Punch, or the London Charivari, page 29 by Various Authors
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ier left her cold. Such is the perversity of women--and Mr. SHAW. Higgins's one act of civility to his protégée, 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