Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/41

15 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW 15 ment on Napoleon the Third. He had a fine forehead, a long head, eyes that were built on top of two highly developed organs of speech (according to the phrenologists) and remarkably thick, strong, dark hair. He knew all about the subject of the debate ; knew more than the lecturer ; had read everything that had ever been written on the subject ; and remembered all the facts that bore on it. He used notes, read them, ticked them off one by one, threw them away, and finished with a coolness and clearness that to me, in my trembling state, seemed miraculous. This young man was the ablest man in England — Sidney Webb. And he was exactly Shaw's own age. The butterfly- was caught. He too would be a dictator, an authority, a liberator, a dogmatic and precocious oracle. This was grand opera and literature and a noble knight- liness combined — De Reszke, Ruskin, and Sigurd in one. He went at once into training. Nervous — unready — hypersensitive — naive — with subtlety of apprehension and a consuming fondness for fineness the very first characteristics of all his faculties — he was preposterously unfitted for the part ; but (and this is specially interesting) the very susceptibility that ought to have saved him made him as wax to the suggestion — the very imagination which he ought to have carried far away from platforms to some place where it could work undisturbed now flushed the dreary planks with limelight — disguised and garlanded the prospect — deluded him into seeing the cheap and prosy game of demagoguing as the very embodiment of romance. "I vowed I would join Webb's society, go every week, speak every week, and become a speaker or perish in the attempt. And I carried out this resolution. I suffered agonies no one suspected. During the speech of the debate I resolved to follow my heart used to beat as painfully as a recruit's going under fire for the first time. I could not use my notes ; when I looked at the paper in my hand I could not collect myself enough to decipher a word. And of the four or five wretched points which were my pretext for