Were I speaking of happiness I should be compelled to argue that the attitude of society and the individual toward sex is the most important thing in the world, but speaking as I am of life as material for art I must maintain, on the contrary, that it is much less important. As long as they have an attitude and as long as that attitude remains, as it has always remained, an inadequate one, those unresolved discords which make living and reading interesting will continue to arise. As a critic I “view with alarm” nothing except the possibility that the problem should be solved to everybody’s satisfaction, but that calamity does not seem at all likely to occur since I have never heard of a saint in the desert or a debauché in a brothel who was not sufficiently maladjusted to be a fruitful subject for fiction. After all, the things we do are both more significant and less changing than our attitude toward our acts. We burn men at the stake to light a Roman garden, to save the world from the horror of heresy, or to protect the sanctity of female virtue and assure the supremacy of the white race, but we burn them always; we fight because arms are glorious, because the service of God demands the rescue of His holy sepulcher from the infidel, or because we must make the world safe for peace, but always we fight; and the most important thing is the insistent lust of cruelty or the impulse to fight rather than the rationalization of these motives. So, too, with love. Paphnutius is harried out of apathy into a state in which he sees visions because of the temptations of the devil, Milton because God gave Eve to Adam as a comforter, Shelley because woman is the symbol of the unutterable, and Shaw (presumably) because only by the process of reproduction can the Life Force perform its perfectionist experiments; but the resultant impulses are not so very different. Mr. F. W. Myers once referred to the procreation of children in these lines: Lo! When a man magnanimous and tender, Lo! When a woman desperate and true, Make the inevitable sweet surrender, Show one another what the Lord can do,... but I doubt if the states of mind which called forth these lines and, say, Swinburne’s Dolores were as different as the verses would suggest or as the authors imagined. Without going so far as to say that the two poems are of equal literary merit, one can at least say that they are almost equally interesting and delightful to the observer of life or art and that as long as the mystical, the ascetic, the sentimental, and the biological attitudes toward love continue to exist side by side or to follow one another in succeeding epochs, the critic will not find literature either dull or monotonous.