ess destructive because it is, so to speak, an optimistic
scepticism--or, as I have said, a dreary hope. It was none the better
because the destroyers were always talking about the new vistas and
enlightenments which their new negations opened to us. The republican
temple, like any other strong building, rested on certain definite
limits and supports. But the modern man inside it went on indefinitely
knocking holes in his own house and saying that they were windows. The
result is not hard to calculate: the moral world was pretty well all
windows and no house by the time that Bernard Shaw arrived on the scene.

Then there entered into full swing that great game of which he soon
became the greatest master. A progressive or advanced person was now to
mean not a man who wanted democracy, but a man who wanted something
newer than democracy. A reformer was to be, not a man who wanted a
parliament or a republic, but a man who wanted anything that he hadn't
got. The emancipated man must cast a weird and suspicious eye round him
at all the institutions of the world, wondering which of them was
destined to die in the next few centuries. Each one of them was
whispering to himself, "What can I alter?"

This quite vague and varied discontent probably did lead to the
revelation of many incidental wrongs and to much humane hard work in
certain holes and corners. It also gave birth to a great deal of quite
futile and frantic speculation, which seemed destined to take away
babies from women, or to give votes to tom-cats. But it had an evil in
it much deeper and more psychologically poisonous than any superficial
absurdities. There was in this thirst to be "progressive" a subtle sort
of double-mindedness and falsity. A man was so eager to be in advance of
his age that he pretended to be in advance of himself. Institutions that
his wholesome nature and habit fully accepted he had to sneer at as
old-fashioned, out of a servile and snobbish fear of the future. Out of
the primal forests, through all the real progress of history, man had
picked his way obeying his human instinct, or (in the excellent phrase)
following his nose. But now he was trying, by violent athletic
exertions, to get in front of his nose.

Into this riot of all imaginary innovations Shaw brought the sharp edge
of the Irishman and the concentration of the Puritan, and thoroughly
thrashed all competitors in the difficult art of being at once modern
and intelligent. In twe