Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/56

30 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW that fine suggestion of the Life-force working up and up, through speechless monsters, and stupid, stuttering minor men, seeking for a brain that could express it, till at length, through the intellect of the Artist- Philosopher (another name for Sigurd-Ruskin-De- Reszke) it achieved articulation, became conscious of its own desires, and delivered its commands and warnings brusquely to the unemerged remainder of its carcase : — The mysterious thing we call life organizes itself into all living shapes, bird, beast, beetle, and fish, rising to the human marvel in cunning dwarfs and in laborious muscular giants, capable, these last, of enduring toil, willing to buy love and life, not with suicidal curses and renunciations, but with patient manual drudgery in the service of higher powers. And these higher powers are called into existence by the same self-organization of life still more wonderfully into rare persons who may by com parison be called gods, creatures capable of thought, whose aims extend far beyond the satisfaction of their bodily appetites and personal affections, since they perceive it is only by the establish- ment of a social order founded on the common bonds of moral faith that the world can rise from mere savagery." " Men of genius are the men selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an intellectual con- sciousness of her own instinctive purpose." " The great man incarnates the philosophic consciousness of life. *' All his treatises and poems and scriptures are the struggle of Life to become divinely conscious of itself instead of stumbling blindly hither and thither in the line of least resistance." This Life-force says : — I have done a thousand wonderful things unconsciously by merely willing to live and following the line of least resistance : now I want to know myself and my destination and choose my path ; so I have made a special brain, a philosopher's brain, to The Perfect Wagneritey p. 11.