asked a waiter in a
restaurant for a bottle of yellow wine and some greenish-yellow grapes,
the waiter would think him mad. It is undoubtedly true that if a
Government official, reporting on the Europeans in Burmah, said, "There
are only two thousand pinkish men here" he would be accused of cracking
jokes, and kicked out of his post. But it is equally obvious that both
men would have come to grief through telling the strict truth. That too
truthful man in the restaurant; that too truthful man in Burmah, is Mr.
Bernard Shaw. He appears eccentric and grotesque because he will not
accept the general belief that white is yellow. He has based all his
brilliancy and solidity upon the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact
that truth is stranger than fiction. Truth, of course, must of
necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit
ourselves.

So much then a reasonable appreciation will find in Mr. Shaw to be
bracing and excellent. He claims to see things as they are; and some
things, at any rate, he does see as they are, which the whole of our
civilization does not see at all. But in Mr. Shaw's realism there is
something lacking, and that thing which is lacking is serious.

Mr. Shaw's old and recognized philosophy was that powerfully presented
in "The Quintessence of Ibsenism." It was, in brief, that conservative
ideals were bad, not because They were conservative, but because they
were ideals. Every ideal prevented men from judging justly the
particular case; every moral generalization oppressed the individual;
the golden rule was there was no golden rule. And the objection to this
is simply that it pretends to free men, but really restrains them from
doing the only thing that men want to do. What is the good of telling a
community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws?
The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people. And what
is the good of telling a man (or a philosopher) that he has every
liberty except the liberty to make generalizations. Making
generalizations is what makes him a man. In short, when Mr. Shaw
forbids men to have strict moral ideals, he is acting like one who
should forbid them to have children. The saying that "the golden rule
is that there is no golden rule," can, indeed, be simply answered by
being turned round. That there is no golden rule is itself a golden
rule, or rather it is much worse than a golden rule. It is an iron
rule; a fetter on t