“One evening I was playing on the street with a schoolfellow of mine, when my father came home. He questioned me about this boy, who was the son of a prosperous ironmonger. The feelings of my father, who was not prosperous and who sold flour by the sack, when he learned that his son had played on the public street with the son of a man who sold nails by the pennyworth in a shop are not to be described. He impressed on me that my honour, my self-respect, my human dignity, all stood upon my determination not to associate with persons engaged in retail trade. Probably this was the worst crime my father ever committed. And yet I do not see what else he could have taught me, short of genuine republicanism, which is the only possible school of good manners.
“Imagine being taught to despise a workman, and to respect a gentleman, in a country where every rag of excuse for gentility is stripped off by poverty! Imagine being taught that there is one God—a Protestant and a perfect gentleman—keeping Heaven select for the gentry; and an idolatrous impostor called the Pope, smoothing the hell-ward way for the mass of the people, only admissible into the kitchens of most of the aforesaid gentry as 'thorough servants' (general servants) at eight pounds a year! Imagine the pretensions of the English peerage on the incomes of the English lower middle-class. I remember Stopford Brooke one day telling me that he discerned in my books an intense and contemptuous hatred for society. No wonder! though, like him, I strongly demur to the usurpation of the word 'society' by an unsocial system of setting class against class and creed against creed.”[3]
As to education, in the ordinary sense, the lad had none: he never learned anything at school. He found no incentive to study under the tutelage of people who put Cæsar and Horace into the hands of small boys and expected the result to be an elegant taste and knowledge of the world. His first teacher was his uncle, the Rev. William George Carroll, Vicar of St. Bride's, Dublin—reputed the first Protestant clergyman in Ireland to declare for Home Rule. We have one brief but comprehensive glimpse of his school life at this period of immaturity: “The word education brought to my mind four successive schools where my parents got me out of the way for half a day. In these crèches—for that is exactly what they were—I learned nothing. How I could have been such a sheep as to go to them, when I could just as easily have flatly refused, puzzles and exasperates me to this day. They did me a great deal of harm, and no good whatever. However, my parents thought I ought to go, being too young to have any confidence in my own instincts. So I went. And if you can in any public way convey to these idiotic institutions my hearty curse, you will relieve my feelings infinitely.... As a schoolboy I was incorrigibly idle and worthless. And I am proud of the fact.” In the preface to John Bull's Other Island, Shaw has referred in particular to the Wesleyan Connexional School, now Wesley College, Dublin. Here the Wesleyan catechism was taught without protest to pupils, the majority of whom were Church (Protestant Irish) boys! So long as their sons were taught genuine Protestantism, the parents didn't bother about the particular brand. The school's most famous alumni are Sir Robert Hart and Bernard Shaw. In the school roll-book Shaw is entered for the first time as attending on April 13th, 1867. Unfortunately, only a bare record of his class marks is given. “He seems to have been generally near or at the bottom of his classes,” said the principal, the Rev. William Crawford, in a letter to me of date August 6th, 1909; “but, perhaps typically of the man, he jumped up suddenly to second place once in his first quarter, and does not seem to have aspired again. He was entered in the 'First Latin Class,' I suppose the most junior division on the classical side.” Shaw sat in class between a classic and a mathematician, both in after years distinguished scholars. Each did his appropriate share of young Shaw's work. In return Shaw would narrate for their delectation, according to the account of one of the twain, numerous stories from the Iliad and Odyssey, in his own peculiar and inimitable vein. Shaw was only in his tenth year when he entered the Wesleyan Connexional School; and in that year Dr. H. R. Parker, of Trinity College, Dublin, was head master and Rev. T. A. McKee was governor. Apparently, no picture of the old school now exists; the new building stands near, but not on, the site of the old school.[4]
It might be imagined, from the evidence of Shaw's own confessions just detailed, that it was impossible for a boy who “took refuge in idleness” at school to acquire any sort of an education; but such a supposition is very wide of the mark. The discipline he received at home, the discipline of laissez faire et laissez aller, which might have spoiled the average boy, had just the opposite effect upon this strangely inquisitive, alarmingly self-assertive child. If he lost somewhat in youthful gentleness and tenderness, he gained greatly in manly determination and independence. If he was never treated as a child, at least he was let do what he liked. Thus the habit of freedom, which, as he once assured me, most Englishmen and Englishwomen of his class never acquire, came to him naturally.
One might say of Shaw's mother that she was the antithesis of Candida on the domestic plane. In many respects she was a forerunner of the “new woman” of our own day—independent, self-reliant, indifferent to public opinion. She was, in her son's phrase, “constitutionally unfitted for the sentiment of wifehood and motherhood”; her genuine energy and talents were bestowed almost undividedly upon music. Not long after her marriage to Mr. Shaw, she became the right hand of an energetic genius, who had formed a musical society and an orchestra in Dublin. These organizations were composed wholly of amateurs—and unavoidably so—in view of the state of musical activity in Dublin at the time. By all the local professors of music this energetic genius and man of successful ambitions, George John Vandaleur Lee, was held in the greatest contempt, even hatred, because he had repudiated their traditions, and thereby actually trained himself to become an effective teacher of singing. Through actual dissection, as well as by practical singing, he studied the anatomy of the throat until he was able, by watching and hearing a singer, to state with certainty the exact nature of the physical processes going on. From Badeali, an Italian opera singer, who preserved a splendid voice to a great age, he learned the secret of voice preservation. This method he taught to Mrs. Shaw so successfully that when she gave up singing, late in life, it was not because her voice failed her, but because her age made singing ridiculous.[5]
Lee's twofold influence upon the young Shaw—indirectly through Mrs. Shaw's musical activities, and directly through the inspiration of his personal character, one of phenomenal competence and unswerving determination—is very markedly visible in the Shaw of after years, the brilliant musical critic and the doggedly persistent seeker after worthy success and merited fame. Mrs. Shaw studied singing under Lee, and thorough bass under Logier. She assisted Lee in all his various and varied enterprises, copying orchestral parts and scoring songs for him. She led the chorus for him at the musical society; and at different times she appeared in operas produced and directed by Lee, playing Azucena in Il Trovatore, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Margaret in Gounod's Faust, and Lucrezia Borgia in Donizetti's opera of that name. Finally, in order to facilitate matters, Mrs. Shaw kept house for Lee by setting up a joint household, a sort of “blameless ménage à trois”—the phrase her son used in speaking of it to me—which lasted until 1872, the year of Lee's departure for London.
As all these operas were rehearsed at his home, it was only natural that Bernard Shaw should pick up, quite unconsciously, indeed, a knowledge of that extraordinary literature of modern music, from Bach to Wagner, with which his mother and Lee were so familiar. While he was yet a small boy, he whistled and sang, from the first bar to the last, not only the operas he frequently heard, but also the many oratorios rendered from time to time by the musical society. Indeed, Mr. Shaw once remarked that, besides their respectability, the chief merit of his family was a remarkable aptitude for playing all sorts of wind instruments by ear, even his father playing “Home, Sweet Home” upon the flute. Before he was fifteen, Bernard Shaw knew at least one important work by Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Gounod from cover to cover. Not only did he whistle the themes to himself as a street boy whistles music-hall songs, but he also sang incessantly, to himself and for himself, opera and oratorio, in an “absurd gibberish which was Italian picked up by ear—and Irish Italian at that.” No one ever taught him music in his youth, but when he grew up, although he had a very indifferent voice, he took some singing lessons under his mother. At first, he found that he could not make a rightly produced sound that was audible two yards off. But he learned readily, under the competent instruction of his mother, and now his voice, “a commonplace baritone of the most ordinary range, B flat to F, and French pitch preferred for the F,” is distinguished rather by audibility than in any other respect. It is noteworthy that the lessons he learned from his mother—the secrets of breathing and enunciation—proved of incalculable value to him afterwards on the platform, in the strenuous days of his dialectical warfare.
Reproduced from a copy, by Bernard Shaw, of the original
photograph by Richard Pigott, forger of the Parnell letters. Taken in 1863.
Although Bernard Shaw idled away his time at school, the very real education he received through other broader and deeper channels has since saved him, he stoutly maintains, from being “at the smallest disadvantage with men who only know the grammar and mispronunciation of the Greek and Latin poets and philosophers.” The other great motor of educational influence in his youth was the National Gallery of Ireland; to that cherished asylum, which he haunted in the days of his youth, he has often expressed his unmeasured gratitude. Whenever he had any money, he bought volumes of the Bohn translation of Vasari; and at fifteen he knew enough of a considerable number of Italian and Flemish painters to recognize their work at sight. His communion with the masterpieces preserved in the Dublin Gallery was so solitary that he was once driven to say, with comically extravagant egoism, that he believed he was the only Irishman, except the officials, who had ever been there. This acquaintance with art and the history of art “did more for him,” he once asserted, than the two cathedrals in Dublin so magnificently “restored” out of the profits of the drink trade. I think we must conclude, with the ever modest autobiographer, that, thanks to communism in pictures, he was really a very highly educated boy.