not work." He and a society called the Fabians, which once exercised
considerable influence, followed this shrewd and sound strategic hint
to avoid mere emotional attack on the cruelty of Capitalism; and to
concentrate on its clumsiness, its ludicrous incapacity to do its own
work. This campaign succeeded, in the sense that while (in the educated
world) it was the Socialist who looked the fool at the beginning of that
campaign, it is the Anti-Socialist who looks the fool at the end of it.
But while it won the educated classes it lost the populace for ever. It
dried up those springs of blood and tears out of which all revolt must
come if it is to be anything but bureaucratic readjustment. We began
this book with the fires of the French Revolution still burning, but
burning low. Bernard Shaw was honestly in revolt in his own way: but it
was Bernard Shaw who trod out the last ember of the Great Revolution.
Bernard Shaw proceeded to apply to many other things the same sort of
hilarious realism which he thus successfully applied to the industrial
problem. He also enjoyed giving people a piece of his mind; but a piece
of his mind was a more appetising and less raw-looking object than a
piece of Hardy's. There were many modes of revolt growing all around
him; Shaw supported them--and supplanted them. Many were pitting the
realism of war against the romance of war: they succeeded in making the
fight dreary and repulsive, but the book dreary and repulsive too. Shaw,
in _Arms and the Man_, did manage to make war funny as well as
frightful. Many were questioning the right of revenge or punishment; but
they wrote their books in such a way that the reader was ready to
release all mankind if he might revenge himself on the author. Shaw, in
_Captain Brassbound's Conversion_, really showed at its best the merry
mercy of the pagan; that beautiful human nature that can neither rise to
penance nor sink to revenge. Many had proved that even the most
independent incomes drank blood out of the veins of the oppressed: but
they wrote it in such a style that their readers knew more about