Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/45

THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW 19 rouse restiveness : for mutinous democrats and fierce vegetarian-anarchists wanted utterances that hit and looked like lumps of steel. And the problem, briefly, was therefore how to appear to be using this blunt life-preserver sort of language without really relin- quishing the air of the subtler devices which had hitherto been looked on as the sole prerogative of rhetoric. Well, Shaw found a way. His hearers wanted straight talk : so he cast periods like horizontal bars. But they were bars that worked like piston-rods : all built for thrust and drive, they displayed the splendid beauty of clean speed ; and so, at the very moment when they seemed to be contemptuously discarding all merely emotional adjuncts, they were actually dizzying the audience with that supremely unusual excitement, the intoxicating ecstasy of pace. Shaw stripped all his sentences of those trailing wreaths and ropes of metaphor which Ruskin, his predecessor in these paths of sensual socialism, had elaborately wound round his message — and then he multiplied still further the effect of impetuousness thus obtained by devoting all the energy that might have gone to making gar- lands to the task of fitting clause into clause with such ingenious sockets that never a joint could be seen, and a long sentence really made up of many added items lay when finished as level as a spear, streaking past as though launched with one lunge. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch this process being perfected : first of all the studious assemblage of the parts, then the gradual speeding-up of the machine. Mr. Reginald Harrington Lind, at the outset of his career, had no object in life save that of getting through it as easily as possible ; and this he understood so little how to achieve that he suffered himself to be married to a Lancashire cotton-spinner'a heiress. She bore him three children, and then eloped with a