Page:Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.djvu/174

 Fielding and Thackeray were, have appealed to the inexorable order when they wrote satirically, as in Jonathan Wild and Barry Lyndon. The stock in trade of George Bernard Shaw today is our persisting trust in magic formulas. The substance of his art is but to prick that bubble. In Androcles and the Lion, for example, he gives a reading of Christian martyrdom in what professes to be the unchanging law of character; his audience wonder why he should have demonstrated the obvious, and they remark as they go home that he is losing his old sparkle. But they have applauded with spontaneous and unembarrassed delight that moment in the play where the lion refuses to eat Androcles—which proves, I suppose, that they have fallen into Shaw's trap. Yet with all this clever exposing of our inconsistencies, the satirist gives us no vision of what