SIX MAJOR PROPHETS
CHAPTER I
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Dramatic Critic of Life
I am a journalist, proud of it, deliberately cutting out of my works all that is not journalism, convinced that nothing that is not journalism will live long as literature, or be of any use whilst it does live. I deal with all periods, but I never study any period but the present; and as a dramatist I have no clue to any historical or other personage save that part of him which is also myself.... The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.—G. B. S., in "The Sanity of Art."
August 4, 1914, cuts time in two like a knife. The continuity of human progress in science, arts, letters, commerce, philosophy, everything, was broken off at that point—to be taken up again, who knows when? Nothing in the world can remain quite the same as before. Everything is seen in a new light. All our old ideas, even the most ancient and most reverenced, will have to be taken out and looked over to see how many of them remain intact and useful, just as after an earthquake one overhauls the china closet. "The transvaluation of all values", which Nietzsche looked for, has come to pass sooner than he expected, although the results of this reëstimation are not likely to be what he anticipated. It is not merely that the geographies will have to be revised and the histories rewritten, but all books will be classified as antebellum or postbellum literature. It will, however, not be necessary to mark them A. B. or P. B., for they will by their style of thought and language bear an indelible though invisible date with reference to this line of demarcation.