Fanny's First Play

By Shaw, George Bernard

Book Id: WPLBN0000678779
Format Type: PDF eBook:
File Size: 0.3 MB
Reproduction Date: 2005

Title:	Fanny's First Play
Author:	Shaw, George Bernard
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Fiction, Literature and history, Literature & philosophy
Collections:	Classic Literature Collection, Penn State University's Electronic Classics Series Collection
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	Penn State University's Electronic Classics


Citation APA MLA Chicago Bernard Shaw, B. G. (n.d.). Fanny's First Play. Retrieved from http://www.self.gutenberg.org/

Excerpt
Excerpt: Preface to Fanny?s First Play. Fanny?s First Play, being but a potboiler, needs no preface. But its lesson is not, I am sorry to say, unneeded. Mere morality, or the substitution of custom for conscience was once accounted a shameful and cynical thing: people talked of right and wrong, of honor and dishonor, of sin and grace, of salvation and damnation, not of morality and immorality. The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car. Nowadays we do not seem to know that there is any other test of conduct except morality; and the result is that the young had better have their souls awakened by disgrace, capture by the police, and a month?s hard labor, than drift along from their cradles to their graves doing what other people do for no other reason than that other people do it, and knowing nothing of good and evil, of courage and cowardice, or indeed anything but how to keep hunger and concupiscence and fashionable dressing within the bounds of good taste except when their excesses can be concealed.