Bernard Shaw, of the Fabian Society, ceased to be a private citizen. He became a man of "affairs," destined, thenceforward, to live in the publicity of debating-halls, among those ideas which reformers and politicians have actually socialised, removing them from the privacy of human experience and turning them into public property--like parks, open spaces, and wash-houses. I do not mean that he treated this public property as other, and more conventionally-minded, men habitually treat it. Mr. Shaw walks down the Strand as if it were his private bridle-path. He walks across an Insurance Bill or a National Theatre scheme or a policy for giving self-government to Englishmen as a man who might be treading the weeds in his own garden. But the intellectual stage-properties were all prepared for him and presented ready-made in those times when he went night after night to lecture in the city and suburbs of London. He had, indeed, the social cosmopolitanism which made him dissociate himself from small literary coteries and gain a practical knowledge of publicly-minded men. But one cannot fail to see that his long experience of lecturing, debating, setting up arguments, and parrying verbal attacks--which made him the best debater in England, and turned him, as Dr. Henderson has suggested, from a doctrinaire into a "practical opportunist"--served not only to endow him with his consistency as a thinker and his excellence in expounding ideas, but also confirmed him in his defects as a humanist. His continual intercourse with the innumerable fixed ideas of societies and committees, his debater's habit of attacking whatever fixed idea he encounters, have had the effect of organising his own mind along the lines of such fixed ideas, theses, positions and oppositions as could be defended or countered by his boundless resource in argument, wit, and raillery; and it followed that his interpretation of life was likely to resolve itself into the debater's generalisations, the partialities and half-truths which ignore what is individual, personal, intimate, and finest--for the finest things in life are those which cannot be generalised, which are individual and unique, which admit of being stated but not argued. It follows also that his strength is in attack and in destructive criticism. The only important positive ideas for which he stands are the Supermannish idea of the duty of every man to be himself to the utmost, and a generous democratic idea of freedom, in accordance with which every self-respecting man and woman should be given the opportunity to work out his or her own destiny fully, unhampered by the tyrannies of caste, prestige, sentimental traditions, false codes, and effete moral obligations.