My touching faith in these saves me from pessimism: I
believe in the future; but this only makes the present--which I
foresee as going strong for a couple of million of years or so--all
the more excruciating by contrast.
For casting into dramatic form a compendium of my indictments of the
present from a purely political standpoint, the old play of Snt George
occurred to me as having exactly the framework I needed. In the person
of the Turkish Knight I could embody that howling chaos which does
duty among us for a body-politic. The English Knight would accordingly
be the Liberal Party, whose efforts (whenever it is in favor with the
electorate) to reduce chaos to order by emulating in foreign politics
the blackguardism of a Metternich or Bismarck, and in home politics
the spirited attitudinisings of a Garibaldi or Cavor, are foredoomed
to the failure which its inherent oldmaidishness must always win for
the Liberal Party in all undertakings whatsoever. Snt George is, of
course, myself. But here my very aptitude in controversy tripped me up
as playwright. Owing to my nack of going straight to the root of the
matter in hand and substituting, before you can say Jack Robinson, a
truth for every fallacy and a natural law for every convention, the
scene of Snt George (Bernard Shaw)'s victory over the Turkish Knight
came out too short for theatrical purposes.
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