One suspects that there is as much fun as commerce in Mr. Shaw’s advertisement.  Mr. Shaw would advertise himself in this sense even if he were the inmate of a workhouse.  He is something of a natural peacock.  He is in the line of all those tramps and stage Irishmen who have gone through! life with so fine a swagger of words.  This only means that in his life he is an artist.

He is an artist in his life to an even greater extent than he is a moralist in his art.  The mistake his depreciators make, however, is in thinking that his story ends here.  The truth about Mr. Shaw is not quite so simple as that.  The truth about Mt.  Shaw cannot be told until we realize that he is an artist, not only in the invention of his own life, but in the observation of the lives of other people.  His Broadbent is as wonderful a figure as his George Bernard Shaw.  Not that his portraiture is always faithful.  He sees men and women too frequently in the refracting shallows of theories.  He is a doctrinaire, and his characters are often comic statements of his doctrines rather than the reflections of men and women.  “When I present true human nature,” he observes in one of the many passages in which he justifies himself, “the audience thinks it is being made fun of.  In reality I am simply a very careful writer of natural history.”  One is bound to contradict him.  Mr. Shaw often thinks he is presenting true human nature when he is merely presenting his opinions about human nature—­the human nature of soldiers, of artists, of women.  Or, rather, when he is presenting a queer fizzing mixture of human nature and his opinions about it.

This may be sometimes actually a virtue in his comedy.  Certainly, from the time of Aristophanes onwards, comedy has again and again been a vehicle of opinions as well as a branch of natural history.  But it is not always a virtue.  Thus in The Doctors Dilemma, when Dubedat is dying, his self-defence and his egoism are for the most part admirably true both to human nature and to Mr. Shaw’s view of the human nature of artists.  But when he goes on with his last breath to utter his artistic creed:  “I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of colour, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed.  Amen, Amen,” these sentences are no more natural or naturalistic than the death-bed utterances in one of Mr. G.R.  Sims’s ballads.  Dubedat would not have thought these things, he would not have said these things; in saying them he becomes a mere mechanical figure, without any admixture of humanity, repeating Mr. Shaw’s opinion of the nature of the creed of artists.  There is a similar falsification in the same play in the characterization of the newspaper man who is present at Dubedat’s death and immediately afterwards is anxious to interview the widow.  “Do you think,” he asks, “she would give me a few words on ’How it Feels to be a