I remember very vividly the first occasion on which I saw and heard Mr.
Shaw. He was lecturing on "Some Necessary Repairs to Religion" to a
religious organization, now defunct, called "The Guild of St. Mathew."
His lecture was extraordinarily startling to a young man, fresh from
Belfast and still influenced by his fathers' faith, although in revolt
against much of it. When the lecture was over, a lady asked him to say
what his belief was about the Resurrection, and he replied, that if she
would promise not to tell any one, he would say that he did not believe
it ever took place. And then came one of those strange lapses from
serious argument which are characteristic of him. Another questioner
asked him if he believed in the Immaculate Conception. "Of course I
do," he said. "I believe that all conceptions are immaculate!" The
questioner was so paralysed by this reply that she sat down without
pointing out to him that the Catholic Church believes in the Immaculate
Conception on the assumption that all conceptions are not immaculate.
On many occasions, Mr. Shaw has brilliantly dodged the point in that
manner; but they are not occasions that need be remembered against
him. Ever and always he has given his best and hardest thought to the
service of mankind. He has practiced what he preaches, and if we are
thrown on the scrap-heap, it will not be because Mr. Shaw has failed to
do his uttermost to help God to realise Himself. What a shock it will
be to him to find that the scrap-heap is a more likeable place than his
God's heaven!
X
He is greatly generous to young men. Like most of my contemporaries I
have imposed upon his good nature very often. I sent "Jane Clegg" and
"John Ferguson" in manuscript to him and asked him if he would read
them and tell me what his opinion of them might be. Probably a dozen
or more young men were doing exactly the same thing with their MSS.
He could spend the whole of his time reading other men's plays, if he
were to let his good nature go uncontrolled. But he read my plays and
wrote long, valuable letters of advice about them to me. I hesitate to
mention this fact lest it should cause an avalanche of MSS. to fall
upon him, but I am trying to draw his portrait, and unless I mention
his generosity to young men, the portrait will not be a faithful one.
I am under personal obligations to him of many sorts, and I do not
know of any man who so freely helps his friends and says so little
about it. He is now sixty-six years old, but there are no signs of age
about him other than the fact that his hair and his beard, once red,
have turned white. He still has the mind and eagerness of a young man.
His walk is as springy and alert as it was when I first knew him, as
I am sure it has always been. When I see him in the street sometimes,
tall, lean, very tidy and almost foppish in an unusual way, walking
with great assurance and ease, examining now and then his very shapely
hands, and gazing about him with that queer, quizzical, kindly look in
his pleasant eyes that is so significant of him, I feel that although
he is thirty years older than I am, according to the official records,
he is, in spirit, thirty years younger. He will never be old. If he
lives to be a centenarian, he will still be talking like a young man;
and perhaps it is his extraordinary youth and vitality, as much as his
disrespect for established things, that draws young men inevitably to
him. His fearless, challenging spirit attracted all those who were
in revolt against stagnant beliefs; and even now, when the multitude
seems to have caught up with him and his views are less startling
than they were a few years ago, he still stimulates the minds of the
young and the eager and sends them bounding forward. "You should so
live," he once said, "that when you die, God is in your debt!" He
bids men and women strive to put more into the common pool than they
take out, and he asserts with something like moral fury that any one
who is taking more from the common pool than he puts in, is cheating
both God and man. There are querulous persons who say that his work
will not live. Their forefathers probably said that Shakespeare's work
would not live, that Cervantes's work would not live, that Fielding's
work would not live, that Dickens's work would not live; and no doubt
they produced sound arguments to support their faith. Who could have
believed that "Don Quixote," a mere skit on contemporary novelettes,
would win universal favor, or that "Pickwick Papers," mere verbiage
for a set of pictures drawn by a popular artist, would live? Yet these
local, topical, and very contemporary things will not perish. Mr. Shaw
has indisputably affected the thoughts and lives of thinking men and
women on two continents for thirty years. He is a very daring fellow
who asks us to believe that this brilliant, original, forceful mind
will not continue to affect the thoughts and lives of men and women for
generations to come.