THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW 9 des souvenirs d'enfance," writes M. Charles Cestre, "quand il a d^crit, dans le Disciple au Diahle, les affranchements et les indignations dune famille puri- taine dont le chef, le bonhomme Dudgeon, a con- serve quelques faiblesses humaines au milieu de I'austerite aigre et hargneuse des siens," and goes on to speak impressively of the youth practising "sans effort une sorte d'ascetisme inne." " Austerite aigre et hargneuse " be hanged ! The lad's life was a volup- tuous revel. He dreamed and dawdled at school, where he was only a desultory day-boy, and where, as he has owned himself, he learned nothing whatever — not even (more's the pity) fives or footer ; and at home, the less distracted, he simply soaked himself lusciously in the licensed orgies and ecstasies of music. Melody, grand opera melody, not only, for him, took the place of the prose of real life, he even dissolved all his books in it, making it a vehicle for absorbing Scott and Victor Hugo and Poe, in an absolutely sensuous physical form. *' In music," he once wrote (in an article we ought to have reprinted — an early article describing these indulgences) : — In music you will find the body of and reality of that feeling which the mere novelist could only describe to you ; there will come home to your senses something in which you can actually experience the candour and gallant impulse of the hero, the grace and trouble of the heroine, and the extracted emotional quintessence of their love. I gained penetrating experiences of Victor Hugo and Schiller from Donizetti, Verdi, and Beethoven, of the Bible from Handel, of Goethe from Schumann, of Beaumarchais and Molifere from Mozart, and of M^rimtie from Bizet, besides finding in Berlioz an unconscious interpreter of Edgar Allan Poe. When I was in the schoolboy adventure vein, I could range from Vincent Wallace to Meyerbeer ; I could become quite maudlin over Mendelssohn and Gounod. . . . Enrich these orgies still further with emotions insa- tiably sought for in the Italian rooms of the Dublin
