Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/49

THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW 23 virtuosity ; with of course a fundamental justness in its paradox. For it was really Shaw's joyous sense of picturesqueness that made him pick this sour pose of acid reasonableness and sustain it with such zest ; it was a vivid, romantic imagination that enabled him to perfect it, living into the part with all his power ; and so it was therefore profoundly logical that the result should be a romantic reputation — a name for remorseless common sense that had the goblin quality of legend, prevailing on men and artists to regard his gift of lightning logic with an uneasy twilight reverence and awe. Then why bewail its acquisition? In face of all these merits, why pity the manufacturer of this piti- less prose and propound this dark theory about his being the dupe of a decoy? There are reasons in plenty. Hitherto we have spoken of this instrument of expression as though it were something solid and separable — as a sword, which he forged ; as a flute, which he played on ; a detachable piece of his equip- ment. That is one of the weaknesses of rhetoric. It was actually his own mind that he put on the anvil and altered ; it was his own larynx that he fitted with patent stops. The sword cut both ways, carving the hand that controlled it; the flute was a magic flute that filled the mind of the player with all the tunes that flowed through it, compelling his thoughts to move in step with its piping. The parallel-bars of his prose have seemed to us thus far a firm apparatus on which he could perform acrobatically. We have now to face the fact that they were the bars of a cage, and that Shaw had shut himself and his capers inside it. And by this self-restriction something much more