Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/36

10 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW Art Gallery — rooms which he admits he haunted hungrily, weeks at a time, all through his romantic adolescence, and you have a faithful impression of the way this young man began to "pratiquer" his " as- c^tisme inn^." When Oscar Wilde's mother, in Merrion Square, was posing languishingly in her drawing-room as Speranza, Mrs. Shaw, in a Dublin theatre, a few streets away, was flinging herself passionately into the part of Azucena ; and before the son of the latter was out of his teens he had drained dizzier delight from the coloured lines of the world's greatest painters, and had absorbed far more heady music, than the son of the former did all the days of his life. Nor is the " narrow puritanism " of the picture very markedly increased if we complete it by putting in the figure of Shaw's father — an amiable weak tippler and rather lovable snob, helplessly haughty about his kinsman the baronet ; or if we extend it to include the figure of that favourite uncle who (as Mr. Shaw somewhere mentions) used to go about declaring that the revival of Lazarus was a pre-arranged job, done on the basis of a bribe. No, no ! London, a little later, may have partly cemented G.B.S., made a sterner and a sourer, and in some ways a stricter man of him ; but, when he reached it, in his twenties, he was an out-and-out romantic — as little like a preacher as Bunyan before Bedford Gaol or St. Francis in the gallant days of his youth. Soaked in Gounod and Mendelssohn, dream- ing of Mozart and Michelangelo, hugging a vague idea of becoming " a wicked baritone in opera," he was still (as he has owned) " chronically ashamed and even miserable," simply because " I felt I couldn't do anything." " What was wrong with me was the want of self-respect, the diffidence, the cowardice of the ignoramus and the duffer." "My destiny was to educate London, but what I knew was exactly what