like the French classical drama. But going to
"The Philanderer" is like going among periwigs and rapiers and hearing
that the young men are now all for Racine. What makes such work sound
unreal is not the praise of Ibsen, but the praise of the novelty of
Ibsen. Any advantage that Bernard Shaw had over Colonel Craven I have
over Bernard Shaw; we who happen to be born last have the meaningless
and paltry triumph in that meaningless and paltry war. We are the
superiors by that silliest and most snobbish of all superiorities, the
mere aristocracy of time. All works must become thus old and insipid
which have ever tried to be "modern," which have consented to smell of
time rather than of eternity. Only those who have stooped to be in
advance of their time will ever find themselves behind it.

But it is irritating to think what diamonds, what dazzling silver of
Shavian wit has been sunk in such an out-of-date warship. In _The
Philanderer_ there are five hundred excellent and about five magnificent
things. The rattle of repartees between the doctor and the soldier about
the humanity of their two trades is admirable. Or again, when the
colonel tells Chartaris that "in his young days" he would have no more
behaved like Chartaris than he would have cheated at cards. After a
pause Chartaris says, "You're getting old, Craven, and you make a
virtue of it as usual." And there is an altitude of aerial tragedy in
the words of Grace, who has refused the man she loves, to Julia, who is
marrying the man she doesn't, "This is what they call a happy
ending--these men."

There is an acrid taste in _The Philanderer_; and certainly he might be
considered a super-sensitive person who should find anything acrid in
_You Never Can Tell_. This play is the nearest approach to frank and
objectless exuberance in the whole of Shaw's work. _Punch_, with wisdom
as well as wit, said that it might well be called not "You Never Can
Tell" but "You Never Can be Shaw." And yet if anyone will read this
blazing farce and then after it any of the romantic farces, such as
_Pickwick_ or even _The Wrong Box_, I do not think he will be disposed
to erase or even to modify what I said at the beginning about the
ingrained grimness and even inhumanity of Shaw's art. To take but one
test: love, in an "extravaganza," may be light love or love in idleness,
but it should be hearty and happy love if it is to add to the general
hilarity. Such are the ludicrous but lucky love