It is something to have heard once in a lifetime the ecstatic thrill that glorifies Essex Hall while that intellectual pirate Mr. Bernard Shaw sails out and scuttles a number of little merchant ships of thought that have never hurt anybody.  The applause and admiring laughter that punctuate his periods really suggest that Fabianism makes people happy, while the continued prosperity of the group gives the lie to the cynic who reminded me how popular ping-pong was while the craze lasted, and how utterly forgotten it is to-day.  But I had to rub my eyes while I stood in the overcrowded room, listening to Puck in Jaeger, more witty, perhaps, than the old Puck, but no less boyishly malicious, and ask myself whether, after all, this was only the old magic in a new form.  True, civilisation had perforce p. 206made him larger in order that human beings might appreciate his eloquence, and I saw no traces of wings or magic flowers.  But beyond that I recognised the same pitying contempt for mortals, the same arrogant confession of his own faults, the same na?ve cunning.  And then (perhaps a turn of the voice did it, or some slight slurring of the words) the enchantment passed, the ears of his audience resumed their ordinary dimensions, and I offered mentally two teaspoonfuls of honey to the real Puck, for I saw that he had tricked me into recognising his qualities in the most serious man the twentieth century knows.

Yet, though I found Mr. Shaw to be only a prophet and his fellow-Fabians honest enthusiasts instead of bewitched weavers, I cannot say that the discovery left my mind at ease for the welfare of the fairy kingdom that is so important to every one who has not forgotten it.  What if this terrible seriousness were to spread?  What if every one were to turn prophet?  What if a night should come when never a child in all the Duke of York’s Theatre would clap its hands p. 207to keep Tinker Bell alive?  At first I wished to reject this frightful end of all our play and laughter and wonder as impossible.  Yet sinister stories of children who preferred sewing-machines and working models to dolls and tin soldiers rose in my mind, and it is hardly more than a step from that degree of progress to the case of the child who may find the science of sanitation more interesting than tales of fairies.  The possibility should make even the extremists shudder, but it must be remembered that many honest people believe in technical education, and that for that matter practically the whole of the teaching in our schools takes the form of an attack on the stronghold of the imaginative child.  It is our barbarous custom to supplant a child’s really beautiful theories with the ugly crudities which we call facts, and it is impossible to realise how much humanity loses in the process.  As for the fairies, frail little folk at best, how shall they prevail against the criticism of our sulphur and the cunning of our permanganate of potash?  Shall we always be able to distinguish them from microbes?

p. 208It may be well to pause here and see whither the wise, serious men of to-day are taking us.  I suppose they will abolish Will-o’-the-Wisp by draining all the marshes, and their extreme industry will render Puck’s kindly household labours ludicrously............