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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
failure in the mission hc undertook in youth. I have no such handicap. Therefore, I can be confident of success in that respect. What I say will predominate how I say it.
More than forty years ago, the young Shaw wrote the following in the preface of his “Plays Unpleasant": “But in claiming place for my plays among works of art, I must make a melancholy reservation. One or two friendly readers may find it interesting, amusing, even admirable, as far as a mere topical farce can excite admiration ; but nobody will find it a beautiful or a lovable work. It is saturated with vulgarity of the life it represents ; the people do not speak nobly, live gracefully, or sincerely face their own positions ; the author is not giving cxpression in pleasant fancies to the underlying beauty and romance of happy lifc, but dragging up to the smooth surface of 'respectability' a handful of the slime and foulness of its polluted bed, playing off your laughter at the scandal of the exposure against your shudder at the blackness. It is not my fault, rcader, if my art is the expression of my sense of moral or intellectual perversity rather than of my sense of beauty”.
A little above, I asked, as to why a cat should not tell the story of her life, and why it should not interest human readers. Evidently, I believe that a member of my race is fully entitled to record the events of his or her life, and that human
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