On the other hand there is a trace of the spirit in _Mrs Warren's Profession_, and _Salome_ seems full of it. Curiously enough, in some of the permitted dramas by Mr Bernard Shaw there is evidence of this desire. Mr Shaw often seems to be saying, "I'm going to make your flesh creep." He is a brilliant dramatist, and also, desperately in earnest, and it may well be that they are right who think that his plays will live along after the death of most English works produced since the public and critics were bewildered at the first performance of _Widowers' Houses_, and he certainly appears to adopt as a policy the theory of stirring up into activity the lethargic stomach of the British playgoer by devices carefully calculated to make him howl.
_Salome_ stands in another category: the author had no lesson to teach. As a work of art his play would not be invalidated or even weakened if, instead of the biblical characters and phrases, he had invented his prophet, slightly altered time and place, and left out the quotations; but to have done this would have been to avoid shocking people. Of course it is not always easy to be certain whether an audacity is employed with the desire to "_ébouriffer le bourgeois_" that may be excusable, or with the object of beating the big drum and calling attention, ignobly, to the existence of a work which, but for such means of publicity, might have remained unnoticed. In the case of _Salome_ it is hard to guess to which of these two motives one ought to ascribe the choice of treatment made by the lamentable man of genius who illustrated the truth of the theory advocated by the late dramatic critic of _The Times_ in his work "The Insanity of Genius."
Such audacities often deceive the youthful critic, and, in some of the notices referred to, the signs of youth are manifest in the ill-balanced enthusiasm, as well as in the employment of phrases of praise which the old hand shirks with a curious kind of bashfulness.
In criticism there is a difficulty analogous to that which is supposed to beset the performance of the part of Juliet; it is rather nicely put in the title of one of Béranger's poems--and also of a rather dreary, once popular, novel, "Si Jeunesse Savait, si Vieillesse Pouvait." In youth one has intense sympathy with the lost causes, or, rather, with those that have not yet been found, and superb contempt for the conventional, without possessing the judgment to distinguish the tares from the wheat; every novelty attracts, every audacity appeals, and we introduce obscure artists of alleged genius by the dozen to an unsympathetic world; as age and judgment come enthusiasm wanes, till at last the inevitable crystallization begins and new ideas beat vainly at the doors of our minds.