used (as they mostly are in modern books and magazine articles) to
balance and modify each other. A plain figure 4, scrawled in chalk
anywhere, must always mean something; it must always mean 2 + 2. But
the most enormous and mysterious algebraic equation, full of letters,
brackets, and fractions, may all cancel out at last and be equal to
nothing. When a demagogue says to a mob, "There is the Bank of England,
why shouldn't you have some of that money?" he says something which is
at least as honest and intelligible as the figure 4. When a writer in
the _Times_ remarks, "We must raise the economic efficiency of the
masses without diverting anything from those classes which represent the
national prosperity and refinement," then his equation cancels out; in a
literal and logical sense his remark amounts to nothing.

There are two kinds of charlatans or people called quacks to-day. The
power of the first is that he advertises--and cures. The power of the
second is that though he is not learned enough to cure he is much too
learned to advertise. The former give away their dignity with a pound of
tea; the latter are paid a pound of tea merely for being dignified. I
think them the worse quacks of the two. Shaw is certainly of the other
sort. Dickens, another man who was great enough to be a demagogue (and
greater than Shaw because more heartily a demagogue), puts for ever the
true difference between the demagogue and the mystagogue in _Dr.
Marigold_: "Except that we're cheap-jacks and they're dear-jacks, I
don't see any difference between us." Bernard Shaw is a great
cheap-jack, with plenty of patter and I dare say plenty of nonsense, but
with this also (which is not wholly unimportant), with goods to sell.
People accuse such a man of self-advertisement. But at least the
cheap-jack does advertise his wares, whereas the don or dear-jack
advertises nothing except himself. His very silence, nay his very
sterility, are supposed to be marks of the richness of his erudition. He
is too learned to teach, and sometimes too wise even to talk. St. Thomas
Aquinas said: "In auctore auctoritas." But there is more than one man at
Oxford or Cambridge who is considered an authority because he has never
been an author.

Against all this mystification both of silence and verbosity Shaw has
been a splendid and smashing protest. He has stood up for the fact that
philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and
Greats, but of