"No Greek town would have endured within its walls a youth so completely shattered in all his moral build, as was Rousseau. He was thoroughly and hopelessly demoralised in character, décousu and eccentric in thought, and badly tutored in point of knowledge. The clever woman that was his protectress, mistress, and guide, and who displayed a marvellous capacity for devising jobs and an inexhaustible resourcefulness in turning things and persons to practical use, could yet never discover any usefulness in Jean Jacques.
"He wrote, later on, novels, political treatises, botanical ones, musical ones. In truth he never wrote a novel; he wrote nothing but pamphlets; stirring, wild, eccentric, enchanting pamphlets. He was not, like Beaumarchais, a pamphleteer and yet a writer of a real, and immortal comedy, itself a political pamphlet. Rousseau was a writing stump-orator doing anticipative yeoman's work for the Revolution.
"So are all the Cynics. So are Ibsen, Tolstoy; so is Shaw. Their dramas may be, say are no dramas at all; their novels may be, say are no novels at all; their serious treatises are neither serious nor treatises; and yet they are, and always will be great effectological centres. They attack the whole fabric of the extant civilisation; by this one move they rally round them both the silent and the loud enemies of What Is, and the eager friends of what Ought To Be. Of these malcontents there always is a great number; especially in times of prolonged peace.
"A war, a real, good national war would immediately sweep away all these social malcontents.
"That's why the leaders of the Cynics, and more especially Tolstoy and Shaw, hate war. It is their mar-feast, their kill-joy; their microbes do not prosper in times of war.
"Without the fatal and all but universal peace of the period from 50 A.D. to 190 A.D., Christianity could never have made any headway in the Roman Empire; just as we got rid of our Cynics by the second Athenian Empire and its great wars.
"This, then, is in my opinion the true perspective of our modern Cynics. As literature or truth, they exhibit little of value, except that Shaw appears to me (—if a Greek may be allowed to pass judgment on such a matter—) to be the only one amongst living writers in England who has real literary splendour in his style. As men, however, exercising an effect on a possible social Revolution, these writers are of the utmost importance.
"Or to repeat it in my terms: alethologically nil or nearly so, effectologically very important or interesting; this is the true perspective of writers like Tolstoy, Shaw, and other modern Cynics.
"Their influence is not on Thought, nor on Art, but on Action.