Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/70

44 character that does not wait for circumstances to shape it is of less worth in the race that must he run Well, Shaw set too soon. The pressure of those early days of gleeful mutiny, the need for being dogmatic, precipitated his young ideas in a premature philosophy, to which ever since he has clung; and at the same time the material out of which he had to get his ideas, the personal experiences he turned into opinions, were quite unfairly lopsided, incomplete, artificial. The idiosyncrasy of his troupe he might to some extent have counterbalanced by picking their points of view with care and then arranging these so that they partly reproduced the pattern and poise of reality; but such ingenuity availed nothing whatever against the bias of his own point of view. He might (and he did) arrange his rapiers like spokes to look like a mimic Wheel of Life ; but to no purpose, for the hub was out of truth. And it was out of truth because, quite literally, what he had taken as his centre was really eccentric, and what he had accepted in his innocence as a genuine axle was actually only a crank.

For remember, once more, where he was when he formed his views: remember the New Woman and The Woman Who Did, and the Ibsen Society and rational dress, and the general dank, indoor, stuffy, insincere atmosphere of devotees and defiance in which he formed his first impressions and made one. It was suburban in the worst sense—under the Town, shut in and overshadowed by its mass. "I am a typical Irishman," he once said, "my family came from Yorkshire." Actually, he is a typical Cockney: he came from the country before he had learned that Middlesex wasn't the middle; and what he ought to have said was: "I am a true Metropolitan: my views are so very provincial." Shut up in one pigeon-hole, he felt he was surveying the whole room; he took it for granted that the highly specialized existence he shared was a fair