Chapter II: Part 2

The original Pygmalion took a block of dead ivory and made of it so fair a figure of a woman that he fell in love with his own creation, and Aphrodite, at his request, brought it to life. Mr. SHAW'S _Pygmalion_ takes a live flower-girl, turns her into a lifeless wax figure fit for a milliner's shop-window, and flatters himself, as an artist, on the result, but, as a man, proposes to take no interest in it, moral or physical. So you can easily see why almost any other proper name you can think of would have done better for the title.

The play itself shows the same typical inconsequence, the same freedom from the pedantry of logic. _Eliza Doolittle's_ ambition is to become fitted for the functions of a young lady in a florist's shop. _Henry Higgins_, professor of phonetics, undertakes for a wager to teach her the manners and diction of a duchess--a smaller achievement, of course, in Mr. SHAW'S eyes, but still a step in the right direction. And he is better than his word. After six months she has acquired a mincing speech, from which she is still liable to lapse into appalling indiscretions; but after another six months the product might pass muster in any _modiste's_ showroom. And then she turns on him and protests that he has spoilt her life. As a flower-girl, she tells him, she used to earn her living honestly; now there is nothing she is good for.

Of course, you say, her contact with refined society--"we needs must love the highest when we see it"--has unfitted her for mixing with inferior people. On the contrary. She has, it is true, passed the final test of a series of social functions; but meanwhile all this time of her apprenticeship in manners she has been living her daily life, doing half-menial duties, in the house of _Higgins_, who happens to have no manners at all. One trembles, indeed, to picture the figure that he himself, the master, must have cut when he took his pupil to the halls of the great.

_Henry Higgins_ Sir HERBERT TREE.]

Then perhaps, you say, she has fallen into an unrequited passion for him, and this accounts for her peevishness? Well, if she has, we have only Mr. SHAW'S word for it, and she gets no sympathy from us for her deplorable taste in men. There was another man who was always about the house, a man with a habit of courtesy, but this gallant soldier left her cold. Such is the perversity of women--and Mr. SHAW. _Higgins's_ one act of civility to his _protegee_, on which we had to base our hopes of a happy issue, was to throw a bunch of flowers at her from a balcony in Chelsea--not perhaps a very tactful reminder of her origin. But he was only just in time. Another two seconds of delay and the final curtain would have cut off this tardy and inadequate effort of conciliation.

(_Showing middle stage in course of lessons in Polite Conversation._)

_Eliza Doolittle_ (Mrs. PATRICK CAMPBELL) to _Mrs. Eynsford-Hill_ (Miss CARLOTTA ADDISON). "An aunt of mine died of in-flu-en-za: but it's my be-lief they done h-her in."]

However, nobody goes to a production of Mr. SHAW'S with the idea of seeing a play. We go to hear him discourse on just anything that occurs to him without prejudice in the matter of his mouthpiece. This time he was represented by a dustman; and for once Mr. SHAW consented to temper his wisdom to the limitations of its repository. His _Alfred Doolittle_ (father of the flower-girl) threw off a little cheap satire on the morality of the middle-classes, yet admitted the drawbacks of unauthorised union (as practised by himself), since a man's wife is there to be kicked, whereas a mistress is apt to be more exigent of the amenities; you must adopt a more lover-like attitude if you want to retain her. He also argued brightly in defence of his proposal to sell his own daughter to any man for a fiver; let fall a platitude or two in praise of the lot of the undeserving poor; and (having come in for a fortune) found that charity had lost its blessedness--that the touch of nature which makes the whole world kin was only admirable when you did the "touching" yourself. Not bad for a dustman, but Mr. SHAW has done better.

For the rest the attraction lay in the performance of individual actors rather than in the stuff of the play. Mrs. PATRICK CAMPBELL was delicious, both in her unregenerate state, and even more during the middle phase of the refining process. She made the Third Act a pure delight. Later, when she became tragic, she sacrificed something of her particular charm to the author's insincerity.

Sir HERBERT TREE, always at his best in comedy, was an excellent _Higgins_ in his lighter moods. As for Mr. EDMUND GURNEY, he was far the best dustman I have ever met. His freedom from scruples, combined with a natural gift for unctuous and persuasive rhetoric, commanded admiration. _Higgins_, indeed, who could read potentialities at a glance, considered that he might, under happier conditions, have gone far toward attaining Cabinet rank or filling a Welsh pulpit.

Of the others, Mr. PHILIP MERIVALE played the too subsidiary part of _Colonel Pickering_ with admirable self-repression; and Miss ROSAMOND MAYNE-YOUNG, as the mother of _Higgins_, was a very gracious figure.

The play was curiously uneven. If one might be permitted to enter and leave at one's pleasure I would advise you to miss out the desultory First Act. But if you insist on seeing it then take care to read your programme before the lights go down and find out that the scene is the porch of a church. I thought all the time that it was the porch of a theatre. Make sure in the same way about the Chelsea flat, or you may mistake it for a charming country cottage. The Second and Third Acts are not to be missed on any account, but I shouldn't worry about the Fourth. In the Fifth you should go away for good the moment that the dustman makes his exit. The tedium that follows is most distressing, and can only be explained as the author's revenge for your laughter. It was a cruel thing to do.

But I forgive him. I take away many delightful memories of my evening with _Pygmalion_, and, best of all, the picture of Sir HERBERT'S frank and childlike pleasure at having discovered Mr. BERNARD SHAW.

* * * * *

_Expert Salesman._ "THEN I SHOULD HAVE IT. AFTER ALL, THE GUV'NOR PAYS!"]

* * * * *

"POTASH AND PERLMUTTER."

If you have ever been to an American commercial drama, you will know the opening scene of this one before the curtain goes up. The business interior; the typewriter on the left; the head of the firm opening cryptic correspondence and dictating unintelligible answers; spasmodic incursions of cocksure buyers and bagmen; a prevailing air of smartness, of hustle, of get-on-or-get-out. In _The Melting Pot_ Mr. ZANGWILL has been creating a diversion with an Hebraic theme, his hero being a refugee from Kieff, where his family had perished in a pogrom. This new variation has occurred--independently, no doubt--to the author of _Potash and Perlmutter_, who has grafted it (including the detail of the immigrant from Kieff) on the old commercial stock, and done very well indeed with his blend.

His two protagonists in the Teuton-American-Semitic firm of "cloak and suit" manufacturers that gives its title to the play are extraordinarily alive. I am but imperfectly acquainted with this racial variety, but I can easily recognise that Messrs. AUGUSTUS YORKE and EGBERT LEONARD, who represent the two partners, are gifted with the most amazing powers of observation and reproduction.

The pair are alike in their mercenary tastes and in that loyalty which is so fine a feature of the Jewish race, and is here found in frequent conflict with their commercial instincts. The cruel wrench that their generosity always costs them is a true measure of its excellence. They quarrel alike over details of business policy; but they always stand together where profit is obviously to be made by a common attitude, or where they find themselves in a tight corner. Yet the author has preserved a nice distinction between them. It is _Potash_, the elder of the two, and encumbered by fetters of domestic affection, who is the weaker vessel, and commits the indiscretions with whose issue he is impotent to cope; it is _Perlmutter_, with the quicker brains, contemptuous but devoted, who throws all the blame where it is due, yet stands by to share the punishment.

I found their language and accent rather hard to follow, a difficulty not shared by the strong Jewish element in an audience that was extremely quick to appreciate the humour that kept one always on the alert. It is profitless to ask how much of the fun was due to the things said and how much to the manner of saying them. The essential matter is that actors and author between them gave us an unusually good time, and I am much obliged to them.

Apart from the leading characters, the _Mrs. Potash_ of Miss MATILDA COTTRELLY was a most delightful study, and the breezy methods of Mr. CHARLES DICKSON as a buyer and Mr. EZRA MATTHEWS as a salesman were effective of their kind.

The plot, as usual in such plays, was rather elementary. So, too, with the love interest; but the right kind of sentiment was not wanting in the very human characters of _Potash_ and _Perlmutter_. For a rare moment or two there was a break in our laughter and tears were not far away.

O. S.

* * * * *

THE POST-OFFICE SAVINGS BANK.

My nephew Rupert has been spending part of his Easter holidays with me. There is nothing like a boy of fifteen for adding an atmosphere to a house--in which term I include a garden. It is a special atmosphere, hard to define, but quite unmistakable when you have once lived in it. It is compounded of football, cricket, hockey--these are not actual, but conversational--of visits to the stables, romps with dogs in a library, tousled hair, muddy trousers, a certain contempt for time, the loan of my collar-stud, an insatiable desire to look through the back volumes of _Punch_, long rides on a bicycle and an irresistible tendency of ink to the fingers, presumably caused by the terrible duty of writing letters to parents. There may be other ingredients, but these are the chief. I am bound to add that he is a very amiable boy, with a strong sense of humour, and that he associates on very friendly terms with the little girls, his cousins, who form the majority of this household, it being quite understood that, for the time, they become boys while he remains what he is.

The other morning Rupert evidently had something on his mind. He made various half-hearted and thoroughly unsuccessful efforts to leave the room, twiddled his cap in his hands, tripped over the rug and finally spoke.

"Thanks awfully, Uncle Harry, for lending me your bicycle."

"That's all right," I said. "You're very welcome to it. It's a good thing for it to be used."

"Yes," he said, "but I shan't want it again."

"Tired of it?" I said. "Well, there's no compulsion."

"Oh, I know that--thanks awfully--but it isn't that. It's a ripping bicycle. I should like to ride it for ever, but----"

"Well, what is it? Out with it."

"I've got one of my own."

"One of your own!" I said. "How's that? You hadn't got one yesterday."

"No, but I've got one now. I bought it this morning at Hickleden. There's a bicycle shop there, and I heard there was a good bicycle for sale cheap, so I went over this morning and had a ride on it, and it suited me splendidly, so I bought it, and I've got it here."

"Bought it?" I said. "That's all very well; but how did you pay for it?"

"That," he said, "is where all the bother comes in."

"It generally does," I said. "Either you've got the money, and then it seems such a waste; or you haven't got it, and then it's a lifetime of misery. Debt, my boy, is an awful thing."

"Don't rag, Uncle Harry; I've got the money all right."

"Then be a man and shell out."

"Yes, but that's just what I can't do. It's this way: the price of the bicycle is five pounds seventeen and sixpence."

"And a very good price too."

"It's got three gears and a lamp and everything complete. Well, I've got three pounds ten in the Post-Office Savings Bank. I put it in in London."

"That's a good beginning, anyhow."

"Yes, and Aunt Mary gave me a pound for my birthday, and I put that in at the post-office here yesterday. It's better not to keep pounds in your pocket."

"Quite right," I said; "we have now got to four pounds ten."

"And Grandma sent me a pound this morning in a postal-order."

"We're all but up to it now," I said. "The excitement is becoming intense."

"Isn't it? And I've got the rest in shillings and sixpences and coppers."

"Away you go, then, and pay for the bicycle."

"Ah, but it isn't as easy as all that. I can't get the money out of the Post-Office."

"What," I said--"they won't let you have your own money? They calmly take the savings of a lifetime and then refuse to give them up?"

"I went round there this morning and they said I'd put the money in in London and there were various formalities to be gone through before I could draw it out here."

"The official mind," I said, "delights in technicalities. Let us see how you stand:--

To save you from the silly game of playing drakes and ducks
You banked the cash in Middlesex--but asked for it in Bucks.

Or we could put it in this way:--

In order not to spend it all in lollipops and toffees
You gave it to the P. M. G. to keep it in his office.

Or in this way:--

You bought a three-gear bicycle because you had a will for it,
And now you've gone and fetched the thing and cannot pay the bill for it.

Rupert, you're in the cart."

"By Jove, Uncle Harry," he said in an awestruck tone, "that's poetry."

"Is it?" I said. "I just threw it off."

"Oh, yes, it's poetry all right. It's got rhymes, you know."

"Rupert," I said, "let us come back to plain prose and consider your desperate financial situation. You cannot get your three pounds ten."

"No, not yet."

"And Aunt Mary's pound?"

"They said that, being holiday time, that wouldn't have got to headquarters yet."

"Gracious goodness," I said, "I never knew a savings bank had so many pitfalls. The whole thing is too complicated for my mind."

"It isn't really complicated," said Rupert. "It's quite plain; but perhaps if you put it into poetry you'll understand it better."

"Rupert," I said, "let us have no sarcasms. The thing is too serious for that. You possess your grandmother's pound in a postal-order and assorted coins to the amount of seven and sixpence, total one pound seven and six, to pay for a bicycle costing five pounds seventeen and sixpence. In short, you are a bankrupt."

"But I shall get the money."

"That is what they all say."

Eventually the matter was arranged and the bicycle man was satisfied. Rupert's correspondence with the Post Office still continues. But his faith in that institution has received a severe shock.

R. C. L.

* * * * *

"The Rev. C. A. Brereton has presented to the St. Pancras Guardians a
donkey for the use of the children at Leavesden Poor Law Schools, and
a member of the Board has presented an A B C time-table."--_Daily
News._

_Anonymous Benefactor_ (_when the secret of his name leaks out_): "No, no, don't thank me.... It was last year's."

* * * * *

Headlines to adjoining columns in _The Toronto Daily Star_:--

"MAYOR TO CALL MEETING | "MAYOR CALLS 'GLOBE'S' TO DISCUSS SCRIPTURE." | REPORT A 'BLASTED LIE.'"

These Mayors lead a life full of variety.

* * * * *

_Good and encouraging Samaritan_ (_helping sportsman to remount after immersion in the brook_). "NEXT OLD BRUCK BE HEAPS BIGGER'N THIS UN, AND HE DO HAVE A TURRIBLE LOT O' WATER IN HE JUST NOW."]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)

_Dodo the Second_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), by E. F. BENSON. Doesn't the very title-page sound like a leaf from your dead past? I protest that for my own part I was back on hearing it in the naughty nineties, the very beginning of them indeed (the fact that I was also back in the school-room did little to impair the thrill) and agog to read the clever, audacious book that all the wonderful people who lived in those days were talking about. And behold! here they all are again--not the people who talked, but the audacious characters. Only the trouble is that we have all in the interval become so much more audacious ourselves that their efforts in this kind seem to fail to produce the old impression. This is by no means to say that I didn't enjoy _Dodo the Second_. I enjoyed it very much indeed; and so will you. For one thing, it was the jolliest experience to recognize so many old friends--_Dodo_ herself (now of course the _Princess Waldenech_), and the wicked _Prince_, and the rest of them. Of _Dodo_ at least it may be said, moreover, that she has matured credibly; this middle-aging lady is exactly what the siren of twenty years ago would have developed into, still beautiful, still alluring, and still (I must add) capable of infecting everyone else in a conversation with exactly her own trick of cheap and rather fatiguing brilliance. Added to all this there is now a new generation of characters, several of whom are quite pleasant company; for them and for one very impressive piece of descriptive work in the account of a gathering storm, this Twenty Years After may be heartily welcomed. Indeed one leaves _Dodo_ of 1914 so vigorously alive that I am not without hope of her turning up yet again as a grandmother in 1934.

* * * * *

I have discovered from _The Rebellion of Esther_ (ALSTON RIVERS) why it is that my sympathies, usually at the disposal of insurgents, are withheld from the Suffragette. Anyone who is genuinely out to assert a principle, at the cost of quarrelling with established authority, has a certain merit of altruism which even the most law-abiding may count as a mitigating circumstance, however unworthy the end in view; but the egoism of a young lady (like Miss MARGARET LEGGE'S heroine) who in whatever cause defies all institutions with the latent motive of asserting herself will induce even the most lawless to support warmly the powers of suppression. _Miss Esther Ballinger_ had a number of real grievances, but her point of view was typified in her attitude towards the illicit and incidental motherhood of one of her acquaintances. Without hearing the facts, she pronounced it to be "a courageous stand against conventional morality," which it just possibly might have proved to be upon enquiry, and by no means a weak surrender to immediate desires, as much more probably it was in fact. From my knowledge of _Esther_ she had but one reason for expressing this opinion, and that was the personal pleasure of saying the unorthodox thing, an element which accounts for much of the unconventionality of that intellectual class of townsfolk figuring broadcast in the book, and largely discounts the value of its criticisms. I suspected the same flaw in her expressed convictions on religious, political and feminist matters, and I shouldn't be surprised to learn, though there is no hint of it, that she stopped short of complete revolt in her own big affair because she realized instinctively that even a passionate pose may lose its attractions if it has to be maintained for a lifetime. Miss MARGARET LEGGE, though alive to the young person's faults, regards her as, on the whole, deep-thinking and right-minded; and I would not for a moment have our personal difference of opinion discourage anybody from reading a carefully studied and ably written novel.

* * * * *

The attitude of Militarist to Pacifist has the makings of a very pretty comedy. When the Mystics (with the Friends and the Tolstoians) were evangelical enough to preach their message of peace even to the point of non-resistance, they were broadly scouted as sentimental and idealistic idiots, and reminded of a nature red in tooth and claw rampant in this most sordid of all possible worlds. Now that the Rationalists take up the case against war from another end, they are denounced as squalid souls, with a greengrocer's outlook, morbidly anxious about the price of peas and potatoes, and urged to remember that not by bread alone doth man live. In _The Foundations of International Polity_ (HEINEMANN), a series of lectures developing phases of the argument of the Great Illusion, Mr. NORMAN ANGELL incidentally deals with this greengrocery business. Nobody with knowledge of his shrewd and vigorous method will be surprised that without bluster or rhetoric he establishes a very clear verdict of acquittal. One has always the impression that the rationalist in him is deliberately repressing the mystic, lest his case be weakened by a suspicion of sentimentalism. For it must be obvious that not a cold, still less a squalid, but a generous purpose alone could inspire the fervour that flashes between the reasoned lines. When Mr. ANGELL pleads that policy is directed towards "self-interest," an easily misunderstandable pronouncement, it is no mean self-interest he has in view but a quality of high civilising and social value. He argues cogently that defence is not incompatible with, but rather a part of, rational pacifism, which is the protest against coercion; re-emphasises the difference between soldiering and policing; and illustrates the essential shallowness of that venerable tag, "Human nature doesn't change," by pointing to the decay of the duello, and the decline of the grill as a means of reasoning with heretics and witches. Were this learned Clerk a politician (which Heaven avert!), he would move for yet another increment to the Supplementary Navy Estimates--to wit, the price of a battleship to be expended in the distribution of this fighting pacifist's books to all journalists, attaches, clergymen, bazaar-openers, club oracles, professors, head-masters and other obvious people in both Germany and Britain.

* * * * *

In his new satirical study of certain modern cranks and their unpleasantness Mr. OLIVER ONIONS has, I think, allowed his bitterness to outrun his sense of proportion. _A Crooked Mile_ (METHUEN) is a sequel to his earlier book, _The Two Kisses_. We meet again those two young women, _Dorothy_ and _Amory_, and the natural characteristics that they once presented seem now to be tortured into caricature. _Amory_ has indeed all my sympathy, so badgered is she by Mr. ONIONS, so relentlessly forced into ignominious positions; and I cannot feel, as I should do, that she would have achieved those ignominies without Mr. ONIONS' impelling hand behind her. I have myself considerable sympathy for cranks, and perhaps that is why I regard Mr. ONIONS' satire as a dry, gritty business. His humour is, of course, always a delightful thing, but here I fancy that he has not drawn the true line between comedy and farce, between satire that preserves the probabilities and indiscriminate exaggeration. Of the three Mr. ONIONSES who have at different times given me pleasure--the author of _Widdershins_, the author of _In Accordance with the Evidence_, and the author of _Little Devil Doubt_--I greatly prefer the first. In _A Crooked Mile_ there is one chapter worthy of all three of them--that chapter where _Amory_ discovers that her lover is going away with another woman. That is fine work. For the rest I hope that he will grow tired of his social satire and soon give us again some more of his delicate imagination and fancy.

* * * * *

What I felt about _The Girl on the Green_ (METHUEN) was that, however charming and capable, she was not quite likely, after but a few short months of golf, to have put up such a good fight in her great match with the crack amateur, _Jim Beverley_, who was giving her a half. I couldn't manage to believe it. However, that was not my business, but MARK ALLERTON'S. According to him, _Frank_ took her match to the last green, in spite of a number of cats, headed by the Vicar's wife, who did their best to put her off her game. Yes, you are right to presume that what began as a single developed into a flirtsome, and that the twain lived happily ever after in a nice little dormy house, and that _Jim_ bested the HILTONS and the OUIMETS, while _Frank_ put permanently out of joint all the noses of all the Misses LEITCH. Those who not only play but talk, dream, read and generally live for golf will, I can say with confidence, be grateful to Mr. MARK ALLERTON for this easy, hopeful narrative.

* * * * *

* * * * *

_The Morning Post_ on the Army and Navy Boxing Championships:--

"These men's middles were full of good things."

Why don't they train better?