t state that
tries to manage him. This anarchism of his is not a question of thinking
for himself; every decent man thinks for himself; it would be highly
immodest to think for anybody else. Nor is it any instinctive licence or
egoism; as I have said before, he is a man of peculiarly acute public
conscience. The unmanageable part of him, the fact that he cannot be
conceived as part of a crowd or as really and invisibly helping a
movement, has reference to another thing in him, or rather to another
thing not in him.

The great defect of that fine intelligence is a failure to grasp and
enjoy the things commonly called convention and tradition; which are
foods upon which all human creatures must feed frequently if they are to
live. Very few modern people of course have any idea of what they are.
"Convention" is very nearly the same word as "democracy." It has again
and again in history been used as an alternative word to Parliament. So
far from suggesting anything stale or sober, the word convention rather
conveys a hubbub; it is the coming together of men; every mob is a
convention. In its secondary sense it means the common soul of such a
crowd, its instinctive anger at the traitor or its instinctive
salutation of the flag. Conventions may be cruel, they may be
unsuitable, they may even be grossly superstitious or obscene; but there
is one thing that they never are. Conventions are never dead. They are
always full of accumulated emotions, the piled-up and passionate
experiences of many generations asserting what they could not explain.
To be inside any true convention, as the Chinese respect for parents or
the European respect for children, is to be surrounded by something
which whatever else it is is not leaden, lifeless or automatic,
something which is taut and tingling with vitality at a hundred points,
which is sensitive almost to madness and which is so much alive that it
can kill. Now Bernard Shaw has always made this one immense mistake
(arising out of that bad progressive education of his), the mistake of
treating convention as a dead thing; treating it as if it were a mere
physical environment like the pavement or the rain. Whereas it is a
result of will; a rain of blessings and a pavement of good intentions.
Let it be remembered that I am not discussing in what degree one should
allow for tradition; I am saying that men like Shaw do not allow for it
at all. If Shaw had found in early life that he was contradict