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 in upsetting the pseudo-historical, pseudo-philosophical illusions of Anglo-Saxons, in charmingly ridiculous pantomimes, which the redeeming humor of that patient race has just intelligence enough thoroughly to enjoy.

If he were himself less moralistically earnest the spice of the jest would disappear.  His humor is not universal humor.  It is topical humor; and topical humor derives its point from moral contrast,—­the contrast in this case between the virtue of Mr. Shaw and the vices of modern society.

“Man and Superman” is undoubtedly his most interesting work from a philosophical point of view, but his later plays—­such bewitching farces as “Fanny’s First Play,” “Androcles,” and “Pygmalion”—­seem to express more completely than anything else that rollicking combative roguishness which is his most characteristic quality.