[30] “The hero is remarkable because, without losing his pre-eminence as hero, he not only violates every canon of propriety, like Tom Jones or Des Grieux, but every canon of sentiment as well. In an age when the average man's character is rotted at the core by the lust to be a true gentleman, the moral value of such an example as Trefusis is incalculable.”—Mr. Bernard Shaw's Works of Fiction. Reviewed by Himself. In the Novel Review, February, 1892.
[31] The words are those of Mr. W. L. Courtney.
[32] There are exceptions to this generalization, of course—Lady Cicely, Candida, Nora, Jennifer, Barbara.
[33] Bernard Shaw and Woman. In Harper's Bazaar, June, 1905.
[34] It is worthy of remark that the conclusion of Love Among the Artists, as Julius Bab has pointed out, accurately prefigures the conclusion of Candida. The situation, the very words, are almost identical.
THE FABIAN SOCIETY
“If ever there was a society which lived by its wits, and by its wits alone, that society was the Fabian.”—The Fabian Society. Tract No. 41. By G. B. Shaw.
CHAPTER IV
For the student of Shaw's work and career, there is no escape from the resemblance, superficial or vital, between Shaw himself and the numerous comic figures he has projected upon the stage. Like that Byronic impostor, Saranoff, Shaw has gone through life afflicted with a multiplicity of personalities. In The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes said that when two people meet, there are always six persons present. But Shaw needs no party of the second part to sum up the total of personalities: he is eternally dogged with his own ubiquitous aliases. Bernard Shaw, the “fictionist”; Corno di Bassetto, the music critic of admirable fooling and pungent criticism; G. B. S., the apostle of comic intransigéance in criticism of art, music, and drama—and life; “P-Shaw,” the Gilbertian topsy-turvyist of essay and drama; George Bernard Shaw, Fabian, economist, public speaker, borough councillor, reformer—all these distinct characters is Shaw, in Maeterlinckian phrase, constantly meeting upon the highway of fate. It is the province of the biographer to detect, among this confusing cloud of aliases, the real man.
In 1883, the career of Bernard Shaw the “fictionist” came to an abrupt and final conclusion. While this first and introductory chapter in the book of Shaw's multiplex life was being written, the material for another and infinitely more important chapter was slowly being collected and arranged. With this second chapter begins the life of the real Shaw.