 Section 17 of The Quintessence of Ibsenism. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Philip Panos. The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw. Section 17. Appendix. I have a word or two to add as to the difficulties which Ibsen's philosophy places in the way of those who are called on to impersonate his characters on the stage in England. His idealist figures, at once higher and more mischievous than ordinary Philistines, puzzle by their dual aspect the conventional actor, who persists in assuming that if he is to be selfish on the stage he must be villainous, that if he is to be self-sacrificing and scrupulous he must be a hero, and if that he is to satirize himself unconsciously he must be comic. He is constantly striving to get back to familiar ground by reducing his part to one of the stage types with which he is familiar, and which he has learnt to present by rule of thumb. The more experienced he is, the more certain is he to de-Ibsenize the play into a melodrama or a farcical comedy of the common sort. Give him helmet to play, and he begins by declaring that the part is a mass of inconsistencies, and ends by suddenly grasping the idea that it is only Joseph's surface over again. Give him Gregor's verly, the devotee of truth, and he will first play him in the vein of George Washington, and then when he finds that the audience laughs at him instead of taking him respectfully, rush to the conclusion that Gregor's is only his old friend, the truthful milkman, in a phenomenon in a smock frock, and begin to play for the laughs and relish them. That is, if there are only laughs enough to make the part completely comic. Otherwise, he will want to omit the passages which provoke them. To be laughed at when playing a serious part is hard upon an actor, and still more upon an actress. It is derision than which nothing is more terrible to whose livelihood depends on public approbation, and whose calling produces an abnormal development of self-consciousness. Now Ibsen undoubtedly does freely require from his artists that they shall not only possess great skill and power on every plane of their art, but that they shall also be ready to make themselves acutely ridiculous sometimes at the very climax of their most deeply felt passages. It is not to be wondered at that they prefer to pick and choose among the lines of their parts, retaining the great professional opportunities afforded by the tragic scenes, and leaving out the touches which complete the portrait at the expense of the model's vanity. If an actress of established reputation were asked to play Hedda Gabler, her first impulse would probably be to not only turn Hedda into a brunvilier or a bourgeois or a forget-me-not, but to suppress all the meaner callosities and odiousnesses which detract from Hedda's dignity as dignity is estimated on the stage. The result would be about as satisfactory to a skilled critic as that of the retouching which has made shop window photography the most worthless of the arts. The whole point of an Ibsen play lies in the exposure of the very conventions upon which are based those by which the actor is ridden. Charles Surface or Tom Jones may be very effectively played by artists who fully accept the morality provessed by Joseph Surface and Blythel. Neither Fielding nor Sheridan forces upon either actor or audience the dilemma that since Charles and Tom are lovable there must be something hopelessly inadequate in the commercial and sexual morality which condemns them as a player of blaggards. The ordinary actor will tell you that the authors do not defend their hero's conduct not seeing that making them lovable is the most complete defense of their conduct that could possibly be made. How far Fielding and Sheridan saw it, how far Moliere or Mozart were convinced that the statue had right on his side when he threw down one into the bottomless pit, how far Milton went in his sympathy with Lucifer, all of these are speculative points which no actor has hitherto been called upon to solve. But they are the very subjects of Ibsen's plays. Those whose interest and curiosity are not excited by them find him the most puzzling and tedious of dramatists. He has not only made lost women lovable but he has recognized and avowed that this is a vital justification for them and has accordingly explicitly argued on their side and awarded them the sympathy which poetic justice grants only to the righteous. He has made the terms lost and ruined in this sense ridiculous by making women apply them to men with the most ludicrous effect. Hence Ibsen cannot be played from the conventional point of view. To make that practicable the plays would have to be rewritten. In the rewriting the fascination of the part would vanish and with it their attraction for the performers. A doll's house was adapted in this fashion though not at the instigation of an actress but the adaptation fortunately failed. Otherwise we might have to endure in Ibsen's case what we have already endured in that of Shakespeare many of whose plays were supplanted for centuries by incredibly debased versions of which Sibbers Richard III and Garex Catherine and Patruchio have lasted to our own time. Taking Tama's estimate of 18 years as the apprenticeship of a completely accomplished stage artist there is little encouragement to offer Ibsen parts to our finished actors and actresses. They do not understand them and would not play them in their integrity if they could be intuced to attempt them. In England only two women in the full maturity of their talent have hitherto meddled with Ibsen. One of these Miss Genevieve Ward who created the part of Lona Hessell in the English version of Pillars of Society had the advantage of exceptional enterprise and intelligence and of a more varied culture and experience of life and art than are common in her profession. The other Mrs Theodore Wright the first English Mrs Alving was hardly known to the dramatic critics though her personality and her artistic talent as an amateur reciter and actress had been familiar to the members of the most advanced social and political bodies in London since the days of the international. It was precisely because her record lay outside the beaten track of newspaper criticism that she was qualified to surprise its writers as she did. In every other instance the women who first ventured upon playing Ibsen heroines were young actresses whose ability had not before been fully tested and whose technical apprenticeships were far from complete. Miss Janet A Church though she settled the then disputed question of the feasibility of Ibsen's plays on the English stage by her impersonation of Nora in 1889 which still remains the most complete artistic achievement in the new genre had not been long enough on the stage to secure a unanimous admission of her genius though it was of the most irresistible and irrepressible kind. Miss Florence Fah who may claim the palm for artistic courage and intellectual conviction in selecting for her experiment Rosemursholm in comparably the most difficult and dangerous as it is also the greatest of Ibsen's later plays had almost relinquished her profession from lack of interest in its routine after spending a few years in acting farcical comedies. Miss Elizabeth Robbins and Miss Marion Lee whose unaided enterprise we owe our early acquaintance with Heather Gabler on the stage were like Miss A Church and Miss Fah juniors in their profession. All four were products of the modern movement for the higher education of women literate in touch with advanced thought and coming by natural predilection on the stage from outside the theatrical class in contradistinction to the senior generation of inveterately sentimental actresses schooled in the old-fashioned if at all born into their profession quite out of the political and social movement around them in short intellectually naive to the last degree. The new school says to the old you cannot play Ibsen because you are ignoramuses to which the old school retorts you cannot play anything because you are amateurs but taking amateur in its sense of unpractised executant both schools are amateur as far as Ibsen's plays are concerned. The old technique breaks down in the new theatre for though in theory it is a technique of general application making the artist so plastic that he can mold himself to any shape designed by the dramatist in practice it is but a stock of tones and attitudes out of which by appropriate selection and combination a certain limited number of conventional stage figures can be made up it is no more possible to get an Ibsen character out of it than to contrive a Greek costume out of an English wardrobe and some of the attempts already made have been so grotesque that at present when one of the more specifically Ibsanian parts has to be filled it is actually safer to entrust it to a novice than to a competent and experienced actor a steady improvement may be expected in the performances of Ibsen's plays as the young players whom they interest gain the experience needed to make mature artists of them they will gain this experience not only in plays by Ibsen himself but in the works of dramatists who will have been largely influenced by Ibsen playwrights who formally only compounded plays according to the received prescriptions for producing tears or laughter are already taking their profession seriously to the full extent of their capacity and venturing more and more to substitute the incidents and catastrophes of spiritual history for the swoon's surprises discoveries murders duels assassinations and intrigues which are the common places of the theater at present others who have no such impulse find themselves forced to raise the quality of their work by the fact that even those who witness Ibsen's plays with undisguised weariness and aversion find when they return to their accustomed theatrical fare that they have suddenly become conscious of absurdities and artificialities in it which never troubled them before in just the same way the painters of the naturalist school reformed their opponents much more extensively than the number of their own direct admirers indicates for example it is still common to hear the most contemptuous abuse and ridicule of Monet and Whistler from persons who have nevertheless had their former tolerance of the unrealities of the worst type of conventional studio picture wholly destroyed by these painters until quite lately too musicians were heard to be extolling Donizetti in the same breath with which they had vehemently decried Wagner they would make rye faces at every chord in Tristan und Esolder and never suspected that their old faith was shaken until they went back to La Favorite and found that it had become as obsolete as the rhymed tragedies of Lee and Otway in the drama then we may depend on it that though we shall not have another Ibsen yet nobody will write for the stage after him as most playwrights wrote before him this will involve a corresponding change in the technical stock in trade of the actor whose ordinary training will then cease to be a positive disadvantage to him when he is entrusted with an Ibsen part no one need fear on this account that Ibsen will gradually destroy melodrama it might as well be assumed that Shakespeare will destroy musical entertainments or the prose romances of William Morris supersede the illustrated police news all forms of art rise with the culture and capacity of the human race but the forms rise together the higher forms do not return upon and submerge the lower the wretch who finds his happiness in setting a leash of greyhounds on a hair or in watching a terrier killing rats in a pit may evolve into the mere blockhead who would rather go to a free and easy and chuckle over a dull silly obscene song but such a step will not raise him to the level of the frequenter of music halls of the better class where though the entertainment is administered in small separate doses or turns yet the turns have some artistic pretension above him again is the patron of that elementary form of sensational drama in which there is hardly any more connection between the incidents than the fact that the same people take part in them and call forth some very simple sort of moral judgment by being consistently villainous or virtuous throughout as such a drama would be almost as enjoyable if the acts were played in the reverse of their appointed order no inconvenience except that of a backseat is suffered by the playgoer who comes in for half price at nine o'clock on a higher plane we have dramas with a rational sequence of incidents the interest of any one of which depends on those which have preceded it and as we go up from plane to plane we find this sequence becoming more and more organic until at last we come to a class of play in which nobody can understand the last act who has not seen the first also accordingly the institution of half price at nine o'clock does not exist at theaters devoted to plays of this class the highest type of play is completely homogeneous often consisting of a single very complex incident and not even the most exhaustive information as to the story enables a spectator to receive the full force of the impression aimed at in any given passage if he enters the theater for that passage alone the success of such plays depends on the exercise by the audience of powers of memory imagination insight reasoning and sympathy which only a small minority of the play going public at present possesses to the rest the higher drama is as disagreeably perplexing as the game of chess is to a man who has barely enough capacity to understand skittles consequently just as we have the chess club and the skittle alley prospering side by side we shall have the theater of shakespeare mullier girta and ipson prospering alongside that of henry arthur jones and gilbert of sardu grunty and pinero of bucanon and onet as naturally as these already prosper alongside that of pettit and sims which again does no more harm to the music halls than the music halls due to the waxworks or even the rat pit although this last is dropping into the limbo of discarded brutalities by the same progressive movement that has led the intellectual playgoer to discard sardu and take to ipson it has often been said that political parties progress serpent wise the tale being today with a head was formally yet never overtaking the head the same figure may be applied to grades of playgoers with the reminder that this sort of serpent grows at the head and drops off joints of his tail as he glides along therefore it is not only inevitable that new theaters should be built for the new first class of playgoers but that the best of the existing theaters should gradually be converted to their use even at the cost of ousting in spite of much angry protest the old patrons who are being left behind by the movement the resistance of the old playgoers to the new plays will be supported by the elder managers the elder actors and the elder critics one manager pitties ipson for his ignorance of effective playwriting and declares that he can see exactly what ought to have been done to make a real play of header gabler his case is parallel to that of mr. henry erving who saw exactly what ought to have been done to make a real play of gutters foust and got mr. wills to do it a third manager repelled and disgusted by ipson condemns header as totally deficient in elevating moral sentiment one of the plays which he prefers is sardos la tosca clearly these three representative gentlemen all eminent both as actors and managers will hold by the conventional drama until the commercial success of ipson forces them to recognize that in the course of nature they are falling behind the taste of the day mr. thorn and the vaudeville theater was the first leading manager who ventured to put a play of ipsons into his evening bill and he did not do so until miss elizabeth robbins and miss marion lee had given 10 experimental performances at his theater at their own risk mr. charrington and miss janet a church who long before that staked their capital and reputation on a doll's house had to take a theater and go into management themselves for the purpose the production of rosemus holm was not a managerial enterprise in the ordinary sense at all it was an experiment made by miss far who played rebecca an experiment too which was considerably hampered by the refusal of the london managers to allow members of their companies to take part in the performance in short the senior division would have nothing to say for themselves in the matter of the one really progressive theatrical movement of their time but for the fact that mr. wh vernan's effort to obtain a hearing for pillars of society in 1880 was the occasion of the first appearance of the name of ipson on an english play bill but it had long been obvious that the want of a playhouse at which the aims of the management should be unconditionally artistic was not likely to be supplied either at our purely commercial theaters or at those governed by actor managers reigning absolutely over all the other actors a power which a young man abuses to provide opportunities for himself and which an older man uses in an old-fashioned way mr. william archer in an article in the fortnightly review invited private munificents to endow a national theater and sometime later a young dutchman mr. j t grind an enthusiast in theatrical art came forward with a somewhat similar scheme private munificents remained irresponsive fortunately one must think since it was a feature of both plans that the management of the endowed theater should be handed over to committees of managers and actors of established reputation in other words to the very people whose deficiencies have created the whole difficulty mr. grind however being very prepared to take any practicable scheme in hand himself soon saw the realities of the situation well enough to understand that to wait for the floating of a fashionable utopian enterprise with the prince of wales as president and a capital of at least 20 000 pounds would be to wait forever he accordingly hired a cheap public hall in tottenham court road and though his resources fell far short of those with which an ambitious young professional man ventures upon giving a dance made a bold start by announcing a performance of ghosts to inaugurate the independent theater on the lines of the theater libre of paris the result was that he received sufficient support both in money and gratuitous professional aid to enable him to give the performance at the royalty theater and throughout the following week he shared with ipsen the distinction of being abusively discussed to an extent that must have amply convinced him that his efforts had not passed unheeded possibly he may have counted on being handled generously for the sake of his previous services in obtaining some consideration for the contemporary english drama on the continent even to the extent of bringing about the translation and production in foreign theaters of some of the most popular of our recent plays but if he had any such hope it was not fulfilled for he received no quarter wherever and at present it is clear that unless those who appreciate the service he has rendered to theatrical art in england support him as energetically as his opponents attack him it will be impossible for him to maintain the performances of the independent theater at the pitch of efficiency and frequency which will be needed if it is to have any wide effect on the taste and seriousness of the play going public one of the most formidable and exasperating obstacles in his way is the detestable censorship exercised by the official licensor of plays a public nuisance of which it seems impossible to rid ourselves under existing parliamentary conditions the licensor has the london theaters at his mercy through his power to revoke their licenses and he is empowered to exact a fee for reading each play submitted to him so that his income depends on his allowing no play to be produced without going through that ordeal as these powers are granted to him in order that he may forbid the performance of plays which would have an injurious effect on public morals the unfortunate gentleman is bound in honor to try to do his best to keep the stage in the right path which he of course can set about in no other way than by making it a reflection of his individual views which are necessarily dictated by his temperament and by the political and pecuniary interests of his class this he does not dare to do self mistrust and the fear of public opinion paralyze him whenever either the strong hand or the open mind claims its golden opportunity and the net result is that indecency and vulgarity are rampant on the london stage from which flows the dramatic stream that irrigates the whole country whilst shelly's chenchi tragedy and ipson's ghosts are forbidden and have in fact only been performed once in private that is before audiences of invited non-paying guests it is now so well understood that only plays of the commonest idealist type can be sure of a license in london that the novel and not the drama is the form adopted as a matter of course by thoughtful masters of fiction the merits of the case ought to be too obvious to need restating it is plain that every argument that supports a censorship of the stage supports with tenfold force a censorship of the press which is admittedly an abomination what is wanted is the entire abolition of the censorship and the establishment of free art in the sense which we speak of free trade there is not the slightest ground for protecting theaters against the competition of music halls or for denying to mr grind as a theatrical entrepreneur the freedom he would enjoy as a member of a publishing firm in the absence of a censorship a manager can be prosecuted for an offense against public morals just as a publisher can at present though managers may not touch shelly or ghosts they find no difficulty in obtaining official sanction practically amounting to indemnity for indecencies from which our uncensored novels are perfectly free the truth is that the real support of the censorship comes from those puritans who regard art as a department of original sin to them the theater is an unmixed evil and every restriction on it again to the cause of righteousness against them stand those who regard art in all its forms as a department of religion the holy war between the two sides has played a considerable part in the history of england and is just now being prosecuted with renewed vigor by the puritans if their opponents do not display equal energy it is quite possible that we shall presently have a reformed censorship 10 times more odious than the existing one the very absurdity of which causes it to be exercised with a half-heartedness that prevents the licensor from doing his worst as well as his best the wise policy for the friends of art just now is to use the puritan agitation in order to bring the matter to an issue and then to make a vigorous effort to secure that the upshot shall be the total abolition of the censorship end of section 17 section 18 of the quintessence of ipsonism this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libra vox dot org recording by philip panos the quintessence of ipsonism by george bernard shore section 18 as it is with the actors and managers so it is with the critics the supporters of ipson are the younger men in the main however the press follows the managers instead of leading them the average newspaper dramatic critic is not a lessing a lamb or a lewis there was a time when he was not necessarily even an accustomed playgoer but simply a member of the reporting or literary staff told off for theatre duty without any question as to his acquaintance with dramatic literature at present though the special nature of his function is so far beginning to be recognized that appointments of the kind usually now fall into the hands of inveterate frequenters of the theatre yet he is still little more than the man who supplies accounts of what takes place in the playhouses just as his colleague supplies accounts of what takes place at the police court an important difference however being that the editor who generally cares little about art and knows less will himself occasionally criticize or ask one of his best writers to criticize a remarkable police case whereas he never dreams of theatrical art as a subject upon which there could be any editorial policy sir edwin arnold's editorial attack on ipson was due to the accidental circumstance that he like richler writes verses between wiles in fact the dramatic critic of a newspaper in ordinary circumstances is at his best a good descriptive reporter and at his worst a mere theatrical newsman as such he is a person of importance among actors and managers and of no importance whatever elsewhere naturally he frequents the circles in which alone he has made much of and by the time he has seen so many performances that he has formed some critical standards in spite of himself he has also enrolled among his personal acquaintances every actor and manager of a few years standing and become engaged in all the private likes and dislikes the quarrels and friendships in a word all the partialities which personal relations involve at which point the value of his verdicts may be imagined add to this that if he has the misfortune to be attached to a paper to which theatrical advertisements are an object or of which the editor and proprietors or their wives do not hesitate to incur obligations to managers by asking for complimentary admissions he may often have to choose between making himself agreeable and forfeiting his post so that he is not always to be relied upon even as a newsman where the plain truth would give offense to any individual behind all the suppressive forces with which the critic has to contend comes the law of libel every adverse criticism of a public performer is a libel and any agreement among the critics to boycott artists who appeal to the law is a conspiracy of course the boycott does take place to a certain extent for if an artist manager or agent shoes any disposition to retort to what is called a slating by a lawyer's letter the critic who cannot for his own sake expose his employers to the expenses of an action or the anxiety attending the threat of one will be tempted to shun the danger by simply never again referring to the litigiously disposed person but although this at first sight seems to sufficiently guarantee the freedom from criticism for most public persons would suffer more from being ignored by the papers them from being attacked in them however abusively its operation is really restricted on the one side to the comparatively few and powerful critics who are attached to important papers at a fixed salary and on the other to those entrepreneurs and artists about whom the public is not imperatively curious most critics get paid for their notices at so much per column or per line so that their incomes depend on the quantity they write under these conditions they find themselves every time they ignore a performance again a dramatist or a manager may attain such a position that his enterprises form an indispensable part of the news of the day he can then safely intimidate a hostile critic by a threat of legal proceedings knowing that the paper can afford neither to brave nor ignore him the late Charles Reed for example was a most dangerous man to criticize adversely but the very writers against whom he took actions found it impossible to boycott him and what read did out of a natural overflow of indignant pugnacity some of our more powerful artistic entrepreneurs occasionally threatened to do now after a deliberate calculation of the advantages of their position if legal proceedings are actually taken and the case is not as usual compromised behind the scenes the uncertainty of the law receives its most extravagant illustration from a couple of lawyers arguing a question of fine art before a jury of men of business even if the critic were a capable speaker and pleader which he is not in the least likely to be he would be debarred from conducting his own case by the fact that his comparatively wealthy employer and not himself would be the defendant in the case in short the law is against straightforward criticism at the very points where it is most needed and though it is true that an ingenious and witty writer can make any artist or performance acutely ridiculous in the eyes of ingenious and witty people without laying himself open to an action and indeed with every appearance of good-humored indulgence such applications of wit and ingenuity do criticism no good whilst in any case they offer no remedy to the plain critic writing for plain readers all this does not mean that the entire press is hopelessly corrupt in its criticism of art but it certainly does mean that the odds against the independence of the press critic are so heavy that no man can maintain it completely without a force of character and a personal authority which are rare in any profession and in which most of them can command higher pecuniary terms and prospects than any which journalism can offer the final degrees of thoroughness have no market value on the press for other things being equal a journal with a critic who is good-humored and compliant will have no fewer readers than one with a critic who is inflexible where the interests of art and the public are concerned i do not exaggerate or go beyond the warrant of my experience when i say that unless a critic is prepared not only to do much more work than the public will pay him for but to risk his livelihood each time he strikes a serious blow at the powerful interests vested in artistic abuses of all kinds conditions which in the long run tire out the strongest man he must submit himself to compromises which detract very considerably from the trustworthiness of his criticism even the critic who is himself in a position to brave these risks must find a sympathetic and courageous editor proprietor who will stand by him without reference to the commercial advantage or disadvantage of his incessant warfare as all the economic conditions of our society tend to throw our journals more and more into the hands of successful money makers the exceeding scarcity of this lucky combination of resolute capable and incorruptible critic sympathetic editor and disinterested and courageous proprietor can hardly be appreciated by those who only know the world of journalism through its black and white veil on the whole though excellent criticisms are written every week by men who either as writers distinguished in other branches of literature and journalism or as civil servants are practically independent of this or that particular appointment as dramatic critic not to mention the few whom strong vocation and force of character have rendered incorruptible there remains a great mass of newspaper reports of theatrical events which is only called dramatic criticism by courtesy among the critics properly so called opinions are divided about ipson in the inevitable way into philistine idealist and realist more or less just at present the crossfiring between them is rather confusing without necessarily being an ipsonist a critic may see at a glance the abuse of the sort quoted on page 89 is worthless and he may for the credit of his cloth attack it on that ground thus we have Mr. a b walkley of the speaker one of the most able and independent of our critics provoking Mr. clement scott beyond measure by alluding to the writers who had just been calling the admirers of ipson muck ferreting dogs as these gentry with a good humored but very perceptible contempt for their literary attainments thereupon mr scott publishes a vindication of the literateness of that school of which mr walkley makes unmerciful fun but mr walkley is by no means committed to ipsonism by his appreciation of ipson's status as an artist much less by his depreciation of the literary status of ipsons foes on the other hand there is mr frederick wedmore a professed admirer of balzac conceiving such a violent antipathy to ipson that he almost echoes sir edwin arnold whose denunciations are at least as applicable to the author of vortra as to the author of ghosts mr george moore accustomed to fight on behalf of zola against the men who are now attacking ipson takes the field promptly against his old enemies in defense of not ipsonism but of free art even mr william archer expressly guards himself against being taken as an ipsonist doctrinaire in the face of all this it is little to the point that some of the critics who have attacked ipson have undoubtedly done so because to put it bluntly they are too illiterate and incompetent in the sphere of dramatic poetry to conceive or relish anything more substantial than the theatrical fair to which they are accustomed or that others intimidated by the outcry raised by sir edwin arnold and the section of the public typified by pastor manders not to mention mr pexniff against their own conviction join the chorus of disparagement from modesty caution compliance in short from want of the courage of their profession there is no reason to suppose that if the whole body of critics had been endowed with a liberal education and an independent income the number of ipsonists among them would be much greater than at present however the tone of their adverse criticism might have been improved ipson as a pioneer in stage progress no less than in morals is bound to have the majority of his contemporaries against him whether as actors managers or critics finally it is necessary to say by way of warning that many of the minor combatants on both sides have either not studied the plays at all or else have been so puzzled that they have allowed themselves to be misled by the attacks of the idealists into reading extravagant immoralities between the lines as for instance that oswald in ghosts is really the son of pastor manders or that loveborg is the father of header tesman's child it has even been asserted that horrible exhibitions of death and disease occur in almost every scene of ipson's plays which for tragedies are exceptionally free from visible physical horrors it is not too much to say that very few of the critics have yet got so far as to be able to narrate accurately the stories of the plays they have witnessed no wonder then that they have not yet made up their minds on the more difficult point of ipson's philosophic drift though i do not myself see how performances of his plays can be quite adequately judged without reference to it one consequence of this is that those who are interested fascinated and refreshed by ipsons art misrepresent his meaning benevolently quite as often as those who are perplexed and disgusted misrepresented maliciously and it already looks as if ipson might attain undisputed supremacy as a modern playwright without necessarily converting a single critic to ipsonism indeed it is not possible that his meaning should be fully recognized much less assented to until society as we now know it loses itself complacency through the growth of the conviction foretold by richard vagner when he declared that man will never be that which he can and should be until by a conscious following of that inner natural necessity which is the only true necessity he makes his life a mirror of nature and frees himself from his thralldom to outer artificial counterfeits then will he first become a living man who now is a mere wheel in the mechanism of this or that religion nationality or state end of section 18 end of the quintessence of ipsonism by george bernard shore