the purity of the mind of a generation.
Doubtless you will have a following--such teachers have ever had those
who followed them--and yet time is always on the side of great
traditions. If enlightened thought has in any respect to change them, it
changes them reverently, and knowing what their worth has been. Sooner
or later all easy ignoring of them is condemned as sheer impertinence.
There is singularly little reason for being impressed by this hasty,
romantic, and loud-sounding crusade against Christian morality and its
Ideal.

In Mr. George Bernard Shaw we have a very different man. Nobody denies
Mr. Shaw's cleverness, least of all Mr. Shaw himself. He is depressingly
clever. He exhibits the spectacle of a man trying to address his
audience while standing on his head--and succeeding.

He has been singularly fortunate in his biographer, Mr. Chesterton, and
one of the things that make this biography such pleasing reading is the
personal element that runs through it all. The introduction is
characteristic and delightful: "Most people either say that they agree
with Bernard Shaw, or that they do not understand him. I am the only
person who understands him, and I do not agree with him." It is not
unnatural that he should take his friend a little more seriously than
most of us will be prepared to do. It really is a big thing to stand on
the shoulders of William Shakespeare, and we shall need time to consider
it before we subscribe to the statue.

For there is here an absolutely colossal egotism. There are certain
newspapers which usually begin with a note of the hours of sunrise and
sunset. During the recent coal strike, some of these newspapers inserted
first of all a notice that they would not be sent out so early as usual,
and then cheered our desponding hearts by assuring us that the sun rises
at 5.37 notwithstanding--as if by permission of the newspaper. Mr. Shaw
somehow gives us a similar impression. Most things in the universe seem
to go on by his permission, and some of them he is not going to allow to
go on much longer. He will tilt without the slightest vestige of
humility against any existing institution, and the tourney is certainly
one of the most entertaining and most extraordinary of our time.

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
ques