Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/66

ness about them than the majority of plays turned out by the class of brains the stage deserves; but anything bigger, anything adequate to his own definition, he had already forfeited the faculty to produce. He was trebly disqualified—and the first of these three handicaps stares out at us so brazenly from the record of his life that the wonder is it never warned him off; so plain is it indeed that it has visibly stamped itself into the framework of his house, making an ominous writing on the walls of his home. "They say. What say they? Let them say." These are the words (his biographer tells us) that Mr. Shaw has had carved above the fire-place in his study. They are sufficiently significant. Admirable enough as the motto of a callow rebel, the old contemptuous Border battle-cry amounts to a surrender of his sword when heard on the lips of a dramatist. For, being interpreted, it really means that "I, the underseated, owner of this hygienic hearth, boast a deliberate lack of that imaginative sympathy which is the chief credential of the interpreter of character." And by sympathy, in this sense, one does not mean a slobbering pity; for pity can be as partial as contempt. By imaginative sympathy one simply means the jolly power of watching, with a chuckling absorption and delight, the doings of every sort and size of people; and of this happy gift, if ever he had it, Shaw by now had been wholly dispossessed. Sympathy is something hardly to be discerned in a man who has deliberately made disdain a working principle; who has learned to study human nature in the spirit of an opponent; and whose idea of "a generous passion" has become a "passion of hatred" for all the "accursed middle-class institutions that have starved, thwarted, misled and corrupted us from our cradles." Tout comprendre, cest tout pardonner: you cannot cut your enemy and know him too. That is a sort of vivisection that is fruitless. And Shaw