CHAPTER I
It is a circumstance of no little significance that Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, two dramatists whose plays have achieved so notable a success on the European stage, should both have been born in Dublin within two years of one another. It has been the good fortune of no other living British or Irish dramatist of our day to receive the enthusiastic acclaim of the most cultured public of continental Europe. What more fitting and natural than this sustention, by the countrymen of Swift and Sheridan, of the Celtic reputation for brilliancy, cleverness and wit?
George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26th, 1856—well-nigh a century later than his countryman and fellow-townsman, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Only one year before, in 1855, was born Shaw's sole rival to the place of the foremost living dramatist of the United Kingdom, Arthur Wing Pinero. It is an interesting coincidence that the year which saw the demise of that “first man of his century,” Heinrich Heine, also witnessed the birth of the brilliant and original spirit who is, in some sense, his natural and logical successor: Bernard Shaw. There is some suggestion of the workings of that wonderful law of compensation, which Emerson preached with such high seriousness, in this synchronous relation of birth and death, connecting Heine and Shaw. The circumstance might be said to proclaim the unbroken continuity of the comic spirit.
Bernard Shaw possesses the unique faculty of befuddling the brains of more sane writers than any other living man. The critic of conventional view-point is dismayed by the discovery that Shaw is bound by no conventions whatever, with the possible exception of the mechanical conventions of the stage. Shaw is essentially an intellectual, not an emotional, talent; the critic of large imaginative sympathy discovers in him one who on occasion disclaims the possession of imagination. Unlike the idealist critic, Shaw is never a hero-worshipper: he derides heroism and makes game of humanity. To the analytic critic, with his schools, his classifications, his labellings, Shaw is the elusive and unanalyzable quantity—a fantastic original, a talent wholly sui generis. With all his realism, he cannot be called the exponent of a school. It would be nearer the truth to say that he is himself a school.
It is futile to attempt to measure Shaw with the foot-rule of prejudice or convention. Only by placing oneself exactly at his peculiar point of view and recording the impressions received without prejudice, preference or caricature, can one ever hope to fathom the mystery of this disquieting intelligence. Most mocking when most serious, most fantastic when most earnest; his every word belies his intent. The antipode to the farcicality of pompous dulness, his gravity is that of the masquerader in motley, the mordant humour of the licensed fool. Contradiction between manner and meaning, between method and essence, constitutes the real secret of his career. The truly noteworthy consideration is not that Shaw is incorrigibly fantastic and frivolous; the alarming fact is that he is remarkably consistent and profoundly in earnest. The willingness of the public to accept the artist at his face value blinds its eyes to the profound, almost grim, seriousness of the man. The great solid and central fact of his life is that he has used the artistic mask of humour to conceal the unswerving purpose of the humanitarian and social reformer. The story of the career of George Bernard Shaw, in whom is found the almost unprecedented combination of the most brilliantly whimsical humour with the most serious and vital purpose, has already, even in our time, taken on somewhat of the character of a legend. It might become a fairy story, in very fact, if we did not finally determine to relate it, to associate it in printed form with the life of our time.
How to write the biography of so complex a nature? The greatest living English dramatic critic once confessed that he never approached a more difficult task than that of interpretation of Shaw's plays. One of Shaw's most intimate friends once suggested that the title of his biography would probably be “The Court Jester who was Hanged.”
A few years ago, in discussing with me the plan of his biography, Mr. Shaw suggested for it the euphonious if journalistic title—G. B. S. Biography and Autobiography. Though the book as a whole is not developed along the lines originally suggested sufficiently to render that title truly applicable, for this first chapter surely none could be more suitable. These “Dublin Days” have been reproduced by Shaw with much amplitude, and more or less precision; so that, accepting Shaw's definition of Autobiography and mine of Biography, the result will be a narrative of much falsehood and perhaps a little truth.
“All autobiographies are lies,” is Shaw's fundamental thesis. “I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies. No man is bad enough to tell the truth about himself during his lifetime, involving, as it must, the truth about his family and friends and colleagues. And no man is good enough to tell the truth in a document which he suppresses until there is nobody left alive to contradict him.” The true, the real autobiography will never be written; no man, no woman—Rousseau, Marie Bashkirtseff?—ever dared to write it. Were one to attempt to write the book entitled, My Heart Laid Bare, as Poe says somewhere in his Marginalia, “the paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.” Shaw once “tried the experiment, within certain limits, of being candidly autobiographical.” He produced no permanent impression, because nobody ever believed him; but the extent to which he stood compromised with his relations may well be imagined. His few confidential reminiscences won him the reputation of being the “most reckless liar in London”; they reeked too strongly of the diabolism mentioned by Poe. And yet we must accept Shaw's comically irreverent autobiographical details, in view of his assertion that they are attempts at genuine autobiography.
In the autobiographical accounts of his youth and early life, as well as in many conversations on the subject with Mr. Shaw, I have discovered ample explanation of his scepticism concerning the binding ties of blood, of the strangely unsympathetic, even hostile, relations between parents and children displayed throughout his entire work. These autobiographical accounts reveal on his part less filial affection than a sort of comic disrespect for the mistakes, faults and frailties of his parents and relatives.
Mr. Shaw's grandfather was a Dublin notary and stockbroker, who left a large family unprovided for at his death. George Carr Shaw, his son and Bernard Shaw's father, was an Irish Protestant gentleman; his rank—a very damnable one in his son's eyes—was that of a poor relation of that particular grade of the haute bourgeoisie which makes strenuous social pretensions. He had no money, it seems, no education, no profession, no manual skill, no qualification of any sort for any definite social function. Moreover, he had been brought up “to believe that there was an inborn virtue of gentility in all Shaws, since they revolved impecuniously in a sort of vague second cousinship round a baronetcy.” His people, who were prolific and numerous, always spoke of themselves as “the Shaws” with an intense sense of their own importance—as one would speak of the Hohenzollerns or the Romanoffs. An amiable, but timid man, the father's worst faults were inefficiency and hypocrisy. His son could only say of him that he might have been a weaker brother of Charles Lamb. Proclaiming, and half believing, himself a teetotaller, he was in practice often a furtive drinker. The one trait of his which was reproduced in his son, his antithesis in almost every other respect, was a sense of humour, an appreciation of the comic force of anti-climax. “When I was a child, he gave me my first dip in the sea in Killiney Bay,” writes his son. “He prefaced it by a very serious exhortation on the importance of learning to swim, culminating in these words: 'When I was a boy of only fourteen, my knowledge of swimming enabled me to save your Uncle Robert's life.' Then, seeing that I was deeply impressed, he stooped, and added confidentially in my ear: 'And, to tell the truth, I never was so sorry for anything in my life afterwards.' He then plunged into the ocean, enjoyed a thoroughly refreshing swim, and chuckled all the way home.”