University of Virginia Library

OUR MODERN TREATMENT OF PROPHETS

THIS brings us within view of Bernard Shaw's pamphlet on the war. It is natural in a preacher that the most unpardonable sin of the many he is called to denounce should be the sin of complacency; for the sin of complacency virtually amounts to the sin of refusing to hear what the preacher has to say, or, at all events, of refusing to take it seriously. Bernard Shaw has said continuously for many years that the average man is an unsocial sinner; and the average man, instead of hanging his head and mending his ways, has smiled in the face of the prophet. At one time the prophet was stoned, and at another time he was poisoned

or ostracized or pelted in the pillory. But we have lately learned a more effective way of dealing with a prophet: either we turn him into a society preacher and enjoy his denunciation of what our neighbours do, or we pay him handsomely to amuse us in the theater. We have thus improved immensely on the methods of the scribe and the Pharisee; for where the scribe and the Pharisee destroyed only the bodies of their prophets, we, with an even more thorough complacency, aim also at destroying their souls—usually with some success.

But the British public has not succeeded with Bernard Shaw, who continues to be periodically stirred to frenzy by his inability to make every one realize that he or she is directly responsible for all the crimes and miseries of modern civilization. Moreover, because Bernard Shaw has lived most of his life in England, and has therefore been less seriously taken in England than elsewhere, he has concluded that the English are more complacent than any other people in the world. More and more he has come to regard it as his special mission to humble this complacency, to convict the Englishman, above all men, of sin, and of the necessity for humility and repentance. Therefore, whenever the British public becomes, in the view of Bernard Shaw, unduly exalted,—whenever, in fact, it thinks it has a reason to be proud of the British name,—Bernard Shaw is at once suspicious and usually incensed. Latterly he has been unable to resist any occasion of pricking the inflation, real or imagined, of the British spirit; and latterly, misled by habit, and exaggerating the sins he was born to chastise, Bernard Shaw has made some serious mistakes.