Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/65

39 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW 39 vincingly that it enthusiastically endeared to him an attitude it was only intended to excuse, so now his heated declarations of the supreme importance of the drama burgeoned out into corollaries so credible that he had to believe in them himself. He became con- vinced that Drama was the thing best worth doing. It was therefore the work worthiest of his powers. He was already middle-aged — but no matter. In 1898 he stole away from his mere stall. Before the end of the year he was known to the world as the author of Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, II Nothing, then, could be clearer than that Mr. Shaw became a dramatist — not as a result of predilection — but simply because he was propelled into the part by circumstances. Once one realizes that, one also sees the huge unlikelihood of him turning out the born dramatist he claimed to be ; and, indeed, it could easily be shown that even his power "of conjuring up imaginary people in imaginary places and finding pre- texts for theatrical scenes between them" (on which he plumes himself in the Preface to Plays Pleasant) is much more the novelist's dramatic knack than the playwright's, that his mere sense of the physically dramatic, taking that alone, is far from being the true sense of the theatre. But these initial, native deficiencies wouldn't have mattered so much if it hadn't been for that other element ; the grim fact that the very circumstances which had made him dramatist had simultaneously robbed him of his best right to be one. Be one, that is to say, in his own high sense of it — a maker of works of art depicting the daily life of the world, phials filled with essence of actuality. A man of his wit and force couldn't, of course, fail to contrive stage-pieces with a good deal more pith and picturesque-