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* * * * *
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
HIS LIFE AND WORKS
[Illustration: =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.”
[Illustration: =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.
[Illustration: =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
CHAPTER PAGE
AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION v
PREFACE xi
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xv
I. DUBLIN DAYS 3
II. LONDON 31
III. THE NOVELIST 59
IV. THE FABIAN SOCIETY 89
V. THE CART AND TRUMPET 121
VI. SHAVIAN SOCIALISM 151
VII. THE ART CRITIC 195
VIII. THE MUSIC CRITIC 231
IX. THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 261
X. THE PLAYWRIGHT--I 293
XI. THE PLAYWRIGHT--II 335
XII. THE PLAYWRIGHT--III 363
XIII. THE TECHNICIAN 409
XIV. THE DRAMATIST 431
XV. ARTIST AND PHILOSOPHER 453
XVI. THE MAN 491
APPENDIX.--A GENEALOGY OF THE SHAW FAMILY. 513
ILLUSTRATIONS
COVER DESIGN
A Satyric Mask. _From an original in the Department of Greek
and Roman Antiquities, British Museum._
COLOURED PLATES
George Bernard Shaw.
_Lumière autochrome, by Alvin Langdon Coburn_ _Frontispiece_
Ahenobarbus at Rehearsal. _Water-colour of G. B. Shaw,
by J. Bernard Partridge_ _facing p._ 246
PHOTOGRAVURE PLATES
George Bernard Shaw. “The Diabolonian.” _Monochrome
by Éduard J. Steichen_ _facing p._ 80
George Bernard Shaw. “The Philosopher.” _Monochrome
by Alvin Langdon Coburn_ " 468
OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS
Shaw and the biographer. _Photo by Mrs. Bernard Shaw_ _facing p._ viii
Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, George Carr Shaw, etc. " 18
Shaw at the age of twenty-three " 46
Sidney Webb " 92
Henry George " 96
Karl Marx " 96
Cover of Fabian Tract, No. 2 _p._ 103
The Socialist (George Bernard Shaw in 1891) _facing p._ 116
The Cart and Trumpet " 144
A Study of Six Socialists " 164
Cover design of Fabian Essays, 1890. _By Walter Crane_ _p._ 179
Fitzroy Square, London _facing p._ 196
William Morris " 211
George Bernard Shaw. A Cartoon. _By Max Beerbohm_ " 232
Pope Innocent X. " 262
The Modern Pope of Wit and Wisdom. _By Neville S. Lytton_ " 262
John Bull's other Playwright. A Cartoon. _By E. T. Reed_ " 270
William Archer. _By Jessie Holliday_ " 276
Bernard Shaw. _Black-and-white wash sketch
by Joseph Simpson_ " 294
In Consultation (G. B. S. and the author).
_By É. J. Steichen_ " 336
H. Granville Barker. _By A. L. Coburn_ " 372
Shaw's House at Ayot St. Lawrence " 422
George Bernard Shaw. _Photo by Histed_ " 436
Shaw's present home in London (10, Adelphi Terrace) " 446
A plaster bust of Shaw. _By Troubetzkoy_ " 480
G. B. S. (A Cartoon). _By Joseph Simpson_ _p._ 497
A bust of Shaw. _By Rodin_ _facing p._ 500
A Prophet, the Press, and Some People.
_From a water-colour by Jessie Holliday_ " 506
FACSIMILES
MANUSCRIPTS
A page of a letter from Bernard Shaw
to the biographer _facing p._ vi
The first and last pages of original MS. of _Love
Among the Artists_ _pp._ 65-66
PLAYBILLS, ETC.
PAGE
Sunday Afternoon Lectures. March, 1886 126
_The Philanderer._ Berlin 301
_Mrs. Warren's Profession._ Munich 301
_Arms and the Man._ London. First performance 311
_You Never Can Tell._ Stockholm 326
_The Man of Destiny._ Frankfort 326
_Candida._ Paris 349
_Candida._ Brussels 352
_Man and Superman._ New York 365
_Candida._ New York 379
_The Doctor's Dilemma._ Cologne 395
_Arms and the Man._ Frankfort 395
_Press Cuttings._ London 403
A GENEALOGICAL CHART _facing p._ 514
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.
[Illustration: =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.