40 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW

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 ti'ebly disqualified — and the first of these three handi- caps stares out at us so brazenly from the record of his life that the wonder is it never warned him ofp; 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 inter- preter 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 coniprendre, cest tout pardonner : you cannot cut your enemy and know him too. That is a sort of vivisection that is fruitless. And Shaw