No one can help admiring Mr. Shaw.  The dogged persistence which has carried him, unflinching, through adversity into his present fame, without a single compromise or hesitation, is, apart altogether from the question of the truth of his opinions, an admirable quality in a man.  We cannot but admire his immense forcefulness and agility, the fertility of his mind, and the swiftness of its play.  But we utterly refuse to fall down and worship him on account of these.  Indeed the kind of awe with which he is regarded in some quarters seems to be due rather to the eccentricities of his expression than to the greatness of his message or the brilliance of his achievements.

There is no question of his earnestness.  The Puritan is deep in Mr. Shaw, in his very blood.  He has indeed given to the term Puritan a number of unexpected meanings, and yet no one can justly question his right to it.  His Plays for Puritans are not exceptional in this matter, for all his work is done in the same spirit.  His favourite author is John Bunyan, about whom he tells us that he claims him as the precursor of Nietzsche, and that in his estimation John Bunyan’s life was one long tilt against morality and respectability.  The claim is sufficiently grotesque, yet there is a sense in which he has a right to John Bunyan, and is in the same line as Thomas Carlyle.  He is trying sincerely to speak the truth and get it spoken.  He appears as another of the destroyers of shams, the breakers of idols.  He may indeed be claimed as a pagan, and his influence will certainly preponderate in that direction; and yet there is a strain of high idealism which runs perplexingly through it all.

The explanation seems to be, as Mr. Chesterton suggests, that the man is incomplete.  There are certain elementary things which, if he had ever seen them as other people do, would have made many of his positions impossible.  “Shaw is wrong,” says Mr. Chesterton, “about nearly all the things one learns early in life while one is still simple.”  Among those things which he has never seen are the loyalties involved in love, country, and religion.  The most familiar proof of this in regard to religion is his extraordinary tirade against the Cross of Calvary.  It is one of the most amazing passages in print, so far as either taste or judgment is concerned.  It is significant that in this very passage he actually refers to the “stable at Bethany,” and the slip seems to indicate from what a distance he is discussing Christianity.  It is possible for any of us to measure himself against the Cross and Him who hung upon it, only when we have travelled very far away from them.  When we are sufficiently near, we know ourselves to be infinitesimal in comparison.  Nor in regard to home, and all that sanctifies and defends it, does Mr. Shaw seem ever to have understood the real morality that is in the heart of the average man.  The nauseating thing which he quotes as morality is a mere caricature of that vital sense of