And that is
why the old masters play the deuce with our mere susceptibles. Your
Royal Academician thinks he can get the style of Giotto without
Giotto's beliefs, and correct his perspective into the bargain.
Your man of letters thinks he can get Bunyan's or Shakespear's
style without Bunyan's conviction or Shakespear's apprehension,
especially if he takes care not to split his infinitives. And so
with your Doctors of Music, who, with their collections of discords
duly prepared and resolved or retarded or anticipated in the manner
of the great composers, think they can learn the art of Palestrina
from Cherubim's treatise. All this academic art is far worse than
the trade in sham antique furniture; for the man who sells me an
oaken chest which he swears was made in the XIII century, though as
a matter of fact he made it himself only yesterday, at least does
not pretend that there are any modern ideas in it, whereas your
academic copier of fossils offers them to you as the latest
outpouring of the human spirit, and, worst of all, kidnaps young
people as pupils and persuades them that his limitations are rules,
his observances dexterities, his timidities good taste, and his
emptinesses purities. And when he declares that art should not be
didactic, all the people who have nothing to teach and all the
people who don't want to learn agree with him emphatically.
I pride myself on not being one of these
susceptible: If you study the electric light with which I supply
you in that Bumbledonian public capacity of mine over which you
make merry from time to time, you will find that your house
contains a great quantity of highly susceptible copper wire which
gorges itself with electricity and gives you no light whatever. But
here and there occurs a scrap of intensely insusceptible, intensely
resistant material; and that stubborn scrap grapples with the
current and will not let it through until it has made itself useful
to you as those two vital qualities of literature, light and heat.
Now if I am to be no mere copper wire amateur but a luminous
author, I must also be a most intensely refractory person, liable
to go out and to go wrong at inconvenient moments, and with
incendiary possibilities. These are the faults of my qualities; and
I assure you that I sometimes dislike myself so much that when some
irritable reviewer chances at that moment to pitch into me with
zest, I feel unspeakably relieved and obliged. But I never dream of
reforming, knowing that I must take myself as I am and get what
work I can out of myself. All this you will understand; for there
is community of material between us: we are both critics of life as
well as of art; and you have perhaps said to yourself when I have
passed your windows, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." An
awful and chastening reflection, which shall be the closing cadence
of this immoderately long letter from yours faithfully,
G. BERNARD SHAW.
WOKING, 1903
ACT I
Roebuck Ramsden
is in his study, opening the morning letters. The study, handsomely
and solidly furnished, proclaims the man of means. Not a speck of
dust is visible: it is clear that there are at least two housemaids
and a parlormaid downstairs, and a housekeeper upstairs who does
not let them spare elbow-grease. Even the top of Roebuck's head is
polished: on a sunshiny day he could heliograph his orders to
distant camps by merely nodding. In no other respect, however, does
he suggest the military man. It is in active civil life that men
get his broad air of importance, his dignified expectation of
deference, his determinate mouth disarmed and refined since the
hour of his success by the withdrawal of opposition and the
concession of comfort and precedence and power. He is more than a
highly respectable man: he is marked out as a president of highly
respectable men, a chairman among directors, an alderman among
councillors, a mayor among aldermen. Four tufts of iron-grey hair,
which will soon be as white as isinglass, and are in other respects
not at all unlike it, grow in two symmetrical pairs above his ears
and at the angles of his spreading jaws. He wears a black frock
coat, a white waistcoat (it is bright spring weather), and
trousers, neither black nor perceptibly blue, of one of those
indefinitely mixed hues which the modern clothier has produced to
harmonize with the religions of respectable men. He has not been
out of doors yet to-day; so he still wears his slippers, his boots
being ready for him on the hearthrug. Surmising that he has no
valet, and seeing that he has no secretary with a shorthand
notebook and a typewriter, one meditates on how little our great
burgess domesticity has been disturbed by new fashions and methods,
or by the enterprise of the railway and hotel companies which sell
you a Saturday to Monday of life at Folkestone as a real gentleman
for two guineas, first class fares both ways included.
How old is Roebuck? The question is important on the
threshold of a drama of ideas; for under such circumstances
everything depends on whether his adolescence belonged to the
sixties or to the eighties. He was born, as a matter of fact, in
1839, and was a Unitarian and Free Trader from his boyhood, and an
Evolutionist from the publication of the Origin of Species.
Consequently he has always classed himself as an advanced thinker
and fearlessly outspoken reformer.
Sitting at his writing table, he has on his right
the windows giving on Portland Place. Through these, as through a
proscenium, the curious spectator may contemplate his profile as
well as the blinds will permit. On his left is the inner wall, with
a stately bookcase, and the door not quite in the middle, but
somewhat further from him. Against the wall opposite him are two
busts on pillars: one, to his left, of John Bright; the other, to
his right, of Mr Herbert Spencer. Between them hang an engraved
portrait of Richard Cobden; enlarged photographs of Martineau,
Huxley, and George Eliot; autotypes of allegories by Mr G.F. Watts
(for Roebuck believed in the fine arts with all the earnestness of
a man who does not understand them), and an impression of Dupont's
engraving of Delaroche's Beaux Artes hemicycle, representing the
great men of all ages. On the wall behind him, above the
mantelshelf, is a family portrait of impenetrable obscurity.
A chair stands near the writing table for the
convenience of business visitors. Two other chairs are against the
wall between the busts.
A parlormaid enters with a visitor's card. Roebuck
takes it, and nods, pleased. Evidently a welcome caller.
RAMSDEN.
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