be completely original in that sense than a tree can grow out of
air.

Another mistake as to my literary ancestry is made whenever I
violate the romantic convention that all women are angels when
they are not devils; that they are better looking than men; that
their part in courtship is entirely passive; and that the human
female form is the most beautiful object in nature. Schopenhauer
wrote a splenetic essay which, as it is neither polite nor
profound, was probably intended to knock this nonsense violently
on the head. A sentence denouncing the idolized form as ugly has
been largely quoted. The English critics have read that sentence;
and I must here affirm, with as much gentleness as the
implication will bear, that it has yet to be proved that they
have dipped any deeper. At all events, whenever an English
playwright represents a young and marriageable woman as being
anything but a romantic heroine, he is disposed of without
further thought as an echo of Schopenhauer. My own case is a
specially hard one, because, when I implore the critics who are
obsessed with the Schopenhaurian formula to remember that
playwrights, like sculptors, study their figures from life, and
not from philosophic essays, they reply passionately that I am
not a playwright and that my stage figures do not live. But even
so, I may and do ask them why, if they must give the credit of my
plays to a philosopher, they do not give it to an English
philosopher? Long before I ever read a word by Schopenhauer, or
even knew whether he was a philosopher or a chemist, the
Socialist revival of the eighteen-eighties brought me into
contact, both literary and personal, with Mr Ernest Belfort Bax,
an English Socialist and philosophic essayist, whose handling of