Unsigned partial manuscript in Shaw’s hand, written in pencil on 11 pages, 6 x 8, dated May 15, 1900, and accompanied by an ALS dated May 2, 1927, as he presented the manuscript to an unidentified woman. In his manuscript, Shaw offers a witty criticism of a play called ‘Thomas Ellwood’s Guest’, written by an apparent friend. In part: “Thos. E’s Guest is a farce with all the fun carefully left out…Now the natural purpose of an audience is to be impatient of a misunderstanding and and to want it cleared up. If the consequences of it are very funny, they will stand it until they are tired of laughing; and then you have your farce. If the consequences are frightful and tragic, you have your tragedy—Othello. If they are only painful, you have your failure.”
The ‘guest’ of this play is a reincarnation of John Milton, which affords speculations on the character. Shaw writes, “Milton was human; and no human creature could have taken such a prodigious feat without a flash of humor at his own expense…he might have explained that all women are beautiful to the blind…At least, he might have taken a leaf from the exclamation of Samson Agonistes. But Thomas Ellwood’s guest is as dull a dog as Thomas himself or his sulky daughter…In short, I tell you what I have told you a thousand times before: that Art will not breed with Art, but only with Life. As long as you keep out of your plays every quality, good or bad, that you have to put into your conversation before anybody will endure five minutes of it, so long will you make everybody wonder that a man with such powers of expression and appreciate, and with a sense of humor into the bargain, should be so abjectly afraid to write anything he really thinks or feels. Unless you do what Moore did; that is, give up high art painting and high art poetry, and stolidly drudge at describing what you have actually seen in the world—if it were only chorus girls eating dry bread to get rid of the smell of whiskey—you will never reach the gates of real poetry.”
In the brief letter that accompanies, Shaw writes, “The extracts are within your statutory privilege of reasonable quotation, which you are welcome to exercise as far as I am concerned. The hypothesis of creative evolution is put forward quite seriously in Back to Methuselah, as you will see by the preface.” The manuscript is numbered pages 1–13, but pages 5–6 are absent, without much loss to the rhythm of the criticism. In fine condition, with several larger spots of foxing to the first two pages, intersecting folds, scattered tiny stains, and a small hole in the gutter margins from early binding and two leaves with short tears. The letter has a central vertical fold, light soiling, and irregular trimming along its lower edge, otherwise condition is fine. The pages and the letter are bound in a 6.75 x 8.25 volume.
The remarkable and often searing comments made on these pages are somewhat buffered by the accompanying letter, in which Shaw mentions the hypothesis of creative evolution that he put forward “quite seriously” in the 1921 preface of Back to Methuselah. It was there that Shaw addressed life in a post-World War I Europe...a world, he said, that was pockmarked by poverty and inept government. He wrote that primitive societies were much more easily governable than the complex societies of the 20th century. With age comes wisdom, but Shaw admitted that human life was too short to benefit from personal experiences. His solution—enhanced longevity that would exist in a world where a 100-year-old man would be ‘middle aged’ at best. Such a change, Shaw predicted, would happen through Creative Evolution...evolutionary change that occurs because it is needed or wanted. This letter and the astonishingly detailed critique are literary masterpieces. Pre-certified John Reznikoff/PSA/DNA and RR Auction COA.
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