that it is
often this knot which ties safely together the whole bundle of human
life . . . here lies the limitation of that lucid and compelling
mind; he cannot quite understand life, because he will not accept its
contradictions." Humanity is built of these contradictions, therefore
Shaw pities humanity more than he loves it. "It was his glory that he
pitied animals like men; it was his defect that he pitied men almost
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."

As a vegetarian and a water drinker Shaw himself lacked, in
Chesterton's eyes, something of complete humanity. And in discussing
social problems he was more economist than man. "Shaw (one might
almost say) dislikes murder, not so much because it wastes the life
of the corpse as because it wastes the time of the murderer." This
lack of the full human touch is felt, even in the plays, because Shaw
cannot be irrational where humanity always is irrational. In
_Candida_ "It is completely and disastrously false to the whole
nature of falling in love to make the young Eugene complain of the
cruelty which makes Candida defile her fair hands with domestic
duties. No boy in love with a beautiful woman would ever feel
disgusted when she peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. He would like
her to be domestic. He would simply feel that the potatoes had become
poetical and the lamps gained an extra light. This may be irrational;
but we are not talking of rationality, but of the psychology of first
love.* It may be very unfair to women that the toil and triviality of
potato-peeling should be seen through a glamour of romance; but the
glamour is quite as certain a fact as the potatoes. It may be a bad
thing in sociology that men should deify domesticity in girls as
something dainty and magical; but all men do. Personally I do not
think it a bad thing at all; but that is another argument."**

[* No two love affairs are the same. This sentence assumed that they
are all the same. To Eugene, the poet living in a world of
imagination and abhorring reality, Candida was what Dulcinea was to
Don Quixote. G.B.S.]

[** _George Bernard Shaw_, pp. 120-1.]

Yet Shaw's limitations are those of a great man and a genius. In an
age of narrow specialism he has "stood up for the fact that
philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and
Greats, but of those