Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/46

20 20 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW professor of spiritualism, who deserted her on the eve of her fourth confinement, in the course of which she caught scarlet fever and died. Her child survived, but was sent to a baby farm and starved to death in the usual manner. That is an early effort, from The Irrational Knot Already, it will be seen, the desired effect of imper- turbability is there, gained by that diligent maintenance of a monotone ; and the crowded middle sentence does nearly take the listener's breath away by telescoping four travails, two tragedies, and a comic professor of spiritualism into a couple of level lines. But there are still a few defects : the jolts at the commas break the pace rather badly, and the sentences, though they are still comparatively short ones, are only kept continuous by making each clause cannon the next instead of plunking past like a rifle-bullet straight from stop to stop. Months of practice and experiment, on paper by day and on platforms each night, taught him how to overcome these conditions. The sentence that follows was one written for an actual speech (and written, it is interesting to note, in that last home of the old school of rhetoric, William Morris's Manor House at Kelmscott), and the reader will see how perfectly the sense of precipitancy is secured to it by the simple device of dropping its successive items into the slots of a kind of eternally expanding carrier which branches forward from a single steady verb :— One can see that the Local Government Board of the future will be a tremendous affair ; that foreign States will be deeply affected by the reaction of English progress ; that international trade, always the really dominant factor in foreign policy, will have to be reconsidered from a new point of view when profit comes to be calculated in terms of net social welfare instead of individual pecuniary gain ; that our present system of imperial aggression, in which, under pretext of exploration and coloniza- tion, the flag follows the filibuster and trade follows the flag, with the missionary bringing up the rear, must collapse when the