6 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



sight one would expect an intellectual — and Mr. Shaw is nothing if 

 not intellectual, much more intellectual, his friends say, and he him- 

 self has said, than Shakespeare — one would expect an intellectual 

 to be rather indifferent to the moral inconsistencies and hypocricies 

 of the great leviathan, to the vulgar common place eternal insincerities 

 of raw human nature, and to be interested only in the false theories 

 of other intellectuals; but after all there are two schools of intellectuals, 

 as there are two of satirists and humourists, there are the "intellect- 

 uals" of the old world, men like Aristotle, who take a seriously scien- 

 tific view of the world, and build on the past, on fact and history, 

 and are thereby deeply prejudiced against reform ideals; for were the 

 reforms practicable they would have been secured already in that 

 illimitable past which has already tried all perm.utations and com- 

 binations of circumstances and institutions, which seemed to promise 

 improvement, and has adopted already all which really brought im- 

 provement; unrealised ideals are now presumably — Aristotle sug- 

 gests — Wills o' the wisp, misleading fires. The great flaws of life- — 

 slavery, infanticide, abortion, prostitution — though they be to the 

 Jews a stumbling block and to the Christians a horror — I am not 

 exactly quoting Aristotle you perceive but only Aristotelians — re- 

 main as permanent flaws — just as Ireland remains a running sore but 

 not a mortal disease in the British body politic — simply because they 

 have always been. These are the conservative intellectuals; they 

 accept permanent flaws as a part of the laws of life. But Mr. Shaw 

 has always been a liberal intellectual; he has always been idealist 

 rather than scientific; he has, for example, a violent feud with the doctors 

 and the vivisectionists; though he be an intellectual he is even in a 

 greater degree a humanitarian; "Androcles and the Lion" is not a 

 scoff at the early Christian idealist; but rather a sympathetic picture 

 of him as compared with the unchristian rufîfîans of the world of all 

 ages. "Blanco Posnet" and "theDevil'sdisciple" are not caricatures of 

 impracticable visionaries but pictures of rough and foul-mouthed 

 honesty, of unconscious Christianity in fact, which because it is 

 rough and foul-mouthed is quite misunderstood by the smug con- 

 ventional so-called Christianity of the Sunday school ; the only objec- 

 tion to these entertaining and spirited dramas is obviously that they 

 are a little too obvious and unintellectual ; if a reader knows already 

 from his reading of the Gospels that the Sunday schools are not in- 

 fallible exponents of Christianity, that the publican and the harlot 

 have already been entered in the race for the Kingdom by a Higher 

 Authority than the Sunday school, against the righteous who need 

 no repentance, well, such a reader says "agreed" before the race 



