Maeterlinck and Walt Whitman, constitutes a writing on the wall the
significance of which cannot be gainsaid. The vogue alone of Mr. Bernard
Shaw, apostle to the Philistines, is a portent sufficiently conclusive.
To regard Mr. Shaw either as a great dramatist or an original
philosopher is, of course, absurd. He, of all men, must surely be the
last to imagine such a vain thing about himself; but even should he be
so self-deluded, his immense coarse usefulness to his day and generation
remains, and the value of it can hardly be overestimated. What others
have said for years as in a glass darkly, with noble seriousness of
utterance, he proclaims 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