Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/52

26 26 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW a kind of cowardice here — but what I do want us to realize is that it is the cowardice that comes from an artist's horror of the disgracefulness of making or drawing a false stroke. Shaw wouldn't a bit mind giving himself away ; what he cannot bear is the thought that he has involuntarily done so. It would seem so very careless. Taking life with the triple seriousness of Art, of Ireland, and of Youth, the idea of having wasted a drop of it would anguish him; and almost all his irresponsibilities have been the result of this terrifying sense of personal respon- sibility. It is this, for example, and not freakishness, that makes him dwell so disproportionately on ap- parent trivialities of dress and diet — on his way of eating and drinking, of spelling " cigarets " and not smoking them ; and when he rages so fantastically over our refusal to agree, he is in reality just beat- ing back desperately any private qualms as to his rightness, frantically justifying himself to himself. It is the same boyish fear that sets him eternally chattering explanations. He is often not so much trying to discover the truth as to find some further proof that he has told it. When he buttonholes us so officiously outside his own plays — prefacing, pro- mising, assuring — for all the world like a Showman blarneying desperately away outside his booth before he dares let us in — he is really not so much trying to humbug us with his harangues as to reassure and satisfy himself. He uses all the vigour of his imagi- nation to hypnotize that vigour ; his wit never dis- plays a more wonderful nimbleness than when trying to reconcile his own sallies. He will found a philo- sophy to escape admitting a jest was idle,^ and then ^ See, for example, the solemn Note at the end of Ccesar and Cleopatra, where Mr. Shaw desperately improvises a solemn theory about the Influence of Climate Upon Character and the Comparative Unimportance of Racial Influx, in order to persuade