The whole method is not so very subtle after all.  Pick out a vice or a deformity.  Do not trouble to acquaint yourself too intimately with the history of morals in the past, but boldly canonise your vice or your deformity with ritual of epigram and paradox.  Proclaim loudly and eloquently that this is your faith, and give it a pathetic aspect by dwelling tenderly upon any trouble which it may be likely to cost those who venture to adopt it.  It is not perhaps a very admirable way to deal with such subjects.  The whole world of tradition and the whole constitution of human nature are against you.  Men have wrestled with these things for thousands of years, and they have come to certain conclusions which the experience of all time has enforced upon them.  By a dash of bold imagination you may discount all that laborious past, and leave an irrevocable stain upon the purity of the mind of a generation.  Doubtless you will have a following—­such teachers have ever had those who followed them—­and yet time is always on the side of great traditions.  If enlightened thought has in any respect to change them, it changes them reverently, and knowing what their worth has been.  Sooner or later all easy ignoring of them is condemned as sheer impertinence.  There is singularly little reason for being impressed by this hasty, romantic, and loud-sounding crusade against Christian morality and its Ideal.

In Mr. George Bernard Shaw we have a very different man.  Nobody denies Mr. Shaw’s cleverness, least of all Mr. Shaw himself.  He is depressingly clever.  He exhibits the spectacle of a man trying to address his audience while standing on his head—­and succeeding.

He has been singularly fortunate in his biographer, Mr. Chesterton, and one of the things that make this biography such pleasing reading is the personal element that runs through it all.  The introduction is characteristic and delightful:  “Most people either say that they agree with Bernard Shaw, or that they do not understand him.  I am the only person who understands him, and I do not agree with him.”  It is not unnatural that he should take his friend a little more seriously than most of us will be prepared to do.  It really is a big thing to stand on the shoulders of William Shakespeare, and we shall need time to consider it before we subscribe to the statue.

For there is here an absolutely colossal egotism.  There are certain newspapers which usually begin with a note of the hours of sunrise and sunset.  During the recent coal strike, some of these newspapers inserted first of all a notice that they would not be sent out so early as usual, and then cheered our desponding hearts by assuring us that the sun rises at 5.37 notwithstanding—­as if by permission of the newspaper.  Mr. Shaw somehow gives us a similar impression.  Most things in the universe seem to go on by his permission, and some of them he is not going to allow to go on much longer.  He will tilt without the slightest vestige of humility against any existing institution, and the tourney is certainly one of the most entertaining and most extraordinary of our time.