S we approach the denouement of Arms and the Man, that delectable comedy written so long ago, in Shaw's and the world's youth, when war was still a subject to make light of, we find the admirable chocolate-cream soldier Bluntschli summing up the meaning of life for the romantic Sergius: But now that youve found that life isnt a farce, but quite sensible and what further obstacle is there to your happiness?'1 Obviously we are intended to smile at the simplicity of the sanguine, matter-of-fact Bluntschli, betrayed into the profession of arms by an incurably romantic disposition, and now about to leave it for that most characteristically Swiss of professions: hotelkeeping. But, as Shaw teaches us again and again, we may soon find ourselves laughing out of the other side of our mouths. For the cream of Shaw's jest is precisely that life is indeed something quite sensible and serious, worthy of our laughter, something, in fact, whose seriousness and good sense we can perceive most fully through laughter, once we have rid ourselves both of illusions and of cynicism. Now I am well aware that Shaw is a notoriously unreliable guide to the thought of Shaw, and that his obiter dicta are particularly misleading when one endeavors to apply them to Shaw's artistic achievement. Nevertheless, I submit that in the comic earnestness of Bluntschli's reasonable approach to the dashing Sergius we may find a key not only to Shaw's philosophy of comedy but also to the puzzling and indefinable practice-I dare not call it method-of an even greater writer of English comedies. For, despite the many and obvious differences between their works, Shakespeare and Shaw, as comic dramatists, are exceedingly casual about freely mingling comic and serious matter, no doubt on the excellent principle that the best comedies must deal with serious themes, and consequently may. well introduce scenes that border on the tragic. (We are familiar enough with comic relief; but let us remember that and even tragic, relief also exists. Think of Barbara's terrible moment of decision at the end of Act II of Major Barbara; of the Hero-Claudio plot in Much Ado About Nothing; or of the Marschallin's profoundly moving soliloquy that ends Act I of Strauss's and Hofmannsthal's Der Rosenkavalier.) The mixture of comedy and tragedy: the importance of the happy ending: these, as Dr. Johnson well understood, were problems not only to excite a Rymer or a Voltaire, but to give pause to the most passionate of Shakespeare's ad-