GLAZIERS’ HOUSES
Tories was but a bed-ridden and toothless hag, mumbling the
senile curses and jests which she could no longer articulate.
True it is that the Word of Shaw is quick and powerful,
sharper than a two-edged sword. Yet the habit of sword-
swallowing is probably fatal to the suicidal intentions of a
Brutus, and it has certainly grown on him until he can no
longer slay either himself or another.
A dweller in the glass houses of Fad, he has thrown stones
at the fishy god. A Society Shimei, he has spat against the
wind, and his beard is befouled.
True, every thought of Shaw is a great thought; and so
equable and far-seeing is the artist, that its contradictory
appears with it. His births are all Siamese twins; his god is
Janus; his sign is Gemini . . . but his end is (I fear) not to
rise above the equilibrium of contraries by a praeter-Hegelian
dialectic, but to sink wearily between his two stools, a lament-
able loon. . . . This Nulli Secundus, inflated with fermenting
Grape-Nuts!
For in all that mass of analysis lucid and terrible I cannot
recall a single line of beauty, rarelya note of ecstasy; with one
exception (John Tanner), hardly a hero. Even he not a little
absurd.
He has seen through the shams of romance, and marriage,
and free love, and literary pose, and medical Ju-Ju, and
religious rant, and political twaddle, and Socialist Buncombe
and—every phase of falsehood. . . . But he has hardly
grasped that each such falsehood is but a shadow of some sun
of truth. He does not perceive the ineffable glory of the Uni-
verse in its whole and in each part. He has smitten at the
shadow of a shadow: it falls—the world is filth. Let him
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