Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/42

16 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW this ghastly practice of mine I invariably forget three — the best three." Flaubert and Pater undergoing flagellation in the hope of being granted purity of prose underwent far less torment than did this equally fine artist to learn the tricks of Cockney repartee : I attended the Hampstead Historic Club once a fortnight, and spent a night in the alternative weeks at a private circle of Economists. I made all my acquaintances think me madder than usual by the pertinacity with which I attended debating societies and haunted all sorts of hole-and-corner debates and public meetings and made speeches at them. I was President of the Local Government Board at **an amateur Parliament" — and he even turned the very novels that might have proved his salvation (by giving his creative energy a path of escape) into mimic debating societies too — not only rising up in the name of each character in turn (Connolly, Lydia Carew, Cashel, Trefusis) to deliver a short address on some selected topic, but actually turning as many of the characters as possible into wrorking models, draft sketches, of that omniscient, imperturbable Sigurd-Shelley- Wagner- Webb which he had resolved Bernard Shaw must become. " I am thoroughly well-satisfied with myself," says Elinor McQuinch in The Irrational Knot. "At last I have come out of a scene without having forgotten the right thing to say." Connolly, in the same book, is "con- centrated and calm, making no tentative movements of any kind (even tying a white tie did not puzzle him into fumbling), but acting with a certainty of air, and consequent economy of force, dreadful to the irreso- lute." These, it may be said, are simply self-reflections, involuntary mimings of the artist in his picture. Looking back at Connolly now, when Shaw has grown so like him, it is natural to regard him as an uncon- scious copy of his maker. But it is Shaw who is the consequence, Connolly the cause. These novels of