Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/50

24 24 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW malignant is meant than the mere hemming-in of his mind with wrong subjects. It is true, indeed, that the man who trains himself to speak without notes, of Rent, Interest, Profit, Wages, Toryism, Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Trade-Unionism, Co-operation, Democracy, the Division of Society into Classes, and the suitability of Human Nature to Systems of Just Distri- bution, is building up his views rather badly — too hastily- leaving the principal sites of his brain to a rabble of reach-me-down tenants. But if there had been nothing worse than this, Shaw would have pulled through, after a check ; he had creative energy enough to make even Interest interesting, and to convert Rents into a human reality; he would have ultimately humanized these ill-conditioned aliens much as a rich soil will regenerate and civilize a top-dressing of undesirable settlers. No, the fatal thing was not the type of topic he discussed ; it was the attitude he struck whilst discussing. It induced a spiritual deformity, a perpetual kink which he will carry to his grave ; you might say (I, at any rate, would have no right to reprove you) that it produced a condition of permanent hump. We have seen how he slaved to acquire a tone of icy arrogance. Well, once found, it fairly froze to his tongue. The aesthetic fashion of the hour favoured contempt, tirades, antagonisms, an omniscient schoolmastering of creation. Instead of wearing it a moment and then tossing it aside, this man hugged it to him till it became a second skin. And the reason for this rueful permanence, like all the primary causes in this amazing comedy of errors, only make the result the more perverse. For it was exactly Shaw's unsuitability for the rigid part of pedagogue that made him adopt the Dotheboys demeanour so exuberantly ; it was exactly because