There was real tragedy, however, in Aveling’s alliance with Karl Marx’s daughter; for Eleanor Marx was a splendid woman, strong both in brain and in heart, and true as steel to the man who was greatly her inferior in both, and who treated her at the end with a treachery and ingratitude which led directly to her death. As a corrective of the romantic socialism of the S.D.F. arose the soberer doctrine of Fabianism, a name derived, we are told, from the celebrated Fabius, who won his victories on the principle of “more haste, less speed”; else one would have been disposed to trace it to a derivative of the Latin _fari_, “to talk,” as seen in the word “con_fab_ulation.” In the early and most interesting days of Fabianism, its chief champions, known as “the four,” were Sidney Webb, Bernard Shaw, Sydney Olivier, and Graham Wallas; and assuredly no Roman three ever “kept the bridge so well” as the Fabian four kept the planks of their platform in all the assaults that were made on it. Rarely have better debates been heard than at those fortnightly meetings in Willis’s Rooms. The trouble indeed with Fabianism was that it became almost _too_ brainy; it used to remind me of Sydney Smith’s remark about some one who was all mind--that “his intellect was indecently exposed.” Humaneness found little place in the Fabian philosophy. Once, when visiting a suburban villa that had just been occupied by a refined Fabian family, I learned that the ladies of the household, highly intellectual and accomplished women, had themselves been staining the floors of their new and charming residence with bullock’s blood brought in a bucket from the shambles. Shaw was, of course, the outstanding figure of Fabianism, as he was bound to be of any movement in which he took permanent part; but he was a great deal more than Fabian, he was humanitarian as well; and it gives cause for reflection, as showing how much easier it is to change men’s theories than their habits, that, while his influence on social and economic thought has been very marked, his followers in the practice of the Humanities have been few. It has been noticeable, too, how, in the many appreciations that have been written of Shaw, his humanitarianism has been almost entirely ignored, or passed over as an amiable eccentricity of a man of genius. Yet it is clear that if “G.B.S.,” who, during the past forty years, has done enough disinterested work to make the reputation of a score of philanthropists, is “not to be taken quite seriously,” there is no sense in taking any one seriously. A man is not less in earnest because he has a rich gift of humour or veils his truths in paradoxes. Shaw, in fact, is one of the most serious and painstaking of thinkers: his frivolity is all in the manner, his seriousness in the intent; whereas, unhappily, in most persons it is the intent that is so deadly frivolous, and the manner that is so deadly dull.