The Equinox (Volume I, Number III)

THE EQUINOX rather new-edge his sword for a deeper analysis, and cut away the veil from the face of our Mother. ’Sdeath, man, is there nothing we may love? He is wrong, anyway, to gibe at Scripture. For, like Balaam, I came to curse, and appear to be blessing him! (with scarce a monitory word). And, like Balaam, too, I have been reviewed by G. K. Chesterton. To pass from this painful subject... . Let me rouse myself to a really resolute effort to denounce Shaw as a niddering. Aha! I have it. The man is a journalist after all. We have to thank him for semi-educating a few of our noodles, for applying the caustic of Ibsen (right) and Wagner (wrong—the book’s drivel) to that most indolent of ulcers, the British Public, but for nothing more. His own work, bar “Man and Overman” (why the hybrid Super- man?), is aglib sham. If it proves anything, it proves nothing. But are we to writhe in the ecstasies of Pyrrhonism? For this prophet claims to be Zoroaster. Can we be sure even of that? He has educated the British goat to caper to his discordant Pan-pipe, so that without the nuisance of crucifixion he may scourge the money-changers from the temple. Yet is this true cynicism? Doth he delight, the surly Diogenes, in his solitary gambols—that insult both Lydia and Lalage? Or is he doing it to tempt them—to coquette with them? Is he a man deadly serious in positive constructive aim, yet so sensitive to ridicule that he will always seek to turn it off as a jest—and so a stultifier of himself? A Christ crucified, not upon Calvary, but upon Venusberg, and so no redeemer? If so, ave atgue vale, George Bernard Shaw, for a redeemer 348