luctantly from Paris brought colour with them, and splashed it joyously over everything in sight.

But the colour is only an expressive incident. The principal fact about the Village is that it really is a village. Everybody in it knows everybody else. There is village intimacy, village curiosity, village gossip. Only in one respect is Greenwich Village different. The gossip is kindly. Perhaps because it is impossible to keep secrets, nobody tries to. Nobody cares, anyway.

This curiosity and this candour are the foundations of the Village morality. People do not break the anti-trust laws in Greenwich Village. But they do fall in love, with the results which can be found described at length in the fiction and poetry of all nations. Women laugh and cry in Greenwich Village, and men say to themselves: "What a fool I am. And yet!" In a word, they fall in love. There is folly in Greenwich Village; but because the inhabitants are permitted to laugh at it, they reserve their indignation for more serious matters. They dislike unkindness. They hate hypocrisy. That is why they become so angry when a judge upsets the Constitution of the United States and sends somebody to jail for making a speech on a soapbox. They are of any politics, or none-mostly none. They agree, however, in disliking policemen and editors.

The romantic impression prevails outside that nobody in Greenwich Village does any work. This is not strictly true. But the Village does play, and with such gay and riotous abandon that it is no wonder if sober middle-class people disapprove. This aristocratic use of leisure seems all the more immoral when one reflects that it is achieved on such small incomes. The virtuous bourgeois who has to deny himself most of the things he would really enjoy because he has to spend his money on things he does not enjoy at all, may well be enraged at this incongruous and bewildering spectacle. Here are people who haven't much money enjoying themselves as if they had all the money in the world!

Yet Greenwich Village may presently cease to be. That stubborn little street which has so long braced itself against the outside world, has been pierced through. Down extended Seventh Avenue the tides of traffic which have so long been kept out, will be hurled through the heart of the Village. In a few years the subway will be finished; apartment buildings, which have already crept in, will go up everywhere. The crooked streets will be straightened out. The old houses, with their high ceilings and fireplaces, will be torn down. The section will become simply a part of New York. And the gaiety, the daring, the talk, the laughter, the love, the effervescent youth which now sparkles in Green

wich Village-will that too be crowded out, banished, destroyed? The great wave of traffic, of ordinariness, of law and order, of middle-class virtue, is lifted over the Village, ready to fall. The Village meanwhile enjoys itself.

1916

XI. Shaw and Jesus

B

ERNARD SHAW as an exponent of Christianity is a spectacle that might very well drive a Bishop to despair. Shaw, in spite of the silly old talk about "clever paradox," is so convincing a writer that when he turns (as he does in the preface to "Androcles and the Lion") to arguing for Christianity, he will be like to convert us all to the teachings of Jesus: and then what will become of the church!

I solemnly profess that he has converted me. At least, he has finished the job that the war began. Up to 1914 I was, like the rest of the civilized world, a believer in the gospel of force. Like the Kaiser and Sir Edward Grey and Colonel Roosevelt and the McNamara boys, I believed that a judicious use of high explosives would bring to pass a Kingdom of Heaven on earth. And I am still so recent a convert that I am afraid I might backslide if my modest assistance were needed in building a barricade. But at present writing, it looks as though I should have a considerable space of time in which to establish myself in my new faith.

It is an odd feeling, this being a Christian. But, after all, what is a fellow to do? Optimist by temperament though I am, I really cannot go on believing in this silly war. To see anything in it but a hysterical attempt on the part of civilization to commit suicide, requires an intensity of credulity which my mind cannot sustain for more than the few minutes a day in which I read the newspapers. But if one does not believe that the world is going to be made saner and sweeter and finer by a victory of the Allies over Germany (or vice versa), then one is perilously near Christianity. If we are not to take a gun and shoot the people who disagree with us (the simplicity of which method has always appealed to me), we must find some way of getting along with them. Now that is "loving your enemies," and a general attempt to put it in practice would involve a catastrophic dissolution of the State, the Prison System, Property Rights, and almost Everything Else one could think of.

Once upon a time I read the gospel of St. Mark, and conceived a qualified admiration for the haughty, imperious, masterful, clever, epigrammatic young thaumaturgist who is its hero. In his sayings, moreover, there seemed to be a certain pith of wisdom. He resented family ties, like Samuel Butler; he was an impatiently hostile critic of marriage, like Ibsen; he had a deep contempt for work done not in joy but for bread and butter, just as William