an
advertiser in an age of advertisement. M. Hamon quotes him as saying:--

Stop advertising myself! On the contrary, I must do it more than
ever. Look at Pears's Soap. There is a solid house if you like, but
every wall is still plastered with their advertisements. If I were
to give up advertising, my business would immediately begin to fall
off. You blame me for having declared myself to be the most
remarkable man of my time. But the claim is an arguable one. Why
should I not say it when I believe that it is true?

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