But humorists are privileged persons. That, no doubt, accounts for the astonishing toleration of Bernard Shaw. Were it not that he is a _farceur_, born to write knock-about comedies--his plays, by the way, might be termed knock-about comedies of the middle-class mind--he would never have got a hearing for his common-place blasphemies, and cheap intellectual antics. He is undeniably "funny," so we cannot help laughing, though we are often ashamed of ourselves for our laughter; for to him there is nothing sacred--except his press-notices, and--his royalties.
His so-called "philosophy" has an air of dangerous novelty only to those innocent middle-classes born but yesterday, to whom any form of thought is a novelty. Methusaleh himself was not older than Mr. Shaw's "original ideas." In England, twenty years ago, we were long since weary of his egotistic buffooneries. Of anything "fine" in literature or art he is contemptuously ignorant, and from understanding of any of the finer shades of human life, or of the meaning of such words as "honour," "gentleman," "beauty," "religion," he is by nature utterly shut out. 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 _à 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.