again through his brazen megaphone, with all the imperturbable aplomb of an impudent showman, having as little self-respect as he has respect for his public; and, as a consequence, that vast herd of middle-class minds to whom finer spirits appeal in vain hear for the first time truths as old as philosophy, and answer to them with assenting instincts as old as humanity.  Truth, like many another excellent commodity, needs a vulgar advertisement, if it is to become operative in the masses.  Mr. Shaw is truth’s vulgar advertisement.  He is a brilliant, carrying noise on behalf of freedom of thought; and his special equipment for his peculiar revivalist mission comes of his gift for revealing to the common mind not merely the untruth of hypocrisy, but the laughableness of hypocrisy, first of all.  He takes some popular convention, that of medicine or marriage or what you will, and shows you not merely how false it is but how ludicrously false.  He purges the soul, not with the terror and pity of tragedy, but with the irresistible laughter of rough-and-tumble farce.  To think wrongly is, first of all, so absurd.  He proves it by putting wrong thinking on the stage, where you see it for yourself in action, and laugh immoderately.  Perhaps you had never thought how droll wrong thinking or no thinking was before; and while you laugh with Shaw at your side-splitting discovery, the serious message glides in unostentatiously—­wrong thinking is not merely laughable; it is also dangerous, and very uncomfortable.  And so the showman has done his work, the advertiser has sold his goods, and there is so much more truth in circulation in unfamiliar areas of society.

That word “society” naturally claims some attention at the hands of one who would speak of Mrs. Grundy, particularly as she has owed her long existence to a general misconception as to what constitutes “society,” and to a superstitious terror as to its powers over the individual.  Society—­using the word in its broad sense—­has heretofore been regarded as a vague tremendous entity imposing a uniformity of opinion and action on the individual, under penalty of a like vague tremendous disapproval for insubordination.  Independent minds, however, have from time to time, and in ever increasing numbers, ventured to do their own will and pleasure in disregard of this vague tremendous disapproval, and have, strange to say, found no sign of the terrible consequences threatened them, with the result that they, and the onlookers, have come to the conclusion that this fear of society is just one more bugaboo of timorous minds, with no power over the courageous spirit.  From a multitude of such observations men and women have come more and more to draw the conclusion that the solidarity of society is nothing but a myth, and that so-called society is merely a loosely connected series of independent societies, formed by natural selection among their members, each with its own codes and satisfactions; and that a man not welcome in one society may readily find a home for himself in another, or indeed, if necessary, and if he be strong enough, rest content with his own society of one.