It is right to break up old china because it is ugly; but to destroy the china because you enjoy the sound of the crash is a little depraved. Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton, _et id omne genus_--the race of joyous tomboys who dash things about--have a great charm always. The bored, cultivated, sedentary people in any old civilization wake up more cheerfully in the morning when there is one of these fellows at work. A new thrill comes into the journals which the literati had grown to hate so heartily. “Ah,” cry the leisure classes, “what has Tommy got to say this morning, I wonder.” These two gentlemen, Shaw and Chesterton, are the Max and Moritz of the present epoch. For this reason I have tried to like them. I have tried to tolerate them. I have tried to believe that they are serviceable to mankind from some point of view which is not yet revealed to me. I do believe this; but I believe it with the head and not with the heart. The following reflections are, after all, a mere groping toward the light, and the tapping of the staff of a blind man. Any one who has ever passed through London must have been struck with the competition for notice among all classes of people whose conspicuousness depends upon their personal activity. In England there are such masses of any one kind of man or woman that the desire for identification--in itself a noble desire--leads people to resort to every expedient for attracting notice to themselves. This is the explanation of the hyphen in names. Edward B. Jones is a name that no one can remember; but Edward Burne-Jones is easy. In like manner ladies turn to lion-hunting, not because they love lions but because it gives them a status. Indeed, England has always been full of sham lions, who spring into existence to supply the demand created by these ladies. So of charity; so of culture; so of politics. Now there are often intellectual men--like Beaconsfield, and Oscar Wilde, and Whistler--who are unwilling to wait for their talents to lift them into notice, but who resort to artificial notoriety in order to expedite matters. They stick a feather in their cap and call it ‘maccaroni’. Their times suggest this course to them, and their times claim them instantly when they have complied with the suggestion. In literary England there is such an enormous and immediate acclaim for any new cleverness, that a poor and talented young man is under strong temptation to become surprising and brilliant in his writing. If he will only do this he will find himself petted, fed, and proclaimed almost at once.