It is against such degradations that Mr. Muir raises his voice, and in particular against such degradations in the field of the fine arts. The superficial, I daresay, will mistake him (once they get over the sheer immorality of his relation to Nietzsche) as simply one more pleader for _l'art pour l'art--_one more prophet of a superior and disembodied æstheticism. Well, turn to his singularly acute and accurate estimate of Walter Pater: there is the answer to that error. He has, in fact, no leanings whatsoever in any such direction. The thing he argues for, despite all his fury against the debasement of art to mob uses, is not an art that shall be transcendental, but an art that shall relate itself to life primarily and unashamedly, an art that shall accept and celebrate life. He preaches, of course, out of season. There has never been a time in the history of the world when the natural delight of man in himself was held in greater suspicion. Christianity, after two thousand years, seems triumphant at last. From the ashes of its barbaric theology there arises the phoenix of its maudlin sentimentality; the worship of inferiority becomes its dominating cult. In all directions that worship goes on. It gives a new colour to politics, and not only to politics, but also to the sciences and the arts. Perhaps we are at the mere beginning of the process. The doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God is now defended and propagated by machine guns; it becomes a felony to deny it; one is already taxed in America to make good the lofty aspirations of Poles, Jugo-Slavs and Armenians. In England there are signs of a further step. An Ehrlich or a Koch, miraculously at work there, might be jailed for slitting the throat of a white rat: all the lower animals, too, it appears, are God's creatures. So viewed, a guinea-pig becomes the peer of a Beethoven, as a farm-hand is already the peer of a Bach. It is too late to turn back; let us hope that the logic of it is quickly worked out to its unescapable conclusion. Once the _pediculus vestimenti_ and the streptococcus are protected, there will be a chance again, it may be, for the law of natural selection to achieve its benign purgation.