en his heart by having already softened his head. It is
the reverse of sentimental to insist that a nigger is being burned
alive; for sentimentalism must be the clinging to pleasant thoughts. And
no one, not even a Higher Evolutionist, can think a nigger burned alive
a pleasant thought. The sentimental thing is to warm your hands at the
fire while denying the existence of the nigger, and that is the ruling
habit in England, as it has been the chief business of Bernard Shaw to
show. And in this the brutalitarians hate him not because he is soft,
but because he is hard, because he is not to be softened by conventional
excuses; because he looks hard at a thing--and hits harder. Some foolish
fellow of the Henley-Whibley reaction wrote that if we were to be
conquerors we must be less tender and more ruthless. Shaw answered with
really avenging irony, "What a light this principle throws on the defeat
of the tender Dervish, the compassionate Zulu, and the morbidly humane
Boxer at the hands of the hardy savages of England, France, and
Germany." In that sentence an idiot is obliterated and the whole story
of Europe told; but it is immensely stiffened by its ironic form. In the
same way Shaw washed away for ever the idea that Socialists were weak
dreamers, who said that things might be only because they wished them to
be. G. B. S. in argument with an individualist showed himself, as a
rule, much the better economist and much the worse rhetorician. In this
atmosphere arose a celebrated Fabian Society, of which he is still the
leading spirit--a society which answered all charges of impracticable
idealism by pushing both its theoretic statements and its practical
negotiations to the verge of cynicism. Bernard Shaw was the literary
expert who wrote most of its pamphlets. In one of them, among such
sections as _Fabian Temperance Reform_, _Fabian Education_ and so on,
there was an entry gravely headed "Fabian Natural Science," which stated
that in the Socialist cause light was needed more than heat.

Thus the Irish detachment and the Puritan austerity did much good to the
country and to the causes for which they were embattled. But there was
one thing they did not do; they did nothing for Shaw himself in the
matter of his primary mistakes and his real limitation. His great defect
was and is the lack of democratic sentiment. And there was nothing
democratic either in his humanitarianism or his Socialism. These new and
refined faiths tend