s
absinthe and whose Pegasus was the nightmare. This diseased pride was
not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all
political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a
question of one man one vote, but of one man one universe.

I have in my time had my fling at the Fabian Society, at the pedantry of
schemes, the arrogance of experts; nor do I regret it now. But when I
remember that other world against which it reared its bourgeois banner
of cleanliness and common sense, I will not end this chapter without
doing it decent honour. Give me the drain pipes of the Fabians rather
than the panpipes of the later poets; the drain pipes have a nicer
smell. Give me even that business-like benevolence that herded men like
beasts rather than that exquisite art which isolated them like devils;
give me even the suppression of "Zaeo" rather than the triumph of
"Salome." And if I feel such a confession to be due to those Fabians who
could hardly have been anything but experts in any society, such as Mr.
Sidney Webb or Mr. Edward Pease, it is due yet more strongly to the
greatest of the Fabians. Here was a man who could have enjoyed art among
the artists, who could have been the wittiest of all the _flaneurs_; who
could have made epigrams like diamonds and drunk music like wine. He has
instead laboured in a mill of statistics and crammed his mind with all
the most dreary and the most filthy details, so that he can argue on the
spur of the moment about sewing-machines or sewage, about typhus fever
or twopenny tubes. The usual mean theory of motives will not cover the
case; it is not ambition, for he could have been twenty times more
prominent as a plausible and popular humorist. It is the real and
ancient emotion of the _salus populi_, almost extinct in our
oligarchical chaos; nor will I for one, as I pass on to many matters of
argument or quarrel, neglect to salute a passion so implacable and so
pure.

_The Critic_

It appears a point of some mystery to the present writer that Bernard
Shaw should have been so long unrecognised and almost in beggary. I
should have thought his talent was of the ringing and arresting sort;
such as even editors and publishers would have sense enough to seize.
Yet it is quite certain that he almost starved in London for many years,
writing occasional columns for an advertisement or words for a picture.
And it is equally certain (it is proved by twenty anecd