“I had better break this letter off lest I should be betrayed into expressing myself as strongly as I feel. I return the cheque. If you should see fit to use it for the purpose of erecting a tombstone to Messrs. P. F. Collier and Son, I shall be happy to contribute the epitaph, in which I shall do my best to do justice to their monstrous presumption.
“G. Bernard Shaw.”
In quite good humour the editor of Collier's Weekly assured Mr. Shaw that the award was a mistake. The “responsible” readers were out of town, and the sporting editor, who was a devotee of football, a vegetarian, a Socialist, a misanthrope, a misogynist—in short, a true disciple of G. B. S.—made the award. Of course, on receipt of Mr. Shaw's letter the sporting editor was summarily discharged!
A Bust of Shaw. By Auguste Rodin.
From the bronze original owned by Bernard Shaw.
A marble replica is in the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin.
Alvin Langdon Coburn.
Courtesy of the Sculptor.
The fantastic phenomenon “G. B. S.,” accredited by popular superstition, after a long campaign on Shaw's part in the interest of creating and fostering the legend, is a phenomenon that obviously never could, never did, nor ever will, exist under the heavens. Indeed, it is one of Mr. Shaw's foibles to insist that he is short of many accomplishments which are fairly common, and in some ways an obviously ignorant, stupid and unready man. Certainly it is not a little strange that with all his remarkable knowledge of modern art, music, literature, economics and politics, he speaks no language but his own, and reads no foreign language, save French, with ease. I remember hearing someone ask Rodin whether Shaw really spoke French. “Ah! no!” replied Rodin, with his genial smile and a faint twinkle of the eyes; “Monsieur Shaw does not speak French. But somehow or other, by the very violence of his manner and gesticulation, he succeeds in imposing his meaning upon you!” Shaw is fond of relating the incident which laid the foundation for his reputation as an Italian scholar. “Once I was in Milan with a party of English folk. We were dining at the railway restaurant, and our waiter spoke no language other than his own. When the moment came to pay and rush for the train, we were unable to make him understand that we wanted not one bill, but twenty-four separate ones. My friends insisted that I must know Italian, so to act as interpreter, I racked my memory for chips from the language of Dante, but in vain. All of a sudden, a line from The Huguenots flashed to my brain: 'Ognuno per se: per tutti il ciel' ('Every man for himself: and heaven for all.') I declaimed it with triumphant success. The army of waiters was doubled up with laughter, and my fame as an Italian scholar has been on the increase ever since.”
As a rule, foreign critics rate Shaw higher as a thinker and philosopher than as wit and dramatist. The painters and sculptors likewise represent him as a personality of tremendous intellectual force. The bust by Rodin—intermediate as a work of art between his busts of Puvis de Chavannes and J. P. Laurens in the Musée de Luxembourg—reveals the thoughtful student, of philosophic insight and tremendous cerebration. Rodin, who finds Shaw “charming,” recently said to Mrs. John van Vorst: “He is perhaps a 'fraud,' as you Americans put it. But the first victim of Bernard Shaw's charlatanism is Bernard Shaw himself. Susceptible to impressions as are all artists, and a philosopher at the same time, he cannot do otherwise than deceive himself. The cold reason which he could, were it unhampered, apply to the problems of this life, is modified, reduced to vapour, by his delicate temperamental sensitiveness and by his keen Irish sense of humour. It is, in fact, to his Irish blood that Bernard Shaw, as we know him, is due. With the cold Anglo-Saxon current only in his veins, he would have proved the 'bore' par excellence who tries to divert us while reforming society, to win our applause by mere idol-breaking.”[246] Also, in the Hon. Neville S. Lytton's portrait of Shaw, after the Innocent X. of Velásquez, there is portrayed the modern pope of wit and wisdom.[247] And the redoubtable logician, the philosophic satirist, is admirably bodied forth in that remarkable photograph of Shaw—the masterpiece in portraiture of Alvin Langdon Coburn.[248]
The real Bernard Shaw is one of the most genial and delightfully entertaining of men. In his London quarters, at Adelphi Terrace, or in the quiet retreat of Ayot St. Lawrence, in Hertfordshire, he is easy, hospitable and unaffectedly natural.[249] In his manner, the combination of light spontaneity with a sort of effusive shyness is peculiarly engaging. There is something strikingly transitory about his presence: one always feels that he has just managed to catch Shaw “on the fly.” While he not infrequently plays up to his reputation for gay self-puffery, in such innocent diversions, for example, as ecstatically admiring the Rodin bust or rhapsodizing over Coburn's prints of him, it is always quite obviously with the humorous consciousness that his listener is sharing in the imposture. The genius of proverbial classification writes like an angel and talks like Poor Poll; Shaw possesses the unique distinction of talking, whether in his own home or upon the public platform, as trenchantly and as brilliantly as he writes. Unlike many celebrated raconteurs, whose ability consists almost solely in pouring forth a flood of polished anecdote and personal reminiscence, Shaw talks with apparent ease and equal wit upon any and every subject that comes to hand, from Richard Wagner to Anthony Comstock, from spiritualism to bicycling, from German philosophy to women's clothes. One is amused to discover that his extreme acuteness in analyzing subjects upon which he is an authority is equalled only by his marvellous glibness in talking of things of which he can really know little or nothing. Far from taking his cue from Coleridge or Wilde and monopolizing the conversation for hours at a time, he makes an attentive and appreciative listener, instantaneously responsive to clever characterization or thoughtful analysis. A great tease and joker, he is perpetually telling upon his friends devastatingly comic stories which they vehemently deny in toto. When he is not poking fun at your views or drawing your fire by carefully directed sarcasm, he is entertaining you with some humorous episode in his own life—a tilt with Anatole France, perhaps, a bit of repartee with which he turned the tables on Gilbert Chesterton, or an illiterate person's joke on Shaw which for the time being completely floored him.