people have that consciousness. To them Undershaft the Mystic
will be quite intelligible, and his perfect comprehension of his
daughter the Salvationist and her lover the Euripidean republican
natural and inevitable. That, however, is not new, even on the
stage. What is new, as far as I know, is that article in
Undershaft's religion which recognizes in Money the first need
and in poverty the vilest sin of man and society.

This dramatic conception has not, of course, been attained per
saltum. Nor has it been borrowed from Nietzsche or from any man
born beyond the Channel. The late Samuel Butler, in his own
department the greatest English writer of the latter half of the
XIX century, steadily inculcated the necessity and morality of a
conscientious Laodiceanism in religion and of an earnest and
constant sense of the importance of money. It drives one almost
to despair of English literature when one sees so extraordinary a
study of English life as Butler's posthumous Way of All Flesh
making so little impression that when, some years later, I
produce plays in which Butler's extraordinarily fresh, free and
future-piercing suggestions have an obvious share, I am met with
nothing but vague cacklings about Ibsen and Nietzsche, and am
only too thankful that they are not about Alfred de Musset and
Georges Sand. Really, the English do not deserve to have great
men. They allowed Butler to die practically unknown, whilst I, a
comparatively insignificant Irish journalist, was leading them by
the nose into an advertisement of me which has made my own life a
burden. In Sicily there is a Via Samuele Butler. When an English
tourist sees it, he either asks "Who the devil was Samuele
Butler?" or wonders why the Sicilians should perpetuate the
memory of the author of Hudibras.