honour and imperative conscience of righteousness which, thank God, are still alive among us.  “My dear,” he says, “you are the incarnation of morality, your conscience is clear and your duty done when you have called everybody names.”  Similar, and no less unfortunate, is his perversion of that instinct of patriotism which, however mistaken in some of its expressions, has yet proved its moral and practical worth during many a century of British history.  There is the less need to dwell upon this, because those who discard patriotism have only to state their case clearly in order to discredit it.

We do not fear greatly the permanent influence of these fundamental errors.  The great heart of the civilised world still beats true, and is healthy enough to disown so maimed an account of human nature.  Yet there is danger in any such element in literature as this.  Mr. Shaw’s biographer has virtually told us that in these matters he is but a child in whom “Irish innocence is peculiar and fundamental.”  The pleadings of the nurse for the precocious and yet defective infant are certainly very touching.  He may be the innocent creature that Mr. Chesterton takes him for, but he has said things which will exactly suit the views of libertines who read him.  Such pleadings are quite unavailing to excuse any such child if he does too much innocent mischief.  His puritanism and his childlikeness only make his teaching more dangerous because more piquant.  It has the air of proceeding from the same source as the ten commandments, and the effect of this upon the unreflecting is always considerable.  If a child is playing in a powder magazine, the more childish and innocent he is the more dangerous he will prove; and the explosion, remember, will be just as violent if lit by a child’s hand as if it had been lit by an anarchist’s.  We have in England borne long enough with people trifling with the best intentions among explosives, moral and social, and we must consider our own safety and that of society when we are judging them.

As to the relation in which Mr. Shaw stands to paganism, his relations to anything are so “extensive and peculiar” that they are always difficult to define.  But the later phase of his work, which has become famous in connection with the word “Superman,” is due in large part to Nietzsche, whose strange influence has reversed the Christian ideals for many disciples on both sides of the North Sea.  So this idealist, who, in Major Barbara, protests so vigorously against paganism, has become one of its chief advocates and expositors.  One of his characters somewhere says, “I wish I could get a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams were not unreal.”  It may be admitted that there are many brutal facts and perhaps more unreal dreams; but, for our part, that which keeps us from becoming pagans is that we have found facts that are not brutal and dreams which are the realest things in life.