Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/64

38 38 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW selves, and played the patt with an overpowering completeness. He now idolized the theatre in the same impulsive way, and was once more taken in by his own eloquence. For Shaw's besetting weakness is a certain stubborn pride of soul which cannot permit him to admit, even in a whisper to himself, that the cause he is engaged in is not crucial ; and he now reacted exactly as such a character could be counted on to react, with results distinctly startling to the stage. For no sooner had Mr. Harris seen him settled in his stall than he sprang up declaring it a choir-stall in a cathedral. " The theatre," said he, " is a place where two or three are gathered together, with an apostolic succession as serious and as continuously inspired as that younger institution, the apostolic succession of the Christian Church." " The theatre," he said, '* is as important as the Church was in the Middle Ages, and much more important than the Church in London now." It is "a factory of thought, a prompter of conscience, an elucidator of conduct, an armoury against despair and dullness, and a temple of the Ascent of Man." Its plays were " identical with a church service as a combination of artistic ritual, pro- fession of faith and sermon " ; and its players, to their own immense embarrassment, were hailed as " hiero- phants of a cult as eternal and sacred as any professed religion in the world." Our Don Quixote, dear romantic, was discomfiting the marionettes by taking them with unintended seriousness. The completion of the operation will be plain. Mr. Shaw may never persuade us that the theatre exerts a power equal to that which established Inquisitions, and curdled Europe into Crusades, and shot the great frozen fountains of Chartres and Rouen into mid-sky ; but he quickly persuaded himself. Just as his first infatuation made his pride produce a theory which put the case for contentiousness so confoundedly con-