—his literary licentiousness and his personal restraint—his intellectual voracity and his physical vegetarianism—the intense earnestness and benevolence of his real aims and ideals and the daft capers he cuts as he preaches them—have inspired any number of vivid interpretations, all of them with at least the life of paradox; but the best of them by far, much the noblest and the neatest, is the one which seizes all these contrasts—the austerity and the perversity, the inverted altruisms, the harangues and the humility, the general wild lack of all resemblance between reputation and reality—and thereupon presents him as a martyr who twice over and more has sacrificed the hard-won crown of martyrdom, its impressiveness, its reward of dignity—a prophet who has disguised himself as a jester to gain an audience for his message, staining his sackcloth to look like motley, only to find that his frantic jokes, invented so feverishly, simply exasperate his listeners instead of luring them—that they regard his levity as ill-timed, his solemn touches as sacrilegious, and the texts which they feel his pranks profane, and which they had hitherto accepted unsuspiciously, as being rendered henceforward and for ever quite unfitted for respectable family consumption. This conception of his last martyrdom, as might be expected, is naturally the one Mr. Shaw favours himself. "My case is really that of Rabelais over again," he has said. "In order to gain a hearing it was necessary for me to attain the footing of a privileged lunatic, with the licence of a jester. My method has therefore been to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say and then say it with the utmost levity. And all the time the real joke is that I am in earnest."
But there is a realler joke than that, and a very much richer. That's the merest drop-scene: the true Comedy lies behind. Another second and we will
