hod of approach with regard to all the great arts, and
most especially with regard to the art of literature.

No one, after reading him, can remain gross, academic, vulgar, or
indiscriminate. And, with the rest, we seem to be aware of a secret
attitude not only towards art but towards life also, to miss the key
to which would be to fail in that architecture of the soul and senses
which is the object of the discipline not merely of the aesthetic but
of the religious cult.

For the supreme initiation into which we are led by these elaborate
and patient essays, is the initiation into the world of inner
austerity, which makes its clear-cut and passionate distinctions in
our emotional as well as in our intellectual life.

Everything, without exception, as we read Pater becomes "a matter of
taste"; but the high and exclusive nature of this taste, to which no
sensations but those which are vulgar and common are forbidden, is
itself a guarantee of the gentleness and delicacy of the passions
evoked. His ultimate philosophy seems to be that--as he himself has
described it in "Marius,"--of Aristippus of Cyrene; but this
"undermining of metaphysic by means of metaphysic" lands him in no
mere arid agnosticism or weary emptiness of suspended judgment; but in
a rich and imaginative region of infinite possibilities, from the
shores of which he is able to launch forth at will; or to gather up at
his pleasure the delicate shells strewn upon the sand.

85. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. MAN AND SUPERMAN.

Mr. Shaw has found his role and his occupation very happily cut out
for him in the unfailing stupidity, not untouched by a sense of humor,
of our Anglo-Saxon democracy in England and America. In Germany, too,
there seems naivete and simplicity enough to be still entertained by
these mischievously whimsical and yet portentously moral comedies. It
appears however that the civilization for which Rabelais and Voltaire
wrote, is less willing to acclaim as an extraordinary genius one who
has the wit to pierce with a bodkin the idolatries and illusions of
such pathetically simple people.

Bernard Shaw takes the Universe very seriously. By calling it the
Life-Force he permits himself to address it in that heroic vein
reserved, among more ordinary intelligencies, for anthropomorphic
deities. Bernard Shaw's sense of the comic draws its spirit from the
contrast between clever people and stupid people, and seems to appear
at its best when engaged i