T THE REAL BERNARD SHAW BY ARCHIBALD HENDERSON I HE supreme difficulty in discovering the real has engaged in a deliberate campaign of artistic camouflage. "The public imagination demands a best man everywhere," he once remarked; "and if Nature does not supply him the public imagination invents him. The art of humbug is the art of getting invented in this way." Shaw has never shrunk from the delightful pastime of stimulating the public imagination. The remedy for lack of recognition he early found in sedulous advertisement. In the earliest edition of the English "Who's Who," Shaw mentions as his favorite recreation "showing off!" Indeed, he once gaily confessed: "I have advertised myself so well that I find myself, while still in middle life, almost as legendary a person as the Flying Dutchman." In England people don't talk about Bernard Shaw: they talk about "G. B. S." Early in life Shaw fixed the London public with his glittering eye, and succeeded in mesmerizing that public into accepting a view of him so fantastic and extraordinary as to bear no resemblance to the real man. "G. B. S." is Bernard Shaw's prime paradox, a Frankenstein monster of his own creation. With this mannikin as a model, everyone nowadays with any pretension to literary skill has manufactured a little Shaw of his own. The result is that there are countless fantastic portraits of Shaw's reputation, but no picture of the real man. Shaw is not taken in by the lay figure of his own reputation, “G. B. S." -as who should say Teddy Bear or Dutch Doll—; because he manufactured that reputation himself. In speaking of on this Shavian mannikin, G. B. S., he once remarked: "The whole point of the creature is that he is unique, fantastic, unrepresentative, inimitable, impossible, undesirable any large scale, utterly unlike anybody that ever existed before, hopelessly unnatural, and void of all real passion." I propose to tear off this mask of Shaw's reputation. Unfortunately, Shaw cannot help us; for he is profoundly sceptical as to the possibility of veracious autobiography. "All autobiographies are deliberate lies," he honestly confesses. "No man is bad enough to tell the truth about himself during his life-time, 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 man I present is the mischievous, Puck-like, gracious, teasing, generous, philosophic, satiric, and profound personality known to me in the personal intimacy of a long, friendly, and thoroughly unceremonious intercourse. I accept as truth itself his provocative confession: "Like all men I play many parts, and none of them is more or less real than the other. I am a soul of infinite worth. I am, in short, not only what I can make out of myself, which varies greatly from hour to hour and emergency to emergency, but what you can see in me." The questions to be resolved, then, are: what has Bernard Shaw made out of himself; and what can we see in him? II "I am a typical Irishman-my family came from Yorkshire." Thus speaks Shaw of his nativity, contrary to the fashion of the proverbial Irishman who declares that one ought always to be loyal to his native land whether he was born there or not. Patriotism seems to be wholly missing in the make-up of the man who could ask: "How can I pretend to any particular love for the country I have abandoned, or for the country which has ruined her?" Com ing of a family marked by as much ingrained snobbishness as lies perhaps unconfessed in the most of us, a family who "revolved in a sort of impecunious second-cousinship around a baronetcy," with an unpractical father and an artistic mother, he "grew up wild" in the mystic atmosphere of the Ireland of the Saints. As a lad, church-going was unendurable to one who in after life could say: "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 forever damned if they had 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." Refuge from the hated tasks of school attendance and church-going he found in the National Gallery of Ireland, which he haunted as a youth. In after years he was wont to affirm that this picture gallery, which only he and the policemen ever visited, had done more for him than the two cathedrals in Dublin so magnificently "restored" out of the profits of the drink trade. He reacted violently against the Moody and Sankey revival; and in a letter to "Public Opinion," just fifty years ago, protested vehemently against the services of the American revivalists, which he said "were not of a religious, but of a secular, not to say profane character." The most lasting effect upon Shaw as a youth was the influence of music. His mother was a beautiful and talented opera singer, particularly successful in the roles of Donizetti's Lucrezia, Donna Anna in "Don Giovanni," and Marguerite in "Faust." In total refutation of Gilbert Chesterton's notion that Shaw was reared in a "narrow Puritan home," Shaw has vehemently asserted that, quite to the contrary, as a lad he indulged himself to the full in the licensed orgies and romantic ecstasies of music. “། gained penetrating experiences of Victor Hugo and Schil ler from Donizetti, Verdi and Beethoven," he once confessed; "of the Bible from Handel, of Goethe from Gounod, of Beaumarchais and Molière from Mozart, and of Mérimée from Bizet, besides finding in Berlioz an unconscious interpreter of Edgar Allan Poe." Concerning this period of adolescence, when he reacted violently from religious ceremonial and the conventional society of Dublin, and ranged happily in spirit from Vincent Wallace to Meyerbeer, from Mendelssohn to Gounod, he once remarked with acid veracity: "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." The greatest living dramatist was influenced in his art more by Mozart than by Shakespeare; and one of the greatest paradoxes in Bernard Shaw's career is the vivid contrast between the ruthless realist of the critics' invention and the arrant romanticist his youth proclaims him to be. "In music," lyrically exclaims the devotee of Beethoven, Mozart, and Richard Strauss, "you will find the body and reality of that feeling which the mere novelist can only describe to you; there will come home to your senses something in which you can actually experience the candour and gallant impulse of the hero, the grace and trouble of the heroine, and the extracted emotional quintessence of their love.” III This young romantic, inspired by Mendelssohn and Gounod, by Michael Angelo and Mantegna, by Shelley and Poe, in 1876 threw himself recklessly into London. "My destiny was to educate London," he whimsically confesses twenty years later, "but I had neither studied my pupil nor related my ideas properly to the common stock. What I knew was exactly what the educated Englishman didn't know; and what he knew I either didn't know or didn't believe." In a series of five novels written between 1879 and 1883, Shaw managed to work off that green sickness of romanticism which he had brought with him from Ireland, and to form vital contacts with the world of modern thought. These remarkable youthful productions, absurdly amateurish, singularly acute yet amazingly inept, all very carefully written, contain many germs of Shaw's later development. In them he hales to the bar of judgment what he felt to be the "seven deadly sins:" respectability, conventional virtue, filial affection, modesty, sentiment, devotion to women, ro mance. In the first letter I ever had from Mr. Shaw, more than twenty-two years ago, he is frankly and, I am confident, veraciously autobiographical. "I never lived the literary life, or belonged to a literary club; and though I brought all my powers unsparingly to the criticism of the fine arts, I never frequented their social surroundings. My time was fully taken up (when I was not actually writing or attending performances) by public work, in which I was fortunate enough to be associated with a few men of exceptional ability and character. I got the committee habit, the impersonality and imperturbability of the statesman, the constant and unceremonious criticism of men who were at many points much abler and better informed than myself, a great deal of experience which cannot be acquired in conventional grooves, and that 'behind the scenes' knowledge of the mechanism of political illusion which seems so cynical to the spectators in front. This training of mine has enabled me to produce an impression of being an extraordinarily clever, original, and brilliant writer, deficient only in feeling, whereas the truth is that though I am in a way a man of genius-otherwise I suppose I would not have sought out and enjoyed my experience, and been simply bored by holidays, luxury and money—yet I am not in the least naturally 'brilliant' and not at all ready or clever. If literary men generally were put through the mill I went through and kept out of their |