Widow?’ Rather a good title for an article, isn’t it?” These sentences are bad because into an atmosphere of more or less naturalistic comedy they simply introduce a farcical exaggeration of Mr. Shaw’s opinion of the incompetence and impudence of journalists.  Mr. Shaw’s comedies are repeatedly injured by a hurried alteration of atmosphere in this manner.  Comedy, as well as tragedy, must create some kind of illusion, and the destruction of the illusion, even for the sake of a joke, may mean the destruction of laughter.  But, compared with the degree of reality in his characterization, the proportion of unreality is not overwhelming.  It has been enormously exaggerated.

After all, if the character of the newspaper man in The Doctor’s Dilemma is machine-made, the much more important character of B.B., the soothing and incompetent doctor, is a creation of the true comic genius.

Nine people out of ten harp on Mr. Shaw’s errors.  It is much more necessary that we should recognize that, amid all his falsifications, doctrinal and jocular, he has a genuine comic sense of character.  “Most French critics,” M. Hamon tells us ... “declare that Bernard Shaw does depict characters.  M. Remy de Gourmont writes:  ’Moliere has never drawn a doctor more comically “the doctor” than Paramore, nor more characteristic figures of women than those in the same play, The Philanderer. The character-drawing is admirable.’” M. Hamon himself goes on, however, to suggest an important contrast between the characterization in Mr. Shaw and the characterization in Moliere:—­

In Shaw’s plays the characters are less representative of vices or passions than those of Moliere, and more representative of class, profession, or sect.  Moliere depicts the miser, the jealous man, the misanthrope, the hypocrite; whereas Shaw depicts the bourgeois, the rebel, the capitalist, the workman, the Socialist, the doctor.  A few only of these latter types are given us by Moliere.

M. Hamon’s comparison, made in the course of a long book, between the genius of Mr. Shaw and the genius of Moliere is extraordinarily detailed.  Perhaps the detail is overdone in such a passage as that which informs us regarding the work of both authors that “suicide is never one of the central features of the comedy; if mentioned, it is only to be made fun of.”  The comparison, however, between the sins that have been alleged against both Moliere and Mr. Shaw—­sins of style, of form, of morals, of disrespect, of irreligion, of anti-romanticism, of farce, and so forth—­is a suggestive contribution to criticism.  I am not sure that the comparison would not have been more effectively put in a chapter than a book, but it is only fair to remember that M. Hamon’s book is intended as a biography and general criticism of Mr. Shaw as well as a comparison between his work and Moliere’s.  It contains, it must be confessed, a great deal that is not new to English readers, but then so do all books about Mr. Shaw.  And it has also this fault that, though it is about a master of laughter, it does not contain even the shadow of a smile.  Mr. Shaw is made an idol in spite of himself:  M. Hamon’s volume is an offering at a shrine.