whether
you are so ignorant as to think you
are being believed when you aren’t. Thus,
for instance, when you brag about burning Venice to
express your contempt for “tourists,” we
cannot think much of the culture, as culture, which
supposes St. Mark’s to be a thing for tourists
instead of historians. This, however, would be
the least part of our unfavourable judgment.
That judgment is complete when we have read such a
paragraph as this, prominently displayed in a paper
in which you specially spread yourself: “That
the Italians have a perfect knowledge of the fact
that this city of antiquities and tourists is subject,
and rightly subject, to attack and bombardment, is
proved by the measures they took at the beginning
of the war to remove some of their greatest art treasures.”
Now culture may or may not include the power to admire
antiquities, and to restrain oneself from the pleasure
of breaking them like toys. But culture does,
presumably, include the power to think. For less
laborious intellects than your own it is generally
sufficient to think once. But if you will think
twice or twenty times, it cannot but dawn on you that
there is something wrong in the reasoning by which
the placing of diamonds in a safe proves that they
are “rightly subject” to a burglar.
The incessant assertion of such things can do little
to spread your superior culture; and if you say them
too often people may even begin to doubt whether you
have any superior culture after all. The earnest
friend now advising you cannot but grieve at such
incautious garrulity. If you confined yourself
to single words, uttered at intervals of about a month
or so, no one could possibly raise any rational objection,
or subject them to any rational criticism. In
time you might come to use whole sentences without
revealing the real state of things.
Through neglect of these maxims, my dear Professor,
every one of your attacks upon England has gone wide.
In pure fact they have not touched the spot, which
the real critics of England know to be a very vulnerable
spot. We have a real critic of England in Mr.
Bernard Shaw, whose name you parade but apparently
cannot spell; for in the paper to which I have referred
he is called Mr. Bernhard Shaw. Perhaps you think
he and Bernhardi are the same man. But if you
quoted Mr. Bernard Shaw’s statement instead
of misquoting his name, you would find that his criticism
of England is exactly the opposite of your own; and
naturally, for it is a rational criticism. He
does not blame England for being against Germany.
He does most definitely blame England for not being
sufficiently firmly and emphatically on the side of
Russia. He is not such a fool as to accuse Sir
Edward Grey of being a fiendish Machiavelli plotting
against Germany; he accuses him of being an amiable
aristocratic stick who failed to frighten the Junkers
from their plan of war. Now, it is not in the
least a question of whether we happen to like this
quality or that: Mr. Shaw, I rather fancy, would