the perfect and painful consciousness
of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the
consistency in things is a wit--and a Calvinist. The man who sees the
inconsistency in things is a humorist--and a Catholic. However this may
be, Bernard Shaw exhibits all that is purest in the Puritan; the desire
to see truth face to face even if it slay us, the high impatience with
irrelevant sentiment or obstructive symbol; the constant effort to keep
the soul at its highest pressure and speed. His instincts upon all
social customs and questions are Puritan. His favourite author is
Bunyan.

But along with what was inspiring and direct in Puritanism Bernard Shaw
has inherited also some of the things that were cumbersome and
traditional. If ever Shaw exhibits a prejudice it is always a Puritan
prejudice. For Puritanism has not been able to sustain through three
centuries that native ecstacy of the direct contemplation of truth;
indeed it was the whole mistake of Puritanism to imagine for a moment
that it could. One cannot be serious for three hundred years. In
institutions built so as to endure for ages you must have relaxation,
symbolic relativity and healthy routine. In eternal temples you must
have frivolity. You must "be at ease in Zion" unless you are only paying
it a flying visit.

By the middle of the nineteenth century this old austerity and actuality
in the Puritan vision had fallen away into two principal lower forms.
The first is a sort of idealistic garrulity upon which Bernard Shaw has
made fierce and on the whole fruitful war. Perpetual talk about
righteousness and unselfishness, about things that should elevate and
things which cannot but degrade, about social purity and true Christian
manhood, all poured out with fatal fluency and with very little
reference to the real facts of anybody's soul or salary--into this weak
and lukewarm torrent has melted down much of that mountainous ice which
sparkled in the seventeenth century, bleak indeed, but blazing. The
hardest thing of the seventeenth century bids fair to be the softest
thing of the twentieth.

Of all this sentimental and deliquescent Puritanism Bernard Shaw has
always been the antagonist; and the only respect in which it has soiled
him was that he believed for only too long that such sloppy idealism was
the whole idealism of Christendom and so used "idealist" itself as a
term of reproach. But there were other and negative effects of
Purit