[3] In the Days of My Youth. By Bernard Shaw. Mainly About People, 1898.
[4] Compare Jubilee of Wesley College, Dublin, December, 1895—being a special number of the Wesley College Quarterly.
[5] Lee continued steadily to advance in his profession, becoming successively music-teacher, opera-conductor, festival conductor, and finally fashionable teacher of singing in Park Lane, London. He accomplished everything that he undertook, even conducting a Handel Festival in Dublin, participated in by Tietjens, Agnesi, and other leading singers of the day. For several years he enjoyed great popularity in London as a teacher of music. When he died, quite suddenly, at his home in Park Lane, it was discovered, Shaw afterwards remarked, that he had exhausted his stock of health in his Dublin period, and that the days of his vanity in London were days of progressive decay.
[6] In speaking of his apprenticeship as a clerk in the land office, Shaw declares: “I should have been there still if I had not broken loose in defiance of all prudence, and become a professional man of genius—a resource not open to every clerk. I mention this to show that the fact that I am not still a clerk may be regarded for the purposes of this article as a mere accident. I am not one of those successful men who can say, Why don't you do as I do?'”—From Bernard Shaw as a Clerk. By Himself in The Clerk, January, 1908.
[7] The Religion of the Pianoforte, in the Fortnightly Review, February, 1894.
[8] Mr. Shaw's other sister, Miss Lucy Carr Shaw, was the immediate cause of her mother's settling in London. She became a professional singer, and, later, a writer. Her best known book is entitled Five Letters of the House of Kildonnel.
LONDON
“My destiny was to educate London, but I had neither studied my pupil nor related my ideas properly to the common stock of human knowledge.”—George Bernard Shaw: an Interview, in The Chap-Book, November, 1896.
CHAPTER II
“When did you first feel inclined to write?” Shaw was once asked. “I never felt inclined to write, any more than I ever felt inclined to breathe,” was his perverse reply. “I felt inclined to draw: Michelangelo was my boyish ideal. I felt inclined to be a wicked baritone in an opera when I grew out of my earlier impulse towards piracy and highway robbery. You see, as I couldn't draw, I was perfectly well aware that drawing was an exceptional gift. But it never occurred to me that my literary sense was exceptional. I gave the whole world credit for it. The fact is, there is nothing miraculous, nothing particularly interesting, even, in a natural faculty to the man who has it. The amateur, the collector, the enthusiast in an art, is the man who lacks the faculty for producing it. The Venetian wants to be a cavalry soldier; the Gaucho wants to be a sailor; the fish wants to fly, and the bird to swim. No, I never wanted to write. I know now, of course, the value and the scarcity of the literary faculty (though I think it over-rated); but I still don't want it.” And he added: “You cannot want a thing and have it, too.”