is precisely the cut-and-dried Fabian
side of Mr. Shaw which blinds him to facts of a certain sort--the
fact, for instance, that for certain human needs no ingenious, or
_invented_, rational remedy is possible; that in certain departments
of life where the great instincts are concerned the accumulated
conscious and subconscious experience of thousands of years of mankind
have produced a kind of instinctive knowledge which logic cannot
tamper with; which is bound up with human nature and is near to a
thousand subtle truths never yet brought within the scope of
scientific knowledge; which it is dangerous to attack by a brutal
frontal assault, as if the issue were a single and simple debating
issue; which is defied only under just such penalties as Mr. Shaw
himself alludes to.

It is already evident why Mr. Shaw is far better as lecturer, debater,
pamphleteer, and writer of critical essays than as writer of either
romances or plays. He is primarily a social reformer, like Henry
George and Karl Marx, though he brings more wit, cleverness, driving
power, and intellectual agility to bear upon his subjects. He is
interested in public morality and "affairs," in generalities rather
than individuals, in ideas about life rather than in life at first
hand. He sees through the intellect rather than through the
perceptions. He is concerned to prove and to teach rather than to
_show_. He has made very few _characters_ in his plays, for the simple
reason that he handicaps his persons by treating them as _ideas_
rather than as _persons_. This is to say, that as an artist he is
never disinterested; he is more concerned with the case which his
puppets are set up to prove than with a situation for its own sake. In
_Caesar and Cleopatra_ he did for once allow a subject to exist for
its own sake. He had no axe to grind, primarily, on behalf of society
and its morals. It is not perhaps the cleverest of his plays, but it
is the play which is most a play; and if it is not a great play, that
is because Mr. Shaw is not a great dramatist--he has not allowed
himself to be a great imaginative artist--he turned his back upon
imaginative art at the age of twenty-nine.

In the cleverest of his plays there is, indeed, always one real
person, and that person is none other than himself. In _Man and
Superman_, in _Arms and the Man_, and in _John Bull's Other Island_,
the hero is in each case nothing more nor less than a new
impersonation of Bernard Shaw