But Mr. Moore is learned in the senses: he knows them in everything but their purity. Yes, even sensuality is in his books corrupted. How true this is we realize when in "Evelyn Innes" he compares one of his characters to a faun. We are almost distressed at this, for we feel that the word is not only coarsened, but used with a wrong meaning altogether: we feel that Mr. Moore is incapable of understanding what a faun is! These sophisticated, scented and somewhat damaged voluptuaries of his, in whose conversation there is always an atmosphere of expensive feminine lingerie, and who "know" women so intimately; how perverted must be the taste which can compare them with the hardy, nimble, unconscious creatures of ancient Greece! But Mr. Moore is much nearer in temper to Oscar Wilde than to the realists. He is an æsthete essentially, and a realist only in the second place, and only because he is an æsthete. The province of selected exquisite beauty had been exhausted by Wilde and his school; so Mr. Moore turned to the squalid, the commonplace and the diseased in Life, there to find his "æsthetic emotion." This explains the curious effect at once of colour and of drabness in his books. He is a perverted Wilde; doubly a decadent. 154 _Mr. Bernard Shaw_ Both the strength and the weakness of Mr. Shaw spring from a defect--his lack of Love. Freedom from illusion is his strength. He possesses common sense minus common sentiment; that, and probably nothing more; and that gives to his thought an appearance of subtlety, though it is not really subtle. Thus, his common sense tells him that Love is essentially creation. He sees through the illusions which Love spins round its purpose, because he does not see these illusions at all. Love, indeed, is known to him in all but its illusions; but who knows Love that knows not Love's illusions? Still, it is to his honour that he has conceived Love as creation. His weakness consists in that his attitude to Love is purely intellectual. He lacks Love more than any other man of his time. In grappling with the great problems of existence, it is not Love but the very absence of Love that has been his most useful weapon; and so he has seen much, but grasped nothing, created nothing. And because he has never loved, he can never be called an artist. For how can one who has not loved idealize? And how can one who has not idealized be an artist? In Mr. Shaw, Nature has gone out of her way to create the very antithesis of the artist.