itizen. He
became a man of "affairs," destined, thenceforward, to live in the
publicity of debating-halls, among those ideas which reformers and
politicians have actually socialised, removing them from the privacy of
human experience and turning them into public property--like parks,
open spaces, and wash-houses. I do not mean that he treated this public
property as other, and more conventionally-minded, men habitually treat
it. Mr. Shaw walks down the Strand as if it were his private
bridle-path. He walks across an Insurance Bill or a National Theatre
scheme or a policy for giving self-government to Englishmen as a man
who might be treading the weeds in his own garden. But the intellectual
stage-properties were all prepared for him and presented ready-made in
those times when he went night after night to lecture in the city and
suburbs of London. He had, indeed, the social cosmopolitanism which
made him dissociate himself from small literary coteries and gain a
practical knowledge of publicly-minded men. But one cannot fail to see
that his long experience of lecturing, debating, setting up arguments,
and parrying verbal attacks--which made him the best debater in
England, and turned him, as Dr. Henderson has suggested, from a
doctrinaire into a "practical opportunist"--served not only to endow
him with his consistency as a thinker and his excellence in expounding
ideas, but also confirmed him in his defects as a humanist. His
continual intercourse with the innumerable fixed ideas of societies and
committees, his debater's habit of attacking whatever fixed idea he
encounters, have had the effect of organising his own mind along the
lines of such fixed ideas, theses, positions and oppositions as could
be defended or countered by his boundless resource in argument, wit,
and raillery; and it followed that his interpretation of life was
likely to resolve itself into the debater's generalisations, the
partialities and half-truths which ignore what is individual, personal,
intimate, and finest--for the finest things in life are those which
cannot be generalised, which are individual and unique, which admit of
being stated but not argued. It follows also that his strength is in
attack and in destructive criticism. The only important positive ideas
for which he stands are the Supermannish idea of the duty of every man
to be himself to the utmost, and a generous democratic idea of freedom,
in accordance with which every self-resp