y Henson, who, though he does not want to limit its
circulation, is eager at least to expurgate it for the reading of
simple persons. I do not, I may say, quarrel with Canon Henson. Every
man has a right to be shocked so long as it is his own shock and not a
mere imitation of somebody else's. What one has no patience with is
the case of those people who are always shocked in herds. They are
intellectually too lazy to be shocked, so to say, off their own bat.
So they join a mob of the shocked as they might join a demonstration
in the streets or a political party. They are so lacking in initiative
that, instead of boldly being shocked themselves, they frequently even
are content to be shocked by proxy. In the world of the theatre they
hire the Censor to be shocked for them by all the immoral plays that
are written. The Censor having been duly shocked, the public feels
that it has done all that can be expected of it in that direction and
it refuses to turn a hair afterwards no matter what it sees in the
theatre. It takes schoolgirls to musical comedies which are as often
as not mere tinkling farces of lust. But it does not care. It has
handed over its capacity for being shocked to the Censor, and nothing
can stir it out of the happy sleep of its faculties any more--nothing,
I should add, except a Shaw play. For even the chalk of a dozen
censors could not remove the offence of Mr Shaw. He is like an
evangelist who would suddenly rise up at a garden party and talk
about God. He is as bad form as one of those enthusiastic converts who
corner us in railway trains or buttonhole us in the streets to ask us
if we are saved. He is a Salvationist who has broken into the
playhouse, and, as he unfolds the knockabout comedy of redemption, we
are aware that we no longer feel knowing and superior, as we expect
the winking laughter of the theatre to make us feel, but ignorant and
simple, like a child singing its first hymns. That is the mood, at any
rate, of _Androcles and the Lion_. That is the offence and the stone
of stumbling. Mr Shaw has stripped some of our most sacred feelings as
bare as babies, and we do not know what to do to express our sense of
the indecency.

It is clear, then, that being shocked is simply a way of recovering
our balance. It is also a way of recovering our sense of superiority.
There is more pleasure in being shocked by the sin of one's neighbour
or one's neighbour's wife than in eating cream buns. Not, indee