George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

The Inhabitants
Tchekov’s plays, being less lucrative than swings and
roundabouts, got no further in England, where theatres are
only ordinary commercial affairs, than a couple of perfor-
mances by the Stage Society. We stared and said, “How Rus-
sian!” They did not strike me in that way. Just as Ibsen’s in-
tensely Norwegian plays exactly fitted every middle and pro-
fessional class suburb in Europe, these intensely Russian plays
fitted all the country houses in Europe in which the plea-
sures of music, art, literature, and the theatre had supplanted
hunting, shooting, fishing, flirting, eating, and drinking. The
same nice people, the same utter futility. The nice people
could read; some of them could write; and they were the sole
repositories of culture who had social opportunities of con-
tact with our politicians, administrators, and newspaper pro-
prietors, or any chance of sharing or influencing their activi-
ties. But they shrank from that contact. They hated politics.
They did not wish to realize Utopia for the common people:
they wished to realize their favorite fictions and poems in
their own lives; and, when they could, they lived without
scruple on incomes which they did nothing to earn. The
women in their girlhood made themselves look like variety
theatre stars, and settled down later into the types of beauty
imagined by the previous generation of painters. They took
the only part of our society in which there was leisure for
high culture, and made it an economic, political and; as far
as practicable, a moral vacuum; and as Nature, abhorring
the vacuum, immediately filled it up with sex and with all
sorts of refined pleasures, it was a very delightful place at its

---

5
GB Shaw
best for moments of relaxation. In other moments it was
disastrous. For prime ministers and their like, it was a veri-
table Capua.
Horseback Hall
But where were our front benchers to nest if not here? The
alternative to Heartbreak House was Horseback Hall, con-
sisting of a prison for horses with an annex for the ladies and
gentlemen who rode them, hunted them, talked about them,
bought them and sold them, and gave nine-tenths of their
lives to them, dividing the other tenth between charity,
churchgoing (as a substitute for religion), and conservative
electioneering (as a substitute for politics). It is true that the
two establishments got mixed at the edges. Exiles from the
library, the music room, and the picture gallery would be
found languishing among the stables, miserably discontented;
and hardy horsewomen who slept at the first chord of
Schumann were born, horribly misplaced, into the garden
of Klingsor; but sometimes one came upon horsebreakers
and heartbreakers who could make the best of both worlds.
As a rule, however, the two were apart and knew little of one
another; so the prime minister folk had to choose between
barbarism and Capua. And of the two atmospheres it is hard
to say which was the more fatal to statesmanship.