Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/28

2 out of his true place—crammed when still young and tender into an inappropriate mould, and held there while circumstances, with a diabolical deftness, screwed the die down on his features ineffaceably; and his very air of arrogance, which makes this description sound absurd, was but one of the imprints received in that hour. That the man whose deepest desire is to heal and help humanity should have become a kind of byword for mockery; that his altruism should seem egotism, his earnestness insolence, his mysticism materialism, his refusal to have living creatures slaughtered for his food a symptom, not of warm-heartedness, but of cold-bloodedness; that the man whose only quarrel with Christianity is its acquired element of cruelty, and who has preached and practised constantly an absolutely saintly code of private conduct and the strictest obedience to the Church's hardest rules, should yet be regarded as a dangerous enemy of morals and reproved (as he was by The Times itself in a leader on Androcles and the Lion) for ribaldry and irreverence in regard to sacred things: all these and their hundred kindred contradictions are explained when we watch his career from the beginning and perceive the frightful dexterity with which fate has always employed his best qualities to drive him along a road that must distort them. We shall find the essential Shaw to be eager, idealistic, impulsive, romantic. We shall see him flung, at exactly the most impressionable hour of his life, into the peculiarly priggish and self-assertive little world of the intellectual London of the eighties. We shall see how his native eagerness and inexperience idealized that environment; and how his wit and his vividness and his love of picturesqueness urged and enabled him to reproduce all its elements in a single concentrated pose; and how the accent he then adopted, the