The play
has missed fire, and the playwright and his hero are ridiculous. Let us
understand one thing: if we want to make men dutiful we must make them
joyous.
IV
It is because we must talk of grave things that we must preserve our
gaiety; otherwise we could not preserve our balance. By some freak of
nature, the average man strikes attitudes as readily as the average boy
whistles. We know how the _poseur_ works mischief to every cause, and we
can see the _poseur_ on every side. In politics, he has made the
platform contemptible, which is a danger to the nation, needing the
right use of platform; in literature--well, we all know bourgeois, but
who has done justice to the artist who gets on a platform to talk about
the bourgeois?--in religion, the _poseur_ is more likely to make
agnostics than all the Rationalist Press; and the agnostic _poseur_ in
turn is very funny. Now all these are an affliction, a collection of
absurdities of which we must cure the nation. If we cannot cure the
nation of absurdity we cannot set her free. Let it be our rule to
combine gaiety with gravity and we will acquire a saving sense of
proportion. Only the solemn man is dull; the serious man has a natural
fund of gaiety: we need only be natural to bring back joy to serious
endeavour. Then we shall begin to move. Let us remember a revolution
will surely fail when its leaders have no sense of humour.
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