nty twopenny controversies he took the
revolutionary side, I fear in most cases because it was called
revolutionary. But the other revolutionists were abruptly startled by
the presentation of quite rational and ingenious arguments on their own
side. The dreary thing about most new causes is that they are praised in
such very old terms. Every new religion bores us with the same stale
rhetoric about closer fellowship and the higher life. No one ever
approximately equalled Bernard Shaw in the power of finding really fresh
and personal arguments for these recent schemes and creeds. No one ever
came within a mile of him in the knack of actually producing a new
argument for a new philosophy. I give two instances to cover the kind of
thing I mean. Bernard Shaw (being honestly eager to put himself on the
modern side in everything) put himself on the side of what is called
the feminist movement; the proposal to give the two sexes not merely
equal social privileges, but identical. To this it is often answered
that women cannot be soldiers; and to this again the sensible feminists
answer that women run their own kind of physical risk, while the silly
feminists answer that war is an outworn barbaric thing which women would
abolish. But Bernard Shaw took the line of saying that women had been
soldiers, in all occasions of natural and unofficial war, as in the
French Revolution. That has the great fighting value of being an
unexpected argument; it takes the other pugilist's breath away for one
important instant. To take the other case, Mr. Shaw has found himself,
led by the same mad imp of modernity, on the side of the people who want
to have phonetic spelling. The people who want phonetic spelling
generally depress the world with tireless and tasteless explanations of
how much easier it would be for children or foreign bagmen if "height"
were spelt "hite." Now children would curse spelling whatever it was,
and we are not going to permit foreign bagmen to improve Shakespeare.
Bernard Shaw charged along quite a different line; he urged that
Shakespeare himself believed in phonetic spelling, since he spelt his
own name in six different ways. According to Shaw, phonetic spelling is
merely a return to the freedom and flexibility of Elizabethan
literature. That, again, is exactly the kind of blow the old speller
does not expect. As a matter of fact there is an answer to both the
ingenuities I have quoted. When women have fought in revolutio