Incidentally, it gave birth to the tumultuous discussion of the so-called “symbolic” play which raged over England and America half a dozen years ago. Nowadays one hears little of “symbolism” and even the comic papers have ceased to regard Ibsen and his company as men who write in mysterious cryptograms. But persons who follow the trend of things dramatic remember the disputations that once awoke the echoes. You will find the germ of them in Shaw’s half-forgotten discourses upon “Brand,” “Peer Gynt,” and “Emperor and Galilean.”
In the early ’90’s, when Max Nordau’s mighty tome, “Degeneration,” was making a stir like a new best-selling novel, Shaw published a counter-blast to it. Even exceeding Nordau in the minuteness of his knowledge, he made an answer that, in the words of one admirer, “wiped Nordau off the field of discussion.” Unhappily, this effort at regeneration has been forgotten with “Degeneration.”
Shaw’s remarkable essay “On Going to Church,” which was recently republished in book form, is an earnest plea for less humbug in public worship. The average church, he argues, is so hopelessly ugly, tawdry, and irritating, that it straightway dissipates any religious emotion the stray comer may harbor when he enters.
The socialistic and political essays, while by no means unimportant to the students of the Shaw plays, are scarcely within the province of this book.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND STATISTICAL
I
George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, July 26, 1856. His paternal grandfather, Bernard Shaw, was high sheriff of County Kilkenny, and his maternal grandfather, Walter Bagnall Gurley, a county ’squire and fox hunter, with an extensive, but entailed estate. Shaw’s father was a younger son and, in consequence, no millionaire. But that he was a pauper or that the dramatist, in his youth, was attracted to vegetarianism because, as James Huneker hints, cabbages are cheaper than venison, there is no reason to believe. When the family came to London, in 1876, it took up quarters in “a well furnished house in a pleasant part” of the city. This upon the authority of Mr. Stanley Shaw, a relative, in a letter to the New York Sun, dated Berlin, April 25, 1905.
The Shaws then, were country gentlemen, and in all probability little different from the other Irish gentry about them. The son of the younger son was educated and reared in the orthodox fashion. He learned the speech of the Irish aristocracy and the foreign tongues in favor—English, French, and maybe a bit of German; he mastered the three R’s, he studied the history of his country, and went to church. “When I was a little boy,” he says in his essay “On Going to Church,” “I was compelled to go on Sunday; and though I escaped from that intolerable bondage before I was ten, it prejudiced me so violently against church-going that twenty years elapsed before, in foreign lands and in pursuit of works of art, I became once more a church-goer. To this day, my flesh creeps when I recall that genteel suburban Irish Protestant church, built by Roman Catholic workmen who would have considered themselves damned had they crossed its threshold afterward....” A virtuous, commonplace family. Its present head, says the Mr. Stanley Shaw aforesaid, “is Major Sir Frederick Shaw, Bart., D. S. O. of Bushey Park, Dublin.” A respectable, well-sounding name and address.