ny people do not realize that humour, and not wit, is the ruling
characteristic of Mr. Shaw's plays. He is not content with witty
conversation about life, as Wilde was: he has an actual comic vision of
human society.

His humour, it is true, is not the sympathetic humour of Elia or
Dickens; but then neither was Moliere's. As M. Hamon reminds us, Moliere
anticipated Mr. Shaw in outraging the sentiment, for instance, which has
gathered round the family. "Moliere and Shaw," as he puts it with quaint
seriousness, "appear to be unaware of what a father is, what a father is
worth."

The defence of Mr. Shaw, however, does not depend on any real or
imaginary resemblance of his plays to Moliere's. His joy and his misery
before the ludicrous spectacle of human life are his own, and his
expression of them is his own. He has studied with his own eyes the
swollen-bellied pretences of preachers and poets and rich men and lovers
and politicians, and he has derided them as they have never been derided
on the English stage before. He has derided them with both an artistic
and a moral energy. He has brought them all into a Palace of Truth,
where they have revealed themselves with an unaccustomed and startling
frankness. He has done this sometimes with all the exuberance of mirth,
sometimes with all the bitterness of a satirist. Even his bitterness is
never venomous, however. He is genial beyond the majority of inveterate
controversialists and propagandists. He does not hesitate to wound and
he does not hesitate to misunderstand, but he is free from malice. The
geniality of his comedy, on the other hand, is often more offensive than
malice, because it is from an orthodox point of view geniality in the
wrong place. It is like a grin in church, a laugh at a marriage service.

It is this that has caused all the trouble about Mr. Shaw's writings on
the war. He saw, not the war so much as the international diplomacy that
led up to the war, under the anti-romantic and satirical comic vision. I
do not mean that he was not intensely serious in all that he wrote about
the war. But his seriousness is essentially the seriousness of (in the
higher sense of the word) the comic artist, of the disillusionist. He
sees current history from the absolutely opposite point of view, say, to
the lyric poet. He was so occupied with his satiric vision of the
pretences of the diplomatic world that, though his attitude to the war
was as anti-Prussian as M. Vander