Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 — John Shaqi
Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914Various
General
Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
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.
[Illustration: FROM FLOWER-GIRL TO PERFECT LADY.
(_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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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