He
laughs and sneers to make up for his deficiencies, like that Pietro
Aretino who threw his perishable mud at Michael Angelo. So is it always
with the vulgarian out of his sphere. Once he dared to talk vulgarly of
God to a great man who believed in God--Count Tolstoi.

He had written to Tolstoi _a propos_ his insignificant little play _The
Showing up of Blanco Posnet_, and in the course of his letter had said:
"Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any less
to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?" Tolstoi had hitherto been
favourably inclined towards Shaw, owing to his friend and biographer Mr.
Aylmer Maude; but this cheap-jack sacrilege was too much for the great
old man, who seemed to know God with almost Matthew Arnold's

plainness as near
As flashing as Moses felt,

and he closed the correspondence with a rebuke which would have abashed
any one but the man to whom it was sent.

Tolstoi was like Walt Whitman--he "argued not concerning God." It is a
point of view which people like Mr. Shaw can never understand; any more
than he or his like can comprehend that there are areas of human feeling
over which for him and other such bulls in china-shops should be posted
the delicate Americanism--KEEP OUT.

XXIX

THE BIBLE AND THE BUTTERFLY

Once, in my old book-hunting days, I picked up, on the Quai Voltaire, a
copy of the _Proverbs of King Solomon_. Then it was more possible than
today to make finds in that quaint open-air library which, still more
than any library housed within governmental or diplomaed walls, is
haunted by the spirit of those passionate, dream-led scholars that
made the Renaissance, and crowded to those lectures filled with that
dangerous new charm which always belongs to the poetic presentation of
new knowledge--those lectures, "musical as is Apollo's lute," being
given up on the hill nearby, by a romantic young priest named Abelard.

My copy of the Great King's Wisdom was of no particular bibliographical
value, but it was one of those thick-set, old-calf duodecimos "black
with tarnished gold" which Austin Dobson has sung, books that, one
imagines, must have once made even the Latin Grammar attractive. The
text was the Vulgate, a rivulet of Latin text surrounded by meadows of
marginal comments of the Fathers translated into French,--the whole
presided over, for the edification of the young novice, to whom my copy
evidently belonged, by a