s the basis of our plays
and novels is not romance, but a really scientific natural history;" he
is quite right, if he feels it to be his own particular function, to
spend his whole force in "indicting" society. But how terrible a loss in
human interest and vitality if all our creative artists are to occupy
themselves in this process of "indictment"--indictment being at all
times the antithesis of fair criticism and presentment. I would venture
to suggest that human life, roughly speaking, may be divided into two
great parts, one of which is completely tabooed by Mr. Shaw. These two
parts or aspects of life may be named and envisaged in a hundred
different ways. Aristotle called them the "practical" and the
"theoretic." The Roman Church called them the "temporal" and the
"spiritual." The social philosophers called them the "State" and the
"Individual." They may be called "Science" and "Art," "Politics" and
"Poetry," "Public" and "Private," "Social" and "Personal," "Public
Work" (Shaw) and "The Will of God," "Philanthropy" and "Friendship,"
"Justice" and "Mercy," "Humanitarian" and "Human." Each second term in
these categories is cut clean out of modern life by Mr. Shaw. When he
says that "Ibsen was to the last fascinating and full of a strange
moving beauty," he says it as if he were reproaching Ibsen. His whole
influence is thrown on to the side of an austere common sense which
destroys emotion because it may become fanaticism, which laughs at
sentiment because it may be perverted into nonsense, which is as
Puritanically cruel to the insidious blandishments of romance as Plato
was cruel to the poets.

Is it fanciful to imagine that it is with the Irishman as I have
always fancied it was with the Greek philosopher, that by reason of
his own knowledge of the dangerous burning fever of poetry, from his
own susceptibility to its enchantments, he decided to crown the poets
with garlands and banish them to another city? That, indeed, is an
idle fancy. Mr. Shaw exists to prove that there are Irishmen who do
not suffer from the intoxication of beauty, who are not susceptible to
the windy ardours of romance. Nevertheless Mr. Shaw, too, has his
romance. He learnt it in the eager, fighting days when he held up the
standard of Fabianism before the blinking eyes of suburban audiences;
when he learnt to detest the silly ways of silly people whose
silliness was feebly glorified under the names of morality, religion,
sentiment, and p