must have guessed all this long ago.

For the truth is that Mr. Shaw has never seen things as they really are.
If he had he would have fallen on his knees before them.
He has always had a secret ideal that has withered all the things
of this world. He has all the time been silently comparing humanity
with something that was not human, with a monster from Mars,
with the Wise Man of the Stoics, with the Economic Man of the Fabians,
with Julius Caesar, with Siegfried, with the Superman. Now, to have
this inner and merciless standard may be a very good thing,
or a very bad one, it may be excellent or unfortunate, but it
is not seeing things as they are. it is not seeing things as they
are to think first of a Briareus with a hundred hands, and then call
every man a cripple for only having two. It is not seeing things
as they are to start with a vision of Argus with his hundred eyes,
and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one.
And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigod
of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latter
days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots. And this
is what Mr. Shaw has always in some degree done. When we really see
men as they are, we do not criticise, but worship; and very rightly.
For a monster with mysterious eyes and miraculous thumbs,
with strange dreams in his skull, and a queer tenderness for this
place or that baby, is truly a wonderful and unnerving matter.
It is only the quite arbitrary and priggish habit of comparison with
something else which makes it possible to be at our ease in front of him.
A sentiment of superiority keeps us cool and practical; the mere facts
would make, our knees knock under as with religious fear. It is the fact
that every instant of conscious life is an unimaginable prodigy.
It is the fact that every face in the street has the incredible