y. Something indeed
has been done in the past with the river of laughter that almost every
Irish person has flowing in his heart; but infinitely more might be
done if these rivers were put in harness.

Yet, take away two Irish names from the field of modern comedy in the
English language written during the nineteenth century, and you have
uncommonly little for which literary merit can be claimed. The quality
of Oscar Wilde's is scarcely disputed. There is the more reason to dwell
on Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays, because they have not even in the twentieth
century been fully accepted by that queer folk, the theatre-going
public. But I never yet heard of anyone who saw _You Never can Tell_,
and was not amused by it. That was a farce, no doubt, but a farce which
appealed to emotions less elementary than those which are touched by the
spectacle of a man sitting down by accident on his hat; it was a farce
of intellectual absurdities, of grotesque situations arising out of
perversities of character and opinion; a farce that you could laugh at
without a loss of self-respect. But it is rather by his comedies than by
his farces that Mr. Shaw should be judged. If they are not popular, it
is for a very good reason: Mr. Shaw's humour is too serious. His humour
is a strong solvent, and one of the many things about which this
humorist is in deadly earnest is the fetish worship of tradition. To
that he persists in applying--in _Candida_ as in half a dozen other
plays--the ordeal by laughter--an ordeal which every human institution
is bound to face. _Candida_ will not only make people laugh, it will
make them think; and it is not easy to induce the public to think after
dinner on unaccustomed lines. They will laugh when they have been used
to laugh, weep when they have been used to weep; but if you ask them to
laugh when they expect to weep, or _vice versa_, the public will resent
the proceeding. The original humorist, like every other original artist,
has got slowly and laboriously to convert his public before he can
convince them of his right to find tears and laughter where he can.

Whatever Mr. Shaw touches, whether it be the half-hysterical impulse
that sometimes passes current for heroism, as in _Arms and the Man_, or,
as in the _Devil's Disciple_, the conventional picturesqueness of a Don
Juan--that maker of laws, breaker of hearts, so familiar with the
limelight, so unused to the illumination by laughter, who finds himself
in the