Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/67

41 THE INNOCENCE OP BERNARD SHAW 41 really admitted his own incapacity for play-writing when he affirmed that the average audience was a set of soapy stupids, " part of them nine-tenths chapel- goers by temperament, and the remainder ten-tenths blackguards." For the stage at its best is only a mirror held up before the face of the watching house. The big play is composed of little players ; it must com- prehend them even when they don't comprehend it. That, then, is the first of Mr. Shaw's three acquired deficiencies ; his socialism has made him unsociable : his confirmed habit of wiping somebody out, which he formed among the Fabians because it was so effective there, becomes here a disastrous obliteration of his model ; he is like an archer (not William, though !) who has set up a target with care and then discovered it has used up all the wood meant for arrows. And now, on the top of it, driving it in further, comes acquired defect number two — one that limits still further his already narrowed range of subjects, and one that is all the more mischievous because it is masked by a quality that may have done much at the outset to convince him that drama was his line. All Shaw's early efforts as a writer were given, as we have seen, to the task of forming a medium of expression apt for physical utterance — a type of diction he could debate with and dictate with dogmatically, dealing it out from his hustings or stabbing it into his societies in successive sentences as pat and purposeful as neatly planted blows. Now, that meant good dialogue; and so, long before he had ever dreamt of turning dramatist, he had perfectly acquired the great trick which so many playwrights never do learn : the art of making all his words fit live lips and leap alertly off the tongue, as slick and natural as slang, fresh with the colours of actual intercourse. But whilst his platform-work thus taught him the acoustics of the stage and how to make his characters talk like human beings, it also confirmed