y of all things; but he is careful, and even
cautious, in "Mankind in the Making," for that deals with the day after
to-morrow. He began with the end of the world, and that was easy. Now
he has gone on to the beginning of the world, and that is difficult.
But the main result of all this is the same as in the other cases. The
men who have really been the bold artists, the realistic artists, the
uncompromising artists, are the men who have turned out, after all, to
be writing "with a purpose." Suppose that any cool and cynical
art-critic, any art-critic fully impressed with the conviction that
artists were greatest when they were most purely artistic, suppose that
a man who professed ably a humane aestheticism, as did Mr. Max
Beerbohm, or a cruel aestheticism, as did Mr. W. E. Henley, had cast
his eye over the whole fictional literature which was recent in the
year 1895, and had been asked to select the three most vigorous and
promising and original artists and artistic works, he would, I think,
most certainly have said that for a fine artistic audacity, for a real
artistic delicacy, or for a whiff of true novelty in art, the things
that stood first were "Soldiers Three," by a Mr. Rudyard Kipling; "Arms
and the Man," by a Mr. Bernard Shaw; and "The Time Machine," by a man
called Wells. And all these men have shown themselves ingrainedly
didactic. You may express the matter if you will by saying that if we
want doctrines we go to the great artists. But it is clear from the
psychology of the matter that this is not the true statement; the true
statement is that when we want any art tolerably brisk and bold we have
to go to the doctrinaires.

In concluding this book, therefore, I would ask, first and foremost,
that men such as these of whom I have spoken should not be insulted by
being taken for artists. No man has any right whatever merely to enjoy
the work of Mr. Bernard Shaw; he might as well enjoy the invasion of
his country by the French. Mr. Shaw writes either to convince or to
enrage us. No man has any business to be a Kiplingite without being a
politician, and an Imperialist politician. If a man is first with us,
it should be because of what is first with him. If a man convinces us
at all, it should be by his convictions. If we hate a poem of Kipling's
from political passion, we are hating it for the same reason that the
poet loved it; if we dislike him because of his opinions, we are
disliking him for the best