s eccentric
environment, most of which does not convey an impression of a very
bracing atmosphere. That revolutionary society must have contained many
high public ideals, but also a fair number of low private desires. And
when people blame Bernard Shaw for his pitiless and prosaic coldness,
his cutting refusal to reverence or admire, I think they should remember
this riff-raff of lawless sentimentalism against which his commonsense
had to strive, all the grandiloquent "comrades" and all the gushing
"affinities," all the sweetstuff sensuality and senseless sulking
against law. If Bernard Shaw became a little too fond of throwing cold
water upon prophecies or ideals, remember that he must have passed much
of his youth among cosmopolitan idealists who wanted a little cold water
in every sense of the word.

Upon two of these modern crusades he concentrated, and, as I have said,
he chose them well. The first was broadly what was called the
Humanitarian cause. It did not mean the cause of humanity, but rather,
if anything, the cause of everything else. At its noblest it meant a
sort of mystical identification of our life with the whole life of
nature. So a man might wince when a snail was crushed as if his toe were
trodden on; so a man might shrink when a moth shrivelled as if his own
hair had caught fire. Man might be a network of exquisite nerves running
over the whole universe, a subtle spider's web of pity. This was a fine
conception; though perhaps a somewhat severe enforcement of the
theological conception of the special divinity of man. For the
humanitarians certainly asked of humanity what can be asked of no other
creature; no man ever required a dog to understand a cat or expected the
cow to cry for the sorrows of the nightingale.

Hence this sense has been strongest in saints of a very mystical sort;
such as St. Francis who spoke of Sister Sparrow and Brother Wolf. Shaw
adopted this crusade of cosmic pity but adopted it very much in his own
style, severe, explanatory, and even unsympathetic. He had no
affectionate impulse to say "Brother Wolf"; at the best he would have
said "Citizen Wolf," like a sound republican. In fact, he was full of
healthy human compassion for the sufferings of animals; but in
phraseology he loved to put the matter unemotionally and even harshly. I
was once at a debating club at which Bernard Shaw said that he was not a
humanitarian at all, but only an economist, that he merely hated to see