[132] Shaw's fine essay on the art of Ellen Terry also appeared in the Neue Freie Presse late in 1905. For the English version of the article, cf. the Boston Transcript, January 20th, 1906.
[133] His Valedictory appeared in the Saturday Review, May 21st, 1898.
THE PLAYWRIGHT—I
“In all my plays my economic studies have played as important a part as a knowledge of anatomy does in the works of Michelangelo.”—Letter to the author, of date June 30th, 1904.
“Plays which, dealing less with the crimes of society, and more with its romantic follies, and with the struggles of individuals against those follies, may be called, by contrast, Pleasant.”--Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, Vol. I., Preface.
CHAPTER X
While resting from the over-exertions of the political campaign at the time of the General Election in 1892, Shaw came upon the manuscript of the partially finished play begun in 1885. “Tickled” by the play, and urged by Mr. Grein, Shaw began work upon it anew. “But for Mr. Grein and the Independent Theatre Society,” Shaw confessed, “it would have gone back to its drawer and lain there another seven years, if not for ever.”[134] With this play, Widowers' Houses, Shaw made his début upon the English stage as a problem dramatist with the avowed purpose of exposing existent evils in the prevailing social order. Widowers' Houses is the first native play of the New School in England consciously devoted to the exposure of the social guilt of the community.
In 1885, shortly after the completion of the novels of his nonage, Shaw began this play in collaboration with Mr. William Archer. After learning to know Shaw by sight in the British Museum reading-room, as a “young man of tawny complexion and attire,” studying alternately, if not simultaneously, Karl Marx's Das Kapital (in French), and an orchestral score of Tristan and Isolde, Mr. Archer finally met him at the house of a common acquaintance.
Bernard Shaw.