Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/68

42 42 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW him in a foible which reacted on those characters to make them human beings of one particular kind. For the essence of his own speeches had been their slitting, pelting salience : it had been his work to resolve the old vague rumblings of oratory into a rattle of definite drops — and nothing, he found, sped a period so well as a core of cute meaning, self-contained. With the result that a crisp statement soon became essential to his sentences : he could no more begin to write one with- out an assertion to maintain it than a cabby could go a drive without a fare. But though this confirmed inability to ask a question, or to suggest, or appeal, or submit, or discriminate, or qualify, or use art as a means of evocation, summoning a wisdom deeper than the artist knew he controlled — although this limitation was an immense asset on a platform, it obviously became a fatal barrier to com- pleteness when the habitual asserter set to work to write a play. For it meant that the stage-door of his theatre had to be shut in the faces of a throng of very necessary characters ; all the dim folk and foggy folk, the puzzled and perturbed, the groping, hoping, helpless, humble, unassertive humans, who act by instinct in- stead of by reason and whose deeds speak so much more clearly than their words — all these he was compelled to turn away. He couldn't employ them, for he couldn't equip them with a part. His sympathies, we have seen, were already limited — but even if he were filled with a positive affection for such characters he couldn't take them on — no, not even to take them off; for although he understood them they did not understand themselves ; and for people who don't know their own minds and can't communicate the knowledge clearly, Shaw has no form of speech that will do. He can write none but definite dialogue ; and definite dialogue entails definite minds ; and the result is that all the members of his cast seem members of