Note

194 MODERN DRAMA September have opened fire from the depths of my innermost soul against their confounded ideals of Truth, Duty, Self-Sacrifice, Virtue, Reason and so on." Taking a different tack five days later, he implores Archer to tell Ibsen that he did not really label him a doctrinaire socialist, as Ibsen had gathered from a newspaper account of his talk; he had merely stated that Ibsen's direct attack on "the ideal of Law and Order" and his implicit repudiation of all isms whatsoever show that he and the Fabians stand together on a crucial issue. Later corrective letters intended for Archer himself, who fumbled miserably in his review of The Quintessence, display Shaw at his forensic and analytical best. Part of another letter in this sequence, one to an old idealist appropriately named Edward Deacon Girdlestone, sums up the Shavian bent that emerges again and again in this invaluable first volume of his collected letters. Vigorously defending his socialistic and antiidealistic position, he asserts: Virtue, morals, ethics, are all a noxious product of private property. Our enemy is not essentially the landlord or capitalist: these are but accidental forms of the true enemy-the Good Man. Virtue is only a mask for the revolting features of Unhappiness. Let us be religious, if you will, but not virtuous, not moral, not good-anything but that. My only boast is that in these days when it is so easy & cheap to be a Christ, I have ventured to follow the poor, despised, but always right Devil. He concludes with typical witty anti-climax: "Ask Mrs. Girdlestone whether I have not chosen the better part." CHARLES A. CARPENTER NOTE We should like to draw our readers' attention to the Asian Drama issue to appear in February, 1967. This issue will be edited by Toshihiko Sato, Department of .oriental Languages, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa. ...