On the whole, happy as was his choice of scene, fascinating as are these almost actionless conversations, the whole thing is a _jeu d’esprit_, with no message of practical import to our age or to the aged unless it be to slightly encourage the hope in the latter that by willing to do so more and more intensely they may add somewhat to their length of years. Shaw’s Ancients are simply a board of censors to carry out his own whims and who have grown arrogant as their powers increased. Altogether they are so unlovely that the reader would hesitate whether he would prefer to be a bloodless Ancient or to take his chance of being exterminated by them as a short-liver. The two Ancients in the fifth book of the Pentateuch, 700 and 800 years old respectively, are chilly, loveless, almost clotheless, sleepless, hairless creatures, happy in enjoying a wisdom of the nature of which we are given very few hints. They teach that all works of art from rag dolls to statues, and even to homunculi, are needless, and the intimation is that they are well on the way to becoming independent of the body, which they have subjected and which has lost all its attractions. We are not even told how the gigantic eggs from which the race is born at adolescence are produced. The final verdict of Lilith, the androgynous mother of our first parents in Eden, is that in giving Eve curiosity, which was still impelling the race to conquer matter and then resolve itself back into bodiless vortexes and energies, she had made no mistake for the Ancients are ever gaining in wisdom to comprehend the universe and, despite the slow decay of their bodies, are likely to attain the goal of achieving real but immaterial truth, beauty, and goodness all in one, so that she need not exterminate man and produce in his place a new and higher race of beings. Thus Shaw’s Ancients are the direct antithetes of Nietzsche’s supermen.