to say that he rushed into print with a
frank confession of the failure of his old theory. But it is also
characteristic of him that he rushed into print also with a new
alternative theory, quite as definite, quite as confident, and, if one
may put it so, quite as infallible as the old one. Progress had never
happened hitherto, because it had been sought solely through education.
Education was rubbish. "Fancy," said he, "trying to produce a greyhound
or a racehorse by education!" The man of the future must not be taught;
he must be bred. This notion of producing superior human beings by the
methods of the stud-farm had often been urged, though its difficulties
had never been cleared up. I mean its practical difficulties; its moral
difficulties, or rather impossibilities, for any animal fit to be called
a man need scarcely be discussed. But even as a scheme it had never been
made clear. The first and most obvious objection to it of course is
this: that if you are to breed men as pigs, you require some overseer
who is as much more subtle than a man as a man is more subtle than a
pig. Such an individual is not easy to find.

It was, however, in the heat of these three things, the decline of his
merely destructive realism, the discovery of Nietzsche, and the
abandonment of the idea of a progressive education of mankind, that he
attempted what is not necessarily his best, but certainly his most
important work. The two things are by no means necessarily the same. The
most important work of Milton is _Paradise Lost_; his best work is
_Lycidas_. There are other places in which Shaw's argument is more
fascinating or his wit more startling than in _Man and Superman_; there
are other plays that he has made more brilliant. But I am sure that
there is no other play that he wished to make more brilliant. I will not
say that he is in this case more serious than elsewhere; for the word
serious is a double-meaning and double-dealing word, a traitor in the
dictionary. It sometimes means solemn, and it sometimes means sincere. A
very short experience of private and public life will be enough to prove
that the most solemn people are generally the most insincere. A somewhat
more delicate and detailed consideration will show also that the most
sincere men are generally not solemn; and of these is Bernard Shaw. But
if we use the word serious in the old and Latin sense of the word
"grave," which means weighty or valid, full of substance, then