nning 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
depression than oppression. In _Widowers' Houses_ Shaw very nearly (but
not quite) succeeded in making a farce out of statistics. And the
ultimate utility of his brilliant interruption can best be expressed in
the very title of that play. When ages of essential European ethics have
said "widows' houses," it suddenly occurs to him to say "but what about
widowers' houses?" There is a sort of insane equity about it which was
what Bernard Shaw had the power to give, and gave.

Out of the same social ferment arose a man of equally unquestionable
genius, Mr. H. G. Wells. His first importance was that he wrote great
adventure stories in the new world the men of science had discovered. He
walked on a round slippery world as boldly as Ulysses or Tom Jones had
worked on