Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/37

11 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW 11 the educated Englishman did not know, and what he knew I either didn't know or didn't believe." He came up to London, in short, as young poets always have come ; with a knowledge of life, of human nature, including their own, limited to the information supplied by opera libretti and the hydrogenous prose of De Quincey and Shelley; agonized by their own awkwardness, shamed by their own innocence, des- perately troubled by their unpreparedness for destiny, but beautifully upheld through it all by the dim, golden conviction that a Destiny of some distinction does await them, and that London, the wise alchemist, will know the very drop to add to send their dreams showering down in a shining precipitate of definite tasks and high resolutions. In fact, just exactly the usual glorious mixture of prig, blushing schoolgirl, and god. And the year (this is very important indeed) the year was 1876. Ill Now let the game softly begin. London, deft, crimp, has one regulation ruse which she tries on all such shy new-comers : she feigns lethargy, indifference, a bored kind of nonchalance, a composure that looks exactly like incapacity — and so, with one stroke, restores the novice's self-confidence and sets his indignation briskly sparking. Apathy, a wasteful apathy — that is invari- ably the personal quality the place seems to present to the aspirant : a smooth, maddening indifference, not to his own entrance merely (that indeed might have proved his superiority — for that he was humbly pre- pared), but to her own powers and opportunities, her duties and beauties — to the general dazzling adven- turousness and terrific irrevocableness and tormenting possibilities of Life. Actually, to be sure, this languor is merely a mask ; it is the disguise adopted by good