Sham and Super-sham.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXIX, Issue 5, 3 August 1907, Page 46

Sham and Super-sham.

A writer who conceals his identity under the pseudonym of “Z ” makes a deliciously fierce attack on Mr. George Bernard Shaw in “ Blackwood’s Magazine,” a periodical long famous for its plain speaking. The writer, who, in a feeble, un-Black-wood jibe, calls Mr. Shaw throughout Mr. George Shaw, dubs him, among other things:—Au ideal polytechnic playwright. Our little charlatan. This ignorant jackanapes. This feeble imitator of such diseased eccentricities as Nietzsche. The following are a few characteristic passages in this whole-hearted indictment :—■ “ He has tried everything, from posing as an agitator at Hammersmith to being photographed as a living statue.” “ Any scholarly critic . . . with a real knowledge of the broader fields of philosophy and literature, could smash a charlatan like Mr. Shaw in a very few pages, if it were worth the trouble — smash him beyond all hope of repair.” “We are tired of watching him hop over the graves of the illustrious dead, and skip like a blue-behinded apo upon the trees of Paradise. For this man is not in earnest.” Flashes of hypocritical and perverted sentiment, every pair of which are mutually destructive —these things have misled a few stupid but really earnest people into thinking him a stern moralist in disguise, or a philosopher of some hitherto unknown sort.” " Decadence and perversion are writ large over everything that comes from his pen. and he has not even the redeeming quality of genius.” “ Even his morality is a morbid and exaggerated reaction, partly imitated — as to its pose —from the worst side of Tolstoy’.’ “ It is useless to take his wild charges against the Elizabethans as anything more than an amusing commentary on his own shallow and conceited intellect.”