the earlier works not only that mankind is constantly improving, but
that almost everything must be considered in the light of this fact.
More than once he seemed to argue, in comparing the dramatists of the
sixteenth with those of the nineteenth century, that the latter had a
definite advantage merely because they were of the nineteenth century
and not of the sixteenth. When accused of impertinence towards the
greatest of the Elizabethans, Bernard Shaw had said, "Shakespeare is a
much taller man than I, but I stand on his shoulders"--an epigram which
sums up this doctrine with characteristic neatness. But Shaw fell off
Shakespeare's shoulders with a crash. This chronological theory that
Shaw stood on Shakespeare's shoulders logically involved the supposition
that Shakespeare stood on Plato's shoulders. And Bernard Shaw found
Plato from his point of view so much more advanced than Shakespeare that
he decided in desperation that all three were equal.

Such failure as has partially attended the idea of human equality is
very largely due to the fact that no party in the modern state has
heartily believed in it. Tories and Radicals have both assumed that one
set of men were in essentials superior to mankind. The only difference
was that the Tory superiority was a superiority of place; while the
Radical superiority is a superiority of time. The great objection to
Shaw being on Shakespeare's shoulders is a consideration for the
sensations and personal dignity of Shakespeare. It is a democratic
objection to anyone being on anyone else's shoulders. Eternal human
nature refuses to submit to a man who rules merely by right of birth.
To rule by right of century is to rule by right of birth. Shaw found his
nearest kinsman in remote Athens, his remotest enemies in the closest
historical proximity; and he began to see the enormous average and the
vast level of mankind. If progress swung constantly between such
extremes it could not be progress at all. The paradox was sharp but
undeniable; if life had such continual ups and downs, it was upon the
whole flat. With characteristic sincerity and love of sensation he had
no sooner seen this than he hastened to declare it. In the teeth of all
his previous pronouncements he emphasised and re-emphasised in print
that man had not progressed at all; that ninety-nine hundredths of a man
in a cave were the same as ninety-nine hundredths of a man in a suburban
villa.

It is characteristic of him