. Shaw is truth's vulgar
advertisement. He is a brilliant, carrying noise on behalf of freedom of
thought; and his special equipment for his peculiar revivalist mission
comes of his gift for revealing to the common mind not merely the
untruth of hypocrisy, but the laughableness of hypocrisy, first of all.
He takes some popular convention, that of medicine or marriage or what
you will, and shows you not merely how false it is but how ludicrously
false. He purges the soul, not with the terror and pity of tragedy, but
with the irresistible laughter of rough-and-tumble farce. To think
wrongly is, first of all, so absurd. He proves it by putting wrong
thinking on the stage, where you see it for yourself in action, and
laugh immoderately. Perhaps you had never thought how droll wrong
thinking or no thinking was before; and while you laugh with Shaw
at your side-splitting discovery, the serious message glides in
unostentatiously--wrong thinking is not merely laughable; it is also
dangerous, and very uncomfortable. And so the showman has done his work,
the advertiser has sold his goods, and there is so much more truth in
circulation in unfamiliar areas of society.

That word "society" naturally claims some attention at the hands of one
who would speak of Mrs. Grundy, particularly as she has owed her long
existence to a general misconception as to what constitutes "society,"
and to a superstitious terror as to its powers over the individual.
Society--using the word in its broad sense--has heretofore been regarded
as a vague tremendous entity imposing a uniformity of opinion and action
on the individual, under penalty of a like vague tremendous disapproval
for insubordination. Independent minds, however, have from time to time,
and in ever increasing numbers, ventured to do their own will and
pleasure in disregard of this vague tremendous disapproval, and have,
strange to say, found no sign of the terrible consequences threatened
them, with the result that they, and the onlookers, have come to the
conclusion that this fear of society is just one more bugaboo of
timorous minds, with no power over the courageous spirit. From a
multitude of such observations men and women have come more and more to
draw the conclusion that the solidarity of society is nothing but a
myth, and that so-called society is merely a loosely connected series of
independent societies, formed by natural selection among their members,
each with its own codes a