g the mere idolatry
of Him of Avon. That idolatry was bad for England; it buttressed our
perilous self-complacency by making us think that we alone had, not
merely a great poet, but the one poet above criticism. It was bad for
literature; it made a minute model out of work that was really a hasty
and faulty masterpiece. And it was bad for religion and morals that
there should be so huge a terrestrial idol, that we should put such
utter and unreasoning trust in any child of man. It is true that it was
largely through Shaw's own defects that he beheld the defects of
Shakespeare. But it needed someone equally prosaic to resist what was
perilous in the charm of such poetry; it may not be altogether a mistake
to send a deaf man to destroy the rock of the sirens.

This attitude of Shaw illustrates of course all three of the divisions
or aspects to which the reader's attention has been drawn. It was partly
the attitude of the Irishman objecting to the Englishman turning his
mere artistic taste into a religion; especially when it was a taste
merely taught him by his aunts and uncles. In Shaw's opinion (one might
say) the English do not really enjoy Shakespeare or even admire
Shakespeare; one can only say, in the strong colloquialism, that they
swear by Shakespeare. He is a mere god; a thing to be invoked. And
Shaw's whole business was to set up the things which were to be sworn by
as things to be sworn at. It was partly again the revolutionist in
pursuit of pure novelty, hating primarily the oppression of the past,
almost hating history itself. For Bernard Shaw the prophets were to be
stoned after, and not before, men had built their sepulchres. There was
a Yankee smartness in the man which was irritated at the idea of being
dominated by a person dead for three hundred years; like Mark Twain, he
wanted a fresher corpse.

These two motives there were, but they were small compared with the
other. It was the third part of him, the Puritan, that was really at war
with Shakespeare. He denounced that playwright almost exactly as any
contemporary Puritan coming out of a conventicle in a steeple-crowned
hat and stiff bands might have denounced the playwright coming out of
the stage door of the old Globe Theatre. This is not a mere fancy; it is
philosophically true. A legend has run round the newspapers that Bernard
Shaw offered himself as a better writer than Shakespeare. This is false
and quite unjust; Bernard Shaw never said anythin