ge than
would appear from their nature. He can lure his enemy on with fantasies
and then overwhelm him with facts. Thus the man of science, when he read
some wild passage in which Shaw compared Huxley to a tribal soothsayer
grubbing in the entrails of animals, supposed the writer to be a mere
fantastic whom science could crush with one finger. He would therefore
engage in a controversy with Shaw about (let us say) vivisection, and
discover to his horror that Shaw really knew a great deal about the
subject, and could pelt him with expert witnesses and hospital reports.
Among the many singular contradictions in a singular character, there is
none more interesting than this combination of exactitude and industry
in the detail of opinions with audacity and a certain wildness in their
outline.

This great game of catching revolutionists napping, of catching the
unconventional people in conventional poses, of outmarching and
outmanoeuvring progressives till they felt like conservatives, of
undermining the mines of Nihilists till they felt like the House of
Lords, this great game of dishing the anarchists continued for some time
to be his most effective business. It would be untrue to say that he was
a cynic; he was never a cynic, for that implies a certain corrupt
fatigue about human affairs, whereas he was vibrating with virtue and
energy. Nor would it be fair to call him even a sceptic, for that
implies a dogma of hopelessness and definite belief in unbelief. But it
would be strictly just to describe him at this time, at any rate, as a
merely destructive person. He was one whose main business was, in his
own view, the pricking of illusions, the stripping away of disguises,
and even the destruction of ideals. He was a sort of anti-confectioner
whose whole business it was to take the gilt off the gingerbread.

Now I have no particular objection to people who take the gilt off the
gingerbread; if only for this excellent reason, that I am much fonder of
gingerbread than I am of gilt. But there are some objections to this
task when it becomes a crusade or an obsession. One of them is this:
that people who have really scraped the gilt off gingerbread generally
waste the rest of their lives in attempting to scrape the gilt off
gigantic lumps of gold. Such has too often been the case of Shaw. He
can, if he likes, scrape the romance off the armaments of Europe or the
party system of Great Britain. But he cannot scrape the romance o