G. B. S. (A Cartoon).
Reproduced from Three Living Lions.
Joseph Simpson.
Courtesy of the Artist.
The extravagant braggart and arrant poseur of the Shavian myth vanishes in the presence of the real Shaw. His playful pretence of vanity is a source of great amusement to himself and his friends. Socially, it is an admirable resource in the art of entertainment. “I have never pretended that G. B. S. was real,” said Shaw the other day: “I have over and over again taken him to pieces before the audience to show the trick of him. And even those who, in spite of that, cannot escape from the illusion, regard G. B. S. as a freak. The whole point of the creature is that he is unique, fantastic, unrepresentative, inimitable, impossible, undesirable on any large scale, utterly unlike anybody that ever existed before, hopelessly unnatural, and void of real passion. Clearly such a monster could do no harm, even were his example evil (which it never is).” “The G. B. S. you know,” he laughingly remarked to me one day, with a rapid shrug of the shoulders and a deprecatory wave of the hand, “is merely a family joke with a select circle. G. B. S. sometimes gets on my nerves; but he is a great source of amusement to a small but highly enlightened audience. Of course, there are lots of people in the world who regard me as a huge joke; and perhaps I am as much responsible for the G. B. S. legend as anybody else. But the vast majority of my readers,” he added, “are serious persons who regard me as a serious person who has something serious to impart.”
As an instance of the multiplicity of diverse impressions which Bernard Shaw succeeds in evoking, consider his letter to P. F. Collier and Son. Unknown to Shaw, his story, Aërial Football, was published during a period within which the best story submitted was to receive a prize of one thousand dollars. Shaw's letter in “acknowledgment” of Collier's cheque evoked a thousand different expressions of opinion—ranging between the opinion at one end of the scale that Shaw, as a great man of letters, was entirely justified in his indignant protest at being placed involuntarily in the position of competing for a money prize in a fiction contest, and the opinion at the other end of the scale that Shaw was playing a spectacular and sensational prank, and indulging in a rather expensive form of advertisement. Shaw's letter speaks for itself:
“Sir,—What do you mean by this unspeakable outrage? You send me a cheque for a thousand dollars, and inform me that it is a bonus offered by Messrs. P. F. Collier and Son for the best story received during the quarter in which my contribution appeared. May I ask what Messrs. P. F. Collier and Son expected my story to be?
“If it were not the best they could get for the price they were prepared to pay, they had no right to insert it at all. If it was the best, what right have they to stamp their own contributors publicly as inferior when they have taken steps to secure the result beforehand by paying a special price to a special writer?
“And what right have they to assume that I want to be paid twice over for my work, or that I am in the habit of accepting bonuses and competing for prizes?
“Waiving all these questions for a moment, I have another one to put to you. How do Messrs. P. F. Collier and Son know that my story was the best they received during the quarter? Are they posterity? Are they the verdict of history? Have they even the very doubtful qualification of being professional critics?