A STRAIGHT TALK

By

G**RGE B*RN*RD SH*W

(Preface to “Snt George.  A Christmas Play")

When a public man lays his hand on his heart and declares that his conduct needs no apology, the audience hastens to put up its umbrellas against the particularly severe downpour of apologies in store for it.  I wont give the customary warning.  My conduct shrieks aloud for apology, and you are in for a thorough drenching.

Flatly, I stole this play.  The one valid excuse for the theft would be mental starvation.  That excuse I shant plead.  I could have made a dozen better plays than this out of my own head.  You don’t suppose Shakespeare was so vacant in the upper storey that there was nothing for it but to rummage through cinquecento romances, Townley Mysteries, and suchlike insanitary rubbishheaps, in order that he might fish out enough scraps for his artistic fangs to fasten on.  Depend on it, there were plenty of decent original notions seething behind yon marble brow.  Why didn’t our William use them?  He was too lazy.  And so am I. It is easier to give a new twist to somebody else’s story that you take readymade than to perform that highly-specialised form of skilled labor which consists in giving artistic coherence to a story that you have conceived roughly for yourself.  A literary gentleman once hoisted a theory that there are only thirty-six possible stories in the world.  This—­I say it with no deference at all—­is bosh.  There are as many possible stories in the world as there are microbes in the well-lined shelves of a literary gentleman’s “den.”  On the other hand, it is perfectly true that only a baker’s dozen of these have got themselves told.  The reason lies in that bland, unalterable resolve to shirk honest work, by which you recognise the artist as surely as you recognise the leopard by his spots.  In so far as I am an artist, I am a loafer.  And if you expect me, in that line, to do anything but loaf, you will get the shock your romantic folly deserves.  The only difference between me and my rivals past and present is that I have the decency to be ashamed of myself.  So that if you are not too bemused and bedevilled by my “brilliancy” to kick me downstairs, you may rely on me to cheerfully lend a foot in the operation.  But, while I have my share of judicial vindictiveness against crime, Im not going to talk the common judicial cant about brutality making a Better Man of the criminal.  I havent the slightest doubt that I would thieve again at the earliest opportunity.  Meanwhile be so good as to listen to the evidence on the present charge.