A peculiar difficulty arrests the writer of this rough study at the very start. Many people know Mr. Bernard Shaw chiefly as a man who would write a very long preface even to a very short play. And there is truth in the idea; he is indeed a very prefatory sort of person. He always gives the explanation before the incident; but so for the matter of that does the Gospel of St. John. For Bernard Shaw as for the mystics Christian and heathen (and Shaw is best described as a heathen mystic) the philosophy of facts is anterior to the facts themselves. In due time we come to the fact the incarnation; but in the beginning was the Word.