The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

GLAZIERS’ HOUSES Tories was but a bed-ridden and toothless hag, mumbling the senile curses and jests which she could no longer articulate. True it is that the Word of Shaw is quick and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword. Yet the habit of sword- swallowing is probably fatal to the suicidal intentions of a Brutus, and it has certainly grown on him until he can no longer slay either himself or another. A dweller in the glass houses of Fad, he has thrown stones at the fishy god. A Society Shimei, he has spat against the wind, and his beard is befouled. True, every thought of Shaw is a great thought; and so equable and far-seeing is the artist, that its contradictory appears with it. His births are all Siamese twins; his god is Janus; his sign is Gemini . . . but his end is (I fear) not to rise above the equilibrium of contraries by a praeter-Hegelian dialectic, but to sink wearily between his two stools, a lament- able loon. . . . This Nulli Secundus, inflated with fermenting Grape-Nuts! For in all that mass of analysis lucid and terrible I cannot recall a single line of beauty, rarelya note of ecstasy; with one exception (John Tanner), hardly a hero. Even he not a little absurd. He has seen through the shams of romance, and marriage, and free love, and literary pose, and medical Ju-Ju, and religious rant, and political twaddle, and Socialist Buncombe and—every phase of falsehood. . . . But he has hardly grasped that each such falsehood is but a shadow of some sun of truth. He does not perceive the ineffable glory of the Uni- verse in its whole and in each part. He has smitten at the shadow of a shadow: it falls—the world is filth. Let him 347