not there by
accident. It is another to say (in the face of ocular experience) that
the mousetrap runs after the mouse.

But whenever Shaw shows the Puritan hardness or even the Puritan
cheapness, he shows something also of the Puritan nobility, of the idea
that sacrifice is really a frivolity in the face of a great purpose. The
reasonableness of Calvin and his followers will by the mercy of heaven
be at last washed away; but their unreasonableness will remain an
eternal splendour. Long after we have let drop the fancy that
Protestantism was rational it will be its glory that it was fanatical.
So it is with Shaw. To make Anne a real woman, even a dangerous woman,
he would need to be something stranger and softer than Bernard Shaw. But
though I always argue with him whenever he argues, I confess that he
always conquers me in the one or two moments when he is emotional.

There is one really noble moment when Anne offers for all her cynical
husband-hunting the only defence that is really great enough to cover
it. "It will not be all happiness for me. Perhaps death." And the man
rises also at that real crisis, saying, "Oh, that clutch holds and
hurts. What have you grasped in me? Is there a father's heart as well as
a mother's?" That seems to me actually great; I do not like either of
the characters an atom more than formerly; but I can see shining and
shaking through them at that instant the splendour of the God that made
them and of the image of God who wrote their story.

A logician is like a liar in many respects, but chiefly in the fact
that he should have a good memory. That cutting and inquisitive style
which Bernard Shaw has always adopted carries with it an inevitable
criticism. And it cannot be denied that this new theory of the supreme
importance of sound sexual union, wrought by any means, is hard
logically to reconcile with Shaw's old diatribes against sentimentalism
and operatic romance. If Nature wishes primarily to entrap us into
sexual union, then all the means of sexual attraction, even the most
maudlin or theatrical, are justified at one stroke. The guitar of the
troubadour is as practical as the ploughshare of the husbandman. The
waltz in the ballroom is as serious as the debate in the parish council.
The justification of Anne, as the potential mother of Superman, is
really the justification of all the humbugs and sentimentalists whom
Shaw had been denouncing as a dramatic critic and as a dramatist si