The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

THE EQUINOX good St. George Bernard Shaw! With a spear thou hast pierced its side, and there floweth forth beer and water. Turn also, gramercy, upon the others, even unto the lowest. As Ibsen hawked at carrion birds with a Wild Duck, so do thou create some harpy to torment them. Who is this that followeth thee? Behold this mumbler born to butcher the English language, and educated to hack it with a saw! This stuttering babbler, this Harpocrates by the compulsion of a Sloane Square Mammurra! Who is this hanger-on to the be- draggled petticoats of thy lousy Thalia—this beardless, witless filcher of thy fallen crab-apples? This housemaid of the Court Theatre, the Gittite slut whose bleary eyes weep sexless crocodile tears over the crassness of the daughters of the Philistines? Arise, and speak to this palsied megalomaniac, this frowsy Moll Flanders of a degenerated Chelsea, this down-at-heel Jléneur on the outer boulevards of a prostituted literature, this little mongrel dog that fawneth upon the ill-cut trousers of thee, O St. Pancras Pulchinello—this little red-coated person that doth mouth and dance upon the kakophonous barrel-organ of New Thought fakirs and Modernity mountebanks. Speak to this parasite—itself unspeakably verminous— of the long-haired brigade, who has “got on” for that it had neither sufficient talent to excite envy, nor manhood enough to excite apprehension, but wit well to comprehend the sycophancy of the self-styled court and the tittle-tattle of the servants’ hall. It is an Editor—dear Lord my God! it is an Editor; but he who employs it has an equally indefeasible title to employ the pronoun “ We.” 35°