IX
I remember very vividly the first occasion on which I saw and heard Mr. Shaw. He was lecturing on "Some Necessary Repairs to Religion" to a religious organization, now defunct, called "The Guild of St. Mathew." His lecture was extraordinarily startling to a young man, fresh from Belfast and still influenced by his fathers' faith, although in revolt against much of it. When the lecture was over, a lady asked him to say what his belief was about the Resurrection, and he replied, that if she would promise not to tell any one, he would say that he did not believe it ever took place. And then came one of those strange lapses from serious argument which are characteristic of him. Another questioner asked him if he believed in the Immaculate Conception. "Of course I do," he said. "I believe that all conceptions are immaculate!" The questioner was so paralysed by this reply that she sat down without pointing out to him that the Catholic Church believes in the Immaculate Conception on the assumption that all conceptions are not immaculate. On many occasions, Mr. Shaw has brilliantly dodged the point in that manner; but they are not occasions that need be remembered against him. Ever and always he has given his best and hardest thought to the service of mankind. He has practiced what he preaches, and if we are thrown on the scrap-heap, it will not be because Mr. Shaw has failed to do his uttermost to help God to realise Himself. What a shock it will be to him to find that the scrap-heap is a more likeable place than his God's heaven!
X
He is greatly generous to young men. Like most of my contemporaries I have imposed upon his good nature very often. I sent "Jane Clegg" and "John Ferguson" in manuscript to him and asked him if he would read them and tell me what his opinion of them might be. Probably a dozen or more young men were doing exactly the same thing with their MSS. He could spend the whole of his time reading other men's plays, if he were to let his good nature go uncontrolled. But he read my plays and wrote long, valuable letters of advice about them to me. I hesitate to mention this fact lest it should cause an avalanche of MSS. to fall upon him, but I am trying to draw his portrait, and unless I mention his generosity to young men, the portrait will not be a faithful one. I am under personal obligations to him of many sorts, and I do not know of any man who so freely helps his friends and says so little about it. He is now sixty-six years old, but there are no signs of age about him other than the fact that his hair and his beard, once red, have turned white. He still has the mind and eagerness of a young man. His walk is as springy and alert as it was when I first knew him, as I am sure it has always been. When I see him in the street sometimes, tall, lean, very tidy and almost foppish in an unusual way, walking with great assurance and ease, examining now and then his very shapely hands, and gazing about him with that queer, quizzical, kindly look in his pleasant eyes that is so significant of him, I feel that although he is thirty years older than I am, according to the official records, he is, in spirit, thirty years younger. He will never be old. If he lives to be a centenarian, he will still be talking like a young man; and perhaps it is his extraordinary youth and vitality, as much as his disrespect for established things, that draws young men inevitably to him. His fearless, challenging spirit attracted all those who were in revolt against stagnant beliefs; and even now, when the multitude seems to have caught up with him and his views are less startling than they were a few years ago, he still stimulates the minds of the young and the eager and sends them bounding forward. "You should so live," he once said, "that when you die, God is in your debt!" He bids men and women strive to put more into the common pool than they take out, and he asserts with something like moral fury that any one who is taking more from the common pool than he puts in, is cheating both God and man. There are querulous persons who say that his work will not live. Their forefathers probably said that Shakespeare's work would not live, that Cervantes's work would not live, that Fielding's work would not live, that Dickens's work would not live; and no doubt they produced sound arguments to support their faith. Who could have believed that "Don Quixote," a mere skit on contemporary novelettes, would win universal favor, or that "Pickwick Papers," mere verbiage for a set of pictures drawn by a popular artist, would live? Yet these local, topical, and very contemporary things will not perish. Mr. Shaw has indisputably affected the thoughts and lives of thinking men and women on two continents for thirty years. He is a very daring fellow who asks us to believe that this brilliant, original, forceful mind will not continue to affect the thoughts and lives of men and women for generations to come.
H. G. WELLS
I
There are men, such as Dr. Johnson, who are mentally active and physically torpid, and there are other men, such as Mr. Jack Johnson, who are very alert physically, but not quite so alert in their minds. It seldom happens that a man combines great physical energy with great intellectual energy. Such a man is Mr. Bernard Shaw. So is Mr. H. G. Wells. I imagine that Mr. Wells is more active, both in body and in mind, than Mr. Shaw, despite the fact that the latter is the slender man of the two and that his tongue works more rapidly in conjunction with his brain; for Mr. Shaw feels fatigue sooner than Mr. Wells. I doubt whether Mr. Wells suffers from fatigue at all or to any serious extent. He takes few, if any, holidays, works for many hours every day, plays games very assiduously, and is unhappy if he has not got some work on hand. He begins to write a new book immediately he has completed its predecessor, having no belief, seemingly, in fallow time. When he is not working or playing, he is talking. His conversation has a curious resemblance in its shape, if I may use that word, to the style of his writing. One listens for the suspended sentence, for the dots with which, in his prose, he breaks a thought so that the reader may himself complete it. Mr. Shaw once told me that he could not work at creative writing for more than two hours every day, and I suspect that he suffers more from physical fatigue than he will admit. Mr. Wells works for considerably more than two hours every day (and sometimes during the night) though I do not suppose he works for two consecutive hours at any time. If you are a guest in his house, you will see him engaged in some game, tennis or hockey or that wild game of his own invention, "barn-ball," or perhaps playing demon patience; and when you are inclined to imagine that he is settling down to a long day of games, you discover that he is no longer with the players, but back in his study working on a manuscript.
One expects a certain amount of sluggishness in every man, and probably there are days when Mr. Wells's mind and body go to sleep or lie about supine, but I do not believe that any one has ever seen him asleep or supine. His mind is so active that one can almost see ideas leaping off his tongue as he talks, and he has a very remarkable capacity for engaging the attention of his auditors without making any perceptible effort to do so. His conversation, unlike that of Mr. Yeats or Mr. George Moore, is unrehearsed conversation. It has not the swift brilliance of Mr. Shaw's talk, and it goes to its point rather jerkily, but it reaches its destination. He is not so easily distracted from his course as Mr. Gilbert Chesterton is, or perhaps I ought to say that he does not take so long to get to his destination. Mr. Chesterton seems to me to be falling with great amiability on his subject, whereas Mr. Wells is eagerly struggling up to it. Mr. Chesterton defers to others with great courtesy, but his mind, I imagine, is already made up. He listens to a controversialist, not because he thinks he is likely to be converted to an opposite opinion—he is fairly certain that he will not be converted—but because he has excellent manners and an exceptionally kindly character. It is hard to believe that any man of merit is without some malice in his nature, some element of cattishness, but if there is a man of merit without these things then that man is Mr. Chesterton. If he could bring himself to throttle the creature he most detests, the international financier, the man without a country, he would, I am sure, do so entirely without prejudice. Mr. Wells listens, not out of politeness, but in the hope that he will receive information, and this hope of his causes him to listen very patiently even to bad or inexpert talkers. He has the additional merit, rare among men of genius, of being an uncommonly good host, very punctilious about the comfort and pleasure of his guests. He is a sociable man, mingling easily with very various people, gregarious where Mr. Yeats and Mr. Shaw are solitary, and he is instinctively friendly. His hospitality is lavish and with something of the Dickensian tradition in it. He has none of the chilly aloofness of Mr. Yeats nor of the shy constraint of Mr. Shaw nor of the nervous coldness of Mr. Galsworthy. Were it not for a degree of cruelty in his nature, I should say that Mr. Chesterton and he were as near to each other in temperament as any two men of merit can be. It is this strain of cruelty in him which makes him so attractive when he loses his temper, for he seems only to be witty when he is about to hit some one very severely on the head. I do not know any man who can lose his temper in print with so much effect and so entertainingly as Mr. Wells can lose his. He is hardly a witty man, as Mr. Shaw and Mr. Yeats and even Mr. Gilbert Chesterton are witty men, but he has a neat, malicious humour which delights him as much as it delights his friends, and is most often displayed when he is attacking some one.