I. PUBLISHED VOLUMES, WITH REVIEWS Mistress Dorothy Marvin, Excerpts from the Memoirs of Sir Edward Armstrong, Bart., of Copeland Hall, Somerset. London: Innes, 1896; New York: Appleton (in Town and Country Library, No. 188) 1896. Reviewed, Athenæum, '95, 2, 897.

Fierceheart the Soldier. London: Innes, 1897. New York: Appleton (in Town and Country Library, No. 217) 1897. Reviewed, Athenæum '97, 1, 804; Literary World (London), N. S. 55, 530.

Willow the King. The Story of a Cricket

Match. London: Ward, Locke, 1899. Reviewed, Athenæum '99, 2, 96; Lit. World (London) N. S. 60, 30; Spectator 83, 352. Lady Barbarity. A Romantic Comedy. London: Ward, Locke, 1898. New York: Appletion (in Town and Country Library, No. 271) 1890. Reviewed, Athenæum '99, 2, 584; Literary World (London) N. S. 60, 329. Wayfarers. London: Ward, Locke, 1901. New York: Appleton (in Town and Country Library, No. 307) under title Love's Itinerary, 1901. Reviewed, Lit. World (London) N. S. 66, 225.

Patricia at the Inn. London: Arrowsmith,

1901. New York: B. W. Dodge, 1906. Reviewed, Lit. World (London) N. S. 64, 443. Broke of Covenden. London: Constable, 1904. Boston: Turner, 1904. Reviewed, Academy 67, 49; Critic 45, 557; Lit. World (London) N. S. 70, 183; Sat. Review 98, 85; Spectator 93, 259.

Henry Northcote. London: Constable, 1906;

Boston: Turner, 1906; New Ed., New York: Moffat, Yard, 1911. Reviewed, Bookman (London) 30, 118; Dial (W. M. Payne) 42, 144; Lit. World (London) N. S. 72, 202. William Jordan, Junior. London: Constable, 1907; New York: Moffat, Yard, 1908. Reviewed, Chicago Post, May 5, '08; Dial (W. M. Payne) 44, 351; Hartford Courant, April 4, '08; N. Y. Evening Sun, May 16, '08; Outlook, May 9, '08. Araminta. London: Smith, Elder, 1909; New York: Moffat, Yard, 1909. Serialised in the Forum, 1908-9. Reviewed: Athenæum '09, 1, 312; Atlantic 103, 702; Bookman 29, 315; Book News Monthly, April, '09; Chic. Evening Post, Mch. 13, '09; Chic. Record-Herald, Feb. 25, '09; Current Lit. 47, 340; Dial (W. M. Payne) 46, 369; Independent €6, 707; Nation 88, 337; N. Y. Evening Post, Apr. 30, '09; N. Y. Times, 14, 134 and 379; N. Y. Tribune, Mch. 13, '09; Outlook June 19, '09; Saturday Review 107, 469; Spectator 102, 504.

Fortune. London: Nelson, 1910; New York: Moffat, Yard, 1910. Reviewed, Bookman 31, 525; Dial (W. M. Payne) 48, 394; Nation 91, 35; N. Y. Times 15, 241; Saturday Review 109, 665; Spectator 105, 359; Times (London), Apr. 28, 1910, 154c.

Mrs. Fitz. London: Smith, Elder, 1910; New York: Moffat, Yard, 1910. Reviewed, Athenæum '10, 2, 551; Atlantic (Margaret Sherwood) May, 1911; Dial, Feb. 1, '11; Hartford Courant, Dec. 3, 1910; Metropolitan Mag., Jan. 1911; N. Y. Evening Post,

Nov. 26, '10; N. Y. Times 15, 712; N. Y. Tribune, Oct. 23, '10; Spectator 105, 865; Times (London) Oct. 20, 1910, 392b. The Principal Girl. Serialised in the Atlantic 1911-12. To be published, in the spring of 1912, London: Methuen; New York: Moffat, Yard.

II. APPRECIATIONS, ETC.

Peattie, Elia W. Article based on William Jordan, Junior, Chic. Daily Tribune, Apr. 25, 1908.

Seccombe, Thomas. Article based on Araminta, Bookman (London) 36, 38. Tennyson, A. B. S., Article based on Araminta, in Contemp. Rev. 95, sup. 8.

A CORRECTION. In the Bibliography of Arnold Bennett, published in the November BookMAN, through a typographical error a headline, "In Collaboration with Eden Phillpotts," was run in as part of the text following the novel, Hilda Lessways. This headline, of course, refers, not to Hilda Lessways, but to the two following titles, Sinews of War and The Statue, both of which are the joint work of Mr. Bennett and Mr. Phillpotts.

I

BERNARD SHAW*

Not many Americans have any real acquaintance with Bernard Shaw. They know him as novelist, playwright, jester, disputant, iconoclast, but of any continuity in his purpose, or method in his madness they are ignorant. The great mass of printed rubbish that has accumulated about him has only confused them. For years past it has seemed a waste of time to read a word that any other professional writer had to say about him. Shavianism of course was simply a nuisance, and, fortunately, is now dead. Nobody wants a Shaw notion expounded by any other person than Shaw, and Shaw himself apparently feels in the same way about it. As to his critics, they have consisted, in this country, chiefly of academic Thebans who have emerged only to ejaculate "Mountebank!" and then returned to their congenial routine of expounding the leading thoughts in In Memoriam or what Thackeray owed to Sterne. To be sure, there was Mr. G. K. Chesterton, but his is the opposite extreme to the academic, the extreme of

unconscionable and often irrelevant vivacity. While our "Cultured" critics could take no pleasure in Shaw, because he was not long enough dead and decided

*George Bernard Shaw. His Life and Works. A Critical Biography (Authorised). By Archibald Henderson, Ph.D. Cincinnati : Stewart and Kidd Company, 1911.

upon, Mr. Chesterton's easily stimulated mind became as gloriously drunk on Shaw as it did on Dickens or the Roman Catholic Church or Woman as the Mainstay of the Cosmos. People do not read Mr. Chesterton for knowledge of a subject but only to see the colours he throws on it. So it came to pass that little could be made of Shaw when viewed through the minds of his commentators, whether reflected in frozen academic puddles or with the Chesterton rainbow on him.

Now comes Dr. Archibald Henderson to the rescue of the inquisitive, with the first adequate and lucid report of Shaw that has appeared in print. He spent six years in preparing it and it fills a volume of more than five hundred pages, which nevertheless seems too short, for a more entertaining narrative, whether in biography or fiction, has not appeared in recent years. Shaw has aided the author in its preparation and has approved the result. Much of it is in Shaw's own words, quoted from his conversations, letters and books. Much of it is summary of Shaw's views as expressed in his critic, dramatic critic and playwright. professional writings as art critic, music In general, though Dr. Henderson calls it a "critical" biography, Shaw speaks for himself and the writer's views are not intruded. If, as he says, his own views are in "hearty disagreement" with Shaw's on many points, he has shown admirable self-repression. He is loyal

to his subject, sometimes even slavish, and he has kept his own colour out of the picture. To be sure, one must take it for granted that Shaw is a very great person, that is the premise of the entire work. But it is implied, not insisted upon in rapturous adjectives.

"I cannot begin, like Ruskin, by saying that my father was an entirely honest merchant," said Shaw in one of his confessions. "I don't know whether he was or not; I do know that he was an entirely unsuccessful one." The best thing Shaw could say of his father was that he might have been a weaker brother of Charles Lamb. His mother was a woman of strong character, self-reliant, indifferent to conventional opinions, and with unusual talent as a musician. He was brought up in an atmosphere of class prejudice and genteel poverty, and the main thing that he learned from it was hatred of respectability. The glimpses Dr. Henderson gives of his environment explains in part his scorn of class distinctions and fashionable society.

One evening, says Shaw, I was playing on the street with a school-fellow of mine, when my father came home. He questioned me about the 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 street with the son of a man who sold nails by the pennyworth are not to be described. He impressed on me that my honour, my human dignity, all stood upon my determination not to associate with persons associated in retail trade. . . . 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 Goda Protestant and a perfect gentleman-keeping Heaven select for the gentry; and an idolatrous impostor called the Pope, smoothing the hellward 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!

He went to four successive schools, at which, according to his own account and that of his biographer, he learned nothing. He says they were merely crèches at which his parents got him out of

the way for half a day. He thinks they did him a good deal of harm and no good whatever, and he tells his biographer, "If you can in any public way convey to these idiotic institutions my hearty curse, you will relieve my feelings infinitely." The two chief educa

tional influences in his early life were music and painting. Mrs. Shaw led the chorus at a musical society and young Shaw heard the works of the principal composers constantly rehearsed at home. Before he was fifteen he knew by heart many operas and oratorios. He was also familiar with a considerable number of Italian and Flemish paintings and with the history of art. When a boy he haunted the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, and spent his spare money on volumes of Vasari in the Bohn translation. But of education in the usual sense, he had none. His people could not afford to send him to the university, and he never regretted it, being as sceptical of university ideals as of others. He held that the knowledge which he picked up of his own accord did not place him "at the smallest disadvantage with men who only know the_grammar and mispronunciation of the Greek and Latin poets and philosophers" and that the university turned out men who all thought alike and were snobs. Eager but unsystematic reading, an intense love of music and a keen interest in painting characterised his early life, which was wholly lacking in the usual active pleasures of boyhood.

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 ascetism, which left its indelible mark upon his character.

At the age of fifteen he became a clerk in the office of an Irish land agent and for five years did his work faithfully and well, though utterly despising it. Meanwhile his father's income being hopelessly insufficient for the support of the household, his mother had gone to London and become a professional teacher of singing. Young Shaw joined her

there in 1876, and without the least compunction permitted her to support him for several years, while he pegged away as a literary free lance.

With that comic seriousness which always passes for outrageous prevarication, Shaw has related that during the nine years from 1876 to 1885 his adventures in literature netted him the princely sum of exactly six pounds. At first he "devilled" for a musical critic; but his notices "led to the stoppage of all the concert advertisements and ruined the paper"-"which died-partly of me." He also began a Passion Play in blank verse, with the mother of the hero represented as a termagant. . . . “I was always, fortunately for me," Mr. Shaw once remarked, "a failure as a trifler. All my attempts at Art for Art's sake broke down; it was like hammering tenpenny nails into sheets of notepaper."

He was, moreover, quite unfitted by training for competition in this field.

I was a foreigner-an Irishman, the most foreign of all foreigners when he has not gone through the university mill. I was

not uneducated; but unfortunately what I knew was exactly what the educated Englishman did not know, and what he knew I either I didn't know or didn't believe.

During this period he received his largest fee, £5, from a patent medicine advertisement. A publisher once asked for some verses to accompany some old blocks that had been purchased for a school prize book. Shaw sent him a parody, as a joke, but to his amazement the publisher took it seriously and sent him a fee. Thereupon Shaw in gratitude wrote him a serious verse for another picture. The publisher took this. as a joke in rather bad taste. Shaw's uncompromising attitude at this time is likened by Dr. Henderson to the character of the "true artist" as described by Tanner in Man and Superman.

"The true artist," runs the passage, "will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deep

est creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose, whilst he really means them to do it for his."

Shaw did try, to be sure, to "earn an honest living," but regarded it the while. as a "sin against his nature," and soon gave up the attempt. He then determined to write as he wished to write, regardless of the time spent or the rewards. forfeited.

I was an able-bodied, able-minded young man in the strength of my youth; and my family, then heavily embarrassed, needed my help urgently. That I should have chosen to be a burden to them instead was, according to all the conventions of peasant fiction, monstrous. Well, without a blush I embraced the monstrosity. I did not throw myself into the struggle for life; I threw my mother into it. I was not a staff to my father's old age; I hung on to his coat tails. His reward was to live just long enough to read a review of one of these silly novels written in an obscure journal by a personal friend of my own. . . . People wondered at my heartlessness; one young and romantic lady had the courage to remonstrate openly and indignantly with me, "for the which," as Pepys said of the shipwright's wife who refused his advances, "I did respect her." Callous as Comus to moral babble, I steadily wrote my five pages a day and made a man of myself (at my mother's expense) instead of a slave.

He says elsewhere—

My mother worked for my living instead of preaching that it was my duty to work for hers; therefore take off your hat to her and blush.

During this period he wrote the five novels of which the first, written in 1879 and called "with merciless fitness" Immaturity, was never published and the four others were all rejected at first by the publishers and did not find their way into print until 1884-1886, when they ran as serials in the Socialist magazines. By that time or a little later he had repented of them and he never ceased to express contempt for them. He told his present biographer that he always regarded admiration of Cashel Byron's Profession

the mark of a fool. Meanwhile Shaw had been cultivating his musical and artistic tastes and saturating himself with the doctrines of Henry George, Karl Marx and the spirit of Ibsen. He belonged at this time to a little band of intimates who revelled in the discussion of land nationalisation, Socialism, vegetarianism, humanitarianism, Wagner, Walt Whitman, and what not. It was Shelley's example that made Shaw a vegetarian. For twenty-five years he confesses with shame, he had been a "cannibal," but thenceforth he became a strict vegetarian. It did not, according to him, require any self-denial. He declared that "the enormity of eating the scorched corpses of animals cannibalism with its heroic dish omitted becomes impossible the moment it becomes consciously instead thoughtlessly habitual."

of

These novels, despite his repudiation, contain many of the elements of his mature work. Thus An Unsocial Socialist, written in 1883, when he was twentyseven, is marked by many of the anarchic dogmas, the oddities, and the seeming paradoxes of his plays. Its hero, Trefusis, the apostle and philosopher of the New Order, expounds the same doctrine that runs through Man and Superman, namely, that woman at the behest of the Life Force is forever pursuing man. Shaw said his purpose in writing it was "to produce a novel which should be a gigantic grapple with the whole social problem," but after finishing two chapters, he tells us, he "broke down in sheer ignorance and incapacity." These two chapters were published serially in 1884. and later appeared in book form. Trefusis, like Tanner in Man and Superman, finds that marriage means "apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of his soul, violation of his manhood," etc., and Henrietta, like Gertrude in the later play, shamelessly pursues her fleeing man.

One has only to pass in review Slaw's work, from An Unsocial Socialist to Man and Superman, to discover that persistent exemplification of his theory that "woman is the pursuer and contriver, man the pursued and disposed of." . . . It is highly unreasonable to suppose that the exploitation of such a theory on Shaw's part is a perverse and impish trick, designed solely épater le bourgeois. Shaw has driven

home his theory in countless deliberate state

ments.

The iconoclasm of An Unsocial Socialist, the sneers at custom and at conventional morality, the doctrine of the rottenness of our civilisation, run straight through all Shaw's work down to the present day. It may be that Shaw is mad, as he himself has frequently conjectured. One evidence of it is that he believes all the rest of the world to be. But the hypothesis that a man is a mere jester or intellectual acrobat when he has remained for thirty years loyal to the same purpose and constantly expounding the same doctrines is altogether too absurd. He is and has been for a whole generation a sectarian bigot of a welldefined branch of Socialism, as deeply attached to his opinions as was John Calvin. What he said in earnest was from the very first taken as a joke. He soon saw that thousands welcomed as a joke what they would have resented as a serious doctrine. So he became a propagandist by the simple process of asserting in the most uncompromising manner his own beliefs, which seemed so preposterous as to be quite safe, and at his fiercest moments, when he was storming against property, marriage, and morals, everybody felt happy and secure, remarking that it was capital fun and he a harmless fellow.

The writers and artists who left the deepest impression on Shaw in his early life were Shelley, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Marx, Wagner, Mozart and Michael Angelo. He owed the implse that drove him into economic studies to Henry George, whom one evening in the autumn of 1882 he chanced to hear lecture in London. This changed the whole course of his life.

It flashed on me then for the first time that the "conflict between Religion and Science" . . . the overthrow of the Bible, the higher education of women, Mill on Liberty, and all the rest of the storm that raged round Darwin, Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer and the rest, on which I had brought myself up intellectually, was a mere middle-class business. Suppose it could have produced a nation of Matthew Arnolds and George Eliots!-you may well shudder. The importance of the economic basis now dawned on me.