o him that in prisons and
workhouses (where the amount can be absolutely regulated) the inmates
should have three glasses of beer a day. The Puritan cannot call that
excess; but he will find something to call it. For it is not the excess
he objects to, but the beer. It is a transcendental taboo, and it is one
of the two or three positive and painful prejudices with which Bernard
Shaw began. A similar severity of outlook ran through all his earlier
attitude towards the drama; especially towards the lighter or looser
drama. His Puritan teachers could not prevent him from taking up
theatricals, but they made him take theatricals seriously. All his plays
were indeed "plays for Puritans." All his criticisms quiver with a
refined and almost tortured contempt for the indulgencies of ballet and
burlesque, for the tights and the _double entente_. He can endure
lawlessness but not levity. He is not repelled by the divorces and the
adulteries as he is by the "splits." And he has always been foremost
among the fierce modern critics who ask indignantly, "Why do you object
to a thing full of sincere philosophy like _The Wild Duck_ while you
tolerate a mere dirty joke like _The Spring Chicken_?" I do not think he
has ever understood what seems to me the very sensible answer of the man
in the street, "I laugh at the dirty joke of _The Spring Chicken_
because it is a joke. I criticise the philosophy of _The Wild Duck_
because it is a philosophy."

Shaw does not do justice to the democratic ease and sanity on this
subject; but indeed, whatever else he is, he is not democratic. As an
Irishman he is an aristocrat, as a Calvinist he is a soul apart; he
drew the breath of his nostrils from a land of fallen principalities and
proud gentility, and the breath of his spirit from a creed which made a
wall of crystal around the elect. The two forces between them produced
this potent and slender figure, swift, scornful, dainty and full of dry
magnanimity; and it only needed the last touch of oligarchic mastery to
be given by the overwhelming oligarchic atmosphere of our present age.
Such was the Puritan Irishman who stepped out into the world. Into what
kind of world did he step?

_The Progressive_

It is now partly possible to justify the Shavian method of putting the
explanations before the events. I can now give a fact or two with a
partial certainty at least that the reader will give to the affairs of
Bernard Shaw something of the sa