In these imponderable and invisible matters, many are in a like case with Hamlet's mother, when she was unable to see the ghost of his father which he so plainly saw. "Yet all there is I see!" exclaimed the queen—though she was quite wrong, as wrong as Mr. Ruskin when he could see nothing in that painting of Whistler's but a cocks-comb throwing a paint-pot at a canvas and calling it a picture!
Many people who have sharp enough eyes and ears for their own worlds are absolutely blind and deaf when introduced into other worlds for which nature has not equipped them. But this by no means prevents their pronouncing authoritative opinions in those worlds, opinions which would be amazing if they were not so impertinent. Many literary people proclaim their indifference to and even contempt for music—as if their announcement meant anything more than their music deafness, their unfortunate exclusion from a great art. Mark Twain used to advertise his preference for the pianola over the piano—as if that proved anything against the playing of Paderewski. Similarly, he acted the bull in the china-shop in regard to Christian Science, which cannot be the accepted creed of millions of men and women of intelligence and social value without deserving even in a critic the approach of some respect.
But humorists are privileged persons. That, no doubt, accounts for the astonishing toleration of Bernard Shaw. Were it not that he is a farceur, born to write knock-about comedies—his plays, by the way, might be termed knock-about comedies of the middle-class mind—he would never have got a hearing for his common-place blasphemies, and cheap intellectual antics. He is undeniably "funny," so we cannot help laughing, though we are often ashamed of ourselves for our laughter; for to him there is nothing sacred—except his press-notices, and—his royalties.
His so-called "philosophy" has an air of dangerous novelty only to those innocent middle-classes born but yesterday, to whom any form of thought is a novelty. Methusaleh himself was not older than Mr. Shaw's "original ideas." In England, twenty years ago, we were long since weary of his egotistic buffooneries. Of anything "fine" in literature or art he is contemptuously ignorant, and from understanding of any of the finer shades of human life, or of the meaning of such words as "honour," "gentleman," "beauty," "religion," he is by nature utterly shut out. He laughs and sneers to make up for his deficiencies, like that Pietro Aretino who threw his perishable mud at Michael Angelo. So is it always with the vulgarian out of his sphere. Once he dared to talk vulgarly of God to a great man who believed in God—Count Tolstoi.
He had written to Tolstoi à propos his insignificant little play The Showing up of Blanco Posnet, and in the course of his letter had said: "Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?" Tolstoi had hitherto been favourably inclined towards Shaw, owing to his friend and biographer Mr. Aylmer Maude; but this cheap-jack sacrilege was too much for the great old man, who seemed to know God with almost Matthew Arnold's
plainness as near
As flashing as Moses felt,
and he closed the correspondence with a rebuke which would have abashed any one but the man to whom it was sent.
Tolstoi was like Walt Whitman—he "argued not concerning God." It is a point of view which people like Mr. Shaw can never understand; any more than he or his like can comprehend that there are areas of human feeling over which for him and other such bulls in china-shops should be posted the delicate Americanism—KEEP OUT.