What's wrong with traditional dates

Lots of new stuff these last months, though I haven't been posting them here. This includes several discussions on Socialism (beginning to feel repetitive), reviews and letters in The New Statesman, The Nation and The New Age; and the complete Queer Trades. Today's quotation comes from a letter by Shaw, in the long discussion which started with his review The Case Against Chesterton:

I will even go so far as to say that it will serve him right if future professors, specialising in the literature of the Capitalistic Era, explain to their students that they must not rely on traditional dates, as it is clear from internal evidence that though Wells and Bennett and Chesterton are dated as contemporaries, Chesterton must have died before the middle of the nineteenth century, and may perhaps be placed as early as the fifteenth or sixteenth as a master of the School of Rabelais, Wells and Bennett, on the other hand, could not possibly have come earlier than the post-Ibsen period. “As against this,” we may conceive the future professor lecturing, “it is alleged that one of Chesterton’s best books is a monograph on Shaw, who is dated as a contemporary of Wells. But the best authorities are agreed that this extraordinarily enlightened author was one of the pioneers of the twenty-fifth century, and that the allusions to him in the books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are later interpolations, the pseudo-Chesterton book being probably by Shaw himself, a hypothesis which fully accounts for its heartfelt eulogy. It has been objected that the writer does not seem to have read Shaw’s works; but this is clearly an intentional mystification, very characteristic of the freakish founder of the Shavians.”