s. The only thing for the
dependent individualist in a village to do is to go somewhere else, to
some place where a man may at the same time hold his job and his
opinions, a place too big to keep track of its units, too busy to ask
irrelevant questions, and so diverse in its constituents as to have
generated tolerance and free operation for all.

Now, in spite of its bigness, the world was till quite recently little
more than a village, curiously held in subjection by village
superstitions and village ethics, narrow conceptions of life and
conduct; but the last twenty years have seen a remarkable enlargement of
the human spirit, a reassertion of the natural rights of man as against
the figments of prurient and emasculate conventions, to which there is
no parallel since the Renaissance. Voices have been heard and truths
told, and multitudes have listened gladly that aforetime must take
shelter either in overawed silence or in utterance so private that they
exerted no influence; and the literature of the day alone, literature of
wide and greedy acceptance, is sufficient warrant for the obituary
announcement which, if not yet, as I said, officially made, is already
writing in the hearts, and even in the actions, of society. The
popularity of such writers as Meredith and Hardy, Ibsen and Nietzsche,
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