Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/55

THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW 29 begun by old Cervantes. Now there was some of the sap of human truth in this at least — it did touch actual earth : it is a diagnosis, indeed, that we can find an instant use for, here and now, for doesn't it form the perfect definition of the source of all Shaw's own disasters ? It is because he sentimentally sees himself as a satirist and harsh realist, instead of harshly realizing he is actually a romantic, that he has gone so hopelessly astray ; it is because he sees himself as a Cervantes when he is really a Don Quixote (down even to his personal appearance, by the way : G.B.S. and G.K.C. — the Knight and Sancho, irresistibly ; and down even to the famous misadven- ture with the dolls — for Shaw's chief mistake about the theatre, as we will see, is his solemn attribution to the marionettes he found there of powers they never have possessed) that he has suffered the Don's own doom. But the vitality in this principle, ironi- cally enough, only served to sustain him while he unconsciously provided a perfect demonstration of its fatal action ; and if a sudden, shivering sense of its personal aptness did ever assail his subconsciousness, it simply hurried him on with the task of planting, on the other side, as a stout protection against any lurking fatuousness, the famous pair of reciprocating twin hypotheses — the hypotheses of the Artist-Philo- sopher and the Superman. The urgent necessity for these will be recognized. The theory of the Superman was essentially nothing but a defence of platform-dogmatism ; to bully and brow-beat in the name of Egalit4, Fraternity was decently impossible without some such extension of the synthesis ; and to the aid of the announcement that *' no one having any practical experience of Proletarian Democracy has any belief in its capacity for solving great political problems or even for doing ordinary parochial work intelligently," there came