first grand
failures as a theologian.

For this reason I have deliberately called a halt in his dramatic
career, in order to consider these two essential points: What did the
mass of Englishmen, who had now learnt to admire him, imagine his point
of view to be? and second, What did he imagine it to be? or, if the
phrase be premature, What did he imagine it was going to be? In his
latest work, especially in _Man and Superman_, Shaw has become a
complete and colossal mystic. That mysticism does grow quite rationally
out of his older arguments; but very few people ever troubled to trace
the connection. In order to do so it is necessary to say what was, at
the time of his first success, the public impression of Shaw's
philosophy.

Now it is an irritating and pathetic thing that the three most popular
phrases about Shaw are false. Modern criticism, like all weak things,
is overloaded with words. In a healthy condition of language a man finds
it very difficult to say the right thing, but at last says it. In this
empire of journalese a man finds it so very easy to say the wrong thing
that he never thinks of saying anything else. False or meaningless
phrases lie so ready to his hand that it is easier to use them than not
to use them. These wrong terms picked up through idleness are retained
through habit, and so the man has begun to think wrong almost before he
has begun to think at all. Such lumbering logomachy is always injurious
and oppressive to men of spirit, imagination or intellectual honour, and
it has dealt very recklessly and wrongly with Bernard Shaw. He has
contrived to get about three newspaper phrases tied to his tail; and
those newspaper phrases are all and separately wrong. The three
superstitions about him, it will be conceded, are generally these: first
that he desires "problem plays," second that he is "paradoxical," and
third that in his dramas as elsewhere he is specially "a Socialist." And
the interesting thing is that when we come to his philosophy, all these
three phrases are quite peculiarly inapplicable.

To take the plays first, there is a general disposition to describe that
type of intimate or defiant drama which he approves as "the problem
play." Now the serious modern play is, as a rule, the very reverse of a
problem play; for there can be no problem unless both points of view are
equally and urgently presented. _Hamlet_ really is a problem play
because at the end of it one is really in doubt a