Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/40

14 14 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW tempt for the canaille ; he turned socialist because he was an aristocrat. But in the case of a youngling like Shaw, a tender emotionalist fed hitherto wholly on the sweet-stuff of opera and still viewing the world in terms of Shelley and Wagner, it simply amounted to ravishment. It meant thrusting all his soft faculties into a premature mould ; it meant emphasizing and petrifying and fixing for ever on his character just those quaint qualities of contemptuousness and ingenuous disdain which in the ordinary way would just have been softly erased by experience once their first task of setting him producing was performed. It means that instead of prompting him to some piece of self- vindication, some earnest proof of individual worth and power, his boyish bumptiousness began straight- way to boast in its own name and make an ambition of mere self-assertiveness. For of course he was helpless. Face to face with such a force, what could a poor romantic do? He yielded at a touch — fell like a shot sea-bird — was culled like a slender wayside flower. With the echoes of the hammer-song still hammering in his head, he saw him- self as a Sigurd among Alberics — and since everywhere about him the old obvious evils spawned and sprawled, all the generous decencies of youth joined with its egotisms to make him vow to have a drive at London- Fafnir. " My destiny is to educate London," he assured himself solemnly ; and set about the job without delay. He himself has described how the final vision descended and crystallized all his vague cravings. Perceive him flutteringly approach the fateful Webb. He has strayed into one of the meetings of the myriad societies of that day, a body calling itself (doubtless for some perfectly adequate reason) the Zeletical Society — and this is the stirring sight he beheld : — The speaker was a young man, about twenty-one, with a profile that suggested, on account of the nose and imperial, an improve-