Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/48

22 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW the quality which makes the Englishman dangerous to him ; and the Englishman instinctively flatters the faults that make the Irishman harmless and amusing to him. AVhat is wrong with the prosaic Englishman is what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries : stupidity. The vitality which places nourishment and children first, heaven and hell a somewhat remote second, and the health of society as an organic whole nowhere, may muddle successfully through the comparatively tribal stages of gregariousness ; but in nineteenth-century nations and twentieth- century empires the determination of every man to be rich at all costs and of every woman to be married at all costs must without a highly scientific social organization produce a ruinous develop- ment of poverty, celibacy, prostitution, infant mortality, adult degeneracy, and everything that wise men most dread. In short, there is no future for men, however brimming with crude vitality, who are neither intelligent nor politically educated enough to be Socialists. So do not misunderstand me in the other direction either : if I appreciate the vital qualities of the bee, I do not guarantee the Englishman against being, like the bee (or the Canaanite), smoked out and unloaded of his honey by beings inferior to himself in simple acquisitiveness, combativeness, and fecundity, but superior to him in imagination and cunning. Lightened of all adjectives, nimble with nouns, turning categories into keyboards, he is wont to ripple us a run and, avoiding vowels in order to get the snap of consonants, it rattles past at a rate that makes the best of Swift seem slow, and pelts the brain with stinging drops like driving hail. It is deliberately cold and colourless, but it produces a kind of glow, an unusual warmth that almost melts the icy argument, almost turns it into something rich and wild. For rapidity, poignancy, unanimity, prompt- ness, an exquisite timing and adjustment of its parts, there is no prose to be compared with it in English. And just as an athlete is more beautiful than an aesthete, so it grows more sensuous the more austere it becomes, positively practising a bodily seductiveness by seeming wholly to rely on an appeal to cold-blooded intelligence. It was very interesting, very curious