Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/53

27 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW 27 write a play to prove the philosophy humanly true,i and then extend the philosophy to include clauses which declare a dramatist's characters are free and independent personalities, quite uncontrolled by the conscious will of their creator, and that he himself is a dramatist in that sense.^ In brief, he is the kind of man who, rather than admit, even to himself, that he has got into a hole, would remorselessly chip corners off his own character till it fitted, no matter what the mutilation cost him. And this, and even worse than this, is precisely the horrible practice we are now to see him engaged in. Worse, because his thrawn thoroughness, the artist's instinct perverted, made him mangle and carve his conception of the whole of the rest of mankind in order to make it fit into his own forced malformities. His instinct for harmony made him insist that dis- harmony was an essential condition of health. " In this world," he declared, " if you do not say a thing in an irritating way, you might just as well not say it at all, since nobody will trouble themselves about anything that does not trouble them." " The fact is," he said again, " there is nothing the public de- himself that the pantomime fooling with Britannus is a piece of penetrating historical portraiture and a subtle psychological study. The gravely reproduced portraits of Caesar and General Burgoyne in the same volume and the solemn resurrection of a contemporary print of the Pharos of Alexandria are analogous devices for cunningly satisfying his conscience that he has been spending his powers on work of an adequate dignity. One sometimes feels Mr. Shaw must have less humour than levity — the latter seems so often to outrun the first. ' See John BulVs Other Island, where that impromptu Britannus theory about the Influence of Climate Upon, etc., is dragged out again in order to be propped up, exhumed in order to be properly animated. " See Preface to Man and Superman, p. xvii ; Preface to John BulVs Other Island, p. vii ; and other amendments in- numerable.