Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/29

Rh attitudes he struck as he hectored the world from rebel platforms, ate back into his instincts and affected his habit of mind, until at length intolerance, arrogance, contentiousness, contradictiousness, became instinctively his imagination's weapons. And finally we shall see how his very earnestness and craving for consistency forced him on to the concoction of a philosophy which would justify his policy of pert exasperation; and how he gradually perfected a theory which represented irritation as the only open sesame to men's consciousness, and cold clear thinking as the weapon now most needed to cut us free from our pampering illusions, and which therefore laid on the man of genius as his deepest duty this thankless task of challenge and contempt. And we shall watch this adventitious creed drinking up vitality from his veins, dilating till at last it shut him in—trapped in a dense grove of ideas that slowly altered him until he matched them—as dungeon walls will do a captive....

PART I

I

The whole thing, put abruptly, is another example of the tyranny of technique over temperament—of the way an instrument invented for too narrow a need will react on the fingers that use it, stiffening and striking back till it fatally deforms them, wrenching their special talent awry. The "tyranny of technique over temperament" may sound, indeed, just at first, a predicament as purely academic as the famous "deduction killed by a fact"; but really it is far fuller of ringing human comedy, of thrills, and alarums and poetry, than even the most dramatic of all the existing portraits of Shaw, the most exciting of the alternative estimates. The man's