the difference between belief
in the efficacy of the crucifixion as an infallible cure for guilt,
and a congenital incapacity for believing this, or (the same
thing) desiring to believe it.

The Secular View Natural, not Rational,
therefore Inevitable.

It must therefore be taken as a flat fundamental modern
fact, whether we like it or not, that whilst many of us can-
not believe that Jesus got his curious grip of our souls by
mere sentimentality, neither can we believe that he was John
Barleycorn. The more our reason and study lead us to be-
lieve that Jesus was talking the most penetrating good sense
when he preached Communism ; when he declared that the
reality behind the popular belief in God was a creative
spirit in ourselves called by him the Heavenly Father and
by us Evolution, Elan Vital, Life Force and other names;
when he protested against the claims of marriage and the
family to appropriate that high part of our energy that was
meant for the service of his Father, the more impossible it
becomes for us to believe that he was talking equally good
sense when he so suddenly announced that he was himself
a visible concrete God ; that his flesh and blood were mira-
culous food for us ; that he must be tortured and slain in
the traditional manner and would rise from the dead after

Preface ci

three days ; and that at his Second Coming the stars would
fall from heaven and he become king of an earrhly para-
dise. But it is easy and reasonable to believe that an over-
wrought preacher at last went mad as Swift and Ruskin and
Nietzsche went mad. Every asylum has in it a patient
suffering from the delusion that he is a god, yet otherwise
sane enough. These patients do not nowadays declare that
they will be barbarously slain and will rise from the dead,
because they have lost that tradition of the destiny of god-
head; but they claim everything appertaining to divinity
that is within their knowledge.

Thus the gospels as memoirs and suggestive statements
of sociological and biological doctrine, highly relevant to
modern civilization, though ending in the history of a psycho-
pathic delusion, are quite credible, intelligible, and interest-
ing to modern thinkers. In any other light they are neither
credible, intelligible, nor interesting except to people upon
whom the delusion imposes.

" The Higher Criticism."

Historical research and paleographic criticism will no
doubt continue their demonstrations that the New Testa-
ment, like the Old, seldom tells a single story or expounds
a single doctrine, and gives us often an accretion and con-
glomeration of widely discrete and even unrelated traditions
and doctrines. But these disintegrations, though technically
interesting to scholars, and gratifying or exasperating, as
the case may be, to people who are merely defending or
attacking the paper fortifications of the infallibility of the
Bible, have hardly anything to do with the purpose of
these pages. I have mentioned the fact that most of the
authorities are now agreed (for the moment) that the date
of the birth of Jesus may be placed at about 7 b.c. ; but
they do not therefore date their letters 1923, nor, I pre-
sume, do they expect me to do so. What I am engaged
in is a criticism (in the Kantian sense) of an established

cii Androcles and the Lion

body of belief which has become an actual part of the
mental fabric of my readers ; and I should be the most
exasperating of triflers and pedants if I were to digress
into a criticism of some other belief or no-belief which my
readers might conceivably profess if they were erudite
Scriptural paleographers and historians, in which case, by
the way, they would have to change their views so fre-
quently that the gospel they received in their childhood
would dominate them after all by its superior persistency.
The chaos of mere facts in which the Sermon on the
Mount and the Ode to Charity suggest nothing but disputes
as to whether they are interpolations or not, in which
Jesus becomes nothing but a name suspected of belonging
to ten different prophets or executed persons, in which
Paul is only the man who could not possibly have written
the epistles attributed to him, in which Chinese sages,
Greek philosophers, Latin authors, and writers of ancient
anonymous inscriptions arc thrown at our heads as the
sources of this or that scrap of the Bible, is neither a reli-
gion nor a criticism of religion : one does not offer the
fact that a good deal of the medieval building in Peter-
borough Cathedral was found to be flagrant jerry-building
as a criticism of the Dean's sermons. For good or evil, we
have made a synthesis out of the literature we call the
Bible; and though the discovery that there is a good deal
of jerry-building in the Bible is interesting in its way,
because everything about the Bible is interesting, it does
not alter the synthesis very materially even for the paleo-
graphers, and does not alter it at all for those who know
no more about modern paleography than Archbishop Ussher
did. I have therefore indicated little more of the discoveries
than Archbishop Ussher might have guessed for himself if
he had read the Bible without prepossessions.

For the rest, I have taken the synthesis as it really lives
and works in men. After all, a synthesis is what you
want : it is the case you have to judge brought to an appre-
hensible issue for you. Even if you have little more respect

Preface ciii

for synthetic biography than for synthetic rubber, synthetic
milk, and the still unachieved synthetic protoplasm which
is to enable us to make different sorts of men as a pastry-
cook makes different sorts of tarts, the practical issue still
lies as plainly before you as before the most credulous
votaries of what pontificates as the Higher Criticism.

The Perils of Salvationism.

The secular view of Jesus is powerfully reinforced by
the increase in our day of the number of people who have
had the means of educating and training themselves to the
point at which they are not afraid to look facts in the face,
even such terrifying facts as sin and death. The result is
greater sternness in modern thought. The conviction is
spreading that to encourage a man to believe that though
his sins be as scarlet he can be made whiter than snow by
an easy exercise of self-conceit, is to encourage him to be
a rascal. It did not work so badly when you could also
conscientiously assure him that if he let himself be caught
napping in the matter of faith by death, a red-hot hell
would roast him alive to all eternity. In those days a sudden
death — the most enviable of all deaths — was regarded as
the most frightful calamity. It was classed with plague,
pestilence, and famine, battle and murder, in our prayers.
But belief in that hell is fast vanishing. All the leaders
of thought have lost it ; and even for the rank and file it
has fled to those parts of Ireland and Scotland which are
still in the XVII century. Even there, it is tacitly reserved
for the other fellow.

The Importance of Hell in the Salvation
Scheme.

The seriousness of throwing over hell whilst still clinging
to the Atonement is obvious. If there is no punishment
for sin there can be no self-forgiveness for it. If Christ paid

h

civ Androcles and the Lion

our score, and if there is no hell and therefore no chance
of our getting into trouble by forgetting the obligation,
then we can be as wicked as we like with impunity inside
the secular law, even from self-reproach, which becomes
mere ingratitude to the Savior. On the other hand, if
Christ did not pay our score, it still stands against us ; and
such debts make us extremely uncomfortable. The drive of
evolution, which we call conscience and honor, seizes on
such slips, and shames us to the dust for being so low in
the scale as to be capable of them. The "saved" thief
experiences an ecstatic happiness which can never come
to the honest atheist: he is tempted to steal again to
repfeat the glorious sensation. But if the atheist steals he has
no such happiness. He is a thief and knows that he is a
thief. Nothing can rub that off him. He may try to soothe
his shame by some sort of restitution or equivalent act
of benevolence ; but that does not alter the fact that he
did steal ; and his conscience will not be easy until he has
conquered his will to steal and changed himself into an honest
man by developing that divine spark within him which Jesus
insisted on as the everyday reality of what the atheist
denies.

Now though the state of the believers in the Atonement
may thus be the happier, it is most certainly not more
desirable from the point of view of the community. The
fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to
the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than
a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and
dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a neces-
sity of life. Whether Socrates got as much happiness out
of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question ; but a nation
of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a
nation of Wesleys ; and its individuals would be higher in
the evolutionary scale. At all events it is in the Socratic
man and not in the Wesleyan that our hope lies now.

Preface

cv

The Right to refuse Atonement.

Consequently, even if it were mentally possible for all
of us to believe in the Atonement, w^e should have to cry
oiF it, as we evidently have a right to do. Every man to
vv^hom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right
to say " No, thank you : I prefer to retain my full moral
responsibility : it is not good for me to be able to load a
scapegoat with my sins : I should be less careful how I
committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing."
Then, too, there is the attitude of Ibsen : that iron moralist
to whom the whole scheme of salvation was only an ignoble
attempt to cheat God ; to get into heaven without paying
the price. To be let off, to beg for and accept eternal life as
a present instead of earning it, would be mean enough even
if we accepted the contempt of the Power on whose pity
we were trading ; but to bargain for a crown of glory as
well ! that was too much for Ibsen : it provoked him to
exclaim, " Your God is an old man whom you cheat," and
to lash the deadened conscience of the XIX century back
to life with a whip of scorpions.

The Teaching of Christianity.

And there I must leave the matter to such choice as
your nature allows you. The honest teacher who has to
make known to a novice the facts about Christianity cannot
in any essential regard, I think, put the facts otherwise
than as I have put them. If children are to be delivered
from the proselytizing atheist on the one hand, and the
proselytizing nun in the convent school on the other, with
all the other proselytizers that lie between them, they must
not be burdened with idle controversies as to whether there
was ever such a person as Jesus or not. When Hume said
that Joshua's campaigns were impossible, Whately did not
wrangle about it : he proved, on the same lines, that the

cvi Androcles and the Lion

campaigns of Napoleon were impossible. Only fictitious
characters will stand Hume's sort of examination : nothing
will ever make Edward the Confessor and St Louis as real
to us as Don Quixote and Mr Pickwick. We must cut
the controversy short by declaring that there is the same
evidence for the existence of Jesus as for that of any other
person of his time ; and the fact that you may not believe
everything Matthew tells you no more disproves the exist-
ence of Jesus than the fact that you do not believe every-
thing Macaulay tells you disproves the existence of William
III. The gospel narratives in the main give you a biography
which is quite credible and accountable on purely secular
grounds when you have trimmed off everything that Hume
or Grimm or Rousseau or Huxley or any modern bishop
could reject as fanciful. Without going further than this,
you can become a follower of Jesus just as you can become
a follower of Confucius or Lao Tse, and may therefore call
yourself a Jesuist, or even a Christian, if you hold, as the
strictest Secularist quite legitimately may, that all prophets
are inspired, and all men with a mission, Christs.

The teacher of Christianity has then to make known to
the child, first the song of John Barleycorn, with the fields
and seasons as witness to its eternal truth. Then, as the
child's mind matures, it can learn, as historical and psycho-
logical phenomena, the tradition of the scapegoat, the Re-
deemer, the Atonement, the Resurrection, the Second
Coming, and how, in a world saturated with this tradition,
Jesus has been largely accepted as the long expectedand often
prophesied Redeemer, the Messiah, the Christ. It is open to
the child also to accept him. If the child is built like Glad-
stone, he will accept Jesusas his Savior, and Peter and John the
Baptist as the Savior's revealer and forerunner respectively.
If he is built like Huxley, he will take the secular view,
in spite of all that a pious family can do to prevent him.
The important thing now is that the Gladstones and
Huxleys should no longer waste their time irrelevantly
and ridiculously wrangling about the Gadarene swine, and

Preface cvii

that they should make up their minds as to the soundness
of the secular doctrines of Jesus ; for it is about these that
they may come to blows in our own time.

Christianity and The Empire.

Finally, let us ask why it is that the old superstitions
have so suddenly lost countenance that although, to the
utter disgrace of the nation's leaders and rulers, the laws
by which persecutors can destroy or gag all freedom of
thought and speech in these matters are still unrepealed
and ready to the hand of our bigots and fanatics (quite
recently a respectable shopkeeper was convicted of " blas-
phemy " for saying that if a modern girl accounted for an
illicit pregnancy by saying she had conceived of the Holy
Ghost, we should know what to think : a remark which
would never have occurred to him had he been properly
taught how the story was grafted on the gospel), yet some-
how they are used only against poor men, and that only in a
half-hearted way. When we consider that from the time
when the first scholar ventured to whisper as a professional
secret that the Pentateuch could not possibly have been
written by Moses to the time within my own recollection
when Bishop Colenso, for saying the same thing openly, was
inhibited from preaching and actually excommunicated,
eight centuries elapsed (the point at issue, though technic-
ally interesting to paleographers and historians, having no
more bearing on human welfare than the controversy as to
whether uncial or cursive is the older form of writing) ;
yet now, within fifty years of Colenso's heresy, there is not
a Churchman of any authority living, or an educated layman,
who could without ridicule declare that Moses wrote the
Pentateuch as Pascal wrote his Thoughts or D'Aubigny
his History of the Reformation, or that St Jerome wrote the
passage about the three witnesses in the Vulgate, or that
there are less than three different accounts of the creation
jumbled together in the book of Genesis. Now the maddest

cviii Androcles and the Lion

Progressive will hardly contend that our growth in wisdom
and liberality has been greater in the last half century than
in the sixteen half centuries preceding : indeed it would
be easier to sustain the thesis that the last fifty years have
witnessed a distinct reaction from Victorian Liberalism to
Collectivism which has perceptibly strengthened the State
Churches. Yet the fact remains that whereas Byron's Cain,
published a century ago, is a leading case on the point that
there is no copyright in a blasphemous book, the Salvation
Army might now include it among its publications without
shocking anyone.

I suggest that the causes which have produced this sudden
clearing of the air include the transformation of many
modern States, notably the old self-contained French
Republic and the tight little Island of Britain, into empires
which overflow the frontiers of all the Churches. In India,
for example, there are less than four million Christians out
of a population of three hundred and sixteen and a half
millions. The King of England is the defender of the faith ;
but what faith is now the faith ? The inhabitants of this
island would, within the memory of persons still living,
have claimed that their faith is surely the faith of God, and
that all others are heathen. But we islanders are only forty-
five millions; and if we count ourselves all as Christians,
there are still seventy-seven and a quarter million
Mahometans in the Empire. Add to these the Hindoos and
Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains, whom I was taught in my child-
hood, by way of religious instruction, to regard as gross
idolaters consigned to eternal perdition, but whose faith
I can now be punished for disparaging by a provocative
word, and you have a total of over three hundred and
forty-two and a quarter million heretics to swamp our
forty-five million Britons, of whom, by the way, only six
thousand call themselves distinctively "disciples of Christ,"
the rest being members of the Church of England and
other denominations whose discipleship is less emphatically
affirmed. In short, the Englishman of today, instead of

Preface cix

being, like the forefathers whose ideas he clings to, a subject
of a State practically wholly Christian, is now crowded,
and indeed considerably overcrowded, into a corner of an
Empire in which the Christians are a mere eleven per cent
of the population ; so that the Nonconformist who allows
his umbrella stand to be sold up rather than pay rates
towards the support of a Church of England school, finds
himself paying taxes not only to endow the Church of Rome
in Malta, but to send Christians to prison for the blasphemy
of offering Bibles for sale in the streets of Khartoum.

Turn to France, a country ten times more insular in its
preoccupation with its own language, its own history, its
own character, than we, who have always been explorers
and colonizers and grumblers. This once self-centred
nation is forty millions strong. The total population of
the French Republic is about one hundred and fourteen
millions. The French are not in our hopeless Christian
minority of eleven per cent ; but they are in a minority of
thirty-five per cent, which is fairly conclusive. And, being
a more logical people than we, they have officially abandoned
Christianity and declared that the French State has no
specific religion.

Neither has the British State, though it does not say so.
No doubt there are many innocent people in England who
take Charlemagne's view, and would, as a matter of course,
off'er our eighty-nine per cent of " pagans, I regret to say "
the alternative of death or Christianity but for a vague
impression that these lost ones are all being converted
gradually by the missionaries. But no statesman can
entertain such ludicrously parochial delusions. No English
king or French president can possibly govern on the assump-
tion that the theology of Peter and Paul, Luther and Calvin,
has any objective validity, or that the Christ is more than
the Buddha, or Jehovah more than Krishna, or Jesus more
or less human than Mahomet or Zoroaster or Confucius.
He is actually compelled, in so far as he makes laws against
blasphemy at all, to treat all the religions, including

ex Androcles and the Lion

Christianity, as blasphemous when paraded before people
who are not accustomed to them and do not want them. And
even that is a concession to a mischievous intolerance which
an empire should use its control of education to eradicate.
On the other hand, Governments cannot really divest
themselves of religion, or even of dogma. When Jesus said
that people should not only live but live more abundantly,
he was dogmatizing; and many Pessimist sages, including
Shakespear, whose hero begged his friend to refrain from
suicide in the words "Absent thee from felicity awhile,"
would say dogmatizing very perniciously. Indeed many
preachers and saints declare, some of them in the name of
Jesus himself, that this world is a vale of tears, and that our
lives had better be passed in sorrow and even in torment,
as a preparation for a better life to come. Make these sad
people comfortable; and they baffle you by putting on hair
shirts.

None the less. Governments must proceed on dogmatic
assumptions, whether they call them dogmas or not; and
they must clearly be assumptions common enough to stamp
those who reject them as eccentrics or lunatics. And
the greater and more heterogeneous the population the
commoner the assumptions must be. A Trappist monastery
can be conducted on assumptions which would in twenty-
four hours provoke the village at its gates to insurrection.
That is because the monastery selects its people ; and if a
Trappist does not like it he can leave it. But a subject
of the British Empire or the French Republic is not selected ;
and if he does not like it he must lump it ; for emigration is
practicable only within narrow limits, and seldom provides
an effective remedy, all civilizations being now much alike.
To anyone capable of comprehending government at all
it must be evident without argument that the set of funda-
mental assumptions drawn up in the thirty-nine articles
or in the Westminster Confession are wildly impossible
as political constitutions for modern empires. A personal
profession of them by any person disposed to take such

Preface cxi

professions seriously would practically disqualify him for
high imperial office. A Calvinist Viceroy of India and a
Particular Baptist Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
would wreck the empire. The Stuarts wrecked even the
tight little island which was the nucleus of the empire by
their Scottish logic and theological dogma ; and it may be
sustained very plausibly that the alleged aptitude of the
English for self-government, which is contradicted by every
chapter of their history, is really only an incurable inaptitude
for theology, and indeed for co-ordinated thought in any
direction, which makes them equally impatient of sys-
tematic despotism and systematic good government : their
history being that of a badly governed and accidentally free
people (comparatively). Thus our success in colonizing, as
far as it has not been produced by exterminating the
natives, has been due to our indifference to the salvation of
our subjects. Ireland is the exception which proves the
rule; for Ireland, the standing instance of the inability of
the English to colonize without extermination of natives,
is also the one country under British rule in which the
conquerors and colonizers proceeded on the assumption
that their business was to establish Protestantism as well as
to make money and thereby secure at least the lives of the
unfortunate inhabitants out of whose labor it could be
made. At this moment Ulster is refusing to accept fellow-
citizenship with the other Irish provinces because the south
believes in St Peter and Bossuet, and the north in St Paul
and Calvin. Imagine the effect of trying to govern India
or Egypt from Belfast or from the Vatican !

The position is perhaps graver for France than for Eng-
land, because the sixty-five per cent of French subjects
who are neither French nor Christian nor Modernist in-
cludes some thirty millions of negroes who are susceptible,
and indeed highly susceptible, of conversion to those Salva-
tionist forms of pseudo-Christianity which have produced
all the persecutions and religious wars of the last fifteen
hundred years. When the late explorer Sir Henry Stanley

cxii Androcles and the Lion

told me of the emotional grip which Christianity had over
the Baganda tribes, and read me their letters, which were
exactly like medieval letters in their literal faith and ever-
present piety, I said "Can these men handle a rifle?" To
which Stanley replied with some scorn "Of course they
can, as well as any white man." Now at this moment (191 5)
a vast European war is being waged, in which the French
are using Senegalese soldiers. I ask the French Government,
which, like our own Government, is deliberately leaving the
religious instruction of these negroes in the hands of mis-
sions of Petrine Catholics and Pauline Calvinists, whether
they have considered the possibility of a new series of
crusades, by ardent African Salvationists, to rescueParis from
the grip of the modern scientific "infidel," and to raise the
cry of "Back to the Apostles : back to Charlemagne!"

We are more fortunate in that an overwhelming majority
of our subjects are Hindoos, Mahometans, and Buddhists:
that is, they have, as a prophylactic against Salvationist
Christianity, highly civilized religions of their own. Maho-
metanism, which Napoleon at the end of his career classed
as perhaps the best popular religion for modern political
use, might in some respects have arisen as a reformed Chris-
tianity if Mahomet had had to deal with a population of
seventeenth-century Christians instead of Arabs who wor-
shipped stones. As it is, men do not reject Mahomet for
Calvin ; and to offer a Hindoo so crude a theology as ours
in exchange for his own, or our Jewish canonical literature
as an improvement on Hindoo scripture, is to offer old
lamps for older ones in a market where the oldest lamps,
like old furniture in England, are the most highly valued.

Yet, I repeat, government is impossible without a re-
ligion : that is, without a body of common assumptions.
The open mind never acts : when we have done our
utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still, when
we can reason and investigate no more, must close our
minds for the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically
on our conclusions. The man who waits to make an

Preface cxili

entirely reasonable will dies intestate. A man so reason-
able as to have an open mind about theft and murder, or
about the need for food and reproduction, might just as
well be a fool and a scoundrel for any use he could be as a
legislator or a State official. The modern pseudo-democratic
statesman, who says that he is only in power to carry out
the will of the people, and moves only as the cat jumps,
is clearly a political and intellectual brigand. The rule of
the negative man who has no convictions means in practice
the rule of the positive mob. Freedom of conscience as
Cromwell used the phrase is an excellent thing; never-
theless if any man had proposed to give effect to freedom
of conscience as to cannibalism in England, Cromwell
would have laid him by the heels almost as promptly as
he would have laid a Roman Catholic, though in Fiji at
the same moment he would have supported heartily the
freedom of conscience of a vegetarian who disparaged the
sacred diet of Long Pig.

Here then comer, in the importance of the repudiation
by Jesus of proselytism. His rule " Dont pull up the tares :
sow the wheat : if you try to pull up the tares you will
pull up the wheat with it" is the only possible rule for a
statesman governing a modern empire, or a voter support-
ing such a statesman. There is nothing in the teaching
of Jesus that cannot be assented to by a Brahman, a
Mahometan, a Buddhist or a Jew, without any question
of their conversion to Christianity. In some ways it_ is
easier to reconcile a Mahometan to Jesus than a British
parson, because the idea of a professional priest is un-
familiar and even monstrous to a Mahometan (the tourist
who persists in asking who is the dean of St Sophia puzzles
beyond words the sacristan who lends him a huge pair of
slippers) ; and Jesus never suggested that his disciples should
separate themselves from the laity : he picked them up
by the wayside, where any man or woman might follow
him. For priests he had not a civil word ; and they shewed
their sense of his hostility by getting him killed as soon as

cxiv Androcles and the Lion

possible. He was, in short, a thoroughgoing anti-Clerical.
And though, as we have seen, it is only by political means
that his doctrine can be put into practice, he not only never
suggested a sectarian theocracy as a form of government,
and would certainly have prophesied the downfall of the
late President Kruger if he had survived to his time, but,
when challenged, he refused to teach his disciples not to
pay tribute to Caesar, admitting that Caesar, who pre-
sumably had the kingdom of heaven within him as much
as any disciple, had his place in the scheme of things.
Indeed the apostles made this an excuse for carrying sub-
servience to the State to a pitch of idolatry that ended in
the theory of the divine right of kings, and provoked men
to cut kings' heads off to restore some sense of proportion in
the matter. Jesus certainly did not consider the overthrow ot
the Roman empire or the substitution of a new ecclesiasti-
cal organization for the Jewish Church or for the priesthood
of the Roman gods as part of his program. He said that
God was better than Mammon ; but he never said that
Tweedledum was better than Tweedledee; and that is
why it is now possible for British citizens and statesmen
to follow Jesus, though they cannot possibly follow either
Tweedledum or Tweedledee without bringing the empire
down with a crash on their heads. And at that I must
leave it.

hof^vov., Decer: her 191 5.

CONTENTS

IX
X

xii
xiii

xiv
xiv

Androcles and the Lion

Preface on the Prospects of Christianity vii
Why not give Christianity a Trial ? vii
Why Jesus more than Another ?
Was Jesus a Coward ? .
Was Jesus a Martyr ? . .

The Gospels without Prejudice
The Gospels now unintelligible to

Novices .....
Worldliness of the Majority .
Religion of the Minority. Salva-

tionism .....
The Difference between Atonement

and Punishment
Salvation at first a Class Privilege ;

and the Remedy
Retrospective Atonement ; and the

Expectation of t-ic Redeemer
Completion of the Scheme by

Luther and Calvin
John Barleycorn ....
Looking for the End of the World.
The Honor of Divine Parentage
Matthew .....

The Annunciation : the Massacre :

the Flight ....

John the Baptist ....
Jesus joins the Baptists .
cxv

PAGE
I

XX

xxi
xxii
xxiii

XXV
XXV

xxvi
xxvii

cxvi Contents

PAGE

The Savage John and the Civilized

Jesus ..... xxvii

Jesus not a Proselytist . . . xxix

The Teachings of Jesus . . xxx

The Miracles .... xxxi
Matthew imputes Bigotry to Jesus xxxiii
The Great Change . . xxxiv

Jerusalem and the Mystical Sacrifice xxxv
Not this Man but Barabbas . xxxvi

The Resurrection . . . xxxvii

Date of Matthew's Narrative . xxxvii

Class Type of Matthew's Jesus xxxvii

Mark xxxix

The Women Disciples and the

Ascension . . . xxxix

Luke ...... xl

Luke the Literary Artist . . xl

The Charm of Luke's Narrative . xli
The Touch of Parisian Romance . xlii
Waiting for the Messiah . . xliii

John ...... xlv

A New Story and a New Character xlr
John the Immortal Eye Witness . xlvi
The Peculiar Theology of Jesus . xlix
John agreed as to the Trial and

Crucifixion .... 1

Credibility of the Gospels . . Hi

Fashions in Belief . . . liii

Credibility and Truth . . . liv

Christian Iconolatry and the Peril

of the Iconoclast . . . Ivi

The Alternative to Barabbas . . Iviii

The Reduction to Modern Practice

of Christianity . . . . Ix

Modern Communism . . . Ixll

Redistribution . ... Ixiii

Contents

cxvii

PAGE

Shall He Who Makes, Own ? . Ixiii

Labor Time .... Ixlv

The Dream of Distribution Accord-
ing to Merit .... Ixv
Vital Distribution . . . Ixvi

Equal Distribution . . . Ixviii

The Captain and the Cabin Boy . Ixviii
The Political and Biological Objec-
tions to Inequality . . . Ixix
Jesus as Economist . . . Ixx
Jesus as Biologist .... Ixxi
Money the Midwife of Scientific

Communism .... Ixxl
Judge Not ..... Ixxiii
Limits to Free Will . . . Ixxiv

Jesus on Marriage and the Family . Ixxvi
Why Jesus did not Marry . Ixxvii

Inconsistency of the Sex Instinct Ixxviii
For Better for Worse . . . Ixxix

The Remedy .... Ixxx
The Case for Marriage . . . Ixxxi

Celibacy no Remedy . . Ixxxii

After the Crucifixion . . Ixxxiii

The Vindictive Miracles and the

Stoning of Stephen . . Ixxxiv

Paul ..... Ixxxv

The Confusion of Christendom Ixxxix
The Secret of Paul's Success . . xc

Paul's Qualities .... xcii
The Acts of the Apostles . . xcii

The Controversies on Baptism and

Transubstantiation . . . xcv

The Alternative Christs . xcviii

Credulity no Criterion . . xcviii

Belief in Personal Immortality no

Criterion xcix

CXVlll

Contents

The Secular View Natural, not

Rational, therefore Inevitable
"The Higher Criticism"
The Perils of Salvationism
The Importance of Hell in the

Salvr.tion Scheme
The Right to refuse Atonement
The Teaching of Christianity-
Christianity and The Empire

Appendix to the Play .

Overruled ....

Preface .....
The Alleviations of Monogamy
Inaccessibility of the Facts
The Convention of Jealousy .
The Missing Data of a Scientific

Natural History of Marriage
Artificial Retribution
The Favorite Subject of Farcica

Comedy ....
The Pseudo Sex Play .
Art and Morality .
The Limits of Stage Presentation
Pruderies of the French Stage
Our Disillusive Scenery
Holding the Mirror up to Nature
Farcical Comedy Shirking its Subject

c

ci
ciii

ciii
cv
cv

evil

46

55
55
56

57

59
60

61
62

63
64
64
66

(>!
68

53

Pygmalion

Preface ....

A Professor of Phonetics
Sequel

What Happened Afterwards

99
99

191

97

PROLOGUE

Overture: forest sounds, roaring of lions. Christian hymn
faintly.

A jungle path. A lion''s roar, a melancholy suffering roar,
comes from the jungle. It is repeated nearer. The lion limps
from the jungle on three legs, holding up his right forepaw, in
which a huge thorn sticks. He sits down and contemplates it.
He licks it. He shakes it. He tries to extract it by scraping
it along the ground, and hurts himself worse. He roars piteously.
He licks it again. Tears drop from his eyes. He limps pain-
fully off the path and lies down under the trees, exhausted with
pain. Heaving a long sigh, like wind in a trombone, he goes to
sleep.

Androclcs and his wife Megaera come along the path. He is
a small, thin, ridiculous little man who might be any age from
thirty to fifty-five. He has sandy hair, watery compassionate
blue eyes, sensitive nostrils, and a very presentable forehead;
but his good points go no further : his arms and legs and back,
though wir-i of their kind, look shrivelled and starved. He carries
a big bundle, is very poorly clad, and seems tired and hungry.

His wife is a rather handsome pampered slattern, well fed
and in the prime of life. She has nothing to carry, and has a
stout stick to help her along.

MEGAERA {suddcnly throwing down her stick'] I wont go
another step.

ANDROCLES ^pleading wearily] Oh, not again, dear. Whats

I B

2 Androcles and the Lion Prologue

the good of stopping every two miles and saying you wont
go another step? We must get on to the next village
before night. There are wild beasts in this wood : lions,
they say.

MEGAERA. I dont belicvc a word of it. You are always
threatening me with wild beasts to make me walk the very
soul out of my body when I can hardly drag one foot be-
fore another. We havnt seen a single lion yet.
ANDROCLES. Well, dear, do you want to see one ?
MEGAERA [tearing the buTidlefrom his bcck] You cruel brute,
you dont care how tired I am, or what becomes of me [she
throws tl^e bundle on the ground'] : always thinking of your-
self. Self! self! self! always yourself ! [She sits down on the
bundle\

ANDROCLES [sitting down sadly on the ground with his elbows
on his knees and his head in his hands'] We all have to think
of ourselves occasionally, dear,

MEGAERA. A man ought to think of his wife sometimes.
ANDROCLES. He caut always help it, dear. You make me
think of you a good deal. Not that I blame you.

MEGAERA. Blame me! I should think not indeed. Is it
my fault that I'm married to you ?

ANDROCLES. No, dear : that is my fault.
MEGAERA. Thats a nice thing to say to me. Arnt you
happy with me ?

ANDROCLES. I dout complain, my love.
MEGAERA. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
ANDROCLES. I am, my dear.
MEGAERA. Yourc uot : you glory in it.
ANDROCLES. In what, darling?

MEGAERA. In everything. In making me a slave, and
making yourself a laughing-stock. It's not fair. You get me
the name of being a shrew with your meek ways, always
talking as if butter wouldnt melt in your mouth. And just
because I look a big strong woman, and because I'm good-
hearted and a bit hasty, and because youre always driving
me to do things I'm sorry for afterwards, people say "Poor

Prologue Androcles and the Lion 3

man : what a life his wife leads him ! " Oh, if they only
knew ! And you think I dont know. But I do, I do,
[screaming] I do.

ANDROCLES. Ycs, my dear : I know you do.

MEGAERA. Then why dont you treat me properly and
be a good husband to me ?

ANDROCLES. What can I do, my dear?

MEGAERA. What Can you do ! You can return to your
duty, and come back to your home and your friends, and
sacrifice to the gods as all respectable people do, instead of
having us hunted out of house and home for being dirty dis-
reputable blaspheming atheists.

ANDROCLES. I'm not an atheist, dear : I am a Christian.

MEGAERA. Well, isnt that the same thing, only ten times
worse ? Everybody knows that the Christians are the very
lowest of the low.

ANDROCLES. Just like us, dear.

MEGAERA. Speak for yourself. Dont you dare to com-
pare me to common people. My father owned his own
public-house ; and sorrowful was the day for me when you
first came drinking in our bar.

ANDROCLES. I confess I was addicted to it, dear. But I
gave it up when I became a Christian,

MEGAERA. Youd much better have remained a drunkard.
I can forgive a man being addicted to drink : it's only
natural ; and I dont deny I like a drop myself sometimes.
What I cant stand is your being addicted to Christianity.
And whats worse again, your being addicted to animals.
How is any woman to keep her house clean when you
bring in every stray cat and lost cur and lame duck in the
whole countryside? You took the bread out of my mouth
to feed them : you know you did : dont attempt to
deny it.

ANDROCLES. Only when they were hungry and you were
getting too stout, dearie.

MEGAERA. Yes : insult me, do, [R2si;!g] Oh! I wont bear
it another moment. You used to sit and talk to those

4 Androcles and the Lion Prologue

dumb brute beasts for hours, when you hadnt a word for
me,

ANDROCLES. They never answered back, darling, [He rises
and again shoulders the bundie\

MEGAERA, Well, if youre fonder of animals than of your
own wife, you can live with them here in the jungle, Ive
had enough of them and enough of you. I'm going back.
I'm going home.

ANDROCLES \barring the way back] No, dearie : dont take
on like that. We cant go back. Weve sold everything :
we should starve ; and I should be sent to Rome and thrown
to the lions —

MEGAERA, Servc you right! I wish the lions joy of you.
[Screaming] Are you going to get out of my way and let me
go home ?

ANDROCLES, No, dear —

MEGAERA. Then I'll make my way through the forest;
and when I'm eaten by the wild beasts youll know what a
wife youve lost. [She dashes into the jungle and nearly falls
over the sleeping lion]. Oh ! Oh ! Andy! Andy! [She totters
back and collapses into the arms of Androcles, who, crushed by her
weight, falls on his bundle].

ANDROCLES [extracting himself from beneath her and slapping
her hands in great anxiety] What is it, my precious, my
pet.? Whats the matter.? [He raises her head. Speechless
with tfrror, she points in the direction of the sleeping lion. He
steals cautiously towards the spot indicated by Meg^iera. She
rises with an effort and totters after him].

MEGAERA. No, Andv : youll be killed. Come back.

The lion utters a long snoring sigh. Androcles sees the lion,
and recoils fainting into the arms of Megaera, who falls back on
the bundle. They roll apart and lie staring in terror at one
another. The lion is heard groaning heavily in the jungle.

ANDROCLES [whispering] Did you see \ A lion,

MEGAERA [despairing] The gods have sent him to punish
us because youre a Christian. Take me away, Andy, Save
me.

Prologue Androcles and the Lion 5

ANDROCLES [rising] Meggy: theres one chance for you.
Itll take him pretty nigh twenty minutes to eat me (I'm
rather stringy and tough) and you can escape in less time
than that.

MEGAERA. Oh, dont talk about eating. [T/:e lion rises with
a great groan and limps towards them']. Oh! [She faints],

ANDROCLES [qUdking, but keeping between the Hon and Megaera]
Dont you come near my wife, do you hear? [The lion
groans. Androcles can hardly stand for trembling]. Meggy:
run. Run for your life. If I take my eye off him, it's all
up. [The lion holds up his wounded paw and flaps it piteously
before Androcles]. Oh, hes lame, poor old chap ! Hes got
a thorn in his paw. A frightfully big thorn. [Full of sym-
pathy] Oh, poor old man ! Did um get an awful thorn into
urn's tootsums wootsums? Has it made um too sick to eat
a nice little Christian man for um's breakfast? Oh, a nice
little Christian man will get um's thorn out for um ; and
then um shall eat the nice Christian man and the nice
Christian man's nice big tender wifey pifey. [The lion
responds by moans of self-pity]. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Now,
now [taking the paw in his hand], um is not to bite and not
to scratch, not even if it hurts a very very little. Now
make velvet paws. Thats right. [He pulls gingerly at the
thorn. The Hon., with an angry yell of pain, j^^^^ back his paw
so abruptly that Androcies is thrown on his back]. Steadeee !
Oh, did the nasty cruel little Christian man hurt the sore
paw? [The lion moans assentingly but apologetically]. Well,
one more little pull and it will be all over. Just one little,
little, leetle pull ; and then um will live happily ever after.
[He gives the thorn another pull. The lion roars and snaps his
jaws with a terrifying clash]. Oh, mustnt frighten um's good
kind doctor, um's affectionate nursey. That didnt hurt at
all : not a bit. Just one more. Just to shew how the brave
big lion can bear pain, not like the little crybaby Christian
man. Oopsh ! [The thorn comes out. The lion yells with pain,
and shakes his paw wildly]. Thats it! [Holding up the thorn].
Now it's out. Now lick um's paw to take away the nasty

6 Androcles and the Lion Prologue

inflammation. See? [He licks his ozvn hand. The lion nods
intelligently and licks his paw industriously^. Clever little
liony-plony! Understands urn's dear old friend Andy
Wandy. \The lion licks his face\ Yes, kissums Andy Wandy.
[The Hon., "^(^ggif'S ^^^ ^'^^^ violently., rises on his hind legs, and
embraces Androcles., who makes a wry face and cries] Velvet
paws ! Velvet paws ! [The lion draws in his claws]. Thats
right. [He embraces the Hon., who finally takes the end of his
tail in one paw., places that tight round Androcles^ waist., resting
it on his hip. Androcles takes the other paw in his hand., stretches
out his arm., and the two waltz rapturously round and round
and finally away through the jungle].

MEGAERA [who has revived during the waltz] Oh, you
coward, you havnt danced with me for years; and now
you go off dancing with a great brute beast that you havnt
known for ten minutes and that wants to eat your own
wife. Coward! Coward! Coward! [She rushes off after
ihem into the jungle].

ACT I

Evening. The end of three converging roads to Rome. Three
triumphal arches span them where they debouch on a square at
the gate of th:e city. Looking north through the arches one can
see the campagna t/:readed by the three long dusty tracks.
On the east and west sides of the square are long stone benches.
An old beggar sits on the east side, his bowl at his feet.

Through the eastern arch a squad of Roman soldiers tramps
along escorting a batch of Christian prisoners of both sexes and
all ages., among them one Lavinia, a good-looking resolute yomig
woman, apparently of higher social standing than her fellow-
prisoners. A centurion, carrying his vinewood cudgel, trudges
alongside the squad, on its right, in command of it. All are tired
and dusty ; but the soldiers are dogged and indifferent, the
Christians lighthearted and determined to treat their hardships
as a joke and encourage one another.

A bugle is heard far behind on the road, where the rest of
the cohort is following.

CENTURION \_stopping'] Halt ! Orders from the Captain.
[They halt and wait]. Now then, you Christians, none of
your larks. The captain's coming. Mind you behave your-
selves. No singing. Look respectful. Look serious, if
youre capable of it. See that big building over there !
Thats the Coliseum. Thats where youll be thrown to the
lions or set to fight the gladiators presently. Think of
that ; and itU help you to behave properly before the
captain. [The Captain arrives]. Attention ! Salute ! [The
soldiers salute].

7

8 Androcles and the Lion Act I

A CHRISTIAN [cheerfuIIy'] God bless you, Captain !

THE CENTURION [scarida/izcdj Silence !

TSf Captain, a patrician, handsome, about thirty-Jive, very
cold and distinguished, very superior and authoritative, steps up
on a stone seat at the west side of the square, behind the centurion,
so as to dominate the others more effectually.

THE CAPTAIN. Ccnturion.

THE CENTURION {standing at attention and saluting] Sir ?

THE CAPTAIN [speaking Stiffly and officially] You will remind
your men, Centurion, that we are now entering Rome.
You will instruct them that once inside the gates of Rome
they are in the presence of the Emperor. You will make
them understand that the lax discipline of the march
cannot be permitted here. You will instruct them to
shave every day, not every week. You will impress on
them particularly that there must be an end to the profanity
and blasphemy of singing Christian hymns on the march.
I have to reprimand you. Centurion, for not only allowing
this, but actually doing it yourself.

THE CENTURION [dpologctic] The men march better.
Captain.

THE CAPTAIN. No doubt. For that reason an exception is
made in the case of the march called Onward Christian
Soldiers. This may be sung, except when marching
through the forum or within hearing of the Emperor's
palace ; but the words must be altered to " Throw them
to the Lions."

The Christians burst into shrieks of uncontrollable laughter,
to the great scandal ofth:e Centurion.

CENTURION. Silence! Silen-n-n-n-nce ! Wheres your
behavior? Is that the way to listen to an officer? \To
the Captain] Thats what we have to put up with from these
Christians every day, sir. Theyre always laughing and
joking something scandalous. Theyve no religion : thats
how it is.

LAViNiA. But I think the Captain meant us to laugh.
Centurion. It was so funny.

Act I Androcles and the Lion 9

CENTURION. Youll find out how funny it is when youre
thrown to the lions tomorrow. [To the Captain^ zvho
looks displeased^ Beg pardon, Sir. \To the Christians']
Silennnnce !

THE CAPTAIN. You Ere to instruct your men that all inti-
macy with Christian prisonersmust nowcease. The men have
fallen into habits of dependence upon the prisoners, espe-
cially the female prisoners, for cooking, repairs to uniforms,
writing letters, and advice in their private affairs. In a
Roman soldier such dependence is inadmissible. Let me
see no more of it whilst we are in the city. Further, your
orders are that in addressing Christian prisoners, the
manners and tone of your men must express abhorrence
and contempt. Any shortcoming in this respect will be
regarded as a breach of discipline. \_He turns to the
prisoners] Prisoners.

CENTURION \Jierceli\ Prisonerrrrrs ! Tention ! Silence !

THE CAPTAIN. I Call your attention, prisoners, to the fact
that you may be called on to appear in the Imperial Circus
at any time from tomorrowonwards according to the require-
ments of the managers. I may inform you that as there is
a shortage of Christians just now, you may expect to be
called on very soon.

LAViNiA. What will they do to us. Captain ?

CENTURION. Silence !

THE CAPTAIN. The womcn will be conducted into the
arena with the wild beasts of the Imperial Menagerie, and
will suffer the consequences. The men, if of an age to bear
arms, will be given weapons to defend themselves, if they
choose, against the Imperial Gladiators.

LAVINIA. Captain : is there no hope that this cruel per-
secution—

CENTURION [shocked] Silence ! Hold your tongue, there.
Persecution, indeed !

THE CAPTAIN [unpioved and somewhat sardonic] Persecution
is not a term applicable to the acts of the Emperor. The
Emperor is the Defender of the Faith. In throwing you

lo Androcles and the Lion Act I

to the lions he will be upholding the interests of religion
in Rome. If you were to throw him to the lions, that
would no doubt be persecution.

The Christians again laugh heartily.

CENTURION \_horriJied'\ Silence, I tell you ! Keep silence
there. Did anyone ever hear the like of this?

LAViNiA. Captain : there will be nobody to appreciate
your jokes when we are gone.

THE CAPTAIN [unshaken in his official delivery^ I call the atten-
tion of the female prisoner Lavinia to the fact that as the
Emperor is a divine personage, her imputation of cruelty
is not only treason, but sacrilege. I point out to her further
that there is no foundation for the charge, as the Emperor
does not desire that any prisoner should suffer; nor can any
Christian be harmed save through his or her own obstinacy.
All that is necessary is to sacrifice to the gods : a simple
and convenient ceremony effected by dropping a pinch
of incense on the altar, after which the prisoner is at once
set free. Under such circumstances you have only your
own perverse folly to blame if you suffer, I suggest to you
that if you cannot burn a morsel of incense as a matter of
conviction, you might at least do so as a matter of good
taste, to avoid shocking the religious convictions of your
fellow citizens. I am aware that these considerations do
not weigh with Christians; but it is my duty to call your
attention to them in order that you may have no ground
for complaining of your treatment, or of accusing the
Emperor of cruelty when he is shewing you the most
signal clemency. Looked at from this point of view, every
Christian who has perished in the arena has really
committed suicide.

LAVINIA. Captain : your jokes are too grim. Do not
think it is easy for us to die. Our faith makes life far
stronger and more wonderful in us than when we walked
in darkness and had nothing to live for. Death is harder
for us than for you : the martyr's agony is as bitter as his
triumph is glorious.

Act I Androcles and the Lion 1 1

THE CAPTAIN {rather troubled, addressing her personally and
gravely] A martyr, Lavinla, is a fool. Your death will prove
nothing.

LAViNiA. Then why kill me?

THE CAPTAIN. I mean that truth, if there be any truth,
needs no martyrs.

LAVINIA. No ; but my faith, like your sword, needs testing.
Can you test your sword except by staking your life on \\.l

THE CAPTAIN \suddenly resuming his official tone] I call the
attention of the female prisoner to the fact that Christians
are not allowed to draw the Emperor's officers into argu-
ments and put questions to them for which the military
regulations provide no answer, \The Christians titter].

LAVINIA. Captain : how can you?

THE CAPTAIN. I Call the female prisoner's attention speci-
ally to the fact that four comfortable homes have been
offered her by officers of this regiment, of which she can
have her choice the moment she chooses to sacrifice as all
wellbred Roman ladies do. I have no more to say to the
prisoners.

CENTURION. Dismiss ! But stay where you are.

THE CAPTAIN. CenturioH : you will remain here with your
men in charge of the prisoners until the arrival of three
Christian prisoners in the custody of a cohort of the tenth
legion. Among these prisoners you will particularly identify
an armorer named Ferrovius, of dangerous character and
great personal strength, and a Greek tailor reputed to be
a sorcerer, by name Androcles. You will add the three to
your charge here and march them all to the Coliseum,
where you will deliver them into the custody of the master
of the gladiators and take his receipt, countersigned by the
keeper of the beasts and the acting manager. You under-
stand your instructions?

CENTURION. Yes, sir.

THE CAPTAIN. Dismiss. [//if tkrows off his air of parade, and
descends from his perch. The Centurion seats himself on it and
prepares for a nap, whilst his men stand at ease. The Chris-

1 2 Androcles and the Lion Act I

tians sit down on the west side of the square, glad to rest. Lavinia
alone remains standing to speak to the Captain\

LAVINIA. Captain : is this man who is to join us the
famous Ferrovius, who has made such wonderful conver-
sions in the northern cities ?

THE CAPTAIN. Yes. We are Warned that he has the Strength
of an elephant and the temper of a mad bull. Also that he
is stark mad. Not a model Christian, it would seem.

LAVINIA. You need not fear him if he is a Christian,
Captain.

THE CAPTAIN \coldly\ I shall not fear him in any case, Lavinia.

LAVINIA \her eyes dancing'] How brave of you, Captain !

THE CAPTAIN. You are right : it was a silly thing to sav.
[/» a lower tone, humane and urgent] Lavinia : do Christians
know how to love.?

LAVINIA [composedly] Yes, Captain : they love even their
enemies.

THE CAPTAIN. Is that casy ?

LAVINIA. Very easy, Captain, when their enemies are as
handsome as you.

THE CAPTAIN. Lavinia : you are laughing at me.

LAVINIA. At you. Captain ! Impossible.

THE CAPTAIN. Then you are flirting with me, which is
worse. Dont be foolish.

LAVINIA. But such a very handsome captain.

THE CAPTAIN. Incorrigible! \lJrgently] Listen to me.
The men in that audience tomorrow will be the vilest of
voluptuaries : men in whom the only passion excited by a
beautiful woman is a lust to see her tortured and torn
shrieking limb from limb. It is a crime to gratify that
passion. It is offering yourself for violation by the whole
rabble of the streets and the riff-raff of the court at the
same time. Why will you not choose rather a kindly love
and an honorable alliance.''

LAVINIA. They cannot violate my soul. I alone can do
that by sacrificing to false gods.

THE CAPTAIN. Sacrifice then to the true God. What does

Act I Androcles and the Lion 13

his name matter? We call him Jupiter. The Greeks call
him Zeus. Call him what you will as you drop the incense
on the altar flame : He will understand.

LAViNiA. No. I couldnt. That is the strange thing, Cap-
tain, that a little pinch of incense should make all that
difFerence. Religion is such a great thing that when I meet
really religious people we are friends at once, no matter
what name we give to the divine will that made us and
moves us. Oh, do you think that I, a woman, would quarrel
with you for sacrificing to a woman god like Diana, if Diana
meant to you what Christ means to me ? No ; we should
kneel side by side before her altar like two children. But
when men who believe neither in my god nor in their own
— men who do not know the meaning of the word religion
— when these men drag me to the foot of an iron statue
that has become the symbol of the terror and darkness
through which they walk, of their cruelty and greed, of
their hatred of God and their oppression of man — when
they ask me to pledge my soul before the people that this
hideous idol is God, and that all this wickedness and false-
hood is divine truth, I cannot do it, not if they could put
a thousand cruel deaths on me. I tell you, it is physically
impossible. Listen, Captain : did you ever try to catch a
mouse in your hand? Once there was a dear little mouse
that used to come out and play on my table as I was read-
ing. I wanted to take him in my hand and caress him ;
and sometimes he got among my books so that he could not
escape me when I stretched out my hand. And I did stretch
out my hand ; but it always came back in spite of me. I
was not afraid of him in my heart ; but my hand refused :
it is not in the nature of my hand to touch a mouse. Well,
Captain, if I took a pinch of incense in my hand and
stretched it out over the altar fire, my hand would come
back. My body would be true to my faith even if you
could corrupt my mind. And all the time I should believe
more in Diana than my persecutors have ever believed in
anything. Can you understand that ?

14 Androcles and the Lion Act I

THE CAPTAIN [simp/y] Yes: I understand that. But my hand
would not come back. The hand that holds the sword has
been trained not to come back from anything but victory.

LAVtNiA. Not even from death ?

THE CAPTAIN. Lcast of all from death.

LAViNiA. Then I must not come back from death either.
A woman has to be braver than a soldier.

THE CAPTAIN. Prouder, you mean.

LAVINIA [start/ed] Prouder ! You call our courage pride !

THE CAPTAIN. There is no such thing as courage : there
is only pride. You Christians are the proudest devils on
earth.

LAVINIA [Surt] Pray God then my pride may never become
a false pride. [S/^e turns away as if she did not wish to con-
tinue the conversation, but softens and says to him with a smile']
Thank you for trying to save me.

THE CAPTAIN. I kucw it was no use ; but one tries in spite
of one's knowledge.

LAVINIA. Something stirs, even in the iron breast of a
Roman soldier?

THE CAPTAIN. It will soon be iron again. I have seen
many women die, and forgotten them in a week,

LAVINIA. Remember me for a fortnight, handsome Captain.
I shall be watching you, perhaps.

THE CAPTAIN. From the skies ? Do not deceive yourself,
Lavinia. There is no future for you beyond the grave.

LAVINIA. What does that matter? Do you think I am
only running away from the terrors of life into the comfort
of heaven ? If there were no future, or if the future were
one of torment, I should have to go just the same. The
hand of God is upon me.

THE CAPTAIN. Ycs: when all is said, we are both patricians,
Lavinia, and must die for our beliefs. Farewell. [^He offers
her his hand. She takes it and presses it. He walks away, trim
and calm. She looks after him for a mofnent, and cries a little
as he disappears through the eastern arch. A trumpet-call is
beard from the road through the western arch].

Act I Androcles and the Lion 15

CENTURION [waking up and rising] Cohort of the tenth
with prisoners. Two file out with me to receive them.
[He goes out through the tvestern arch, followed by four soldiers
in tivo fles\

Lentulus and Metellus come into the square from the west
side with a little retinue of servants. Both are young courtiers^
dressed in the extremity of fashion. Lentulus is slender, fair-
haired, epicene. Metellus is manly, compactly built, olive skinned,
not a talker.

LENTULUS. Christians, by Jove ! Lets chafF them.

METELLUS. Awful btutes. If you knew as much about
them as I do you wouldnt want to chafF them. Leave
them to the lions.

LENTULUS [indicating Lavinia, who is still looking towards
the arches after the Captain] That woman's got a figure. [He
walks past her, staring at her invitingly; but she is preoccupied
and is not conscious of him]. Do you turn the other cheek
when they kiss you?

LAVINIA [starting] What?

LENTULUS. Do you tum the other cheek when they kiss
you, fascinating Christian?

LAVINIA. Dont be foolish. [To Metellus, who has remained
on her right, so that she is between them] Please dont let your
friend behave like a cad before the soldiers. How are they
to respect and obey patricians if they see them behaving
like street boys ? [Sharply to Lentulus] Pull yourself to-
gether, man. Hold your head up. Keep the corners of
your mouth firm; and treat me respectfully. What do
you take me for?

LENTULUS [irresolutely] Look here, you know : I — you —
I—

LAVINIA. Stuff! Go about your business. [5/^ turns de-
cisively away and sits dozvn with her comrades, leaving him
disconcerted].

METELLUS. You didnt get much out of that. I told you
they were brutes.

LENTULUS. Plucky little filly ! I suppose she thinks 1

1 6 Androcles and the Lion Act I

care. \^With an air of indifference he strolls with Lentuhis to
the east side of the square, where they stand watching the return
of the Centurion through the western arch with his men, escort-
ing three prisoners : Ferrovius, Androcles, and Spintho. Ferro-
vius is a powerful, choleric man in the prime of life, with large
nostrils, staring eyes, and a thick neck: a man whose sensibilities
are keen and violent to the verge of madness. Spintho is a de-
bauchee, the wreck of a good-looking man gone hopelessly to the
bad. Androcles is overwhelmed with grief and is restraining
his tears with great difficulty'].

THE CENTURION [to Lavinia] Here are some pals for you.
This little bit is Ferrovius that you talk so much about.
[Ferrovius turns on him threateningly. The Centurion holds up
his left forefinger in admonition]. Now remember that youre
a Christian, and that youve got to return good for evil.
\Ferrovius controls himself convulsively ; moves away from
temptation to the east side near Lentulus; clasps his hands
in silent prayer; and throws himself on his knees]. Thats the
way to manage them, eh! This fine fellow [indicating
Androcles, who comes to his left, and makes Lavinia a heart-
broken salutation] is a sorcerer. A Greek tailor, he is. A
real sorcerer, too: no mistake about it. The tenth marches
with a leopard at the head of the column. He made a
pet of the leopard; and now he's crying at being parted
from it. [Androcles sniffs lamentably]. Aint you, old chap?
Well, cheer up, we march with a Billy goat [Androcles
brightens up] thats killed two leopards and ate a turkey-
cock. You can have him for a pet if you like. [Androcles,
quite consoled, goes past the Centurion to Lavinia, and sits down
contentedly on the ground on her left]. This dirty dog [collar-
ing Spintho] is a real Christian. He mobs the temples, he
does [at each accusation he gives the neck of Spintho' s tunic a
twist] ; he goes smashing things mad drunk, he does; he
steals the gold vessels, he does ; he assaults the priestesses,
he does — yah! [He flings Spintho into the middle of the group
of prisoners]. Youre the sort that makes duty a pleasure, you
are.

Act I Androcles and the Lion 17

spiNTHo [gasph/g] Thats it : strangle me. Kick me. Beat
me. Revile me. Our Lord was beaten and reviled. Thats
my way to heaven. Every martyr goes to heaven, no matter
what hes done. That is so, isnt it, brother?

CENTURION. Well, if youre going to heaven, / dont
want to go there. I wouldnt be seen with you.

LENTULUs. Haw! Good ! {Indicating the kneeling Ferro-
vius\ Is this one of the turn-the-other-cheek gentlemen,
Centurion ?

CENTURION. Yes, sir. Lucky for you too, sir, if you want
to take any liberties with him.

LENTULUS {to Ferrovius] You turn the other cheek when
youre struck, I'm told.

FERROVIUS \slowly turning his great eyes on him\ Yes, by
the grace of God, I do, now.

LENTULUS. Not that yourc a coward, of course ; but out
of pure piety.

FERROVIUS. I fear God more than manj at least I try
to.

LENTULUS. Lets scc. {He strikes him on the cheek.
Androcles makes a wild movement to rise and interfere ; but
Lavinia holds him down, watching Ferrovius intently. Ferro-
vius, without fiinching, turns the other cheek. Lentulus, rather
out of countenance, titters foolishly, and strikes him again feebly\
You know, I should feel ashamed if I let myself be struck
like that, and took it lying down. But then I'm not a
Christian : I'm a man. {Ferrovius rises impressively and towers
over him. Lentulus becomes white with terror ; and a shade of
green flickers in his cheek for a moment\

FERROVIUS {with the calm of a steam hammer"] I have not
always been faithful. The first man who struck me as you
have just struck me was a stronger man than you: he hit
me harder than I expected. I was tempted and fell ; and
it was then that I first tasted bitter shame. I never had a
happy moment after that until I had knelt and asked his
forgiveness by his bedside in the hospital. {Putting his hands
on Lentulus'' s shoulders with paternal weight]. But now I have

c

1 8 Androcles and the Lion Act I

learnt to resist with a strength that is not my own. I am
not ashamed now, nor angry.

LENTULus [uneasi/y] Er — good evening. [He tries to move
away\

FERROvius [gripping his shoulders'] Oh, do not harden your
heart, young man. Come : try for yourself whether our
way is not better than yours. I will now strike you on one
cheek ; and you will turn the other and learn how much
better you will feel than if you gave way to the promptings of
anger. [He holds him with one hand and clenches the other Jist\

LENTULUS. Centurion : I call on you to protect me.

CENTURION. You asked for it, sir. It's no business of ours.
Youve had two whacks at him. Better pay him a trifle and
square it that way.

LENTULUS. Yes, of course. \To Ferroz'ius'] It was only a
bit of fun, I assure you : I meant no harm. Here. [He
proffers a gold coin],

FERROVIUS [taking it and throwing it to the old beggar, who
snatches it up eager h, and hobbles off to spend zV] Give all thou
hast to the poor. Come, friend : courage ! I may hurt your
body for a moment ; but your soul will rejoice in the
victory of the spirit over the flesh. [He prepares to strike].

ANDROCLES. Easy, Ferrovius, easy: you broke the last
man's jaw.

Lentulus, with a moan of terror, attempts to Jiy ; but Fer-
rovius holds hi?n ruthlessly.

FERROVIUS. Yes ; but I saved his soul. What matters a
broken jaw?

LENTULUS. Dont touch me, do you hear? The law —

FERROVIUS. The law will throw me to the lions to-
morrow: what worse could it do were I to slay you?
Pray for strength ; and it shall be given to you.

LENTULUS. Let me go. Your religion forbids you to strike
me.

FERROVIUS. On the contrary, it commands me to strike
you. How can you turn the other cheek, if you arc not
first struck on the one cheek?

Act I Androcles and the Lion 19

LENTULUS [a/most in tears'] But I'm convinced already
that what you said is quite right. I apologize for striking
you,

FERRovius [greatly pleased] My son : have I softened
your heart? Has the good seed fallen in a fruitful place?
Are your feet turning towards a better path ?

LENTULUS \_abjectly] Yes, yes. Theres a great deal in what
you say.

FERROVIUS [radiant] Join us. Come to the lions. Come
to suffering and death.

LENTULUS [falling on his knees and bursting into tears] Oh,
help me. Mother! mother!

FERROVIUS. These tears will water your soul and make
it bring forth good fruit, my son. God has greatly blessed
my efforts at conversion. Shall I tell you a miracle — yes,
a miracle — wrought by me in Cappadocia ? A young man
— ^just such a one as you, with golden hair like yours —
scoffed at and struck me as you scoffed at and struck me.
I sat up all night with that youth wrestling for his soul ;
and in the morning not only was he a Christian, but his
hair was as white as snow. [Lentulus falls in a dead faint].
There, there: take him away. The spirit has overwrought
him, poor lad. Carry him gently to his house ; and leave
the rest to heaven.

CENTURION. Take him home, ^he servants, intimidated,
hastily carry him out. Metellus is about to follow when Ferrovius
lays his hand on his shoulder].

FERROVIUS. You are his friend, young man. You will see
that he is taken safely home.

METELLUS [wtth awestruck civility] Certainly, sir. I shall
do whatever you think best. Most happy to have made
your acquaintance, I'm sure. You may depend on me.
Good evening, sir.

FERROVIUS [with unction] The blessing of heaven upon
you and him.

Metellus follows Lentulus. The Centurion returns to his seat
to resume his interrupted nap. The deepest awe has settled on

20 Androcles and the Lion Act I

the spectators. Ferrovius, with a long sigh of happiness, goes ts
Lavinia, and offers her his hand.

LAViNiA [taking zV] So that is how you convert people,
Ferrovius.

FERROvius. Yes : there has been a blessing on my work
in spiteof my unworthiness and mybackslidings — all through
my wicked, devilish temper. This man —

ANDROCLES \hastilf\ Dont slap me on the back, brother.
She knows you mean me.

FERROVIUS. How I wish I wcrc weak like our brother
here ! for then I should perhaps be meek and gentle like
him. And yet there seems to be a special providence that
makes my trials less than his. I hear tales of the crowd
scoffing and casting stones and reviling the brethren ; but
when I come, all this stops : my influence calms the passions
of the mob : they listen to me in silence ; and infidels are
often converted by a straight heart-to-heart talk with me.
Every day I feel happier, more confident. Every day
lightens the load of the great terror.

LAVINIA. The great terror.'' What is that ?

Ferrovius shakes his head and does not answer. He sits down
beside her on her left, and buries his face in Ins hands in gloomy
meditation.

ANDROCLES. Well, you see, sister, he's never quite sure of
himself Suppose at the last moment in the arena, with the
gladiators there to fight him, one of them was to say any-
thing to annoy him, he might forget himself and lay that
gladiator out.

LAVINIA. That would be splendid.

FERROVIUS [springing up in horror'\ What !

ANDROCLES. Oh, sister !

FERROVIUS. Splendid to betray my master, like Peter!
Splendid to act like any common blackguard in the day of
my proving ! Woman: you are no Christian. \_He moves away
from her to thie middle of the square, as if her neighborhood
contaminated him\.

LAVINIA \laughing\ You know, Ferrovius, I am not always

Act I Androcles and the Lion 21

a Christian. I dont think anybody is. There are moments
when I forget all about it, and something comes out quite
naturally, as it did then.

spiNTHo. What does it matter? If you die in the arena,
youll be a martyr ; and all martyrs go to heaven, no matter
what they have done. Thats so, isnt it, Ferrovius?

FERROvius. Yes: that is so, if we are faithful to the end.

LAViNiA. I'm not so sure.

spiNTHo. Dont say that. Thats blasphemy. Dont say
that, I tell you. We shall be saved, no matter what we do.

LAVINIA. Perhaps you men will all go into heaven bravely
and in triumph, with your heads erect and golden trumpets
sounding for you. But I am sure I shall only be allowed to
squeeze myself in through a little crack in the gate after
a great deal of begging. I am not good always : I have
moments only.

SPINTHO. Youre talking nonsense, woman. I tell you,
martyrdom pays all scores.

ANDROCLES. Well, let us hope so, brother, for your sake.
Youve had a gay time, havnt you? with your raids on the
temples. I cant help thinking that heaven will be very dull
for a man of your temperament. [Spintho snarls^ Dont be
angry : I say it only to console you in case you should die
in your bed tonight in the natural way. Theres a lot of
plague about.

SPINTHO [rising and running about in abject terror] I never
thought of that. Oh Lord, spare me to be martyred. Oh,
what a thought to put into the mind of a brother ! Oh, let
me be martyred today, now. I shall die in the night and
go to hell. Youre a sorcerer : youve put death into my mind.
Oh, curse you, curse you ! [He tries t« seize Androcles by the
throat\

FERROVIUS [holding him in a grasp of iron] Whats this,
brother? Anger! Violence! Raising your hand to a
brother Christian !

SPINTHO. It's easy for you. Youre strong. Your nerves
are all right. But I'm full of disease. [Ferrovius takes his

22 Androcles and the Lion Act I

hand from kim with instinctive disgust\ Ive drunk all my
nerves away. I shall have the horrors all night.

ANDROCLES Ys^Tnpathetic\ Oh, dont take on so, brother.
We're all sinners.

SFiNTHo {snivellings frying to feel consoled^ Yes : I daresay
if the truth were known, youre all as bad as I am.

LAViNiA {contemptuously'] Does that comfort you?

FERROvius {sternly'] Pray, man, pray.

spiNTHO. Whats the good of praying? If we're martyred
we shall go to heaven, shant we, whether we pray or not ?

FERROVIUS. Whats that? Not pray! {Seizing him again]
Pray this instant, you dog, you rotten hound, you slimy
snake, you beastly goat, or —

spiNTHO. Yes : beat me : kick me. I forgive you : mind
that.

FERROVIUS {spurning him with loathing] Yah ! {Spintho reels
away and falls in front of Ferrovius].

ANDROCLES {reaching out and catching the skirt of Ferrovius' s
tunic] Dear brother: if you wouldnt mind — ^just for my
sake —

FERROVIUS. Well ?

ANDROCLES. Dont call him by the names of the animals.
Weve no right to. Ivc had such friends in dogs. A pet
snake is the best of company. I was nursed on goat's milk.
Is it fair to them to call the like of him a dog or a snake
or a goat ?

FERROVIUS. I only meant that they have no souls.

ANDROCLES {anxiously protesting] Oh, believe me, they
have. Just the same as you and me. I really dont think
I could consent to go to heaven if I thought there were to
be no animals there. Think of what they suffer here.

FERROVIUS. Thats true. Yes: that is just. They will
have their share in heaven.

Spintho {who has picked himself up and is sneaking past
Ferrovius on his left, sneers derisively] ! !

FERROVIUS {turning on him fiercely] Whats that you say?

SPINTHO {cowering] Nothing.

Act I Androcles and the Lion 23

FERROvius \clenching his Jist'\ Do animals go to heaven or
not?

SPiNTHo. I never said they didnt.

FERROVIUS \implacable\ Do they or do they not?

SPINTHO. They do : they do. [Scrambling out of Ferrovius' s
reach\ Oh, curse you for frightening me !

A bugle call is heard.

CENTURION [waking up] Tention ! Form as before. Now
then, prisoners : up with you and trot along spry. [The
soldiers fall in. The Christians rise].

A man with an ox goad comes running through the central arch.

THE ox DRIVER. Hcrc, you soldicrs ! clear out of the way
for the Emperor.

THE CENTURION. Emperor ! Wheres the Emperor? You
aint the Emperor, are you? ,

THE ox DRIVER. It's the menagerie service. My team of
oxen is drawing the new lion to the Coliseum. You clear
the road.

CENTURION. What! Go in after you in your dust, with
half the town at the heels of you and your lion ! Not likely.
We go first.

THE ox DRIVER. The menagerie service is the Emperor's
personal retinue. You clear out, I tell you.

CENTURION. You tell me, do you ? Well, I'll tell you
something. If the lion is menagerie service, the lion's
dinner is menagerie service too. This [•pointing to the
Christians] is the lion's dinner. So back with you to your
bullocks double quick ; and learn your place. March. [The
soldiers start]. Now then, you Christians : step out there.

LAViNiA [marching] Come along, the rest of the dinner.
I shall be the olives and anchovies.

ANOTHER CHRISTIAN [laughing] I shall be the soup.

ANOTHER. I shall be the fish.

ANOTHER. Ferrovius shall be the roast boar.

FERROVIUS [heavili] I see the joke. Yes, yes : I shall be
the roast boar. Ha! ha I [He laughs conscientiously and
marches out with them].

24 Androcles and the Lion Act I

ANDROCLES \_following\ I shall be the mince pie. \Each
announcement is received with a louder laugh by all the rest
as the joke catches on],

CENTURION [scandalized] Silence! Have some sense of
your situation. Is this the way for martyrs to behave? [To
Spintho, who is quaking and loitering] I know what you 11 be
at that dinner. Youll be the emetic. [He shoves him rudely
along].

spiNTHO. It's too dreadful : I'm not fit to die.

CENTURION. Fitter than you are to live, you swine.

They pass from the square westward. The oxen, drawing
a waggon with a great wooden cage and the lion in it, arrize
through the central arch.

ACT II

Behind the Emperor's box at the Coliseum, where the per-
formers assemble before entering the arena. In t/^e middle a wide
passage leading to the arena descends from the floor level under
the imperial box. On both sides of this passage steps ascend to
a landing at the back entrance to the box. The landing forms
a bridge across the passage. At the entrance to the passage are
two bronze mirrors, one on each side.

On the west side of this passage, on the right hand of any
one coming from the box and standing on the bridge, the martyrs
are sitting on the steps. Lavinia is seated half-way up, thought-
ful, trying to look death in the face. On her left Androcles con-
soles himself by nursing a cat. Ferrovius stands behind them,
his eyes blazing, his figure stiff with intense resolution. At the
foot of the steps crouches Spin t ho, with his head clutched in his
hands, full of horror at the approach of martyrdom.

On the east side of the passage the gladiators are standing
and sitting at ease, waiting, like the Christians, for their turn
in the arena. One {Retiarius) is a nearly naked man with a
net and a trident. Another (Secutor) is in armor with a sword.
He carries a helmet with a barred visor. The editor of the
gladiators sits on a chair a little apart from them.

The Call Boy enters from the passage.

THE CALL BOY. Number six. Retiarius versus Secutor.

The gladiator with the net picks it up. The gladiator with
the helmet puts it on; and the two go into the arena, the
net thrower taking out a little brush and arranging his hair

25

26 Androcles and the Lion Act II

as he goes, the other tightening his straps and shaking his
shoulders loose. Both look at themselves in the mirrors before
the J enter the passage.

LAViNiA. Will they really kill one another?

spiNTHO. Yes, if the people turn down their thumbs.

THE EDITOR. You Icnow nothing about it. The people
indeed ! Do you suppose we would kill a man worth per-
haps fifty talents to please the rifFrafF? I should like to
catch any of my men at it.

sPiNTHO. I thought —

THE EDITOR \contemptuously\ You thought! Who cares
what you think? Youll be killed all right enough.

SPINTHO {groans and again hides his face"] ! ! !

LAVINIA. Then is nobody ever killed except us poor
Christians ?

THE EDITOR. If the vestal virgins turn down their thumbs,
thats another matter. Theyre ladies of rank.

LAVINIA. Does the Emperor ever interfere?

THE EDITOR. Oh, yes : he turns his thumb up fast enough
if the vestal virgins want to have one of his pet fighting
men killed.

ANDROCLES. But dont they ever just only pretend to kill
one another ? Why shouldnt you pretend to die, and get
dragged out as if you were dead; and then get up and go
home, like an actor?

THE EDITOR. See here : you want to know too much.
There will be no pretending about the new lion : let that
be enough for you. Hes hungry.

spiNTHO [groaning with horror^ Oh, Lord ! cant you stop
talking about it? Isnt it bad enough for us without
that ?

ANDROCLES. I'm glad hes hungry. Not that I want him
to suffer, poor chap ! but then he'll enjoy eating me so
much more. Theres a cheerful side to everything.

THE EDITOR [rising and striding over to Androcles'\ Here :
dont you be obstinate. Come with me and drop the pinch
of incense on the altar. Thats all you need do to be let off.

Act II Androcles and the Lion 27

ANDRocLES. No : thank you very much indeed; but I
really mustnt.

THE EDITOR. What! Not to savc your life ?

ANDROCLES. Id rather not. I couldnt sacrifice to Diana :
shes a huntress, you know, and kills things.

THE EDITOR. That dont matter. You can choose vour
own altar. Sacrifice to Jupiter : he likes animals : he turns
himself into an animal when he goes off duty.

ANDROCLES. No : it's very kind of you; but I feel I cant
save myself that way.

THE EDITOR. But I dont ask you to do it to save yourself:
I ask you to do it to oblige me personally.

ANDROCLES [scrambling up in the greatest agitation] Oh,
please dont say that. This is dreadful. You mean so kindly
by me that it seems quite horrible to disoblige you. If you
could arrange for me to sacrifice when theres nobody look-
ing, I shouldnt mind. But I must go into the arena with
the rest. My honor, you know.

THE EDITOR. Houor ! The honor of a tailor?

ANDROCLES [^apologetically] Well, perhaps honor is too strong
an expression. Still, you know, I couldnt allow the tailors
to get a bad name through me.

THE EDITOR. How much will you remember of all that
when you smell the beast's breath and see his jaws opening
to tear out your throat ?

spiNTHO [rising with a yell of terror] I cant bear it. Wheres
the altar? I'll sacrifice.

FERROvius. Dog of an apostate. Iscariot !

SPINTHO. I'll repent afterwards. I fully mean to die
in the arena : I'll die a martyr and go to heaven ; but
not this time, not now, not until my nerves are better.
Besides, I'm too young: I want to have just one more
good time. [The gladiators laugh at him]. Oh, will no one
tell me where the altar is? [He clashes into the passage and
vanishes].

ANDROCLES [to the Editor, pointing after Spintho] Brother :
I cant do that, not even to oblige you. Dont ask me.

28 Androcles and the Lion Act II

THE EDITOR. Well, if yourc determined to die, I cant
help you. But I wouldnt be put ofF by a swine like
that.

FERROVius. Peace, peace : tempt him not. Get thee
behind him, Satan.

THE EDITOR [fushing With rage] For two pins Id take a
turn in the arena myself today, and pay you out for daring
to talk to me like that.

Ferrovius springs forward.

LAViNiA [rising quickly and interposing] Brother, brother :
you forget.

FERROVIUS [curbing himself by a mighty effort] Oh, my
temper, my wicked temper ! \To the Editor, as Lavinia sits
down again, reassured] Forgive me, brother. My heart was
full of wrath: I should have been thinking of your dear
precious soul.

THE EDITOR. Yah! {He turns his back on Ferrovius con-
temptuously, and goes back to Ins seat].

FERROVIUS [continuing] And I forgot it all : I thought^ of
nothing but offering to fight you with one hand tied behind
me.

THE EDITOR [turuing pugnaciously] What !

FERROVIUS [on the border line between xeal and ferocity] Oh,
dont give way to pride and wrath, brother. I could do it
SO easily. I could —

They are separated by the Menagerie Keeper, who rushes in
from the passage, furious.

THE KEEPER. Hcres a nice business 1 Who let that Chris-
tian out of here down to the dens when we were changing
the lion into the cage next the arena?

THE EDITOR. Nobody let him. He let himself.

THE KEEPER. Wcll, the Hou's ate him.

Consternation. The Christians rise, greatly agitated. The
gladiators sit callously, but are highly amused. All speak or cry
out or laugh at once. Tumult.

LAVINIA. Oh, poor wretch ! ferrovius. The apostate has
perished. Praise be to God's justice ! androcles. The poor

Act II Androcles and the Lion 29

beast was starving. It couldnt help itself, the christians.
What ! Ate him ! How frightful ! How terrible ! Without
a moment to repent! God be merciful to him, a sinner!
Oh, I cant bear to think of it! In the midst of his sin!
Horrible, horrible ! the editor. Serve the rotter right !
THE GLADIATORS. Just Walked into it, he did. Hes mar-
tyred all right enough. Good old lion ! Old Jock doesnt
like that: look at his face. Devil a better! The Emperor
will laugh when he hears of it. I cant help smiling. Ha
ha ha ! ! ! ! !

THE KEEPER. Now his appetite's taken off, he wont as
much as look at another Christian for a week.

ANDROCLES. Couldnt you have saved him, brother?

THE KEEPER. Savcd him ! Saved him from a lion that Id
just got mad with hunger ! a wild one that came out of the
forest not four weeks ago ! He bolted him before you could
say Balbus.

LAViNiA [^sitting down agairi] Poor Spintho ! And it wont
even count as martyrdom !

THE KEEPER. Scrve him right ! What call had he to
walk down the throat of one of my lions before he was
asked ?

ANDROCLES. Perhaps the lion wont eat me now.

THE KEEPER. Ycs : thats just like a Christian I think only
of yourself! What am / to do? What am I to say to the
Emperor when he sees one of my lions coming into the
arena half asleep?

THE EDITOR. Say nothing. Give your old lion some bitters
and a morsel of fried fish to wake up his appetite. [Laughter].

THE KEEPER. Yes : it's easy for you to talk; but —

THE EDITOR [scrambling to his feet] Sh ! Attention there !
The Emperor. [The Keeper bolts precipitately into the passage.
The gladiators rise smartly and form into line].

The Emperor enters on the Christians' side, conversing with
Metellus, and followed by his suite.

THE GLADIATORS. Hail, Caesax ! those about to die salute
thee.

30 Androcles and the Lion Act II

CAESAR. Good morrow, friends.

Metellus shakes hands with the Editor, who accepts his con-
descension with bluff respect.

LAViNiA. Blessing, Caesar, and forgiveness!

CAESAR {turning in some surprise at the salutation] There is
no forgiveness for Christianity.

LAVINIA. I did not mean that, Caesar. I mean that we
forgive you.

METELLUS. An inconceivablc liberty ! Do you not know,
woman, that the Emperor can do no wrong and therefore
cannot be forgiven?

LAVINIA. I expect the Emperor knows better. Anyhow,
we forgive him.

THE CHRISTIANS. Amen !

CAESAR. Metellus : you see now the disadvantage of too
much severity. These people have no hope ; therefore
they have nothing to restrain them from saying what they
like to me. They are almost as impertinent as the gladia-
tors. Which is the Greek sorcerer?

ANDROCLES [humbly touching his forelock] Me, your Wor-
ship.

CAESAR. My Worship ! Good ! A new title. Well : what
miracles can you perform?

ANDROCLES. I Can cure warts by rubbing them with my
tailor's chalk; and I can live with my wife without beat-
ing her.

CAESAR. Is that all ?

ANDROCLES. You dont know her, Caesar, or you wouldnt
say that.

CAESAR. Ah, well, my friend, we shall no doubt contrive
a happy release for you. Which is Ferrovius?

FERROvius. I am he.

CAESAR. They tell me you can fight.

FERROVIUS. It is easy to fight. 1 can die, Caesar.

CAESAR. That is still easier, is it not?

FERROVIUS. Not to me, Caesar. Death comes hard to
ray flesh ; and fighting comes very easily to my spirit [beat-

Act II Androcles and the Lion 31

ing his breast and lamenting] Oh, sinner that I am ! \He throws
himself down on the steps, deeply discouraged\

CAESAR. Metellus : I should like to have this man in the
Pretorian Guard.

METELLUS. / should not, Caesar. He looks a spoilsport.
There are men in whose presence it is impossible to have
any fun : men who are a sort of walking conscience. He
would make us all uncomfortable.

CAESAR. For that reason, perhaps, it might be well to have
him. An Emperor can hardly have too many consciences.
\To Ferrovius'\ Listen, Ferrovius. \Ferrovius shakes his head
and will not look up']. You and your friends shall not be out-
numbered today in the arena. You shall have arms; and
there will be no more than one gladiator to each Christian.
If you come out of the arena alive, I will consider favor-
ably any request of yours, and give you a place in the
Pretorian Guard. Even if the request be that no ques-
tions be asked about your faith I shall perhaps not refuse it.

FERROVIUS. I will not fight. I will die. Better stand
with the archangels than with the Pretorian Guard.

CAESAR. I cannot believe that the archangels — whoever
they may be — would not prefer to be recruited from the
Pretorian Guard. However, as you please. Come : let us
see the show.

As the Court ascends the steps, Secutor and Retiarius return
from the arena through the passage: Secutor covered with dust
and very angry : Retiarius grinning.

SECUTOR. Ha, the Emperor. Now we shall see. Caesar:
I ask you whether it is fair for the Retiarius, instead of
making a fair throw of his net at me, to swish it along the
ground and throw the dust in my eyes, and then catch
me when I'm blinded. If the vestals had not turned up
their thumbs I should have been a dead man.

CAESAR [halting on the stair] There is nothing in the
rules against it.

SECUTOR [indignantly] Caesar: is it a dirty trick or is it
not.?

32 Androcles and the Lion Act il

CAESAR. It is a dusty one, my friend. {Obsequious laughter\.
Be on your guard next time.

SECUTOR. Let him be on his guard. Next time I'll throw
my sword at his heels and strangle him with his own net
before he can hop off. \To the Retiarius] You see if I dont.
[He goes out past the gladiators, sulky and furious'].

CAESAR [to the chuckling Retiarius\ These tricks are not
wise, my friend. The audience likes to see a dead man in
all his beauty and splendor. If you smudge his face and
spoil his armor they will shew their displeasure by not
letting you kill him. And when your turn comes, they will
remember it against you and turn their thumbs down.

THE RETiARius. Perhaps that is why I did it, Caesar. He
bet me ten sesterces that he would vanquish me. If I had
had to kill him I should not have had the money.

CAESAR [indulgent, laughing] You rogues : there is no end
to your tricks. I'll dismiss you all and have elephants to
fight. They fight fairly. [He goes up to his box, and knocks
at it. It is opened from within by the Captain, who stands as on
parade to let him pass].

The Call Boy comes from the passage, followed by three at-
tendants carrying respectively a bundle of swords, some helmets,
and some breastplates and pieces of armor which they throw down
in a heap.

THE CALL Boy. By your leave, Caesar. Number eleven !
Gladiators and Christians !

Ferrovius springs up, ready for martyrdom. The other Chris-
tians take the summons as best they can, some joyful and brave,
some patient and dignified, some tearful and helpless, some em-
bracing one another with emotion. The Call Boy goes back into
the passage.

CAESAR [turning at the door of the box] The hour has come,
Ferrovius. I shall go into my box and see you killed, since
you scorn the Pretorian Guard. [He goes into the box. The
Captain shuts the door, remaining inside with the Emperor.
Metellus and the rest of the suite disperse to their seats. The
Christians, led by Ferrovius, move towards the passage].

T
Act II Androcles and the Lion 33

LAViNiA [to Ferrovius'\ Farewell.

THE EDITOR. Steady there. You Christians have got to
fight. Here ! arm yourselves.

FERROvius \_picki?!g tip c sword'\ I'll die sword in hand to
shew people that I could fight if it were my Master's will,
and that I could kill the man who kills me if I chose.

THE EDITOR. Put on that armor.

FERROVIUS. No armor.

THE EDITOR [bullying him] Do what youre told. Put on
that armor.

FERROVIUS [gripping the sword and looking dangerous] I
said, No armor.

THE EDITOR. And what am I to say when I am accused
of sending a naked man in to fight my men in armor?

FERROVIUS. Say your prayers, brother ; and have no fear
of the princes of this world.

THE EDITOR. Tsha ! You obstinatc fool ! [He bites his
lips irresolutely^ not knowing exactly what to do].

ANDROCLES [to Ferrovius] Farewell, brother, till we meet
in the sweet by-and-by.

THE EDITOR [to Androcks] You are going too. Take a
sword there ; and put on any armor you can find to fit you.

ANDROCLES. No, really : I cant fight : I never could : I
cant bring myself to dislike anyone enough, I'm to be
thrown to the lions with the lady.

THE EDITOR. Then get out of the way and hold your
noise. [Androcles steps aside with cheerful docility]. Now
then ! Are you all ready there ?

A trumpet is heard from the arena.

FERROVIUS [starting convulsively] Heaven give me
strength !

THE EDITOR. Aha! That frightens you, does it?

FERROVIUS. "Man : there is no terror like the terror of that
sound to me. When I hear a trumpet or a drum or the
clash of steel or the hum of the catapult as the great stone
flies, fire runs through my veins : I feel my blood surge up
hot behind my eyes : I must charge : I must strike : I must

o

34 Androcles and the Lion Act II

conquer : Caesar himself will not be safe in his imperial
seat if once that spirit gets loose in me. Oh, brothers, pray !
exhort me ! remind me that if I raise my sword my honor
falls and my Master is crucified afresh.

ANDROCLES. Just Icccp thinking how cruelly you might
hurt the poor gladiators.

FERROvius. It does not hurt a man to kill him.

LAViNiA. Nothing but faith can save you.

FERROVIUS. Faith! Which faith? There are two faiths.
There is our faith. And there is the warrior's faith, the
faith in fighting, the faith that sees God in the sword.
How if that faith should overwhelm me?

LAVINIA. You will find your real faith in the hour of
triaL

FERROVIUS. That is what I fear. I know that I am a
fighter. How can I feel sure that I am a Christian ?

ANDROCLES. Throw away the sword, brother.

FERROVIUS. I cannot. It cleaves to my hand. I could as
easily throw a woman I loved from my arms. [^Stariing]
Who spoke that blasphemy? Not I.

LAVINIA. I cant help you, friend. I cant tell you not to
save your own life. Something wilful in me wants to see
you fight your way into heaven.

FERROVIUS. Ha !

ANDROCLES. But if you are going to give up our faith,
brother, why not do it without hurting anybody? Dont
fight them. Burn the incense.

FERROVIUS. Burn the incense ! Never.

LAVINIA. That is only pride, Ferrovius.

FERROVIUS. Only pride! What is nobler than pride?
[Conscience stricken] Oh, I'm steeped in sin. I'm proud of
my pride.

LAVINIA. They say we Christians are the proudest devils
on earth — that only the weak are meek. Oh, I am worse
than you. I ought to send you to death ; and I am tempt-
ing you.

ANDROCLES. Brother, brother : let them rage and kill:

Ace II Androcies and the Lion ^S

let us be brave and sutFor. You must go as a lamb to the
slaughter.

FERRovius. Aye, aye : that is right. Not as a lamb is
slain by the butcher; but as a butcher might let himself
be slain by a [/ookiKg at the Editor] by a silly ram whose
head he could fetch ofF in one twist.

Before the Editor can retort, the Call Boy rushes up through
the passage, and the Captain comes from the Emperor's box
and descends the steps.

THE CALL BOY. In with you : into the arena. The stage
is waiting.

THE CAPTAIN. The Emperor is waiting. \To the Editor'\
What are you dreaming of, man? Send your men in at
once.

THE EDITOR. Ycs, sir : it's these Christians hanging back.

FERROVIUS \in a voice of thunder] Liar !

THE EDITOR [not heeding him] March. [The gladiators told
off to fight with the Christians march down the passage] Follow
up there, you.

THE CHRISTIAN MEN AND WOMEN \as they part] Be steadfast,
brother. Farewell. Hold up the faith, brother. Farewell.
Go to glory, dearest. Farewell. Remember : we are praying
for you. Farewell. Be strong, brother. Farewell. Dont
forget that the divine love and our love surround you.
Farewell. Nothing can hurt you : remember that, brother.
Farewell. Eternal glory, dearest. Farewell.

THE EDITOR \out of paticnce] Shove them in, there.

The remaining gladiators and the Call Boy make a movement
towards them.

FERROVIUS [interposing] Touch them, dogs ; and we die
here, and cheat the heathen of their spectacle. [To his fellow
Christians] Brothers : the great moment has come. That
passage is your hill to Calvary. Mount it bravely, but
meekly J and remember ! not a word of reproach, not a blow
nor a struggle. Go. [They go out through the passage. He turns
to Lavinia] Farewell.

LAViNiA. You forget : I must follow before you are cold.

36

Androcles and the Lion Act ii

FERROvius. It is true. Do not envy me because I pass
before you to glory, \^He goes through the passage\,

THE EDITOR \to the Call Boj\ Sickening work, this. Why-
cant they all be thrown to the lions.'' It's not a man's job.
[//(? throws himself moodily into his chair\

The remaining gladiators go back to their former places in-
differently. The Call Boy shrugs his shoulders and squats dozvn
at the entrance to the passage^ near the Editor.

Lavinia and the Christian women sit down again, wrung
with grief some weeping silently, some praying, some calm and
steadfast. Androcles sits down at Lavinia' s feet. The Captain
stands on the stairs, watching her curiously.

ANDROCLES. I'm glad I havnt to fight. That would really
be an awful martyrdom. lam lucky.

LAVINIA \looking at him with a pang of remorse'\ Androcles :
burn the incense : youll be forgiven. Let my de&th atone
for both. I feel as if I were killing you.

ANDROCLES. Dont think of me, sister. Think of yourself.
That will keep your heart up.

The Captain laughs sardonically.

LAVINIA \startled: she had forgotten his presence'\ Are you
there, handsome Captain.? Have you come to see me die?

THE CAPTAIN \coming to her side~\ I am on duty with the
Emperor, Lavinia.

LAVINIA. Is it part of your duty to laugh at us?

THE CAPTAIN. No : that is part of my private pleasure.
Your friend here is a humorist. I laughed at his telling you
to think of yourself to keep up your heart. / say, think of
yourself and burn the incense.

LAVINIA. He is not a humorist : he was right. You ought
to know that, Captain : you have been face to face with
death.

THE CAPTAIN. Not with Certain death, Lavinia. Only
death in battle, which spares more men than death in bed.
What you are facing is certain death. You have nothing
left now but your faith in this craze of yours : this Christi-
anity. Are your Christian fairy stories any truer than our

Act IJ Androcles and the Lion 37

stories about Jupiter and Diana, in which, I may tell you,
I believe no more than the Emperor does, or any educated
man in Rome?

LAViNiA. Captain : all that seems nothing to me now.
I'll not say that death is a terrible thing; but I will say that
it is so real a thing that when it comes close, all the
imaginary things — all the stories, as you call them — fade
into mere dreams beside that inexorable reality. I know
now that I am not dying for stories or dreams. Did you
hear of the dreadful thing that happened here while we
were waiting?

THE CAPTAIN. I heard that one of your fellows bolted,
and ran right into the jaws of the lion. I laughed. I still
laugh.

LAVINIA. Then you dont understand what that meant?

THE CAPTAIN. It meant that the lion had a cur for his
breakfast.

LAVINIA. It meant more than that. Captain. It meant
that a man cannot die for a story and a dream. None of us
believed the stories and the dreams more devoutly than
poor Spintho ; but he could not face the great reality. What
he would have called my faith has been oozing away minute
by minute whilst Ive been sitting here, with death coming
nearer and nearer, with reality become realler and realler,
with stories and dreams fading away into nothing.

THE CAPTAIN. Are you then going to die for nothing?

LAVINIA. Yes : that is the wonderful thing. It is since
all the stories and dreams have gone that I have now no
doubt at all that I must die for something greater than
dreams or stories.

THE CAPTAIN. But for what ?

LAVINIA. I dont know. If it were for anything small
enough to know, it would be too small to die for. I think I'm
going to die for God. Nothing else is real enough to die for.

THE CAPTAIN. What is God ?

LAVINIA. When we know that, Captain, we shall be gods
ourselves.

38 Androcles and the Lion Act il

THE CAPTAIN. Lavinia : come down to earth. Burn the
incense and marry me.

LAVINIA. Handsome Captain : would you marry me if I
hauled down the flag in the day of battle and burnt the
incense? Sons take after their mothers, you know. Do you
want your son to be a coward?

THE CAPTAIN \_strongly moved\ By great Diana, I think I
would strangle you if you gave in now.

LAVINIA {putting her hand on the head of Androeies'] The
hand of God is on us three. Captain.

THE CAPTAIN. What nonsense it all is ! And what a
monstrous thing that you should die for such nonsense, and
that I should look on helplessly when my whole soul cries
out against it ! Die then if you must ; but at least I can cut
the Emperor's throat and then my own when I see your
blood.

The Emperor tl^rows open the door of his box angrily^ and
appears in wrath on the threshold. The Editor^ the Call Boy,
and the gladiators spring to their feet.

THE EMPEROR. The Christians will not fight; and your
curs cannot get their blood up to attack them. It's all that
fellow with the blazing eyes. Send for the whip. \The Call
Boy rushes out on the east side for the whip\ If that will
not move them, bring the hot irons. The man is like a
mountain. \^He returns angrily into the box and slams the
door\

The Call Boy returns with a man in a hideous Etruscan
mask, carrying a whip. They both rush dozen the passage into
the arena.

LAVINIA [rising] Oh, that is unworthy. Can they not kill
him without dishonoring him?

ANDROCLES [scrambling to his feet and running into the middle
of the space between the staircases] It's dreadful. Now / want
to fight. I cant bear the sight of a whip. The only time I
ever hit a man was when he lashed an old horse with a
whip. It was terrible : I danced on his face when he was
on the ground. He mustnt strike Ferrovius : I'll go into the

Act II Androcles and the Lion 39

arena and kill him first. \^He makes a wild dash into the
passage. As he does so a great clamor is heard from the arena^
ending in wild applause. The gladiators listen and look inquir-
i?igly at one another'].

THE EDITOR. WhatS Up HOW?

LAViNiA [to the Captain] What has happened, do you think ?

THE CAPTAIN. What Can happen ? They are killing them,
I suppose.

ANDROCLES [running in through the passage, screami?!g with
horror and hiding his eyes] ! ! !

LAVINIA. Androcles, Androcles: whats the matter?

ANDROCLES. Oh dont ask me, dont ask me. Something
too dreadful. Oh ! [He crouches by her and hides his face in
her robe, sobbing],

THE CALL BOY [rushing through from the passage as before]
Ropes and hooks there ! Ropes and hooks !

THE EDITOR. Well, need you excite yourself about it?
[Another burst of applause].

Two slaves in Etruscan masks, with ropes and drag hooks,
hurry in.

ONE OF THE SLAVES. How many dead ?

THE CALL BOY. Six. [The slavc blows a whistle twice; and
four more masked slaves rush through into the arena with the
same apparatus] And the basket. Bring the baskets [The
slave whistles three times, and runs through the passage with
his companion],

THE CAPTAIN. Who are the baskets for?

THE CALL BOY. For the whip. Hes in pieces. Theyre all
in pieces, more or less. [Lavinia hides her face].

Two more masked slaves come in zvith a basket and follow
the others into the arena, as the Call Boy turns to the gladiators
and exclaitns, exhausted] Boys: he's killed the lot.

THE EMPEROR [again bursting from his box, this time in an
ecstasy of delight] Where is he ? Magnificent ! He shall have
a laurel crown.

Ferrovius, madly waving his bloodstained sword, rushes
through the passage in despair, followed by his co-religionists.

40 Androcles and the Lion Act II

and hy the menagerie keeper, who gees to the gladiators. The
gladiators draw their swords nervouslf\.

FERROvius. Lost ! lost for cvcr ! I have betrayed my
Master. Cut ofF this right hand : it has offended. Ye have
swords, my brethren : strike.

LAViNiA. No, no. What have you done, Ferrovius?

FERROVIUS. I know not; but there was blood behind
my eyes ; and theres blood on my sword. What does that
mean ?

THE EMPEROR \_enthusiastically, on the landing outside his box\
What does it mean ? It means that you are the greatest
man in Rome. It means that you shall have a laurel crown
of gold. Superb fighter : I could almost yield you my
throne. It is a record for my reign : I shall live in history.
Once, in Domitian's time, a Gaul slew three men in the
arena and gained his freedom. But when before has one
naked man slain six armed men of the bravest and best?
The persecution shall cease : if Christians can fight like
this, I shall have none but Christians to fight for me. [To
the Gladiators'\ You are ordered to become Christians, you
th^re : do you hear ?

RETiARius. It is all one to us, Caesar. Had I been there
with my net, the story would have been different.

THE CAPTAIN \_suddenly seizing Lavinia by the wrist and
dragging her up the steps to the Emperor] Caesar : this woman
is the sister of Ferrovius. If she is thrown to the lions he
will fret. He will lose weight ; get out of condition —

THE EMPEROR. The Hons .? Nonscuse ! [To Laz'inia] Ma-
dam : I am proud to have the honor of making your
acquaintance. Your brother is the glory of Rome.

LAVINIA. But my friends here. Must they die.""

THE EMPEROR. Die ! CcTtainly not. There has never
been the slightest idea of harming them. Ladies and gentle-
men : you are all free. Pray go into the front of the house
and enjoy the spectacle to which your brother has so
splendidly contributed. Captain : oblige me by conducting
them to the seats reserved for my personal friends.

Act II Androcles and the Lion 41

THE MENAGERIE KEEPER. Cacsar : I must havc OHC Christian
for the lion. The people have been promised it; and thej
will tear the decorations to bits if they are disappointed.

THE EMPEROR. True, true : we must have somebody for
the new lion.

FERRovius. Throw me to hira. Let the apostate perish.

THE EMPEROR. No, no : you would tear him in pieces,
my friend ; and we cannot afford to throw away lions as
if they were mere slaves. But we must have somebody.
This is really extremely awkward.

THE MENAGERIE KEEPER. Why not that little Greek chap ?
Has not a Christian : hes a sorcerer.

THE EMPEROR. The Very thing : he will do very well.

THE CALL BOY \_issui?ig from the passage'] Number twelve.
The Christian for the new lion.

ANDROCLES [rising, and pulling himself sadly together] Well,
it was to be, after all.

LAViNiA. I'll go in his place, Caesar. Ask the Captain
whether they do not like best to see a woman torn to pieces.
He told me so yesterday.

THE EMPEROR. There is something in that : there is
certainly something in that — if only I could feel sure that
your brother would not fret.

ANDROCLES. No : I should never have another happy hour.
No : on the faith of a Christian and the honor of a tailor,
I accept the lot that has fallen on me. \i my wife turns
up, give her my love and say that my wish was that she
should be happy with her next, poor fellow ! Caesar : go
to your box and see how a tailor can die. Make way for
number twelve there. [He marches out along the passage].

The vast audience in the amphitheatre now sees the Emperor
re-enter his box and take his place as Jndrocles, desperately
frightened, hut still marching with piteous devotion, emerges
from the other end of the passage, and finds himself at the focus
of thousands of eager eyes. The lio?i's cage, with a heavy port-
cullis grating, is on his left. The Emperor gives a signal. A
gong sounds. Androcles shivers at the sound; then falls on his

42 Androcles and the Lion Act II

Jinecs and pray. The grating rises zcith a clash. The lion
boundi into the arena. He rushes round frisking in his freedom.
He sees Androcles. He stops ; rises stiffly by straightening his
legs; stretches out his nose forward and his tail in a horizontal
line behind, like a pointer, and utters an appalling roar. Androcles
crouches and hides his face in his hands. The lion gathers him-
self for a spring, swishing his tail to and fro through the
dust in an ecstasy of anticipation. Androcles throws up his
hands in supplication to heaven. The lion checks at the sight of
Androcles' s face. He then steals towards him; smells him ; arches
his back; purrs like a motor car; finally rubs himself against
Androcles, knocking him over. Androcles, supporting himself
on his wrist, looks affrightedly at the lion. The lion limps on
three paws, holding up the other as if it was wounded. A fash
of recognition lights up the face of Androcles. He flaps his hand
as if it had a thorn in it, and pretends to pull the thorn out and
to hurt himself. The lion nods repeatedly. Androcles holds out
his hands to the lion, who gives him both paws, zvhich he shakes
with enthusiasm. They embrace rapturously, finally waltz round
the arena amid a sudden burst of deafening applause, and out
through the passage, the Emperor watching them in breathless
astonishment until they disappear, when he rushes from his box
and descends the steps in frantic excitement.

THE EMPEROR. My ffiends, an incredible! an amazing
thing ! has happened. I can no longer doubt the truth of
Christianity. \The Christians press to him joyfully\ This
Christian sorcerer — \with a yell, he breaks off as he sees
Androcles and the lion emerge from the passage, waltzing. He
bolts wildly up the steps into his box, and slams the door. All,
Christians and gladiators alike, fiy for their lives, the gladiators
bolting into the arena, the others in all directions. The place is
emptied with magical suddenness^.

ANDROCLES [^na'ively'\ Now I wonder why they all run
away from us like that. [The lion, combining a series of yawns,
purrs, and roars, achieves something very like a laugh"].

THE EMPEROR [standing on a chair inside his box and looking
over the wall] Sorcerer : I command you to put that lion to

Act II Androcles and the Lion 43

death instantly. It is guilty of high treason. Your conduct
is most disgra — [the lion charges at him up the stairs] help !
[He disappears. The lion rears against the box ; looks over the
partition at him; and roars. The Emperor darts out through
the door and down to Androcles, pursued by the lion].

ANDROCLES. Dont run away, sir : he cant help springing
if you run. [He seizes the Emperor and gets between him and
the lion, who stops at once]. Dont be afraid of him.

THE EMPEROR. I am not afraid of him. [The lion crouches,
growling. The Emperor clutches Androcles], Keep between us.

ANDROCLES. Ncvcr bc afraid of animals, your worship :
thats the great secret. He'll be as gentle as a lamb when
he knows that you are his friend. Stand quite still ; and
smile ; and let him smell you all over just to reassure him ;
for, you see, hes afraid of you ; and he must examine you
thoroughly before he gives you his confidence. [To the lion]
Come now, Tommy ; and speak nicely to the Emperor,
the great good Emperor who has power to have all our
heads cut off if we dont behave very very respectfully to
him.

The lion utters a fearful roar. The Emperor dashes madly up
the steps, across the landing, and down again on the other side,
with the lion in hot pursuit. Androcles rushes after the lion ;
overtakes him as he is descending; and throws himself on his
back, trying to use his toes as a brake. Before he can stop him
the lion gets hold of the trailing end of the Emperor's robe.

ANDROCLES. Oh bad wicked Tommy, to chase the Emperor
like that! Let go the Emperor's robe at once, sir: wheres
your manners ? ]frhe lion growls and worries the robe]. Dont
pull it away from him, your worship. Hes only playing.
Now I shall be really angry with you, Tommy, if you dont
let go. [The lion growls again]. I'll tell you what it is, sir:
he thinks you and I are not friends.

THE EMPEROR [trying to undo the clasp of his brooch] Friends !
You infernal scoundrel [the lion growls] — dont let him go.
Curse this brooch ! I cant get it loose.

ANDROCLES. We mustnt let him lash himself into a rage.

44 Androcles and the Lion Act ii

You must shew him that you are my particular friend — if
you will have the condescension. [He seizes the Emperor's
hatids and shahs them cordially\ Look, Tommy : the nice
Emperor is the dearest friend Andy Wandy has in the whole
world: he loves him like a brother.

THE EMPEROR. You little brutc, you damned filthy little
dog of a Greek tailor : I'll have you burnt alive for daring
to touch the divine person of the Emperor. \The lio7i growls\

ANDROCLES. Oh dont talk like that, sir. He understands
every word you say : all animals do : they take it from the
tone of your voice. [The lion growls and lashes his tail\ I
think hes going to spring at your worship. If you wouldnt
mind saying something affectionate. [The lion roars],

THE EMPEROR [shaking Androcles^ hands frantically] My
dearest Mr. Androcles, my sweetest friend, my long lost
brother, come to my arms. [He embraces Androcles\ Oh,
what an abominable smell of garlic !

The lion lets go the robe and rolls over on his back, clasping
his forepaws over one another coquettishly above his nose.

ANDROCLES. There ! You see, your worship, a child might
play with him now. See ! [He tickles the liori's belly. The
lion wriggles ecstatically]. Come and pet him.

THE EMPEROR. I must conqucr these unkingly terrors.
Mind you dont go away from him, though. [He pats the
lion's chest],

ANDROCLES. Oh, sir, how It^^ men would have the courage
to do that!

THE EMPEROR. Ycs : it takcs a bit of nerve. Let us have
the Court in and frighten them. Is he safe, do you think ?

ANDROCLES. Quitc safc now, sir.

THE EMPEROR [majestically] What ho, there! All who are
within hearing, return without fear. Caesar has tamed the
lion. [All the fugitives steal cautiously in. The menagerie
keeper comes from the passage with other keepers armed with iron
bars and tridents]. Take those things away. I have subdued
the beast. [He places kis foot on it],

FERRovius [timidly approaching the Emperor and looking down

Act II Androcles and the Lion 45

zvith awe on the I'lori] It is strange that I, who fear no man,
should fear a lion.

THE CAPTAIN. Evcry man fears something, Ferrovius.

THE EMPEROR. How about the Pretorian Guard now?

FERROVIUS. In my youth I worshipped Mars, the God of
War. I turned from him to serve the Christian god ; but
today the Christian god forsook me ; and Mars overcame
me and took back his own. The Christian god is not yet.
He will come when Mars and I are dust ; but meanwhile
I must serve the gods that are, not the God that will be.
Until then I accept service in the Guard, Caesar.

THE EMPEROR. Very wisely said. All really sensible men
agree that the prudent course is to be neither bigoted in
our attachment to the old nor rash and unpractical in
keeping an open mind for the new, but to make the best
of both dispensations.

THE CAPTAIN. What do you say, Lavinia? Will you too
be prudent ?

LAVINIA \on the stairs] No : I'll strive for the coming of
the God who is not yet.

THE CAPTAIN. May I come and argue with you occasion-
ally?

LAVINIA. Yes, handsome Captain : you may. [He kisses her
hand\

THE EMPEROR. And now, my friends, though I do not, as
you see, fear this lion, yet the strain of his presence is con-
siderable; for none of us can feel quite sure what he will
do next.

THE MENAGERIE KEEPER. Caesar : give us this Greek sor-
cerer to be a slave in the menagerie. He has a way with
the beasts.

ANDROCLES [dtstresscd] Not if they are in cages. They
should not be kept in cages. They must be all let out.

THE EMPEROR. I givc this sorccrcr to be a slave to the
first man who lays hands on him. [The menagerie keepers
and the gladiators rush for Androcles. The lion starts up and
faces them. They surge hack]. You see how magnanimous

±6 Androcles and the Lion Act II

we Romans are, Androcles. We suffer you to go in
peace.

ANDROCLES. I thank your worship. I thank you all, ladies
and gentlemen. Come, Tommy. Whilst we stand together,
no cage for you : no slavery for me. [He goes out with the
lion, everybody crowding away to give him as wide a berth as
possible\

* -* -i^ * * *

In this play I have represented one of the Roman per-
secutions of the early Christians, not as the conflict of a
false theology with a true, but as what all such persecutions
essentially are: an attempt to suppress a propaganda that
seemed to threaten the interests involved in the established
law and order, organized and maintained in the name of
religion and justice by politicians who are pure oppor-
tunist Have-and-Holders. People who are shewn by their
inner light the possibility of a better world based on the
demand of the spirit for a nobler and more abundant life,
not for themselves at the expense of others, but for every-
body, are naturally dreaded and therefore hated by the
Have-and-Holders, who keep always in reserve two sure
weapons against them. The first is a persecution effected
by the provocation, organization, and arming of that herd
instinct which makes men abhor all departures from
custom, and, by the most cruel punishments and the
wildest calumnies, force eccentric people to behave and
profess exactly as other people do. The second is by
leading the herd to war, which immediately and infallibly
makes them forget everything, even their most cherished
and hardwon public liberties and private interests, in the
irresistible surge of their pugnacity and the tense pre-
occupation of their terror.

There is no reason to believe that there was anything
more in the Roman persecutions than this. The attitude
of the Roman Emperor and the officers of his staff towards
the opinions at issue were much the same as those of a

Androcles and the Lion 47

modern British Home Secretary towards members of the
lower middle classes when some pious policeman charges
them with Bad Taste, technically called blasphemy : Bad
Taste being a violation of Good Taste, which in such
matters practically means Hypocrisy. The Home Secretary
and the judges who try the case are usually far more scepti-
cal and blasphemous than the poor men whom they per-
secute ; and their professions of horror at the blunt utter-
ance of their own opinions are revolting to those behind
the scenes who have any genuine religious sensibility; but
the thing is done because the governing classes, provided
only the law against blasphemy is not applied to them-
selves, strongly approve of such persecution because it en-
ables them to represent their own privileges as part of the
religion of the country.

Therefore my martyrs are the martyrs of all time, and
my persecutors the persecutors of all time. My Emperor,
who has no sense of the value of common people's lives,
and amuses himself with killing as carelessly as with sparing,
is the sort of monster you can make of any silly-clever
gentleman by idolizing him. We are still so easily imposed
on by such idols that one of the leading pastors of the Free
Churches in London denounced my play on the ground that
my persecuting Emperor is a very fine fellow, and the per-
secuted Christians ridiculous. From which I conclude that
a popular pulpit may be as perilous to a man's soul as an
imperial throne.

All my articulate Christians, the reader will notice, have
different enthusiasms, which they accept as the same re-
ligion only because it involves them in a common opposi-
tion to the official religion and consequently in a common
doom. Androcles is a humanitarian naturalist, whose views
surprise everybody. Lavinia, a clever and fearless free-
thinker, shocks the Pauline Ferrovius, who is comparatively
stupid and conscience ridden. Spintho, the blackguardly
debauchee, is presented as one of the typical Christians of
that period on the authority of St Augustine, who seems

48 Androcles and the Lion

to have come to the conclusion at one period of his de-
velopment that most Christians were what we call wrong
uns. No doubt he was to some extent right: I have had
occasion often to point out that revolutionary movements
attract those who are not good enough for established
institutions as well as those who are too good for them.

But the most striking aspect of the play at this moment
is the terrible topicality given it by the war. We were at
peace when I pointed out, by the mouth of Ferrovius, the
path of an honest man who finds out, when the trumpet
sounds, that he cannot follow Jesus. Many years earlier,
in The Devil's Disciple, I touched the same theme even
more definitely, and shewed the minister throwing off his
black coat for ever when he discovered, amid the thunder
of the captains and the shouting, that he was a born fighter.
Great numbers of our clergy have found themselves of late
in the position of Ferrovius and Anthony Anderson. They
have discovered that they hate not only their enemies but
everyone who does not share their hatred, and that they
want to fight and to force other people to fight. They
have turned their churches into recruiting stations and their
vestries into munition workshops. But it has never occurred
to them to take off their black coats and say quite simply,
" I find in the hour of trial that the Sermon on the Mount
is tosh, and that I am not a Christian. I apologize for all
the unpatriotic nonsense I have been preaching all these
years. Have the goodness to give me a revolver and a com-
mission in a regiment which has for its chaplain a priest of
the god Mars : my God." Not a bit of it. They have stuck
to their livings and served Mars in the name of Christ, to
the scandal of all religious mankind. When the Archbishop
of York behaved like a gentleman and the Head Master of
Eton preached a Christian sermon, and were reviled by
the rabble, the Martian parsons encouraged the rabble.
For this they made no apologies or excuses, good or bad.
They simply indulged their passions, just as they had
always indulged their class prejudices and commercial

Androcles and the Lion 49

interests, without troubling themselves for a moment as
to whether they were Christians or not. They did not
protest even when a body calling itself the Anti-German
League (not having noticed, apparently, that it had been
anticipated by the British Empire, the French Republic,
and the Kingdoms of Italy, Japan, and Serbia) actually suc-
ceeded in closing a church at Forest Hill in which God
was worshipped in the German language. One would have
supposed that this grotesque outrage on the commonest
decencies of religion would have provoked a remonstrance
from even the worldliest bench of bishops. But no : apparently
it seemed to the bishops as natural that the House of God
should be looted when He allowed German to be spoken
in it as that a baker's shop with a German name over the
door should be pillaged. Their verdict was, in effect,
"Serve God right, for creating the Germans!" The in-
cident would have been impossible in a country where the
Church was as powerful as the Church of England, had it
had at the same time a spark of catholic as distinguished
from tribal religion in it. As it is, the thing occurred; and
as far as I have observed, the only people who gasped were
the Freethinkers.

Thus we see that even among men who make a profes-
sion of religion the great majority are as Martian as the
majority of their congregations. The average clergyman is
an official who makes his living by christening babies, marry-
ing adults, conducting a ritual, and making the best he can
(when he has any conscience about it) of a certain routine
of school superintendence, district visiting, and organiza-
tion of almsgiving, which does not necessarily touch Christi-
anity at any point except the point of the tongue. The
exceptional or religious clergyman may be an ardent
Pauline Salvationist, in which case his more cultivated
parishioners dislike him, and say that he ought to have
joined the Methodists. Or he may be an artist expressing
religious emotion without intellectual definition by means
of poetry, music, vestments, and architecture, also pro-

E

50 Androcles and the Lion

ducing religious ecstasy by physical expedients, such as fasts
and vigils, in which case he is denounced as a Ritualist.
Or he may be either a Unitarian Deist like Voltaire or Tom
Paine, or the more modern sort of Anglican Theosophist to
whom the Holy Ghost is the Elan Vital of Bergson, and the
Father and Son are an expression of the fact that our functions
and aspectsare manifold, and that we are all sonsand all either
potential or actual parents, in which case he is strongly sus-
pected by the straiter Salvationists of being little better than
anAtheist. All thesevarieties, yousee, excite remark. They
may be very popular with their congregations ; but they are
regarded by the average man as the freaks of the Church.
The Church, like the society of which it is an organ, is
balanced and steadied by the great central Philistine mass
above whom theology looms as a highly spoken of and
doubtless most important thing, like Greek Tragedy, or
classical music, or the higher mathematics, but who are
very glad when church is over and they can go home to
lunch or dinner, having in fact, for all practical purposes,
no reasoned convictions at all, and being equally ready to
persecute a poor Freethinker for saying that St James was
not infallible, and to send one of the Peculiar People to
prison for being so very peculiar as to take St James
seriously.

In short, a Christian martyr was thrown to the lions not
because he was a Christian, but because he was a crank :
that is, an unusual sort of person. And multitudes of people,
quite as civilized and amiable as we, crowded to see the
lions eat him just as they now crowd the lion-house in the
Zoo at feeding-time, not because they really cared two-
pence about Diana or Christ, or could have given you any
intelligent or correct account of the things Diana and Christ
stood against one another for, but simply because they
wanted to see a curious and exciting spectacle. You, dear
reader, have probably run to see a fire ; and if somebody
came in now and told you that a lion was chasing a man
down the street you would rush to the window. And if

Androcles and the Lion 51

anyone were to say that you were as cruel as the people
who let the lion loose on the man, you would be justly
indignant. Now that we may no longer see a man hanged,
we assemble outside the jail to see the black flag run up.
That is our duller method of enjoying ourselves in the old
Roman spirit. And if the Government decided to throw
persons of unpopular or eccentric views to the lions in the
Albert Hall or the Earl's Court stadium tomorrow, can you
doubt that all the seats would be crarnmed, mostly by
people who could not give you the most superficial account
of the views in question. Much less unlikely things have
happened. It is true that if such a revival does take place
soon, the martyrs will not be members of heretical religious
sects : they will be Peculiars, Anti-Vivisectionists, Flat-Earth
men, scoffers at the laboratories, or infidels who refuse to
kneel down when a procession of doctors goes by. But the
lions will hurt them just as much, and the spectators will
enjoy themselves just as much, as the Roman lions and
spectators used to do.

It was currently reported in the Berlin newspapers that
when Androcles was first performed in Berlin, the Crown
Prince rose and left the house, unable to endure the (I
hope) very clear and fair exposition of autocratic Im-
perialism given by the Roman captain to his Christian
prisoners. No English Imperialist was intelligent and
earnest enough to do the same in London. If the report
is correct, I confirm the logic of the Crown Prince, and am
glad to find myself so well understood. But I can assure
him that the Empire which served for my model when I
wrote Androcles was, as he is now finding to his cost,
much nearer my home than the German one.

OVERRULED
XXIV

1912

53

PREFACE TO OVERRULED.

The Alleviations of Monogamy.

This piece is not an argument for or against polygamy.
It is a clinical study of how the thing actually occurs
among quite ordinary people, innocent of all unconven-
tional views concerning it. The enormous majority of cases
in real life are those of people in that position. Those who
deliberately and conscientiously profess what are oddly
called advanced views by those others who believe them to
be retrograde, are often, and indeed mostly, the last people
in the world to engage in unconventional adventures of any
kind, not only because they have neither time nor disposi-
tion for them, but because the friction set up between the
individual and the community by the expression of unusual
views of any sort is quite enough hindrance to the heretic
without being complicated by personal scandals. Thus the
theoretic libertine is usually a person of blameless family
life, whilst the practical libertine is mercilessly severe on
all other libertines, and excessively conventional in pro-
fessions of social principle.

What is more, these professions are not hypocritical :
they are for the most part quite sincere. The common
libertine, like the drunkard, succumbs to a temptation
which he does not defend, and against which he warns
others with an earnestness proportionate to the intensity of
his own remorse. He (or she) may be a liar and a humbug,

55

56 Preface to Overruled

pretending to be better than the detected libertines, and
clamoring for their condign punishment ; but this is mere
self-defence. No reasonable person expects the burglar to
confess his pursuits, or to refrain from joining in the cry
of Stop Thief when the police get on the track of another
burglar. If society chooses to penalize candor, it has itself
to thank if its attack is countered by falsehood. The
clamorous virtue of the libertine is therefore no more hypo-
critical than the plea of Not Guilty which is allowed to
every criminal. But one result is that the theorists who
write most sincerely and favorably about polygamy know
least about it ; and the practitioners who know most about
it keep their knowledge very jealously to themselves. Which
is hardly fair to the practice.

Inaccessibility of the Facts.

Also, it is impossible to estimate its prevalence. A
practice to which nobody confesses may be both universal
and unsuspected, just as a virtue which everybody is
expected, under heavy penalties, to claim, may have no
existence. It is often assumed — indeed it is the official
assumption of the Churches and the divorce courts — that a
gentleman and a lady cannot be alone together innocently.
And that is manifest blazing nonsense, though many women
have been stoned to death in the east, and divorced in the
west, on the strength of it. On the other hand, the inno-
cent and conventional people who regard gallant adventures
as crimes of so horrible a nature that only the most depraved
and desperate characters engage in them or would listen to
advances in that direction without raising an alarm with
the noisiest indignation, are clearly examples of the fact
that most sections of society do not know how the other
sections live. Industry is the most effective check on gal-
lantry. Women may, as Napoleon said, be the occupatioa
of the idle man just as men are the preoccupation of the
idle woman ; but the mass of mankind is too busy and too

Preface to Overruled ^'j

poor for the long and expensive sieges which the professed
libertine lays to virtue. Still, wherever there is idleness
or even a reasonable supply of elegant leisure there is a
good deal of coquetry and philandering. It is so much
pleasanter to dance on the edge of a precipice than to go
over it that leisured society is full of people who spend a
great part of their lives in flirtation, and conceal nothing
but the humiliating secret that they have never gone any
further. For there is no pleasing people in the matter oi
reputation in this department : every insult is a flattery :
every testimonial is a disparagement : Joseph is despised and
promoted, Potiphar's wife admired and condemned : in
short, you are never on solid ground until you get away
from the subject altogether. There is a continual and irre-
concilable conflict between the natural and conventional
sides of the case, between spontaneous human relations
between independent men and women on the one hand
and the property relation between husband and wife on the
other, not to mention the confusion under the common
name of love of a generous natural attraction and interest
with the murderous jealousy that fastens on and clings to
its mate (especially a hated mate) as a tiger fastens on a
carcase. And the confusion is natural ; for these extremes
are extremes of the same passion ; and most cases lie some-
where on the scale between them, and are so complicated
by ordinary likes and dislikes, by incidental wounds to vanity
or gratifications of it, and by class feeling, that A will be
jealous of B and not of C, and will tolerate infidelities on
the part of D whilst being furiously angry when they arc
committed by E.

The Convention of Jealousy.

That jealousy is independent of sex is shewn by its
intensity in children, and by the fact that very jealous
people are jealous of everybody without regard to relation-
ship or sex,and cannot bear to hear the person they "love"

58

Preface to Overruled

speak favorably of anyone under any circumstances (many
women, for instance, are much more jealous of their
husbands' mothers and sisters than of unrelated women
whom they suspect him of fancying) ; but it is seldom pos-
sible to disentangle the two passions in practice. Besides,
jealousy is an inculcated passion, forced by society on
people in whom it would not occur spontaneously. In
Brieux's Bourgeois aux Champs, the benevolent hero finds
himself detested by the neighboring peasants and farmers,
not because he preserves game, and sets mantraps for
poachers, and defends his legal rights over his land to the
extremest point of unsocial savagery, but because, being an
amiable and public -spirited person, he refuses to do all
this, and thereby offends and disparages the sense of
property in his neighbors. The same thing is true of matri-
monial jealousy: the man who does not at least pretend to
feel it, and behave as badly as if he really felt it, is despised
and insulted ; and many a man has shot or stabbed a friend
or been shot or stabbed by him in a duel, or disgraced himself
and ruined his own wife in a divorce scandal, against his
conscience, against his instinct, and to the destruction of
his home, solely because Society conspired to drive him to
keep its own lower morality in countenance in this miserable
and undignified manner.

Morality is confused in such matters. In an elegant pluto-
cracy, a jealous husband is regarded as a boor. Among the
tradesmen who supply that plutocracy with its meals, a
husband who is not jealous, and refrains from assailing his
rival with his fists, is regarded as a ridiculous, contemptible,
and cowardly cuckold. And the laboring class is divided
into the respectable section which takes the tradesman's
view, and the disreputable section which enjoys the license
of the plutocracy without its money: creeping below the law
as its exemplars prance above it ; cutting down all expenses
of respectability and even decency; and frankly accept-
ing squalor and disrepute as the price of anarchic self-
indulgence. The conflict between Malvolio and Sir Toby,

Preface to Overruled 59

between the marquis and the bourgeois, the cavalier and
the puritan, the ascetic and the voluptuary, goes on con-
tinually, and goes on not only between class and class and
individual and individual, but in the selfsame breast in a
series of reactions and revulsions in which the irresistible
becomes the unbearable, and the unbearable the irresistible,
until none of us can say what our characters really are in
this respect.

The Missing Data of a Scientific Natural
History of Marriage.

Of one thing I am persuaded : we shall never attain to
a reasonably healthy public opinion on sex questions until
we offer, as the data for that opinion, our actual conduct
and our real thoughts instead of a moral fiction which
we agree to call virtuous conduct, and which we then —
and here comes in the mischief — pretend is our conduct
and our thoughts. If the result were that we all believed
one another to be better than we really are, there would be
something to be said for it; but the actual result appears to
be a monstrous exaggeration of the power and continuity of
sexual passion. The whole world shares the fate of Lucrezia
Borgia, who, though she seems on investigation to have been
quite a suitable wife for a modern British Bishop, has been
invested by the popular historical imagination with all the
extravagances of a Messalina or a Cenci. Writers of belles
lettres who are rash enough to admit that their whole life
is not one constant preoccupation with adored members of
the opposite sex, and who even countenance La Rochefou-
cauld's remark that very few people would ever imagine
themselves in love if they had never read anything about
it, are gravely declared to be abnormal or physically defec-
tive by critics of crushing unadventurousness and domesti-
cation. French authors of saintly temperament are forced
to include in their retinue countesses of ardent complexion

6o Preface to Overruled

with whom they are supposed to live in sin. Sentimental
controversies on the subject are endless ; but they are use-
less, because nobody tells the truth. Rousseau did it by an
extraordinary effort, aided by a superhuman faculty for
human natural history; but the result was curiously discon-
certing because, though the facts were so conventionally
shocking that people felt that they ought to matter a great
deal, they actually mattered very little. And even at that
everybody pretends not to believe him.

Artificial Retribution.

The worst of that is that busybodies with perhaps rather
more than a normal taste for mischief are continually try-
ing to make negligible things matter as much in fact as
they do in convention by deliberately inflicting injuries
— sometimes atrocious injuries — on the parties concerned.
Few people have any knowledge of the savage punishments
that are legally inflicted for aberrations and absurdities to
which no sanely instructed community would call any atten-
tion. We create an artificial morality, and consequently an
artificial conscience, by manufacturing disastrous conse-
quences for events which, left to themselves, would do very
little harm (sometimes not any) and be forgotten in a few
days.

But the artificial morality is not therefore to be con-
demned offhand. In many cases it may save mischief
instead of making it : for example, though the hanging of
a murderer is the duplication of a murder, yet it may be
less murderous than leaving the matter to be settled by
blood feud or vendetta. As long as human nature insists
on revenge, the official organization and satisfaction of
revenge by the State may be also its minimization. The
mischief begins when the official revenge persists after the
passion it satisfies has died out of the race. Stoning a
woman to death in the east because she has ventured to
marry again after being deserted by her husband may be

Preface to Overruled 6i

more merciful than allowing her to be mobbed to death ;
but the official stoning or burning of an adulteress in the
west would be an atrocity, because few of us hate an
adulteress to the extent of desiring such a penalty, or of
being prepared to take the law into our own hands if it
were withheld. Now what applies to this extreme case
applies also in due degree to the other cases. Offences in
which sex is concerned are often needlessly magniiied by
penalties, ranging from various forms of social ostracism to
long sentences of penal servitude, which would be seen to
be monstrously disproportionate to the real feeling against
them if the removal of both the penalties and the taboo
on their discussion made it possible for us to ascertain their
real prevalence and estimation. Fortunately there is one
outlet for the truth. We are permitted to discuss in jest
what we may not discuss in earnest. A serious comedy
about sex is taboo : a farcical comedy is privileged.

The Favorite Subject of Farcical Comedy.

The little piece which follows this preface accordingly
takes the form of a farcical comedy, because it is a con-
tribution to the very extensive dramatic literature which
takes as its special department the gallantries of married
people. The stage has been preoccupied by such affairs
for centuries, not only in the jesting vein of Restoration
Comedy and Palais Royal farce, but in the more tragically
turned adulteries of the Parisian school which dominated
the stage until Ibsen put them out of countenance and rele-
gated them to their proper place as articles of commerce.
Their continued vogue in that department maintains the
tradition that adultery is the dramatic subject par excel-
lence, and indeed that a play that is not about adultery is
not a play at all. I was considered a heresiarch of the
most extravagant kind when I expressed my opinion, at
the outset of my career as a playwright, that adultery is
the dullest of themes on the stage, and that from Francesca

62 Preface to Overruled

and Paolo down to the latest guilty couple of the school of
Dumas^ls, the romantic adulterers have all been intolerable
bores.

The Pseudo Sex Play.

Later on, I had occasion to point out to the defenders
of sex as the proper theme of drama, that though they
were right in ranking sex as an intensely interesting sub-
ject, they were wrong in assuming that sex is an indis-
pensable motive in popular plays. The plays of Moliere
are, like the novels of the Victorian epoch or Don Quixote,
as nearly sexless as anything not absolutely inhuman can
be; and some of Shakespear's plays are sexually on a par
with the census : they contain women as well as men, and
that is all. This had to be admitted ; but it was still
assumed that the plays of the XIX century Parisian school
are, in contrast with the sexless masterpieces, saturated
with sex ; and this I strenuously denied. A play about
the convention that a man should fight a duel or come to
fisticuffs with his wife's lover if she has one, or the con-
vention that he should strangle her like Othello, or turn
her out of the house and never see her or allow her to see
her children again, or the convention that she should never
be spoken to again by any decent person and should finally
drown herself, or the convention that persons involved in
scenes of recrimination or confession by these conventions
should call each other certain abusive names and describe
their conduct as guilty and frail and so on : all these may
provide material for very elTective plays ; but such plays
are not dramatic studies of sex : one might as well say that
Romeo and Juliet is a dramatic study of pharmacy because
the catastrophe is brought about through an apothecary.
Duels are not sex ; divorce cases are not sex ; the Trade
Unionism of married women is not sex. Only the most
insignificant fraction of the gallantries of married people
produce any of the conventional results; and plays occu-
pied wholly with the conventional results are therefore

L

Preface to Overruled 63

utterly unsatisfying as sex plays, however interesting they
may be as plays of intrigue and plot puzzles.

The world is finding this out rapidly. The Sunday papers,
which in the days when they appealed almost exclusively
to the lower middle class were crammed with police
intelligence, and more especially with divorce and murder
cases, now lay no stress on them ; and police papers which
confined themselves entirely to such matters, and were once
eagerly read, have perished through the essential dulness of
their topics. And yet the interest in sex is stronger than
ever: in fact, the literature that has driven out the journalism
of the divorce courts is a literature occupied with sex to
an extent and with an intimacy and frankness that would
have seemed utterly impossible to Thackeray or Dickens
if they had been told that the change would complete itself
within fifty years of their own time.

Art and Morality.

It is ridiculous to say, as inconsiderate amateurs of the
arts do, that art has nothing to do with morality. What is
true is that the artist's business is not that of the police-
man; and that such factitious consequences and put-up
jobs as divorces and executions and the detective operations
that lead up to them are no essential part of life, though,
like poisons and buttered slides and red-hot pokers, they
provide material for plenty or thrilling or amusing stories
suited to people who are incapable of any interest in psy-
chology. But the fine artist must keep the policeman out
of his studies of sex and studies of crime. It is by clinging
nervously to the policeman that most of the pseudo sex
plays convince me that the writers have either never had
any serious personal experience of their ostensible subject,
or else have never conceived it possible that the stage dare
present the phenomena of sex as they appear in nature.

64

Preface to Overruled

The Limits of Stage Presentation.

But the stage presents much more shocking phenomena
than those of sex. There is, of course, a sense in which
you cannot present sex on the stage, just as you cannot
present murder. Macbeth must no more really kill Duncan
than he must himself be really slain by MacdufF. But the
feelings of a murderer can be expressed in a certain artistic
convention ; and a carefully prearranged sword exercise
can be gone through with sufficient pretence of earnest-
ness to be accepted by the willing imaginations of the
younger spectators as a desperate combat.

The tragedy of love has been presented on the stage in
the same way. In Tristan and Isolde, the curtain does
not, as in Romeo and Juliet, rise with the lark : the whole
night of love is played before the spectators. The lovers
do not discuss marriage in an elegantly sentimental way :
they utter the visions and feelings that come to lovers at
the supreme moments of their love, totally forgetting that
there are such things in the world as husbands and lawyers
and duelling codes and theories of sin and notions of pro-
priety and all the other irrelevancies which provide hack-
neyed and bloodless material for our so-called plays of
passion.

Pruderies of the French Stage.

To all stage presentations there are limits. If MacdufF
were to stab Macbeth, the spectacle would be intolerable;
and even the pretence which we allow on our stage is
ridiculously destructive to the illusion of the scene. Yet
pugilists and gladiators will actually fight and kill in public
without shame, even as a spectacle for money. But no sober
couple of lovers of any delicacy could endure to be watched.
We in England, accustomed to consider the French stage
much more licentious than the British, are always surprised

Preface to Overruled 65

and puzzled when we learn, as we may do any day if we
come within reach of such information, that French actors
are often scandalized by what they consider the indecency
of the English stage, and that French actresses who desire
a greater license in appealing to the sexual instincts than
the French stage allows them, learn English and estab-
lish themselves on the English stage. The German and
Russian stages are in the same relation to the French
and, perhaps more or less, all the Latin stages. The reason
is that, partly from a want of respect for the theatre,
partly from a sort of respect for art in general which moves
them to accord moral privileges to artists, partly from the
very objectionable tradition that the realm of art is Alsatia
and the contemplation of works of art a holiday from the
burden of virtue, partly because French prudery does not
attach itself to the same points of behavior as British prud-
ery, and has a different code of the mentionable and the
unmentionable, and for many other reasons, the French
tolerate plays which are never performed in England until
they have been spoiled by a process of bowdlerization ; yet
French taste is more fastidious than ours as to the exhibition
and treatment on the stage of the physical incidents of sex.
On the French stage a kiss is as obvious a convention as
the thrust under the arm by which Macduff runs Macbeth
through. It is even a purposely unconvincing convention :
the actors rather insisting that it shall be impossible for
any spectator to mistake a stage kiss for a real one. In
England, on the contrary, realism is carried to the point
at which nobody except the two performers can perceive
that the caress is not genuine. And here the English stage
is certainly in the right; for whatever question there arises
as to what incidents are proper for representation on the
stage or not, my experience as a playgoer leaves me in no
doubt that once it is decided to represent an incident, it
will be offensive, no matter whether it be a prayer or a
kiss, unless it is presented with a convincing appearance
of sincerity.

F

66 Preface to Overruled

Our Disillusive Scenery.

For example, the main objection to the use of illusive
scenery (in most modern plays scenery is not illusive :
everything visible is as real as in your drawingroom at home)
is that it is unconvincing ; whilst the imaginary scenery
with which the audience provides a platform or tribune
like the Elizabethan stage or the Greek stage used by
Sophocles, is quite convincing. In fact, the more scenery
you have the less illusion you produce. The wise play-
wright, when he cannot get absolute reality of presentation,
goes to the other extreme, and aims at atmosphere and
suggestion of mood rather than at direct simulative illusion.
The theatre, as I first knew it, was a place of wings and
flats which destroyed both atmosphere and illusion. This
was tolerated, and even intensely enjoyed, but not in the
least because nothing better was possible ; for all the devices
employed in the productions of Mr Granville Barker or
Max Reinhardt or the Moscow Art Theatre were equally
available for Colley Gibber and Garrick, except the in-
tensity of our artificial light. When Garrick played
Richard III in slashed trunk hose and plumes, it was not
because he believed that the Plantagenets dressed like that,
or because the costumiers could not have made him a XV
century dress as easily as a nondescript combination of the
state robes of George III with such scraps of older fashions
as seemed to playgoers for some reason to be romantic.
The charm of the theatre in those days was its makebelieve.
It has that charm still, not only for the amateurs, who are
happiest when they are most unnatural and impossible and
absurd, but for audiences as well. I have seen performances
of my own plays which were to me far wilder burlesques
than Sheridan's Critic or Buckingham's Rehearsal ; yet
they have produced sincere laughter and tears such as the
most finished metropolitan productions have failed to elicit.
Fielding was entirely right when he represented Partridge

Preface to Overruled 67

as enjoying intensely the performance of the king in Hamlet
because anybody could see that the king was an actor,
and resenting Garrick's Hamlet because it might have
been a real man. Yet we have only to look at the portraits
of Garrick to see that his performances would nowadays
seem almost as extravagantly stagey as his costumes. In
our day Calve's intensely real Carmen never pleased the
mob as much as the obvious fancy ball masquerading of
suburban young ladies in the same character.

Holding the Mirror up to Nature.

Theatrical art begins as the holding up to Nature of a
distorting mirror. In this phase it pleases people who are
childish enough to believe that they can see what they look
like and what they are when they look at a true mirror.
Naturally they think that a true mirror can teach them
nothing. Only by giving them back some monstrous image
can the mirror amuse them or terrify them. It is not until
they grow up to the point at which they learn that they
know very little about themselves, and that they do not
see themselves in a true mirror as other people see them, that
they become consumed with curiosity as to what they really
are like, and begin to demand that the stage shall be a
mirror of such accuracy and intensity of illumination that
they shall be able to get glimpses of their real selves in it,
and also learn a little how they appear to other people.

For audiences of this highly developed class, sex can no
longer be ignored or conventionalized or distorted by the
playwright who makes the mirror. The old sentimental
extravagances and the old grossnesses are of no further
use to him. Don Giovanni and Zerlina are not gross :
Tristan and Isolde are not extravagant or sentimental.
They say and do nothing that you cannot bear to hear
and see; and yet they give you, the one pair briefly and
slightly, and the other fully and deeply, what passes in the
minds of lovers. The love depicted may be that of a philo-

68 Preface to Overruled

sophic adventurer tempting an ignorant country girl, or of
a tragically serious poet entangled with a woman of noble
capacity in a passion which has become for them the
reality of the whole universe. No matter : the thing is
dramatized and dramatized directly, not talked about as
something that happened before the curtain rose, or that
will happen after it falls.

Farcical Comedy Shirking its Subject.

Now if all this can be done in the key of tragedy and philo-
sophic comedy, it can, I have always contended, be done in
the key of farcical comedy; and Overruledis a trifling experi-
ment in that manner. Conventional farcical comedies are
always finally tedious because the heart of them, the inevitable
conjugal infidelity, is always evaded. Even its consequences
are evaded. Mr Granville Barker has pointed out rightly that
if the third acts of our farcical comedies dared to describe the
consequences that would follow from the first and second
in real life, they would end as squalid tragedies; and in
my opinion they would be greatly improved thereby even
as entertainments; for I have never seen a three-act farci-
cal comedy without being bored and tired by the third act,
and observing that the rest of the audience were in the
same condition, though they were not vigilantly intro-
spective enough to find that out, and were apt to blame
one another, especially the husbands and wives, for their
crossness. But it is happily by no means true that conjugal
infidelities always produce tragic consequences, or that
they need produce even the unhappincss which they often
do produce. Besides, the more momentous the conse-
quences, the more interesting become the impulses and
imaginations and reasonings, if any, of the people who dis-
regard them. If I had an opportunity of conversing with
the ghost of an executed murderer, I have no doubt he
would begin to tell me eagerly about his trial, with the
names of the distinguished ladies and gentlemen who

Preface to Overruled 69

honored him with their presence on that occasion, and
then about his execution. All of which would bore me
exceedingly. I should say, "My dear sir: such manu-
factured ceremonies do not interest me in the least. I
know how a man is tried, and how he is hanged. I should
have had you killed in a much less disgusting, hypocritical,
and unfriendly manner if the matter had been in my hands.
What I want to know about is the murder. How did you
feel when you committed it? Why did you do it? What
did you say to yourself about it? If, like most murderers,
you had not been hanged, would you have committed other
murders ? Did you really dislike the victim, or did you
want his money, or did you murder a person whom you
did not dislike, and from whose death you had nothing to
gain, merely for the sake of murdering? If so, can you
describe the charm to me ? Does it come upon you periodic-
ally ; or is it chronic ? Has curiosity anything to do with
it?" I would ply him with all manner of questions to find
out what murder is really like ; and I should not be satis-
fied until I had realized that I, too, might commit a murder,
or else that there is some specific quality present in a mur-
derer and lacking in me. And, if so, what that quality is.

In just the same way, I want the unfaithful husband or
the unfaithful wife in a farcical comedy not to bother me
with their divorce cases or the stratagems they employ to
avoid a divorce case, but to tell me how and why married
couples are unfaithful, I dont want to hear the lies they
tell one another to conceal what they have done, but the
truths they tell one another when they have to face what
they have done without concealment or excuse. No doubt
prudent and considerate people conceal such adventures,
when they can, from those who are most likely to be
wounded by them ; but it is not to be presumed that, when
found out, they necessarily disgrace themselves by irritating
lies and transparent subterfuges.

My playlet, which I offer as a model to all future writers
of farcical comedy, may now, I hope, be read without

yo Preface to Overruled

shock. I may just add that Mr Sibthorpe Juno's view that
morality demands, not that we should behave morally (an
impossibility to our sinful nature) but that we shall not
attempt to defend our immoralities, is a standard view in
England, and was advanced in all seriousness by an earnest
and distinguished British moralist shortly after the first
performance of Overruled. My objection to that aspect of
the doctrine of original sin is that no necessary and inevitable
operation of human nature can reasonably be regarded as
sinful at all, and that a morality which assumes the contrary
is an absurd morality, and can be kept in countenance only by
hypocrisy. When people were ashamed of sanitary problems,
and refused to face them, leaving them to solve themselves
clandestinely in dirt and secrecy, the solution arrived at was
the Black Death. A similar policy as to sex problems has
solved itself by an even worse plague than the Black Death;
and the remedy for that is not salvarsan, but sound moral
hygiene, the first foundation of which is the discontinuance
of our habit of telling not only the comparatively harmless
lies that we know we ought not to tell, but the ruinous lies
that we foolishly think we ought to tell.

OVERRULED

A lady and gentleman are sitting together on a chesterfield
in a retired corner of the lounge of a seaside hotel. It is a sum-
mer night : the French window behind them stands open. The
terrace without overlooks a moonlit harbor. The lounge is dark.
The chesterfield, upholstered in silver grey, and the two figures
on it in evening dress, catch the light from an arc lamp some-
where; but the walls, covered with a dark green paper, are in
gloom. There are two stray chairs, one on each side. On the
gentleman's right, behind him up near the window, is an unused
fireplace. Opposite it on the lady's left is a door. The gentle-
man is on the lady's right.

The lady is very attractive, with a musical voice and soft
appealing manners. She is young: that is, one feels sure that
she is under thirty-five and over twenty-four. The gentleman
does not look much older. He is rather handsome, and has
ventured as far in the direction of poetic dandyism in the
arrangement of his hair as any man who is not a professional
artist can afford to in England. He is obviously very much in
love with the lady, and is, in fact, yielding to an irresistible
impulse to throw his arms round her.

THE LADY. Dont — oh doiit be horrid. Please, Mr Lunn
\she rises from the lounge and retreats behind it] I Promise me
you wont be horrid.

GREGORY LUNN. I'm not being horrid, Mrs Juno. I'm not
going to be horrid. I love you : thats all. I'm extra-
ordinarily happy.

MRS JUNO. You will really be good?
71

y2 Overruled

GREGORY. I'll be whatever you wish me to be. I tell you
I love you. I love loving you. I dont want to be tired and
sorry, as I should be if I were to be horrid. I dont want you
to be tired and sorry. Do come and sit down again.

MRS JUNO \comi7ig back to her seat] Youre sure you dont
want anything you oughtnt to?

GREGORY. Quite sure, I only want you [//'^ rrrwY/]. Dont
be alarmed : I 1 i k e wanting you. As long as I have a want,
I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

MRS JUNO. Yes; but the impulse to commit suicide is
sometimes irresistible.

GREGORY. Not with you.

MRS JUNO. What !

GREGORY. Oh, it sounds uncomplimentary; but it isnt
really. Do you know why half the couples who find them-
selves situated as we are now behave horridly?

MRS JUNO. Because they cant help it if they let things go
too far.

GREGORY. Not a bit of it. It's because they have nothing
else to do, and no other way of entertaining each other.
You dont know what it is to be alone with a woman who
has little beauty and less conversation. What is a man to
do? She cant talk interestingly; and if he talks that way
himself she doesnt understand him. He cant look at her :
if he does, he only finds out that she isnt beautiful. Before
the end of five minutes they arc both hideously bored.
Thercs only one thing that can save the situation ; and
thats what you call being horrid. With a beautiful, witty,
kind woman, thercs no time for such follies. It's so de-
lightful to look at her, to listen to her voice, to hear all
she has to say, that nothing else happens. That is why the
woman who is supposed to have a thousand lovers seldom
has one ; whilst the stupid, graceless animals of women have
dozens.

MRS JUNO. I wonder ! It's quite true that when one feels
in danger one talks like mad to stave it off, even when one
doesnt quite want to stave it off.

Overruled 73

GREGORY. One never does quite want to stave it off.
Danger is delicious. But-death isnt. We court the danger;
but the real delight is in escaping, after all.

MRS JUNO. I dont think we'll talk about it any more.
Danger is all very well when you do escape; but some-
times one doesnt. I tell you frankly I dont feel as safe as
you do — if you really do.

GREGORY. But surely you can do as you please without
injuring anyone, Mrs Juno. That is the whole secret of
your extraordinary charm for me.

MRS JUNO. I dont understand.

GREGORY. Well, I hardly know how to begin to explain.
But the root of the matter is that I am what people call a
good man.

MRS JUNO. I thought so until you began making love to
me.

GREGORY. But you kncw I loved you all along.

MRS JUNO, Yes, of course ; but I depended on you not to
tell me so ; because I thought you were good. Your blurt-
ing it out spoilt it. And it was wicked besides,

GREGORY. Not at all. You see, it's a great many years
since Ive been able to allow myself to fall in love. I
know lots of charming women ; but the worst of it is, thcyre
all married. Women dont become charming, to my taste,
until theyre fully developed; and by that time, if theyrc
really nice, theyre snapped up and married. And then,
because I am a good man, I have to place a limit to my regard
for them. I may be fortunate enough to gain friendship and
even very warm affection from them ; but my loyalty to their
husbands and their hearths and their happiness obliges me
to draw a line and not overstep it. Of course I value such
affectionate regard very highly indeed. I am surrounded
with women who are most dear to me. But every one of
them has a post sticking up, if I may put it that way, with
the inscription : Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. How
we all loathe that notice ! In every lovely garden, in every
dell full of primroses, on every fair hillside, we meet that

74 Overruled

confounded board; and there is always a gamekeeper round
the corner. But what is that to the horror of meeting it on
every beautiful woman, and knowing that there is a husband
round the corner? I have had this accursed board standing
between me and every dear and desirable woman until I
thought I had lost the power of letting myself fall really and
wholeheartedly in love.

MRS JUNO. Wasnt there a widow?

GREGORY. No. Widows are extraordinarily scarce in
modern society. Husbands live longer than they used to ;
and even when they do die, their widows have a string of
names down for their next.

MRS JUNO. Well, what about the young girls ?

GREGORY. Oh, who carcs for young girls ? Theyre un-
sympathetic. Theyre beginners. They dont attract me.
I'm afraid of them.

MRS JUNO. Thats the correct thing to say to a woman of
my age. But it doesnt explain why you seem to have put
your scruples in your pocket when you met me.

GREGORY. Surely thats quite clear. I —

MRS JUNO. No : please dont explain. I dont want to
know. I take your word for it. Besides, it doesnt matter
now. Our voyage is over ; and to-morrow I start for the
north to my poor father's place.

GREGORY [surprise^/] Your poor father ! I thought he was
alive.

MRS JUNO. So he is. What made you think he wasnt?

GREGORY. You Said your poor father.

MRS JUNO. Oh, thats a trick of mine. Rather a silly
trick, I suppose ; but thcrcs something pathetic to me
about men : I find myself calling them poor So-and-So
when theres nothing whatever the matter with them.

GREGORY [zv/jo has listened in growing alarm] But — I —
is? — wa — ? Oh Lord!

MRS JUNO. Whats the matter?

GREGORY. Nothing.

MRS JUNO. Nothing! [Rising anxious ly']'^or\icnst:yo\xrt\\\.

Overruled y^

GREGORY. No. It was Something about your late
husband —

MRS JUNO. My late husband! What do you mean?
[Clutching him, horror-strickeTi] Dont tell me he's dead.

GREGORY {rising, equally appalled^ Dont tell me he's alive.

MRS JUNO. Oh, dont frighten me like this. Of course
he's alive — unless youve heard anything.

GREGORY. The first day we met — on the boat — you spoke
to me of your poor dear husband.

MRS JUNO {releasing him, quite reassured^ Is that all ?

GREGORY. Well, afterwards you called him poor Tops.
Always poor Tops, or poor dear Tops. What could I
think ?

MRS JUNO {sitting down again] I wish you hadnt given me
such a shock about him ; for I havnt been treating him at
all well. Neither have you,

GREGORY {relapsing into his seat, overwhelmed] And you
mean to tell me youre not a widow !

MRS JUNO, Gracious, no! I'm not in black.

GREGORY, Then I have been behaving like a blackguard !
I have broken my promise to my mother, I shall never
have an easy conscience again.

MRS JUNO. I'm sorry. I thought you knew.

GREGORY. You thought I was a libertine?

MRS JUNO, No ; of course I shouldnt have spoken to
you if I had thought that, I thought you liked me, but
that you knew, and would be good.

GREGORY {stretching his hands towards her breast] I thought
the burden of being good had fallen from my soul at last.
I saw nothing there but a bosom to rest on : the bosom
of a lovely woman of whom I could dream without guilt.
What do I see now ?

MRS JUNO. Just what you saw before.

GREGORY {despairingly] No, no.

MRS JUNO. What else?

GREGORY. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted : Trespassers
Will Be Prosecuted.

76 Overruled

MRS JUNO. They wont if they hold their tongues. Dont
be such a coward. My husband wont eat you.

GREGORY. I'm not afraid of your husband. I'm afraid of
my conscience.

MRS JUNO \_losing patience] Well ! I dont consider myself
at all a badly behaved woman ; for nothing has passed
between us that was not perfectly nice and friendly; but
really! to hear a grown-up man talking about promises to
his mother! —

GREGORY \interrupting /:er] Yes, yes : I know all about
that. It's not romantic: it's not Don Juan: it's not
advanced ; but we feel it all the same. It's far deeper in
our blood and bones than all the romantic stuff. My
father got into a scandal once : that was why my mother
made me promise never to make love to a married woman.
And now Ive done it I cant feel honest. Dont pretend
to despise me or laugh at me. You feel it too. You said
just now that your own conscience was uneasy when you
thought of your husband. What must it be when you
think of my wife ?

MRS JUNO [rising ag/^ast] Your wife ! ! ! You dont dare
sit there and tell me coolly that youre a married man !

GREGORY. I never led you to believe I was unmarried.

MRS JUNO. Oh! You never gave me the faintest hint
that you had a wife.

GREGORY. I did indeed. I discussed things with you
that only married people really understand.

MRS JUNO. Oh ! !

GREGORY. I thought it the most delicate way of letting
you know.

MRS JUNO. Well, you are a daisy, I must say. I suppose
thats vulgar ; but really ! really ! ! You and your goodness !
However, now weve found one another out theres only
one thing to be done. Will you please go.

GREGORY [rising slowly] I ought to go.

MRS JUNO. Well, go.

GREGORY. Yes. Er — [/f^ tries to go] I — I somehow cant.

Overruled 77

[He sits down again helplessly'] My conscience is active : my
will is paralyzed. This is really dreadful. Would you
mind ringing the bell and asking them to throw me out ?
You ought to, you know.

MRS JUNO. What ! make a scandal in the face of the
whole hotel ! Certainly not. Dont be a fool.

GREGORY. Yes ; but I cant go.

MRS JUNO. Then I can. Goodbye.

GREGORY [clinging to her hand] Can you really ?

MRS JUNO. Of course I — [she wavers] Oh dear! [They
contemplate one another helplessly]. I cant. [She sinks on the
lounge, hand in hand with him],

GREGORY. For hcavcn's sake pull yourself together. It's
a question of self-control.

MRS jUN'o [dragging her hand away and retreating to the
end of the chesterfield] No : it's a question of distance. Self-
control is all very well two or three yards off, or on a ship,
with everybody looking on. Dont come any nearer.

GREGORY. This is a ghastly business. I want to go awav ;
and I cant.

MRS JUNO. I think you ought to go [he makes an effort ;
and she adds quickh] but if you try to I shall grab you
round the neck and disgrace myself. I implore you to sit
still and be nice.

GREGORY. I implore you to run away. I believe I can
trust myself to let you go for your own sake. But it will
break my heart.

MRS JUNO. I dont want to break your heart. I cant bear
to think of your sitting here alone. I cant bear to think of
sitting alone myself somewhere else. Its so senseless — so
ridiculous — when we might be so happy. I dont want to
be wicked, or coarse. But I like you very much ; and I do
want to be affectionate and human.

GREGORY. I ought to draw a line.

MRS JUNO. So you shall, dear. Tell me : do you really
like me ? I dont mean love me : you might love the house-
maid—

78

Overruled

GREGORY \yehementlsi'\ No !

MRS JUNO. Oh yes you might; and what does that matter,
anyhow? Are you really fond of me? Are we friends —
comrades? Would you be sorry if I died?

GREGORY \jhrinking\ Oh dont.

MRS JUNO. Or was it the usual aimless man's lark : a mere
shipboard flirtation?

GREGORY. Oh no, no : nothing half so bad, so vulgar,
so wrong. I assure you I only meant to be agreeable. It
grew on me before I noticed it.

MRS JUNO. And you were glad to let it grow?

GREGORY. I let it grow because the board was not up.

MRS JUNO. Bother the board! I am just as fond of Sib-
thorpe as —

GREGORY. Sibthorpe !

MRS JUNO. Sibthorpe is my husband's Christian name. I
oughtnt to call him Tops to you now.

GREGORY \_chuckring\ It sounded like something to drink.
But I have no right to laugh at him. My Christian name
is Gregory, which sounds like a powder.

MRS JUNO \chiUed\ That is so like a man ! I offer you
my heart's warmest friendliest feeling ; and you think of
nothing but a silly joke. A quip like that makes you
forget me.

GREGORY. Forget you ! Oh, if only I could !

MRS JUNO. If you could, would you?

GREGORY \_burftng bis shamed face in his hands'\ No : I'd die
first. Oh, I hate myself.

MRS JUNO. I glory in myself It's so jolly to be reckless.
Can a man be reckless, I wonder?

GREGORY \straightening himself desperatelf\ No. I'm not
reckless. I know what I'm doing : my conscience is awake.
Oh, where is the intoxication of love? the delirium? the
madness that makes a man think the world well lost for the
woman he adores? I dont think anything of the sort: I
see that it's not worth it : I know that it's wrong: I have
never in my life been cooler, more businesslike.

Overruled 79

MRS JUNO \opening her arms to him^^ But you cant resist me.

GREGORY. I must. lought. \Throwingkim5elfinto her arms\
Oh my darling, my treasure, we shall be sorry for this.

MRS JUNO. We can forgive ourselves. Could we forgive
ourselves if we let this moment slip ?

GREGORY. I protest to the last. I'm against this. I have
been pushed over a precipice. I'm innocent. This wild
joy, this exquisite tenderness, this ascent into heaven can
thrill me to the uttermost fibre of my heart \with a gesture
of ecstasy she hides her face on his shoulder'] ; but it cant subdue
my mind or corrupt my conscience, which still shouts to
the skies that I'm not a willing party to this outrageous con-
duct. I repudiate the bliss with which you are filling me.

MRS JUNO. Never mind your conscience. Tell me how
happy you are.

GREGORY. No : I recall you to your duty. But oh, I will
give you my life with both hands if you can tell me that you
feel for me one millionth part of what I feel for you now.

MRS JUNO. Oh yes, yes. Be satisfied with that. Ask for
no more. Let me go.

GREGORY. I cant. I have no will. Something stronger
than either of us is in command here. Nothing on earth
or in heaven can part us now. You know that, dont you ?

MRS JUNO. Oh, dont make me say it. Of course I know.
Nothing — not life nor death nor shame nor anything
can part us.

A MATTER-OF-FACT MALE VOICE IN THE CORRIDOR. All

right. This must be it.

The two recover with a violent start; release one another;
and spring back to opposite sides of the lounge.

GREGORY. That did it.

MRS JUNO \in a thrilling whisper] Sh-sh-sh ! That was my
husband's voice.

GREGORY. Impossible : it's only our guilty fancy.

A woman's VOICE. Thisis the way to the lounge. I know it.

GREGORY. Great Heaven ! we're both mad. Thats my
wifes voice.

8o Overruled

MRS JUNO. Ridiculous ! Oh, we're dreaming it all. We —
\the door opens; and Sibthorpe Juno appears in the roseate glow
of the corridor {which happens to be papered in pink) with Mrs
Lunn, like Tannhduser in the hill of Venus. He is a fussily
energetic little man., who gives himself an air of gallantry by
greasing the points of his moustaches and dressing very carefully.
She is a tall, imposing, handsome, languid woman, with flashing
dark eyes and long lashes. They make for the chesterfield, not
noticing the two palpitating figures blotted against the walls in
the gloom on either side. The figures fiit away noiselessly through
the window and disappear\

JUNO \ofiiciously'\ Ah : here we are. \^He leads the way to
the sofa']. Sit down : I'm sure youre tired. [She sit s\ Thats
right. [He sits beside her on her left\. Hullo ! [he rises] this
sofa's quite warm.

MRS LUNN [bored] Is it? I dont notice it. I expect the
sun's been on it.

JUNO. I felt it quite distinctly : I'm more thinly clad than
you. [He sits down again, and proceeds, with a sigh of satis-
faction] What a relief to get off the ship and have a private
room ! Thats the worst of a ship. Youre under observation
all the time.

MRS LUNN. But why not?

JUNO. Well, of course theres no reason : at least I sup-
pose not. But, you know, part of the romance of a journey
is that a man keeps imagining that something might happen ;
and he cant do that if there are a lot of people about and
it simply cant happen.

MRS LUNN. Mr Juno: romance is all very well on board
ship ; but when your foot touches the soil of England theres
an end of it.

JUNO. No : believe me, thats a foreigner's mistake : we
are the most romantic people in the world, we English.
Why, my very presence here is a romance.

MRS LUNN [faintly ironical] Indeed ?

JUNO. Yes. Youve guessed, ofcourse, that I'm a married man.

MRS LUNN. Oh, thats all right. I'm a married woman.

Overruled 8 1

JUNO. Thank Heaven for that ! To my English mind,
passion is not real passion without guilt. I am a red-blooded
man, Mrs Lunn : I cant help it. The tragedy of my life
is that I married, when quite young, a woman whom I
couldnt help, being very fond of. I longed for a guilty
passion — for the real thing — the wicked thing ; and yet I
couldnt care twopence for any other woman when my wife
was about. Year after year went by: 1 felt my youth slip-
ping away without ever having had a romance in mv life;
for marriage is all very well ; but it isnt romance. Theres
nothing wrong in it, you see.

MRS LUNN. Poor man ! How you must have suffered !

JUNO. No : that was what was so tame about it. I
wanted to suffer. You get so sick of being happily married.
It's always the happy marriages that break up. At last my
wife and I agreed that we ought to take a holiday.

MRS LUNN. Hadnt you holidays every year ?

JUNO. Oh, the seaside and so on ! Thats not what we
meant. We meant a holiday from one another.

MRS LUNN. How Very odd !

JUNO. She said it was an excellent idea ; that domestic
felicity was making us perfectly idiotic ; that she wanted
a holiday too. So we agreed to go round the world in opposite
directions. I started for Suez on the day she sailed for
New York.

MRS LUNN \_suddenly becoming attentive'] Thats precisely
what Gregory and I did. Now I wonder did he want a
holiday from me ! What he said was that he wanted the
delight of meeting me after a long absence.

JUNO. Could anything be more romantic than that?
Would anyone else than an Englishman have thought of
it ? I daresay my temperament seems tame to your boiling
southern blood —

MRS LUNN. My what !

JUNO. Your southern blood. Dont you remember how
you told me, that night in the saloon when I sang "Fare-
well and adieu to you dear Spanish ladies," that you were

82 Overruled

by birth a lady of Spain ? Your splendid Andalusian beauty
speaks for itself.

MRS LUNN. StufF! I was born in Gibraltar. My father
was Captain Jenkins. In the artillery.

JUNO [^ardentlyl It is climate and not race that determines
the temperament. The fiery sun of Spain blazed on your
cradle; and it rocked to the roar of British cannon.

MRS LUNN. What eloquence! It reminds me of my hus-
band when he was in love — before we were married. Are
you in love ?

JUNO. Yes; and with the same woman.

MRS LUNN. Well, of course, I didnt suppose you were in
love with two women.

JUNO. I dont think you quite understand. I meant that
I am in love with you.

MRS LUNN \relapsi7ig into deepest boredom'\ Oh, that ! Men
do fall in love with me. They all seem to think me a
creature with volcanic passions : I'm sure I dont know why ;
for all the volcanic women I know are plain little creatures
with sandy hair. I dont consider human volcanoes respect-
able. And I'm so tired of the subject ! Our house is always
full of women who are in love with my husband and men
who are in love with me. We encourage it because it's
pleasant to have company.

JUNO. And is your husband as insensible as yourself?

MRS LUNN. Oh, Gregory's not insensible : very far
from it; but I am the only woman in the world for
him.

JUNO. But you ? Are you really as insensible as you say
you are ?

MRS LUNN. I never said anything of the kind. I'm not
at all insensible by nature ; but (I dont know whether
youve noticed it) I am what people call rather a fine figure
of a woman.

JUNO \_pas5iondteIf\ Noticed it ! Oh, Mrs Lunn ! Have I
been able to notice anything else since we met?

MRS LUNN. There you go, like all the rest oi them ! I

Overruled 83

ask you, how do you expect a woman to keep up what you
call her sensibility when this sort of thing has happened
to her about three times a week ever since she was seven-
teen? It used to upset me and terrify me at first. Then I
got rather a taste for it. It came to a climax with Gregory :
that was why I married him. Then it became a mild lark,
hardly worth the trouble. After that I found it valuable
once or twice as a spinal tonic when I was run down; but
now it's an unmitigated bore. I dont mind your declaration :
I daresay it gives you a certain pleasure to make it. I quite
understand that you adore me; but (if you dont mind) I'd
rather you didnt keep on saying so.

JUNO. Is there then no hope for me?

MRS LUNN. Oh, yes. Gregory has an idea that married
women keep lists of the men theyll marry if they become
widows. I'll put your name down, if that will satisfy you.

JUNO, Is the list a long one ?

MRS LUNN. Do you mean the real list? Not the one I
shew to Gregory : there are hundreds of names on that ;
but the little private list that he'd better not see?

JUNO, Oh, will you really put me on that? Say you will.

MRS LUNN. Well, perhaps I will. [He kisses her handl.
Now dont begin abusing the privilege.

JUNO. May I call you by your christian name ?

MRS LUNN. No: it's too long. You cant go about calling
a woman Seraphita.

JUNO \ecstaticaUf\ Seraphita !

MRS LUNN. I used to be called Sally at home; but when
I married a man named Lunn, of course that became
ridiculous. Thats my one little pet joke. Call me Mrs
Lunn for short. And change the subject, or I shall go to
sleep,

JUNO. I cant change the subject. For me there is no
other subject. Why else have you put me on your list ?

MRS LUNN, Because youre a solicitor. Gregory's a solicitor.
I'm accustomed to my husband being a solicitor and telling
me things he oughtnt to tell anybody.

84 Overruled

JUNO [ruefully'] Is that all? Oh, I cant believe that the
voice of love has ever thoroughly avi^akened you.

MRS LUNN. No : it sends me to sleep. [Juno appeals against
this by an amorous demonstration']. It's no use, Mr Juno : I'm
hopelessly respectable : the Jenkinses always were. Dont
you realize that unless most women were like that, the world
couldnt go on as it does?

JUNO [darkly] You think it goes on respectably ; but I
can tell you as a solicitor —

MRS LUNN. Stuff! of coursc all the disreputable people
who get into trouble go to you, just as all the sick
people go to the doctors; but most people never go to
a solicitor.

JUNO [rising, with a growing sense of injury] Look here,
Mrs Lunn : do you think a man's heart is a potato? or a
turnip? or a ball of knitting wool? that you can throw it
away like this?

MRS LUNN. I dont throw away balls of knitting wool. A
man's heart seems to me much like a sponge : it sops up
dirty water as well as clean.

JUNO. I have never been treated like this in my life.
Here am I, a married man, with a most attractive wife : a
wife I adore, and who adores me, and has never as much as
looked at any other man since we were married. I come
and throw all this at your feet. I ! I, a solicitor! braving
the risk of your husband putting me into the divorce court
and making me a beggar and an outcast ! I do this for your
sake. And you go on as if I were making no sacrifice : as
if I had told you it's a fine evening, or asked you to have
a cup of tea. It's not human. It's not right. Love has
its rights as well as respectability [he sits down again, aloof
and sulky].

MRS LUNN. Nonsense! Here! heres a flower [she gives
him one]. Go and dream over it until you feel hungry.
Nothing brings people to their senses like hunger.

JUNO [contemplating the flower without rapture] What good's
this ?

Overruled 85

MRS LUNN \snatching it from him'] Oh ! you dont love me
a bit.

JUNO. Yes I do. Or at least I did. But I'm an English-
man ; and I think you ought to respect the conventions of
English life.

MRS JUNO. But I am respecting them; and youre not.

JUNO. Pardon me. I may be doing wrong ; but I'm
doing it in a proper and customary manner. You may be
doing right ; but youre doing it in an unusual and question-
able manner. I am not prepared to put up with that. I can
stand being badly treated : I'm no baby, and can take care
of myself with anybody. And of course I can stand being
well treated. But the one thing I cant stand is being un-
expectedly treated. It's outside my scheme of life. So
come now! youve got to behave naturally and straight-
forwardly with me. You can leave husband and child,
home, friends, and country, for my sake, and come with me
to some southern isle — or say South America — where we
can be all in all to one another. Or you can tell your
husband and let him jolly well punch my head if he can.
But I'm damned if I'm going to stand any eccentricity.
It's not respectable.

GREGORY [coming in from the terrace and advancing with
dignity to his wife's end of the chesterfield] Will you have the
goodness, sir, in addressing this lady, to keep your temper
and refrain from using profane language?

MRS LUNN [rising, delighted] Gregory! Darling [she enfolds
him in a copious embrace] !

JUNO [rising] You make love to another man to ray
face !

MRS LUNN. Why, he's my husband.

JUNO. That takes away the last rag of excuse for such
conduct. A nice world it would be if married people were
to carry on their endearments before everybody !

GREGORY. This is ridiculous. What the devil business is
it of yours what passes between my wife and myself? Youre
not her husband, are you ?

86 Overruled

JUNO. Not at present; but I'm on the list. I'm her
prospective husband : youre only her actual one. I'm the
anticipation : youre the disappointment.

MRS LUNN. Oh, my Gregory is not a disappointment.
\_FondIy'\ Are you, dear.?

GREGORY. You just Wait, my pet. I'll settle this chap
for you. \^He dise7igages himself from her ejnbrace, and faces
Juno. She sits down placidly^ You call me a disappointment,
do you ? Well, I suppose every husband's a disappointment.
What about yourself? Dont try to look like an unmarried
man. I happen to know the lady you disappointed. I
travelled in the same ship with her ; and —

JUNO. And you fell in love with her.

GREGORY [taken aback\ Who told you that?

JUNO. Aha ! you confess it. Well, if you want to
know, nobody told me. Everybody falls in love with my
wife.

GREGORY. And do you fall in love with everybody's wife ?

JUNO. Certainly not. Only with yours.

MRS LUNN. But whats the good of saying that, Mr Juno r
I'm married to him ; and theres an end of it,

JUNO. Not at all. You can get a divorce.

MRS LUNN. What for?

JUNO. For his misconduct with my wife.

GREGORY \_deeply indignant'] How dare you, sir, asperse the
character of that sweet lady ? a lady whom I have taken
under my protection.

JUNO. Protection !

MRS JUNO [returnifig hastily] Really you must be more
careful what you say about me, Mr Lunn.

JUNO. My precious ! [He embraces her]. Pardon this be-
trayal of feeling; but Ive not seen my wife for several
weeks; and she is very dear to me.

GREGORY. 1 call this cheek. Who is making love to his
own wife before people now, pray?

MRS LUNN. Wont you introduce me to your wife, Mr
Juno ?

Overruled 87

MRS JUNO. How do you do? [T/:ey shake hands; and Mrs
"Juno sits down beside Mrs Lutin, on her left\.

MRS LUNN. I'm so glad to find you do credit to Gregory's
taste. I'm naturally rather particular about the women he
falls in love with.

JUNO \sternly'\ This is no way to take your husband's
unfaithfulness. \To Lunn'\ You ought to teach your wife
better. Wheres her feelings? It's scandalous.

GREGORY. What about your own conduct, pray?

JUNO. I dont defend it; and theres an end of the matter.

GREGORY. Well, upon my soul ! What difference does
your not defending it make?

JUNO. A fundamental difference. To serious people I
may appear wicked. I dont defend myself: I am wicked,
though not bad at heart. To thoughtless people I may even
appear comic. Well, laugh at me : I have given myself
away. But Mrs Lunn seems to have no opinion at all about
me. She doesnt seem to know whether I'm wicked or
comic. She doesnt seem to care. She has no moral sense.
I say it's not right. I repeat, I have sinned; and I'm pre-
pared to suffer.

MRS JUNO. Have you really sinned. Tops ?

MRS LUNN [blandly'] I dont remember your sinning. I
have a shocking bad memory for trifles ; but I think I
should remember that — if you mean me.

JUNO [raging] Trifles! I have fallen in love with a
monster.

GREGORY. Dont you dare call my wife a monster.

MRS JUNO [rising quickly and coming between them]. Please
dont lose your temper, Mr Lunn : I wont have my Tops
bullied.

GREGORY. Well, then, let him not brag about sinning
with my wife. [He turns impulsively to his wife; makes her
rise; and takes her proudly on his arm]. What pretension has
he to any such honor?

JUNO. I sinned in intention. [Mrs Juno abandons him and
resumes her seat, chilled]. I'm as guilty as if I had actually

88 Overruled

sinned. And I insist on being treated as a sinner, and not
walked over as it I'd done nothing, by your wife or any
other man.

MRS LUNN. Tush ! [SSe sits down again contemptuously^

JUNO \_furious'] I wont be belittled.

MRS LUNN [to Mrs J uno~\ I hope youll come and stay with,
us now that you and Gregory are such friends, Mrs Juno.

JUNO. This insane magnanimity — .

MRS LUNN. Dont you think youve said enough, Mr Juno?
This is a matter for two women to settle. Wont you take
a stroll on the beach with my Gregory while we talk it
over. Gregory is a splendid listener.

JUNO. I dont think any good can come of a conversation
between Mr Lunn and myself. We can hardly be expected
to improve one another's morals. [He passes behind the
chesterfield to Mrs Lunrfs end; seizes a chair; deliberately pushes
it between Gregory and Mrs Lunn; and sits down with folded
arms, resolved not to budge\

GREGORY. Oh ! Indeed ! Oh, all right. If you come to
that — \he crosses to Mrs Juno; plants a chair by her side ; and
sits down with equal determination\

JUNO. Now we are both equally guilty.

GREGORY. Pardon me. I'm not guilty.

JUNO. In intention. Dont quibble. You were guilty in
intention, as I was.

GREGORY. No. I should rathcr describe myself as being
guilty in fact, but not in intention.

JUNO "1 rising and { What !

MRS JUNO \ exclaiming -| No, really —

MRS LUNN j simultaneously y Gregory !

GREGORY. Yes : I maintain that I am responsible for my
intentions only, and not for reflex actions over which I
have no control. [Mrs Juno sits down, ashamed\ I promised
my mother that I would never tell a He, and that I would
never make love to a married woman. I never have told a
lie—

MRS LUNN [remonstrating] Gregory ! [Zhe sits down again\

Overruled 89

GREGORY. I say never. On many occasions I have resorted
to prevarication; but on great occasions I have always told
the truth. I regard this as a great occasion ; and I wont be
intimidated into breaking my promise. I solemnly declare
that I did not know until this evening that Mrs Juno was
married. She will bear me out when I say that from that
moment my intentions were strictly and resolutely honor-
able ; though my conduct, which I could not control and
am therefore not responsible for, was disgraceful — or would
have been had this gentleman not walked in and begun
making love to my wife under my very nose.

JUNO \_flingi71g himself back into his chair\ Well, I like this !

MRS i.uNN. Really, darling, theres no use in the pot call-
ing the kettle black.

GREGORY. When you say darling, may I ask which of us
you are addressing?

MRS LUNN. I really dont know. I'm getting hopelessly
confused.

JUNO. Why dont you let my wife say something? I
dont think she ought to be thrust into the background
like this.

MRS LUNN. I'm sorry, I'm sure. Please excuse me, dear.

MRS JUNO \thoughtfully\ I dont know what to say. I must
think over it. I have always been rather severe on this sort
of thing; but when it came to the point I didnt behave
as I thought I should behave. I didnt intend to be wicked ;
but somehow or other, Nature, or whatever you choose to
call it, didnt take much notice of my intentions. \Gregory
instinctively seeks her hand and presses //]. And I really did
think, Tops, that I was the only woman in the world for you.

JUNO [^cheerfully'] Oh, thats all right, my precious. Mrs
Lunn thought she was the only woman in the world for him.

GREGORY [reflectively] So she is, in a sort of way.

JUNO [faring up] And so is my wife. Dont you set up to
be a better husband than I am ; for youre not. Ive owned
I'm wrong. You havnt.

MRS LUNN. Are you sorry, Gregory?

^o Overruled

GREGORY [perplexed'l Sorry?

MRS LUNN. Yes, sorry. I think it's time for you to say
youre sorry, and to make friends with Mr Juno before we
all dine together.

GREGORY. Seraphita : I promised my mother —

MRS JUNO [involuntarily'] Oh, bother your mother ! [^^-
covering herself] I beg your pardon.

GREGORY. A promise is a promise. I cant tell a deliberate
lie. I know I ought to be sorry ; but the flat fact is that
I'm not sorry. I find that in this business, somehow or other,
there is a disastrous separation between my moral principles
and my conduct.

JUNO. Theres nothing disastrous about it. It doesnt
matter about your conduct if your principles are all right.

GREGORY. Bosh ! It docsnt matter about your principles
if your conduct is all right.

JUNO. But your conduct isnt all right ; and my principles
are.

GREGORY. Whats the good of your principles being right
if they wont work ?

JUNO. They will work, sir, if you exercise self-sacrifice.

GREGORY. Oh yes: if, if, if. You know jolly well that
self-sacrifice doesnt work either when you really want a
thing. How much have you sacrificed yourself, pray.^

MRS LUNN. Oh, a great deal, Gregory. Dont be rude.
Mr Juno is a very nice man : he has been most attentive
to me on the voyage.

GREGORY. And Mrs Juno's a very nice woman. She
oughtnt to be ; but she is.

JUNO. Why oughtnt she to be a nice woman, pray?

GREGORY. I mean she oughtnt to be nice to me. And
you oughtnt to be nice to my wife. And your wife oughtnt
to like me. And my wife oughtnt to like you. And if they
do, they oughtnt to go on liking us. And I oughtnt to like
your wife; and you oughtnt to like mine; and if we do
we oughtnt to go on liking them. But we do, all of us.
We oughtnt; but we do.

Overruled 91

JUNO. But, my dear boy, if we admit we are in the
wrong wheres ttie harm of it? We're not perfect; but
as long as we keep the ideal before us —

GREGORY. How?

JUNO. By admitting we're wrong.

MRS LUNN [^springing up, out of patience, and pacing round
the lounge intolerantly] Well, really, I must have my dinner.
These two men, with their morality, and their promises
to their mothers, and their admissions that they were wrong,
and their sinning and suffering, and their going on at one
another as if it meant anything, or as if it mattered, are
getting on ray nerves. [Stooping over the back of the chester-
field to address Mrs Juno] If you will be so very good, my
dear, as to take my sentimental husband off my hands
occasionally, I shall be more than obliged to you : I'm
sure you can stand more male sentimentality than I can.
[Sweeping away to the fireplace] I, on my part, will do my
best to amuse your excellent husband when you find him
tiresome.

JUNO. I call this polyandry.

MRS LUNN. I wish you wouldnt call innocent things by
offensive names, Mr Juno. What do you call your own
conduct?

JUNO [rising] I tell you I have admitted —

IWhats the good of keeping on at
that?
Oh, not that again, please.
Tops : I'll scream if you say that
again.

JUNO. Oh, well, if you wont listen to me — ! [He sits
down again].

MRS JUNO. What is the position now exactly? [Mrs Lunn
shrugs her shoulders and gives up the conundrum. Gregory looks
at Juno. Juno turns away his head hufiily], I mean, what are
we going to do?

MRS LUNN. What would you advise, Mr Juno?
JUNO. I should advise you to divorce your husband.

92 Overruled

MRS LUNN. You Want me to drag your wife into court
and disgrace her?

JUNO. No : I forgot that. Excuse me ; but for the moment
I thought I was married to you.

GREGORY. I think we had better let bygones be bygones.
[To Mrs "Juno, very tenderly'] You will forgive me, wont
you? Why should you let a moment's forgetfulness em-
bitter all our future life?

MRS JUNO. But it's Mrs Lunn who has to forgive you.

GREGORY. Oh, dash it, I forgot. This is getting ridiculous.

MRS LUNN. I'm getting hungry.

MRS JUNO. Do you really mind, Mrs Lujin?

MRS LUNN. My dear Mrs Juno, Gregory is one of those
terribly uxorious men who ought to have ten wives. If
any really nice woman will take him off my hands for a
day or two occasionally, I shall be greatly obliged to her.

GREGORY. Seraphita : you cut me to the soul [he
iveeps].

MRS LUNN. Serve you right ! Youd think it quite proper
if it cut me to the soul.

MRS JUNO. Am I to take Sibthorpe off your hands too,
Mrs Lunn ?

JUNO [rising] Do you suppose I'll allow this?

MRS JUNO. Youve admitted that youvc done wrong,
Tops. Whats the use of your allowing or not allowing
after that?

JUNO. I do not admit that I have done wrong. I admit
that what I did was wrong.

GREGORY. Can you explain the distinction?

JUNO. It's quite plain to anyone but an imbecile. If
you tell me Ive done something wrong you insult me.
But if you say that something that I did is wrong you
simply raise a question of morals. I tell you flatly if you
say I did anything wrong you will have to fight me. In
fact I think we ought to fight anyhow. I dont particularly
want to; but I feci that England expects us to.

GREGORY. I wont fight. If you beat mc my wife would

Overruled 93

share my humiliation. If I beat you, she would sympathize
with you and loathe me for my brutality.

MRS LUNN. Not to mention that as we are human beings
and not reindeer or barndoor fowl, if two men presumed
to fight for us we couldnt decently ever speak to either
of them again.

GREGORY. Besides, neither of us could beat the other,
as we neither of us know how to fight. We should only
blacken each others eyes and make fools of ourselves.

JUNO. I dont admit that. Every Englishman can use his
fists.

GREGORY. Youre an Englishman. Can you use yours?

JUNO. I presume so : I never tried.

MRS JUNO. You never told me you couldnt fight. Tops.
I thought you were an accomplished boxer.

JUNO. My precious : I never gave you any ground for
such a belief.

MRS JUNO. You always talked as if it were a matter of
course. You spoke with the greatest contempt of men who
didnt kick other men downstairs.

JUNO. Well, I cant kick Mr Lunn downstairs. We're on
the ground floor.

MRS JUNO. You could throw him into the harbor.

GREGORY. Do you Want me to be thrown into the harbor?

MRS JUNO. No : I only want to shew Tops that he's
making a ghastly fool of himself.

GREGORY [rising and prowling disgustedly between the
chesterfield and the windows'] We're all making fools of
ourselves.

JUNO [following him] Well, if we're not to fight, I must
insist at least on your never speaking to my wife again.

GREGORY. Does my speaking to your wife do you any
harm?

JUNO. No. But it's the proper course to take. [Emphatic-
ally] We must behave with some sort of decency.

MRS LUNN. And are you never going to speak to me
again, Mr Juno?

94 Overruled

JUNO. I'm prepared to promise never to do so. I think
your husband has a right to demand that. Then if I speak
to you after, it will not be his fault. It will be a breach of
my promise ; and I shall not attempt to defend my conduct.

GREGORY \_facing kim\ I shall talk to your wife as often
as she'll let me.

MRS JUNO. I have no objection to your speaking to me,
Mr Lunn.

JUNO. Then I shall take steps.

GREGORY. What steps ?

JUNO. Steps. Measures. Proceedings. Such steps as may
seem advisable.

MRS LUNN \to Mrs J ujio] Can your husband afford a
scandal, Mrs Juno?

MRS JUNO. No.

MRS LUNN. Neither can mine.

GREGORY. Mrs Juno : I'm very sorry I let you in for all
this. I dont know how it is that we contrive to make
feelings like ours, which seems to me to be beautiful and
sacred feelings, and which lead to such interesting and ex-
citing adventures, end in vulgar squabbles and degrading
scenes.

JUNO. I decline to admit that my conduct has been
vulgar or degrading.

GREGORY. I promised —

JUNO. Look here, old chap : I dont say a word against
your mother; and I'm sorry she's dead; but really, you
know, most women are mothers; and they all die some
time or other; yet that doesnt make them infallible
authorities on morals, does it?

GREGORY. I was about to say so myself. Let me add
that if you do things merely because you think some
other fool expects you to do them, and he expects you
to do them because he thinks you expect him to expect
you to do them, it will end in everybody doing what
nobody wants to do, which is in my opinion a silly state
of things.

Overruled 95

JUNO. Lunn : I love your wife ; and thats all about it,

GREGORY. Juno: I love yours. What then?

JUNO. Clearly she must never see you again.

MRS JUNO. Why not?

JUNO. Why not ! My love : I'm surprised at you.

MRS JUNO. Am I to speak only to men who dislike me?

JUNO. Yes : I think that is, properly speaking, a married
woman's duty.

MRS JUNO. Then I wont do it : thats flat. I like to be
liked. I like to be loved. 1 want everyone round me to
love me. I dont want to meet or speak to anyone who
doesnt like me.

JUNO. But, my precious, this is the most horrible
immorality.

MRS LUNN. I dont intend to give up meeting you, Mr
Juno. You amuse me very much. I dont like being loved :
it bores me. But I do like to be amused.

JUNO. I hope we shall meet very often. But I hope
also we shall not defend our conduct.

MRS JUNO [rising] This is unendurable. Weve all been
flirting. Need we go on footling about it?

JUNO [Z'^^^/y] -'- <^ont know what you call footling —

MRS juKO [c»tfif2g /:im short'] You do. You re footling.
Mr Lunn is footling. Cant we admit that we're human
and have done with it?

JUNO. I have admitted it all along. I —

MRS JUNO [almost screaming] Then stop footling.

The di7iner gong sounds.

MRS LUNN [rising] Thank heaven ! Lets go into dinner.
Gregory : take in Mrs Juno.

GREGORY. But surcly I ought to take in our guest, and
not my own wife.

MRS LUNN. Well, Mrs Juno is not your wife, is she?

GREGORY. Oh, of coursc : I beg your pardon. I'm
hopelessly confused. [He offers his arm to Mrs Juno, rather
apprehensively ] .

MRS JUNO. You seem quite afraid of me [she takes his arm].

96 Overruled

GREGORY. I am. I simply adore you. \T/?ey go cut to-
gether; and as they pass through the door he turns and
says in a ringing voice to the other coupk'\ I have said
to Mrs Juno that I simply adore her. \_He takes her out
dejiantly\

MRS LUNN [calling after him] Yes, dear. Shes a darling.
\To Juno'] Now, Sibthorpe.

JUNO {giving her his arm gallantly] You have called me
Sibthorpe! Thank you. I think Lunn's conduct fully
justifies me in allowing you to do it.

MRS LUNN. Yes: I think you may let yourself go now.

JUNO. Seraphita : I worship you beyond expression.

MRS LUNN. Sibthorpe : you amuse me beyond descrip-
tion. Come. [T/iey go in to dinner together].

PYGMALION
XXV

1912

97

PREFACE TO PYGMALION.

A Professor of Phonetics.

As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface,
but a sequel, which I have supplied in its due place.

The English have no respect for their language, and
will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so
abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds
like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth
without making some other Englishman hate or despise
him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners :
English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The re-
former England needs today is an energetic phonetic en-
thusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of
a popular play. There have been heroes of that kind cry-
ing in the wilderness for many years past. When I became
interested in the subject towards the end of the eighteen-
seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J. Ellis
was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head always
covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would apologize
to public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and
Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom
it was impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young
man, lacked their sweetness of character: he was about as
conciliatory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel
Butler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think,
the best of them all at his job) would have entitled him
to high official recognition, and perhaps enabled him to

99

lOO Preface to Pygmalion

popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt for all
academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought
more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the days when
the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and Joseph
Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor
of a leading monthly review to commission an article from
Sweet on the imperial importance of his subject. When it
arrived, it contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack
on a professor of language and literature whose chair Sweet
regarded as proper to a phonetic expert only. The article,
being libellous, had to be returned as impossible ; and I
had to renounce my dream of dragging its author into the
limelight. When I met him afterwards, for the first time for
many years, I found to my astonishment that he, who had
been a quite tolerably presentable young man, had actually
managed by sheer scorn to alter his personal appearance
until he had become a sort of walking repudiation of Oxford
and all its traditions. It must have been largely in his own
despite that he was squeezed into something called a Reader-
ship of phonetics there. The future of phonetics rests prob-
ably with his pupils, who all swore by him ; but nothing
could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance
with the university to which he nevertheless clung by divine
right in an intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if
he has left any, include some satires that may be published
without too destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I
believe, not in the least an illnatured man : very much the
opposite, I should say ; but he would not sufi'er fools gladly.
Those who knew him will recognize in my third act the
allusion to the patent shorthand in which he used to write
postcards, and which may be acquired from a four and six-
penny manual published by the Clarendon Press. The post-
cards which Mrs Higgins describes are such as I have received
from Sweet. I would decipher a sound which a cockney
would represent by zerr, and a Frenchman by seu, and then
write demanding with some heat what on earth it meant.
Sweet, with boundless contempt for my stupidity, would

Preface to Pygmalion loi

reply that it not only meant but obviously was the word
Result, as no other word containing that sound, and capable
of making sense with the context, existed in any language
spoken on earth. That less expert mortals should require
fuller indications was beyond Sweet's patience. There-
fore, though the whole point of his "Current Shorthand"
is that it can express every sound in the language per-
fectly,- vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand
has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones
with which you write m, n, and u, 1, p, and q, scribbling
them at whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfor-
tunate determination to make this remarkable and quite
legible script serve also as a shorthand reduced it in his
own practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms. His
true objective was the provision of a full, accurate, legible
script for our noble but ill-dressed language ; but he was
led past that by his contempt for the popular Pitman
system of shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system. The
triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business organization:
there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn Pitman:
there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and tran-
scripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where
experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary pro-
ficiency. Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion.
He might as well have been the Sybil who tore up the
leaves of prophecy that nobody would attend to. The four
and sixpenny manual, mostly in his lithographed hand-
writing, that was never vulgarly advertized, may perhaps
some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon the
public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica;
but until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman.
I have bought three copies of it during my lifetime; and I
am informed by the publishers that its cloistered existence
is still a steady and healthy one. I actually learned the
system two several times ; and yet the shorthand in which
I am writing these lines is Pitman's. And the reason is,
that my secretary cannot transcribe Sweet, having been

I02 Preface to Pygmalion

perforce taught in the schools of" Pitman. Therefore, Sweet
railed at Pitman as vainly as Thersites railed at Ajax :
his raillery, however it may have eased his soul, gave no
popular vogue to Current Shorthand.

Pygmalion Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom
the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impos-
sible ; still, as will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in
the play. With Higgins's physique and temperament Sweet
might have set the Thames on fire. As it was, he impressed
himself professionally on Europe to an extent that made
his comparative personal obscurity, and the failure of
Oxford to do justice to his eminence, a puzzle to foreign
specialists in his subject. I do not blame Oxford, because
I think Oxford is quite right in demanding a certain social
amenity from its nurslings (heaven knows it is not exor-
bitant in its requirements !) ; for although I well know how
hard it is for a man of genius with a seriously underrated
subject to maintain serene and kindly relations with the
men who underrate it, and who keep all the best places for
less important subjects which they profess without originality
and sometimes without much capacity for them, still, if he
overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot expect
them to heap honors on him.

Of the later generations of phoneticians I know little.
Among them towers the Poet Laureate, to whom perhaps
Higgins may owe his Miltonic sympathies, though here
again I must disclaim all portraiture. But if the play makes
the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians,
and that they arc among the most important people in
England at present, it will serve its turn.

I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely
successful play all over Europe and North America as well
as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and
its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing
it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry
that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my con-
tention that art should never be anything else.

Preface to Pygmalion 103

Finally, and for the encouragement of people troubled
with accents that cut them off from all high employment,
I may add that the change wrought by Professor Higgins
in the flower-girl is neither impossible nor uncommon. The
modern concierge's daughter who fulfils her ambition by
playing the Queen of Spain in Ruy Bias at the Theatre
Franfais is only one of many thousands of men and women
who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a
new tongue. But the thing has to be done scientifically, or
the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first.
An honest and natural slum dialect is more tolerable than
the attempt of a phonetically untaught person to imitate
the vulgar dialect of the golf club; and I am sorry to say
that in spite of the efforts of our Academy of Dramatic Art,
there is still too much sham golfing English on our stage,
and too little of the noble English of Forbes Robertson.

ACT I

Covent Garden at 1 1 . i 5 p.m. Torrents of heavy summer
rain. Cab whistles blowing frantically in all directions. Pedes-
trians running for shelter into the market and under the portico
of St. PauPs Church, where there are already several people,
among them a lady and her daughter in evening dress. They are
all peering out gloomily at the rain, except one man with his back
turned to the rest, who seems wholly preoccupied with a note-
book in which he is writing busily.

The church clock strikes the first quarter.

THE DAUGHTER \in the Space between the central pillars, close
to the one on her left'] I'm getting chilled to the bone. What
can Freddy be doing all this time? Hes been gone twenty-
minutes.

THE MOTHER [on her daughter''s right'\ Not so long. But
he ought to have got us a cab by this.

A BYSTANDER \on the lady s right'\ He wont get no cab not
until half-past eleven, missus, when they come back after
dropping their theatre fares.

THE MOTHER. But wc must havc a cab. We cant stand
here until half-past eleven. It's too bad.

THE BYSTANDER. Well, it aint my fault, missus.

THE DAUGHTER. If Freddy had a bit of gumption, he would
have got one at the theatre door.

THE MOTHER. What could he have done, poor boy.?

THE DAUGHTER. Other people got cabs. Why couldnt he?
105

io6 Pygmalion Act I

Freddy rushes in out of the rain from the Southampton Street
side, and comes between them closing a dripping umbrella. He
is a \oung man of twenty, in evening dress, very wet round
the ankles.

THE DAUGHTER. Well, havnt you got a cab?

FREDDY. Theres not one to be had for love or money.

THE MOTHER. Oh, Freddy, there must be one. You cant
have tried.

THE DAUGHTER. It's too tircsomc. Do you expect us to
go and get one ourselves?

FREDDY. I tell you theyre all engaged. The rain was so
sudden : nobody was prepared ; and everybody had to take
a cab. Ive been to Charing Cross one way and nearly to
Ludgate Circus the other; and they were all engaged.

THE MOTHER. Did you try Trafalgar Square?

FREDDY. There wasnt one at Trafalgar Square.

THE DAUGHTER. Did you try?

FREDDY. I tried as far as Charing Cross Station. Did you
expect me to walk to Hammersmith ?

THE DAUGHTER. You havnt tried at all.

THE MOTHER. You really are very helpless, Freddy. Go
again ; and dont come back until you have found a cab.

FREDDY. I shall simply get soaked for nothing.

THE DAUGHTER. And what about us? Are we to stay here
all night in this draught, with next to nothing on. You
selfish pig —

FREDDY. Oh, very well : I'll go, I'll go. [He opens his um-
brella and dashes off Strandwards, but comes into collision with
a flower girl, who is hurrying in for shelter, knockitig her basket
out of her hands. A blinding flash of Ughtrmg, followed instantly
by a rattling peal of thunder, orchestrates the incident"] .

THE FLOWER GIRL. Nah thcn, Freddy : look wh' y' gowin,
deah.

FREDDY. Sorry [he rushes off\

THE FLOWER GIRL [picking Up her scattered flowers and re-
placing them in the basket'\ Theres menners Pyer! Te-oo
banches o voylets trod into the mad. [She sits down on

Act I Pygmalion 107

the plinth of the column^ sorting her flowers, on the ladfs right.
She is not at all an attractive person. She is perhaps eighteen,
perhaps twenty, hardly older. She wears a little sailor hat of
black straw that has long been exposed to the dust and soot of
London and has seldom if ever been brushed. Her hair needs
washing rather badly : its mousy color can hardly be natural.
She wears a shoddy black coat that reaches nearly to her knees
and is shaped to her waist. She has a brown skirt with a
coarse apron. Her boots are much the worse for wear. She is
no doubt as clean as she can afford to be; but compared to the
ladies she is very dirty. Her features are no worse than theirs ;
but their condition leaves something to be desired; and she needs
the services of a dentist^

THE MOTHER. How do you IcHow that my son's name is
Freddy, pray ?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Ow, ccz ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd
dan y' de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to
spawl a pore gel's flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin. Will
ye-00 py me f 'thero ? \_Here, with apologies, this desperate
attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must
be abandoned as unintelligible outside London\.

THE DAUGHTER. Do nothing of the sorr, mother. The
idea !

THE MOTHER. Please allow me, Clara. Have you any
pennies ?

THE DAUGHTER. No. Ive nothing smaller than six-
pence.

THE FLOWER GIRL [hopcfuily'] I Can gi\'e you change for a
tanner, kind lady.

THE MOTHER \_to Clara'] Give it to me. [Clara parts re-
luctantly]. Now \to the girl] This is for your flowers.

THE FLOWER oiRL. Thank you kindly, lady.

THE DAUGHTER. Make her give you the change. These
things are only a penny a bunch.

THE MOTHER. Do hold your tongue, Clara. [To the girl]
You can keep the change.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, thank you, lady.

io8 Pygmalion Act i

THE MOTHER. Now tcll mc how you know that young
gentleman's name.

THE FLOWER GIRL. I didnt.

THE MOTHER. I heard you call him by it. Dont try to
deceive me.

THE FLOWER GIRL \_protest'iTig] Whos trying to deceive you ?
I called him Freddy or Charlie same as you might yourself
if you was talking to a stranger and wished to be pleasant.
[5/^ sits down beside her basket\.

THE DAUGHTER. Sixpcncc thrown away ! Really, mamma,
you might have spared Freddy that. [5/^ retreats in disgust
behind the pillar\

An elderly gentleman of the amiable military type rushes into
shelter^ and closes a dripping umbrella. He is in the same plight
as Freddy, very wet about the ankles. He is in evening dress,
with a light overcoat. He takes the place left vacant by the
daughter'' s retirement.

THE GENTLEMAN. PhcW !

THE MOTHER \to the gcntkman'l Oh, sir, is there any sign
of its stopping ?

THE GENTLEMAN. I'm afraid not. It started worse than
ever about two minutes ago \he goes to the plinth beside the
flozucr girl; puts up his foot on it; and stoops to turn down his
trouser ends].

THE MOTHER. Oh dear! [She retires sadly and joins her
daughter],

THE FLOWER GIRL [taking advantage of the military gentle-
man's proximity to establish friendly relations with him] If
it's worse, it's a sign it's nearly over. So cheer up. Captain ;
and buy a flower cff a poor girl.

THE GENTLEMAN. I'm sorry. I havnt any change.

THE FLOWER GIRL. I cau give you change. Captain.

THE GENTLEMAN. For a Sovereign? Ive nothing less.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Gam ! Oh do buy a flower off me.
Captain. I can change half-a-crown. Take this for tup-
pence.

THE GENTLEMAN. Now dout bc troublcsomc : theresagood

Act I Pygmalion 109

girl. [Trying his pockets] I really havnt any change — Stop :
heres three hapence, if thats any use to you [he retreats to
the other pillar],

THE FLOWER GIRL [disappointed, but thinking three halfpence
better than nothing] Thank you, sir.

THE BYSTANDER [to the girl] You be careful : give him a
flower for it. Theres a bloke here behind taking down every
blessed word youre saying. [All turn to the man who is taking
notes].

THE FLOWER GIRL [springing up terrified] I aint done nothing
wrong by speaking to the gentleman. Ive a right to sell
flowers if I keep ofi^ the kerb. [Hysterically] I'm a respect-
able girl : so help me, I never spoke to him except to ask
him to buy a flower ofi^ me. [General hubbub, mostly sympa-
thetic to the flower girl, but deprecatifig her excessive sensibility.
Cries o/"Dont start hoUerin. Whos hurting you ? Nobody's
going to touch you. Whats the good of fussing? Steady
on. Easy easy, etc., come from the elderly staid spectators, who
pat her comfortingly. Less patient ones bid her shut her head,
or ask her roughly what is wrong with her. A remoter group,
not knowing what the matter is, crowd in and increase the
noise with question and answer: Whats the row? Whatshe
do? Where is he? A tec taking her down. What! him?
Yes : him over there : Took money off the gentleman, etc.
The flower girl, distraught and mobbed, breaks through them to
the gentleman, crying wildly] Oh, sir, dont let him charge
me. You dunno what it means to me. Theyll take away
my character and drive me on the streets for speaking to
gentlemen. They —

THE NOTE TAKER [coming forward on her right, the rest crowd-
ing after him] There, there, there, there ! whos hurting you,
you silly girl? What do you take me for?

THE BYSTANDER. It's all right : hes a gentleman : look at
his boots. [Explaining to the note taker] She thought you
was a copper's nark, sir.

THE NOTE TAKER [with quick interest] Whats a copper's
nark ?

iio Pygmalion Act I

THE BYSTANDER \_i?jc!pt at defittitmi] It's a — well, it's a
copper's nark, as you might say. What else would you call
it ? A sort of informer.

THE FLOWER GIRL \_still hysterical'] I take my Bible oath I
never said a word —

THE NOTE TAKER \overbearing "but good- humored] Oh, shut
up, shut up. Do I look like a policeman ?

THE FLOWER GIRL \_farfrom reassured] Then what did you
take down my words for ? How do I know whether you
took me down right? You just shew me what youve wrote
about me. [The note taker opens his book and holds it steadily
under her nose, though the pressure of the mob trying to read it
over his shoulders tvculd upset a weaker man]. Whats that ?
That aint proper writing. I cant read that.

THE NOTE TAKER. I Can. [Reads, reproducing her pronuncia-
tion exactly] " Cheer ap, Keptin ; n' baw ya flahr orf a
pore gel."

THE FLOWER GIRL \much distressed^ It's because I called
him Captain. I meant no harm. \To the gentleman] Oh, sir,
dont let him lay a charge agen me for a word like that.
You—

THE GENTLEMAN. Charge! I make no charge. \To the
note taker] Really, sir, if you are a detective, you need
not begin protecting me against molestation by young
women until I ask you. Anybody could see that the girl
meant no harm.

THE BYSTANDERS GENERALLY [demonstrating against police
espionage] Course they could. What business is it of yours?
You mind your own affairs. He wants promotion, he does.
Taking down people's words ! Girl never said a word to him.
What harm if she did? Nice thing a girl cant shelter
from the rain without being insulted, etc., etc., etc. [Zhe is
conducted by the more sympathetic demonstrators back to her
plinth, where she resumes her seat and struggles with her
emotion].

THE BYSTANDER. He aint a tcc. Hes a blooming busybody:
thats what he is. I tell you, look at his boots.

Act I Pygmalion 1 1 1

THE NOTE TAKER \turning OTi Mm genially'] And how are all
your people down at Selsey?

THE BYSTANDER [suspictously'] Who told you my people
come from Selsey?

THE NOTE TAKER. Nevcr you mind. They did. [To the
gir/] How do you come to be up so far east? You were
born in Lisson Grove.

THE FLOWER GIRL [appalled] Oh, what harm is there in
my leaving Lisson Grove ? It wasnt fit for a pig to live in ;
and I had to pay four-and-six a week. [In tears] Oh, boo
— hoo — 00 —

THE NOTE TAKER. Livc wherc yoU like ; but stop that noise.

THE GENTLEMAN [to the girl] Come, come ! he cant touch
you : you have a right to live where you please.

A SARCASTIC BYSTANDER [thrustiug himself between the note
taker and the gentleman] Park Lane, for instance. Id like
to go into the Housing Question with you, I would.

THE FLOWER GIRL [subsiding into a brooding melancholy over
her basket, and talking very low-spiritedly to herself] I'm a
good girl, I am.

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER [tiot attending to her] Do you
know where / come from ?

THE NOTE TAKER [promptly] Hoxton.

Titterings. Popular interest in the note taker's performance
increases.

THE SARCASTIC ONE [amaxed] Well, who said I didnt ? Bly
me! You know everything, you do.

THE FLOWER GIRL [stUl nursing her sense of injury] Aint no
call to meddle with me, he aint.

THE BYSTANDER [to her] Of coursc he aint. Dont you stand
it from him. [To the note taker] See here : what call have
you to know about people what never offered to meddle
with you? Wheres your warrant?

SEVERAL BYSTANDERS [encouraged by this seeming point oflazv]
Yes: wheres your warrant?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Let him say what he likes. I dont want
to have no truck with him.

1 1 2 Pygmalion Act i

THE BYSTANDER. You take US for dirt under your feet, dont
you? Catch you taking liberties with a gentleman !

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER. Ycs : tell him whcrc he come
from if you want to go fortune-telling.

THE NOTE TAKER. Cheltenham, Harrow, Cambridge, and
India.

THE GENTLEMA!<i. (^^^'^^ right. \_Great laughter. Reaction
in the note taker's favor. Exclamations o/'He knows all about
it. Told him proper. Hear him tell the toft" where he come
from? etc.]. May I ask, sir, do you do this for your living
at a music hall ?

THE NOTE TAKER. Ivc thought of that. Perhaps I shall
some day.

The rain has stopped ; and the persons on the outside of the
crowd begin to drop off.

THE FLOWER GIRL [resenting tlie reaction] Hes no gentle-
man, he aint, to interfere with a poor girl.

THE DAUGHTER [out o/ pdtiencc, pushing her way rudely to
the front and displacing the gentleman, who politely retires
to the other side of the pillar'\ What on earth is Freddy
doing? I shall get pneumonia if I stay in this draught any
longer.

THE NOTE TAKER [to himsclf hastily making a note of her
pronunciation of'''-monia^'''\ Earlscourt.

THE DAUGHTER [violently^ Will you please keep your im-
pertinjent remarks to yourself.

THE NOTE TAKER. Did I Say that out loud? I didnt mean
to. I beg your pardon. Your mother's Epsom, unmistake-
ably.

THE MOTHER [advancing between her daughter and the note
taker'] How very curious ! I was brought up in Largelady
Park, near Epsom.

THE NOTE TAKER [uproariously amused] Ha! ha! What a
devil of a name ! Excuse me. [To the daughter] You want
a cab, do you ?

THE DAUGHTER. Dont dare speak to me.

THE MOTHER. Oh plcase, please, Clara. [Her daughter

Act I Pygmalion 1 1 3

repudiates her with an angry shrug and retires haughtil'f\. We
should be so grateful to you. sir, if you found us a cab.
\The note taker produces a zvhistle\. Oh, thank you. \She
joins her daughter\

The note taker blows a piercing blast.

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER. Thcrc ! I knowed he was a
plain-clothes copper.

THE BYSTANDER. That aint. a police whistle : thats a sport-
ing whistle.

THE FLOWER GIRL [sttll preoccupied with her wounded feel-
ings'] Hes no right to take away my character. My character
is the same to me as any lady's.

THE NOTE TAKER. I dont kuow whether youve noticed it;
but the rain stopped about two minutes ago.

THE BYSTANDER. So it has. Why didnt you say so before?
and us losing our time listening to your silliness ! \^He walks
off towards the Strand].

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER. I cau tell whcrc you comc
from. You come from Anwell. Go back there.

THE NOTE TAKER [^helpfully] //anwell.

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER [^affecting great distinction of
speech] Thenk you, teacher. Haw haw ! So long \he touches
his hat with mock respect and strolls off].

THE FLOWER GIRL. Frightening people like that ! How
would he like it himself?

THE MOTHER It's quite fine now, Clara. We can walk to
a motor bus. Come. \She gathers her skirts above her ankles
and hurries off towards the Strand],

THE DAUGHTER. But the cab — [her mother is out of hearing].
Oh, how tiresome ! [She follows angrily].

All the rest have gone except the note taker, the gentleman,
and the flower girl, who sits arranging her basket, and still pity-
ing herself in murmurs.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Poor girl ! Hard enough for her to live
without being worrited and chivied.

THE GENTLEMAN [returning to his former place on the note
taker's left] How do you do it, if I may ask ?

114 Pygmalion Act I

THE NOTE TAKER. Simply phonctics. The science of
speech. Thats my profession: also my hobby. Happy is
the man who can make a living by his hobby! You can
spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue. / can
place any man within six miles. I can place him within two
miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Ought to bc ashamcd of himself, un-
manly coward !

THE GENTLEMAN. But is thcic a Hving in that?
THE NOTE TAKER. Oh ycs. Quitc a fat onc. This is an age
of upstarts. Men begin in Kentish Town with j^8o a year,
and end in Park Lane with a hundred thousand. They
want to drop Kentish Town ; but they give themselves
away every time they open their mouths. Now I can teach
them —

THE FLOWER GIRL. Let him mind his own business and
leave a poor girl —

THE NOTE TAKER [explosively'] Woman : cease this detest-
able boohooing instantly; or else seek the shelter of some
other place of worship.

THE FLOWER GIRL [witk feeble defiance'] Ive a right to be
here if I like, same as you.

THE NOTE TAKER. A woman who utters such depressing
and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere — ^^no
right to live. Remember that you are a human being with
a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech : that your
native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton
and The Bible ; and dont sit there crooning like a bilious
pigeon.

THE FLOWER GIRL \quite Overwhelmed, looking up at him in
mingled wonder and deprecation without daring to raise her
head] Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oo !

THE NOTE TAKER \w hipping out his hook] Heavens ! what
a sound! [He writes; then holds out the book and reads, re-
producing her vowels exactly] Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oo !

THE FLOWER GIRL [tickkd by the performance, and laughing
in spite of herself] Garn !

Act I Pygmalion 1 1 5

THE NOTE TAKER. You scc this crcaturc with her kerb--
stone English : the English that will keep her in the gutter
to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could
pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador's garden
party. I could even get her a place as lady's maid or shop
assistant, which requires better English. Thats the sort of
thing I do for commercial millionaires. And on the
profits of it I do genuine scientific work in phonetics,
and a little as a poet on Miltonic lines.

THE GENTLEMAN. I am myself a student of Indian dia-
lects ; and —

THE NOTE TAKER [eagerly] Are you? Do you know Colonel
Pickering, the author of Spoken Sanscrit ?

THE GENTLEMAN. I am Colonel Pickering. Who are you.?

THE NOTE TAKER. Henry Higgins, author of Higgins's
Universal Alphabet.

PICKERING [zvith enthusiasm'] I came from India to meet
you.

HIGGINS. I was going to India to meet you.

PICKERING. Where do you live }

HIGGINS. 27A Wimpole Street. Come and see m.e to-
m.orrow.

PICKERING. I'm at the Carlton. Come with me now and
lets have a jaw over some supper.

HIGGINS. Right you are.

THE FLOWER GIRL \_to Pickering, as he passes her] Buy a
flower, kind gentleman. I'm short for my lodging.

PICKERING. I really havnt any change. I'm sorry [he
goes away]..

HIGGINS [shocked at the girPs mendacity] Liar. You said
you could change half-a-crown.

THE FLOWER GIRL [rising in desperation] You ought to be
stuffed with nails, you ought. [Flinging the basket at his
feet] Take the whole blooming basket for sixpence.

The church clock strikes the second quarter.

HIGGINS [hearing in it the voice of God, rebuking him for
his Pharisaic want of charity to the poor girl] A reminder.

1 1 6 Pygmalion Act I

\^He raises his hat solemnly ; then throws a handful of money into
the basket and follows Pickering'].

THE FLOWER GIRL [picking Up a half-crown] Ah-o\v-ooh !
[Picking up a couple of for ins] Aaah-ow-ooh ! [Picking up
several coins] Aaaaaah-ow-ooh ! [Picking up a half-sovereign]
Aaaaaaaaaaaah-ow-ooh ! ! !

FREDDY [springing out of a taxlcab] Got one at last.
Hallo! [To the girl] Where are the two ladies that were
here ?

THE FLOWER GIRL. They Walked to the bus when the
rain stopped.

FREDDY. And left me with a cab on my hands ! Damna-
tion !

THE FLOWER GIRL [with grandcur] Never you mind, young
man. /'m going home in a taxi, [fihe sails off to the cab.
The driver puts his hand behind him and holds the door firmly
shut against her. Quite understanding his mistrust^ she shews
him her handful of money]. Eightpence aint no object
to me, Charlie. [He grins and opens the door]. Angel
Court, Drury Lane, round the corner of Micklejohn's oil
shop. Lets sec how fast you can make her hop it. [She
gets in and pulls the door to with a slam as the taxicab starts].

FREDDY. Well, I'm dashed!

ACT II

Next day at 1 1 a.m. Higgins's laboratory in Wimpole
Street. It is a room on the first floor, looking on the street, and
was meant for the drawing-room. The double doors are in the
middle of the back wall; and persons entering find in the
corner to their right two tall file cabinets at right angles to
07ie another against the walls. In this corner stands a fiat
writing-table, on which are a phonograph, a laryngoscope, a
row of tiny organ pipes with a bellows, a set of lamp chimneys
for singing flames with burners attached to a gas plug in the
wall by an indiarubber tube, several tuning-forks of different
sixes, a life-size image of half a human head, shewing in section
the vocal organs, and a box containing a supply of wax cylinders
for the phonograph.

Further down the room, on the same side, is a fireplace, with
a comfortable leather-covered easy-chair at the side of the hearth
nearest the door, and a coal-scuttle. There is a clock on the
mantelpiece. Between the fireplace and the phonograph table
is a stand for newspapers.

On the other side of the central door, to the left of the visitor,
is a cabinet of shallow drawers. On it is a telephone and the tele-
phone directory. The corner beyond, and most of the side wall,
is occupied by a grand piano, with the keyboard at the end
furthest from the door, and a bench for the player extending
the full length of the keyboard. On the piano is a dessert dish
heaped with fruit and sweets, mostly chocolates.

The middle of the room is clear. Besides the easy-chair, the

117

1 1 8 Pygmalion Act li

piano bench, and two chairs ai the phonograph table, there
is one stray chair. It stands near t/ne fireplace. On the walls,
engravings: mostly Piranesis and mezzotint portraits. No
paintings.

Pickering is seated at the table, putting down some cards and
a tuning-fork which he has been using. Higgins is standing up
near him, closing two or three file drazvers which are hanging
out. He appears in the mor?iing light as a robust, vital,
appetizing sort of man of forty or thereabouts, dressed in a
professional-looking black frock-coat with a white linen collar
and black silk tie. He is of the energetic, scietitific type,
heartily, even violently interested in everything that can be
studied as a scientific subject, and careless about himself and
other people, including their feelings. He is, in fact, but for
his years and size, rather like a very impetuous baby " taking
notice" eagerly and loudly, and requiring almost as much watch-
ing to keep him out of unintended mischief. His manner varies
from genial bullying when he is in a good humor to stormy
petulance when anything goes wrong; but he is so entirely
frank and void of malice that he remains likeable even in his
least reasonable moments.

HIGGINS \as he shuts the last drawer'] Well, I think thats
the whole show.

PICKERING. It's really amazing. I havnt taken half of it
in, you know.

HIGGINS. Would you like to go over any of it again?

piCKE-RiNG [rising and coming to the fireplace, where he plants
himself with his back to the fire] No, thank you; not now.
I'm quite done up for this morning.

HIGGINS [following him, and standing beside him on his left]
Tired of listening to sounds?

PICKERING Yes. It's a fearful strain. I rather fancied
myself because I can pronounce twenty-four distinct vowel
sounds ; but your hundred and thirty beat me. I cant hear
a bit of difference between most ot them.

HIGGINS [chuckimg, and going over to the piano to eat sweets]

Act II Pygmalion 119

Oh, that comes with practice. You hear no diiFerence at
first ; but you keep on listening, and presently you find
theyre all as different as A from B, [Mrs Pearce looks in:
she is Higginis housekeeper]. Whats the matter ?

MRS PEARCE [hesitating, evidently perplexed] A young
woman wants to see you, sir.

HiGGiNS. A young woman ! What does she want?

MRS PEARCE. Well, sir, she says youll be glad to see her
when you know what shes come about. Shes quite a
common girl, sir. Very common indeed. I should have
sent her away, only I thought perhaps you wanted her to
talk into your machines. I hope Ive not done wrong; but
really you see such queer people sometimes — youll excuse
me, I'm sure, sir —

HIGGINS. Oh, thats all right, Mrs Pearce, Has she an
interesting accent?

MRS PEARCE. Oh, something dreadful, sir, really. I dont
know how you can take an interest in it.

HIGGINS [to Pickering] Lets have her up. Shew her up,
Mrs Pearce [he rushes across to his working table and picks
out a cylinder to use on the phonograph].

MRS PEARCE [only half resigned to it] Very well, sir. Its
for you to say. [She goes downstairs].

HIGGINS. This is rather a bit of luck. I'll shew you how
I make records. We'll set her talking; and I'll take it
down first in Bell's visible Speech; then in broad Romic ;
and then we'll get her on the phonograph so that you can
turn her on as often as you like with the written transcript
before you.

MRS PEARCE [returning] This is the young woman, sir.

The flower girl enters in state. She has a hat with three
ostrich feathers, orange, sky-blue, and red. She has a nearly clean
apron, and the shoddy coat has been tidied a little. The pathos
of this deplorable figure, with its innocent vanity and conse-
quential air, touches Pickering, who has already straightened
himself in the presence of Mrs Pearce. But as to Higgins,
the only distinction he makes between men and women is that

I20 Pygmalion Act II

when ke is neither bullying nor exclaiming to the heavens
against some featherweight cross, he coaxes women as a child
coaxes its nurse when it wants to get anything out of her.

HiGGiNS \_brusquely, recognizing her with unconcealed dis-
appointment, and at once, babylike, making an intolerable
grievance of it\ Why, this is the girl I jotted down last
night. Shes no use : Ive got all the records I want of the
Lisson Grove lingo; and I'm not going to waste another
cylinder on it. \To the girl\ Be off with you : I dont want
you.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Dont you bc SO saucy. You aint heard
\vhat I come for yet. [ To Mrs Pearce, who is waiting at the
door for further instructions'] Did you tell him I come in a
taxi ?

MRS PEARCE. Nonsensc, girl ! what do you think a gentle-
man like Mr Higgins cares what you came in?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, we are proud! He aint above
giving lessons, not him : I heard him say so. Well, I aint
come here to ask for any compliment; and if my money's
not good enough I can go elsewhere.

HIGGINS. Good enough for what?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Good cnough for ye-oo. Now you
know, dont you ? I'm come to have lessons, I am. And
to pay for em too : make no mistake.

HIGGINS [stupent] Well!!! [Recovering his breath with a
gasp] What do you expect me to say to you ?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Well, if you was a gentleman, you
might ask me to sit down, I think. Dont I tell you I'm
bringing you business?

HIGGINS. Pickering: shall we ask this baggage to sit
down, or shall we throw her out of the window?

THE FLOWER GIRL [running away in terror to the piano,
where she turns at bay] Ah-ah-oh-ow-ow-ow-oo ! [Wounded
and whimpering] I wont be called a baggage when Ive
offered to pay like any lady.

Motionless, the two men stare at her from the other side of the
room, amazed.

Act II Pygmalion 121

PICKERING [gefit/y] What is it you want, my girl ?

THE FLOWER GIRL. I Want to be a lady in a flower shop
stead of selling at the corner of Tottenham Court Road.
But they wont take me unless I can talk more genteel.
He said he could teach me. Well, here I am ready to pay
him — not asking any favor — and he treats me as if I was
dirt.

MRS PEARCE. How Can you be such a foolish ignorant girl
as to think you could aiFord to pay Mr Higgins ?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Why shouldnt I ? I know what lessons
cost as well as you do; and I'm ready to pay.

HIGGINS. How much ?

THE FLOWER GIRL [coming back to him, triumphant] Now
youre talking ! I thought youd come off it when you saw
a chance of getting back a bit of what you chucked at me
last night. {Confidentially] Youd had a drop in, hadnt you?

HIGGINS [peremptorily] Sit down.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, if youre going to make a compli-
ment of it —

HIGGINS [thundering at her] Sit down.

MRS PEARCE [severely] Sit down, girl. Do as youre told.
[She places the stray chair near the hearthrug between Higgins and
Pickering, and stands behind it waiting for the girl to sit down].

THE FLOWER GIRL. Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-o'o ! [She stands, half
rebellious, half bewildered].

PICKERING [very courteous] Wont you sit down ?

LIZA [coy/y] Dont mind if I do. [She sits down. Pickering
returns to the hearthrug].

HIGGINS. Whats your name ?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Liza Doolittlc.

HIGGINS [declaiming gravely]

Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy and Bess,
They went to the woods to get a bird's nes' :
PICKERING. They found a nest with four eggs in it :
HIGGINS. They took one apiece, and left three in it.

They laugh heartily at their ozvn wit.

122 Pygmalion Act n

LIZA. Oh, dont be silly.

MRS PEARCE. You mustnt speak to the gentleman like that.

LIZA, Well, why wont he speak sensible to me?

HiGGiNS. Come back to business. How much do you
propose to pay me for the lessons?

LIZA. Oh, I know whats right. A lady friend of mine
gets French lessons for eighteenpence an hour from a real
French gentleman. Well, you wouldnt have the face to
ask me the same for teaching me my own language as you
would for French ; so I wont give more than a shilling.
Take it or leave it.

HIGGINS [walking up and down the room, rattling his keys
a?id his cash in his pockets'] You know, Pickering, if you
consider a shilling, not as a simple shilling, but as a per-
centage of this girl's income, it works out as fully equiva-
lent to sixty or seventy guineas from a millionaire.

PICKERING. How so?

HIGGINS. Figure it out. A millionaire has about j^i50 a
day. She earns about half-a-crown.

LIZA [haughtily'] Who told you I only —

HIGGINS [continuing] She offers me two-fifths of her day's
income for a lesson. Two-fifths of a millionaire's income
for a day would be somewhere about £60. It's handsome.
By George, it's enormous ! it's the biggest offer I ever had.

LIZA [rising, terrifed] Sixty pounds ! What are you talk-
ing about? I never offered you sixty pounds. Where
would I get —

HIGGINS. Hold your tongue.

LIZA [weeping] But I aint got sixty pounds. Oh —

MRS PEARCE. Dont Cry, you silly girl. Sit down. No-
body is going to touch your money.

HIGGINS. Somebody is going to touch you, with a broom-
stick, if you dont stop snivelling. Sit down.

LIZA [obeying slowly] Ah-ah-ah-ow-00-0 ! One would
think you was my father.

HIGGINS. If I decide to teach you, I'll be worse than two
fathers to you. Here [he offers her his silk handkerchief] !

Act II Pygmalion 123

LIZA. Whats this for?

HiGGiNS. To wipe your eyes. To wipe any part of your
face that feels moist. Remember : thats your handkerchief ;
and thats your sleeve. Dont mistake the one for the other
if you wish to become a lady in a shop.

Liza, utterly bewildered, stares helplessly at him.

MRS PEARCE. It's no use talking to her like that, Mr
Higgins : she doesnt understand you. Besides, youre
quite wrong : she doesnt do it that way at all \she takes the
handker chief \

LIZA [snatching it] Here! You give me that handkerchief.
He give it to me, not to you.

PICKERING [laughing] He did. I think it must be regarded
as her property, Mrs Pearce.

MRS PEARCE [resigning herself] Serve you right, Mr Higgins.

PICKERING. Higgins : I'm interested. What about the
ambassador's garden party? I'll say youre the greatest
teacher alive if you make that good. I'll bet you all the
expenses of the experiment you cant do it. And I'll pay
for the lessons.

LIZA. Oh, you are real good. Thank you, Captain.

HIGGINS [tempted, looking at her] It's almost irresistible.
Shes so deliciously low — so horribly dirty —

LIZA [protesting extremely] Ah-ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo-oo ! ! !
I aint dirty : I washed my face and hands afore I come, I did.

PICKERING. Youre certainly not going to turn her head
with flattery, Higgins.

MRS PEARCE [uneasy] Oh, dont say that, sir: theres
more ways than one of turning a girl's head ; and nobody
can do it better than Mr Higgins, though he may not
always mean it. I do hope, sir, you wont encourage him to
do anything foolish.

HIGGINS [becoming excittd as the idea grows on him] What
is life but a series of inspired follies ? The difficulty is to
find them to do. Never lose a chance : it doesnt come
everyday. I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed
guttersnipe.

124 Pygmalion Act II

LIZA [strongly deprecating this view of her~\ Ah-ah-ah-ow-
ow-oo !

HiGGiNS \carried awa-p^ Yes : in six months — in three if
she has a good ear and a quick tongue — I'll take her any-
where and pass her ofF as anything. We'll start to-day:
now! this moment! Take her away and clean her, Mrs
Pearce. Monkey Brand, if it wont come off any other
way. Is there a good fire in the kitchen ?

MRS PEARCE \^rotesting\ Yes; but —

HIGGINS [storming on] Take all her clothes ofF and burn
them. Ring up Whiteley or somebody for new ones. Wrap
her up in brown paper til they come.

LIZA. Youre no gentleman, youre not, to talk of such
things. I'm a good girl, I am ; and I know what the like
of you are, I do.

HIGGINS. We want none of your Lisson Grove prudery
nere, young woman. Youve got to learn to behave like a
duchess. Take her away, Mrs Pearce. If she gives you any
trouble, wallop her.

LIZA [springing up and running between Pickering and Mrs
Pearce for protection] No! I'll call the police, I will.

MRS PEARCE. But Ive no place to put her.

HIGGINS. Put her in the dustbin.

LIZA. Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo !

PICKERING. Oh come, Higgins ! be reasonable.

MRS PEARCE [resolutely] You must be reasonable, Mr
Higgins: really you must. You cant walk over everybody
like this.

Higgins, thus scolded, subsides. The hurricane is succeeded
by a zephyr of amiable surprise.

HIGGINS [with professional exquisitencss of modulation] I
walk over everybody ! My dear Mrs Pearce, my dear
Pickering, I never had the slightest intention of walking
over anyone. All I propose is that we should be kind to
this poor girl. We must help her to prepare and fit herself
for her new station in life. If I did not express myself clearly
it was because I did not wish to hurt her delicacy, or yours.

Act II Pygmalion 125

Liza, reassured, steals back to her chair.

MRS PEARCE \to Pickering] Well, did you ever hear any-
thing like that, sir ?

PICKERING \laughing heartily] Never, Mrs Pearce : never.

HiGGiNs [patiently] Whats the matter?

MRS PEARCE. Well, the matter is, sir, that you cant take
a girl up like that as if you were picking up a pebble on
the beach.

HIGGINS. Why not?

MRS PEARCE. Why not ! But you dont know anything
about her. What about her parents? She may be married.

LIZA. Garn !

HIGGINS. There ! As the girl very properly says, Garn !
Married indeed ! Dont you know that a woman of that
class looks a worn out drudge of fifty a year after shes
married ?

LIZA. Whood marry me?

HIGGINS [suddenly resorting to the most thrillingly beautiful
low tones in his best elocutionary style] By George, Eliza, the
Streets will be strewn with the bodies of men shooting
themselves for your sake before Ive done with you.

MRS PEARCE. Nouseuse, sir. You mustnt talk like that
to her.

LIZA [rising and squaring herself determinedly] I'm going
away. He's off his chump, he is. I dont want no balmies
teaching me.

HIGGINS [wounded in his tenderest point by her insensibility
to his elocution] Oh, indeed ! I'm mad, am I ? Very well,
Mrs Pearce : you neednt order the new clothes for her.
Throw her out.

LIZA [whimpering] Nah-ow. You got no right to touch me.

MRS PEARCE. You sec uow what comes of being saucy.
[Indicating the door] This way, please.

LIZA [almost in tears] 1 didnt want no clothes. I wouldnt
have taken them [she throws away the handkerchief]. I can
buy my own clothes.

HIGGINS [deftly retrieving the handkerchief and intercepting

I

L

126 Pygmalion Act II

her on her reluctant way to the door\ Youre an ungrateful wicked
girl. This is my return for offering to take you out of the
gutter and dress you beautifully and make a lady of you.

MRS PEARCE. Stop, Mr. Higgins. I wont allow it. It's
you that are wicked. Go home to your parents, girl ; and
tell them to take better care of you.

LIZA. I aint got no parents. They told me I was big
enough to earn my own living and turned me out.

MRS PEARCE. Wheres your mother?

LIZA. I aint got no mother. Her that turned me out
was my sixth stepmother. But I done without them. And
I'm a good girl, I am.

HIGGINS. Very well, then, what on earth is all this fuss
about? The girl doesnt belong to anybody — is no use to
anybody but me. \He goes to Mrs Pearce and begins coax-
ing.'\ You can adopt her, Mrs Pearce : I'm sure a daughter
would be a great amusement to you. Now dont make any
more fuss. Take her downstairs; and —

MRS PEARCE. But whats to become of her? Is she to be
paid anything? Do be sensible, sir.

HIGGINS. Oh, pay her whatever is necessary : put it down
in the housekeeping book. \_Impatientlf\ What on earth
will she want with money ? She'll have her food and her
clothes. She'll only drink if you give her money.

LIZA [^turning on him'\ Oh you are a brute. It's a lie :
nobody ever saw the sign of liquor on me. [She goes back
to her chair and plants herself there defiant lj\.

PICKERING [/;; good-humored remonstrance'\ Does it occur
to you, Higgins, that the girl has some feelings ?

HIGGINS [looking critically at her] Oh no, I dont think so.
Not any feelings that we need bother about. [Cheerily]
Have you, Eliza?

LIZA. I got my feelings same as anyone else.

HIGGINS [to Pickering, refiectiz'ely] You see tha difficulty?

PICKERING. Eh? What difficulty?

HIGGINS. To get her to talk grammar. The mere pro-
nunciation is easy enough.

Act II Pygmalion 127

LIZA. 1 dont want to talk grammar. I want to talk like
a lady.

MRS PEARCE. Will you please keep to the point, Mr
Higgins. I want to know on what terms the girl is to be
here. Is she to have any wages.? And what is to become
of her when youve finished your teaching? You must look
ahead a little.

HIGGINS [impatieni/y] Whats to become of her if I leave
her in the gutter? Tell me that, Mrs Pearce.

MRS PEARCE. ^Thats her own business, not yours, Mr
Higgins.

HIGGINS. Well, when Ive done with her, we can throw
her back into the gutter; and then it will be her own
business again ; so thats all right.

LIZA. Oh, youve no feeling heart in you : you dont care
for nothing but yourself [s/?e rises and takes the floor resol-
utely\ Here ! Ive had enough of this. I'm going [making
for the door'\. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you
ought.

HIGGINS [snatching a chocolate cream from the piano, his
eyes suddenly beginning to twinkle with mischief] Have some
chocolates, Eliza.

LIZA [halting, tempted^ How do I know what might be in
them? Ive heard of girls being drugged by the like of you.

Higgins whips out his penknife ; cuts a chocolate in two ;
puts one half into his mouth and bolts it ; and offers her the
other half.

HIGGINS. Pledge of good faith, Eliza. I eat one half:
you eat the other. [Liza opens her mouth to retort : he
pops the half chocolate into it\ You shall have boxes of
them, barrels of them, every day. You shall live on
them. Eh?

LIZA [who has disposed of the chocolate afier being nearly
choked by it] I wouldnt have ate it, only I'm too ladylike
to take it out of my mouth.

HIGGINS. Listen, Eliza. I think you said you came in a
taxi.

128 Pygmalion Act II

LIZA. Well, what if I did? Ive as good a right to take a
taxi as anyone else.

HiGGiNS. You have, Eliza; and in future you shall have

as many taxis as you vi^ant. You shall go up and down and

round the town in a taxi every day. Think of that, Eliza.

MRS PEARCE. Mr Higgins : youre tempting the girl. It's

not right. She should think of the future.

HIGGINS. At her age ! Nonsense ! Time enough to think
of the future when you havnt any future to think of. No,
Eliza : do as this lady does : think of other people's futures ;
but never think of your own. Think of chocolates, and
taxis, and gold, and diamonds.

LIZA. No : I dont want no gold and no diamonds. I'm a
good girl, I am. [SSe sits down again ^ with an at temp at dignity'].
HIGGINS. You shall remain so, Eliza, under the care of Mrs
Pearce. And you shall marry an officer in the Guards, with
a beautiful moustache : the son of a marquis, who will dis-
inherit him for marrying you, but will relent when he sees
your beauty and goodness —

PICKERING. Excuse me, Higgins; but I really must inter-
fere. Mrs Pearce is quite right. If this girl is to put herself
in your hands for six months for an experiment in teaching,
she must understand thoroughly what shes doing.

HIGGINS. How can she? Shes incapable of understanding
anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are
doing? If we did, would we ever do it?

PICKERING. Very clever, Higgins; but not sound sense.
[To Eliza'] Miss Doolittle —

LIZA, [overwhelmed] Ah-ah-ow-oo !

HIGGINS. There ! Thats all youll get out of Eliza. Ah-
ah-ow-oo ! No use explaining. As a military man you ought
to know that. Give her her orders: thats what she wants.
Eliza : you are to live here for the next six months, learning
how to speak beautifully, like a lady in a florist's shop, li
youre good and do whatever youre told, you shall sleep in
a proper bedroom, and have lots to eat, and money to buy
chocolates and take rides in taxis. If youre naughty and

Act II Pygmalion 129

idle you will sleep in the back kitchen among the black
beetles, and be walloped by Mrs Pearce with a broomstick.
At the end of six months you shall go to Buckingham Palace
in a carriage, beautifully dressed. If the King finds out
youre not a lady, you will be taken by the police to the
Tower of London, where your head will be cut off as ^
warning to other presumptuous flower girls. If you are not
found out, you shall have a present of seven-and-sixpence
to start life with as a lady in a shop. If you refuse this offer
you will be a most ungrateful and wicked girl; and the
angels will weep for you. [To Pickering] Now are you
satisfied, Pickering.^ [To Mrs Pearce] Can I put it more
plainly and fairly, Mrs Pearce.?

MRS PEARCE [patietit/y] I think youd better let me speak
to the girl properly in private. I dont know that I can take
charge of her or consent to the arrangement at all. Of
course I know you dont mean her any harm ; but when you
get what you call interested in people's accents, you never
think or care what may happen to them or you. Come
with me, Eliza.

HiGGiNS. Thats all right. Thank you, Mrs Pearce.
Bundle her off to the bath-room.

LIZA [rising reluctantly and suspiciously] Youre a great bully,
you are. I wont stay here if I dont like. I wont let no-
body wallop me. I never asked to go to Bucknam Palace,
I didnt. I was never in trouble with the police, not me. I'm
a good girl —

MRS PEARCE. Dont answcr back, girl. You dont under-
stand the gentleman. Come with me. [^he leads the way to
the door, and holds it open for Eliza].

LIZA [as she goes out] Well, what I say is right. I wont
go near the king, not if I'm going to have my head cut off.
If I'd known what I was letting myself in for, I wouldnt
have come here. I always been a good girl ; and I never
offered to say a word to him; and I dont owe him nothing;
and I dont care; and I wont be put upon; and I have my
feelings the same as anyone else —

130 Pygmalion Act II

Mrs Pearce shuts the door; and Eliza^s plaints are no longer
•Hudible. Pickering comes from the hearth to the chair and sits
•astride it with his arms on the back.

PICKERING. Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are
;you a man of good character where women are concerned ?

tiiGGiNS \_moodily'\ Have you ever met a man of good
character where women are concerned?

PICKERING. Yes: very frequently.

HiGGiNS [dogmatically, lifting himself on his hands to the level
of the piano, and sitting on it with a bounce'\ Well, I havnt.
I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me,
she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned
nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends
with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. Women
upset everything. When you let them into your life, you
find that the woman is driving at one thing and youre
driving at another.

PICKERING. At what, for example ^

HIGGINS [coming off the piano restlesslf\ Oh, Lord knows!
I suppose the woman wants to live her own life; and the
man wants to live his ; and each tries to drag the other on
to the wrong track. One wants to go north and the other
south; and the result is tliat both have to go east, though
they both hate the east wind. [He sits down on the bench at
the keyboard\ So here I am, a confirmed old bachelor, and
likely to remain so.

PICKERING [rising and standing over him gravely'\ Come,
Higgins! You know what I mean. If I'm to be in this
business I shall feel responsible for that girl. I hope it's
understood that no advantage is to be taken of her position.

HIGGINS. What! That thing! Sacred, I assure you.
[Rising to explai/i] You see, she'll be a pupil ; and teach-
ing would be impossible unless pupils were sacred. Ive
taught scores of American millionairesses how to speak
English : the best looking women in the world. I'm
seasoned. They might as well be blocks of wood. / might
as well be a block of wood. It's —

Act II Pygmalion 1 3 1

Mrs Pearce opens the door. She has Eliza's hat in her hand.
Pickering retires to the easy chair at the hearth and sits down.

HiGGiNS \eagerly\ Well, Mrs Pearce : is it all right?

MRS PEARCE \at the door] I just wish to trouble you with
a word, if I may, Mr Higgins.

HIGGINS. Yes, certainly. Come in. [She comes forzvard\
Dont burn that, Mrs Pearce. I'll keep it as a curiosity.
\_He takes the hat\

MRS PEARCE. Handle it carefully, sir, please. I had to
promise her not to burn it; but I had better put it in the
oven for a while.

HIGGINS \j>utting it down hastily on the piano'] Oh ! thank
you. Well, what have you to say to me?

PICKERING. Am I in the way?

MRS PEARCE. Not at all, sir. Mr Higgins; will you please
be very particular what you say before the girl?

HIGGINS [sternly] Of course. I'm always particular about
what I say. Why do you say this to me ?

MRS PEARCE [unmoved] No, sir : youre not at all particular
when youve mislaid anything or when you get a little im-
patient. Now it doesnt matter before me: I'm used to it.
But you really must not swear before the girl.

H\GGivi% [indignantly] /swear! [Most emphatic iilly] I never
swear. I detest the habit. What the devil do you mean?

MRS PEARCE [stoUdlj] Thats what I mean, sir. You swear
a great deal too much. I dont mind your damning and
blasting, and what the devil and where the devil and
who the devil —

HIGGINS. Mrs Pearce : this language from your lips !
Really!

MRS PEARCE [not to he put off] — but there is a certain word
I must ask you not to use. The girl has just used it herself
because the bath was too hot. It begins with the same
letter as bath. She Tinows no better: she learnt it at her
mother's knee. But she must not hear it from your lips.

HIGGINS [loftily] I cannot charge myself with having ever
uttered it, Mrs Pearce. [She looks at him steadfastly. He

132 Pygmalion Act li

adds^ hiding an uneasy conscience with a judicial a\r\ Except
perhaps in a moment of extreme and justifiable excite-
ment.

MRS PEARCE. Only this morning, sir, you applied it to
your boots, to the butter, and to the brown bread.

HiGGiNs. Oh, that ! Mere alliteration, Mrs Pearce,
natural to a poet.

MRS PEARCE. Well, Sir, whatever you choose to call it, I
beg you not to let the girl hear you repeat it.

HIGGINS. Oh, very well, very well. Is that all?

MRS PEARCE. No, sir. Wc shall have to be very particular
with this girl as to personal cleanliness.

HIGGINS. Certainly. Quite right. Most important.

MRS PEARCE. I mean not to be slovenly about her dress
or untidy in leaving things about.

HIGGINS \going to her solemnly'] Just so, I intended to call
your attention to that. \^Hc passes on to Pickering, who is
enjoying the conversation immensely]. It is these little things
that matter, Pickering. Take care of the pence and the
pounds will take care of themselves is as true of personal
habits as of money. [//<? comes to anchor on the hearthrug,
with the air of a man in an unassailable position].

MRS PEARCE. Ycs, sir. Then might I ask you not to
come down to breakfast in your dressing-gown, or at
any rate not to use it as a napkin to the extent you do,
sir. And if you would be so good as not to eat every-
thing off the same plate, and to remember not to put the
porridge saucepan out of your hand on the clean table-
cloth, it would be a better example to the girl. You know
you nearly choked yourself with a fishbone in the jam only
last week.

HIGGINS \routed from the hearthrug and drifting bach to the
piano] I may do these things sometimes in absence of mind;
but surely I dont do them habitually. \_Angrily] By the
way: my dressing-gown smells most damnably of benzine.
MRS PEARCE. No douht it does, Mr Higgins. But if you
will wipe your hngcrs —

Act II Pygmalion 133

HiGGiNs \_yelling\ Oh very well, very well : I'll wipe them
in my hair in future.

MRS PEARCE. I hope yourc not offended, Mr Higgins.

HIGGINS {shocked at finding himself thought capable of an un-
amiable sentiment'l Not at all, not at all. Youre quite right,
Mrs Pearce : I shall be particularly careful before the girl.
Is that all }

MRS PEARCE. No, sir. Might she use some of those
Japanese dresses you brought from abroad? I really cant
put her back into her old things.

HIGGINS. Certainly. Anything you like. Is that all?

MRS PEARCE. Thank you, sir. Thats all. {She goes
out].

HIGGINS. You know, Pickering, that woman has the most
extraordinary ideas about me. Here I am, a shy, diffident
sort of man, Ive never been able to feel really grown-up
and tremendous, like other chaps. And yet shes firmly
persuaded that I'm an arbitrary overbearing bossing kind
of person. I cant account for it.

Mrs Pearce returns.

MRS PEARCE. If you plcase, sir, the trouble's beginning
already. Theres a dustman downstairs, Alfred Doolittle,
wants to see you. He says you have his daughter here.

PICKERING {rising] Phew ! I say ! {He retreats to the
hearthrug].

HIGGINS {promptly] Send the blackguard up.

MRS PEARCE. Oh, Very well, sir. {She goes out].

PICKERING. He may not be a blackguard, Higgins.

HIGGINS. Nonsense. Of course hes a blackguard.

PICKERING. Whether he is or not, I'm afraid we shall
have some trouble with him.

HIGGINS {confidently] Oh no : I think not. If theres any
trouble he shall have it with me, not I with him. And we
are sure to get something interesting out of him.

PICKERING. About the girl?

HIGGINS. No. I mean his dialect.

PICKERING. Oh !

134 Pygmalion Act II

MRS PEARCE [at tke door\ Doolittle, sir. [Bke admits Doo-
little and retires\

Alfred Doolittle is an elderly but vigorous dustman, clad in
the costume of his profession, including a hat with a back brim
covering his neck and shoulders. He has well marked and
rather interesting features, and seems equally free from fear
and conscience. He has a remarkably expressive voice, the
result of a habit of giving vent to his feelings without
reserve. His present pose is that of wounded honor and stern
resolution.

DOOLITTLE \at the door, uncertain which of the two gentle-
men is his man] Professor Higgins ?

HiGGiNS. Here. Good morning. Sit down.

DOOLITTLE. Morning, Governor. [He sits down magis-
terially'] I come about a very serious matter. Governor.

HIGGINS [to Pickering] Brought up in Hounslow. Mother
Welsh, I should think. [Doolittle opens his mouth, amazed.
Higgins continues] What do you want, Doolittle?

DOOLITTLE [menacingly] I want my daughter : thats what
I want. See ?

HIGGINS. Of course you do. Youre her father, arnt you?
You dont suppose anyone else wants her, do you ? I'm
glad to see you have some spark of family feeling left.
Shes upstairs. Take her away at once.

DOOLITTLE [rising, fearfully taken aback] What !

HIGGINS. Take her away. Do you suppose I'm going to
keep your daughter for you ?

DOOLITTLE [remonstrating] Now, now, look here, Governor.
Is this reasonable? Is it fairity to take advantage of a man
like this? The girl belongs to me. You got her. Where
do I come in ? [He sits down again].

HIGGINS. Your daughter had the audacity to come to my
house and ask me to teach her how to speak properlv so
that she could get a place in a flower-shop. This gentleman
and my housekeeper have been here all the time. [Bullving
him] How dare you come here and attempt to blackmail
me? You sent her here on purpose.

Act II Pygmalion 135

DOOLiTTLE \j)rotestitig] No, Governor.

HiGGiNS. You must have. How else could you possibly
know that she is here?

DOOLITTLE. Dont take a man up like that, Governor.

HIGGINS. The police shall take you up. This is a plant
— a plot to extort money by threats. I shall telephone for
the police \_he goes resolutely to the telephone and opens the
director'f\.

DOOLITTLE. Havc I askcd you for a brass farthing? I leave
it to the gentleman here : have I said a word about money?

HIGGINS \thro'wing the book aside and marching down on
Doolittle with a poser] What else did you come for?

DOOLITTLE [sweetly] Well, what would a man come for?
Be human, Governor.

HIGGINS [disarmed] Alfred : did you put her up to it.?

DOOLITTLE. So help me. Governor, I never did. I take
my Bible oath I aint seen the girl these two months past.

HIGGINS. Then how did you know she was here?

DOOLITTLE [" most musical, most melancholy "] I'll tell
you, Governor, if youll only let me get a word in. I'm
willing to tell you. I'm wanting to tell you. I'm waiting
to tell you.

HIGGINS. Pickering: this chap has a certain natural gift
of rhetoric. Observe the rhythm of his native woodnotes
wild. " I'm willing to tell you : I'm wanting to tell you :
I'm waiting to tell you." Sentimental rhetoric ! thats the
Welsh strain in him. It also accounts for his mendacity
and dishonesty.

PICKERING. Oh, please, Higgins : I'm west country
myself. \To Doolittle] How did you know the girl was
here if you didnt send her?

DOOLITTLE. It was like this. Governor. The girl took a
boy in the taxi to give him a jaunt. Son of her landlady,
he is. He hung about on the chance of her giving him
another ride home. Well, she sent him back for her lug-
gage when she heard you was willing for her to stop here.
1 met the boy at the corner of Long Acre and Endell Street.

1^6 Pygmalion Act II

HiGGiNS. Public house. Yes?

DooLiTTLE. The pooT mail's club, Governor : why
shouldnt I?

PICKERING. Do let him tell his story, Higgins.

DOOLITTLE. He told me what was up. And I ask you,
what was my feelings and my duty as a father? I says to
the boy, " You bring me the luggage," I says —

PICKERING. Why didnt you go for it yourself?

DOOLITTLE. Landlady wouldnt have trusted me with it.
Governor. Shes that kind of woman : you know. I had
to give the boy a penny afore he trusted me with it, the
little swine. I brought it to her just to oblige you like,
and make myself agreeable. Thats all.

HIGGINS. How much luggage?

DOOLITTLE. Musical instrument. Governor. A few pic-
tures, a trifle of jewlery, and a bird-cage. She said she
didnt want no clothes. What was I to think from that.
Governor? I ask you as a parent what was I to think?

HIGGINS. So you came to rescue her from worse than
death, eh ?

DOOLITTLE \_appreciatwely : relieved at being so zve /I under-
stood^ Just so, Governor. Thats right.

PICKERING. But why did you bring her luggage if you
intended to take her away?

DOOLITTLE. Havc I Said a word about taking her away?
Have I now?

HIGGINS [determinedly'] Youre going to take her away,
double quick. [He crosses to the hearth and rings the
bell].

DOOLITTLE [rising] No, Governor. Dont say that. I'm
not the man to stand in my girl's light. Heres a career
opening for her, as you might say ; and —

Mrs Pearce opens the door and awaits orders.

HIGGINS. Mrs Pearce : this is Eliza's father. He has come
to take her away. Give her to him. [He goes back to the
piano, with an air of washing his hands of the whole affair].

DOOLITTLE. No. This is a misunderstanding. Listen here —

Act II Pygmalion 137

MRS PEARCE. He cant take her away, Mr Higgins : how
can he? You told me to burn her clothes.

DOOLiTTLE. Thats right. I cant carry the girl through
the streets like a blooming monkey, can I ? I put it to you.

HIGGINS. You have put it to me that you want your
daughter. Take your daughter. If she has no clothes go
out and buy her some.

DOOLITTLE [^desperate'\ Wheres the clothes she come in ?
Did I burn them or did your missus here?

MRS PEARCE. I am the housekeeper, if you please. I have
sent for some clothes for your girl. When they come you
can take her away. You can wait in the kitchen. This
way, please.

Doolittle, much troubled, accompanies her to the door ; then
hesitates; finally turns confide?itially to Higgins.

DOOLITTLE. Listen here, Governor. You and me is men
of the world, aint we ?

HIGGINS. Oh! Men of the world, are we? Youd better
go, Mrs Pearce.

MRS PEARCE. I think SO, indeed, sir. [She goes, with dignity'].

PICKERING. The floor is yours, Mr Doolittle.

DOOLITTLE \_to Pickering] I thank you, Governor. [To
Higgins, who takes refuge on the piano bench, a little over-
whelmed by the proximity of his visitor; for Doolittle has a
professional favor of dust about him]. Well, the truth is, Ive
taken a sort of fancy to you. Governor; and if you want
the girl, I'm not so set on having her back home again but
what I might be open to an arrangement. Regarded in the
light of a young woman, shes a fine handsome girl. As a
daughter shes not worth her keep ; and so I tell you straight.
All I ask is my rights as a father ; and youre the last man
alive to expect me to let her go for nothing ; for I can see
youre one of the straight sort. Governor. Well, whats a five
pound note to you? And whats Eliza to me? [He returns
to his chair and sits down judicially].

■ PICKERING. I think you ought to know, Doolittle, that
Mr Higgins's intentions are entirely honorable.

i^S Pygmalion Act II

DOOLiTTLE. Coursc they are, Governor. If I thought
they wasnt. Id ask fifty.

HiGGiNS [rcvo/teJ] Do you mean to say, you callous rascal,
that you would sell your daughter for ^^50?

DOOLITTLE. Not in a general way I wouldnt; but to
oblige a gentleman like you I'd do a good deal, I do assure
you.

PICKERING. Have you no morals, man?
DOOLITTLE [uNa/>as^eii] Cant afford them. Governor.
Neither could you if you was as poor as me. Not that I
mean any harm, you know. But if Liza is going to have a
bit out of this, why not me too?

HIGGINS [troui/eal] I dont know what to do, Pickering.
There can be no question that as a matter of morals it's a
positive crime to give this chap a farthing. And yet I feel
a sort of rough justice in his claim.

DOOLITTLE. Thats it. Governor. Thats all I say. A father's
heart, as it were.

PICKERING. Well, I know the feeling ; but really it
seems hardly right —

DOOLITTLE. Dont Say that, Governor. Dont look at it
that way. What am I, Governors both ? I ask you, what
ami? I'm one of the undeserving poor: thats what I am.
Think of what that means to a man. It means that hes up
agcn middle class morality all the time. If theres any-
thing going, and I put in for a bit of it, it's always the
same story : " Youre undeserving; so you cant have it."
But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow's that
ever got money out of six different charities in one week for
the death of the same husband. I dont need less than a
deserving man: I need more. I dont eat less hearty than
him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement,
cause I'm a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song
and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just
the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What
is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving
me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not

Act II Pygmalion 139

to play that game on me. I'm playing straight with you.
I aint pretending to be deserving. I'm undeserving ; and I
mean to go on being undeserving. I like it ; and thats the
truth. Will you take advantage of a man's nature to do
him out of the price of his own daughter what hes brought
up and fed and clothed by the sweat of his brow until
shes growed big enough to be interesting to you two
gentlemen ? Is five pounds unreasonable ? I put it to you ;
and I leave it to you.

HiGGiNS [rising, and going over to Pickering] Pickering :
if we were to take this man in hand for three months, he
could choose between a seat in the Cabinet and a popular
pulpit in Wales.

PICKERING. What do you say to that, Doolittle?

DOOLiTTLE, Not mc, Govemof, thank you kindly. Ive
heard all the preachers and all the prime ministers — for I'm
a thinking man and game for politics or religion or social
reform same as all the other amusements — and I tell you
it's a dog's life anyway you look at it. Undeserving poverty
is my line. Taking one station in society with another, it's
— it's — well, it's the only one that has any ginger in it, to
my taste.

HIGGINS. I suppose we must give him a fiver.

PICKERING. He'll make a bad use of it, I'm afraid.

DOOLITTLE. Not me. Governor, so help me I wont.
Dont you be afraid that I'll save it and spare it and live
idle on it. There wont be a penny of it left by Monday :
I'll have to go to work same as if I'd never had it. It wont
pauperize me, you bet. Just one good spree for myself and
the missus, giving pleasure to ourselves and employment to
others, and satisfaction to you to think it's not been throwed
away. You couldnt spend it better.

HIGGINS [taking cut kts pocket book and coming between
Doolittle and the piano] This is irresistible. Lets give him
ten. [He offers two notes to the dustman],

DOOLITTLE. No, Govcmor. She wouldnt have the heart
to spend ten ; and perhaps I shouldnt neither. Ten

f^o Pygmalion Act II

pounds is a lot of money : it makes a man feel prudent
like ; and then goodbye to happiness. You give me what
I ask you, Governor : not a penny more, and not a penny
less.

PICKERING, Why dont you marry that missus of yours ?
I rather dravv^ the line at encouraging that sort of im-
morality.

DooLiTTLE. Tell her so. Governor : tell her so. /'m
willing. It's me that suffers by it. Ive no hold on her. I
got to be agreeable to her. I got to give her presents. I
got to buy her clothes something sinful. I'm a slave to
that woman. Governor, just because I'm not her lawful
husband. And she knows it too. Catch her marrying
me ! Take ray advice, Governor : marry Eliza while
shes young and dont know no better. If you dont
youU be sorry for it after. If you do, she'll be sorry for
it after ; but better you than her, because youre a man, and
shes only a woman and dont know how to be happy anyhow.
HiGGiNS. Pickering: if we listen to this man another
minute, we shall have no convictions left. [To Dc/c/itt/e]
Five pounds I think you said.

DOOLITTLE. Thank you kindly. Governor.
HiGGiNS. Youre sure you wont take ten.?
DOOLITTLE, Not now. Another time. Governor.
HIGGINS [handing him a Jive-pound note] Here you are.
DOOLITTLE. Thank you, Govcmor. Good morning. [He
hurries to the door, anxious to get away with his booty. When
he opens it he is confronted with a dainty and exquisitely clean
young Japanese lady in a simple blue cotton kimono printed
cunningly with small white jasmine blossoms. Mrs Pearce is
tvith her. He gets out of her zvay deferentially and apologizes^
Beg pardon, miss.

THE JAPANESE LADY. Gam ! Dont you know your own
daughter.''

DOOLITTLE^ exclaiming [Bly me ! it's Eliza !
HIGGINS \ simul- -| Whats that ! This!
PICKERING J taneously [By Jove !

Act II Pygmalion 141

LIZA, Dont I look silly?

HiGGiNs. Silly?

MRS PEARCE [at the door\ Now, Mr HIggins, please dont
say anything to make the girl conceited about herself.

HIGGINS {conscientiously^!^ Oh ! Quite right, Mrs Pearce.
\To Eliza] Yes : damned silly.

MRS PEARCE. Please, sir,

HIGGINS [correcting himself\ I mean extremely silly.

LIZA. I should look all right with my hat on. [^betakes
up her hat ; puts it on ; and walks across the room to the fire-
place with a fashionable air].

HIGGINS. A new fashion, by George ! And it ought to
look horrible !

DOOLiTTLE [with fatherly pride] Well, I never thought
she'd clean up as good looking as that, Governor. Shes a
credit to me, aint she?

LIZA. I tell you, it's easy to clean up here. Hot and
cold water on tap, just as much as you like, there is.
Woolly towels, there is; and a towel horse so hot, it burns
your fingers. Soft brushes to scrub yourself, and a wooden
bowl of soap smelling like primroses. Now I know why
ladies is so clean. Washing's a treat for them. Wish they
saw what it is for the like of me !

HIGGINS. I'm glad the bath-room met with your
approval.

LIZA. It didnt : not all of it; and I dont care who hears
me say it. Mrs Pearce knows.

HIGGINS. What was wrong, Mrs Pearce?

MRS PEARCE [blandly] Oh, nothing, sir. It doesnt matter.

LIZA. I had a good mind to break it. I didnt know
which way to look. But I hung a towel over it, I did.

HIGGINS. Over what?

MRS PEARCE. Ovcr the looking-glass, sir.

HIGGINS. Doolittle : you have brought your daughter up
too strictly.

DOOLITTLE. Mc ! I nevcr brought her up at all, except
to give her a lick of a strap now and again. Dont put it on

142 Pygmalion Act II

me, Governor. She aint accustomed to it, you see: thats
all. But she'll soon pick up your free-and-easy ways.

LIZA. I'm a good girl, I am ; and I wont pick up no
free and easy ways.

HiGGiNs. Eliza: if you say again that youre a good girl,
your father shall take you home.

LIZA. Not him. You dont know my father. All he
come here for was to touch you for some money to get
drunk on.

DooLiTTLE. Well, what else would I want money for?
To put into the plate in church, I suppose. [S/^e puts out
her tongue at him. He is so incensed by this that Pickering
presently finds it necessary to step between them]. Dont you
give me none of your lip ; and dont let me hear you giving
this gentleman any of it neither, or youll hear from me
about it. See?

HIGGINS. Have you any further advice to give her before
you go, Doolittle? Your blessing, for instance.

DOOLITTLE. No, Govcmor : I aint such a mug as to put
up my children to all I know myself. Hard enough to
hold them in without that. If you want Eliza's mind im-
proved. Governor, you do it yourself with a strap. So
long, gentlemen. \^He turns to go\

HIGGINS [impressively] Stop. Youll come regularly to see
your daughter. It's your duty, you know. My brother is
a clergyman ; and he could help you in your talks with her.
DOOLITTLE [evasively] Certainly. I'll come. Governor.
Not just this week, because I have a job at a distance.
But later on you may depend on me. Afternoon, gentle-
men. Afternoon, maam. [He tukes off his hat to Mrs Pcarce,
tvho disdains the salutation and gees cut. He winks at Higgins,
thinking him probably a fellow-sufferer from Mrs Pearce's diffi-
cult disposition, and follows her].

LIZA. Dont you believe the old liar. He'd as soon you
set a bull-dog on him as a clergyman. You wont see him
again in a hurry.

HIGGINS. I dont want to, Eliza. Do you?

Act II Pygmalion 143

LIZA. Not me. I dont want never to see him again, I
dont. Hes a disgrace to me, he is, collecting dust, instead
of working at his trade.

PICKERING, What is his trade, Eliza?

LIZA. Talking money out of other people's pockets into
his own. His proper trade's a navvy; and he works at
it sometimes too — for exercise — and earns good money
at it. Aint you going to call me Miss Doolittle anymore?

PICKERING. I beg your pardon, Miss Doolittle. It was a
slip of the tongue.

LIZA. Oh, I dont mind ; only it sounded so genteel. I
should just like to take a taxi to the corner of Tottenham
Court Road and get out there and tell it to wait for me,
just to put the girls in their place a bit. I wouldnt speak
to them, you know.

PICKERING. Better wait til we get you something really
fashionable.

HiGGiNs. Besides, you shouldnt cut your old friends now
that you have risen in the world. Thats what we call
snobbery.

LIZA. You dont call the like of them my friends now, I
should hope. Theyve took it out of me often enough with
their ridicule when they had the chance; and now I mean
to get a bit of my own back. But if I'm to have fashionable
clothes, I'll wait. I should like to have some. Mrs Pearce
says youre going to give me some to wear in bed at night
different to what I wear in the daytime ; but it do seem a
waste of money when you could get something to shew.
Besides, I never could fancy changing into cold things on
a winter night.

MRS PEARCE \coming l>ack] Now, Eliza. The new things
have come for you to try on.

LIZA. Ah-ow-oo-ooh ! [S/pe rus/?es out].

MRS PEARCE \^following her\ Oh, dont rush about like that,
girl. \_^he shuts the door behind her\

HIGGINS. Pickering: we have taken on a stiff job.

PICKERING \_with conviction] Higgins : we have.

ACT III

It is Mrs Higgim's at-hme day. Nobody has yet arrived.
Her drawing-room, in aflat on Chelsea embankment, has three
windows looking on the river; and the ceiling is not so lofty as
it would be in an older house of the same pretension. The
windows are open, giving access to a balcony with flowers in
pots. If you stand with your face to the windows, you have the
fireplace on your left and the door in the right-hand wall close
to the corner nearest the windows.

Mrs Higgins was brought up on Morris and Burne Jones;
and her room, which is very unlike her son's room in Wimfole
Street, is not crowded with furniture and little tables and nick-
nacks. In the middle of the room there is a big ottoman; and
this, with the carpet, the Morris wall-papers, and the Morris
chint-z window curtains and brocade covers of the ottoman and
tti cushions, supply all the ornament, and are much too hand-
some to be hidden by odds and ends of useless things. A few
good oil-paintings from the exhibitions in the Grosvenor Gallery
thirty years ago {the Burne Jones, not the Whistler side of
them) are on the zualls. The only landscape is a Cecil Lawson
on the scale of a Rubens. There is a portrait of Mrs Higgins
as she was when she defied fashion in her youth in one of the
beautiful Rossetiian costumes which, when caricatured by people
who did not understand, led to the absurdities of popular
estheticism in the eighteen-seventies.

In the corner diagonally opposite the door Mrs Higgins, nozo
over sixty and long past taking the trouble to dress out of the

144.

Act III Pygmalion 145

fashion^ sits writing at an elegantly simple writing-table with a
bell button within reach of her hand. There is a Chippendale
chair further back in the room between her and the window
nearest her side. At the other side of the room, further forward,
is an Elizabethan chair roughly carved in the taste of Inigo
Jones. On the same side a piano in a decorated case. The
corner between the fireplace and the window is occupied by a
divan cushioned in Morris chintz.

It is between four and five in the afternoon.

The door is opened violently ; and Higgins enters with his hat on.

MRS HIGGINS \_dismayed'\ Henry \_scolding him'\ \ What are
you doing here to-day? It is my at-home day: you pro-
mised not to come. \_As he bends to kiss her, she takes his hat
off, and presents it to him'].

HIGGINS. Oh bother! \_He throws the hat down on the table].

MRS HIGGINS. Go home at once.

HIGGINS [kissing her] I know, mother. I came on purpose.

MRS HIGGINS. But you mustnt. I'm serious, Henry.
You oiFend all my friends : they stop coming whenever
they meet you.

HIGGINS. Nonsense I I know I have no small talk ; but
people dont mind. [He sits on the settee].

MRS HIGGINS. Oh! dont they .? Small talk indeed ! What
about your large talk? Really, dear, you mustnt stay.

HIGGINS. I must. Ive a job for you. A phonetic job.

MRS HIGGINS. No usc, dear. I'm sorry ; but I cant get
round your vowels ; and though I like to get pretty post-
cards in your patent shorthand, I always have to read the
copies in ordinary writing you so thoughtfully send me.

HIGGINS. Well, this isnt a phonetic job.

MRS HIGGINS. You Said it was.

HIGGINS. Not your part of it. Ive picked up a girl.

MRS HIGGINS. Does that mean that some girl has picked
you up?

HIGGINS. Not at all. I dont mean a love affair.

MRS HIGGINS. What a pity !

L

146 Pygmalion Act III

HIGGINS. Why?

MRS HIGGINS. Well, vou ncvcr fall in love with anyone
under forty-five. When will you discover that there are
some rather nice-looking young women about?

HIGGINS. Oh, I cant be bothered with young women.
My idea of a lovable woman is something as like you as
possible. I shall never get into the way of seriously liking
young women : some habits lie too deep to be changed.
[^Rising abruptly and walking about, jingling his money and his
keys in his trouser pockets'\ Besides, theyre all idiots.

MRS HIGGINS. Do you know what you would do if you
really loved me, Henry ?

HIGGINS. Oh bother! What? Marry, I suppose?

MRS HIGGINS. No. Stop fidgeting and take your hands
out of your pockets. \_M'ith a gesture of despair, he obeys
and sits down again]. Thats a good boy. Now tell me
about the girl.

HIGGINS. Shes coming to see you.

MRS HIGGINS. I dont remember asking her.

HIGGINS. You didnt. / asked her. If youd known her
you wouldnt have asked her.

MRS HIGGINS. Indeed! Why?

HIGGINS. Well, it's like this. Shes a common flower girl.
I picked her off the kerbstone.

MRS HIGGINS. And invitcd her to my at-home!

HIGGINS [rising and coming to her to coax her] Oh, thatll
be all right. Ive taught her to speak properly; and she
has strict orders as to her behavior. Shes to keep to two
subjects : the weather and everybody's health — Fine day
and How do you do, you know — and not to let herself
go on things in general. That will be safe.

MRS HIGGINS. Safe! To talk about our health ! about our
insides! perhaps about our outsides ! How could you be
so silly, Henry?

HIGGINS [impatiently] Well, she must talk about some-
thing. [He controls himself and sits down again]. Oh, she'll
be all right: dont you fuss. Pickering is in it with me.

Act III Pygmalion 147

Ive a sort of bet on that I'll pass her off as a duchess in
six months. I started on her some months ago; and shes
getting on like a house on fire. I shall win my bet. She
has a quick ear; and shes been easier to teach than my
middle-class pupils because shes had to learn a complete
new language. She talks English almost as you talk French.

MRS HiGGiNs. Thats Satisfactory, at all events.

HiGGiNs. Well, it is and it isnt.

MRS HIGGINS. What docs that mean ?

HIGGINS. You see, Ive got her pronunciation all right ;
but you have to consider not only how a girl pronounces,
but what she pronounces; and thats where —

The J are interrupted by the parlor-maid, announcing guests.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Mrs and Miss Eynsford Hill, \_8he
withdraws'].

HIGGINS. Oh Lord ! [^He rises; snatches his hat from the
table; and makes for the door; but before he reaches it his mother
introduces hi7r{\.

Mrs and Miss Eynsford Hill are the mother and daughter
who sheltered from the rain in Covcnt Garden. The mother
is well bred, quiet, and has the habitual anxiety of straitened
means. The daughter has acquired a gay air of being very much
at home in society: the bravado of genteel poverty.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL [to Mrs Higgins] How do you do?
[They shake hands].

MISS EYNSFORD HILL. How d'you do ? [She shakes].

MRS HIGGINS [introducing] My son Henry.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL. Your Celebrated son! I have so
longed to meet you. Professor Higgins.

HIGGINS [glumly, making no movement in her direction]
Delighted. [He backs against the piano and bows brusquely].

MISS EYNSFORD HILL [going to him with confide?it familiarity]
How do you do ?

HIGGINS [staring at her] Ive seen you before somewhere.
I havnt the ghost of a notion where ; but Ive heard your
voice. [Drearily] It doesnt matter. Youd better sit
down.

148 Pygmalion Act 111

MRS HiGGiNs. I'm sorry to say that my celebrated son has
no manners. You mustnt mind him.

MISS EYNSFORD HILL [gai/y] I dont. [Sh sits in the Eliza-
bethan chdir\

MRS EYNSFORD HILL [« Httk Bewildered'^ Not at all. \^he
sits on the ottoman between her daughter and Mrs Higgins,
who has turned her chair away from the writing-table\

HIGGINS. Oh, have I been rude? I didnt mean to be.

He goes to the central window, through which, with his back to
the company, l:e contemplates the river and tl^e flowers in Batter sea
Park on the opposite bank as if they were a frozen desert.

The parlor-maid returns, ushering in Pickering.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Coloncl Pickering. \^She zvithdraws\

PICKERING. How do you do, Mrs Higgins?

MRS HIGGINS. So glad youvc come. Do you know Mrs
Eynsford Hill — Miss Eynsford Hill? \_Ex change of bows.
The Colonel brings tl:e Chippendale chair a little forward
between Mrs Hill and Mrs Higgins, and sits down\

PICKERING. Has Henry told you what weve come for?

HIGGINS {over his shoulder^ We were interrupted : damn it !

MRS HIGGINS. Oh Henry, Henry, really!

MRS EYNSFORD HILL \half rising'\ Are we in the way?

MRS HIGGINS [risiz/g and making her sit down again] No,
no. You couldnt have come more fortunately: we want
you to meet a friend of ours.

HIGGINS [turning hopefully] Yes, by George ! We want two
or three people. Youll do as well as anybody else.

The parlor-maid returns, ushering Freddy.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Mr Eynsford Hill.

HIGGINS [almost audibly, past endurance] God of Heaven !
another of them.

FRKDDY [shaking hands with Mrs Higgins] Ahdedo ?

MRS HIGGINS. Vcry good of you to come. [Introducing]
Colonel Pickering.

FREDDY [bowing] Ahdedo?

MRS HIGGINS. I dont think you know my son. Professor
Higgins.

Act III Pygmalion 149

FREDDY [going to Higgifis] Ahdedo?

HiGGiNS [/coking at him much as if he were a pickpocket'\ I'll
take my oath Ive met you before somewhere. Where was it?

FREDDY. I dont think so.

HIGGINS [resignedly^ It dont matter, anyhow. Sit down.

He shakes Freddf s hand, and almost slings him on to the
ottoman with his face to the windows ,- then comes round to the
other side of it.

HIGGINS. Well, here we are, anyhow! [He sits down on
the ottoman next Mrs Eynsford Hill, on her left]. And now,
what the devil are we going to talk about until Eliza comes ?

MRS HIGGINS. Henry : you are the life and soul of the
Royal Society's soirees; but really youre rather trying on
more commonplace occasions.

HIGGINS. Am I? Very sorry. [Beaming suddenly] I sup-
pose I am, you know. [Uproariously] Ha, ha!

Miss EYNSFORD HILL [who considcrs Higgins quite eligible
matrimonially] I sympathize. / havnt any small talk.
If people would only be frank and say what they really
think !

HIGGINS [relapsing into gloom] Lord forbid !

MRS EYNSFORD HILL [taking Up her daughter's cue] But why?

HIGGINS. What they think they ought to think is bad
enough. Lord knows ; but what they really think would
break up the whole show. Do you suppose it would be
really agreeable if I were to come out now with what 1
really think ?

Miss EYNSFORD HILL [gaily] Is it SO vcry cynical ?

HIGGINS. Cynical ! Who the dickens said it was cynical ?
I mean it wouldnt be decent.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL [sertously] Oh ! I'm sure you dont
mean that, Mr Higgins.

HIGGINS. You see, we're all savages, more or less. We're
supposed to be civilized and cultured — to know all about
poetry and philosophy and art and science, and so on ; but
how many of us know even the meanings of these names?
[To Miss Hill] What do you know of poetry? [To Mrs

1 50 Pygmalion Act III

/////] What do you know of science? \_Indicati7jg Freddf\
What does he know of art or science or anything else-''
What the devil do you imagine I know of philosophy ?

MRS HiGGiNS \warninglf\ Or of manners, Henry?

THE PARLOR-MAID \opening the door] Miss Doolittle. [Sh
withdrazvsl.

HiGGiNs \_rtsitig hastily and running to Mrs Higgins] Here
she is, mother. [He stands on tiptoe and makes signs over lis
mother's head to Eliza to indicate to her which lady is her
hostess].

Eliza, who is exquisitely dressed, produces an impression of
such remarkable distinction and beauty as she enters that they
all rise, quite fluttered. Guided by Higgins^s signals, she comes
to Mrs Higgins with studied grace.

LIZA [speaking with pedantic correctness of pronunciation and
great beauty of tone] How do you do, Mrs Higgins? [She
gasps slightly in making sure of the H in Higgins, but is quite
successful]. Mr Higgins told me I might come.

MRS HIGGINS [cordially] Ouite right : I'm very glad indeed
to see you.

PICKERING. How do you do. Miss Doolittle?

LIZA [shaking hands with him] Colonel Pickering, is it not?

MRS EYNSFORD HILL, I feel surc wc havc met before, Miss
Doolittle. I remember your eyes.

LIZA. How do you do ? [She sits down on the ottoman grace-
fully in the place just left vacant by Higgins],

MRS EYNSFORD HILL [introducing] My daughter Clara.

LIZA. How do you do ?

CLARA [impulsiz'ely] How do you do? [She sits down on
the ottoman beside Eliza, devouring her with her eyes].

FREDDY [coming to their side of the ottoman] Ive certainly
had the pleasure.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL [introducing] My son Freddy.

LIZA. How do you do ?

Freddy bows and sits down in the Elizabethan chair, in-
fatuated.

HIGGINS [suddenly] By George, yes : it all comes back to

Act III Pygmalion 151

me ! [They stare at hm'\. Covent Garden ! [Lament a blyl
What a damned thing !

MRS HiGGiNS. Henry, please ! [He is ahout to sit on the edge
of the tahle\ Dont sit on my writing-table : youll break ii.

HIGGINS [sulkily\ Sorry.

He goes to the divan^ stumbling into the fender and over the
fire-irons on his way ; extricating himself with muttered impre-
cations; and finishing his disastrous journey by throwing him-
self so impatiently on the divan that he almost breaks it. Mrs
Higgins looks at him, but controls herself and says nothing.

A long and painful pause ensues.

MRS HIGGINS [at last, conversationally'] Will it rain, do you
think?

LIZA. The shallowdepression in the west of these islands is
likely to move slowly in an easterly direction. There are no
indications of any great change in the barometrical situation.

FREDDY. Ha ! ha ! how awfully funny !

LIZA. What is wrong with that, young man ? I bet I got
it right.

FREDDY. Killing !

MRS EYNSFORD HILL. I'm sure I hopc it wont turn cold.
Theres so much influenza about. It runs right through our
whole family regularly every spring.

LIZA [darkly] My aunt died of influenza : so they said.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL [cHcks her tonguc sympathetically] ! ! !

LIZA [in the same tragic tone] But it's my belief they done
the old woman in.

MRS HIGGINS [puzxlcd] Donc her in.''

LIZA. Y-e-e-e-es, Lord love you! Why should she die
of influenza? She come through diphtheria right enough
the year before. I saw her with my own eyes. Fairly blue
with it, she was. They all thought she was dead ; but my
father he kept ladling gin down her throat til she came to
so sudden that she bit the bowl off the spoon.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL [startled] Dear me !

LIZA [piling up the indictment] What call would a woman
with that strength in her have to die of influenza? What

152 Pygmalion Act III

become of her new straw hat that should have come to
me? Somebody pinched it; and what I say is, them as
pinched it done her in.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL. What docs doing her in mean?

HiGGiNS [Sasti/y] Oh, thats the new small talk. To do a
person in means to kill them.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL [to E/Iza, horrlJjed'\ You surely dont
believe that your aunt was killed?

LIZA. Do I not ! Them she lived with would have killed
her for a hat-pin, let alone a hat.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL. But it cant havc been right for your
father to pour spirits down her throat like that. It might
have killed her.

LIZA. Not her. Gin was mother's milk to her. Besides,
he'd poured so much down his own throat that he knew the
good of it.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL. Do you mean that he drank?

LIZA. Drank! My word ! Something chronic.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL. How drcadful for you!

LIZA. Not a bit. It never did him no harm what I could
see. But then he did not keep it up regular. \^CheerfuI/y^
On the burst, as you might say, from time to time. And
always more agreeable when he had a drop in. When he
was out of work, my mother used to give him fourpence
and tell him to go out and not come back until he'd drunk
himself cheerful and loving-like. Theres lots of women
has to make their husbands drunk to make them fit to live
with. \_Now quite at her ease] You see, it's like this. If a
man has a bit of a conscience, it always takes him when
he's sober; and then it makes him low-spirited. A drop of
booze just takes that off and makes him happy. [To Freddy,
who is in convulsions of suppressed laughter] Here ! what are
you sniggering at ?

FREDDY. The new small talk. You do it so awfully well.

LIZA. If I was doing it proper, what was you laughing at ?
\To Iliggins] Have I said anything I oughtnt ?

MRS HIGGINS [interposing] Not at all, Miss Doolittle.

Act III Pygmalion 153

LIZA. Well, thats a mercy, anyhow. \_Expansively'\ What
I always say is —

HiGGiNS [^risitig and looking at his watcF^ Ahem !

LIZA \looking round at him ; taking the hint; and rising"] Well :
I must go. [They all rise. Freddy goes to the door]. So pleased
to have met you. Good-bye. [She shakes hands with Mrs
Biggins].

MRS HIGGINS. Good-byc.

LIZA. Good-bye, Colonel Pickering.

PICKERING. Good-bye, Miss Doolittle. [They shake hands],

LIZA [nodding to the others] Good-bye, all.

FREDDY [opening the door for her] Arc you walking across
the Park, Miss Doolittle? If so —

LIZA. Walk ! Not bloody likely. [SensatioTi], I am going
in a taxi. [She goes out].

Pickering gasps and sits down. Freddy goes out on the balcony
to catch another glimpse of Eliza.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL [suffering from shock] Well, I really
cant get used to the new ways.

CLARA [throwing herself discontentedly into the Elizabethan
chair]. Oh, it's all right, mamma, quite right. People will
think we never go anywhere or see anybody if you are so
old-fashioned.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL. I darcsay I am very old-fashioned ;
but I do hope you wont begin using that expression,
Clara. I have got accustomed to hear you talking about
men as rotters, and calling everything filthy and beastly ;
though I do think it horrible and unladylike. But this
last is really too much. Dont you think so. Colonel
Pickering?

PICKERING. Dont ask me. Ive been away in India for
several years ; and manners have changed so much that I
sometimes dont know whether I'm at a respectable dinner-
table or in a ship's forecastle.

CLARA. It's all a matter of habit. Theres no right or
wrong in it. Nobody means anything by it. And it's so
quaint, and gives such a smart emphasis to things that are

154 Pygmalion Act III

not in themselves very witty. I find the new small talk
delightful and quite innocent.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL [rising] Well, after that, I think it's
time for us to go.

Pickering and Higgins rise.

CLARA [rising] Oh yes : we have three at-homes to go to
still. Good-bye, Mrs Higgins. Good-bye, Colonel Pickering.
Good-bye, Professor Higgins.

HIGGINS [coming grim/y at her from the divan, and accom-
pafiyitjg her to the door] Good-bye. Be sure you try on that
small talk at the three at-homes. Dont be nervous about it.
Pitch it in strong.

CLKV^k [all smiles] I will. Good-bye. Such nonsense, all
this early Victorian prudery!

HIGGINS [tempting her] Such damned nonsense!

CLARA. Such bloody nonsense !

MRS EYNSFORD HILL [convulsively] Clara!

CLARA. Ha ! ha ! [Zhe goes out radiant, conscious of being
thoroughly up to date, and is heard descending the stairs in a
stream of silvery laughter].

FREDDY [to the heavens at large] Well, I ask you — [He
gives it up, and comes to Mrs Higgins]. Good-bye.

MRS HIGGINS [shaking hands] Good-bye. Would you like
to meet Miss Doolittle again?

FREDDY [eagerly] Yes, I should, most awfully.

MRS HIGGINS. Well, you know my days.

FREDDY. Yes. Thanks awfully. Good-bye. [He goes
out].

MRS EYNSFORD HILL. Good-bye, Mr Higgins.

HIGGINS. Good-bye. Good-bye.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL [to Pickering] It's no use. I shall
never be able to bring myself to use that word.

PICKERING. Dont. It's not compulsory, you know. Youll
get on quite well without it.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL. Only, Clara is so down on me if I
am not positively reeking with the latest slang. Good-bye.

PICKERING. Good-bye [They shake hands].

Act III Pygmalion 155

MRS EYNSFORD HILL [to Mrs Higgins] You mustnt mind
Clara. [^Pickering, catching from her lowered tone that this
is not meant for him to hear, discreetly joins Higgins at the
windozu\ We're so poor ! and she gets so few parties, poor
child ! She doesnt quite know. \_Mrs Higgins, seeing that
her eyes are moist, takes her hand sympathetically and goes
with her to the door'\. But the boy is nice. Dont you
think so ?

MRS HIGGINS. Oh, quite nice. I shall always be delighted
to see him.

MRS EYNSFORD HILL. Thank you, dear. Good-bye. [She
goes out].

HIGGINS [eagerly] Well? Is Eliza presentable \_he swoops on
his mother and drags her to the ottoman, where she sits down
in Eliza'' s place zvith her son on her left] ?

Pickering returns to his chair on her right.

MRS HIGGINS. You silly boy, of course shes not present-
able. Shes a triumph of your art and of her dressmaker's;
but if you suppose for a moment that she doesnt give
herself away in every sentence she utters, you must be
perfectly cracked about her.

PICKERING. But dont you think something might be done ?
I mean something to eliminate the sanguinary element
from her conversation.

MRS HIGGINS. Not as long as she is in Henry's hands.

HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is
improper ?

MRS HIGGINS. No, dcarest : it would be quite proper —
say on a canal barge ; but it would not be proper for her
at a garden party.

HIGGINS [deeply injured] Well I must say —

PICKERING [interrupting him] Come, Higgins : you must
learn to know yourself. I havnt heard such language as
yours since we used to review the volunteers in Hyde Park
twenty years ago.

HIGGINS [sulkily] Oh, well, if you say so, I suppose I dont
always talk like a bishop.

156 Pygmalion Act III

MRS HiGGiNS [guteting Henry zvith a touch"] Colonel
Pickering: will you tell me what is the exact state of
things in Wimpole Street?

PICKERING {cheerfully : as if this completely changed the
subject'] Well, I have come to live there with Henry. We
work together at my Indian Dialects; and we think it
more convenient —

MRS HIGGINS. Quitc SO. I know all about that : it's an
excellent arrangement. But where does this girl live?

HIGGINS. With us, of course. Where would she live?

MRS HIGGINS. But on what terms? Is she a servant? If
not, what is she ?

PICKERING [slowl-f] I think I know what you mean, Mrs
Higgins.

HIGGINS. Well, dash me if / do ! Ive had to work at the
girl every day for months to get her to her present pitch.
Besides, shes useful. She knows where my things are, and
remembers my appointments and so forth.

MRS HIGGINS. Howdocs your housekeeper get on with her?

HIGGINS. Mrs Pearce? Oh, shes jolly glad to get so
much taken off her hands; for before Eliza came, she used
to have to find things and remind me of my appoint-
ments. But shes got some silly bee in her bonnet about
Eliza. She keeps saying "You dont think, sir" : doesnt
she, Pick?

PICKERING. Yes: thats the formula. "You dont think,
sir." Thats the end of every conversation about Eliza.

HIGGINS. As if I ever stop thinking about the girl and her
confounded vowels and consonants. I'm worn out, thinking
about her, and watching her lips and her teeth and her
tongue, not to mention her soul, which is the quaintest of
the lot.

MRS HIGGINS. You Certainly are a pretty pair of babies,
playing with your live doll.

HIGGINS. Playing! The hardest job I ever tackled : make
no mistake about that, mother. But you have no idea how
frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and

Act III Pygmalion 157

change her into a quite different human being by creating
a new speech for her. It's filling up the deepest gulf that
separates class from class and soul from soul.

PICKERING [drawing his chair closer to Mrs Higgins and
bending over to her eagerlf\ Yes : it's enormously interest-
ing. I assure you, Mrs Higgins, we take Eliza very
seriously. Every week — every day almost — there is some
new change. \Closer again"] We keep records of every
stage — dozens of gramophone disks and photographs —

HIGGINS \assailing her at the other ear] Yes, by George :
it's the most absorbing experiment I ever tackled. She
regularly fills our lives up : doesnt she. Pick ?

PICKERING. We're always talking Eliza.

HIGGINS. Teaching Eliza.

PICKERING. Dressing Eliza.

MRS HIGGINS. What!

HIGGINS. Inventing new Elizas.

You know, she has the most
\[jpeaiing J extraordinary quickness of ear :
PICKERING. I together] j I assure you, my dear Mrs Higgins,
that girl
'just like a parrot. Ive tried her
with every
PICKERING. IS a genius. She can play the

piano quite beautifully,
possible sort of sound that a
human being can make —
PICKERING. I I We have taken her to classical

concerts and to music
Continental dialects, African dia-
lects, Hottentot
PICKERING. I I halls ; and it's all the same to her :

she plays everything
clicks, things it took me years to
get hold of; and
PICKERING. I she hears right off when she comes

home, whether it's

PICKERING.

HIGGINS.
PICKERING.

|[^/

158 Pygmalion Act III

(she picks them up like a shot,
right away, as if she had
Beethoven and Brahms or Lehar
and Lionel Monckton;
/"been at it all her life.
4 though six months ago, she'd never
[ as much as touched a piano —

MRS HIGGINS [putttKg hcv jingcrs in l:er ears, as tl?ey are by
this time shouting one another down with an intolerable noise'\
Sh-sh-sh— sh! [They stop].

PICKERING. I beg your pardon. \_He draws Ins chair bac\
apologetically].

HIGGINS. Sorry. When Pickering starts shouting nobody
can get a word in edgeways.

MRS HIGGINS. Be quict, Henry. Colonel Pickering: dont
you realize that when Eliza walked into Wimpole Street,
something walked in with her?

PICKERING. Her father did. But Henry soon got rid of
him.

MRS HIGGINS. It would havc been more to the point if her
mother had. But as her mother didnt something else did.

PICKERING. But what?

MRS HIGGINS {uncousciously dating herself by tl:e zvord] A
problem.

PICKERING. Oh, I sec. The problem of how to pass her
off as a lady.

HIGGINS. I'll solve that problem. Ive half solved it
already.

MRS HIGGINS. No, you two infinitely stupid male
creatures: the problem of what is to be done with her
afterwards.

HIGGINS. I dont see anything in that. She can go her
own way, with all the advantages I have given her.

MRS HIGGINS. The advantages of that poor woman who
was here just now ! The manners and habits that disqualify
a fine lady from earning her own living without giving her
a fine lady's income ! Is that what you mean?

Act III Pygmalion 159

PICKERING [indulgently, betfig rather bored'\ Oh, that will
be all right, Mrs Higgins. \He rises to go\.

HiGGiNS \rising also\ We'll find her some light employment.

PICKERING. Shes happy enough. Dont you worry about
her. Good-bye. [He shakes hands as if he were consoling a
frightened cnld, and makes for the door].

HIGGINS. Anyhow, theres no good bothering now. The
thing's done. Good-bye, mother. [He kisses her, and follows
Pickering].

PICKERING [turning for a final consolation] There are
plenty of openings. We'll do whats right. Good-bye.

HIGGINS \to Pickering as they go out together] Let's take
her to the Shakespear exhibition at Earls Court.

PICKERING. Yes: lets. Her remarks will be delicious.

HIGGINS. She'll mimic all the people for us when we get
home.

PICKERING. Ripping. [Both are heard laughing as they go
downstairs].

MRS HIGGINS [rises with an impatietit bounce, and returns to
her work at the writing-table. She sweeps a litter of dis-
arranged papers out of her way ; snatches a sheet of paper from
her stationery case ; and tries resolutely to write. At the third
line she gives it up ; flings down her pen ; grips the table angrily
and exclaims] Oh, men ! men ! ! men ! ! !

ACT IV

The Wlmpole Street laboratory. Midnight. Nobody in the
room. The clock on the mantelpiece strikes twelve. The fire is
not alight: it is a summer night.

Presently Higgins and Pickering are heard on t/:e stairs.

HiGGiNS [calling down to Pickering] I say, Pick : lock up,
will you. I shant be going out again.

PICKERING. Right. Can Mrs Pearcegotobed? We dont
want anything more, do we?

HIGGINS. Lord, no !

Eliza opens the door and is seen on the lighted landing in opera
cloak, brilliant evening dress, and diamonds, with fan, flowers,
and all accessories. She comes to the hearth, and switches on the
electric lights there. She is tired: her pallor contrasts strongly
with her dark eyes and hair; and her expression is almost tragic.
She takes off her cloak; puts her fan and flozuers on the piano;
and sits down on the bench, brooding and silent. Higgins, in
evening dress, with overcoat and hat, comes in, carrying a
smoking jacket which he has picked up downstairs. He takes off
the hat and overcoat; throws them carelessly on the newspaper
stand; disposes of his coat in the same way; puts on the smoking
jacket; and throws himself wearily into the easy-chair at the
hearth. Pickering, similarly attired, comes in. He also takes off
his hat ana overcoat, and is about to throw them on Higgins's
when he hesitates.

PICKERING. I say: Mrs Pcarce will row if we leave these
things lying about in the drawing-room.

160

Act IV Pygmalion i6i

HiGGiNS. Oh, chuck them over the bannisters into the
hall. She'll find them there in the morning and put them
away all right. She'll think we were drunk.

PICKERING. We are, slightly. Are there any letters?

HIGGINS. I didnt look. \^Pickering takes the overcoats and
hats and goes downstairs. Higgins begins half singing half
yawning an air from La Fanciulla del Golden West. Suddenly
he stop and exclaims^ I wonder where the devil my slippers
are !

Eliz.a looks at him darkly ; then rises suddenly and leaves the
room.

Higgins yawns again, and resumes his song.

Pickering returns, with the contents of the letter-box in his
hand.

PICKERING. Only circulars, and this coronetcd billet-doux
for you. \^He throws the circulars into the fender, and posts
himself on the hearthrug, with his back to the grate].

HIGGINS [glancing at the billet-doux] Money-lender. [He
throws the letter after the circulars],

Eliza returns with a pair of large down-at-heel slippers.
She places them on the carpet before Higgins, and sits as before
without a word.

HIGGINS [yawning again] Oh Lord ! What an evening !
What a crew ! What a silly tomfoolery ! [He raises his shoe
to unlace it, and catches sight of the slippers. He stops unlacing
and looks at them as if they had appeared there of their own
accord]. Oh ! theyre there, are they ?

PICKERING [stretching himself] Well, I feel a bit tired. It's
been a long day. The garden party, a dinner party, and
the opera ! Rather too much of a good thing. But youve
won your bet, Higgins. Eliza did the trick, and something
to spare, eh ?

HIGGINS [fervently] Thank God it's over!

Eliza finches violently ; hut they take no notice of her ,• and
she recovers herself and sits stonily as before.

PICKERING. Were you nervous at the garden party? /
was. Eliza didnt seem a bit nervous.

M

1 62 Pygmalion Act IV

HiGGiNS. Oh, she wasnt nervous. I knew she'd be all right.
No: it's the strain of putting the job through all these
months that has told on me. It was interesting enough at
first, while we were at the phonetics ; but after that I got
deadly sick of it. If I hadnt backed myself to do it I
should have chucked the whole thing up two months
ago. It was a silly notion: the whole thing has been a
bore.

PICKERING. Oh come ! the garden party was frightfully
exciting. My heart began beating like anything.

HIGGINS. Yes, for the first three minutes. But when I
saw we were going to win hands down, I felt like a bear
in a cage, hanging about doing nothing. The dinner was
worse : sitting gorging there for over an hour, with nobody
but a damned fool of a fashionable woman to talk to ! I
tell you, Pickering, never again for me. No more arti-
ficial duchesses. The whole thing has been simple pur-
gatory.

PICKERING. Youve ncver been broken in properly to the
social routine. [Strolling over to the piano] I rather enjoy
dipping into it occasionally myself: it makes me feel
young again. Anyhow, it was a great success : an immense
success. I was quite frightened once or twice because Eliza
was doing it so well. You see, lots of the real people cant
do it at all : theyre such fools that they think style comes
by nature to people in their position ; and so they never
learn. Theres always something professional about doing
a thing superlatively well.

HIGGINS. Yes: thats what drives me mad : the silly people
dont know their own silly business. [Rising] However,
it's over and done with ; and now I can go to bed at last
without dreading tomorrow.

Eliza's beauty becomes murderous.

PICKERING. I think I shall turn in too. Still, it's been a
great occasion : a triumph for you. Good-night. [He goes].

HIGGINS [following him] Good-night. [Over his shoulder.,
at the door] Put out the lights, Eliza ; and tell Mrs Pearce

Act IV Pygmalion 163

not to make cofFee for me in the morning : I'll take tea.
[He goes out],

E/iza tries to control herself and feel indifferent as she
rises and walks across to the hearth to switch off the lights. By
the time she gets there she Is on the point of screaming. She
sits down in Higgins's chair and holds on hard to the arms.
Finally she gives way and flings herself furiously on the floor ^
raging.

HiGGiNS [in despairing wrath outside] What the devil have
I done with my slippers? [He appears at the door].

LIZA [snatching up the slippers, and hurling them at him one
after the other with all her force] There are your slippers.
And there. Take your slippers; and may you never have a
day's luck with them !

HIGGINS [astounded] What on earth — ! [He comes to her].
Whats the matter? Get up. [He pulls her up]. Anything

wrong

LIZA [breathless] Nothing wrong — with you. Ive won
your bet for you, havnt I ? Thats enough for you. / dont
matter, I suppose.

HIGGINS. You won my bet! You! Presumptuous insect !
/ won it. What did you throw those slippers at me
for?

LIZA. Because I wanted to smash your face. I'd like to
kill you, you selfish brute. Why didnt you leave me where
you picked me out of — in the gutter? You thank God it's
all over, and that now you can throw me back again there,
do you? [She crisps her fingers frantically].

HIGGINS [looking at her in cool wonder] The creature is ner-
vous, after all.

LIZA [gives a suffocated scream of fur -^^ and instinctively
darts her nails at his face] ! !

HIGGINS [catching her wrists] Ah ! would you ? Claws in,
you cat. How dare you shew your temper to me? Sit down
and be quiet. [He throws her roughly into the easy chair].

LIZA [crushed by superior strength and weight] Whats to
become of me? Whats to become of me?

•.164 Pygmalion Act IV

HiGGiNS. How the devil do I know whats to become of
you ? What does it matter what becomes of you ?

LIZA. You dont care. I know you dont care. You
wouldnt care if I was dead. I'm nothing to you — not so
much as them slippers,

HIGGINS [thundering] Those slippers.

LIZA [with bitter submission] Those slippers. I didnt
think it made any difference now.

ji pause. Eliza hopeless and crushed. Higgins a little uneasy.

HIGGINS [in his loftiest manner] Why have you begun going
on like this? May I ask whether you complain of your
treatment here ?

LIZA. No.

HIGGINS. Has anybody behaved badly to you ? Colonel
Pickering? Mrs Pearce? Any of the servants?

LIZA. No.

HIGGINS. I presume you dont pretend that /have treated
you badly ?

LIZA. No.

HIGGINS. I am glad to hear it. [He moderates his tone].
Perhaps youre tired after the strain of the day. Will you
have a glass of champagne? [He moves towards the door].

LIZA. No. [Recollecting her manners] Thank you.

HIGGINS [gdod-humored again] This has been coming on
you for some days. I suppose it was natural for you to
be anxious about the garden party. But thats all over now.
[He pats her kindly on the shoulder. She writhes]. Theres
nothing more to worry about.

LIZA. No. Nothing more for you to worry about. [She
suddenly rises and gets away from him by going to the piano
bench, where she sits and hides her face]. Oh God! I wish
I was dead.

HIGGINS [staring after her in sincere surprise] Why? In
heaven's name, why? [Reasonably, going to her] Listen to
me, Eliza. All this irritation is purely subjective.

LIZA. I dont understand. I'm too ignorant.

HIGGINS. It's only imagination. Low spirits and nothing

Act IV Pygmalion 165

else. Nobody's hurting you. Nothing's wrong. You go
to bed like a good girl and sleep it off. Have a little cry
and say your prayers : that will make you comfortable.

LIZA. I heard your prayers. "Thank God it's all
over ! "

HiGGiNs [impatiently'] Well, dont you thank God it's all
over? Now you are free and can do what you like.

LIZA [pulling herself together in desperation'] What am I
fit for? What have you left me fit for? Where am I to
go? What am I to do? Whats to become of me?

HIGGINS [enlightened, but not at all impressed] Oh, thats
whats worrying you, is it ? [He thrusts his hands into his pockets,
and walks about 'in his usual manner, rattling the contents of his
pockets, as if condescending to a trivial subject out of pure kind-
ness]. I shouldnt bother about it if I were you. I should
imagine you wont have much difficulty in settling yourself
somewhere or other, though I hadnt quite realized that you
were going away. [She looks quickly at him: he does not look at
her, but examines the dessert stand on the piano and decides that
he will eat an apple]. You might marry, you know. [He bites
a large piece out of the apple and munches it noisily]. You see,
Eliza, all men are not confirmed old bachelors like me and
the Colonel. Most men are the marrying sort (poor devils !) ;
and youre not bad-looking : it's quite a pleasure to look at
you sometimes — not now, of course, because youre crying
and looking as ugly as the very devil ; but when youre all
right and quite yourself, youre what I should call attractive.
That is, to the people in the marrying line, you understand.
You go to bed and have a good nice rest ; and then get up
and look at yourself in the glass ; and you wont feel so
cheap.

Elixa again looks at him, speechless, and does not stir.
The lock is quite lost on him: he eats his apple with a dreamy
expression of happiness, as it is quite a good one.

HiGGiT^i [a genial afterthought occurring to him] I daresay
my mother could find some chap or other who would do
very well.

1 66 Pygmalion Act IV

LIZA. We were above that at the corner of Tottenham
Court Road.

HiGGiNS [waking up] What do you mean ?

LIZA. I sold flowers. I didnt sell myself. Now youve
made a ladj of me I'm not fit to sell anything else. I wish
youd left me where you found me.

HIGGINS \_sUngtng the core of the apple decisively into the
grate] Tosh, Eliza. Dont you insult human relations by
dragging all this cant about buying and selling into it.
You neednt marry the fellow if you dont like him.

LIZA. What else am I to do ?

HIGGINS. Oh, lots of things. What about your old idea
of a florist's shop? Pickering could set you up in one : hes
lots of money. [Chuckling] He'll have to pay for all those togs
you have been wearing to-day ; and that, with the hire of
the jewellery, will make a big hole in two hundred pounds.
Why, six months ago you would have thought it the
millennium to have a flower shop of your own. Come !
youll be all right. I must clear off to bed : I'm devilish
sleepy. By the way, I came down for something : I forget
what it was.

LIZA. Your slippers.

HIGGINS. Oh yes, of course. You shied them at me. [He
picks them up, and is going out when she rises and speaks to
him].

LIZA. Before you go, sir —

HIGGINS [dropping the slippers in his surprise at her calling
him 5;r] Eh ?

LIZA. Do my clothes belong to me or to Colonel
Pickering?

HIGGINS [coming back into the room as if her question were
the very climax of unreason] What the devil use would they
be to Pickering?

LIZA. He might want them for the next girl you pick
up to experiment on.

HIGGINS [shocked and hurt] Is that the way you feel
towards us ?

Act IV Pygmalion 1 67

LIZA. I dont want to hear anything more about that. All
I want to know is whether anything belongs to me. My
own clothes were burnt.

HiGGiNs. But what does it matter? Why need you start
bothering about that in the middle of the night?

LIZA. I want to know what I may take away with me.
I dont want to be accused of stealing.

HIGGINS [nozv deeply wounded\ Stealing! You shouldnt
have said that, Eliza. That shews a want of feeling.

LIZA. I'm sorry. I'm only a common ignorant girl ; and
in my station I have to be careful. There cant be any
feelings between the like of you and the like of me. Please
will you tell me what belongs to me and what doesnt ?

HIGGINS \yery sulky'] You may take the whole damned
houseful if you like. Except the jewels. Theyre hired.
Will that satisfy you ? [He turns on his heel and is about to
go in extreme dudgeon"].

LIZA \drinking in his emotion like nectar^ and nagging him to
provoke a further supply] Stop, please. \^he takes off her
jewels]. Will you take these to your room and keep them
safe? I dont want to run the risk of their being missing.

HIGGINS [furious] Hand them over. [She puts them into
his hands]. If these belonged to me instead of to the j eweller,
I'd ram them down your ungrateful throat. [He per-
functorily thrusts them into his pockets., unconsciously decorating
himself with the protruding ends of the chains].

LIZA [taking a ring off] This ring isnt the jeweller's :
it's the one you bought me in Brighton. I dont want it
now. [Higgins dashes the ring violently into the fireplace, and
turns on her so threateningly that she crouches over the piano
with her hands over her face, and exclaims] Dont you hit me.

HIGGINS. Hit you ! You infamous creature, how dare you
accuse me of such a thing? It is you who have hit me.
You have wounded me to the heart.

LIZA [thrilling with hidden joy] I'm glad. Ive got a little
of my own back, anyhow.

HIGGINS [with dignity, in his finest professional style] You

1 68 Pygmalion Act IV

have caused me to lose my temper : a thing that has hardly
ever happened to me before. I prefer to say nothing more
tonight. I am going to bed.

LIZA [pertly'] Youd better leave a note for Mrs Pcarce
about the coffee ; for she wont be told by me.

HiGGiNs [formally'] Damn Mrs Pearce ; and damn the
coffee; and damn you ; and damn my own folly in having
lavished hard-earned knowledge and the treasure of my
regard and intimacy on a heartless guttersnipe. [He goes
out with impressive decorum, arid spoils it by slamming the door
savagely].

Eliza smiles for the frst time ; expresses her feelings by a
wild pantomime in which an imitation ofHiggins^s exit is con-
fused with her own triumph; and finally goes down on her knees
on the hearthrug to look for the ring.

ACT V

Mrs Higgins's drazving-room. She is at her writing-table as
before. The parlor-maid comes in.

THE PARLOR-MAID \at the door'\ Mr Henry, mam, is down-
stairs with Colonel Pickering.

MRS HiGGiNs. Well, shcw them up.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Thcyrc using the telephone, mam.
Telephoning to the police, I think.

MRS HIGGINS. What!

THE PARLOR-MAID [comtng further in and lowering her
voice] Mr Henry is in a state, mam. I thought I'd better
tell you.

MRS HIGGINS. If you had told me that Mr Henry was not
in a state it would have been more surprising. Tell them
to come up when theyve finished with the police. I suppose
hes lost something.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Ycs, mam [going].

MRS HIGGINS. Go upstairs and tell Miss Doolittle that
Mr Henry and the Colonel are here. Ask her not to come
down til I send for her.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, mam.

Higgins bursts in. He is, as the parlor-maid has said, in a
state.

HIGGINS. Look here, mother: heres a confounded thing!

MRS HIGGINS. Yes, dear. Good-morning. \He checks his
impatience and kisses her, whilst the parlor- maid goes outl.
What is it ?

169

I/O Pygmalion Act V

HiGGiNS. Eliza's bolted.

MRS HIGGINS \_cahnly continuing her writing] You must
have frightened her.

HIGGINS. Frightened her! nonsense! She was left last
night, as usual, to turn out the lights and all that ; and
instead of going to bed she changed her clothes and went
right off: her bed wasnt slept in. She came in a cab for
her things before seven this morning ; and that fool Mrs
Pearce let her have them without telling me a word about
it. What am I to do.''

MRS HIGGINS. Do without, I'm afraid, Henry. The girl
has a perfect right to leave if she chooses.

HIGGINS [wandering distractedly across the room] But I
cant find anything. I dont know what appointments Ive
got. I'm — [Pickering comes in. Mrs Higgins puts down her
pen and turns away from the writing-table].

PICKERING [shaking hands] Good-morning, Mrs Higgins.
Has Henry told you ? [He sits down on the ottomafi].

HIGGINS. What does that ass of an inspector say.'' Have
you offered a reward ?

MRS HIGGINS [rising in indignant amazement] You dont
mean to say you have set the police after Eliza.

HIGGINS. Of course. What are the police for? What
else could we do? [He sits in the Elizabethan chair].

PICKERING. The inspector made a lot of difficulties. 1
really think he suspected us of some improper purpose.

MRS HIGGINS. Well, of coursc he did. What right have
you to go to the police and give the girl's name as if she
were a thief, or a lost umbrella, or something? Really!
[She sits down again, deeply vexed].

HIGGINS. But we want to find her.

PICKERING. We cant let her go like this, you know, Mrs
Higgins. What were we to do?

MRS HIGGINS. You havc HO more sense, either of you,
than two children. Why —

The parlor-maid comes in and breaks off the conversation.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Mr Henry : a gentleman wants to

Act V Pygmalion 171

see you very particular. Hes been sent on from Wimpole
Street.

HiGGiNs. Oh^ bother ! I cant see anyone now. Who is it?

THE PARLOR-MAID. A Mr Doolittlc, sir.

PICKERING. DooHttle ! Do you mean the dustman }

THE PARLOR-MAID. Dustman ! Oh no, sir: a gentleman.

HIGGINS [springing up excitedly^ By George, Pick, it's
some relative of hers that shes gone to. Somebody we
know nothing about. \To the parlor-maid^ Send him up,
quick.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, sir. \^he goes].

HIGGINS [eager/y, going to Ms mother] Genteel relatives!
now we shall hear something. [He sits down in the Chippen-
dale chair].

MRS HIGGINS, Do you know any of her people?

PICKERING. Only her father : the fellow we told you about.

THE PARLOR-MAiD [announcing] Mr Doolittle. [She with-
draws].

DooHttle enters. He is brilliantly dressed in a new fashionable
frock-coat., with white waistcoat and grey trousers. A flower
in his buttonhole^ a dazzling silk hat, and patent leather shoes
complete the effect. He is too concerned with the business he has
come on to notice Mrs Higgins. He walks straight to Higgins,
and accosts him with vehement reproach.

DOOLITTLE [indicating his own person] See here ! Do you
see this? You done this.

HIGGINS. Done what, man ?

DOOLITTLE. This, I tell you. Look at it. Look at this
hat. Look at this coat.

PICKERING. Has Eliza been buying you clothes?

DOOLITTLE. Ellza! not she. Not half. Why would she
buy me clothes ?

MRS HIGGINS. Good-moming, Mr Doolittle. Wont you
sit down ?

DOOLITTLE [taken aback as he becomes conscious that he has
forgotten his hostess] Asking your pardon, maam. [He ap-
proaches her and shakes her proffered hand]. Thank you. [He

172 Pygmalion Act V

sits down on the ottoman, on Pickeriri^s rigkt\ I am that full
of what has happened to me that I cant think of anything
else.

HiGGiNS. What the dickens has happened to you?

DOOLiTTLE. I shouldnt mind if it had only happened
to me : anything might happen to anybody and nobody to
blame but Providence, as you might say. But this is some-
thing that you done to me : yes, you, Henry Higgins.

HIGGINS. Have you found Eliza? Thats the point.

DOOLITTLE. Havc you lost her?

HIGGINS. Yes.

DOOLITTLE. You have all the luck, you have. I aint found
her ; but she'll find me quick enough now after what you
done to me.

MRS HIGGINS. But what has my son done to you, Mr
Doolittle?

DOOLITTLE. Donc to me! Ruined me. Destroyed my
happiness. Tied me up and delivered me into the hands
of middle class morality.

HIGGINS [rising intolerantly and standing over Doolittle^
Youre raving. Youre drunk. Youre mad. I gave you five
pounds. After that I had two conversations with you, at
half-a-crown an hour. Ive never seen you since,

DOOLITTLE. Oh! Drunk ! ami? Mad! ami? Tell me
this. Did you or did you not write a letter to an old
blighter in America that was giving five millions to found
Moral Reform Societies all over the world, and that wanted
you to invent a universal language for him?

HIGGINS. What! Ezra D. Wannafcllcr ! Hes dead. \_He
sits down again carel£ssly\

DOOLITTLE. Yes : hes dead ; and I'm done for. Now
did you or did you not write a letter to him to say that
the most original moralist at present in England, to the
best of your knowledge, was Alfred Doolittle, a common
dustman.

HIGGINS. Oh, after your last visit I remember making
some silly joke of the kind.

Act V Pygmalion 173

DOOLiTTLE. Ah ! you may well call it a silly joke. It
put the lid on me right enough. Just give him the chance
he wanted to shew that Americans is not like us : that
they recognize and respect merit in every class of life,
however humble. Them words is in his blooming will, in
which, Henry Higgins, thanks to your silly joking, he
leaves me a share in his Pre-digested Cheese Trust worth
three thousand a year on condition that I lecture for his
Wannafeller Moral Reform World League as often as they
ask me up to six times a year.

HIGGINS. The devil he does ! Whew ! \_Brightenhig
suddenly'] What a lark !

PICKERING. A safe thing for you, Doolittle. They wont
ask you twice.

DOOLITTLE. It aint the lecturing I mind. I'll lecture
them blue in the face, I will, and not turn a hair. It's
making a gentleman of me that I object to. Who asked
him to make a gentleman of me.? I was happy. I was free.
I touched pretty nigh everybody for money when I wanted
it, same as I touched you, Henry Higgins. Now I am
worrited ; tied neck and heels ; and everybody touches me
for money. It's a fine thing for you, says my solicitor. Is
it? says I. You mean it's a good thing for you, I says.
When I was a poor man and had a solicitor once when
they found a pram in the dust cart, he got me off, and got
shut of me and got me shut of him as quick as he could.
Same with the doctors : used to shove me out of the hos-
pital before I could hardly stand on my legs, and nothing
to pay. Now they finds out that I'm not a healthy man
and cant live unless they looks after me twice a day. In
the house I'm not let do a hand's turn for myself: some-
body else must do it and touch me for it. A year ago
I hadnt a relative in the world except two or three that
wouldnt speak to me. Now Ive fifty, and not a decent
week's wages among the lot of them. I have to live for others
and not for myself: thats middle class morality. You talk
of losing Eliza. Dont you be anxious : I bet shes on my door-

174 Pygmalion Act V

step by this: she that could support herself easy by selling
flowers if I wasnt respectable. And the next one to touch
me will be you, Henry Higgins. I'll have to learn to speak
middle class language from you, instead of speaking proper
English. Thats where youll come in; and I daresay thats
what you done it for.

MRS HIGGINS. But, Hiy dear Mr Doolittle, you need not
suffer all this if you are really in earnest. Nobody can force
you to accept this bequest. You can repudiate it' Isnt that
so, Colonel Pickering?

PICKERING. I believe so.

DOOLITTLE {softenuig his manner in deference to her sex]
Thats the tragedy of it, maam. It's easy to say chuck it;
but I havnt the nerve. Which of us has? We're all in-
timidated. Intimidated, maam : thats what we are. What
is there for me if I chuck it but the workhouse in my old
age? I have to dye my hair already to keep my job as a
dustman. If I was one of the deserving poor, and had put
by a bit, I could chuck it; but then why should I, acause
the deserving poor might as well be millionaires for all the
happiness they ever has. They dont know what happiness
is. But I, as one of the undeserving poor, have nothing
between me and the pauper's uniform but this here blasted
three thousand a year that shoves me into the middle class.
(Excuse the expression, maam : youd use it yourself if you
had my provocation.) Theyve got you every way you turn :
it's a choice between the Skilly of the workhouse and the
Char Bydis of the middle class; and I havnt the nerve for
the workhouse. Intimidated : thats what I am. Broke.
Bought up. Happier men than me will call for my dust,
and touch me for their tip; and I'll look on helpless, and
envy them. And thats what your son has brought me to.
[He is overcome by emotion],

MRS HIGGINS. Well, I'm very glad youre not going to do
anything foolish, Mr Doolittle. For this solves the problem
of Eliza's future. You can provide for her now.

DOOLITTLE \with melancholy resignation] Yes, maam: I'm ex-

Act V Pygmalion 175

pected to provide for everyone now, out of three thousand a
year.

HiGGiNS \^jumping up] Nonsense ! he cant provide for her.
He shant provide for her. She doesnt belong to him. I
paid him five pounds for her. Doolittle : either youre an
honest man or a rogue.

DOOLITTLE [to/erant/y] A little of both, Henry, like the
rest of us : a little of both.

HIGGINS. Well, you took that money for the girl ; and you
have no right to take her as well.

MRS HIGGINS. Henry : dont be absurd. If you want to
know where Eliza is, she is upstairs.

HIGGINS [amaze^l Upstairs ! ! ! Then I shall jolly soon
fetch her downstairs. [He makes resolutely for the door].

MRS HIGGINS [rising and following him] Be quiet, Henry.
Sit down.

HIGGINS. I —

MRS HIGGINS. Sit down, dear; and listen to me.

HIGGINS. Oh very well, very well, very well. [He throws
himself ungraciously on the ottoman, with his face towards the
windows]. But I think you might have told us this half an
hour ago.

MRS HIGGINS. EHza Came to me this morning. She passed
the night partly walking about in a rage, partly trying to
throw herself into the river and being afraid to, and partly
in the Carlton Hotel. She told me of the brutal way you
two treated her.

HIGGINS [bounding up again] What!

PICKERING [rising also] My dear Mrs Higgins, shes been
telling you stories. We didnt treat her brutally. We hardly
said aword to her ; and we parted on particularly good terms.
[Turning on Higgins], Higgins : did you bully her after I
went to bed?

HIGGINS. Just the other way about. She threw my slippers
in my face. She behaved in the most outrageous way. I
never gave her the slightest provocation. The slippers
came bang into my face the moment I entered the room —

176 Pygmalion Act V

before I had uttered a word. And used perfectly awful
language.

PICKERING [astonished] But why? What did we do to her?

MRS HiGGiNS. I think I Icnow pretty well what you did.
The girl is naturally rather affectionate, I think. Isnt she,
Mr Doolittle ?

DOOLiTTLE. Very tender-hearted, maam. Takes after me.

MRS HIGGINS. Just SO. She had become attached to you
both. She worked very hard for you, Henry ! I dont think
you quite realize what anything in the nature of brain work
means to a girl like that. Well, it seems that when the great
day of trial came, and she did this wonderful thing for you
without making a single mistake, you two sat there and
never said a word to her, but talked together of how glad
you were that it was all over and how you had been bored
with the whole thing. And then you were surprised because
she threw your slippers at you ! / should have thrown the
fire-irons at you.

HIGGINS. We said nothing except that we were tired and
wanted to go to bed. Did we. Pick?

PICKERING \shrugging his shoulders] That was all.

MRS HIGGINS \tronicallff\ (^uite sure?

PICKERING. -Absolutely. Really, that was all.

MRS HIGGINS. You didnt thank her, or pet her, or admire
her, or tell her how splendid she'd been.

HIGGINS [impatiently] But she knew all about that. We
didnt make speeches to her, if thats what you mean.

PICKERING [conscience stricke?!] Perhaps we were a little
inconsiderate. Is she very angry?

MRS HIGGINS [returning to her place at the writing-table]
Well, I'm afraid she wont go back to Wimpole Street,
especially now that Mr Doolittle is able to keep up the
position you have thrust on her; but she says she is quite
willing to meet you on friendly terms and to let bygones
be bygones.

HIGGINS [furious] Is she, by George? Ho !

MRS HIGGINS. If you promise to behave yourself, Henry,

Act V Pygmalion 177

I'll ask her to come down. If not, go home ; for you have
taken up quite enough of my time.

HiGGiNS. Oh, all right. Very well. Pick : you behaveyour-
self. Let us put on our best Sunday manners for this
creature that we picked out of the mud. [He flings himself
sulkily into the Elizabethan chair].

DOOLiTTLE [remonstrating] Now, now, Henry Higgins !
have some consideration for my feelings as a middle class
man.

MRS HIGGINS. Remember your promisc, Hcnry. [She presses
the bell-button on the writing-table]. Mr Doolittle : will you be
so good as to step out on the balcony for a moment. I dont
want Eliza to have the shock of your news until she has
made it up with these two gentlemen. Would you mind?

DOOLITTLE. As you wish, lady. Anything to help Henry
to keep her off my hands. [He disappears through the window].

The parlor-maid answers the bell. Pickering sits down in
Doolittle s place.

MRS HIGGINS. Ask Miss Doolittle to come down, please.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Ycs, mam. [She goes out],

MRS HIGGINS. Now, Henry : be good.

HIGGINS. I am behaving myself perfectly.

PICKERING. He is doing his best, Mrs Higgins.

A pause. Higgins throws back his head ; stretches out his
legs ; and begins to whistle.

MRS HIGGINS. Hcury, dearest, you dont look at all nice in
that attitude.

HIGGINS [pulling himself together] I was not trying to look
nice, mother.

MRS HIGGINS. It doesut matter, dear. I only wanted to
make you speak.

HIGGINS. Why?

MRS HIGGINS. Bccausc you cant speak and whistle at the
same time.

Higgins groans. Another very trying pause.

HIGGINS [springing up, out of patience] Where the devil is
that girl? Are we to wait here all day?

N

lyg Pygmalion ActV

Eliza enters, sunny, self-possessed, and giving a staggeringly
convincing exhibition of ease of manner. She carries a little
work-basket, and is very much at home. Pickering is too much
taken aback to rise.

LIZA. How do you do, Professor Higgins? Are you quite
well ?

HIGGINS \choking'\ Am I — {lie can no more].

LIZA. But of course you are : you are never ill. So glad
to see you again, Colonel Pickering. [He rises hastily ; and
they shake hands]. Quite chilly this morning, isnt it? [She
sits down on his left. He sits beside her].

HIGGINS. Dont you dare try this game on me. I taught
it to you; and it doesnt take me in. Get up and come
home; and dont be a fool.

Eliza takes a piece of needlework from her basket, and begins
to stitch at it, without taking the least notice of this outburst.

MRS HIGGINS. Very nicely put, indeed, Henry. No woman
could resist such an invitation.

HIGGINS. You let her alone, mother. Let her speak for
herself. You will jolly soon see whether she has an idea
that I havnt put into her head or a word that I havnt put
into her mouth. I tell you I have created this thing out of
the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden ; and now
she pretends to play the fine lady with me.

MRS HIGGINS [placidly] Yes, dear; but youU sit down, wont
you ?

Higgins sits down again, savagely.

LIZA [to Pickering, taking no apparent notice of Higgins, and
working away deftly] Will you drop me altogether now
that the experiment is over. Colonel Pickering?

PICKERING. Oh dont. You mustnt think of it as an ex-
periment. It shocks me, somehow.

LIZA. Oh, I'm only a squashed cabbage leaf —

PICKERING [impulsively] No.

LIZA [continuing quietly] — but I owe so much to you
that I should be very unhappy if you forgot me,

PICKERING. It's very kind of you to say so, Miss Doolittlc.

ActV Pygmalion 179

LIZA. It's not because you paid for my dresses. I know"
you are generous to everybody with money. But it was from
you that I learnt really nice manners; and that is what
makes one a lady, isnt it ? You see it was so very difficult for
me with the example of Professor Higgins always before
me. I was brought up to be just like him, unable to control
myself, and using bad language on the slightest provoca-
tion. And I should never have known that ladies and gentle-
men didnt behave like that if you hadnt been there.

HIGGINS. Well ! !

PICKERING. Oh, thats only his way, you know. He doesnt
mean it.

LIZA. Oh, / didnt mean it either, when I was a flower
girl. It was only my way. But you see I did it; and thats
what makes the difference after all.

PICKERING. No doubt. Still, he taught you to speak ; and
I couldnt have done that, you know,

LIZA [^triz'ia/ly'] Of course : that is his profession.

HIGGINS. Damnation !

LIZA [continuing'] It was just like learning to dance in the
fashionable way : there was nothing more than that in it.
But do you know what began my real education ?

PICKERING. What.''

LIZA [stopping her work for a moment] Your calling me Miss
Doolittle that day when I first came to Wimpole Street.
That was the beginning of self-respect for me. [ihe resumes
her stitching]. And there were a hundred little things you
never noticed, because they came naturally to you. Things
about standing up and taking off your hat and opening
doors —

PICKERING. Oh, that was nothing.

LIZA. Yes : things that shewed you thought and felt about
me as if I were something better than a scullery-maid;
though of course I know you would have been just the
same to a scullery-maid if she had been let into the drawing-
room. You never took off your boots in the dining-room
when I was there.

1 80 Pygmalion Act V

PICKERING. You mustnt mind that. Higgins takes ofF his
boots all over the place.

LIZA. I know. I am not blaming him. It is his way, isnt
it? But it made such a difference to me that you didnt
do it. You see, really and truly, apart from the things any-
one can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speak-
ing, and so on), the difference between a lady and a Hower
girl is not how she behaves, but how shes treated. I shall
always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he
always treats me as a flower girl, and always will ; but I
know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me
as a lady, and always will.

MRS HIGGINS. Plcase dont grind your teeth, Henry.

PICKERING. Well, this is really very nice of you, Miss
Doolittle.

LIZA. I should like you to call rae Eliza, now, if you
would.

PICKERING. Thank you. Eliza, of course.

LIZA. And I should like Professor Higgins to call me Miss
Doolittle.

HIGGINS. I'll see you damned first.

MRS HIGGINS. Henry! Henry!

PICKERING [LiUg/:ing] Why dont you slang back at him ?
Dont stand it. It would do him a lot of good.

LIZA. I cant. I could have done it once ; but now I
cant go back to it. Last night, when I was wandering about,
a girl spoke to me; and I tried to get back into the old
way with her ; but it was no use. You told me, you know,
that when a child is brought to a foreign country, it picks up
the language in a few weeks, and forgets its own. Well,
I am a child in your country. I have forgotten my own
language, and can speak nothing but yours. Thats the
real break-off with the corner of Tottenham Court Road.
Leaving Wimpole Street finishes it.

picKKRiNG [muc/? alarmed\ Oh ! but youre coming back to
Wimpole Street, arnt you? Youll forgive Higgins?

HIGGINS \rising\ Forgive! Will she, by George ! Let her

Act V Pygmalion i8i

go. Let her find out how she can get on without us. She
will relapse into the gutter in three weeks without me at
her elbow.

Doolittle appears at the centre window. With a look of
dignified reproach at Higgins, he comes slowly and silently to his
daughter, who, with her back to the window, is unconscious of his
approach.

PICKERING. Hes incorrigible, Eliza. You wont relapse,
will you?

LIZA. No : not now. Never again. I have learnt my lesson.
I dont believe I could utter one of the old sounds if I
tried. \_Doolittle touches her on her left shoulder. She drops her
work, losing her self-possession utterly at the spectacle of her
father" s splendor'] A-a-a-a-a-ah-ow-ooh !

HiGGiNS [with a crow of triumph] Aha! Just so. A-a-a-a-
ahowooh ! A-a-a-a-ahowooh ! A-a-a-a-ahowooh ! Victory !
Victory! [He throws himself on the divan, folding his arms,
and spraddling arrogantly].

DOOLITTLE. Can you blame the girl? Dont look at me
like that, Eliza. It aint my fault. Ive come into some
money.

LIZA. You must have touched a millionaire this time,
dad.

DOOLITTLE. I havc. But I'm dressed something special
today. I'm going to St. George's, Hanover Square. Your
stepmother is going to marry me.

LIZA [angrily] Youre going to let yourself down to marry
that low common woman !

PICKERING [quietly] He ought to, Eliza. [To Doolittle]
Why has she changed her mind?

DOOLITTLE [sadly] Intimidated, Governor. Intimidated.
Middle class morality claims its victim. Wont you put on
your hat, Liza, and come and see me turned oft?

LIZA. If the Colonel says I must, I — I'll [almost sobbing]
I'll demean myself. And get insulted for my pains, like
enough.

DOOLITTLE. Dont be afraid : she never comes to words

1 82 Pygmalion Act V

with anyone now, poor woman I respectability has broke
all the spirit out of her.

PICKERING \_squeezifig Eliza's elbow gently'] Be kind to
them, Eliza. Make the best of it.

LIZA [forcing a little smile for him through her vexation] Oh
well, just to shew theres no ill feeling. I'll be back in a
moment. \^he goes out\

DooLiTTLE [sitting down beside Pickering] I feel uncommon
nervous about the ceremony, Colonel. I wish youd come
and see me through it.

PICKERING. But youve been through it before, man. You
were married to Eliza's mother.

DOOLITTLE. Who told you that, Colonel?

PICKERING. Well, nobody told me. But I concluded —
naturally —

DOOLITTLE. No : that aint the natural way. Colonel : it's
only the middle class way. My way was always the un-
deserving way. But dont say nothing to Eliza. She dont
know: I always had a delicacy about telling her.

PICKERING, (^uite right. We'll leave it so, if you dont
mind.

DOOLITTLE. And youll come to the church. Colonel,
and put me through straight?

PICKERING. With pleasure. As far as a bachelor can.

MRS HiGGiNS. May I come, Mr Doolittle? I should be
very sorry to miss your wedding.

DOOLITTLE. I should indccd be honored by your con-
descension, maam ; and my poor old woman would take it
as a tremenjous compliment. Shes been very low, thinking
of the happy days that are no more.

MRS HIGGINS \rising] I'll order the carriage and get ready.
\The men rise, except Higgins]. I shant be more than fifteen
minutes. [As she goes to the door Eliza comes in, hatted and
buttoning her gloves]. I'm going to the church to see your
father married, Eliza. You had better come in the
brougham with me. Colonel Pickering can go on with the
bridegroom.

Act V Pygmalion 183

Mrs Higgins goes out. Eliza comes to the middle of the room
between the centre zuindow and the ottoman. Pickering joins her.

DooLiTTLE. Bridcgroom ! What a word ! It makes a
man realize his position, somehow. \^He takes up his hat and
goes towards the door].

PICKERING. Before I go, Eliza, do forgive him and come
back to us.

LIZA. 1 dont think papa would allow me. Would you,
dad?

DOOLITTLE [sad but magnanimous'] They played you off
verycunning, Eliza, them two sportsmen. If it had been only
one of them, you could have nailed him. But you see, there
was two; and one of them chaperoned the other, as you
might say. [To Pickering] It was artful of you. Colonel ; but
I bear no malice : I should have done the same myself.
I been the victim of one woman after another all my life;
and I dont grudge you two getting the better of Eliza. I
shant interfere. It's time for us to go, Colonel. So long,
Henry. See you in St. George's, Eliza. [He goes out].

PICKERING [coaxing] Do stay with us, Eliza. [He follows
Doolittle].

Eliza goes out on the balcony to avoid being alone with
Higgins. He rises and joins her there. She immediately comes
back into the room and makes for the door; but he goes along the
balcony quickly and gets his back to the door before she reaches it,

HIGGINS. Well, Eliza, youve had a bit of your own back,
as you call it. Have you had enough ? and are you going to
be reasonable.' Or do you want any more?

LIZA. You want me back only to pick up your slippers
and put up with your tempers and fetch and carry for you.

HIGGINS. I havnt said I wanted you back at all.

LIZA. Oh, indeed. Then what are we talking about?

HIGGINS. About you, not about me. If you come back I
shall treat you just as I have always treated you, I cant
change my nature; and I dont intend to change my
manners. My manners are exactly the same as Colonel
Pickering's.

184 Pygmalion Act V

LIZA. Thats not true. He treats a flower girl as if she
was a duchess.

HiGGiNS. And I treat a duchess as if she was a flower girl.

LIZA. I see. [S/ie turns away composedly, and sits on the
ottoman, facing the windozv\ The same to everybody.

HIGGINS. Just so.

LIZA. Like father.

HIGGINS [^grinning, a little taken down'] Without accepting
the comparison at all points, Eliza, it's quite true that your
father is not a snob, and that he will be quite at home in
any station of life to which his eccentric destiny may call
him. [Seriously'] The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad
manners or good manners or any other particular sort of
manners, but having the same manner for all human souls :
in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there
are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

LIZA. Amen. You are a born preacher.

HIGGINS \irritated] The question is not whether I treat
you rudely, but whether you ever heard me treat anyone
else better.

LIZA [with sudden sincerity] I dont care how you treat me.
I dont mind your swearing at me. I dont mind a black
eye: Ive had one before this. But [standing up and facing
him] I wont be passed over.

HIGGINS. Then get out of my way; for I wont stop for
you. You talk about me as if I were a motor bus.

LIZA. So yoLi are a motor bus : all bounce and go, and no
consideration for anyone. But I can do without you: dont
think I cant.

HIGGINS. I know you can. I told you you could.

LIZA [zvoundcd, getting away from him to the other side of
the ottoman with her face to the hearth] I know you did, you
brute. You wanted to get rid of mc.

HIGGINS. Liar.

LIZA. Thank you. [She sits down with dignity].

HIGGINS. You never asked yourself, I suppose, whether /
could do without you.

ActV Pygmalion 185

LIZA [earnestly] Dont you try to get round me. Youll
have to do without me.

HiGGiNS [arrogant] I can do without anybody. I have
my own soul : my own spark of divine fire. But [witA
sudden humility] I shall miss you, Eliza. [He sits down
near her on the ottoman], I have learnt something from your
idiotic notions : I confess that humbly and gratefully. And
I have grown accustomed to your voice and appearance.
I like them, rather.

LIZA. Well, you have both of them on your gramophone
and in your book of photographs. When you feel lonely
without me, you can turn the machine on. It's got no
feelings to hurt.

HIGGINS. I cant turn your soul on. Leave me those
feelings ; and you can take away the voice and the face.
They are not you.

LIZA. Oh, you area devil. You can twist the heart in a
girl as easy as some could twist her arms to hurt her. Mrs
Pearce warned me. Time and again she has wanted to
leave you ; and you always got round her at the last
minute. And you dont care a bit for her. And you dont
care a bit for me.

HIGGINS. 1 care for life, for humanity ; and you are a
part of it that has come my way and been built into my"
house. What more can you or anyone ask ?

LIZA. I wont care for anybody that docsnt care for

me.

HIGGINS. Commercial principles, Eliza. Like [reproducing
her Covent Garden pronunciation with professional exactness]
s'yollin voylets [selling violets], isnt it?

LIZA. Dont sneer at me. It's mean to sneer at me.

HIGGINS. I have never sneered in my life. Sneering
doesnt become either the human face or the human soul.
I am expressing my righteous contempt for Commercialism.
I dont and wont trade in affection. You call me a brute
because you couldnt buy a claim on me by fetching my
slippers and finding my spectacles. You were a fool : I think

1 86 Pygmalion Act V

a woman fetching a man's slippers is a disgusting sight : did I
ever fetch your slippers? I think a good deal more of you
for throwing them in my face. No use slaving for me and
then saying you want to be cared for : who cares for a slave?
If you come back, come back for the sake of good fellow-
ship; for youll get nothing else. Youve had a thousand
times as much out of me as I have out of you ; and if you
dare to set up your little dog's tricks of fetching and carry-
ing slippers against my creation of a Duchess Eliza, I'll
slam the door in your silly face.

LIZA. What did you do it for if you didnt care for me ?

HiGGiNs \_heartily\ Why, because it was my job.

LIZA. You never thought of the trouble it would make
for me.

HIGGINS. Would the world ever have been made if its
maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life
means making trouble. Theres only one way of escaping
trouble; and thats killing things. Cowards, you notice,
are always shrieking to have troublesome people killed.

LIZA. I'm no preacher: I dont notice things like that.
I notice that you dont notice me.

HIGGINS \_jumping up and walking about intolerantly'] Eliza :
youre an idiot. I waste the treasures of my Miltonic mind
by spreading them before you. Once for all, understand
that I go my way and do my work without caring twopence
what happens to either of us. 1 am not intimidated, like
your father and your stepmother. So you can come back or
go to the devil : which you please.

LIZA. What am I to come back for?

HIGGINS {bouncing up on his knees on the ottoman and lean-
ing over it to her] For the fun of it. Thats why I took you on.

LIZA [with averted face] And you may throw me out
tomorrow if I dont do everything you want me to ?

HIGGINS. Yes; and you may walk out tomorrow if I
dont do everything you want me to.

LIZA. And live with my stepmother? •

HIGGINS. Yes. or sell flowers.

Act V Pygmalion 187

LIZA. Oh! if I only could go back to my flower
basket ! I should be independent of both you and father
and all the world ! Why did you take my independence
from me? Why did I give it up? I'm a slave now, for all
my fine clothes.

HiGGiNs. Not a bit. I'll adopt you as my daughter and
settle money on you if you like. Or would you rather
marry Pickering?

LIZA \looking fiercel'^ round at him'] I wouldnt marry you
if you asked me; and youre nearer my age than what
he is.

HIGGINS [^gently'] Than he is: not "than what he is."

LIZA \losing her temper and rising] I'll talk as I like.
Youre not my teacher now.

HIGGINS [rejiective/y] I dont suppose Pickering would,
though. Hes as confirmed an old bachelor as I am.

LIZA, Thats not what I want; and dont you think it.
Ive always had chaps enough wanting me that way. Freddy
Hill writes to me twice and three times a day, sheets and
sheets.

HIGGINS \disagreeahly surprised] Damn his impudence !
\He recoils and finds himself sitting on his heels].

LIZA. He has a right to if he likes, poor lad. And he
does love me.

HIGGINS [getting off the ottoman] You have no right to
encourage him.

LIZA, Every girl has a right to be loved.

HIGGINS. What! By fools like that?

LIZA. Freddy's not a fool. And if hes weak and poor and
wants me, may be hed make me happier than my betters
that bully me and dont want me.

HIGGINS. Can he make anything of you? Thats the
point.

LIZA. Perhaps I could make something of him. But I
never thought of us making anything of one another ; and
you never think of anything else. I only want to be
natural.

1 88 Pygmalion Act V

HiGGiNs. In short, you want me to be as infatuated about
you as Freddy ? Is that it ?

LIZA. No I dont. Thats not the sort of feeling I want
from you. And dont you be too sure of yourself or of me.
I could have been a bad girl if I'd liked. Ive seen more
of some things than you, for all your learning. Girls like
me can drag gentlemen down to make love to them easy
enough. And they wish each other dead the next minute.

HIGGINS. Of course they do. Then what in thunder are
we quarrelling about.''

LIZA [much troubIed'\ I want a little kindness. I know
I'm a common ignorant girl, and you a book-learned gentle-
man ; but I'm not dirt under your feet. What I done
[correcting herse/f] what I did was not for the dresses and
the taxis : I did it because we were pleasant together and
I come — came — to care for you ; not to want you to make
love to me, and not forgetting the difference between us,
but more friendly like.

HIGGINS. Well, of course. Thats just how I feel. And
how Pickering feels. Eliza : youre a fool.

LIZA. Thats not a proper answer to give me [s/:e sinks
on the chair at the writing-table in tears\

HIGGINS. It's all youU get until you stop being a common
idiot. If youre going to be a lady, youll have to give up
feeling neglected if the men you know dont spend half their
time snivelling over you and the other half giving you black
eyes. If you cant stand the coldness of my sort of life, and
the strain of it, go back to the gutter. Work til you are
more a brute than a human being; and then cuddle and
squabble and drink til you fall asleep. Oh, it's a fine life,
the life of the gutter. It's real : it's warm : it's violent ;
you can feel it through the thickest skin : you can taste
it and smell it without any training or any work. Not
like Science and Literature and Classical Music and
Philosophy and Art. You find me cold, unfeeling, selfish,
dont you ? Very well : be off with you to the sort of
people you like. Marry some sentimental hog or other with

Act V Pygmalion 189

lots of money, and a thick pair of lips to kiss you with
and a thick pair of boots to kick you with. If you cant
appreciate what youve got, youd better get what you can
appreciate.

LIZA \_desperate'\ Oh, you are a cruel tyrant. I cant talk
to you : you turn everything against me : I'm always in the
wrong. But you know very well all the time that youre
nothing but a bully. You know I cant go back to the gutter,
as you call it, and that I have no real friends in the world
but you and the Colonel. You know well I couldnt bear
to live with a low common man after you two ; and it's
wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending
I could. You think I must go back to Wimpole Street
because I have nowhere else to go but father's. But dont
you be too sure that you have me under your feet to be
trampled on and talked down. I'll marry Freddy, I will, as
soon as hes able to support me.

HiGGiNs \_5itting down beside her"] Rubbish ! you shall marry
an ambassador. You shall marry the Governor-General of
India or the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, or somebody who
wants a deputy-queen. I'm not going to have my master-
piece thrown away on Freddy.

LIZA. You think I like you to say that. But I havnt
forgot what you said a minute ago ; and I wont be coaxed
round as if I was a baby or a puppy. If I cant have kind-
ness, I'll have independence.

HIGGINS. Independence? Thats middle class blasphemy.
We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on
earth.

LIZA [rising determinedly^ I'll let you see whether I'm
dependent on you. If you can preach, I can teach. I'll go
and be a teacher.

HIGGINS. Whatll you teach, in heaven's name ?

LIZA. What you taught me. I'll teach phonetics.

HIGGINS. Ha! ha! ha!

LIZA. I'll offer myself as an assistant to Professor
Nepean.

190 Pygmalion Act V

HiGGiNS [riswg in a fury] What ! That impostor ! that
humbug ! that toadying ignoramus ! Teach him my
methods ! my discoveries ! You take one step in his
direction and I'll wring your neck. [He lays hands on her].
Do you hear ?

LIZA {defiantly non-resistant] Wring away. What do I
care? I knew youd strike me some day. [He lets her go,
stamping with rage at having forgotten himself and recoils
so hastily that he stumbles hack into his seat on the ottoman].
Aha ! Now I know how to deal with you. What a fool I
was not to think of it before ! You cant take away the
knowledge you gave me. You said I had a finer ear than
you. And I can be civil and kind to people, which is more
than you can. Aha ! Thats done you, Henry Higgins, it
has. Now I dont care that [snapping her fingers] for your
bullying and your big talk. I'll advertize it in the papers
that your duchess is only a flower girl that you taught, and
that she'll teach anybody to be a duchess just the same
in six months for a thousand guineas. Oh, when I think
of myself crawling under your feet and being trampled
on and called names, when all the time I had only to
lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick
myself.

HIGGINS [wondering at her] You damned impudent slut,
you ! But it's better than snivelling; better than fetching
slippers and finding spectacles, isnt it? [Rising] By George,
Eliza, I said I'd make a woman of you ; and I have. I
like you like this.

LIZA. Yes : you turn round and make up to me now
that I'm not afraid of you, and can do without you.

HIGGINS. Of course I do, you little fool. Five minutes
ago you were like a millstone round my neck. Now yourc
a tower of strength : a consort battleship. You and I and
Pickering will be three old bachelors together instead of
only two men and a silly girl.

Mrs Higgins returns, dressed for the wedding. Eliza in-
stantly becomes cool and elegant.

Act V Pygmalion 191

MRS HiGGiNS. The Carriage is waiting, Eliza. Are you
ready ?

LIZA. Quite. Is the Professor coming?

MRS HIGGINS. Certainly not. He cant behave himself in
church. He makes remarks out loud all the time on the
clergyman's pronunciation.

LIZA. Then I shall not see you again, Professor. Good-
bye. [S/:e goes to the door],

MRS HIGGINS {comhig to Higgins] Good-bye, dear.

HIGGINS. Good-bye, mother. [He is about to kiss her, when
he recollects something']. Oh, by the way, Eliza, order a ham
and a Stilton cheese, will you? And buy me a pair of rein-
deer gloves, number eights, and a tie to match that new suit
of mine, at Eale & Binman's. You can choose the color.
[His cheerful, careless, vigorous voice shows that he is incorrigible].

LIZA [disdainfully] Buy them yourself [She sweeps out].

MRS HIGGINS. I'm afraid youve spoiled that girl, Henry.
But never mind, dear : I'll buy you the tie and gloves.

HIGGINS [sunnily] Oh, dont bother. She'll buy em all right
enough. Good-bye.

They kiss. Mrs Higgins runs out. Higgins, left alone, rattles
his cash in his pocket; chuckles: and disports himself in a highly
self-satisfied manner.

******

The rest of the story need not be shewn in action, and
indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were
not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-
mades and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance
keeps its stock of " happy endings " to misfit all stories. Now,
the history of Eliza Doolittle, though called a romance
because the transfiguration it records seems exceedingly
improbable, is common enough. Such transfigurations have
been achieved by hundreds of resolutely ambitious young
women since Nell Gwynne set them the example by play-
ing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which
she began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in all

192 Pygmalion

directions have assumed, for no other reason than that she
became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married
the hero of it. This is unbearable, not only because her
little drama, if acted on such a thoughtless assumption, must
be spoiled, but because the true sequel is patent to anyone
with a sense of human nature in general, and of feminine
instinct in particular.

Eliza, in telling Higgins she would not marry him if he
asked her, was not coquetting : she was announcing a well-
considered decision. When a bachelor interests, and domin-
ates, and teaches, and becomes important to a spinster, as
Higgins with Eliza, she always, if she has character enough to
be capable of it, considers very seriously indeed whether she
will play for becoming that bachelor's wife, especially if he is
so little interested in marriage that a determined and devoted
woman might capture him if she set herself resolutely to do
it. Her decision will depend a good deal on whether she is
really free to choose ; and that, again, will depend on her age
and income. If she is at the end of her youth, and has no
security for her livelihood, she will marry him because she
must marry anybody who will provide for her. But at Eliza's
age a good-looking girl does not feel that pressure: she feels
free to pick and choose. She is therefore guided by her
instinct in the matter. Eliza's instinct tells her not to marry
Higgins. It does not tell her to give him up. It is not in the
slightest doubt as to his remaining one of the strongest per-
sonal interests in her life. It would be very sorely strained
if there was another woman likely to supplant her with him.
But as she feels sure of him on that last point, she has no
doubt at all as to her course, and would not have any, even
if the difference of twenty years in age, which seems so great
to youth, did not exist between them.

As our own instincts are not appealed to by her
conclusion, let us see whether we cannot discover some
reason in it. When Higgins excused his indifference to
young women on the ground that they had an irresistible
rival in his mother, he gave the clue to his inveterate old-

Pygmalion 193

bachelordom. The case is uncommon only to the extent
that remarkable mothers are uncommon. If an imaginative
boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence,
personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and
a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her
to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him
against which very few women can struggle, besides effect-
ing for him a disengagement of his aifections, his sense
of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual
impulses. This makes him a standing puzzle to the huge
number of uncultivated people who have been brought up
in tasteless homes by commonplace or disagreeable parents,
and to whom, consequently, literature, painting, sculpture,
music, and affectionate personal relations come as modes of
sex if they come at all. The word passion means nothing else
to them ; and that Higgins could have a passion for phon-
etics and idealize his mother instead of Eliza, would seem to
them absurd and unnatural. Nevertheless, when we look
round and see that hardly anyone is too ugly or disagreeable
to find a wife or a husband if he or she wants one, whilst
many old maids and bachelors are above theaveragein quality
and culture, we cannot help suspecting that the disentangle-
ment of sex from the associations with which it is so com-
monly confused, a disentanglement which persons of genius
achieve by sheer intellectual analysis, is sometimes produced
or aided by parental fascination.

Now, though Eliza was incapable of thus explainingto her-
self Higgins's formidable powers of resistance to the charm
that prostrated Freddy at the first glance, she was instinct-
ively aware that she could never obtain a complete grip of
him, or come between him and his mother (the first neces-
sity of the married woman). To put it shortly, she knew that
for some mysterious reason he had not the makings of a
married man in him, according to her conception of a
husband as one to whom she would be his nearest and fond-
est and warmest interest. Even had there been no mother-
rival, she would still have refused to accept an interest in her-

o

1 94 Pygmalion

self that was secondary to philosophic interests. Had Mrs
Higgins died, there would still have been Milton and the
Universal Alphabet. Landor's remark that to those who
have the greatest power of loving, love is a secondary affair,
would not have recommended Landor to Eliza. Put that
along with her resentment of Higgins's domineering superi-
ority, and her mistrust of his coaxing cleverness in getting
round her and evading her wrath when he had gone too far
with his impetuous bullying, and you will see that Eliza's
instinct had good grounds for warning her not to marry her
Pygmalion.

And now, whom did Eliza marry? For if Higgins was a
predestinate old bachelor, she was most certainly not a pre-
destinate old maid. Well, that can be told very shortly to
those who have not guessed it from the indications she has
herself given them.

Almost immediately after Eliza is stung into proclaiming
her considered determination not to marry Higgins, she men-
tions the fact that young Mr Frederick Eynsford Hill is
pouring out his love for her daily through the post. Now
Freddy is young, practically twenty years younger than
Higgins : he is a gentleman (or, as Eliza would quality him, a
toff), and speaks like one; he is nicely dressed, is treated by
the Colonel as an equal, loves her unaffectedly, and is not
her master, nor ever likely to dominate her in spite of his
advantage of social standing. Eliza has no use for the foolish
romantic tradition that all women love to be mastered,
if not actually bullied and beaten. "When you go to
women," says Nietzsche, "take your whip with you." Sen-
sible despots have never confined that precaution to women:
they have taken their whips with them when they have
dealt with men, and been slavishly idealized by the men over
whom they have flourished the whip much more than by
women. No doubt there are slavish women as well as slav-
ish men; andwomen, like men, admire those that are stronger
than themselves. But to admire a strong person and to live
under that strong person's thumb are two different things.

Pygmalion 195

The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped ; but
they are by no means disliked or shunned ; and they never
seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are
too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life
is not one long emergency : it is mostly a string of situations
for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which
even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger
partner to help them out. Accordingly, it is a truth every-
where in evidence that strong people, masculine or feminine,
not only do not marry stronger people, but do not shew any
preference for them in selecting their friends. When a lion
meets another with a louder roar " the first lion thinks the
last a bore." The man or woman who feels strong enough
for two, seeks for every other quality in a partner than
strength.

The converse is also true. Weak people want to marry
strong people who do not frighten them too much ; and
this often leads them to make the mistake we describe meta-
phorically as "biting off more than they can chew." They
want too much for too little ; and when the bargain is un-
reasonable beyond all bearing, the union becomes impossible:
it ends in the weaker party being either discarded or borne
as a cross, which is worse. People who are not only weak,
but silly or obtuse as well, are often in these difficulties.

This being the state of human affairs, what is Eliza fairly
sure to do when she is placed between Freddy and Higgins?
Will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins's
slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers ? There can
be no doubt about the answer. Unless Freddy is biologically
repulsive to her, and Higgins biologically attractive to a
degree that overwhelms all her other instincts, she will, if
she marries either of them, marry Freddy.

And that is just what Eliza did.

Complications ensued ; but they were economic, not ro-
mantic. Freddy had no money and no occupation. His
mother's jointure, a last relic of the opulence of Largelady
Park, had enabled her to struggle along in Earlscourt with

196 Pygmalion

an air of gentility, but not to procure any serious secondary
education for her children, much less give the boy a pro-
fession. A clerkship at thirty shillings a week was beneath
Freddy's dignity, and extremely distasteful to him besides.
His prospects consisted of a hope that if he kept up appear-
ances somebody would do something for him. The some-
thing appeared vaguely to his imagination as a private
secretaryship or a sinecure of some sort. To his mother it
perhaps appeared as a marriage to some lady of means who
could not resist her boy's niceness. Fancy her feelings when
he married a flower girl who had become declassee under
extraordinary circumstances which were now notorious !

It is true that Eliza's situation did not seem wholly in-
eligible. Her father, though formerly a dustman, and now
fantasticallydisclassed, had become extremely popular in the
smartest society by a social talent which triumphed over
every prejudice and every disadvantage. Rejected by the
middle class, which he loathed, he had shot up at once into
the highest circles by his wit, his dustmanship (which he
carried like a banner), and his Nietzschean transcendence
of good and evil. At intimate ducal dinners he sat on the
right hand of the Duchess ; and in country houses he smoked
in the pantry and was made much of by the butler when
he was not feeding in the dining-room and being consulted
by cabinet ministers. But he found it almost as hard to do
all this on four thousand a year as Mrs Eynsford Hill to live
in Earlscourt on an income so pitiably smaller that I have
not the heart to disclose its exact figure. He absolutely
refused to add the last straw to his burden by contributing
to Eliza's support.

Thus Freddy and Eliza, now Mr and Mrs Eynsford Hill,
would have spent a penniless honeymoon but for a wedding
present of ^^500 from the Colonel to Eliza. It lasted a long
time because Freddy did not know how to spend money,
never having had any to spend, and Eliza, socially trained
by a pair of old bachelors, wore her clothes as long as they
held together and looked pretty, without the least regard to

Pygmalion 197

their being many months out of fashion. Still, j^500 will
not last two young people for ever ; and they both knew,
and Eliza felt as well, that they must shift for themselves in
the end. She could quarter herself on Wimpolc Street be-
cause it had come to be her home ; but she was quite aware
that she ought not to quarter Freddy there, and that it
would not be good for his character if she did.

Not that the Wimpole Street bachelors objected. When
she consulted them, Higgins declined to be bothered about
her housing problem when that solution was so simple.
Eliza's desire to have Freddy in the house with her seemed
of no more importance than if she had wanted an extra
piece of bedroom furniture. Pleas as to Freddy's character,
and the moral obligation on him to earn his own living, were
lost on Higgins. He denied that Freddy had any character,
and declared that if he tried to do any useful work some
competent person would have the trouble of undoing it: a
procedure involving a net loss to the community, and great
unhappiness to Freddy himself, who was obviously intended
by Nature for such light work as amusing Eliza, which,
Higgins declared, was a much more useful and honorable
occupation than working in the city. When Eliza referred
again to her project of teaching phonetics, Higgins abated
not a jot of his violent opposition to it. He said she was not
within ten years of being qualified to meddle with his pet
subject ; and as it was evident that the Colonel agreed with
him, she felt she could not go against them in this grave
matter, and that she had no right, without Higgins's consent,
to exploit the knowledge he had given her; forhis knowledge
seemed to her as much his private property as his watch :
Eliza was no communist. Besides, she was superstitiously
devoted to them both, more entirely and frankly after her
marriage than before it.

It was the Colonel who finally solved the problem, which
had cost him much perplexed cogitation. He one day asked
Eliza, rather shyly, whether she had quite given up her
notion of keeping a flower shop. She replied that she had-

198 Pygmalion

thought of it, but had put it out of her head, because the
Colonel had said, that day at Mrs Higglns's, that it would
never do. The Colonel confessed that when he said that,
he had not quite recovered from the dazzling impression of
the day before. They broke the matter to Higgins that
evening. The sole comment vouchsafed by him very nearly
led to a serious quarrel with Eliza. It was to the effect that
she would have in Freddy an ideal errand boy.

Freddy himself was next sounded on the subject. He said
he had been thinking of a shop himself; though it had pre-
sented itself to his pennilessness as a small place in which
Eliza should sell tobacco at one counter whilst he sold news-
papers at the opposite one. But he agreed that it would be
extraordinarily jolly to go early every morning with Eliza
to Covent Garden and buy flowers on the scene of their first
meeting : a sentiment which earned him many kisses from
his wife. He added that he had always been afraid to pro-
pose anythingof the sort, because Clara would make an awful
row about a step that must damage her matrimonial chances,
and his mother could not be expected to like it after cling-
ing for so many years to that step of the social ladder on
which retail trade is impossible.

This difficulty was removed by an event highly unexpected
by Freddy's mother. Clara, in the course of her incursions
into those artistic circles which were the highest within her
reach, discovered that her conversational qualifications were
expected to include a grounding in the novels of Mr H. G.
Wells. She borrowed them in various directions so energetic-
ally that she swallowed them all within two months. The
result was a conversion of a kind quite common to-day. A
modern Acts of the Apostles would fill fifty whole Bibles
if anyone were capable of writing it.

Poor Clara, who appeared to Higgins and his mother as
a disagreeable and ridiculous person, and to her own mother
as in some inexplicable way a social failure, had never seen
herself in either light ; for, though to some extent ridiculed
and mimicked in West Kensington like everybody else there.

Pygmalion 199

she was accepted as a rational and normal — or shall we say
inevitable? — sort of human being. At worst they called her
The Pusher; but to them no more than to herself had it
ever occurred that she was pushing the air, and pushing it
in a wrong direction. Still, she was not happy. She was
growing desperate. Her one asset, the fact that her mother
was what the Epsom greengrocer called a carriage lady, had
no exchange value, apparently. It had prevented her from
getting educated, because the only education she could have
afforded was education with the Earlscourt greengrocer's
daughter. It had led her to seek the society of her mother's
class ; and that class simply would not have her, because
she was much poorer than the greengrocer, and, far from
being able to afford a maid, could not afford even a house-
maid, and had to scrape along at home with an illiberally
treated general servant. Under such circumstances nothing
could give her an air of being a genuine product of Large-
lady Park. And yet its tradition made her regard a marriage
with anyone within her reach as an unbearable humiliation.
Commercial people and professional people in a small way
were odious to her. She ran after painters and novelists;
but she did not charm them ; and her bold attempts to pick
up and practise artistic and literary talk irritated them. She
was, in short, an utter failure, an ignorant, incompetent,
pretentious, unwelcome, penniless, useless little snob; and
though she did not admit these disqualifications (for nobody
ever faces unpleasant truths of this kind until the possibility
of a way out dawns on them) she felt their effects too keenly
to be satisfied with her position.

Clara had a startling eyeopencr when,on being suddenly
wakened to enthusiasm by a girl of her own age who dazzled
her and produced in her a gushing desire to take her for a
model, and gain her friendship, she discovered that this ex-
quisite apparition had graduated from the gutter in a few
months time. It shook her so violently, that when Mr H. G.
Wells lifted her on the point of his puissant pen, and
placed her at the angle of view from which the life she was

200 Pygmalion

leading and the society to which she clung appeared in its
true relation to real human needs and worthy social struc-
ture, he effected a conversion and a conviction of sin com-
parable to the most sensational feats of General Booth or
Gypsy Smith, Clara's snobbery went bang. Life suddenly
began to move with her. Without knowing how or why, she
began to make friends and enemies. Some of the acquaint-
ances to whom she had been a tedious or indifferent or
ridiculous affliction, dropped her : others became cordial.
To her amazement she found that some "quite nice" people
were saturated with Wells, and that this accessibility to
ideas was the secret of their niceness. People she had
thought deeply religious, and had tried to conciliate on that
tack with disastrous results, suddenly took an interest in
her, and revealed a hostility to conventional religion which
she had never conceived possible except among the most
desperate characters. They made her read Galsworthy ; and
Galsworthy exposed the vanity of Largelady Park and
finished her. It exasperated her to think that the dungeon
in which she had languished for so many unhappy years
had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she
had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of
keeping well with society, were precisely those by which
alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human
contact. In the radiance of these discoveries, and the tumult
of their reaction, she made a fool of herself as freely and
conspicuously as when she so rashly adopted Eliza's expletive
in Mrs Higgins's drawing-room ; for the new-born Wellsian
had to find her bearings almost as ridiculously as a baby;
but nobody hates a baby for its ineptitudes, or thinks the
worse of it for trying to eat the matches ; and Clara lost
no frienc3 by her follies. They laughed at her to her face
this time ; and she had to defend herself and fight it out as
best she could.

When Freddy paid a visit to Earlscourt (which he never
did when he could possibly help it) to make the desolating
announcement that heandhisElizawere thinkingot blacken-

Pygmalion 201

ing the Largelady scutcheon by opening a shop, he found
the little household aJready convulsed by a prior announce-
ment from Clara that she also was going to work in an old
furniture shop in Dover Street, which had been started by
a fellow Wellsian. This appointment Clara owed, after all,
to her old social accomplishment of Push. She had made
up her mind that, cost what it might, she would see Mr.
Wells in the flesh ; and she had achieved her end at a garden
party. She had better luck than so rash an enterprise de-
served. Mr. Wells came up to her expectations. Age had
not withered him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety
in half an hour. His pleasant neatness and compactness,
his small hands and feet, his teeming ready brain, his un-
affected accessibility, and a certain fine apprehensiveness
which stamped him as susceptible from his topmost hair to
his tipmost toe, proved irresistible. Clara talked of nothing
else for weeks and weeks afterwards. And as she happened
to talk to the lady of the furniture shop, and that lady also
desired above all things to know Mr. Wells and sell pretty
things to him, she offered Clara a job on the chance of
achieving that end through her.

And so it came about that Eliza's luck held, and the ex-
pected opposition to the flower shop melted away. The
shop is in the arcade of a railway station not very far from
the Victoria and Albert Museum ; and if you live in that
neighborhood you may go there any day and buy a button-
hole from Eliza.

Now here is a last opportunity for romance. Would you
not like to be assured that the shop was an immense success,
thanks to Eliza's charms and her early business experience
in Covent Garden ? Alas ! the truth is the truth : the shop
did not pay for a long time, simply because Eliza and her
Freddy did not know how to keep it. True, Eliza had not
to begin at the very beginning : she knew the names and
prices of the cheaper flowers; and her elation was unbounded
v/hen she found that Freddy, like all youths educated at
cheap, pretentious, and thoroughly inefHcient schools, knew

202 Pygmalion

a little Latin. It was very little, but enough to make him
appear to her a Porson or Bentley, and to put him at his
ease with botanical nomenclature. Unfortunately he knew
nothing else ; and Eliza, though she could count money up
to eighteen shillings or so, and had acquired a certain famili-
arity with the language of Milton from her struggles to
qualify herself for winning Higgins's bet, could not write
out a bill without utterly disgracing the establishment.
Freddy's power of stating in Latin that Balbus built a wall
and that Gaul was divided into three parts did not carry
with it the slightest knowledge of accounts or business :
Colonel Pickering had to explain to him what a cheque
book and a bank account meant. And the pair were by no
means easily teachable. Freddy backed up Eliza in her
obstinate refusal to believe that they could save money by
engaging a bookkeeper with some knowledge of the busi-
ness. How, they argued, could you possibly save money by
going to extra expense when you already could not make
both ends meet ? But the Colonel, after making the ends
meet over and over again, at last gently insisted; and Eliza,
humbled to the dust by having to beg from him so often,
and stung by the uproarious derision of Higgins, to whom
the notion of Freddy succeeding at anything was a joke
that never palled, grasped the fact that business, like phon-
etics, has to be learned.

On the piteous spectacle of the pair spending their even-
ings in shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning
bookkeeping and typewriting with incipient junior clerks,
male and female, from the elementary schools, let me not
dwell. There were even classes at the London School of
Economics, and a humble personal appeal to the director of
that institution to recommend a course bearing on the
flower business. He, being a humorist, explained to them
the method of the celebrated Dickensian essay on Chinese
Metaphysics by the gentleman who read an article on China
and an article on Metaphysics and combined the informa-
tion. He suggested that they should combine the London

Pygmalion 203

School with Kew Gardens. Eliza, to whom the procedure
of the Dickensian gentleman seemed perfectly correct (as
in fact it was) and not in the least funny (which was only
her ignorance) took his advice with entire gravity. But the
effort that cost her the deepest humiliation was a request
to Higgins, whose pet artistic fancy, next to Milton's verse,
was caligraphy, and who himself wrote a most beautiful
Italian hand, that he would teach her to write. He declared
thatshe was congenitally incapable of forming a single letter
worthy of the least of Milton's words ; but she persisted ;
and again he suddenly threw himself into the task of teach-
ing her with a combination of stormy intensity, concen-
trated patience, and occasional bursts of interesting disquisi-
tion on the beauty and nobility, the august mission and
destiny, of human handwriting. Eliza ended by acquiring
an extremely uncommercial script which was a positive
extension of her personal beauty, and spending three times
as much on stationery as anyone else because certain quali-
ties and shapes of paper became indispensable to her. She
could not even address an envelope in the usual way be-
cause it made the margins all wrong.

Their commercial schooldays were a period of disgrace
and despair for the young couple. They seemed to be
learning nothing about flower shops. At last they gave it
up as hopeless, and shook the dust of the shorthand schools,
and the polytechnics, and the London School of Economics
from their feet for ever. Besides, the business was in some
mysterious way beginning to take care of itself. They had
somehow forgotten their objections to employing other
people. They came to the conclusion that their own way
was the best, and that they had really a remarkable talent
for business. The Colonel, who had been compelled for
some years to keep a sufficient sum on current account at
his bankers to make up their deficits, found that the pro-
vision was unnecessary : the young people were prospering.
It is true that there was not quite fair play between them
and their competitors in trade. Their week-ends in the

204 Pygmalion

country cost them nothing, and saved them the price of their
Sunday dinners ; for the motor car was the Colonel's ; and
he and Higgins paid the hotel bills. Mr. F. Hill, florist
and greengrocer (they soon discovered that there was money
in asparagus ; and asparagus led to other vegetables), had
an air which stamped the business as classy ; and in private
life he was still Frederick Eynsford Hill, Esquire. Not
that there was any swank about him : nobody but Eliza
knew that he had been christened Frederick Challoner.
Eliza herself swanked like anything.

That is all. That is how it has turned out. It is astonish-
ing how much Eliza still manages to meddle in the house-
keeping at Wimpole Street in spite of the shop and her
own family. And it is notable that though she never nags
her husband, and frankly loves the Colonel as if she were
his favorite daughter, she has never got out of the habit
of nagging Higgins that was established on the fatal night
when she won his bet for him. She snaps his head off on
the faintest provocation, or on none. He no longer dares
to tease her by assuming an abysmal inferiority of Freddy's
mind to his own. He storms and bullies and derides ; but
she stands up to him so ruthlessly that the Colonel has to
ask her from time to time to be kinder to Higgins ; and it
is the only request of his that brings a mulish expression
into her face. Nothing but some emergency or calamity
great enough to break down all likes and dislikes, and throw
them both back on their common humanity — and may they
be spared any such trial ! — will ever alter this. She knows
that Higgins does not need her, just as her father did not
need her. The very scrupulousness with which he told her
that day that he had become used to having her there, and
dependent on her for all sorts of little services, and that he
should miss her if she went away (it would never have
occurred to Freddy or the Colonel to say anything of the
sort) deepens her inner certainty that she is "no more to
him than them slippers" ; yet she has a sense, too, that his
indifference is deeper than the infatuation of commoner

Pygmalion 205

souls. She is immensely interested in him. She has even
secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she could
get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and
with nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag
himoffhispedestal and see himmakinglovelike any common
man. We all have private imaginations of that sort. But
when it comes to business, to the life that she really leads
as distinguished from the life of dreams and fancies, she
likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel ; and she does not
like Higgins and Mr. Doolittle. Galatea never does quite
like Pygmalion : his relation to her is too godlike to be
altogether agreeable.

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinbursh.

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