infamy that
wears a Liberal or Catholic mask. You, too, will speak of the
portraits of Vecelli and the Assumption of Allegri, and declare that
Democracy refuses to lackey-label these honest citizens as Titian and
Correggio. Even that colossal fragment of your ruined honesty that
still stupendously dismisses Beethoven as "some rubbish about a
piano" will give way to remarks about "a graceful second subject in
the relative minor." Nothing can save you now except a rebirth as a
dramatist. I have done my turn; and I now call on you to take yours
and do a man's work.

It is my solemn belief that it was my Quintessence of Ibsenism that
rescued you and all your ungrateful generation from Materialism and
Rationalism.* You were all tired young atheists turning to Kipling
and Ruskinian Anglicanism whilst I, with the angel's wings beating in
my ears from Beethoven's 9th symphony (oh blasphemous Walker in
deafness), gave you in 1880 and 1881 two novels in which you had your
Rationalist-secularist hero immediately followed by my Beethovenian
hero. True, nobody read them; but was that my fault? They are read
now, it seems, mostly in pirated reprints, in spite of their
appalling puerility and classical perfection of style (you are right
as to my being a born pedant, like all great artists); and are at
least useful as documentary evidence that I was no more a materialist
when I wrote _Love Among the Artists_ at 24 than when I wrote
_Candida_ at 39.

[* Cecil avowed this as far as he was concerned. G.B.S.]

My appearances on the platform of the Hall of Science were three
in number. Once for a few minutes in a discussion, in opposition to
Bradlaugh, who was defending property against Socialism. Bradlaugh
died after that, though I do not claim to have killed him. The
Socialist League challenged him to debate with me at St. James's
Hall; but we could not or would not agree as to the proposition to be
debated, he insisting on my being bound by all the publications of
the Democratic Federation (to which I did not belong) and I refusing
to be bound by anything on earth or in heaven except the proposition
that Socialism would benefit the English people. And so the debate
never came off.

Now in those days they were throwing Bradlaugh out of the House of
Commons with bodily violence; and all one could do was to call
oneself an ath