I remember hearing him say that Anatole France and he, among others, were once dining together in Paris, and with great brilliance France spoke uninterruptedly for a long time about the strange type of men called geniuses. At the conclusion, Shaw said: “Yes, I know all about them, for I myself am a genius.” France, who knew virtually nothing of Shaw, was taken aback for only a moment. “Mais oui, monsieur,” he replied, “et une courtisane se nomme une marchande de plaisir!”
Simplicity and unostentation are the keynotes of Shaw's home life. The ornate, the gaudy, the useless are banished from his scheme of things. In his wife, a gracious person of great sweetness, he has both a charming companion and an enthusiastic supporter in all his multifarious activities. Mr. Shaw's retirement from the journalistic lists was signalized by his marriage to Miss Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend, who nursed him back to health and strength—and matrimony—after a serious accident. “I was very ill when I was married,” Mr. Shaw once wrote, “altogether a wreck on crutches and in an old jacket which the crutches had worn to rags. I had asked my friends, Mr. Graham Wallas, of the London School Board, and Mr. Henry Salt, the biographer of Shelley and De Quincey, to act as witnesses, and, of course, in honour of the occasion they were dressed in their best clothes. The registrar never imagined I could possibly be the bridegroom; he took me for the inevitable beggar who completes all wedding processions. Wallas, who is considerably over six feet high, seemed to him to be the hero of the occasion, and he was proceeding to marry him calmly to my betrothed, when Wallas, thinking the formula rather strong for a mere witness, hesitated at the last moment and left the prize to me.”
Shaw is the quintessence of vital energy. He rushes hither and thither, from one task to another, with a feverish, almost frenzied activity. “Bernard Shaw reminds me of a locomotive of the most modern type,” said one of his intimate friends, “perfectly adjusted and running with lightning speed—an engine of tremendous power and efficiency.” One is liable to receive a first impression that Shaw is a delicate and anæmic sort of person—an impression fostered by the mackintosh and gloves he habitually wears and the umbrella he is fond of carrying. Once you have seen the man in action, and realized his abundant vitality and apparently inexhaustible store of nervous energy, you are not surprised to note, in Coburn's nude portrait of Shaw, in the casually affected pose of Rodin's Le Penseur, very massive shoulders and strong muscular development in arms and back. “Mr. Bernard Shaw is New York incarnate,” once wrote Miss Florence Farr. “Both of them are feverish devotees at the altar of work. Empty Mr. Shaw and New York of work and hurry, the man has a headache and closes his eyes in pain; he feels no reason for existence; and the city is a desolation. To Mr. Shaw, as to New York,” she pointedly added: “'doing nothing' is hell and damnation.”[250]
As a conversationist, Mr. Shaw is the most witty and delightful person imaginable. “Shaw is just a great big boy,” one of his intimate friends said to me, “who enjoys life and the world and himself to the fullest extent.” His enjoyment of his own anecdotes, witticisms, and strokes of repartee is irresistibly contagious; you howl with merriment, even when the joke is on you—and untrue to boot, as it often is. Brevity is the soul of his wit; and yet his stories pour forth in a perfect flood, and the coming of the “point” is duly heralded. The bubbling, chuckling note in his voice, the hands rubbed together with lightning-like rapidity, his body convulsively rocking back and forth in his chair—then the “point” with a rush, followed by his mirthfully expressive: “Well, you know——!”; he fairly doubles up, his head is thrown back, his body shakes from head to foot, and his eyes dance and glitter like the sea when struck full by the rays of the sun. His habit is to turn his light batteries of genial sarcasm, satire and irony upon those things which he perceives to be the especial objects of your respect, admiration, or veneration; he invariably depreciates and even ridicules those works of his own which you express an especial liking for. In private conversation, as well as on the platform, he is frequently engaged in drawing your fire and “putting you to your trumps”; and he once laughingly remarked to me that nothing delighted him more than to create around him a miniature reign of terror.[251] Less strongly opinionated persons than himself, when challenged in this way, are occasionally frightened into concealing or belying their real views. I once heard one of Shaw's acquaintances say with much harshness: “The astuteness and acumen of Bernard Shaw is little short of miraculous. His power of making people say precisely what he wants to hear, and at the same time what they don't necessarily believe, is truly phenomenal, almost diabolic.” He always keeps his temper and seldom goes beyond sharp, but good-humoured banter; but when attacked upon some fundamental point in which his convictions are profoundly engaged or the meaning of his life fundamentally misinterpreted, he becomes a dangerous dialectic antagonist who unmasks upon his opponent all the batteries of his keen satire, cutting logic and mordant wit.[252]
“A Prophet, the Press, and Some People.”
Reproduced from the original water-colour.
Jessie Holliday.
Courtesy of the Artist.
As a platform speaker and mob orator, Bernard Shaw is unique alike in his incisive, metallic utterance and in the mystifying directness of his paradoxes. It is genuinely amusing to watch him—the head and front of Fabianism—at a meeting of the Fabian Society. Here he is truly Sir Oracle: his opinion controls the policy of the society, as it has done for many years. While the speaker is addressing the society, Mr. Shaw is usually seated to the front and at the right of the platform, his eye-glasses depending from the hook upon the breast of his coat, his head bowed slightly forward, the fingers of his right hand lightly resting across his lips. This striking figure, with face of deadly pallor, eyes of steel blue, and general appearance of patient, amused tolerance, is here the chief justice of the court, the critic of highest authority. When he does not agree with the speaker, he shakes his head with all the naïve assumption of infallibility; and when some point is made which supports or clinches some well-known argument of his own, he gravely nods with equal sang-froid—the air of the sage encouraging promising youth. When he rises to speak, he dabbles with no graceful preliminaries, but plunges at once in medias res, and, with long forefinger upraised, sharply and mercilessly drives home his paradoxical point with all the deadly accuracy of the practised duellist. Whilst Shaw uses the rapier of cold logic in debate, and is merciless in penetrating the joints in his opponents' armour, he is scrupulously fair and just. His audiences, even at the Fabian meetings, seldom fully endorse, or even seem to understand thoroughly, the full significance and implication of his position; the applause at the close of one of his speeches is, not infrequently, less vigorous and unanimous than at the beginning. And after the meeting is over, one may observe groups of excited Fabians, scattered here and there, vehemently debating as to what Bernard Shaw really meant, and as to whether, after all, what he said was to be taken au grand sérieux!
It is a strange and inexplicable mystery that, whenever a man makes a genuine effort to disencumber himself of all traditional sentiment and contemporary prejudice, and to express himself with perfect naïveté and impartiality, the British public immediately concludes that he is a frivolous jester. Mr. William Archer, however, is of opinion that Shaw is far less free from sentiment than he appears. “I suspect Bernard Shaw of being constitutionally an arrant sentimentalist, whose abhorrence of sentiment is as the shrinking of the dipsomaniac from the single drop of alcohol which he knows will make his craving ungovernable!” If this humorous conjecture be correct, the mania is assuredly a furtive one. On occasion Bernard Shaw enjoys to the full playing with his public and flaunting a red rag at the British Bull, named John; when he chooses he airily plays to perfection the parts of jongleur and matador rolled into one. “It is an astounding thing that people so thoroughly fail to understand me,” Mr. Shaw remarked to me one day. “All that is necessary is discrimination, a strong sense of humour, and ability to occupy my point of view for the time being. Of course, I get no end of fun out of fluttering the dove-cotes. I love to leave fire and desolation in my path—to create the impression that I am a terrible fellow to deal with. The great difficulty with most people is to distinguish between my moods—when I am joking, and when I am serious; they can't see how anyone can joke about serious things. I am continually being asked all sorts of silly questions, and I am human enough”—this with a twinkle in the grey-blue eyes and an expressive wave of the hand—“to enjoy mystifying people who labour under the misfortune of being born without a sense of humour. Why, only the other day some innocent had the temerity to ask me if I were really serious in all that I said, wrote and did.