Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/34

8 8 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW like motley, and turning his staff and scrip, sublimely sacrilegious, into a fool's bladder and wand. It simply will not do. History won't have it. Mr. Chesterton, to be sure, has spoken, with much pathos, of Mr. Shaw's " narrow Puritan home " ; Mr. Huneker, with pride, has enlarged on his " humble peasant birth " ; and to listen to these phrases and then turn to any of the portraits and caricatures, from Max's to Coburn's, from Rodin's to Elliott & Fry's — which have made his face more familiar to the average English reader than that of any personage alive — is really to feel that one discerns the harsh features of the fanatic, that one can recognize in the fierce eyebrows, the aggressive beard, and the scowl, the face of a merci- less fanatic, austere as the stony soil from which he sprang, ablaze with the bitter passion of the protes- tant. Sheer hallucination, I assure you ! We are being hoaxed by the beard. It conceals a soft and charming chin. And Chesterton and Huneker are a pair of sentimental humbugs. For absolutely the first and most fundamental thing about Bernard Shaw biographically is — that he was the son of Lucrezia Borgia ! Of Lucrezia Borgia and of the Margaret of Faust, and of the Donna Anna of Don Giovanni. For Shaw's mother was a young and beautiful Irish opera-singer (she was only twenty years her son's senior), who carried on a *' blameless 7n4nage cl trois" with a famous musical genius on the one hand and the feckless second cousin of a baronet (Bernard Shaw's father) on the other; and Lucrezia (Donizetti's), Donna Anna, and Margaret were her three favourite parts. It is astonishing how adroitly these romantic facts have been mingled in all the current accounts of his life. " His family was a middle-class one," says one well-known critic, " with all the prejudices and habits of that class." " L'^crivain a peut-etre ^voqu6