Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/54

28 28 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW spises so much as an attempt to please it. Torment is its natural element : it is only the saint who has any capacity for happiness." He actually persuaded himself that it is necessary to hurt in order to heal ; that the only way to en- courage men is to discourage them, and that it is necessary to be thoroughly disagreeable in order to persuade them to agree. Simply to save himself from the agony of admitting to himself that his early attitude and insolences had been largely just juvenile egregiousness, he determined to agonize the rest of the world. He began a campaign of universal irritation, repeating feverishly, like a missionary muttering godless prayers, that taunts and intoler- ance were logically much the best of all methods of preaching and spreading the gospel of The Brother- hood of Man. And of course it couldn't end with that absurdity. The disguise had to get deeper, his voice had to rise louder in order to deafen his own ears. Other argu- ments had to radiate, flung out to balance and support the first : once his creative energy got working in this accidental twig it shot out branches till it burst into a self-supporting tree, seeking a satisfying sym- metry. The first corollary that ran out, to act as stay and flying buttress, and subsequently to become a parent stem of its own (so that it now sometimes seems the central pillar of them all, the very tent- pole of his patent storm-proof creed), was the formula that all men's miseries are the result of the dis- crepancy between the sentimental version of life fed into most of us and life as it actually is, and that to hack away these sweetnesses and cauterize the wounds, to kill what he (wrongly) called " the romantic con- vention" with the cruellest acid and steel he could find, was therefore hero's work, hygienic work, a harsh but holy warfare, a completion of the surgery