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.

We are already beginning to look back upon the antebellum days as a closed period, and those who were conspicuous in it are being seen in an historical perspective such as the lapse of a generation of ordinary times is needed to produce. Some reputations are shrinking, others are rising, as mountains seem from a departing train to rearrange themselves according to their true height. The true prophets are becoming distinguishable from the false.

Among those who have taken the test and stand higher than before is George Bernard Shaw. Whether he will write better plays than before remains to be seen. Perhaps he will write no more of any kind. But those he has written will be regarded with more respect because we can see their essential truth, whereas before we feared lest we might be merely fascinated by their glitter. Warnings which the world took for jokes because of their fantastic guise now turn out too terribly real, and advice which the world ignored would better have been heeded.

Few writers have as little to take back on account of the war as Shaw, although few have expressed such decided opinions in such extreme language on so many topics. For instance, Kipling's "The Bear that Walks Like a Man" makes queer reading now that England is fighting to give Russia what then she was ready to fight to prevent her getting. But the full significance of Shaw's fable farce of "Androcles and the Lion" is now for the first time being realized. The philosophy of this, his most frivolous and serious play, is summed up by Ferrovius, a converted giant of the Ursus type, who finds it impossible to keep to his Christian principle of nonresistance when brought into the arena. The natural man rises in him and he slays six gladiators single-handed. This delights the emperor, who thereupon offers him a post in the Pretorian Guards which he had formerly refused. The fallen and victorious Ferrovius accepts, saying:

In my youth I worshiped Mars, the god of war. I turned from him to serve the Christian God; but to-day the Christian God forsook me; and Mars overcame me and took back his own. The Christian God is not yet. He will come when Mars and I are dust; but meanwhile I must serve the gods that are, not the God that will be. Until then I accept service in the Guard, Caesar.

The great cataclysm does not seem to have changed Shaw's opinions one iota, but all England is changed, and so he appears in a different light. More of his countrymen agree with what he used to preach to them than ever before, yet he was never so disliked as he is to-day—which is saying a great deal. The British press has boycotted him. His letters, once so sought after by the most dignified journals, now no longer appear except in The New Statesman. His speeches, be they never so witty and timely, are not reported or even announced.

Consequently those who wish to hear him have to resort to the advertising expedients of the era before printing. A friend of mine just back from London tells me that he saw chalked on the side-walk a notice of a meeting to be addressed by Shaw in some out-of-the-way hall. Going there, he found it packed with an enthusiastic crowd gathered to hear Shaw discuss the questions of the day. The anti-Shavian press said that he had to keep to his house, that he was afraid to stir abroad for fear of a mob, that his career was over, that he was exploded, repudiated, disgraced, boycotted, dead and done for. At the very time when we were reading things like this, he was, as we since have learned, addressing weekly meetings in one of the largest halls in London. Reporters who were sent to see him hounded off the platform witnessed an ovation instead. The audience at his invitation asked him many questions, but not of a hostile character.

Shaw thrives on unpopularity or at least on public disapproval, which is not quite the same thing. It is not only that Shaw would rather be right than Prime Minister; he would rather be leader of the Opposition than Prime Minister. He would be "in the right with two or three"; in fact, if his followers increased much beyond the poet's minimum, he would begin to feel uneasy and suspect that he was wrong.

When Shaw sees a lonely mistreated kitten or a lonely mistreated theory, his tender heart yearns over it. For instance, when all his set started sneering at "natural rights" as eighteenth-century pedantry, he appeared as their champion, and, practically alone among modern radicals and art lovers, he has dared to commend the Puritans. The iconoclastic views which he expressed as dramatic and musical critic in the nineties have been vindicated by events, and now when a young reader opens for the first time "The Quintessence of Ibsenism", "The Perfect Wagnerite", and the collection of "Dramatic Opinions and Essays", he wonders only why Shaw should get so excited about such conventional and undisputed things. It is no wonder Shaw is "the most hated man in England." Nothing is more irritating than to say "I told you so", and he can—and does—ay it oftener than anybody else, unless it is Doctor Dillon.

Shaw's brain secretes automatically the particular antitoxin needed to counteract whatever disease may be epidemic in the community at the time. This injected with some vigor into the veins of thought may not effect a cure, but always excites a feverish state in the organism. It is his habit of seeing that there is another side to a question and calling attention to it at inconvenient times that makes him so irritating to the public. His opponents tried to intern him in Coventry as a pro-German on account of his pamphlet, "Commonsense about the War." But this is almost the only thing produced in England during the first weeks of the war that reads well now. Compare it with its numerous replies and see which seems absurd. Doubtless it was not tactful, it might have been called treasonable, but it certainly was sensible. Shaw kept his head level when others lost theirs. That was because he had thought out things in advance and so did not have to make up his mind in a hurry with the great probability of making it up wrong. In that pamphlet he presented the case for the Allies in a way much more convincing to the American mind than many that came to us in the early days of the war, and his arguments have been strengthened by the course of events, while others advanced at that time have been weakened. Shaw was arguing before a neutral and international jury, and so he did not rest his case on the specious and patriotic pleas that passed muster at that time with the British public.

As for the charge of pro-Germanism, that may best be met by quoting from a letter written by him to a friend in Vienna early in 1915. The language is evidently not pure Shavian. It has been translated into Austrian-German and thence retranslated into British journalese.

As regards myself,