Michael Hicks-Beach who jumps through hoops. It is Sir Henry
Fowler who stands on his head. The solid and respectable statesman of
that type does really leap from position to position; he is really
ready to defend anything or nothing; he is really not to be taken
seriously. I know perfectly well what Mr. Bernard Shaw will be saying
thirty years hence; he will be saying what he has always said. If
thirty years hence I meet Mr. Shaw, a reverent being with a silver
beard sweeping the earth, and say to him, "One can never, of course,
make a verbal attack upon a lady," the patriarch will lift his aged
hand and fell me to the earth. We know, I say, what Mr. Shaw will be,
saying thirty years hence. But is there any one so darkly read in stars
and oracles that he will dare to predict what Mr. Asquith will be
saying thirty years hence?

The truth is, that it is quite an error to suppose that absence of
definite convictions gives the mind freedom and agility. A man who
believes something is ready and witty, because he has all his weapons
about him. He can apply his test in an instant. The man engaged in
conflict with a man like Mr. Bernard Shaw may fancy he has ten faces;
similarly a man engaged against a brilliant duellist may fancy that the
sword of his foe has turned to ten swords in his hand. But this is not
really because the man is playing with ten swords, it is because he is
aiming very straight with one. Moreover, a man with a definite belief
always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he
has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a
zoetrope. Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and
sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity,
because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of
the world.

People accuse Mr. Shaw and many much sillier persons of "proving that
black is white." But they never ask whether the current
colour-language is always correct. Ordinary sensible phraseology
sometimes calls black white, it certainly calls yellow white and green
white and reddish-brown white. We call wine "white wine" which is as
yellow as a Blue-coat boy's legs. We call grapes "white grapes" which
are manifestly pale green. We give to the European, whose complexion is
a sort of pink drab, the horrible title of a "white man"--a picture
more blood-curdling than any spectre in Poe.

Now, it is undoubtedly true that if a man