The first act is promising. Mr. Shaw's little paragraphs--they are intended as a prompt-book in miniature--are more amusing than his preface. We are deluded into the notion that a first-class comedy is at hand. There are all the materials ready. Ramsden, an "advanced" thinker of the antiquated Bradlaugh type, has been appointed co-executor, co-guardian with Tanner, a thinker of the latter-day type; that is, a man who has read Marx, Proudhon, Nietzsche, but not Max Stirner. The fair Ann, her mother and sister are the stakes of the game. Octavius, the sap-headed young man, is ready to sacrifice himself, and his sister shocks all by not acknowledging the father of her unborn child. Here is potential stuff for a tragic comedy. But Mr. Shaw will not mould his material into viable shapes. He refuses to be an artist. He loathes art. And so he is punished by fate--his inspiration vanishes almost at the point of execution, and, except for a few fugitive flashes, never burns serenely or continuously. One telling bit is when Tanner congratulates Violet (what an appropriate name!) on her delicate condition and is scorned by that young person, scorned and snubbed. What--she a wicked woman! No, she is but secretly wedded; in the fulness of time her husband will be revealed. Tanner sneaks away, feeling that not to women must man look for the emancipation of the sexes from conventional notions. There are long harangues on prevailing economic evils, social diseases--all the old Shaw grievances are paraded. Act II is rather thin. In Act III, which recalls a Gilbertian farce, there are cockney brigands, a bandit corporation, limited, devoted to the robbing of automobiles that pass through Spain. The idea is not sufficiently novel to be funny. A lengthy parabasis, written in genuine Shavian, shows us hell, the Devil, Don Juan, and Anna of Mozartean fame. At least the talk here is as brilliant as is commonly supposed to prevail in the nether regions. _Inter alia,_ we read that marriage is the most licentious of human institutions--hence its popularity. Even the Devil is shocked. "The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error." "Beauty, purity, respectability, religion, art, patriotism, bravery, and the rest are nothing but words which I or any one else can turn inside out like a glove," continues this relentless rake and transformed preacher. Too true; but the seamy side as exhibited by Don Juan Shaw is not so convincing as in Nietzsche's transvaluation of all values. "They are mere words, useful for duping barbarians into adopting civilization, or the civilized poor into submitting to be robbed and enslaved."