ed rather to make the Irishman yet more aristocratic,
the Puritan yet more exclusive. To be a Socialist was to look down on
all the peasant owners of the earth, especially on the peasant owners of
his own island. To be a Vegetarian was to be a man with a strange and
mysterious morality, a man who thought the good lord who roasted oxen
for his vassals only less bad than the bad lord who roasted the vassals.
None of these advanced views could the common people hear gladly; nor
indeed was Shaw specially anxious to please the common people. It was
his glory that he pitied animals like men; it was his defect that he
pitied men only too much like animals. Foulon said of the democracy,
"Let them eat grass." Shaw said, "Let them eat greens." He had more
benevolence, but almost as much disdain. "I have never had any feelings
about the English working classes," he said elsewhere, "except a desire
to abolish them and replace them by sensible people." This is the
unsympathetic side of the thing; but it had another and much nobler
side, which must at least be seriously recognised before we pass on to
much lighter things.

Bernard Shaw is not a democrat; but he is a splendid republican. The
nuance of difference between those terms precisely depicts him. And
there is after all a good deal of dim democracy in England, in the sense
that there is much of a blind sense of brotherhood, and nowhere more
than among old-fashioned and even reactionary people. But a republican
is a rare bird, and a noble one. Shaw is a republican in the literal and
Latin sense; he cares more for the Public Thing than for any private
thing. The interest of the State is with him a sincere thirst of the
soul, as it was in the little pagan cities. Now this public passion,
this clean appetite for order and equity, had fallen to a lower ebb, had
more nearly disappeared altogether, during Shaw's earlier epoch than at
any other time. Individualism of the worst type was on the top of the
wave; I mean artistic individualism, which is so much crueller, so much
blinder and so much more irrational even than commercial individualism.
The decay of society was praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is
praised by worms. The aesthete was all receptiveness, like the flea. His
only affair in this world was to feed on its facts and colours, like a
parasite upon blood. The ego was the all; and the praise of it was
enunciated in madder and madder rhythms by poets whose Helicon wa