Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/51

25 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW 25 he was an artist, wholly governed and swayed by the artist's deep, controlling sense of consistency of form, that he refused to relinquish his role of bitter- ness and rancour and persisted in displays of conscious bad form. A weaker artist would have suffered less : our Cranes soon ceased their clamour, our Carpenters turned craftsmen, working happily at a bench instead of irascibly endeavouring to occupy one. All the genuine born propagandists too, on the other hand, changed their manner quite cheerily; the Salts of the earth, after acting as irritants for a time, soci- ably subsided later on into agreeable condiments — as Secretaries to the Humane Society, and so on. But Shaw is utterly incapable of this carnalness. He is overwhelmingly consumed by the poet's passion for unity and symmetry. He feels forced to adhere to all the attitudes of his salad-days — down even to their devotion to salad ; he is incapable of confessing sunnily that those early passions for rolled oats were really only another of youth's ways of sowing wild ones. That accusation of capriciousness so often brought against him — how heartily one wishes it were true ! He lacks the courage to abandon his Convictions. Like his own Sergius, he "never with- draws." He may advance — that is another thing; but, even so, he always carries his old opinions care- fully with him, no matter what the extravagant cost of carriage, ingeniously persuading himself, and us, as he does so, how absolutely essential they are to his equipment. He somewhere reminds us that we all die once each eight years — but in his own case the estate is strictly entailed ; he takes these intimate ancestors of his with the most tremendous seriousness ; he would sooner die than repudiate their pledges ; and many of his apparently wildest and least forgiv- able extravagances have been simply due to his proud attempt to fulfil these contracts. There is perhaps