Shaw and the Biographer.
Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire. July, 1907. From a photograph taken by Mrs. Bernard Shaw.
On my return to America I once more approached my task—this time with the illumination of personality, and with the deeper knowledge of his own interpretation of his life and works, even though Mr. Shaw's views might not, and often did not, entirely tally with my own. The biography was now written finally, from the first chapter to the last.
One who has pursued the errant course of a Will-o'-the-wisp may understand somewhat of my effort to follow the devious route of G. B. S. With interest, though I confess at times with dwindling patience, I have followed the lure of that occasionally somewhat impishly un-kindly light, “o'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent,” till after the fashion of his kind, he abandoned me, wayfaring, on the brink of the abyss to save my neck as best I might. Which things are a parable.
Characteristically, and, it must be admitted, in a sense justly, he remarks that a biography of a living man cannot be finished till he is dead, or words to that effect. But the chances there are against the Biographer as well as the Biographed; and I have no fancy, I confess, that the book should be, as he once maliciously prophesied, “a posthumous work for both of us,” nor that he should be justified in his presentiment that we should “both die the moment we finished it.”
While nothing but death can fitly end a man's life, being no Boswell, and having my own life to attend to as well as his, I have brought these “twenty volumes” to a close. A man who has already, by his own account, “lived three centuries,” is as likely to live three more; but it is less probable that I shall see the end of them. So I take Time by the forelock and write finis to a contribution which can only hope to cover the first three centuries.
“Who is to tackle Mr. Bernard Shaw,” Mr. Augustine Birrell once asked, “and assign to him his proper place in the providential order of the world?” This work is in no sense an effort to assign to Bernard Shaw his “proper place in the providential order of the world.” Such a task it is impossible to accomplish so long as Shaw lives to belie it. No more is it possible to say the final word about any genius in mid-career with limitless possibilities before him. Shaw's masterpiece—even a series of masterpieces!—perhaps remains to be written. His career may have only just begun.
This book is designed to give an authoritative account, biographical and critical, of Bernard Shaw's work, art, philosophy and life up to the present time. Perhaps its appearance is not premature. Shaw has suffered no little from the Shavians. He has served more than once as an excuse for propaganda and counter-propaganda. But save for one or two glaring exceptions, the fatuities of the cult, and the image of the shrine and burning candles have in large measure vanished—it is hoped, to return no more. The time seems ripe for conscientious and thoughtful consideration of the man and his work, in relation to the thought movement of our time—irrespective of political bias and personal prejudice. Perhaps the portrait, though neither “disparaging” nor “unflattering,” may present the “real Shaw,” if more “unexpectedly,” perhaps no less truly, in that I am “a stranger to the Irish-British environment.”
If I have succeeded in removing a legendary figure from the atmosphere of contemporary mythology, and in portraying the real man in the light of common day, then an earnest search for the aurea media of true criticism will not have proved wholly fruitless. I hope I may have succeeded, in some adequate degree, in exhibiting, in their true colours, what Mr. Gilbert Chesterton once justly described to me in a letter as “that humour and that courage which have cleansed so much of the intellect of to-day.”