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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
HIS LIFE AND WORKS

George Bernard Shaw.

Lumière autochrome.
By Alvin Langdon Coburn.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
HIS LIFE AND WORKS

A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY

(Authorized)
By

ARCHIBALD HENDERSON, M.A., Ph.D.

Of the University of North Carolina

With 33 Illustrations, including two Plates in Colour (one from an autochrome
by Alvin Langdon Coburn, the other from a water-colour by Bernard
Partridge), two Photogravures (Coburn and Steichen),
and numerous facsimiles in the text

STEWART & KIDD COMPANY

CINCINNATI
1911

Copyright, 1911,
STEWART & KIDD CO.

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

More than six years ago I conceived the idea of writing a book about Bernard Shaw. The magnitude of the undertaking and the elusiveness of the subject, had I realized them then in their full significance, might well have made me pause. My earliest interest in his work, aroused by his thoughtful laughter and piqued by his elfish impudence, convinced me that this remarkable talent was like no other I had known.

In characteristic style, Mr. Shaw once gave the following fantastic account of the evolution of the present work. A young American professor, Shaw explained, wished to write a book about him. Originally, he thought of beginning his task by writing an article for a daily newspaper. But so rapidly did the material grow that he soon saw the necessity of expanding the newspaper article into a long essay for a monthly review. When the essay was completed, in view of the mass of material in his hands, it appeared totally inadequate to express what he really wished to say about Bernard Shaw. It then occurred to him to write a short book entitled “G. B. S.” Alas! This plan had also to be relinquished, for it was now manifest that in no such small compass was it possible to do justice to his subject. At last he hit upon the brilliant scheme of his final adoption: he would write a history of modern thought in twenty volumes. After considering the forerunners of his hero in the first nineteen volumes, he would devote the twentieth solely to the treatment of George Bernard Shaw.

Such is the history of the genesis of this book—as narrated by Shaw in the well-known Milesian manner. His whimsicalities find gay expression in the invention of such fantastic stories, which delight his auditors and exasperate only the persons concerning whom the invention is concocted. For example, Mr. Shaw once laughingly declared that “Henderson began by hailing me as an infant prodigy, and ended by pronouncing me a genius.” And he delights in retailing the story of my chivalrously to his rescue under the impression that he was an unknown and struggling dramatist who sorely needed, and greatly deserved, enthusiastic championship.

The real history of this biography, if not so interesting or amusing, at least possesses the merit of greater accuracy. I was first drawn to Shaw, not because he was a Socialist, a publicist, an economist. I was concerned with neither his fame nor his obscurity. I had seen his plays produced in America, had followed the ups and downs of his career as a dramatist, and was marking the rise of his star successively in Austria and Germany. The Shaw who caught and held my interest was the dramatist of a new type. I planned writing a brief study of Bernard Shaw and his plays less comprehensive in scope even than the subsequent studies of Holbrook Jackson, Gilbert Chesterton and Julius Bab. Mr. Shaw furnished me with a brief outline of his career and I set to work. After studying his works for some months, I sent a series of queries to Mr. Shaw. Fear fell upon me when, some time later, I received from him a card saying that he had only come to the forty-first page of his reply; and he assured me that if this business was to come off, it might as well be done thoroughly. Fear was turned to consternation when the big budget finally arrived. “I knew that you thought you were dealing simply with a new dramatist,” wrote Mr. Shaw, “whereas, to myself, all the fuss about Candida was only a remote ripple from the splashes I made in the days of my warfare long ago. I do not think what you propose is important as my biography, but a thorough biography of any man who is up to the chin in the life of his time as I have been is worth writing as a historical document; and, therefore, if you still care to face it, I am willing to give you what help I can. Indeed, you can force my hand to some extent, for any story that you start will pursue me to all eternity; and if there is to be a biography, it is worth my while to make it as accurate as possible.”

Facsimile of page 54 of a letter from Bernard Shaw to the biographer, of date January 17th, 1905.

In this way my original plan was developed and expanded. Mr. Shaw's abundant sympathy and encouragement; the overflowing measure of material afforded me; the insight into a life and a period of tremendous significance and vitality; all these combined to offer an opportunity not to be neglected. My interest in the subject deepened with my knowledge. It became my aim to write—not a Rougon-Macquart history of modern thought in twenty volumes—but an account of the movements of a most interesting period, the last quarter of the nineteenth and the opening decade of the twentieth centuries, à propos of Bernard Shaw. As the work progressed, Shaw warned me—and the reporters—that in attempting his biography I had undertaken a “terrific task,” an opinion endorsed by others. I remember one day being introduced to Mr. Bram Stoker as Bernard Shaw's biographer; whereupon he remarked with genuine feeling in his tone: “I can only say that you have my profoundest sympathy!” Soon after I had fairly embarked upon the undertaking, in fact, Shaw pointed out to me its magnitude. “I want you to do something that will be useful to yourself and to the world,” he wrote in February, 1905; “and that is, to make me a mere peg on which to hang a study of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, especially as to the collectivist movement in politics, ethics and sociology; the Ibsen-Nietzschean movement in morals; the reaction against the materialism of Marx and Darwin; the Wagnerian movement in music; and the anti-romantic movement (including what people call realism, materialism and impressionism) in literature and art.”

During the progress of the work I beheld Shaw conquer America, then Germany, then England, and, lastly, the Scandinavian countries and Continental Europe. I realized that my subject, beginning as a somewhat obscure Irish author, had thrown off the garb of submerged renown, taken the public by storm, and become the most universally popular living dramatist, and the most frequently paragraphed man in the world. No British dramatist—not even Shakespeare!—had conquered the world during his lifetime; yet Shaw, just past fifty, had succeeded in turning this cosmic trick. Clippings, pictures, journals and books poured in upon me from every quarter of the globe. I discovered that Shaw was a man with a past as well as a genius with a future, and I realized the truth of his cryptic boast that he had lived for three centuries.

Now and then, to relieve the burden of my thoughts, I would write an essay for some German, French, or American review. But I only met with base ingratitude from the subject of the essay. “Your articles have been a most fearful curse to me,” Mr. Shaw wrote me on one occasion, after the appearance of an article in which I had referred to his unobtrusive philanthropy. “For instance, the day before yesterday I got a typical letter. The writer has nine children; has lost his wife suddenly, and was on the point of shooting himself in desperation for want of fifteen pounds to get him out of his difficulties, when he happened to come on a copy of your article. He instantly felt that here was the man to give him the fifteen pounds and save his life. He is only one out of a dozen who have had the same idea. I shall refer them all to you with assurances that you have read your own character into mine, and are a man with a feeling heart, a full pocket, and a ready hand to give to the afflicted.”

When the book was well under way, I came to England, at Mr. Shaw's invitation, to “study my subject.” My views of his work and genius remained fundamentally the same, though the personal contact with one of the most vivid and remarkable personalities of our time, quite naturally brought about some marked modifications of my more remote impressions, and corrected some of the minor misunderstandings which are inevitable in the absence of a personal acquaintance. Many passages in his works, many phases of his personality, hitherto obscure or incomprehensible, became clear to me. I learned the meaning of his plays, the purport of his philosophy, and the objects of his life not from my view-point alone, but from his own. In the quiet of Ayot, we read and discussed together the portion of the biography then written. With frequent criticism and comment Mr. Shaw helped me to a new and larger comprehension of his life and work.

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.”

PREFACE

I have neither space nor words to express, in full measure, my gratitude and indebtedness to the many friends, critics, scholars and men of letters who have aided me in the preparation of this work. First of all I wish to thank Mr. Shaw himself for his assistance. The voluminous correspondence filled with criticism, exposition and reminiscence; the immense trouble taken in placing ample materials at my disposal; the personal assistance in detailed discussion of the work—will have made this work possible. For the views expressed in this biography Mr. Shaw is in no sense responsible. On many points we are in hearty disagreement. At this place, I take pleasure in expressing my indebtedness to Mrs. Shaw, for kind assistance and helpful suggestions.

Valuable assistance, especially in connection with the earlier stages of Shaw's career as a dramatist, was derived from Mr. William Archer's collection of Shaviana, which he freely and most generously placed at my disposal. The chapter on Shaw as a critic of music I could not have written without the articles lent me by Mr. Archer. I am likewise greatly indebted to Mr. Holbrook Jackson, who gave me free access to his collection of Shaviana, and lent me valuable material hitherto unknown to me, or inaccessible. During the entire course of the preparation of the present work, I have received the counsel and aid of that scholarly student of the drama, Mr. James Platt White, of Buffalo, New York, who freely placed the services of himself and his fine library of dramatic literature at my disposal.

To certain able students of Shaw's work, some of them not known to me personally, and also to a few personal friends, I am also especially indebted. To Mr. John Corbin, Professor William Lyon Phelps and Professor E. E. Hale, Jr., in connection with the chapters treating of the plays; to Mr. James Huneker, in connection with the chapter treating of Shaw as a critic of music; to the late Mr. Samuel L. Clemens and to Dr. C. Alphonso Smith in connection with other critical and biographical chapters—for reading these portions of the work, for helpful criticism in some instances, for the loan of material in others, to all my thanks are gratefully accorded. Needless to say, they are in no wise responsible for any faults or errors of mine. In various ways, in lesser degree, I am indebted to Miss Sally Fairchild, Mr. Henry George, Jr., Mr. J. T. Grein and Mr. Austin Lewis.

Of foreign critics, I wish especially to thank M. Augustin Hamon, the French translator of Shaw's works, for his interesting suggestions, his numerous acts of kindness, and for the rich mass of documents embodying the continental criticism of Shaw with which he has kept me supplied; and Herr Siegfried Trebitsch, of Vienna, the German translator of Shaw's works, for detailed information in regard to Shaw's position and recognition in German Europe. I cannot permit myself to omit from the list of those to whom I am especially indebted the names of M. Jean Blum, formerly Professor at the Lycée, Oran, Algeria; Herr Heinrich Stümcke, editor of Bühne und Welt; Professor Paul Haensel, of the University of Moscow; Dr. Julius Broutá, of Madrid, the Spanish translator of Shaw's works; Herr Hugo Vallentin, the Swedish translator of Shaw's works; Mr. J. M. Borup, the Danish translator of Shaw's works; Baron Reinhold von Willebrand, editor of the Finsk Tidskrift, Helsingfors, Finland; M. Auguste Filon, now resident in England, I believe; and Dr. Georg Brandes, of Copenhagen. In the text of the present work, or in footnotes, I trust I have not failed to express my indebtedness to everyone, not heretofore mentioned, who, in one way or another, has aided me in the present work. I should, however, like to acknowledge here my indebtedness to the officials of the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C, of the British Museum, and of the Cambridge University Library, for their unfailing courtesy and helpfulness.

I have taken the utmost pains to include among the illustrations the most notable representations ever made of Shaw—sculpture, portrait, photograph and cartoon. Moreover, the thought of presenting Shaw to the eye in the most characteristic and representative way, as he appeared at various stages in his career, has been constantly borne in mind. My thanks are now expressed to M. Auguste Rodin for permission to reproduce a photograph of his bronze bust of Shaw, the marble replica of which, presented by Mr. Shaw, now stands in the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin; to Prince Paul Troubetzkoy, Paris, for a photograph of his remarkable plaster bust of Shaw, said to have been made in forty minutes; to the Hon. Neville S. Lytton, for permission to reproduce his unique portrait of Mr. Shaw, after the Innocent X. of Velásquez; to Mr. Bernard Partridge for the loan of his admirable water-colour of Shaw; to Miss Jessie Holliday for the loan of her striking water-colour of Shaw, her photo-drawing of Mr. Webb, and her sketch of Mr. Archer; to Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. E. T. Reed for permission to reproduce cartoons of Shaw; to Mr. H. G. Wells for permission to reproduce his drawing of six Socialists; to Mr. Joseph Simpson, the artist, and Mr. J. Murray Allison, the owner, for the loan of a black-and-white wash drawing—all the best of their kind. I was so fortunate as to enlist the interest and co-operation of those two great American artist-photographers, Alvin Langdon Coburn (London) and Éduard J. Steichen (Paris). Notable portraits and pictures were taken by them especially for this work—one Lumière autochrome and four monochromes by Mr. Coburn, and two monochromes by Mr. Steichen. For permission to photograph the first and last pages of the original manuscript of Love Among the Artists—and also for supplying me with much other valuable material—I am indebted to Mr. D. J. Rider. I wish to express my thanks to Dr. M. L. Ettinghausen, of Munich, who secured for me many playbills of the productions of Shaw's plays in German Europe. I wish to express my thanks also to Mr. Roger Ingpen, for his assistance in the matter of illustrations. My thanks are likewise extended to the proprietors of Punch and Vanity Fair for permission to reproduce certain cartoons which originally appeared in those publications. In especial, I wish to thank Mrs. Shaw for her intelligent aid in the selection of likenesses of Mr. Shaw from his own large collection.

In accordance with the original plan for the biography of Mr. Shaw, the present volume was to contain an appendix, treating chronologically and critically of the production of Shaw's plays throughout the world, from the inception of his career as a dramatist. It has proved advisable to publish this appendix later in a separate, souvenir volume, embodying the history of the dramatic movement inaugurated by Bernard Shaw. Consequently, the chapters in the present volume dealing with Shaw's plays are concerned primarily with critical discussion of the genesis and art of the plays, touching upon their production only in the most casual and adventitious way.

Mr. Shaw is fond of saying: “I am a typical Irishman; my family came from Hampshire.” His lineal ancestor, Captain William Shaw, was of Scotch descent; lived in Hampshire, England; and in 1689 went to Ireland, where the family has since lived. The strains in Mr. Shaw's ancestry are so complicated and interwoven, that it has seemed important to publish a genealogical chart of the Shaw family. The researches were conducted by the expert genealogist, Rev. W. Ball Wright, M.A., Osbaldwick Vicarage, York, at the instance and under the direction of Mr. Shaw himself. The chart, compiled from the data of Mr. Wright, was prepared by the experts of the Grafton Genealogical Press, New York.

To my wife, for her untiring assistance and inestimably valuable criticism, I cannot cancel my debt of gratitude by any expressions, however eloquent. I could not have written this book without her aid. It is to her intellectual directness and to her genius for suggestive criticism, that the present volume owes very much of whatever merit it may possess.

Archibald Henderson.

Cambridge, England.
November 30th, 1910.

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION

The association of America and Bernard Shaw connotes, at the first glance, incongruity if not mutual antipathy. There is at once a suggestion of conflict between the most individualistic personality of the day and the most individualistic nation of the world. One of America's deplorable, if amiable, weaknesses is the predilection for inviting estimates of herself from supercilious people who know nothing about her. And one of Shaw's amusing idiosyncracies is his fancy for discoursing freely upon subjects of which he is pathetically ignorant. Bull-baiting is his daily pastime; but now and then he eagerly yields to the tempting invitation to take a new fling at America. So from time to time we have the diverting spectacle of a remarkably clever and shrewd Irishman making quaintly stupid and delightfully inapposite strictures upon a country he has never visited and upon a people among whom he has never lived or even sojourned.

Imagine a Martian making his first studies of the United States through the sole intermediary of the writings and discourses of Mr. Bernard Shaw. What a lurid and shocking picture would be presented to his view! The United States, thus portrayed, is a “nation of villagers,” suburban in instinct and parochial in moral judgments, “overridden with old-fashioned creeds and a capitalistic religion.” The Americans are an “appalling, horrible, narrow lot,” and America is a “land of unthinking, bigoted persecution.” The American woman is attractive, beautiful, and well-dressed—but has no soul. The American man is a machine of voluble activity without progressive impetus, whose single aim is the acquisition of wealth. America is a semi-barbaric country, incessantly shocking the world with its crass exposures of political corruption and industrial brigandage, murders, manslaughters, and lynchings, peonage, sweat-shops, child-labor, and white slavery. It is fifty years behind England, and a hundred years behind Europe, in art, literature, science, religion, and government—in a word, in civilization.

This lurid chromo, painted in crude and primary colors, is clearly the Shavian reflection of English press-opinion of America and the Americans—if it is not one of Mr. Shaw's most successful comic fictions. In whatever proportion jest and earnest may be commingled in such a comic fiction, certainly it is disappointing to find a man who has often proven himself an exceedingly clear-sighted observer and astute thinker with respect to subjects upon which he is fully informed, betray so pathetic an ignorance of the realities of American life. Mr. Shaw has been content to acquire his notions concerning America at second hand, and often at third and fourth—a method of acquiring information which is to be recommended for ease rather than for accuracy.

The English newspaper is, actually, a standing menace to perfectly equable relations between England and America. There is a yellowness of sensationalism, and there is a yellowness of deliberate misrepresentation. There is a deeper, more subtle inaccuracy than that which inheres in the distortion of facts; it is the inaccuracy which inheres in the suppression of facts. The picture of America daily presented to English eyes through the medium of the English press is a caricature—a broad, crude caricature. It is so flagrant as to lead to the lurid chromo of America achieved by Mr. Shaw. The English visitor to the United States, who gets no further than the hotels of the great cities and the rear platform of an observation car, catches only the most superficial of impressions—chiefly of the hurried metropolitan search for wealth and of the natural, still almost primitive, wildness of the landscape. England means censoriousness; and English curiosity and inquisitiveness are more than often misguided—searching into and accentuating those phases of American life and character which are most open to adverse criticism, and overlooking or ignoring those indicative features and attributes which are most suggestive in their utility and value.

In reality, England and America have much to learn from each other that will be mutually helpful and beneficial. That spirit of generosity which characterizes America in her relations to all the world is the significant deficiency in the English national character. America is the supreme exemplar of internationalism. America is open-mindedness, enterprise, acquisitiveness. England, as instanced most signally in her splendid public institutions, is unsparingly generous—liberally sharing her treasures with all the rest of the world. But she is deplorably retrograde, as a nation, through declining to utilize the best that is to be found in other nationalities and other civilizations. It is, perhaps, sometimes more generous to receive than to give. England austerely plays the rôle of model to other nations; but she cannot abide to “sit at the feet of wisdom,” to appropriate for her own advancement the good and the useful in others, whosoever those others may be. England's besetting sin of national vanity is the canker in the flower of her civilization, the ominous source of her progressive relinquishment of international supremacy.

On the other hand, America has much to learn from England, and from that phase of English spirit signally exemplified in the person of Bernard Shaw. For if he is anything, Shaw is a free thinker—in the original and entirely uncorrupted meaning of that term. His is that boundless naïveté so fertile for truth's own discovery. Not only is he free thinker: he is equally free writer and free speaker. He says exactly what he thinks—and a good deal more. He coats the pill of the satirist with the sugar of the artist; his wit stands sponsor for his irreverence. In Nietzschean phrase, Shaw is a “good European.” He is fully abreast of the most advanced thought of Europe, and consistently maintains relations with the latest developments in the fine arts, philosophy, and sociology. For many years, he has served as a channel for the influx into English-speaking countries of the streams of European consciousness. As an original thinker, Shaw has independently arrived at many conclusions which have been more rigorously elaborated by numerous modern thinkers, from Stirner, Nietzsche and Ibsen to Maeterlinck, Bergson and James. As the literary popularizer of contemporary philosophic ideas, Bernard Shaw is one of the heralds of that steadily evolving spirit of cosmopolitan culture which bids fair to give the intellectual note of the twentieth century.

In this hour of America's great national resurgence in the effort to purge the body politic of glaring social evils, it is helpful to study Bernard Shaw and to discover that his most distinctive and noteworthy service as a public character has been his splendid struggle for the inculcation of the highest ideals of unselfish public service. England far surpasses America in the relative amount of public service rendered by individuals and public organizations in behalf of the general welfare, without remuneration or the hope of remuneration. “I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community,” Bernard Shaw has finely declared, “and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatsoever I can.” Only when individual leaders of opinion in America, of which there is now no dearth, are supported everywhere by an awakened public conscience and a universally functioning spirit of individual responsibility, shall we secure throughout our country, from hamlet to metropolis, the much desiderated remedy for social abuse and the progressive perfecting of popular government.

Archibald Henderson.

Salisbury, N. C., September 4, 1911.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

FACSIMILES

DUBLIN DAYS

“If religion is that which binds men to one another, and irreligion that which sunders, then must I testify that I found the religion of my country in its musical genius and its irreligion in its churches and drawing-rooms.”—In the Days of My Youth. By Bernard Shaw. Mainly About People, 1898.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW:
HIS LIFE AND WORKS

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.”

All the Shaws, because of that remote baronetcy, Mr. Shaw once gravely assured me, considered it the first duty of a respectable Government to provide them with sinecures. After holding a couple of clerkships, Shaw's father, by some means, finally asserted his family claim on the State with sufficient success to attain a post in the Four Courts—the Dublin Courts of Justice. This post in the Civil Service must have been a gross sinecure, for by 1850 it was abolished, and he was pensioned off. He then sold his small pension and went into business as a wholesale dealer in corn, a business of which he had not the slightest knowledge. “I cannot begin, like Ruskin, by saying that my father was an entirely honest merchant,” said his son in one of his autobiographical confidences. “I don't know whether he was or not; I do know that he was an entirely unsuccessful one.” In addition to a warehouse and office in the city, he had a flour mill at a place called Dolphin's Barn, a few miles out. This mill, attached to the business as a matter of ceremony, perhaps paid its own rent, since the machinery was generally in motion. But its chief use, according to Bernard Shaw, “was to amuse me and my boon companions, the sons of my father's partner.”

When he was about forty years of age, Shaw's father married Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly, the daughter of a country gentleman. Students in eugenics might find in their disparity in age—a difference of twenty years—some explanation of the singular qualities and unique genius of their son. The estate in Carlow, now owned by Mr. Shaw, descended to him from his maternal grandfather, Walter Bagnal Gurly, through his mother's brother. Miss Gurly was brought up with extreme severity by her maternal aunt, Ellen Whitcroft, a sweet-faced lady, with a deformed back and a ruthless will, who gave her niece the most rigorous training, with the intention of subsequently leaving her a fortune. The result of this course of education upon Miss Gurly was ignorance alike of the value of money and of the world; her marriage, hastily contracted when her home was made uncomfortable for her by her father's second marriage, gave her a sufficient knowledge of both. Her aunt, angered by this unexpected and vexatious conduct on the part of this absurdly inexperienced young woman, her erstwhile paragon and protégée, summarily disinherited her. In many ways, Miss Gurly's marriage proved a disappointment. Her husband, one of the most impecunious of men, was far too poor to enable her to live on the scale to which she had been accustomed. Indeed, he was anything but a satisfactory husband for a clever woman. It was in her music that Mrs. Shaw found solace and comfort—a refuge from domestic disappointment.

The formative influences of Shaw's early life were of a nature to inculcate in him that disbelief in popular education, that disrespect for popular religion, and that contempt for social pretensions which are so deeply ingrained in his work and character. Is it any wonder, after his youthful experience with orthodox religion, that, like Tennyson, he cherished a contempt for the God of the British: “an immeasurable clergyman”? In his own perverse and brilliant way, he has told us the history of his progressive revolt against the religious standards of his family:

“I believe Ireland, as far as the Protestant gentry are concerned, to be the most irreligious country in the world. I was christened by my uncle; and as my godfather was intoxicated and did not turn up, the sexton was ordered to promise and vow in his place, precisely as my uncle might have ordered him to put more coals on the vestry fire. I was never confirmed, and I believe my parents never were either. The seriousness with which English families take this rite, and the deep impression it makes on many children, was a thing of which I had no conception. Protestantism in Ireland is not a religion; it is a side in political faction, a class prejudice, a conviction that Roman Catholics are socially inferior persons, who will go to hell when they die, and leave Heaven in the exclusive possession of ladies and gentlemen. In my childhood I was sent every Sunday to a Sunday school where genteel children repeated texts, and were rewarded with little cards inscribed with other texts. After an hour of this, we were marched into the adjoining church, to fidget there until our neighbours must have wished the service over as heartily as we did. I suffered this, not for my salvation, but because my father's respectability demanded it. When we went to live in the country, remote from social criticism, I broke with the observance and never resumed it.

“What helped to make this 'church' a hot-bed of all the social vices was that no working folk ever came to it. In England the clergy go among the poor, and sometimes do try desperately to get them to come to church. In Ireland the poor are Catholics—'Papists,' as my Orange grandfather called them. The Protestant Church has nothing to do with them. Its snobbery is quite unmitigated. I cannot say that in Ireland every man is the worse for what he calls his religion. I can only say that all the people I knew were.”

One must beware of the error of exaggerating the influence of Puritanism upon Shaw's character in his youth. Mr. Shaw has laughed consumedly at Mr. Chesterton for speaking of his “narrow, Puritan home.” A little incident may serve to reflect the tone of the heated religious controversies that went on in Mr. Shaw's home when he was a lad. Shaw's father, one of his maternal uncles, and a visitor engaged one day in a discussion over the raising of Lazarus. Mr. Shaw held the evangelical view: that it took place exactly as described. The visitor was a pure sceptic, and dismissed the story as manifestly impossible. But Shaw's uncle described it as a put-up job, in which Jesus had made a confederate of Lazarus—had made it worth his while, or asked him for friendship's sake to pretend he was dead and at the proper moment to pretend to come to life. “Now imagine me as a little child,” said Shaw in narrating the story, “in my 'narrow, Puritan home,' listening to this discussion. I listened with very great interest, and I confess to you that the view which recommended itself most to me was that of my maternal uncle, and I think, on reflection, you will admit that that was the right and healthy point of view for a boy to take, because my maternal uncle's view appealed to a sense of humour, which is a very good thing and a very human thing, whereas the other two views—one appealing to my mere credulity and the other to mere scepticism—really did not appeal to anything at all that had any genuine religious value.... Now that was really the tone of religious controversy at that time, and it almost always showed us the barrenness on the side of religion very much more than it did on the side of scepticism.” This anecdote brings irresistibly to mind Mark Twain's story of the old sea-captain who declared that Elijah had won out in the altar contest, not because of his superiority over the other prophets, or of his God to theirs, but because, under the pretence that it was water, he had had the foresight to inundate his altar with—petroleum!

A short while after he entered a land office in Dublin as an employee, a position secured for him by his uncle, Frederick Shaw, a high official in the Valuation Office, it was discovered that the young Shaw, then in his teens, instead of being an extremely correct Protestant and church-goer, was actually what used to be known in those days as an “infidel.” Many were the arguments, on the subject of religion and faith, that arose among the employees of the firm, arguments that usually went hard for young Shaw, the novice, untrained in dialectic. “What is the use of arguing,” one of the apprentices, Humphrey Lloyd, said to Shaw one day, “when you don't know what a syllogism is?” As he once told me, Mr. Shaw promptly went and found out what it was, learning, like Molière's hero, that he had been making syllogisms all his life without knowing it. Mr. Uniacke Townshend, Shaw's employer, a pillar of the church—and of the Royal Dublin Society—so far respected his freedom of conscience as to make no attempt to reason with him, only imposing the condition that the subject be not discussed in the office. Although secretly chafing under the restraint, young Shaw for a time honourably submitted to the stern limitation; but an outbreak of some sort was inevitable. The immediate occasion of his first alarming appearance in print was the visit of the American evangelists, Moody and Sankey, to Dublin. Their arrival in Great Britain created a considerable sensation, and young Shaw went to hear them when they came to Dublin. Not only was he wholly unmoved by their eloquence, but he actually felt bound to inform the public that, if this were Religion, then he was, on the whole, an Atheist. Imagine the extreme horror of his numerous uncles when they read his letter, solemnly printed in Public Opinion.[1] These evangelistic services, he maintained, “were not of a religious, but a secular, not to say profane, character.” Further, he said: “Respecting the effect of the revival on individuals I may mention that it has a tendency to make them highly objectionable members of society, and induces their unconverted friends to desire a speedy reaction, which either soon takes place or the revived one relapses slowly into his previous benighted condition as the effect fades; and although many young men have been snatched from careers of dissipation by Mr. Moody's exhortations, it remains doubtful whether the change is not merely in the nature of the excitement rather than in the moral nature of the individual.”

The complete story of his “honest doubts,” and his conscientious revolt against the hollowness and inhuman frigidity of the religion he saw practised around him, he has related in the most ludicrously irreverent vein:

“When I was a little boy, I was compelled to go to church 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 afterwards. Every separate stone, every pane of glass, every fillet of ornamental ironwork—half dog-collar, half-coronet—in that building must have sowed a separate evil passion in my young heart. Yes; all the vulgarity, savagery, and bad blood which has marred my literary work, was certainly laid upon me in that house of Satan! The mere nullity of the building could make no positive impression on me; but what could, and did, were the unnaturally motionless figures of the congregation in their Sunday clothes and bonnets, and their set faces, pale with the malignant rigidity produced by the suppression of all expression. And yet these people were always moving and watching one another by stealth, as convicts communicate with one another. So was I. I had been told to keep my restless little limbs still all through the interminable hours; not to talk; and, above all, to be happy and holy there and glad that I was not a wicked little boy playing in the fields instead of worshipping God. I hypocritically acquiesced; but the state of my conscience may be imagined, especially as I implicitly believed that all the rest of the congregation were perfectly sincere and good. I remember at the time dreaming one night that I was dead and had gone to Heaven. The picture of Heaven which the efforts of the then Established Church of Ireland had conveyed to my childish imagination, was a waiting-room with walls of pale sky-coloured tabbinet, and a pew-like bench running all round, except at one corner, where there was a door. I was, somehow, aware that God was in the next room, accessible through the door. I was seated on the bench with my ankles tightly interlaced to prevent my legs dangling, behaving myself with all my might before the grown-up people, who all belonged to the Sunday congregation, and were either sitting on the bench as if at church or else moving solemnly in and out as if there were a dead person in the house. A grimly-handsome lady, who usually sat in a corner seat near me in church, and whom I believed to be thoroughly conversant with the arrangements of the Almighty, was to introduce me presently into the next room—a moment which I was supposed to await with joy and enthusiasm. Really, of course, my heart sank like lead within me at the thought; for I felt that my feeble affectation of piety could not impose on Omniscience, and that one glance of that all-searching eye would discover that I had been allowed to come to Heaven by mistake. Unfortunately for the interest of the narrative, I woke, or wandered off into another dream, before the critical moment arrived. But it goes far enough to show that I was by no means an insusceptible subject; indeed, I am sure, from other early experiences of mine, that if I had been turned loose in a real church, and allowed to wander and stare about, or hear noble music there instead of that most accursed 'Te Deum' of Jackson's and a senseless droning of the 'Old Hundredth,' I should never have seized the opportunity of a great evangelical revival, which occurred to me when I was still in my teens, to begin my literary career with a letter to the Press, announcing with inflexible materialistic logic, and to the extreme horror of my respectable connections, that I was an atheist. When, later on, I was led to the study of the economic basis of the respectability of that and similar congregations, I was inexpressibly relieved to find that it represented a mere phase of industrial confusion, and could never have substantiated its claims to my respect, if, as a child, I had been able to bring it to book. To this very day, whenever there is the slightest danger of my being mistaken for a votary of the blue tabbinet waiting-room or a supporter of that morality in which wrong and right, base and noble, evil and good, really mean nothing more than the kitchen and the drawing-room, I hasten to claim honourable exemption, as atheist and socialist, from any such complicity.”[2]

The lesson of the selfishness and insincerity of society ineradicably impressed upon Ibsen's mind in his childhood days is paralleled by a similar experience in the youth of Shaw. The ingrained snobbery of society as he saw it, the contempt for those lower in social pretensions, if not in social station, revolted the lad's whole nature. He soon became animated with a Carlylean contempt for the snobbery of “respectability in its thousand gigs.” As in the case of the disconsolate Stendhal, Shaw was not long in discovering that his family revered what he despised, and detested what he enthusiastically admired. An incident he relates, in illustration of this trait in his father, serves in great measure to explain Shaw's scorn, in after life, of the blandishments of the drawing-room, his intolerance of fashionable society.

“One evening I was playing on the street with a schoolfellow of mine, when my father came home. He questioned me about this boy, who was the son of a prosperous ironmonger. The feelings of my father, who was not prosperous and who sold flour by the sack, when he learned that his son had played on the public street with the son of a man who sold nails by the pennyworth in a shop are not to be described. He impressed on me that my honour, my self-respect, my human dignity, all stood upon my determination not to associate with persons engaged in retail trade. Probably this was the worst crime my father ever committed. And yet I do not see what else he could have taught me, short of genuine republicanism, which is the only possible school of good manners.

“Imagine being taught to despise a workman, and to respect a gentleman, in a country where every rag of excuse for gentility is stripped off by poverty! Imagine being taught that there is one God—a Protestant and a perfect gentleman—keeping Heaven select for the gentry; and an idolatrous impostor called the Pope, smoothing the hell-ward way for the mass of the people, only admissible into the kitchens of most of the aforesaid gentry as 'thorough servants' (general servants) at eight pounds a year! Imagine the pretensions of the English peerage on the incomes of the English lower middle-class. I remember Stopford Brooke one day telling me that he discerned in my books an intense and contemptuous hatred for society. No wonder! though, like him, I strongly demur to the usurpation of the word 'society' by an unsocial system of setting class against class and creed against creed.”[3]

As to education, in the ordinary sense, the lad had none: he never learned anything at school. He found no incentive to study under the tutelage of people who put Cæsar and Horace into the hands of small boys and expected the result to be an elegant taste and knowledge of the world. His first teacher was his uncle, the Rev. William George Carroll, Vicar of St. Bride's, Dublin—reputed the first Protestant clergyman in Ireland to declare for Home Rule. We have one brief but comprehensive glimpse of his school life at this period of immaturity: “The word education brought to my mind four successive schools where my parents got me out of the way for half a day. In these crèches—for that is exactly what they were—I learned nothing. How I could have been such a sheep as to go to them, when I could just as easily have flatly refused, puzzles and exasperates me to this day. They did me a great deal of harm, and no good whatever. However, my parents thought I ought to go, being too young to have any confidence in my own instincts. So I went. And if you can in any public way convey to these idiotic institutions my hearty curse, you will relieve my feelings infinitely.... As a schoolboy I was incorrigibly idle and worthless. And I am proud of the fact.” In the preface to John Bull's Other Island, Shaw has referred in particular to the Wesleyan Connexional School, now Wesley College, Dublin. Here the Wesleyan catechism was taught without protest to pupils, the majority of whom were Church (Protestant Irish) boys! So long as their sons were taught genuine Protestantism, the parents didn't bother about the particular brand. The school's most famous alumni are Sir Robert Hart and Bernard Shaw. In the school roll-book Shaw is entered for the first time as attending on April 13th, 1867. Unfortunately, only a bare record of his class marks is given. “He seems to have been generally near or at the bottom of his classes,” said the principal, the Rev. William Crawford, in a letter to me of date August 6th, 1909; “but, perhaps typically of the man, he jumped up suddenly to second place once in his first quarter, and does not seem to have aspired again. He was entered in the 'First Latin Class,' I suppose the most junior division on the classical side.” Shaw sat in class between a classic and a mathematician, both in after years distinguished scholars. Each did his appropriate share of young Shaw's work. In return Shaw would narrate for their delectation, according to the account of one of the twain, numerous stories from the Iliad and Odyssey, in his own peculiar and inimitable vein. Shaw was only in his tenth year when he entered the Wesleyan Connexional School; and in that year Dr. H. R. Parker, of Trinity College, Dublin, was head master and Rev. T. A. McKee was governor. Apparently, no picture of the old school now exists; the new building stands near, but not on, the site of the old school.[4]

It might be imagined, from the evidence of Shaw's own confessions just detailed, that it was impossible for a boy who “took refuge in idleness” at school to acquire any sort of an education; but such a supposition is very wide of the mark. The discipline he received at home, the discipline of laissez faire et laissez aller, which might have spoiled the average boy, had just the opposite effect upon this strangely inquisitive, alarmingly self-assertive child. If he lost somewhat in youthful gentleness and tenderness, he gained greatly in manly determination and independence. If he was never treated as a child, at least he was let do what he liked. Thus the habit of freedom, which, as he once assured me, most Englishmen and Englishwomen of his class never acquire, came to him naturally.

One might say of Shaw's mother that she was the antithesis of Candida on the domestic plane. In many respects she was a forerunner of the “new woman” of our own day—independent, self-reliant, indifferent to public opinion. She was, in her son's phrase, “constitutionally unfitted for the sentiment of wifehood and motherhood”; her genuine energy and talents were bestowed almost undividedly upon music. Not long after her marriage to Mr. Shaw, she became the right hand of an energetic genius, who had formed a musical society and an orchestra in Dublin. These organizations were composed wholly of amateurs—and unavoidably so—in view of the state of musical activity in Dublin at the time. By all the local professors of music this energetic genius and man of successful ambitions, George John Vandaleur Lee, was held in the greatest contempt, even hatred, because he had repudiated their traditions, and thereby actually trained himself to become an effective teacher of singing. Through actual dissection, as well as by practical singing, he studied the anatomy of the throat until he was able, by watching and hearing a singer, to state with certainty the exact nature of the physical processes going on. From Badeali, an Italian opera singer, who preserved a splendid voice to a great age, he learned the secret of voice preservation. This method he taught to Mrs. Shaw so successfully that when she gave up singing, late in life, it was not because her voice failed her, but because her age made singing ridiculous.[5]

Lee's twofold influence upon the young Shaw—indirectly through Mrs. Shaw's musical activities, and directly through the inspiration of his personal character, one of phenomenal competence and unswerving determination—is very markedly visible in the Shaw of after years, the brilliant musical critic and the doggedly persistent seeker after worthy success and merited fame. Mrs. Shaw studied singing under Lee, and thorough bass under Logier. She assisted Lee in all his various and varied enterprises, copying orchestral parts and scoring songs for him. She led the chorus for him at the musical society; and at different times she appeared in operas produced and directed by Lee, playing Azucena in Il Trovatore, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Margaret in Gounod's Faust, and Lucrezia Borgia in Donizetti's opera of that name. Finally, in order to facilitate matters, Mrs. Shaw kept house for Lee by setting up a joint household, a sort of “blameless ménage à trois”—the phrase her son used in speaking of it to me—which lasted until 1872, the year of Lee's departure for London.

As all these operas were rehearsed at his home, it was only natural that Bernard Shaw should pick up, quite unconsciously, indeed, a knowledge of that extraordinary literature of modern music, from Bach to Wagner, with which his mother and Lee were so familiar. While he was yet a small boy, he whistled and sang, from the first bar to the last, not only the operas he frequently heard, but also the many oratorios rendered from time to time by the musical society. Indeed, Mr. Shaw once remarked that, besides their respectability, the chief merit of his family was a remarkable aptitude for playing all sorts of wind instruments by ear, even his father playing “Home, Sweet Home” upon the flute. Before he was fifteen, Bernard Shaw knew at least one important work by Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Gounod from cover to cover. Not only did he whistle the themes to himself as a street boy whistles music-hall songs, but he also sang incessantly, to himself and for himself, opera and oratorio, in an “absurd gibberish which was Italian picked up by ear—and Irish Italian at that.” No one ever taught him music in his youth, but when he grew up, although he had a very indifferent voice, he took some singing lessons under his mother. At first, he found that he could not make a rightly produced sound that was audible two yards off. But he learned readily, under the competent instruction of his mother, and now his voice, “a commonplace baritone of the most ordinary range, B flat to F, and French pitch preferred for the F,” is distinguished rather by audibility than in any other respect. It is noteworthy that the lessons he learned from his mother—the secrets of breathing and enunciation—proved of incalculable value to him afterwards on the platform, in the strenuous days of his dialectical warfare.

Reproduced from a copy, by Bernard Shaw, of the original
photograph by Richard Pigott, forger of the Parnell letters. Taken in 1863.

Although Bernard Shaw idled away his time at school, the very real education he received through other broader and deeper channels has since saved him, he stoutly maintains, from being “at the smallest disadvantage with men who only know the grammar and mispronunciation of the Greek and Latin poets and philosophers.” The other great motor of educational influence in his youth was the National Gallery of Ireland; to that cherished asylum, which he haunted in the days of his youth, he has often expressed his unmeasured gratitude. Whenever he had any money, he bought volumes of the Bohn translation of Vasari; and at fifteen he knew enough of a considerable number of Italian and Flemish painters to recognize their work at sight. His communion with the masterpieces preserved in the Dublin Gallery was so solitary that he was once driven to say, with comically extravagant egoism, that he believed he was the only Irishman, except the officials, who had ever been there. This acquaintance with art and the history of art “did more for him,” he once asserted, than the two cathedrals in Dublin so magnificently “restored” out of the profits of the drink trade. I think we must conclude, with the ever modest autobiographer, that, thanks to communism in pictures, he was really a very highly educated boy.

Through lack of means, the Shaws were unable to give their son a university education; perhaps no regret need be felt on this score, since it is not unlikely, in view of his attitude towards a university education, that he would have taken refuge in idleness at Oxford, Cambridge, or Dublin, just as he had done at the schools he had already attended. Unlike his future colleagues in dramatic criticism, William Archer and Arthur Bingham Walkley, graduates of Edinburgh and Oxford respectively, Shaw despised, half ignorantly, half penetratingly, the thought of a university education, for it seemed to him to turn out men who all thought alike and were snobs. So in 1871, at the age of fifteen, he entered the office of an Irish land agent, Mr. Charles Uniacke Townshend, and remained there until March, 1876. Perhaps the Ibsenite, the Nietzschean of after years was thus beginning a course of preliminary training: Henri Beyle used to say that to have been a banker was to have gone through the best preparatory school for philosophy. During this period Bernard Shaw lived in lodgings in Dublin with his father, who had by this time given up that furtive drinking, of which his son in after life spoke with such frank levity. The lad's salary at first was eighteen pounds a year, his position that of junior clerk. He had no fondness for his work, and took no interest in land agency; nevertheless, he made a very satisfactory clerk. At the end of about a year, a sudden vacancy occurred in the most active post in the office, that of cashier. As this involved a sort of miniature banking business for the clients, and the daily receipt and payment of all sorts of rents, interests, insurances, private allowances and so on, it was a comparatively busy post, and a position of trust besides. The junior clerk was temporarily called upon to fill the sudden vacancy pending the engagement of a new cashier of greater age and experience. He performed his numerous duties so successfully that the engagement of the new man was first delayed and then dropped. The child of fifteen, laboriously and successfully struggling to change his sloped, straggly, weak-minded handwriting into a fair imitation of his predecessor's, is father of the man of forty, carefully drawing up elaborate contracts with theatre managers, who never kept them. By this initial exhibition of enterprise, young Shaw's salary, now twenty-four pounds a year, was doubled, which meant a considerable step ahead. The clear-cut chirography of the Shaw of to-day and the neatness of arrangement so noticeable in his apartments at Adelphi Terrace are the results of his early training; indeed, he was a remarkably correct cashier and accountant, as one of Mr. Shaw's colleagues in the office once told me. While he was always ignorant of the state of his own finances, and to-day troubles little about his personal accounts, he was never a farthing out in his accounts at the office.

Land agency in Ireland was, and is still, a socially pretentious business. Although the position Shaw held was regarded as a very genteel sort of post, yet to him this was no gratification, but quite the reverse. It was saturated with a class feeling for which, even at that time, he had an intense loathing. The position carried with it, nevertheless, certain obvious advantages. It secured for him the society of a set of so-called apprentices, who were, in fact, idle young gentlemen who had paid a big premium to be taught a genteel profession. Though the premium was not paid to Shaw, still he took delight in teaching his co-workers various operatic scenas, which were occasionally in full swing when the principal or a customer would enter the office unexpectedly. On one occasion, Mr. Shaw once told me gleefully, a certain apprentice sang: “Ah, che la morte” in his tower—standing on the washstand with his head appearing over a tall screen—with such feeling and such obliviousness to all external events, that the whole office force was suddenly struck busy and silent by the arrival of Mr. Townshend, the senior partner, who stared, stupended, at the bleating countenance above the screen and finally fled upstairs, completely beaten by the situation. The young clerk thus found plenty of fun and diversion in his association with young men of culture and education; this did not make him hate his work any the less. His natural antipathy to respectability asserted itself very early in his career: he once said that land agency was too respectable for him. Moreover, the enforced repression concerning his religious beliefs bred in him a spirit of discontent and revolt. Although he realized that silence on the subject was undoubtedly an indispensable condition of sociability among people who disagreed strongly on such a matter, yet he chafed under the restraint. To such a restraint he felt he could never permanently submit. This incident alone would have had the ultimate effect of making him a bad employee. Fortunately for the world, it put land agency and business as a serious career out of the question for him. The author of Widowers' Houses collecting rents as a lifelong profession is a ludicrous, an incredible incongruity. Shaw retained his place simply for the sake of financial independence. When he gave up his position, his employer was sorry to lose him, and, at the request of Shaw's father, readily gave him a handsome testimonial. In speaking of the circumstance one day, Mr. Shaw told me that he was furious that such a demand should have been made. Nothing could have shown more clearly his distaste for the position he held. “Once or twice,” commented Mr. Shaw, “my employer showed himself puzzled and annoyed when some accident lifted the veil for a moment and gave him a glimpse of the fact that his excellent and pecuniarily incorruptible clerk's mind and interest and even intelligence were ten thousand leagues away, in a region foreign, if not hostile.” Surely this was another age of “inspired office boys.”[6]

In 1872, Mr. Lee left Dublin for London, the joint household broke up, and all musical activity ceased. The return to a single household on Mr. Shaw's income was all but impossible, for his affairs were as unprosperous as ever. At this time there was even some question of Bernard Shaw's two sisters becoming professional singers. With characteristic energy and decisiveness, Mrs. Shaw boldly cut the Gordian knot by going to London and becoming a professional teacher of singing. This domestic débâcle robbed young Shaw of his mother's influence, which was always stimulating and inspiring, if somewhat indirectly and impersonally so. It deprived him also of music, which, up to that time, had been his daily food. This sudden deprivation of the solace of music came to him as a distinct surprise. He had never dreamed of such a contingency. Fortunately the piano remained. Although he had never until then touched it except to pick out a tune with one finger, he now set to work in earnest to learn the art of piano playing. It was in a spirit of desperation that he went out and bought a technical handbook of music, containing a diagram of the keyboard. No finger exercises, no études de vélocité for Shaw: he at once got out Don Giovanni and tried to play the overture! It took him ten minutes to arrange his fingers on the notes of the first chord. “What I suffered, what everybody in the house suffered, whilst I struggled on, labouring through arrangements of Beethoven's symphonies, of Tannhäuser, and of all the operas and oratorios I knew, will never be told.” It was in vain now, he said, merely to sing: “my native wood-notes wild—just then breaking frightfully—could not satisfy my intense craving for the harmony which is the emotional substance of music, and for the rhythmic figures of accompaniment which are its action and movement. I had only a single splintering voice, and I wanted an orchestra.” This musical starvation it was that drove him to the piano in disregard of the rights of his fellow-lodgers.

“At the end of some months I had acquired a technique of my own, as a sample of which I may offer my fingering of the scale of C major. Instead of shifting my hand by turning the thumb under and fingering

C D E F G A B C
———————-
1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5

I passed my fourth finger over my fifth, and played

C D E F G A B C
———————-
1 2 3 4 5 4 5 4.

This method has the advantage of being applicable to all scales, diatonic or chromatic, and to this day I often fall back on it. Liszt and Chopin hit on it too, but they never used it to the extent I did. I soon acquired a terrible power of stumbling through pianoforte arrangements and vocal scores; and my reward was that I gained penetrating experiences of Victor Hugo and Schiller from Donizetti, Verdi, and Beethoven; of the Bible from Handel; of Goethe from Schumann; of Beaumarchais and Molière from Mozart; and of Merimée from Bizet, besides finding in Berlioz an unconscious interpreter of Edgar Allan Poe. When I was in the schoolboy adventure vein, I could range from Vincent Wallace to Meyerbeer; and if I felt piously and genteelly sentimental, I, who could not stand the pictures of Ary Scheffer or the genteel suburban sentiment of Tennyson and Longfellow, could become quite maudlin over Mendelssohn and Gounod. And, as I searched all the music I came across for the sake of its poetic or dramatic content, and played the pages in which I found poetry or drama over and over again, whilst I never returned to those in which the music was trying to exist ornamentally for its own sake and had no real content at all, it soon followed that when I came across the consciously perfect art work in the music dramas of Wagner, I ran no risk of hopelessly misunderstanding it as the academic musicians did. Indeed, I soon found that they equally misunderstood Mozart and Beethoven, though, having come to like their tunes and harmonies, and to understand their mere carpentry, they pointed out what they supposed to be their merits with an erroneousness far more fatal to their unfortunate pupils than the volley of half-bricks with which they greeted Wagner (who, it must be confessed, retaliated with a volley of whole ones fearfully well aimed).”[7]

Although he did a good deal of accompanying, especially in the days of his intimacy with the Salt family, he never really mastered the instrument. Once, in a desperate emergency, he supplied the place of the absent half of the orchestra at a performance of Il Trovatore at a People's Entertainment evening at the Victoria Theatre—and, luckily, came off without disaster. To-day he goes to his little Bechstein piano, a relic of the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and fearlessly attacks any opera or symphony. He is his own Melba, his own Plançon, too, thanks, as his wife pathetically explains, to “a remarkable power of making the most extraordinary noises with his throat.” He even revels in the pianola! And I have shared his enjoyment in his own rendition of a Chopin nocturne upon that remarkable mechanical toy.

Bernard Shaw would have been a model young man at the desk but for the fact that, like Nathaniel Hawthorne at the Boston Custom House, like Ibsen at the apothecary's shop in Grimstad, his heart was not in the thing. “I never made a payment,” he once frankly confessed to me, “without a hope or even a half resolve that I should never have to make it again. In spite of which, I was so wanting in enterprise and so shy and helpless in worldly matters (though I believe I had the air of being quite the reverse), that six months later I found myself making the payment again.”

There gradually came to him a consciousness of the futility of his life, the consciousness of one who has been freed of illusion. In this young boy was none of the soft-blarney, the winning and dulcet melancholy, of the proverbial Irishman. He escaped that mystic influence of Roman Catholicism, which produces the phantast, the dreamer and the saint. Calvinism had taught him that “once a man is born it is too late to save him or damn him; you may 'educate' him and 'form his character' until you are black in the face; he is predestinate, and his soul cannot be changed any more than a silk purse can be changed into a sow's ear.” In the atmosphere of the Island of the Saints—“that most mystical of all mystical things”—he learned to realize the barrenness of all else in comparison with the supreme importance of realizing the purpose of his existence on this earth.

Hence it was that his work and position finally became unbearably irksome, unendurable. London imperatively beckoned to him. That way, perhaps, lay freedom from the obsession of hated respectability, freedom from repression of his convictions, freedom for self-development and spiritual expansion. At the age of twenty, this raw Irish lad, wholly ignorant of the great world, walked out of his office, and threw himself recklessly into London. There, immediately after the death of his sister Agnes in the Isle of Wight, in 1876, he joined his mother in la lutte pour la vie.[8] There he was to set the crystalline intellectual clarity, the philosophic consciousness of the brilliant Celt, into sharp juxtaposition with the plodding practicality, the dogged energy of the complacent Briton. There he was to find the arena for his championship of those advanced movements in art, music, literature and politics, which give significance and character to the closing quarter of the nineteenth century.

In these early years we may discern in Shaw the gradual birth of the social consciousness, the slow unfolding of deep-rooted impulses toward individualism and self-expression. Like other boys of his day and time, Shaw melted lead on Holieve, hid rings in pancakes, and indulged in the conventional mummeries of Christmas. But to him these were dreary, silly diversions, against which his nature rebelled. He once refused to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday—for the very good reason that he had never celebrated his own. In the conventional sense, he was never “reared” at all: he simply “grew up wild.” No effort was made to form his character: he developed from within, strangely aloof in spirit from the healthy gaieties of the normal lad. Thus was bred in him, even at an early age, a sort of premature asceticism which left its indelible mark upon his character. The puritanic convictions which have animated his entire life find their origin in the half-instinctive, half-enforced aloofness of his childhood days.

Shaw was not brought up, as we might expect, a Nonconformist; he was a member of the Irish Protestant Church. He rebelled against the inhuman repression, the meaningless ritualism of his church; but the influences of his home, nevertheless, left their impress upon his nature. His whole long life is an outcry of soaring individualism against repressive authority; and yet the puritan intensity in condemnation of self-indulgence, the ascetic revolt from alcoholism, speaks forth unmistakably in the humanitarian, the vegetarian, the teetotaller of a later epoch.

The ingrained and constitutional protestantism of his forbears found expression in his boyish, yet rigorously atheistic protest against the religion of Moody and Sankey. In this audacious protest we can scarcely expect to find any sort of matured conviction; it is the first bold denial of his life. Thus early we observe the workings of polemic, of criticism and analysis—before he had ever left Irish soil. Even then, I fancy, he felt faint stirrings of a deeper religious protestant faith. In that protest, we may discern a forecast of the Plays for Puritans and The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet.

Thrown upon his own resources, sharing with his fellows none of the wholesome and joyous foolhardiness of youth, he developed a maturity of judgment, a detachment in observation, out of all proportion to his years. His puritanism expressed itself in silent condemnation of the social self-righteousness he saw around him, the distinctions so sharply drawn on lines, not of individual worth, but of social station and respectability. That arresting passage in Man and Superman in which he describes the birth of the social passion is a piece of spiritual autobiography: it changed the child into the man. There was already at work within him the leaven of the later social revolution of our own day. Intensity of political conviction was a family tradition and heritage. In the eighteenth century a Shaw had been leader of the “Orangemen”; and in the nineteenth century one of Shaw's uncles was the first Protestant priest in Ireland who, contrary to the convictions of his companions in creed, declared himself in favour of Home Rule. By heritage, by environment, by temperament, Bernard Shaw was destined to display throughout his life that intensity of political conviction, that depth of humanitarian concern, that passion for social service which will for ever remain associated with his name.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This letter, signed “S,” appeared in Public Opinion on April 3d, 1875. It is a criticism of the methods adopted by Messrs. Moody and Sankey, and an attempt to show that the enormous audiences drawn to the evangelistic services were not proof of their efficacy. Shaw then proceeds to explain the motives which induced many people to attend, predominant among them being “the curiosity excited by the great reputation of the evangelists and the stories, widely circulated, of the summary annihilation by epilepsy and otherwise of sceptics who had openly proclaimed their doubts of Mr. Moody's divine mission.” This letter has been reprinted in Public Opinion, November 8th, 1907.

In his monograph on Shaw (pp. 42-3), Mr. Holbrook Jackson has pointed out that this was not Shaw's first bid for publicity. In the Vaudeville Magazine of September, 1871, there appeared among the Editorial Replies the following: “G. B. Shaw, Torca Cottage, Torca Hill, Dalkey, Co. Dublin, Ireland.—You should have registered your letter; such a combination of wit and satire ought not to have been conveyed at the ordinary rate of postage. As it was, your arguments were so weighty, we had to pay twopence extra for them.”

[2] On Going to Church. This essay appeared originally in the Savoy Magazine, January, 1896; it is now published in book form by John W. Luce and Co., Boston, Mass.

[3] In the Days of My Youth. By Bernard Shaw. Mainly About People, 1898.

[4] Compare Jubilee of Wesley College, Dublin, December, 1895—being a special number of the Wesley College Quarterly.

[5] Lee continued steadily to advance in his profession, becoming successively music-teacher, opera-conductor, festival conductor, and finally fashionable teacher of singing in Park Lane, London. He accomplished everything that he undertook, even conducting a Handel Festival in Dublin, participated in by Tietjens, Agnesi, and other leading singers of the day. For several years he enjoyed great popularity in London as a teacher of music. When he died, quite suddenly, at his home in Park Lane, it was discovered, Shaw afterwards remarked, that he had exhausted his stock of health in his Dublin period, and that the days of his vanity in London were days of progressive decay.

[6] In speaking of his apprenticeship as a clerk in the land office, Shaw declares: “I should have been there still if I had not broken loose in defiance of all prudence, and become a professional man of genius—a resource not open to every clerk. I mention this to show that the fact that I am not still a clerk may be regarded for the purposes of this article as a mere accident. I am not one of those successful men who can say, Why don't you do as I do?'”—From Bernard Shaw as a Clerk. By Himself in The Clerk, January, 1908.

[7] The Religion of the Pianoforte, in the Fortnightly Review, February, 1894.

[8] Mr. Shaw's other sister, Miss Lucy Carr Shaw, was the immediate cause of her mother's settling in London. She became a professional singer, and, later, a writer. Her best known book is entitled Five Letters of the House of Kildonnel.

LONDON

“My destiny was to educate London, but I had neither studied my pupil nor related my ideas properly to the common stock of human knowledge.”—George Bernard Shaw: an Interview, in The Chap-Book, November, 1896.

CHAPTER II

“When did you first feel inclined to write?” Shaw was once asked. “I never felt inclined to write, any more than I ever felt inclined to breathe,” was his perverse reply. “I felt inclined to draw: Michelangelo was my boyish ideal. I felt inclined to be a wicked baritone in an opera when I grew out of my earlier impulse towards piracy and highway robbery. You see, as I couldn't draw, I was perfectly well aware that drawing was an exceptional gift. But it never occurred to me that my literary sense was exceptional. I gave the whole world credit for it. The fact is, there is nothing miraculous, nothing particularly interesting, even, in a natural faculty to the man who has it. The amateur, the collector, the enthusiast in an art, is the man who lacks the faculty for producing it. The Venetian wants to be a cavalry soldier; the Gaucho wants to be a sailor; the fish wants to fly, and the bird to swim. No, I never wanted to write. I know now, of course, the value and the scarcity of the literary faculty (though I think it over-rated); but I still don't want it.” And he added: “You cannot want a thing and have it, too.”

That Shaw did want to write, however, is clearly shown by the early outpourings of the artistic mood in the imaginative boy. When he was quite small, he concocted a short story and sent it to some boys' journal—something about a man with a gun attacking another man in the Glen of the Doons. In after years, spiritual adventures fired his soul; at this time, the gun was the centre of interest. The mimetic instinct of childhood in his case, however, found incentives to the development of almost every artistic faculty other than writing. His hours spent in the National Gallery of Ireland, his study of the literature of Italian art, filled him with the desire to be another Michelangelo; but he couldn't draw. Like Browning, Shaw wished to be an artist, and, like Browning also, he wished to be a musician. He heard music from the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same; he knew whole operas and oratorios. He wanted to be a musician, but couldn't play; to be a dramatic singer, but had no voice. The facile conqueror of every literary domain, mocked in later life with the accusation of being a sort of literary Jack-of-all-trades, was only puzzled as a youth to discover in himself a single promising potentiality.

A casual remark of an acquaintance first startled Shaw, then in his teens, into recognition of the fact that he lacked any sort of final consciousness in regard to his own position and destiny. The apprentice in the land agency office, eight or ten years Shaw's senior, who sang, “Ah, che la morte” with such deadly effect, one day happened to observe that every young fellow thinks that he is going to be a great man until he is twenty. “The shock that this gave me,” Mr. Shaw once confessed to me with perfect naïveté, “made me suddenly aware that this was my own precise intention. But a very brief consideration reassured me—why, I don't know; for I could do nothing that gave me the smallest hope of making good my calm classification of myself as one of the world to which Shelley and Mozart and Praxiteles and Michelangelo belonged, and as totally foreign to the plane on which land agents laboured.”

In Cashel Byron's Profession, the hero, a prize-fighter, remarks that it is not what a man would like to do, but what he can do, that he must work at in this world. Naturally enough, Bernard Shaw, the young lad in his teens, had not yet come to any sort of artistic self-consciousness. Shaw may be said to have spent half of his life in the search for the Ultima Thule of what he could do. And it is by no means certain, judging from the lesson of his career, that he has yet discovered all of his capabilities. Certain it is that, at this formative stage in his career, he had found only one: the ability to keep—not to write—books. Mr. Shaw once pictured for me his state of dejection at this time over his inefficiency and incompetence. “What was wrong with me then was the want of self-respect, the diffidence, the cowardice of the ignoramus and the duffer. What saved me was my consciousness that I must learn to do something—that nothing but the possession of skill, of efficiency, of mastery, in short, was of any use. The sort of aplomb which my cousins seemed to derive from the consciousness that their great-great-grandfather had also been the great-great-grandfather of Sir Robert Shaw, of Bushy Park, was denied to me. You cannot be imposed on by remote baronets if you belong to the republic of art. I was chronically ashamed and even miserable simply because I couldn't do anything. It is true that I could keep Mr. Townshend's cash, and that I never dreamt of stealing it; and riper years have made me aware that many of my artistic feats may be less highly estimated in the books of the Recording Angel than this prosaic achievement; but at this time it counted for less than nothing. It was a qualification for what I hated; and the notion of my principal actually giving me a testimonial to my efficiency as a cashier drove me to an exhibition of rage that must have seemed merely perverse to my unfortunate father.”

In these days of inarticulate revolt against current religious and social ideals, Shaw somehow found an outlet for that seething lava of his spirit, which was one day to burst forth with such alarming effect. This, Shaw's first published work, was the forthright letter in Public Opinion, in which he sought to stem the force of the first great Moody and Sankey revival by the announcement that he, personally, had renounced religion as a delusion! Besides this single public vent for his insurgency, he had found, in the friendship of a kindred spirit of imaginative temperament, the opportunity for the expression of all the doubts, hopes and aspirations of his eager and revolutionary intelligence. With one of his schoolfellows, Shaw struck up a curious friendship: this young fellow, Edward McNulty, was afterwards known as the author of Misther O'Ryan, The Son of a Peasant, and Maureen,[9] three very original and very remarkable novels of Irish life. Both boys possessed imaginative temperaments, and their association gave promise of ripening into close and lasting friendship. But circumstances separated them so effectually that, after their schooldays, they saw very little of each other. McNulty was an official in the Bank of Ireland, and had been drafted to the Newry branch of the institution, while Shaw, as we know, was in Mr. Townshend's land office in Dublin. During the period of their separation, between Shaw's fifteenth and twentieth years, they kept up a tremendous correspondence. In this way they probably worked off the literary energy which usually produces early works. The immense letters, sometimes illustrated with crude drawings and enlivened by brief dramas, which came and went with each post, served as “exhausts” for the superfluous steam of their literary force. It was understood between them that the letters were to be destroyed as soon as answered, as their authors did not relish the possibility of such unreserved soul histories falling into strange hands.

I believe that Shaw perpetrated one more long correspondence, this time with an unnamed English lady, whose fervently imaginative novels would have made her known, Shaw once asserted, had he been able to persuade her to make her name public, or at least to stick to the same pen name, instead of changing it for every book. Shaw also made one valuable acquaintance at this time through the accident of coming to lodge in the same house with him. This was Chichester Bell, of the family of that name distinguished for its inventive genius, a cousin of Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, and a nephew of Melville Bell, the inventor of the phonetic script known as Visible Speech. The author of the Standard Elocutionist, Chichester Bell's father, whom Shaw has described as by far the most majestic and imposing looking man that ever lived on this or any other planet, was the elocution professor in one of the schools attended by Shaw in his youth, the Wesleyan Connexional, now Wesley College, attendance at which, we may be sure from Shaw's case, by no means implied Methodism.[10] Although a qualified physician, Chichester Bell did not care for medical practice, and had gone to Germany, where he devoted himself to the study of chemistry and physics in the school of Helmholtz. Shaw's intercourse with Bell proved to be of great value to him. They studied Italian together, and while Shaw did not learn Italian with any final thoroughness, he learned a great deal else, chiefly about physics and pathology. It was through his association with Bell that he had come to read Tyndall and Trousseau's “Clinical Lectures.” But Bell is to be remembered chiefly in relation to Shaw, as first calling his serious attention to Wagner. When Shaw discovered that Bell, whose judgment he held in high regard, considered Wagner a great composer, he at once bought a vocal score of Lohengrin, which chanced to be the only sample to be had at the Dublin music shops. From this moment dates the career of the remarkable music critic, who, in after life, swept Max Nordau off the field with his brilliant and unanswerable defence of the master-builder of modern music. For the first few bars of Lohengrin completely converted him. He immediately became, and ever afterwards remained, the “Perfect Wagnerite.”

The days of Shaw's youth before he went to London, as we have seen, were poisoned because he was taught to bow down to proprietary respectability. But even in his “unfortunate childhood,” as he calls it, his heart was so unregenerate that he secretly hated, and rebelled against, mere respectability. In after life, he found it impossible to express the relief with which he discovered that his heart was all along right, and that the current respectability of to-day is “nothing but a huge inversion of righteous and scientific social order weltering in dishonesty, uselessness, selfishness, wanton misery, and idiotic waste of magnificent opportunity for noble and happy living.” Not the evangelist's but the true reformer's zeal was always Shaw's. He had too much insight not to recognize the futility of the effort to reform individuals; his humanitarian spirit was impersonal and found its freest manifestation in fulmination and revolt against social institutions. Concerning the unsocial system of setting class against class, and creed against creed, he has mordantly expressed himself:

“If I had not suffered from these things in my childhood, perhaps I could keep my temper about them. To an outsider there is nothing but comedy in the spectacle of a forlorn set of Protestant merchants in a Catholic country, led by a miniature plutocracy of stockholders, doctors and land agents, and flavoured by that section of the landed gentry who are too heavily mortgaged to escape to London, playing at being a court and an aristocracy with the assistance of the unfortunate exile who has been persuaded to accept the post of lord-lieutenant. To this pretence, involving a prodigious and continual lying, as to incomes and the social standing of relations, are sacrificed citizenship, self-respect, freedom of thought, sincerity of character, and all the realities of life, its votaries gaining in return the hostile estrangement of the great mass of their fellow countrymen, and in their own class the supercilious snubs of those who have outdone them in pretension and the jealous envy of those whom they have outdone.”

The power which he found in Ireland religious enough to redeem him from this abomination of desolation was, fitly enough, the power of art. “My mother, as it happened, had a considerable musical talent. In order to exercise it seriously she had to associate with other people who had musical talent. My first childish doubt as to whether God could really be a good Protestant was suggested by my observation of the deplorable fact that the best voices available for combination with my mother's in the works of the great composers had been unaccountably vouchsafed to Roman Catholics. Even the divine gentility was presently called in question, for some of these vocalists were undeniably connected with retail trade.”

The situation in which Mrs. Shaw found herself offered no alternative. “There was no help for it; if my mother was to do anything but sing silly ballads in drawing-rooms she had to associate herself on an entirely republican footing with people of like artistic gifts, without the smallest reference to creed or class. Nay, if she wished to take part in the masses of Haydn and Mozart, which had not then been forgotten, she must actually permit herself to be approached by Roman Catholic priests and even, at their invitation, to enter that house of Belial, the Roman Catholic chapel (in Ireland the word church, as applied to a place of worship, denotes the Protestant denomination), and take part in their services. All of which led directly to the discovery, hard to credit at first, that a Roman Catholic priest could be as agreeable and cultivated a person as a Protestant clergyman was supposed, in defiance of bitter experience, always to be; and, in short, that the notion that the courtly distinctions of Dublin society corresponded to any real human distinctions was as ignorant as it was pernicious. If religion is that which binds men to one another, and irreligion that which sunders, then must I testify that I found the religion of my country in its musical genius and its irreligion in its churches and drawing-rooms.”

It was unerring common sense on the domestic plane, acquiescence in the sole solution of a flinty problem of life, which reveals Shaw's mother to us as the parent from whom he derived his determination, and his firm grip on practical affairs. In marked contradistinction to Lee, Mrs. Shaw made no concessions to fashion, firmly adhering to her master's old method in all its rigour. She behaved with complete independence of manner and speech in the mode of an Irish lady confronted with English people openly describing themselves as “middle-class.” On account of this characteristic independence her first experiences in London were unfortunate and disheartening. Not until she began to teach choirs in schools did she enter upon the road of complete success. The results she produced in these undertakings so pleased the inspectors—and more particularly the parents at the prize distributions—that the head mistresses were sensible enough to let her go her own way. Quite a conclusive proof of her ability is found in the fact that this remarkable woman, vigorous and young-minded to-day although now in the seventies, worked at that famous modern institution, the North Collegiate School for Girls, until quite recently. For some years she sought to retire for the same reason that she stopped singing: to her Irish sense of humour there was an element almost of the ridiculous in a first-rate school having an old woman of between seventy and eighty wave a stick and conduct a choir. But D. Sophia Bryant, the principal and an old friend of hers, could not see her way to change for the better, and it was only within the last year or two that Mrs. Shaw retired from her post. No doubt Mrs. Bryant was right; for Mr. Shaw once remarked to me that it was not an easy matter to find a woman in England who perfectly combines the ability to take command in music with the knowledge of music as an artist, and not as a school-mistress who has superficially studied the subject for the sake of the certificates and the position.

Mr. Shaw's mother is the most remarkably youthful person for her years I have ever known, with the possible exception of Mark Twain. I remember with vivid pleasure taking tea with her and her son one afternoon at her attractive little “retreat” in West London. Her eyes danced with suppressed mirth as she talked, and it was quite easy to see from whom her son derived his strong sense of humour. Mrs. Shaw told several delightful stories, one of which deserves repetition here. It seems that Mrs. Shaw is quite a medium and spiritualist, and takes a great deal of interest in communicating with “spirits” from the other world. One day she “called up” Mr. Shaw's sister and asked her what she thought of George being such a distinguished man. The spirit expressed surprise to hear the news. “But aren't you very proud of George?” queried his mother disappointedly. “Oh, yes,” replied the spirit; “it's all very well in its way. But,” she added, “that sort of thing doesn't count for anything up here”!

Many of Mr. Shaw's very distinctive traits are a direct inheritance from his mother, modified, to be sure, by the differences in education, temperament and views of life. In her teaching of music, Mrs. Shaw deliberately displayed total insensibility to the petty dignities so cherished in English school-life. Upon visiting rectors, head mistresses, local “personages,” and, in fact, upon all those who wished things done their own way, she made what her son called “perfectly indiscriminate onslaughts.” This aggressive assertion of her authority would often have made her position untenable, had it not been for her patent ability and unquestioned power of leadership. Her outspoken frankness of manner and conduct, reproduced with such comically extravagant excess in her son, always won her the support of the discriminating: it was always the real “bigwigs” who understood her manners. Mr. Shaw once said: “From my mother I derive my brains and character, which do her credit.” I remember asking Mr. Shaw's mother one day to what she attributed her son's remarkable success in the world of letters. “Oh,” she said, without a moment's hesitation, her eyes twinkling merrily the while, “the answer is quite simple. Of course, he owes it all to me.”

To his parents, his mother in particular, Mr. Shaw is also indebted for actual financial support during several years of an able-bodied young manhood. But he has warned us against supposing, because he is a man of letters, that he never tried to commit that “sin against his nature” called earning an honest living. We have followed his struggles from his fifteenth to his twentieth year—a period marking a social and spiritual growth on his part, he maintains, of several centuries. “I was born on the outskirts of an Irish city, where we lived exactly as people lived in the seventeenth century, except that there were gas-lamps and policemen in tall hats. In the course of my boyhood literature and music introduced me to the eighteenth century; and I was helped a step further through the appearance in our house of candles that did not need snuffing, an iron-framed pianoforte and typhoid sanitation. Finally, I crossed St. George's Channel into the decadence of the mid-nineteenth-century England of Anthony Trollope, and slowly made my way to the forefront of the age—the period of Ibsen, Nietzsche, the Fabian Society, the motor-car, and my own writings.” Very slowly indeed did he make his way to the forefront of the age of Shavianism. He felt that he was a man of genius, and coolly classified himself as such. With no effort of the imagination, and, likewise, with no prevision of his subsequent oft-repeated failures and the position of pecuniary dependence he was temporarily to occupy, he found himself looking upon London as his destiny. There is something at once amusing, inspiring, and pathetic in the spectacle of this bashful, raw, inexperienced boy, fortified only by the confident consciousness of his yet unproved superiority to the “common run” of humanity, throwing himself thus headlong into London.

Little of romantic glamour, fittingly enough, attaches to Shaw's early struggles in London. No rapt listening to the songs of rival nightingales, Keats and Shelley, as with Browning; no impetuous and clandestine marriage, as with Sheridan; no roses and raptures of la vie Bohème, as with Zola. It is, instead, for the most part a tale of consistent literary drudgery, rewarded by continual and repeated failures. The rare and individual style of the satirist, the deft fingering of the dramatist were wholly undeveloped, and even unsuspected, during this tentative period in his career. He turned his hand to various undertakings—to musical criticism, to versifying, to blank-versifying, to novel-writing; but all equally to no purpose. Asked once what was his first real success, he replied: “Never had any. Success in that sense is a thing that comes to you and takes your breath away. What came to me was invariably failure. By the time I wore it down I knew too much to care about either failure or success. Life is like a battle; you have to fire a thousand bullets to hit one man. I was too busy firing to bother about the scoring. As to whether I ever despaired, you will find somewhere in my works this line: 'He who has never hoped can never despair.' I am not a fluctuator.” His self-sufficiency, even at this time, was proof against all discouragement. Perhaps he found consolation also in the saying: “He who is down need fear no fall.”

Shaw never experienced any poverty of spirit, of determination, or of will; his poverty was pecuniary only. Until the time of his marriage he remained secure from the accusation of being the mould of fashion or the glass of form. While the Shaw of matrimonial respectability bears all the marks of his wife's civilizing influence in the matter of a costume de rigueur—fashionable clothes, patent-leather boots, and even, on rare occasions, a “stiff” collar—his dress in the late seventies and for twenty years thereafter was usually, like that of Marchbanks, strikingly anarchic. His outward appearance, as someone unkindly remarked, suggested that he might be a fairly respectable plasterer! “Now,” said Shaw in 1896, “when people reproach me with the unfashionableness of my attire, they forget that to me it seems like the raiment of Solomon in all his glory by contrast with the indescribable seediness of those days, when I trimmed my cuffs to the quick with scissors, and wore a tall hat and soi-disant black coat, green with decay.” But the poverty of which this attire was the outward, visible sign was “shortness of cash,” as numerous personal reminiscences show. From the depressing and devitalizing effects of “real poverty” he was strong enough to free himself, as the following autobiographical confidence clearly evidences:

“Whilst I am not sure that the want of money lames a poor man more than the possession of it lames a rich one, I am quite sure that the class which has the pretensions and prejudices and habits of the rich without its money, and the poverty of the poor without the freedom to avow poverty—in short, the people who don't go to the theatre because they cannot afford the stalls and are ashamed to be seen in the gallery—are the worst-off of all. To be on the down grade from the haute bourgeoisie and the landed gentry to the nadir at which the younger son's great-grandson gives up the struggle to keep up appearances; to have the pretence of a culture without the reality of it; to make three hundred pounds a year look like eight hundred pounds in Ireland or Scotland; or five hundred pounds look like one thousand pounds in London; to be educated neither at the Board School and the Birkbeck nor at the University, but at some rotten private adventure academy for the sons of gentlemen; to try to maintain a select circle by excluding all the frankly poor people from it, and then find that all the rest of the world excludes you—that is poverty at its most damnable; and yet from that poverty a great deal of our literature and journalism has sprung. Think of the frightful humiliation of the boy Dickens in the blacking warehouse, and his undying resentment of his mother's wanting him to stay there—all on a false point of genteel honour. Think of Trollope, at an upper-class school with holes in his trousers, because his father could not bring himself to dispense with a man-servant. Ugh! Be a tramp or be a millionaire—it matters little which: what does matter is being a poor relation of the rich; and that is the very devil. Fortunately, that sort of poverty can be cured by simply shaking off its ideas—cutting your coat according to your cloth, and not according to the cloth of your father's second cousin, the baronet. As I was always more or less in rebellion against those ideas, and finally shook them off pretty completely, I cannot say that I have much experience of real poverty—quite the contrary.”[11]

With that comic seriousness which always passes for outrageous prevarication, Shaw has related that during the nine years from 1876 to 1885 his adventures in literature netted him the princely sum of exactly six pounds. At first he “devilled” for a musical critic; but his notices “led to the stoppage of all the concert advertisements and ruined the paper”—“which died—partly of me.” He also began a Passion Play in blank verse, with the mother of the hero represented as a termagant. Ah, if that play had only been finished! But Shaw never carried through these customary follies of young authors, unless we agree with those who classify his novels as follies of a green boy. “I was always, fortunately for me,” Mr. Shaw once remarked, “a failure as a trifler. All my attempts at Art for Art's sake broke down; it was like hammering tenpenny nails into sheets of notepaper.”

One finds it an easy matter to believe him when he tells us, not only that he was provincial, unpresentable, but, more broadly speaking, that he was in an impossible position. “I was a foreigner—an Irishman, the most foreign of all foreigners when he has not gone through the University mill. I was ... not uneducated; but, unfortunately, what I knew was exactly what the educated Englishman did not know, and what he knew—I either didn't know or didn't believe.” Six pounds was a very small allowance for a growing young man, even a struggling author, to live on for nine years. Even if we match him with equal scepticism, at least we can discover, as will be seen, no error in his arithmetical calculations. After Shaw had hounded the musical critic and his paper to the grave, London absolutely refused to tolerate him on any terms. As the nine years progressed, he had one article accepted by Mr. G. R. Sims, who had just started a short-lived paper called One and All. “It brought me fifteen shillings. Full of hope and gratitude, I wrote a really brilliant contribution. That finished me.” During this period, he received his greatest fee—five pounds—for a patent medicine advertisement, a circumstance which may give some colour to Dr. Meyerfeld's early denunciation of Shaw as a “quacksalver.” On another occasion, a publisher asked Shaw for some verses to fit some old blocks which he had bought up for a school prize book. “I wrote a parody of the thing he wanted and sent it as a joke. To my stupefaction he thanked me seriously, and paid me five shillings.” Shaw was so much touched by the gift of five shillings for his parody that he wrote the generous publisher a serious verse for another picture. With the startling result that the publisher took it as a joke in questionable taste! Is it any wonder that Shaw's career as a versifier abruptly ended?

The analysis of the artistic temperament which Shaw puts in the mouth of John Tanner—an analysis which Mr. Robert Loraine finds to smack more of mania than of insincerity—is a cynical and distorted picture at best. And yet it gives us a refracted glimpse of the position which Shaw himself deliberately assumed. “The true artist,” Tanner rattles on, “will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose, whilst he really means them to do it for his.” After various attempts “to earn an honest living,” Shaw gave up trying to commit that sin against his nature, as he puts it. His last attempt was in 1879, we are told, “when a company was formed in London to exploit an ingenious invention by Mr. Thomas Alva Edison—a much too ingenious invention, as it proved, being nothing less than a telephone of such stentorian efficiency that it bellowed your most private communications all over the house instead of whispering them with some sort of discretion.” His interest in physics, his acquaintance with the works of Tyndall and Helmholtz, and his friendship with Mr. Chichester Bell, of which mention has been made, gave him, he asserts, the customary superiority over those about him which he is in the habit of claiming in all the relations of life. While he remained with the company only a few months, he discharged his duties in a manner, which, according to his own outrageous and comically prevaricative assertion, “laid the foundation of Mr. Edison's London reputation.”

After this experience, he began, as he says, to lay the foundations of his own fortune “by the most ruthless disregard of all the quack duties which lead the peasant lad of fiction to the White House, and harness the real peasant boy to the plough until he is finally swept, as rubbish, into the workhouse.” Far from being a “peasant lad,” who climbed manfully upward from the lowest rung of the social ladder, he was in reality the son of a gentleman who had an income of at least three figures (four, if you count in dollars instead of pounds), and was second cousin to a baronet. “I never climbed any ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation; and I hereby warn all peasant lads not to be duped by my pretended example into regarding their present servitude as a practicable first step to a celebrity so dazzling that its subject cannot even suppress his own bad novels.”

Shaw seems intent upon convincing us that, like the artist of his own description, he was an atrocious egotist in his disregard of others; but we must take his confessions with the customary grain of salt. “I was an able-bodied and able-minded young man in the strength of my youth; and my family, then heavily embarrassed, needed my help urgently. That I should have chosen to be a burden to them instead was, according to all the conventions of peasant fiction, monstrous. Well, without a blush I embraced the monstrosity. I did not throw myself into the struggle for life: I threw my mother into it. I was not a staff to my father's old age: I hung on to his coat tails. His reward was to live just long enough to read a review of one of these silly novels written in an obscure journal by a personal friend of my own (now eminent in literature as Mr. John Mackinnon Robertson) prefiguring me to some extent as a considerable author. I think, myself, that this was a handsome reward, far better worth having than a nice pension from a dutiful son struggling slavishly for his parents' bread in some sordid trade. Handsome or not, it was the only return he ever had for the little pension he contrived to export from Ireland for his family. My mother reinforced it by drudging in her elder years at the art of music which she had followed in her prime freely for love. I only helped to spend it. People wondered at my heartlessness: one young and romantic lady had the courage to remonstrate openly and indignantly with me, 'for the which,' as Pepys said of the shipwright's wife who refused his advances, 'I did respect her.' Callous as Comus to moral babble, I steadily wrote my five pages a day and made a man of myself (at my mother's expense) instead of a slave.”

In Shaw's opinion, his brain constituted the sum and substance of his riches. The projection and exposition of his experience came to be the most urgent need and object of his life. He recognized a higher duty than merely earning his living: the fulfilment of his individual destiny. He resolved to become a writer. In this resolve to dedicate all his powers to the art of self-expression, lies the explanation of his strange words: “My mother worked for my living instead of preaching that it was my duty to work for hers; therefore, take off your hat to her and blush.”[12]

Although it was a “frightful squeeze” at times, Shaw was not wholly destitute. A suit of evening clothes and the knack of playing a “simple accompaniment at sight more congenially to a singer than most amateurs,” gave him “for a fitful year or so,” the entrée into the better circle of musical society in London.

In this latter day of his assertion that money controls morality, Shaw is perfectly consistent in speaking of his poverty and quotidian shabbiness as the two “disgusting faults” of his youth. But at the time he did not recognize them as faults, because he could not help them. “I therefore tolerated the gross error that poverty, though an inconvenience and a trial, is not a sin and a disgrace: and I stood for my self-respect on the things I had: probity, ability, knowledge of art, laboriousness, and whatever else came cheaply to me.” A certain pride of birth, a consciousness of worthy ancestry, also sustained him, and helped him to triumph over circumstance. It was this same feeling which gave him suavity and poise during the later campaigns of his revolutionary Socialism, and saved him from the excesses, the blind fury, of the mere proletarian. He had a magnificent library in Bloomsbury, a priceless picture-gallery in Trafalgar Square, and another at Hampton Court, without any servants to look after or rent to pay. During these years Shaw's gain in the cultivation of his musical and artistic tastes more than compensated for his lack of the advantages of wealth. Nor were his essays in literature and criticism—I do not refer to his playful dilettantism—profitless in any real sense. It is true that innumerable articles were consistently returned to him; and yet he went his way undismayed, slowly saturating himself with Italian art from Mantegna to Michelangelo, with the best music from London to Bayreuth. And while London had not “caught his tone,” musical or otherwise, at this time, the day was to come in which he should reap the reward for his critical knowledge of art and music, for the rare and individual style which he was slowly perfecting.

To the student of Shaw as the littérateur—the highwayman who “held up” so many different forms of art—the chief interest of this period is to be found in the five novels which he wrote during the five years from 1879 to 1883—an average of one a year. His first novel, written in 1879, and called, “with merciless fitness” as Shaw says, Immaturity, was never published; and we are told that even the rats were unable to finish it. George Meredith, the novelist, who was a reader and literary adviser for the publishing firm of Chapman and Hall, London, from 1860 to 1897, rejected the manuscript of Immaturity, sans phrase—quickly disposing of it with a laconic “No.” The remaining four have all been published, in magazines and in book-form, either in England or America. Shaw “turned them out,” one each year, with unvarying regularity and also with unvarying result: refusal by the publishers. That six pounds which Shaw earned in nine years must certainly have gone a long way—as postage stamps.

Shaw at the age of twenty-three.

From a photo by Window & Grove.
From a photograph taken in London, July 4th, 1879.

Mr. Shaw has carefully explained to us why his works were refused by publisher after publisher. And I find no reason to question his explanation to the effect that it was the world-old struggle between literary conscience and public taste. The more he progressed towards his own individual style, and ventured upon the freer expression of his own ideas, the more he disappointed the “grave, elderly lovers of literature.” As to the regular novel-publishing houses, whose readers were merely on the scent of popularity, they gave him, we are told, no quarter at all. “And so between the old stool of my literary conscientiousness and the new stool of a view of life that did not reach publishing point in England until about ten years later, when Ibsen drove it in, my novels fell to the ground.”

We may omit for the present any discussion of the validity of Mr. Shaw's claims as a “fictionist.” But the story of the circumstances under which the novels finally found their way into print is certainly worthy of narration. It was in 1882 that Henry George, by a speech during one of the public meetings at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, London, fired Shaw to enlist, in Heine's phrase, “as a soldier in the Liberative War of Humanity.”[13] About this time a body, styling itself the Land Reform Union, which still survives as the English Land Restoration League, was formed to propagate Georgite Land Nationalization. The official mouthpiece of this body was called, if memory serves, the Christian Socialist, which did not last long, owing, as Shaw said, to a lack of Christians. Shaw made a number of lifelong friends through his connection with this organization, which he joined soon after its formation. Chief among these may be mentioned James Leigh Joynes, Sydney Olivier and Henry Hyde Champion; other acquaintances were two Christian Socialist clergymen—Stewart Headlam and Symes of Nottingham. Shaw and Symes frequently indulged in wordy warfare over the respective merits of Socialism and Land Nationalization as universal panaceas for social evils. Symes argued that Land Nationalization would settle everything, to which Shaw cleverly and characteristically replied, as he once told me, that if capital were still privately appropriated Symes would remain “the chaplain of a pirate ship.” It is proof of Shaw's fundamental Socialism that he still regards this as a very fair description of the position of a clergyman under our present system.

Through his association with James Leigh Joynes and the Salt family it is not difficult to trace Shaw's initial feeling for Shelley, and the origin and growth of his humanitarian and vegetarian principles. At this time Joynes had just been deprived of his Eton post because he had made a tour in Ireland with Henry George and been arrested with him under the Coercion Act by the police, who did not understand Land Nationalization and supposed the two to be emissaries of the Clan na Gael. Henry Salt, another Eton master, to whom Joynes' sister was married, was not only, like Joynes, a vegetarian, a humanitarian, a Shelleyan, but a De Quinceyite as well. Being a born revolutionist, he loathed Eton; and as soon as he had saved enough to live with a Thoreau-like simplicity in a labourer's cottage in the country, he threw up his post and shook the dust of Eton from his feet. In company with Joynes, Shaw visited the Salts once before they left Eton. It is interesting in this connection to read an absurdly amusing description, written by Shaw, of his first visit to them in the country at Tilford—an article entitled A Sunday on the Surrey Hills.[14]

There were no children in the family; and one of Shaw's chief amusements while visiting the Salts was to play endless pianoforte duets with Mrs. Salt, on what he called “the noisiest grand piano that ever descended from Eton to a Surrey cottage.” Salt found his métier, not in Socialism, but in humanitarianism. He founded the Humanitarian League, of which he is still secretary. This association of Shaw with the Salt family eventuated in close and warm mutual friendship. Many were the visits Shaw paid them at this time and in later years. It was in the heather on Limpsfield Common, during his visits to them at Oxford, that he wrote several of the scenes of his Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant.

In this association may be discovered the real link between Shaw and the Humanitarians. For twenty-five years Shaw was a “cannibal,” according to his own damning verdict. For the remainder of his life he has been a strict vegetarian, professing his principles with a comic force equalled only by the rigour with which he puts them into practice. While the most of men in their boyhood have walked about with a cheap edition of Shelley in their pockets, it is a tiresome trait in Shaw, someone has slightingly remarked, that he has never taken this cheap edition out. Shelley it was, certainly, who first called Shaw's attention to the “infamy of his habits.” And it is also true that Shaw has never discarded his vegetarian principles, never repudiated Shelley's humane views and ideals of life. “It may require some reflection,” Shaw once wrote, “to see that high feeling brings high thinking; but we already know, without reflection, that high thinking brings what is called plain living. In this century the world has produced two men—Shelley and Wagner—in whom intense poetic feeling was the permanent state of their consciousness, and who were certainly not restrained by any religious, conventional or prudential considerations from indulging themselves to the utmost of their opportunities. Far from being gluttonous, drunken, cruel or debauched, they were apostles of vegetarianism and water-drinking; had an utter horror of violence and 'sport'; were notable champions of the independence of women; and were, in short, driven into open revolution against the social evils which the average sensual man finds extremely suitable to him. So much is this the case that the practical doctrine of these two arch-voluptuaries always presents itself to ordinary persons as a saint-like asceticism.”[15]

At the time of the mutual intimacy of Joynes, Shaw, and the Salts, and their unhesitating approval and admiration of Shelley, early in the eighties, vegetarian restaurants began to be established here and there throughout the country. These scattered restaurants, Mr. Shaw once remarked in connection with his own conversion to the faith of Shelley, “made vegetarianism possible for a man too poor to be catered for.”[16] It is hardly open to doubt that, while Shelley first called Shaw's attention to vegetarianism, it was Joynes and Salt who first confirmed him in the belief, which soon became solidified into a hard-and-fast principle, that “the enormity of eating the scorched corpses of animals—cannibalism with its heroic dish omitted—becomes impossible the moment it becomes consciously instead of thoughtlessly habitual.”

Another member of this coterie, in which there was no question of Henry George and Karl Marx, but a great deal of Walt Whitman and Thoreau, was the now well-known Socialist and author, Edward Carpenter, whose Towards Democracy and other works are a faithful reflex of the man. It became the habit of these early apostles of “the simple life” to wear sandals; Carpenter even wore his out of doors. He had taught the secret of their manufacture to a workman friend of his at Millthorpe, a village near Sheffield, where he resided. Not unfittingly, the habitual wearer of moccasins, Carpenter, was always called The Noble Savage by the members of this congenial and delightful circle. The noisy grand piano grew noisier than ever when Shaw and Carpenter visited the Salts—Carpenter, like Shaw, revelling in pianoforte duets with Mrs. Salt.

The death of Joynes was a great grief to these close friends, especially to Shaw. I am convinced that those mordantly incisive and penetrating attacks which Shaw, in after life, made upon modern surgery and modern medicine find their animus in his resentment of the manner of Joynes' death. Certain passages from The Philanderer and The Conflict of Science and Common Sense thus become more humanly comprehensible. The literary activities of this circle, so sadly broken up by the death of Joynes, were by no means confined solely to Carpenter and Shaw. Joynes himself left a volume of excellent translations of the revolutionary songs of the German revolutionists of 1848—Herwegh, Freiligrath and others.[17] Salt, whom Shaw has occasionally quoted, has published several monographs, his tastes and predilections revealing themselves in the names of Shelley, James Thomson, Jeffries and De Quincey.

The Socialist revival of the eighties is responsible for the final publication of Shaw's novels. As long as he kept sending them to the publishers, “they were as safe from publicity as they would have been in the fire.” But as soon as he flung them aside as failures, with a strange perversity, “they almost instantly began to show signs of life.” Among the crop of propagandist magazines which accompanied the Socialistic revival of the eighties was one called To-Day—not the present paper of that name, but one of the many “To-Days which are now Yesterdays.” It was printed by Henry Hyde Champion, but there were several joint editors, of brief tenure, among whom were Belfort Bax, the well-known Socialist, and James Leigh Joynes. Although publishing his novels in this magazine, which it seems paid nothing for contributions, “seemed a matter of no more consequence than stuffing so many window-panes with them,” Shaw nevertheless offered up An Unsocial Socialist and Cashel Byron's Profession on this unstable altar of his political faith.[18]

With one noteworthy exception, there were no visible results from the serial publications of these two novels. Shaw's novels, not uncharacteristically, appeared in inverse order of composition; and number five, An Unsocial Socialist, made Shaw acquainted with William Morris, an acquaintance which, as we shall see, ripened later into genuine and sincere friendship. To Shaw's surprise, as he tells us, William Morris had been reading the monthly instalments with a certain relish—a proof to Shaw's mind “how much easier it is to please a great man than a little one, especially when you share his politics.”

Another propagandist magazine, created after the passing of To-day, and called Our Corner, was published by Mrs. Annie Besant, with whom Shaw had become acquainted about the time he joined the Fabian Society. “She was an incorrigible benefactress,” Shaw says, “and probably revenged herself for my freely expressed scorn for this weakness by drawing on her private account to pay me for my jejune novels.” Up to this time, all Shaw's literary productions seemed to have the deadly effect of driving their media of circulation to an early grave. After The Irrational Knot and Love Among the Artists had run through its pages in serial form, Our Corner likewise succumbed to the inevitable.[19]

To Shaw's expressed regret, Cashel Byron's Profession found one staunch admirer at least. This was Henry Hyde Champion, who had thrown up a commission in the Army at the call of Socialism. This admiration for Shaw's realistic exposure of pugilism—Mr. Shaw once told me that he always considered admiration of Cashel Byron's Profession the mark of a fool!—had very momentous consequences. Champion, it seems, had an “unregenerate taste for pugilism”—a pugnacious survival of his abdicated adjutancy. “He liked 'Cashel Byron' so much that he stereotyped the pages of To-Day which it occupied, and in spite of my remonstrances, hurled on the market a misshapen shilling edition. My friend, Mr. William Archer, reviewed it prominently; the Saturday Review, always susceptible in those days to the arts of self-defence, unexpectedly declared it the novel of the age; Mr. W. E. Henley wanted to have it dramatized; Stevenson wrote a letter about it ...; the other papers hastily searched their waste-paper baskets for it and reviewed it, mostly rather disappointedly; the public preserved its composure and did not seem to care.” This letter of Stevenson's to William Archer,[20] written at Saranac Lake in the winter of 1887-8, contains some very interesting criticism, as a quotation will show:

“What am I to say? I have read your friend's book with singular relish. If he has written any other, I beg you will let me see it; and if he has not, I beg him to lose no time in supplying the deficiency. It is full of promise, but I should like to know his age. There are things in it that are very clever, to which I attach no importance; it is the shape of the age. And there are passages, particularly the rally in the presence of the Zulu King, that show genuine and remarkable narrative talent—a talent that few will have the wit to understand, a talent of strength, spirit, capacity, sufficient vision, and sufficient self-sacrifice, which last is the chief point in a narrative.”

And at the end of his next letter to Mr. Archer (February, 1888), he says “Tell Shaw to hurry up. I want another.”

Neither Shaw nor Champion earned anything from that first shilling edition, “which began with a thousand copies, but proved immortal.” Shortly after this first edition was exhausted, the publishing house of Walter Scott and Company placed a revised shilling edition on the market; and the book was also published in New York at about the same time (Harper and Brothers, New York, 1887). Brentanos, New York, brought out an edition in 1897, and this was followed in 1899 by an edition of An Unsocial Socialist.[21]

The immediate cause of these editions was the temporary interest in the works of Mr. Shaw, occasioned by Mr. Richard Mansfield's notable productions of Arms and the Man and The Devil's Disciple. The publication of Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, in two volumes, by H. S. Stone and Company, of Chicago, followed shortly afterwards. In 1904, when Mr. Daly's production of Candida created such a stir in America, Mr. Volney Streamer, of the firm of Brentanos, a Shaw enthusiast of many years' standing, used his influence to have these two books reprinted. None of Shaw's novels are copyright in America, so that he has never, it appears, reaped the reward of the moderate, although intermittent, vogue which his novels have enjoyed in that country. It is a fact of common knowledge that Shaw prefers to be judged by his later work; but the demand in America for these novels has been so large that they are likely to be published for years yet to come. In 1889 or 1890, it must have been, Shaw happened to notice that his novels were “raging in America,” and that the list of book sales in one of the United States was headed by a novel entitled An Unsocial Socialist. In the preface to the “Authorized Edition” of Cashel Byron's Profession, which contains the history of the life and death of the novels, Mr. Shaw says, “As it was clearly unfair that my own American publishers (H. S. Stone and Company) should be debarred by delicacy towards me from exploiting the new field of derelict fiction, I begged them to make the most of their inheritance; and with my full approval Opus 3, called 'Love Among the Artists' (a paraphrase of the forgotten line 'Love Among the Roses') followed.”[22]

This third act of Shaw's “tragedy,” as he calls it, is by no means the end of the play; as with Thomas Hardy's endless dramas, the curtain may never be rung down. One might imagine that Shaw, the Socialist, required the patience of a Job and the self-repression of a stoic to enable him to restrain his anger over the diversion of the rewards of his talent from his own to the pockets of Capitalist publishers, free of all obligation to the author. But he accepts his fate with breezy philosophy.

“I may say,” he wrote to Harper and Brothers (who had published his Cashel Byron's Profession) in November, 1899, “that I entirely disagree with the ideas of twenty years ago as to the 'piratical' nature of American republications of non-copyright books. Unlike most authors, I am enough of an economist to know that unless an American publisher acquires copyright he can no more make a profit at my expense than he can at Shakspere's by republishing Hamlet. The English nation, when taxed for the support of the author by a price which includes author's royalties, whilst the American nation escapes that burden, may have a grievance against the American nation, but that is a very different thing from a grievance of the author against the American publisher.”[23]

“Suffice it to say here that there can be no doubt now that the novels so long left for dead in the forlorn-hope magazines of the eighties have arisen and begun to propagate themselves vigorously throughout the New World at the rate of a dollar and a half per copy, free of all royalty to the flattered author.” He begs for absolution from blame “if these exercises of a raw apprentice break loose again and insist on their right to live. The world never did know chalk from cheese in the matter of art; and, after all, since it is only the young and old who have time to read—the rest being too busy living—my exercises may be fitter for the market than my masterpieces.”

In 1883, when the last of the novels of his nonage was completed, Shaw was still striking in the dark. He had not yet found the opening into the light, the portal giving out from the stuffy world of imaginative lying into the great world of real life—a life of pleasurable activity, strenuous endeavour, and high achievement. He found his way out by following an insistent summons—the clarion call of Henry George. And when, having doffed the swaddling clothes of romance, he emerged from the dim retreat of his imagination, it was to find himself standing in the dazzling light of a new day—the day of Socialism, of the Fabian Society, and—of George Bernard Shaw.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] These books were published by Edward Arnold.

[10] Cf. John Bull's Other Island; Preface for Politicians, p. xvii.

[11] Who I Am, and What I Think, by G. Bernard Shaw. Part I.—In the Candid Friend, May 11th, 1901.

[12] The Irrational Knot, Preface to the American edition of 1905, Brentanos, N. Y.

[13] Cf. Chapter IV., The Fabian Society.

[14] The Pall Mall Gazette, April 28th, 1888.

[15] The Religion of the Pianoforte. In the Fortnightly Review, February, 1894.

[16] Mr. Shaw's confessions in regard to his change from “cannibalism” to vegetarianism are perhaps best given in an article in the Pall Mall Gazette for January 26th, 1886, entitled, Failures of Inept Vegetarians. By an Expert.

[17] For a brief and illuminative biographical sketch of James Leigh Joynes, compare Shaw's review of his book, Songs of a Revolutionary Epoch, in the Pall Mall Gazette, April 16th, 1888.

[18] The first instalment of An Unsocial Socialist appeared in To-Day, a “monthly magazine of Scientific Socialism,” New Series, Vol. I. (January-June, 1884), March number, pp. 205-220. The final instalment appeared in New Series, Vol. II., of the same magazine (July-December, 1884), December number, pp. 543-579. The novel appeared under Shaw's name, and is marked at the close (page 579), “The End,” and dated beneath, “London, 1883,” the date of composition. Cashel Byron's Profession ran in the same magazine through the years 1885 and 1886, beginning in New Series, Vol. III. (January-June, 1885), April number, pp. 145-160, and concluding in Vol. V. (January-June, 1886), March number, pp. 67-73.

[19] The Irrational Knot began in Vol. V. (January-June, 1885), pp. 229-240, ran through Vols. VI., VII. and VIII., and was concluded in Vol. IX. (January-June, 1887), ending on page 82. Love Among the Artists opened in Vol. X. (July-December, 1887) of the same magazine, ran through Vol. XI., and was concluded in Vol. XII. (July-December, 1888), on page 352. It is marked at the close (page 352), “The End, London, 1881”—the date of composition.

[20] Published, in part, in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vol. II., edited by Sidney Colvin.

[21] The New York Herald contained the statement that “Brentanos have done a service to literature in reprinting two of Shaw's novels that are strangely unfamiliar to the American public.”

[22] This book was published in 1900, followed in 1901 by the “Authorized Edition” of Cashel Byron's Profession (also published by H. S. Stone and Co.), which contains the above-quoted remark. In the autumn of 1901, Grant Richards, at the time the English publisher of almost all of Mr. Shaw's works, also brought out a revised edition of Cashel Byron's Profession. In the autumn of 1904 The Irrational Knot was for the first time published in book form by Archibald Constable and Co., Mr. Shaw's English publishers at present. In 1905 The Irrational Knot was published in America by Brentanos.

[23] On publishing his Cashel Byron's Profession, Harper and Brothers sent Mr. Shaw ten pounds in recognition of his moral right as an author to share any profits the book might yield. There were then no international copyright laws in force, and the works of foreign authors were not protected in America. When Mr. Shaw learned that this same book had been republished by another American house, he sent back to Harper and Brothers the ten pounds, with thanks for its use, explaining that since the book had been republished by another firm, even his moral claim to recognition by the original American publishers had lapsed.

THE NOVELIST

“London was not ripe for me. Nor was I ripe for London. I was in an impossible position. I was a foreigner—an Irishman, the most foreign of all foreigners when he has not gone through the University mill. I was ... not uneducated; but, unfortunately, what I knew was exactly what the educated Englishman didn't know or didn't believe.”—George Bernard Shaw: an Interview. In The Chap-Book, November, 1896.

CHAPTER III

As a young man of twenty-four, Bernard Shaw began to evolve a moral code. He perceived in those phases of contemporary existence which either intimately touched his life or daily challenged his critical scrutiny, a shocking discrepancy between things as they are and things as they should be. He has never been a “whole hogger,” like Pope or Omar Khayyam: he neither believed that whatever is is right nor wished to shatter this sorry scheme of things entire. The arch-foe of idealism, he paradoxically prefaced his attack by hoisting the banner of an ideal. Shaw has spent more than a quarter of a century in formulating his ideal, in attempting to concretize his individual code into a universal ethical system.

Let us not fall into the crass error of supposing that Shaw has never come under the spell of the fascination of idealism and romance. Shaw the realist paid his toll to Romance before the moral passion ever dawned upon his soul. Just as Zola always bore the brand of Hugo, just as Ibsen worked his way through romance to real life, so Shaw found his feet in realism only after tripping several times over the novels of a romantic imagination. Shaw's novels are the products of a riotous and fanciful imagination, if not, as he dubs them, the compounds of ignorance and intuition. In a celebrated discussion with Mr. W. H. Mallock, we have Shaw's frank confession:

“We are both novelists, privileged as such to make fancy pictures of Society and individuals, and to circulate them as narratives of things that have actually been; and the critics will gravely find fault with our fictitious law, or our fictitious history, or our fictitious psychology, if we depart therein from perfect verisimilitude. Why have we this extraordinary privilege? Because, I submit, we are both natural-born tellers of the thing that is not. Not, observe, vulgar impostors who lie for motives of gain, to extort alms, to conceal or excuse discreditable facts in our history, to glorify ourselves, to facilitate the sale of a horse, or to avoid unpleasantness. All humanity lies like that, more or less. But Mr. Mallock and I belong to those who lie for the sheer love of lying, who forsake everything else for it, who put into it laborious extra touches of art for which there is no extra pay, whose whole life, if it were looked into closely enough, would be found to have been spent more in the world of fiction than of reality.”[24]

Shaw has somewhere placed on record his boast that such insight as he had in criticism was due to the fact that he exhausted romanticism before he was ten years old. “Your popular novelists,” he contemptuously declared, “are now gravely writing the stories I told to myself before I replaced my first set of teeth. Some day I will try to found a genuine psychology of fiction by writing down the history of my imagined life, duels, battles, love-affairs with queens and all. They say that man in embryo is successively a fish, a bird, a mammal, and so on, before he develops into a man. Well, popular novel-writing is the fish stage of your Jonathan Swift. I have never been so dishonest as to sneer at our popular novelists. I once went on like that myself. Why does the imaginative man always end by writing comedy if only he has also a sense of reality? Clearly because of the stupendous irony of the contrast between his imaginary adventures and his real circumstances and powers. At night, a conquering hero, an Admirable Crichton, a Don Juan; by day, a cowardly little brat cuffed by his nurse for stealing lumps of sugar.... My real name,” he added, “is Alnaschar.”[25]

As a matter of fact, Shaw has anticipated his exhaustion of romanticism by some seventeen years. It was not until he finished the novels of his nonage that he could justly boast of having “worked off” that romanticism which always appears to be latent in every creative imagination in the stage of incipiency. Remember what Stevenson wrote to William Archer of Cashel Byron's Profession:

“As a whole, it is (of course) a fever dream of the most feverish.... It is all mad, mad and deliriously delightful; the author has a taste in chivalry like Walter Scott's or Dumas's, and then he daubs in little bits of Socialism; he soars away on the wings of the romantic griffon—even the griffon, as he cleaves air, shouting with laughter at the nature of the quest—and I believe in his heart he thinks he is labouring in a quarry of solid granite realism.

“It is this that makes me—the most hardened adviser now extant—stand back and hold my peace. If Mr. Shaw is below five-and-twenty, let him go his path; if he is thirty, he had best be told that he is a romantic, and pursue romance with his eyes open; perhaps he knows it; God knows!—my brain is softened.”[26]

It is all very well for Shaw to say that he used Bizet's Carmen as a safety valve for his romantic impulses. But the testimony of his own novels flatly contradicts his complacent assertion that he was romantic enough to have come to the end of romance before he began to create in art for himself.

These novels, in spite of their youthful romanticism, nevertheless constitute the record of the adventures of an earnest and anarchic young man, with a knack of keen observation and terse portraiture, striving to give voice to and interpret the spirit of the century. When someone, in 1892, suggested that Shaw was, of course, a follower of Ibsen, Shaw replied with a great show of indignation: “What! I a follower of Ibsen! My good sir, as far as England is concerned, Ibsen is a follower of mine. In 1880, when I was only twenty-four, I wrote a book called 'The Irrational Knot,' which reads nowadays like an Ibsenite novel.” And in the postscript to the preface to the new edition of that novel, after having declared with familiar Shavian wiliness in the preface that he “couldn't stand” his own book, he makes a sudden bouleversement as follows: “Since writing the above I have looked through the proof-sheets of this book, and found, with some access of respect for my youth, that it is a fiction of the first order.... It is one of those fictions in which the morality is original and not ready-made.... I seriously suggest that 'The Irrational Knot' may be regarded as an early attempt on the part of the life force to write 'A Doll's House' in English by the instrumentality of a very immature writer aged twenty-four. And though I say it that should not, the choice was not such a bad shot for a stupid instinctive force that has to work and become conscious of itself by means of human brains.”

With all its immaturity, The Irrational Knot is undoubtedly in the “tone of our time.” It is the ill-chosen title, however, rather than the contents which recalls Nora and Torvald. The institution of marriage is not shown to be irrational; Shaw's shafts were aimed at the code of social morality which renders marriages such as the one described inevitable failures. Shaw not only seeks to expose the fatal inconsistencies of this social code, but also damns the feeble shams with which Society attempts to bolster up those inconsistencies.

Endowed with much of the bluntness of Bluntschli, but with an added sensitiveness, the “hero” of this novel may be described as the crude and repellent prototype of the later Shavian males. Believing more in force than in savoir faire, in brutal sincerity than in conventional graces, Conolly stands out for literal truth and violent tactlessness as against social propriety and observance of les convenances. He is acting with perfect validity to himself when he says, in answer to the question as to what he is going to do about his wife's elopement with a former lover: “Eat my supper. I am as hungry as a bear.” After Marian's desertion by her lover, Conolly urges her to return to him, assuring her that now she is just the wife he wants, since she is at last rid of “fashionable society, of her family, her position, her principles, and all the rest of her chains for ever.” Marian refuses, because she cannot “respect herself for breaking loose from what is called her duty.” Their definitive words epitomize the failure of their life together.

“'You are too wise, Ned,' she said, suffering him to replace her gently in the chair.

“'It is impossible to be too wise, dearest,' he said, and unhesitatingly turned and left her.”

The subjects which inspired Shaw's maturer genius are the same subjects which so actively, if crudely and imperfectly, struggle for expression in this early work. Much acuteness is exhibited by the young man of twenty-four in spying out the weak points in the armour of “that corporate knave, Society.” When the “high-bred” wife of the “self-made” man elopes with a “gentleman,” Society's dismay is only feigned. Like Roebuck Ramsden, Marian's relatives are quite willing to forgive, and even to thank, the cur if he will only marry her: by ousting a rank outsider like Conolly, Douglas appears to Society almost in the light of a champion of its cause. Shaw was too close an observer of life, even at twenty-four, to attempt to make out a case against matrimony by celebrating the success of an unblessed union. His point is turned against Society, less for upholding traditional morality than for making the preservation of its class distinctions its highest laws. Society is ready enough to forgive Douglas; but Marmaduke Lind, in setting up an unblessed union with Conolly's sister, Mademoiselle Lalage Virtue, of the Bijou Theatre, places himself beyond the pale. For she is socially “impossible”; and, consequently, there can be no relenting towards Marmaduke until he return, and, in the odour of sanctity and respectability, marry Lady Constance Carberry!

The Irrational Knot cannot be called novel on account of its rather commonplace thought that “a girl who lives in Belgravia ought not to marry with a man who is familiar with the Mile End Road.” But as Mr. W. L. Courtney suggestively remarks: “What is novel is the illustration, in clever and mordant fashion, of the absurd folly and wastefulness of social conditions which obstinately make intelligence subservient to aristocratic prestige. Even in our much-abused country there is, and has been for a long time, a career open for talent; but the aspiring male must not encumber himself by taking a partner out of ranks to which he does not belong. Thus, 'The Irrational Knot' is nothing more nor less than an early tract in defence of Socialism or Communism, or whatever other term should be applied to theories which seek to equalize the chances and opportunities of human beings.” In The Irrational Knot are found the marks of that individual mode of observing and reflecting life, which is popularly denominated “Shavian.” Here is the first clear testimony to that rationalistic mood in Shaw which permeates so much of his subsequent work. And yet this book contains intimations of that deeper philosophy of life which conceives of rationality merely as an instrumentality for carrying out its designs. This knot is irrational only because it is too rational. Marian shrinks from reconcilement with Conolly: she cannot breathe in the icy atmosphere of his rationalistic cocksureness. Conolly expresses Shaw's fundamental protestantism in his assertion that Marian's ill-considered flight with Douglas was the first sensible action of her whole life. It was admirable in his eyes because it was her first vigorous assertion of will, of vital purpose. The human being can and will find freedom only in overriding convention, repudiating “duty,” and solving every problem in terms of its own factors. The book, indeed, is marked less by immaturity of thought than by crudeness of execution. The characters are deficient in the flexibility and pliancy of human beings, and the book lacks suggestion of “the slow, irregular rhythm of life,” of which Henry James somewhere speaks. To Shaw, the depiction of Conolly was evidently a labour of love; and, consequently, we have an execution of force, if not always of convincing veracity. Elinor McQuinch, shrewd, sharp-tongued, acid—the familiar advocatus diaboli, and Shaw in petticoats of the later Shavian drama—is delightfully refreshing in her piquancy, and truly Ibsenic in her determination to “be herself.” The nascent dramatist often speaks out in this book—note the melodramatic Lalage Virtue—but nowhere more characteristically than in the trenchant deliverance of the justly-vexed Elinor:

Facsimile (reduced) of first and last pages of the original manuscript of Love Among the Artists.

Courtesy of Mr. D. J. Rider.

“Henceforth Uncle Reginald is welcome to my heartiest detestation. I have been waiting ever since I knew him for an excuse to hate him; and now he has given me one. He has taken part—like a true parent—against you with a self-intoxicated young fool whom he ought to have put out of the house. He has told me to mind my own business. I shall be even with him for that some day. I am as vindictive as an elephant: I hate people who are not vindictive; they are never grateful either, only incapable of any enduring sentiment.... I am thoroughly well satisfied with myself altogether; at last I have come out of a scene without having forgotten the right thing to say!”

Imagination lingers fondly, as Mr. Hubert Bland once remarked, over the spectacle of Elinor standing in the middle of the stage, three-quarters face to the audience, and firing off those acute generalizations about people who are not vindictive. Shaw's cleverness has begun thus early to betray him; a number of the characters are smart, but quite unnatural. The “Literary Great-grandfather” of the present Shaw unerringly pointed out many of the weak spots of Society; but his fundamental Socialism, impatient of class distinctions and social barriers, leads him occasionally into crude caricature. The book's greatest fault lies, perhaps, in the fact that his characters employ, not the natural, ductile speech of to-day, but the stilted diction of Dumas and Scott.

Commonplace as is the characterization, Shaw's next novel, Love Among the Artists, is a tract—less a novel than a critical essay with a purpose, in narrative form. Shaw confesses that he wrote this book for the purpose of illustrating “the difference between that enthusiasm for the fine arts which people gather from reading about them, and the genuine artistic faculty which cannot help creating, interpreting, or, at least, unaffectedly enjoying music and pictures.”

I have often wondered if it might not be possible for one who did not know Shaw personally to construct a quite credible biography by making a composite of the peculiarly Shavian types presented in his novels and plays. Without carrying the analogy to extremes, I think it mediately true that Shaw has one by one exhibited, in semi-autobiographic form, the distinguishing hall-marks of his individual and many-sided character. To what extent Owen Jack is a projection of the Shaw of this period, how graphically, if unconsciously, Shaw has revealed in this droll original his own ideals of music and his defence of a certain impudently exasperating assertiveness of manner in himself, is difficult to decide. Shaw insists that Jack is partly founded on Beethoven. And yet there is an undoubted resemblance between the real Irishman and the imagined Welshman who plays the Hyde of Jack to the Jekyll of Shaw. Like “C. di B.” and G. B. S., Jack is the first of the “privileged lunatics.” He scorns the pedantry of the schools, sneers at mechanical music of academic origin, jibes at “analytic criticism,” and fiercely denounces the antiquated views of the musical organizations of England, with their old fogeyism, their cowardice in the face of novelty, their dread of innovation, and their cringing subservience to obsolescent and outworn models. Like Shaw, Jack is always tolerant of sincerity, always sympathetic with true effort, unrestrainedly enthusiastic over any vital outpouring of the creative spirit; rebuking tyranny wherever he sees it, exposing falsehood whenever he hears it, eternally vigilant in exposing frauds and unmasking shams. And yet, with all his offensive brusqueness, fierce intolerance, and colossal self-sufficiency, gentle-hearted, compassionate, and, in the presence of beauty, deeply humble.

Shaw once called Love Among the Artists a novel with a purpose. Viewed from another standpoint, it is a collection of types, a study in temperaments. The author preaches the arrogance of genius as opposed to a false humility in the presence of great art works. The shallow artist, Adrian Herbert, “spends whole days in explaining to you what a man of genius is and feels, knowing neither the one nor the other”; Mary Sutherland never surpasses mediocrity as an artist because her knowledge is based upon hearsay instead of upon experience. She stands in sharp contrast to Madge Brailsford, who tersely puts her case to Mary—the case, one might say, of the whole book—“If you don't like your own pictures, depend upon it no one else will. I am going to be an actress because I think I can act. You are going to be a painter because you think you can't paint.” Mr. Huneker declares that Mary Sutherland, “lymphatically selfish and utterly unsympathetic,” is his prime favourite in the story. “Her taste in flaring colours, her feet, her habit of breathing heavily when aroused emotionally, her cowardices, her artistic failures, her eye-glasses, her treacly sentiment—what a study of the tribe artistic! And truly British withal.” The only other noteworthy figure in the book is the evasive, elusive Mademoiselle Szczympliça—a study searching in the closeness and delicacy of its observation. This charming and piquant Polish pianist, although emanating poetry and romance, has, as she puts it, the “soul commercial” within her. She cannot see why, even if she does love her husband, she should therefore dispense with her piano practice!

Unlike the classic model for a play, this novel has neither beginning, middle, nor ending; and yet it has many brilliantly executed scenes. Who could ever forget the street fight in Paris, the humorous “love-scene” between Madge Brailsford and Owen Jack, and the rehearsal, so acute in its satire—fitting companion-piece to the Wagner lecture in Cashel Byron's Profession?

It is noteworthy that Love Among the Artists heralds a favourite thesis of Shaw's—the natural antipathy between blood relations—a thesis expounded many years later by John Tanner in the rather leaden epigram “I suspect that the tables of consanguinity have a natural basis in a natural repugnance.” Cashel Byron is always catching himself in the act of “shying” when his mother is around—she used to throw things at him when he was a boy! Blanche Sartorius is quite ready to hate her father at a moment's notice; no love is lost between Julia and Colonel Craven; Vivie Warren stands out determinedly against her mother's authority; and Frank, with nauseating levity, takes great delight in “jollying” his reprobate father upon the indiscretions of his youth. Phil and Dolly are breezily disrespectful of parental rule; and Anne uses her maudlin mother as an excuse to do just whatever she wants. The thesis is part of Shaw's stock-in-trade, and might be regarded as a mere comic motif, were it not for the “damnable iteration” of the thing. Adrian Herbert avows his positive dislike for his mother, because, as he affirms, their natures are antagonistic, their views of life and duty incompatible—because they have nothing in common. We must take Shaw's insistence upon incompatibility of temperament between blood-relations with a good many grains of salt. It is not even half true that every mother tries to defeat every cherished project of her sons “by sarcasms, by threats, and, failing these, by cajolery”; that everyone's childhood has been “embittered by the dislike of his mother and the ill-temper of his father”; that every man's wife soon ceases to care for him and that he soon tires of her; that every man's brother goes to law with him over the division of the family property; and that every man's son acts in studied defiance of his plans and wishes. These things are only true enough to be funny; just enough of them happen in real life to give Shaw's thesis a sort of comic plausibility. It is the phrases, “love is eternal,” and “blood is thicker than water,” rather than the facts themselves, which make the iconoclastic Shaw see red. I find some explanation of his view in pardonable revolt, as a dramatist, against that persistent superstition of French melodrama—the voix du sang. Some explanation of Shaw's views in the matter may possibly be found in the facts of his own personal experience; at any rate, he once said that the word education brought to his mind four successive schools where his parents got him out of the way for half a day. Indeed, his campaign against the modern system of education springs from his recently expressed disgust with educators for concealing the fact that “the real object of that system is to relieve parents from the insufferable company and anxious care of their children.” Continuing in the same strain, he says:

“Until it is frankly recognized that children are nuisances to adults except at playful moments, and that the first social need that arises from the necessary existence of children in a community is that there should be some adequate defence of the comparative quiet and order of adult life against the comparative noise, racket, untidiness, inquisitiveness, restlessness, fitfulness, shiftlessness, dirt, destruction and mischief, which are healthy and natural for children, and which are no reason for denying them the personal respect without which their characters cannot grow and set properly, we shall have the present pretence of inexhaustible parental tenderness, moulding of character, inculcation of principles, and so forth, to cloak the imprisoning, drilling, punishing, tormenting, brigading, boy and girl farming, which saves those who can afford it from having to scream ten times every hour, 'Stop that noise, Tommy, or I'll clout your head for you.'”[27]

With gradual, yet unhalting steps, Shaw works his way to those startling and topsy-turvy theories which are so delightfully credible to the intellectuels and so bewilderingly exasperating to the Philistines. In Love Among the Artists, Madge Brailsford's open avowal to Owen Jack of her love for him gives a hint that the theory of woman as the huntress and man as the quarry is upon us. But quite the contrary course is taken in Cashel Byron's Profession, Shaw's next novel. Cashel Byron, the perfect pugilist, fights his way into the good graces of the “high-born” heiress, Lydia Carew, by the straight exhibition of his physical prowess. The whole book is conceived in such broadly satirical vein that it is impossible for me to accept it as anything except a boyishly irrepressible pasquinade. Fortunately, the “little bits of Socialism that were daubed in” here and there at first, were afterwards deleted; the current version is a novel, pure and simple, with no discoverable Socialistic thesis behind it. Shaw's explanation that the book was written as an offset to the “abominable vein of retaliatory violence” that runs all through the literature of the nineteenth century need not detain us here; Shaw has made out his own case with sufficiently paradoxical cleverness in the inevitable preface. He spends one-half of his time in explaining his actions during the other half; and it has even been unkindly hinted that each new book of his serves merely as an excuse for writing another preface. And it should be remembered that the preface to Cashel Byron's Profession was written some eighteen years later than was the book itself—ample time for Shaw to devise any excuse for representing his book as a deliberate challenge to British ideals. Suffice it to say that a comparison of Cashel Byron's Profession with Rodney Stone, for example, will make plain the distinction between the realism and the romance of pugilism. And while Byron's exhibitions of physical prowess are the most “howlingly funny” incidents in the book, it is nevertheless true that Shaw has done nothing to surround the “noble art of sluggerei” with any halo of fictitious romance.[28] “Its novelty,” as Shaw himself maintains, “consists in the fact that an attempt is made to treat the art of punching seriously, and to detach it from the general elevation of moral character with which the ordinary novelist persists in associating it.”

The real novelty, and, indeed, the chief charm, of the book consists rather in the fact that no attempt is made to treat anything seriously. So far as the prize-ring is concerned, the book's realism is veracious; the rest is the frankest of popular melodrama. What appeals more strongly to the popular heart than a low-born but invincible slugger fighting his way, round after round, to the side of a noble and fabulously wealthy heroine! What more oracularly Adelphic in its melodrama than the “finger of fate” upon the “long arm of coincidence” directing Cashel's mother to the mansion of Miss Lydia Carew! And what an exquisite fulfilment of poetic justice—the ultimate discovery that Cashel is a scion of one of the oldest county families in England, and heir to a great estate! The thing that makes the book go, of course, is its peculiarly Shavian cast—the combination of what Stevenson called “struggling, overlaid original talent” and “blooming gaseous folly.” Shaw's sense of dramatic situation continually foreshadows the future playwright. The abounding humour of the exquisitely ludicrous scene at the reception—the devastating comicality of the brute, with his native “mother-wit,” turned rough-and-ready philosopher! When Cashel is set down in the midst of this ethical-artistic circle, he breezily excels all the professors—for he discusses art positively, in the terminology of his own profession, in which he is a past master. The sublime hardihood of elucidating Beethoven and Wagner in terms of the pugilistic art of Jack Randall! And Bashville, over whom Stevenson howled with derision and delight, what a brief for democratic Socialism is Bashville—prototype for the Admirable Crichton and 'Enry Straker—keenly conscious of his own absurdity, yet zealously standing out in defence of his mistress and in insistence upon the truly democratic doctrine of “equal rights for all, special privileges for none.” Who cannot sympathize with Stevenson: “I dote on Bashville—I could read of him for ever; de Bashville je suis le fervent—there is only one Bashville, and I am his devoted slave; Bashville est magnifique, mais il n'est guère possible.” Or when he says: “Bashville—O Bashville! j'en chortle (which is finely polyglot).” Service is as sacred to Bashville as pugilism is to Cashel. Each is the “ideal” professional man, who magnifies his office and measures up to the height of his own profession. Each demands recognition for fulfilling to the best of his ability his own special function in life. Shaw insists that the real worth of a man is not to be measured by the social standing of his profession, but in terms of his professional efficiency.

Shaw's mastery of the portrayal of striking contrasts is exhibited in the case of Cashel Byron and Lydia Carew. There is a strong hint of the “female Yahoo” in Lydia's avowal to her aristocratic suitor: “I practically believe in the doctrine of heredity; and as my body is frail and my brain morbidly active, I think my impulse towards a man strong in body and untroubled in mind is a trustworthy one. You can understand that; it is a plain proposition in eugenics.” This was fun to Stevenson—but “horrid fun.” His postscript is laconically eloquent: “(I say, Archer, my God! what women!)” William Morris seems to have had the rights in the matter in describing Lydia, to Shaw privately, as a “prig-ess.” Shaw grandiloquently speaks of her as “superhuman all through,” a “working model” of an “improved type” of womanhood. “Let me not deny, however ...,” he remarks, “that a post-mortem examination by a capable critical anatomist—probably my biographer—will reveal the fact that her inside is full of wheels and springs.” The book closes on a mildly Shavian note—the romance has dwindled to banality. “Cashel's admiration for his wife survived the ardour of his first love for her; and her habitual forethought saved her from disappointing his reliance on her judgment.”

All that was needed to expose the threadbare plot of Cashel Byron's Profession was The Admirable Bashville: or Constancy Unrewarded—Shaw's blank-verse stage version of the novel. This delightful jest was perpetrated in defence of the stage-right of the novel, which threatened to pass into unworthy hands through the malign workings of that “foolish anomaly,” the English Copyright Law. In Shaw's celebrated lecture on Shakespeare, at Kensington Town Hall, section 10, as given in his abstract, reads as follows:

“That to anyone with the requisite ear and command of words, blank verse, written under the amazingly loose conditions which Shakespeare claimed, with full liberty to use all sorts of words, colloquial, technical, rhetorical, and obscurely technical, to indulge in the most far-fetched ellipses, and to impress ignorant people with every possible extremity of fantasy and affectation, is the easiest of all known modes of literary expression, and that this is why whole oceans of dull bombast and drivel have been emptied on the heads of England since Shakespeare's time in this form by people who could not have written Box and Cox to save their lives. Also (this on being challenged) that I can write blank verse myself more swiftly than prose, and that, too, of full Elizabethan quality plus the Shakespearian sense of the absurdity of it as expressed in the lines of Antient Pistol. What is more, that I have done it, published it, and had it performed on the stage with huge applause.”[29]

Liking the “melodious sing-song, the clear, simple, one-line and two-line sayings, and the occasional rhymed tags, like the half-closes in an eighteenth-century symphony, in Peele, Kid, Greene, and the histories of Shakespeare,” Shaw quite naturally “poetasted The Admirable Bashville in the rigmarole style.” After illustrating how unspeakably bad Shakespearean blank verse is, Shaw ludicrously claims that his own is “just as good.” Nor is it possible to deny that his own blank verse positively scintillates with the Shakespearean—or is it Shavian?—sense of its absurdity. The preface to The Admirable Bashville has the genuine Shavian timbre, with its solemn fooling, its portentous levity, its false premises and ludicrous conclusions. In that preface, as Mr. Archer puts it, Shaw “defends the woodenness of his blank verse by arguing that wooden blank verse is the best. That, at any rate, is the gist of his contention, though he does not put it in just that way.”

The play—for despite Shaw's prefaces, the play's the thing—is a truly admirable burlesque of rhetorical drama. Not Bashville, but Cashel only is admirable; it is Cashel's constancy that is rewarded. The piece is couched in a tone of the most delicious extravagance—a hit, a palpable hit, in every line. I cannot resist the temptation to quote from the scene in which Lydia, Lucian, and Bashville, fast locked against intrusion, debate the question of admitting Cashel, the presumably infuriated ruffian, who has just been successfully tripped up by Bashville as he is trying to enter the Carew mansion.

Lydia:We must not fail in courage with a fighter.
Unlock the door.

Lucian:Like all women, Lydia,
You have the courage of immunity.
To strike you were against his code of honour;
But me, above the belt, he may perform on
T' th' height of his profession. Also Bashville.

Bashville: Think not of me, sir. Let him do his worst.
Oh, if the valour of my heart could weigh
The fatal difference 'twixt his weight and mine,
A second battle should he do this day:
Nay, though outmatched I be, let but my mistress
Give me the word: instant I'll take him on
Here—now—at catchweight. Better bite the carpet
A man, than fly, a coward.

Lucian:Bravely said:
I will assist you with the poker.

And well worth remembering is the naïve autobiography, delivered at the request of the Zulu king, of that celestially denominated “bruiser” concerning whom Cashel once said: “Slave to the ring I rest until the face of Paradise be changed.”

Cetewayo: Ye sons of the white queen:
Tell me your names and deeds ere ye fall to.

Paradise:Your royal highness, you beholds a bloke
What gets his living honest by his fists.
I may not have the polish of some toffs
As I could mention on; but up to now
No man has took my number down. I scale
Close on twelve stun; my age is twenty-three;
And at Bill Richardson's “Blue Anchor” pub
Am to be heard of any day by such
As likes the job. I don't know, governor,
As ennythink remains for me to say.

Those who witnessed the original production of the play by the London Stage Society in 1903, and also the later production in 1909 at the “Afternoon Theatre” (His Majesty's), unhesitatingly gave it that “huge applause” of which Shaw speaks so frankly. “The best burlesque of rhetorical drama in the language,” is Mr. Archer's sweeping dictum. Even the most hardened of Philistines might find it easy to agree with his statement: “Fielding's 'Tom Thumb' and Carey's 'Chrononhotonthologos' are, it seems to me, not in the running.”

Not until the appearance of An Unsocial Socialist, fifth of the novels of his nonage, is the Pandora's box of Shavian theories opened. There now begin to troop forth those startling and anarchic views with which the name of Shaw is popularly associated. This modern “École des Maris” heralds the reign of the “literature of effrontery”; Shaw is beginning to take his stride. With all its extravagance and waywardness, An Unsocial Socialist has been declared by at least one critic of authority to be as brilliant as anything George Meredith ever wrote. Let us recall Stevenson's warning to Shaw: “Let him beware of his damned century; his gifts of insane chivalry and animated narration are just those that might be slain and thrown out like an untimely birth by the Daemon of the Epoch.” Gone are the chivalry and romance—the winds of Socialism have blown them all away. But the book fairly reeks of the “damned century,” with its mad irresponsibility, its exasperating levity, its religious and social revolt. Written in 1883, it seethes and bubbles with the scum of the Socialist brew just then beginning to ferment. Shaw's original design, he tells us, was to “produce a novel which should be a gigantic grapple with the whole social problem.... When I had finished two chapters of this enterprise—chapters of colossal length, but containing the merest preliminary matter—I broke down in sheer ignorance and incapacity.” Eventually the two prodigious chapters of Shaw's magnum opus were published as a complete novel, in two “books,” under the title An Unsocial Socialist. Shaw begins fiercely to sermonize humanity, to deride all customs and institutions which have not their roots sunk in individualism and in social justice. The Seven Deadly Sins are: respectability, conventional virtue, filial affection, modesty, sentiment, devotion to woman, romance. Sidney Trefusis is the philosopher of the New Order, revolted by the rottenness of present civilization and resolved, by any means, to set in motion some schemes for its reformation. Discovering too late that marriage to him, as to Tanner, means “apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of his soul, violation of his manhood, sale of his birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat,” Trefusis deliberately deserts his wife, not because, as with Falk and Svanhild in Ibsen's Love's Comedy, love seems too exquisite, too ethereal to be put to the illusion-shattering test of marriage, but because marriage involves the triumph of senses over sense, of passion over reason. Even after he has ceased to love Henrietta, her love for him continues to set in motion the mechanism of passion, and he is revolted by the fact that she is satisfied so long as “the wheels go round.”

The millionaire son of a captain of industry, Trefusis has, by a strange freak of fate, drunk deep of the Socialist draught of the epoch. Respecting his dead father for his energy and bravery among unscrupulous competitors in the struggle for existence, Trefusis curses his memory for the inhuman means employed in his business dealings and the social crimes concealed by the shimmer of his “ill-gotten gold.”

His most significant utterance—an outburst before the wealthy landowner, Sir Charles Brandon—gives us a clear picture of Shaw's Socialist views at this time:

“A man cannot be a Christian: I have tried it, and found it impossible both in law and in fact. I am a capitalist and a landholder. I have railway shares, mining shares, building shares, bank shares, and stock of most kinds; and a great trouble they are to me. But these shares do not represent wealth actually in existence: they are a mortgage on the labour of unborn generations of labourers, who must work to keep me and mine in idleness and luxury. If I sold them, would the mortgage be cancelled and the unborn generations released from its thrall? No. It would only pass into the hands of some other capitalist; and the working classes would be no better off for my self-sacrifice. Sir Charles cannot obey the command of Christ: I defy him to do it. Let him give his land for a public park: only the richer classes will have leisure to enjoy it. Plant it at the very doors of the poor, so that they may at least breathe its air; and it will raise the value of the neighbouring houses and drive the poor away. Let him endow a school for the poor, like Eton or Christ's Hospital; and the rich will take it for their own children as they do in the two instances I have named. Sir Charles does not want to minister to poverty, but to abolish it. No matter how much you give to the poor, everything but a bare subsistence wage will be taken away from them again by force. All talk of practising Christianity, or even bare justice, is at present mere waste of words. How can you justly reward the labourer when you cannot ascertain the value of what he makes, owing to the prevalent custom of stealing it?... The principle on which we farm out our national industry to private marauders, who recompense themselves by blackmail, so corrupts and paralyses us that we cannot be honest even when we want to. And the reason we bear it so calmly is that very few of us really want to.”

A Marx in Shaw's clothing, Trefusis devotes all his energies, all his wealth, to the task of forming an international association—“The International,” history gives it—of men pledged “to share the world's work justly; to share the produce of the work justly; to yield not a farthing—charity apart—to any full-grown and able-bodied idler or malingerer, and to treat as vermin in the commonwealth persons attempting to get more than their share of wealth or give less than their share of work.” Whole-souledly committed to Socialism in its iconoclastic aspects, Trefusis defies convention, prudery, delicacy, good-taste, and tact in all his actions, convinced beyond reclaim that “vile or not, whatever is true is to the purpose.” His philosophy holds it a short-sighted policy to run away from a mistake or a misunderstanding, instead of “facing the music” and clearing the matter up. A licensed eccentric like his prototypic creator in real life, Trefusis is permitted to take liberties granted to no one else; and by the “exercise of a certain considerate tact (which, on the outside, perhaps, seems the opposite of tact),” but which in reality consists in the most ingenious double-dealing, he somehow or other contrives to have his way and go scot-free.

In the early part of the story, disguised as that “terrific combination of nerves, gall, and brains,” Smilash, he dexterously philanders to his heart's content with several young girls at the boarding-school where his wife was educated. The verisimilitude of the portraits, the acute psychology exhibited in the portrayal of the feelings, sentiments, and sentimentalities of young girls in the boarding-school stage of evolution, testify to Shaw's remarkable gifts as a genuine realist. That forerunner of Julia Craven, the romantic little Henrietta Jansenius, is portrayed with insight, and not without delicacy and restraint. The most unreal, most unhuman scene in the book is that in which Trefusis apostrophizes the body of his dead wife. His reflections impress me as both flippant and callous in their solemn setting. It is with a sense of profound shock that we hear him rudely flout the “funereal sanctimoniousness” of the family physician, mock at the “harrowing mummeries” of religious and social observance, and “damn the feelings” of a father and mother who regarded their daughter as their chattel and showed no true feeling for her when she was alive. Trefusis is devoured with the conviction that the first, if the hardest, of all duties is one's duty to one's self. His fine Italian hand is betrayed in his later philanderings with the whilom loves of Smilash, now grown up into disagreeable, hard, calculating women. Trefusis's trickery of Sir Charles Brandon, his unfeeling deception of Gertrude Lindsay, his base flattery of Lady Brandon, his misleading promise to Erskine, are all exhibitions of his Jesuitical policy. The exponent of Socialism and the New Morality, Trefusis has no scruples in employing unfair means to secure whatsoever he wants—for the cause of labour and for himself.[30]

George Bernard Shaw.

From a photograph by Eduard J Steichen made at 10 Adelphi Terrace,
London, W.C. August, 1907.

Mr. W. L. Courtney has somewhere called attention to the curious triumph achieved by “our only modern dramatist,” as he calls Bernard Shaw, in view of the fact that Shaw has never hesitated at interpreting women as beasts of prey. In the novels we find premonitions of Shaw's later attitude toward women. Some suspicion of Shaw's theory that woman “takes the initiative in sex business” dawns upon us when Madge Brailsford openly courts Owen Jack; but Lydia Carew, that bloodless Ibsen type, is anything but the huntress. An Unsocial Socialist opens our eyes; for Henrietta shamelessly pursues the mocking Trefusis and exhausts every feminine wile in the effort to induce him to return to the chains of wedlock. The idea is also uppermost in the final scene, in which Trefusis, by means of a little diabolically-concocted sentiment, persuades the pursuing Gertrude to give him up, and, “for his sake,” to marry Erskine. When Shaw came to erect his theory into a system in Man and Superman, he threw a flood of light upon all his former work. There is a keynote to the philosophy of every great or pioneer thinker: Shakespeare had his Hamlet, Wagner his Free-willing of Necessity, Schopenhauer his Will to Live, and Nietzsche his Will to Power. So Shaw is the apostle of the Life Force, as he calls it; and woman is incarnate life force—potent instrument of that irresistible, secret, blind impulse which Nature wields for her own transcendent purposes, heedless of the feelings, welfare, or happiness of individuals. Recognizing woman as the primal vital agency in the fulfilment of Nature's laws, he has not unnaturally come to regard her as “much more formidable than man, because she is, as it were, archetypal, belonging to the original structure of things, and has behind her activity, sometimes benevolent and more often malevolent, the great authority of Nature herself.”[31] Under the spell of this plausible conviction, Shaw endows woman with all the attributes of a blind, unreasoning, unscrupulous force of nature. And for his faith he can find ample support in the literature of an age which produced Schopenhauer's Essay on Woman, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, The Triumph of Death, Gräfin Julie, Erdgeist, The Confounding of Camellia. With great adroitness, but with a curious inconsistency in one who has spent years of his life in “blaming the Bard,” Shaw finds the chief support for his claim in the plays of Shakespeare himself. By blandishment, Rosalind accomplishes her purpose; Miranda ensnares Ferdinand with the words, “I would not wish any companion in the world but you. I am your wife if you will marry me.” Juliet scales Romeo's defences one by one, and there is Desdemona with her fond “hint”; Mariana, the strategist; Helena, pursuing the recreant Bertram; Olivia, powerless to hide her passion; and poor, mad, melancholy Ophelia.

One has only to pass in review Shaw's work, from An Unsocial Socialist to Man and Superman, to discover that persistent exemplification of his theory that “woman is the pursuer and contriver, man the pursued and disposed of.” Indeed, in his very first play, we find Shaw's concrete illustration of Don Juan's statement that “a woman seeking a husband is the most unscrupulous of all the beasts of prey.” All the men in Shaw's plays seem to suffer, not from Prossy's, but from Charteris's complaint: “At no time have I taken the initiative and pursued women with my advances as women have persecuted me.” All seem to labour under the conviction that the woman's need of a man “does not prevail against him until his resistance gathers her energy to a climax, at which she dares to throw away her customary exploitations of the conventional affectionate and dutiful poses, and claim him by natural right for a purpose that far transcends their mortal personal purposes.” The quintessence of the Shavian woman is Ann Whitefield, that “most gorgeous of all my female creatures,” as Shaw calls her—incarnation of fecundity in Nature, wilful, unscrupulous, immodest, aggressive, dominant—compelling Tanner to obey her biological imperative.

The appearance of Shaw's theory in An Unsocial Socialist is responsible for this divagation of mine from the theme of the novels, this anticipation of the feminine psychology of the plays. It is highly unreasonable to suppose that the exploitation of such a theory on Shaw's part is a perverse and impish trick, designed solely épater le bourgeois: Shaw has driven home his theory in countless deliberate statements. As a philosophic concept, as an interpretation of woman by an a-priorist, little fault can be found with Shaw in the matter. No one can question Shaw's right to his opinion. Even as an effort to make the natural attraction of the sexes the mainspring of the action in modern English drama, Shaw's delineation of woman is far from being unworthy of consideration, though it has swung wide of the mark in exaggerative reaction against the romantic sentimentalities of the English stage. Shaw's women are full of purpose and vitality—the most “advanced” of women in assertion of their rights, in resolute determination to override all the barriers of current respectability and “prurient prudery,” in perfect readiness to forego all considerations of good taste, tact, delicacy, modesty, conventional virtue. They ruthlessly repudiate all those qualities which have led man to dub her his “better half.” Shaw's mistake consists in painting woman, not as she really, normally is, but as his preconceived philosophic system requires her to be. He planks down for our inspection less a life-like portrait of the eternal feminine than a philosophic interpretation of the “superior sex.” Shaw is a remarkable critic of life. Certain phases of human nature, unnoticed or unaccented by others, he has depicted with a veracity, a cleverness, a sparkling brilliancy beyond all praise. But it is one thing to portray an individual, a totally different thing to announce a universal type. A soldier like Bluntschli, a dare-devil like Dudgeon, a minister like Gardner, a hero like Cæsar or Napoleon, a wooer like Valentine, a Socialist like Trefusis, a pugilist like Byron—all these may have lived. Shaw doubtless can—indeed, sometimes does—point to their counterparts, if not in literature, certainly in real life. But to say that all soldiers are like Bluntschli, for example, is little more foolish than to say that all women are like Blanche, like Julia, like Ann. The vital defect in Shaw's women is that they are too blatant, too obvious, too crude. They are lacking in mystery, in finer subtlety, in the subconscious and obscurer instincts of sex, in the arts of exquisite seduction, of keenly-felt yet only half-divined allurement.[32] The Life Force goes about its business, one would fain remind Mr. Shaw, not openly and with a blare of trumpets, but by a thousand devious and hidden paths. Of course, there is always the danger of taking Shaw too seriously. Mr. Archer wittily, but, above all, entirely truthfully, dubbed Ann a “mythological monster.” As a pendant to Everyman of the Dutch morality, Ann may be the Everywoman of the Shavian morality. But even Shaw himself admits, with wily fairness, that while, philosophically, Ann may be Everywoman according to the Shavian dispensation, yet in practical, everyday existence there are countless women who are not Ann.

If faith is to be placed in M. Émile Faguet's dictum that no exceptional work of art is ever written by anyone before reaching the age of thirty, then Shaw's novels are debarred by the Statute of Limitations. The “ineptitude” of his novels, of which Mr. Shaw once spoke to me, is attributable to the fact that during this early period he fed upon his imagination. He had not yet come into any deep or really vital communion with humanity. Produced in that impressionable period when dreaming seems preferable to living, the novels bristle with faults—immaturities of form, crudenesses of expression, blatant didactics. They are often loose and disjointed, generally lacking in closely articulated structure. With all his pretended effort at realism, Shaw has failed to impart to his novels that one quality without which no modern work of fictive art can take the very highest rank—inevitableness. To Shaw, as to Zola, art is life seen through a temperament. And I often receive the impression that Shaw's novels are less faithful records of contemporary existence than documents revelative of Bernard Shaw. Shaw is lacking in artistic self-restraint; like the true propagandist, he seems almost unwilling to accept facts as they are, so eager is he to impose upon them the stamp of his individual predilections. It is the strangest of paradoxes that one who claims for himself that rare and priceless gift—the abnormally normal eyesight of the realist—should have spent his life in the endeavour to fix the mask of Shaw upon the face of life.

“The gods know that Bernard Shaw has many sins of omission to answer for when he reaches the remotest peak of Parnassus,” writes Mr. Huneker; “but for no one of his many gifts will he be so sternly taken to task as the wasted one of novelist.... There is more native talent for sturdy, clear-visioned, character-creating fiction in the one prize-fighting novel of Bernard Shaw than in the entire cobweb work of the stylistic Stevenson!... Shaw could rank higher as a novelist than as a dramatist—always selecting for judgment the supreme pages of his tales, pages wherein character, wit, humour, pathos, fantasy, and observation are mingled with an overwhelming effect.”[33] While there is much of truth in what Mr. Huneker says, I should hold quite the opposite opinion concerning Shaw's relative merits as novelist and dramatist. Not the least significant feature of the novels, to my mind, is their foreshadowing of the future dramatist.[34] Turning over the pages of the novels, from first to last one cannot but observe this recurrent trait: Shaw always sees his characters in a “situation.” It is difficult to read one of Shaw's novels without unconsciously looking for the stage directions. Proud as he is of his gifts as a “fictionist,” no one is more conscious than is Shaw himself of his deficiencies in this rôle. With his customary succinctness, he once put the case to me as it really is: “My novels are very green things, very carefully written.”

FOOTNOTES:

[24] On Mr. Mallock's Proposed Trumpet Performance. In the Fortnightly Review, April, 1894.

[25] Who I Am, and What I Think. Part I. In the Candid Friend, May 11th, 1901.

[26] The Letters of R. L. Stevenson, Vol. II. Edited by Sidney Colvin, pp. 107 et seq.

[27] Does Modern Education Ennoble? In Great Thoughts, October 7th, 1905.

[28] A dramatization of the novel, by Mr. Stanislaus Stange, was produced with moderate success in New York several years ago. Unique interest attached to the production because the part of Cashel Byron was taken by Mr. James J. Corbett, some time pugilistic champion of the world—and incidentally quite a clever actor. There is much of Cashel in Mr. Corbett, whose popular sobriquet is “Gentleman Jim.”

[29] Bernard Shaw Abashed. In the Daily News, April 17th, 1905.

[30] “The hero is remarkable because, without losing his pre-eminence as hero, he not only violates every canon of propriety, like Tom Jones or Des Grieux, but every canon of sentiment as well. In an age when the average man's character is rotted at the core by the lust to be a true gentleman, the moral value of such an example as Trefusis is incalculable.”—Mr. Bernard Shaw's Works of Fiction. Reviewed by Himself. In the Novel Review, February, 1892.

[31] The words are those of Mr. W. L. Courtney.

[32] There are exceptions to this generalization, of course—Lady Cicely, Candida, Nora, Jennifer, Barbara.

[33] Bernard Shaw and Woman. In Harper's Bazaar, June, 1905.

[34] It is worthy of remark that the conclusion of Love Among the Artists, as Julius Bab has pointed out, accurately prefigures the conclusion of Candida. The situation, the very words, are almost identical.

THE FABIAN SOCIETY

“If ever there was a society which lived by its wits, and by its wits alone, that society was the Fabian.”—The Fabian Society. Tract No. 41. By G. B. Shaw.

CHAPTER IV

For the student of Shaw's work and career, there is no escape from the resemblance, superficial or vital, between Shaw himself and the numerous comic figures he has projected upon the stage. Like that Byronic impostor, Saranoff, Shaw has gone through life afflicted with a multiplicity of personalities. In The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes said that when two people meet, there are always six persons present. But Shaw needs no party of the second part to sum up the total of personalities: he is eternally dogged with his own ubiquitous aliases. Bernard Shaw, the “fictionist”; Corno di Bassetto, the music critic of admirable fooling and pungent criticism; G. B. S., the apostle of comic intransigéance in criticism of art, music, and drama—and life; “P-Shaw,” the Gilbertian topsy-turvyist of essay and drama; George Bernard Shaw, Fabian, economist, public speaker, borough councillor, reformer—all these distinct characters is Shaw, in Maeterlinckian phrase, constantly meeting upon the highway of fate. It is the province of the biographer to detect, among this confusing cloud of aliases, the real man.

In 1883, the career of Bernard Shaw the “fictionist” came to an abrupt and final conclusion. While this first and introductory chapter in the book of Shaw's multiplex life was being written, the material for another and infinitely more important chapter was slowly being collected and arranged. With this second chapter begins the life of the real Shaw.

As he himself has told us, his parents pulled him through the years in which he earned nothing. But he was perpetually “grinding away” at something, perpetually feeling his way towards confidence and efficiency. The diversity of his interests was remarkable: nothing he touched proved banal or unfruitful. This universality of interests—the determination to grasp, the effort to master, every subject that came to his hand—is little less than conclusive as an explanation of his many-sidedness. “I did not start life with a programme. I simply accepted every job offered to me, and I did it the best way I could.” In this simple and straightforward statement is found the key to that diversity of talent, that range of ability, which is perhaps the most striking and noteworthy characteristic of this rare and eccentric genius.

The decisive and revolutionary changes in Shaw's truly “chequered” career were due, in almost all cases, to the adventitious or deliberate influence of some dominant personality in literature or in life. The crucial conjunctures in his career are closely associated with the names of Shelley, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Marx, Wagner, Mozart and Michelangelo, in art, music, literature and philosophy; with the names and personalities, among others, in life of James Leigh Joynes, the Salt family, Henry George, Sidney Webb, William Morris and William Archer.

In Shaw's acquaintance with the late James Lecky[35] is found the germ of that strenuous propagandist activity which may be called the most definitive expression of Shaw's life. It was in 1879 that Shaw first became intimate with Lecky and with those various subjects, connected with music and languages on the scientific side, to which Lecky devoted so much of his energy and attention. Once interested in some pursuit, Lecky would become so enthused that he would demand of his friends an interest therein commensurate with his own. This pestiferously altruistic spirit of Lecky's proved of great value to Shaw, who set his critical brain to work upon many of the problems which Lecky brought to his attention. Through Lecky, Shaw acquired a working knowledge of Temperament, concerning which he once boasted that he was probably the only living musical critic who knew what it meant; and a due appreciation of Pitman's Shorthand—which he could write at the rate of twenty words per minute and could not read afterwards on any terms!—as probably the worst system of shorthand ever invented, yet the best pushed on its business side. Together Lecky and Shaw studied and discussed Phonetics, and while Shaw's knowledge of the subject was by no means exhaustive, his interest in it has since served as a permanent protection against such superficial catch-penny stuff as the reformed spellings that are invented every six months by faddists. Shaw's individual mode of punctuation, his use of spaced letters in place of italics, his almost total rejection, on Biblical authority, which he accepted for once, of quotation marks, and those numerous original rules of punctuation and phonetics which he has from time to time formulated in magazine and daily press,[36] find their raison d'être in Shaw's early association with Lecky and subsequent acquaintance, through Lecky's instrumentality, with the late Alexander Ellis and Henry Sweet, of Oxford. As readers of the notes to Captain Brassbound's Conversion may gather, Shaw accepts Sweet as his authority; indeed, he highly values his acquaintance with that “revolutionary don,” as he calls him, and once said that, in any other place or country in the world, Sweet would be better known than even Shaw himself. The knowledge of phonetics, the interest in language-reform acquired through his acquaintance with men like Lecky, Ellis and Sweet is the explanation, Mr. Shaw once told me, of the fact that the Cockney dialect, which so befuddles and astounds the readers of Captain Brassbound's Conversion, is far more scientific in its analysis of London coster lingo than anything that had previously occurred in fiction.

In the winter of 1879, Lecky joined a debating club, called The Zetetical Society, numbering among its members Mr. Sidney Webb, Mr. Emil Garcke, and Mr. J. G. Godard. It was a sort of “junior copy” of the once well-known Dialectical Society, which had been founded to discuss Stuart Mill's essay on Liberty not long after its appearance in print. Both societies were strongly Millite; in both there was complete freedom of discussion, political, religious and sexual. Women took a prominent part in the debates, which often dealt with subjects concerning their rights, interests and welfare. A noteworthy feature of these debates, particularly in relation to Shaw's future development as a public speaker, and a critic as well, was that each speaker, at the conclusion of his speech, might be cross-examined on it by any one of the others in a series of questions. In this society Malthus, Ingersoll, Darwin and Herbert Spencer were held in especial reverence. The works of Huxley, Tyndall and George Eliot were on the shelves of all the members. The tone of the society was very “advanced”—individualistic, atheistic, evolutionary. Championship of the Married Woman's Property Act was scarcely silenced by the Act itself. The fact that Mrs. Besant's children were torn from her like Shelley's, aroused hot indignation, as did the prosecutions for “blasphemy” then going on. It is not without significance that, even at this time, Shaw was Socialist enough to defend the action of the State in both cases. Indeed, he has always been, as he once told me, somewhat of Morris's opinion that “There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have charge of children; but there can be no doubt that the parents are the worst.” Strange jest of fate, Shaw began his career by joining a society whose members regarded Socialism as an exploded fallacy! How little did anyone dream that, even then, underground rumblings of the approaching revolution might be faintly heard! That recurrent quindecennial cycle of Socialistic upheaval of which Karl Kautsky has somewhere spoken, was well-nigh completed. Within five years Socialism was to burst forth with fresh impetus, sweep the younger generation along with it, and plunge the Dialectical and Zetetical Societies into the “blind cave of eternal night.”

Sidney Webb.

Reproduced from the original photo-drawing.

Jessie Holliday.
Courtesy of the artist.

One night in the winter of 1879, Lecky dragged Shaw to a meeting of the Zetetical Society, which then met weekly in the rooms of the Woman's Protective and Provident League in Great Queen Street, Long Acre. It will be related elsewhere why Shaw decided to join the society at once; suffice it to say here that he became a frequent attendant upon the meetings of the society, entering actively, if haltingly, into discussion and debate. The importance, in its bearing upon Shaw's subsequent career as a man of affairs and a man of letters, of an acquaintance he formed at this time through the accident of joining the Zetetical Society, can scarcely be overestimated. A few weeks after joining the society Shaw's keenest interest was aroused in a speaker who took part in one of the debates. This speaker was a young man of about twenty-one, rather below middle height, with small, pretty hands and feet, and a profile that suggested, on account of the nose and imperial, an improvement on Napoleon the Third. I well remember the animated way in which Mr. Shaw described to me the man and the occurrence. “He had a fine forehead, a long head, eyes that were built on top of two highly developed organs of speech (according to the phrenologists), and remarkably thick, strong, dark hair. He knew all about the subject of debate; knew more than the lecturer; knew more than anybody present; had read everything that had ever been written on the subject; and remembered all the facts that bore on it. He used notes, read them, ticked them off one by one, threw them away, and finished with a coolness and clearness that, to me in my then trembling state, seemed miraculous. This young man was the ablest man in England—Sidney Webb.” Then a trembling novice, yet subsequently to be known as the cleverest man in England, Shaw to-day does not hesitate to pay full honour to the part Sidney Webb has played in his career. The extent and value of this association will reveal itself in due course. Shaw has said and done a thousand clever things; but, as he once freely confessed to me, “Quite the cleverest thing I ever did in my life was to force my friendship on Webb, to extort his, and keep it.”

After Shaw had been a member of the Zetetical Society for about a year, he joined the Dialectical Society, and was faithful to it for years after it had dwindled into a little group of five or six friends of Dr. Drysdale, the apostle of Malthus. Shaw subsequently joined another debating society, the Bedford, presided over by Stopford Brooke, who had not then given up his pastorate at Bedford Chapel to devote himself exclusively to literature. During these years, as we shall see more particularly in the next chapter, Shaw was slowly perfecting himself in the art of public speaking. The fascination of the platform grew upon him daily. He not only spoke frequently himself, but also attended public meetings of every sort, learning by precept, experience, and example the secrets of the art of platform speaking. With dogged persistence, he was surely, if slowly, acquiring what he himself has called the coolness, the self-confidence and the imperturbability of the statesman.

During these years he had gradually widened and deepened his knowledge of the subjects which periodically came up for discussion in the various debating societies he had joined. In his boyhood he had read Mill on Liberty, on Representative Government, and on the Irish Land Question. And he was fully the equal of his co-debaters in knowledge and comprehension of the evolutionary ideas and theories of Darwin, Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, George Eliot, and their school. But of political economy he knew absolutely nothing. It was in 1882 that his attention was first definitely directed into the economic channel.

England and Ireland were greatly stirred up at this time by the arrest of Henry George and James Leigh Joynes as “suspicious strangers” in Ireland (August, 1882). Joynes, a master of Eton, wishing to see something of the popular side of the Irish movement, accompanied George as a correspondent of the London Times. George was making an investigation of the situation in Ireland preliminary to his campaign of propaganda in behalf of his Single Tax theories, enunciated in Progress and Poverty. The arrest of George and Joynes, on the charge of being agents of the Fenians, was widely commented on in the newspapers of Great Britain and Ireland, and resulted in a Parliamentary questioning. Progress and Poverty, pronounced by Alfred Russel Wallace “undoubtedly the most remarkable and important work of the nineteenth century,” began to sell by the thousands; it was prominently reviewed in the London Times and dozens of other papers; and George felt at last that he was “beginning to move the world.” Further encouragement came from the Land Nationalization Society, which had been founded in London early in 1882, with Alfred Russel Wallace at its head.[37] “It contained in its membership,” says Mr. Henry George, Jr., in his biography of his father, “those who, like Wallace, desired to take possession of the land by purchase and then have the State exact an annual quit-rent from whoever held it; those who had the Socialistic idea of having the State take possession of the land with or without compensation and then manage it; and those who, with Henry George, repudiated all idea of either compensation or of management, and would recognize common rights to land simply by having the State appropriate its annual value by taxation. Such conflicting elements could not long continue together, and soon those holding the George idea withdrew and organized on their own distinctive lines, giving the name of the Land Reform Union to their organization.” While interest was at fever heat, George was invited by the Land Nationalization Society to lecture under the auspices of a working men's audience in Memorial Hall. The bill, a true copy of which lies before me, reads as follows:

LAND NATIONALIZATION.
Memorial Hall,
Farringdon Street,
On Tuesday, September 5th, 1882.
Under auspices of
THE LAND NATIONALIZATION SOCIETY.
Professor
F. W. Newman
will preside.

George's speech that night was the torch that “kindled the fire in England”—a fire which he afterwards said no human power could put out. It was the masses that George was trying to educate and arouse. It was the masses whose ear he caught that night.

Henry George. From a photograph taken in 1882.

Karl Marx. By special permission.

At that time, Bernard Shaw eagerly haunted public meetings of all kinds. By a strange chance, he wandered that night into the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street. The speaker of the evening was Henry George: his speech wrought a miracle in Shaw's whole life. It “kindled the fire” in his soul. “It flashed on me then for the first time,” Shaw once wrote, “that 'the conflict between Religion and Science' ... the overthrow of the Bible, the higher education of women, Mill on Liberty, and all the rest of the storm that raged round Darwin, Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, and the rest, on which I had brought myself up intellectually, was a mere middle-class business. Suppose it could have produced a nation of Matthew Arnolds and George Eliots!—you may well shudder. The importance of the economic basis dawned on me.”[38] Shaw now read Progress and Poverty; and many of the observations which the fifteen-year-old Shaw had unconsciously made now took on a significance little suspected in the early Dublin days of his indifference to land agency.[39]

Shaw was so profoundly impressed by the logic of Henry George's conclusions and suggested remedial measures that, shortly after reading Progress and Poverty, he went to a meeting of the Social Democratic Federation, and there arose to protest against their drawing a red herring across the track opened by George. The only satisfaction he had was to be told that he was a novice: “Read Marx's Capital, young man,” was the condescending retort of the Social Democrats. Shaw promptly went and did so, and then found, as he once said, that his advisers were awestruck, as they had not read it themselves! It was then accessible only in the French version at the British Museum. William Archer has testified to the diligence with which Shaw studied Marx's great work; he caught his first glimpse of Shaw in the British Museum Library, where he noticed a “young man of tawny complexion and attire” studying alternately—if not simultaneously—Das Kapital, and an orchestral score of Tristan and Isolde!

While Darwin, Huxley, Spencer and their school left a distinct impress upon Shaw's mind, it is nevertheless true that he never became a Darwinian. To-day he is violently opposed to Darwinian materialism; and yet the Shavian philosophy, historically considered, is a natural consequence of that bitter fight against convention, custom, authority, and orthodoxy, inaugurated by Darwin and his followers. But Shaw's sociologic doctrine is a distillation, not of the Descent of Man or of the Data of Ethics, but of Das Kapital. At this crucial period in Shaw's career he was exactly in the mood for Marx's reduction of all the conflicts to the conflict of classes for economic mastery, of all social forms to the economic forms of production and exchange. The real secret of Marx's fascination for him, as he once said, was “his appeal to an unnamed, unrecognized passion—a new passion—the passion of hatred in the more generous souls among the respectable and educated sections for the accursed middle-class institutions that had starved, thwarted, misled, and corrupted them from their cradles.” In Marx, Shaw found a kindred spirit; for, like Marx, his whole life had bred in him a defiance of middle-class respectability, of revolt against its benumbing and paralyzing influence. As Shaw once said:

“Marx's 'Capital' is not a treatise on Socialism; it is a jeremiad against the bourgeoisie, supported by such a mass of evidence and such a relentless genius for denunciation as had never been brought to bear before. It was supposed to be written for the working classes; but the working man respects the bourgeoisie and wants to be a bourgeois; Marx never got hold of him for a moment. It was the revolting sons of the bourgeoisie itself—Lassalle, Marx, Liebknecht, Morris, Hyndman, Bax, all, like myself, bourgeois crossed with squirearchy—that painted the flag red. Bakunin and Kropotkin, of the military and noble caste (like Napoleon), were our extreme left. The middle and upper classes are the revolutionary element in society; the proletariat is the conservative element, as Disraeli well knew.”[40]

Some such Marxist passion, one surmises, subsequently carried weight with Shaw in influencing his choice of the Fabian Society as the fit milieu for the development and exploitation of his energy and talent. For at heart Shaw is what his plays so abundantly prove him—the revolted bourgeois.

Not only did Marx's jeremiad against the bourgeoisie awaken instant response in Shaw: it changed the whole tenor of his life. No single book—not the Bible of orthodoxy and respectability, certainly—has influenced Shaw so much as the “bible of the working classes.” It made him a Socialist. Although he has since repudiated some of the fundamental economic theories of Marx, at this time he found in Das Kapital the concrete expression of all those social convictions, grievances and wrongs which seethed in the crater of his being. He became that most determined, most resistless, and often most dangerous of men to deal with, a man with a mission. “From that hour,” I once heard Mr. Shaw say, “I became a man with some business in the world.”

During the years 1883 and 1884 Shaw threw himself heart and soul into the exciting task of Socialist agitation and propagandism. His dogged practice in public speaking now began to demonstrate its value with telling effect. While he spent his days in criticizing books in the Pall Mall Gazette and pictures in the World, he devoted his evenings to consistent and strenuous Socialist propagandism. He accepted invitations to address all sorts of bodies on every day in the week, Sunday not excepted. Remember his confession that he first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands. During these years, also, he was coming into close touch with the younger generation destined soon to unite in a solid phalanx as the Fabian Society. Probably no living man has touched modern life at so many points as has Bernard Shaw. In his lifetime he has traversed a very lengthy arc on the circle of modern culture, modern thought and modern philosophy. Sovereign contempt for the laggard is one of his prominent characteristics; he himself has ever been an “outpost thinker” on the firing-line of modern intellectual conflict. Essentially significant because essentially modern, Shaw owes no small share of his ability, his versatility, and his breadth of interests to his voraciously acquisitive, acutely inquisitive intellect. Clever acquaintances, brimming with ideas, and overflowing with combative zeal, furnished grist for the ceaselessly active mill of Shaw's intelligence. No biography which failed to trace the shaping influence exerted upon Shaw's frantically complex career by such men as Hubert Bland, Graham Wallas, Sidney Olivier, Sidney Webb and William Morris, could lay just claim to the title of genuine natural history.

At the Land Reform Union Shaw first met Sidney Olivier, then upper division clerk in the Colonial Office. Sidney Webb and Sidney Olivier, very close friends, were the two resident clerks there. When Webb, at Shaw's persuasion, joined the Fabians, Olivier went with him. There existed a very close relation, not only between the various members of the Fabian Society, but also between many of the advanced societies which came to life at this time. For example, Sidney Olivier, who was secretary of the Fabian Society for several years, and Edward Carpenter's brother, Captain Alfred Carpenter, of the Royal Navy, married sisters; in this way there was a sort of family connection between the Socialist and Humanitarian movements. Olivier had made friends at Oxford with Graham Wallas, who was probably influenced through this connection to become a Fabian. The very intimate relation existing between Shaw, Webb, Olivier and Wallas, and the consequent marked influence upon Shaw's literary career and performance, will be spoken of elsewhere at greater length. It is noteworthy that all of these men possessed literary talents of no mean order. Webb's books have a world-wide reputation. Olivier's play, Mrs. Maxwell's Marriage, has been performed by the London Stage Society; and his literary talent has displayed itself, not only in plays, but also in verse, essay and story.[41] In addition to his ability as a facile public speaker, Graham Wallas also possessed literary talent of no mean order, displayed to best advantage in his book on Francis Place, with its lucid exposition of the way in which politics are “wire-pulled” in England by real reformers.[42]

Another man of talent, whose very opposition of belief and view-point exerted a sort of stimulating influence upon Shaw, was William Clarke, an Oxford M.A., who contributed the chapter on The Industrial Basis of Socialism to Fabian Essays. A Whitmanite, with strong feelings of rationalist type, allied in spirit to Martineau, the Unitarians, and their logical outgrowth, the American Ethical Society, Clarke made upon Shaw an ineffaceable impression. Shaw first met this remarkable man at the Bedford Society—a meeting which bore fruit in Clarke's joining the Fabian Society. Clarke had lectured in America, known Whitman, and is remembered as the author of several books. Although a successful lecturer, he had by this time exhausted the interest of lecturing, being much older than the other Fabians. A very unlucky man, he was, in consequence, very poor. It has been often said that in the matter of philanthropy Shaw never let his right hand know what his left was doing; he found a way to relieve Clarke's poverty without even letting Clarke, who quarrelled with everything and everybody, suspect that he was the recipient of benefaction. When the Daily Chronicle changed its policy and decided to give a column in its pages to Labour, its concerns and interests, the editor, in his search for young blood, hit upon Shaw, who quietly substituted Clarke in his place. Had Clarke ever discovered the truth it might have mitigated the profound moral horror of Shaw he always entertained. How Shaw must have chuckled over the latent comedy! The secret philanthropist regarded as a moral anarchist, a monstrum horrendum, by his highly moral beneficiary! To Clarke, an altruist and moralist to the backbone, the dawning of Ibsenism, of Nietzscheism, of Shavianism, seemed to be the coming of chaos. “Yet the fact that I knew his value and insisted on it, and that I could sympathize even with his horror of me,” Mr. Shaw once told me, “kept our personal relations remorsefully cordial. The last time I called on him was in the influenza period. He was working madly, as usual. He would have certainly refused to see anyone; but he was alone in the flat, and opened the door for me. With a savage, set face that would have made even Ibsen's mouth look soft by contrast, he said, through his shut teeth: 'I can give you five minutes and that is all.' 'My dear Clarke,' I replied, ambling idly into his study, 'I must leave in half an hour to keep an appointment; and I have just been thinking how I am to get away from you so soon; for I know you won't let me go.' And it turned out exactly as I said. We began to discuss the Parnell divorce case and the Irish crisis, and I could not get away from him until the hour was nearly doubled.”[43]

The part which the Fabian Society has played in English life, and the share of Bernard Shaw in the task of advancing the principles of Collectivism in the last twenty odd years, alone offer ample material for a book. So diverse in its ramifications is the subject, that it will be possible here to trace the evolutionary advance of Socialism in England only in so far as it directly bears upon Shaw's career.[44] As we know, Shaw began his real education as a pupil of Mill, Comte, Darwin and Spencer. Converted to Socialism by Henry George and his Progress and Poverty, Shaw took to insurrectionary economics after reading Das Kapital. Marx's book won his support because it so fiercely “convicted private property of wholesale spoliation, murder and compulsory prostitution; of plague, pestilence and famine; battle, murder and sudden death.” For some time before joining any Socialist society, Shaw preached Socialism with the utmost zeal and enthusiasm. The choice of a society lay between the Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League—both quite proletarian in their rank and file, both aiming at being large working-class organizations—and the Fabian Society, which was middle-class through and through. “When I myself, on the point of joining the Social Democratic Federation, changed my mind and joined the Fabian instead,” Shaw once wrote, “I was guided by no discoverable difference in programme or principle, but solely by an instinctive feeling that the Fabian, and not the Federation, would attract the men of my own bias and intellectual habits, who were then ripening for the work that lay before us.”

Facsimile of Cover of Fabian Tract, No. 2.