nal point is so plain; no sceptical philosopher
can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on
a hot afternoon. "Am I a boy?--Why am I a boy?--Why aren't I a
chair?--What is a chair?" A child will sometimes ask questions of this
sort for two hours. And the philosophers of Protestant Europe have asked
them for two hundred years.

If that were all that I meant by Shaw making men more philosophic, I
should put it not among his good influences but his bad. He did do that
to some extent; and so far he is bad. But there is a much bigger and
better sense in which he has been a philosopher. He has brought back
into English drama all the streams of fact or tendency which are
commonly called undramatic. They were there in Shakespeare's time; but
they have scarcely been there since until Shaw. I mean that Shakespeare,
being interested in everything, put everything into a play. If he had
lately been thinking about the irony and even contradiction confronting
us in self-preservation and suicide, he put it all into _Hamlet_. If he
was annoyed by some passing boom in theatrical babies he put that into
_Hamlet_ too. He would put anything into _Hamlet_ which he really
thought was true, from his favourite nursery ballads to his personal
(and perhaps unfashionable) conviction of the Catholic purgatory. There
is no fact that strikes one, I think, about Shakespeare, except the fact
of how dramatic he could be, so much as the fact of how undramatic he
could be.

In this great sense Shaw has brought philosophy back into
drama--philosophy in the sense of a certain freedom of the mind. This is
not a freedom to think what one likes (which is absurd, for one can only
think what one thinks); it is a freedom to think about what one likes,
which is quite a different thing and the spring of all thought.
Shakespeare (in a weak moment, I think) said that all the world is a
stage. But Shakespeare acted on the much finer principle that a stage is
all the world. So there are in all Bernard Shaw's plays patches of what
people would call essentially undramatic stuff, which the dramatist puts
in because he is honest and would rather prove his case than succeed
with his play. Shaw has brought back into English drama that
Shakespearian universality which, if you like, you can call
Shakespearian irrelevance. Perhaps a better definition than either is a
habit of thinking the truth worth telling even when you meet it by
accident. In Sha