Note 203 — Chapter XII

Shaw recently said: “I do not see how any observant student of genius from the life can deny that the Arts have their criminals and lunatics as well as their sane and honest men ... and that the notion that the great poet and artist can do no wrong is as mischievously erroneous as the notion that the King can do no wrong, or that the Pope is infallible, or that the power which created all three did not do its own best for them. In my last play, The Doctor's Dilemma, I recognized this by dramatizing a rascally genius, with the disquieting result that several highly intelligent and sensitive persons passionately defended him, on the ground, apparently, that high artistic faculty and an ardent artistic imagination entitled a man to be recklessly dishonest about money, and recklessly selfish about women, just as kingship in an African tribe entitles a man to kill whom he pleases on the most trifling provocation. I know no harder practical question than how much selfishness one ought to stand from a gifted person for the sake of his gifts or the chance of his being right in the long run.”—The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate, by Bernard Shaw, pp. 11-12; The New Age Press (London), 1908. This brochure is also published by Benjamin R. Tucker, New York.