GEORGE BERNARD SHAW was born in Dublin, July 26, 1856. His paternal grandfather, Bernard Shaw, was high sheriff of County Kilkenny, and his maternal grandfather, Walter Bagnall Gurley, a county ’squire and fox hunter, with an extensive, but entailed estate. Shaw’s father was a younger son and, in consequence, no millionaire. But that he was a pauper or that the dramatist, in his youth, was attracted to vegetarianism because, as James Huneker hints, cabbages are cheaper than venison, there is no reason to believe. When the family came to London, in 1876, it took up quarters in “a well furnished house in a pleasant part” of the city. This upon the authority of Mr. Stanley Shaw, a relative, in a letter to the New York Sun, dated Berlin, April 25, 1905.
The Shaws then, were country gentlemen, and in all probability little different from the other Irish gentry about them. The son of the younger son was educated and reared in the orthodox fashion. He learned the speech of the Irish aristocracy and the foreign tongues in favor—English, French, and maybe a bit of German; he mastered the three R’s, he studied the history of his country, and went to church. “When I was a little boy,” he says in his essay “On Going to Church,” “I was compelled to go 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 afterward....” A virtuous, commonplace family. Its present head, says the Mr. Stanley Shaw aforesaid, “is Major Sir Frederick Shaw, Bart., D. S. O. of Bushey Park, Dublin.” A respectable, well-sounding name and address.
Shaw was twenty when he reached London—the meditative, impressionable, speculative, iconoclastic age. Apparently he fell an easy prey to the philosophical anarchists who then held the centre of the stage—Proudhon, Lassalle, Marx, Louis Blanc, Engels, Liebknecht, and the lesser Germans. Certainly it was a day of stimulating stirring about. Huxley and Spencer were up to their necks in gore; Ibsen, with “The League of Youth” behind him, was giving form to “The Pillars of Society” and “A Doll’s House”; Nietzsche was tramping up and down his garden path; Wagner was hard at work; “The Principles of Sociology” had just come from the press. Sham-smashing was in the air. Everything respectable was under suspicion.
It didn’t take Shaw long to spring out of the audience upon the stage. His first novel, in truth, must have been begun long before he learned to find his way about the streets of London. Whether it was good or bad the human race will never know; publishers declined it without thanks, and the author, when his manuscripts began to have a value, decided that it should remain unpublished. “It was a very remarkable work,” he says, “but hardly one which I should be well advised in letting loose whilst my livelihood depends on my credit as a literary workman. I can recall a certain difficulty, experienced even while I was writing the book, in remembering what it was about....” Thus heavily did his theme bear down upon him.
What the young Irishman did to relieve his imagination during the next three years is not recorded. That he learned a great deal, particularly of music and literature, is very probable. His sister was a professional singer, and the persons he met were chiefly of the literary-artistic sort. He was “but an infant of twenty-four, when, being at that time one of the unemployed” he essayed to mend his “straitened fortunes” by writing his second novel, “The Irrational Knot.” It was no masterpiece, but if the few persons who glanced through it possessed prophetic eyes they must have seen in it marks of a genius rather startling. A year later came “Love Among the Artists”—a volume of nearly 500 pages. Then, in order, came “Cashel Byron’s Profession” and “An Unsocial Socialist.” Not one of these extraordinary tales struck the fancy of the publishers. “An encouraging compliment or two,” says Shaw, was his sole reward for the fatiguing labor of writing them. Not until a good while afterward did any of the five see the light, and then it was only “to fill up the gaps in socialist magazines financed by generous friends.” “An Unsocial Socialist” was the first to reach the dignity of covers. After it came “Cashel Byron’s Profession” and “The Irrational Knot.” “Love Among the Artists” was the last to appear upon the book stalls.
Meanwhile Shaw had become engaged in half a dozen reform crusades. Vegetarianism found in him an early advocate and socialism won him easily. In 1883, the year Karl Marx died, Thomas Davidson, an American, laid the foundation of the Fabian Society at a series of parlor conferences in London. In 1884 Shaw joined the society, and four years later, when it began holding public meetings, he found himself one of its leading lights. He has told us himself how he delighted to indulge in eloquent socialistic orations from cart-tails and how he came to acquire a bodyguard of faithful auditors whose presence was assured whenever it was announced that he would speak. With the pen, too, he labored for the manifesto of 1845, and even to-day he is still hard at it—despite prosperity, the approach of middle age and a fair imitation of the thing called fame. He wrote tracts in great number and after 1889 edited the Fabian Essays. Incidentally he wrote “Fabianism and the Empire” (1900), “Fabianism and the Fiscal Question” (1904), and other socialistic broadsides. At odd moments he had his say, too, upon the subjects of vegetarianism, the use of quotation marks, capitalization, evening clothes, capital punishment, and the eternal snobbishness of the patriotic Britisher.
During all this time he was drawn nearer and nearer to the theater. As far back as 1885 he began a play in collaboration with William Archer, the translator of Ibsen. This drama, rewritten and amplified seven years later, was the first of his works to be performed in public. But the need of getting on in the world pressed gloomily. “The question was,” Shaw has told us, “how to get a pound a week.” Novel writing was plainly hopeless and play making seemed equally impossible. There remained a chance to set up shop as a critic. Shaw made the plunge and almost immediately his humor and originality won him an audience. “Soon,” he says, “my privileges were enormous and my wealth immense.... The classes patiently read my essays; the masses patiently listened to my harangues. I enjoyed the immunities of impecuniosity with the opportunities of a millionaire....”
At the start Shaw’s regular topic was the art pictorial, but before long he began to dabble in music. According to Max Beerbohm, his first essay was printed in the first number of the Star in 1888. This was a highly purposeful periodical, founded by T. P. O’Connor (“If we enable the charwoman to put two lumps of sugar in her tea instead of one,” said “Tay Pay,” in his salutatory, “we shall not have worked in vain”), and Shaw wrote over the nom de plume of “Corno di Bassetto.” In 1890, after two years’ service, he transferred his flag to the World. Then, like his friend Huneker, he abandoned music for the drama, and from January, 1895, to May, 1898, he was the critic of the Saturday Review—the London weekly in whose columns the ingenious Mr. Beerbohm now holds forth.
As has been noted, “Widowers’ Houses,” Shaw’s first play, was completed in 1892. It was given its initial performance during that year at the Royalty Theater, London, by the Independent Theater Company, and made a rather strenuous success. “The socialists and independents,” says Shaw, “applauded me furiously on principle; the ordinary play-going first-nighters hooted me frantically on the same ground; I, being at that time in some practice as what might be unpolitely called a mob-orator, made a speech before the curtain; the newspapers discussed the play for a whole fortnight, not only in the ordinary theatrical notices and criticisms, but in leading articles and letters; and finally the text of the play was published, with an introduction by Mr. Grein (the manager of the Independent Company), an amusing account by Mr. Archer of the original collaboration, and a long preface and several elaborate controversial appendices in the author’s most energetically egotistical fighting style.”
“The Philanderer” was written in 1893, also for the Independent Theater, and “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” was completed the same year. The former was withdrawn because it was found well-nigh impossible to unearth actors capable of understanding it sufficiently to play it, and the latter remained in the manager’s desk because the virtuous English play-censor forbade its performance. Nine years later—January 12, 1902—it was presented privately by the Stage Society.
In 1894 a group of philanthropic play-goers, convinced that the dramas of the day were intolerable, financed a series of special performances at the Avenue Theater, London. The second play presented was Shaw’s “Arms and the Man.” It was given its premiere April 21, and ran until July 7. Shaw, in his preface to the second volume of “Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant” enters upon an elaborate account of its receipts and the philosophy thereof. During its brief season the Londoners paid $8,500 to see it and the cost of presenting it, counting salaries, rents, lights, advertising, and royalties, was nearly $25,000. Soon afterwards Richard Mansfield presented the play in the United States and it made a very fair success. It is in the Mansfield repertoire even to-day, and now and then there is a matinée performance of it. But apparently the public does not very vigorously demand it. In translation it has been done in Germany.
“The Man of Destiny” was written in 1895. Two years later it was given one performance at Croydon, England. Then it slumbered until the last months of 1904, when Arnold Daly played it in New York as an after-piece to “Candida.” Since then his company has appeared in it in most of the large cities of the United States. “Candida” and “You Never Can Tell” were written in 1896. The former was first played by the Independent Theater Company, during a tour of the English provinces, in 1897. Arnold Daly, scraping together $300, presented it, in association with Winchell Smith, at the Berkeley Lyceum, a diminutive theater in West 45th street, New York, in 1904. The success of the drama was so great that before long Daly found himself a Broadway star under the management of Liebler & Co., and at present it seems likely that Shaw’s plays will serve to keep him in the public eye for a good while to come.
Shaw wrote a one-act piece, “How He Lied to Her Husband,” for his young American interpreter, and when it was presented in New York, in the fall of 1904, it made a great stir. “You Never Can Tell,” which had been withdrawn by Shaw after being placed in rehearsal in London, was given at the Garrick Theater by Daly at the conclusion of the run of “Candida.” The two volumes of “Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant” were published in 1898. They included “Widowers’ Houses,” “The Philanderer,” “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” “Arms and the Man,” “You Never Can Tell,” “Candida,” and “The Man of Destiny”—not to speak of a 37-page preface dealing with a vast multitude of subjects.
“The Devil’s Disciple,” the first of the “Three Plays for Puritans,” was written early in 1897. Richard Mansfield presented it in New York in the fall of that year and it made an excellent success. Like “Arms and the Man” it is still in his repertoire—pretty far down in the trunk, it may be mentioned in passing, with many other plays atop of it. In October, 1899, Murray Carson’s company played it for a few weeks at Kensington, near London. “Cæsar and Cleopatra” was written in 1898, and “Capt. Brassbound’s Conversion” the next year. The “Three Plays for Puritans” were published in 1900. “The Admirable Bashville, or Constancy Rewarded” was given by the Stage Society at the Imperial Theatre in 1903. Shaw evolved it from the fragments of “Cashel Byron’s Profession” to protect his rights in the latter, an unauthorized dramatization having been made for an American pugilist-actor. The play was printed as an appendix to the second English edition of “Cashel Byron’s Profession.”
“Man and Superman” was written in 1902, and published the next year, with a gigantic preface, and “The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion” as an appendix. Preface, play, and appendix make a volume of 244 closely-printed pages. The drama saw the light on the evening of May 23, 1905, at the Court Theater, London. Granville Barker, made up to resemble Shaw, played the role of John Tanner, and Miss Lillian McCarthy was the Ann Whitefield. May 21 and 22 there were special performances of the play by the Stage Society, and in September, 1905, Robert Loraine and his company presented it in New York. The third act with the scene of Don Juan in Hell was omitted. “John Bull’s Other Island” was completed in 1904, and presented at six special matinees at the Court Theater by the Stage Society in the fall of that year. “Major Barbara” was written in 1905.
Shaw’s two critical tracts, “The Perfect Wagnerite” and “The Quintessence of Ibsenism” were published in 1888 and 1891, respectively. His last scholastic manifesto, “The Common Sense of Municipal Training” was issued in 1904. A remarkable essay, “On Going to Church,” which appeared originally in the Savoy Quarterly—Arthur Symons’ journal—in 1896, was reprinted early in 1905, and attained a large sale. In the late ’80’s, in an English periodical, there appeared his celebrated answer to Max Nordau’s book, “Degeneration.” In the opinion of some of his admirers this is, by far, the best of his controversial works, but, unfortunately, it has not been reprinted in permanent form.
“When Arnold Daly visited Shaw,” says Gustav Kobbé, “he found several indications that cynicism and Fabian socialism are not unprofitable. Shaw lives in large apartments in the New Reform Club, overlooking the Thames embankment, and he has a country place at Welwin, too.... There is no sham in the interior of his places of abode. There is a complete absence of the cheap æsthetic or of superfluous ornamentation. Simplicity of outline distinguishes such ornaments as there are. Handles, incrustations and the like are eschewed. Shaw explained to Daly that he wished nothing in his abode that would collect dust. Even rugs are tabooed.... Daly did not find the author a poseur, but simply a man who was not an ordinary man....”
That Shaw has a keen eye to business a great many aspiring managers have discovered. He demands a royalty of 15 per cent. of the gross receipts of his plays—considerably more than all but the most famous dramatists receive—and is careful and unsentimental in his negotiations. That he is now basking in the sun of prosperity is very probable. Saving only Shakespeare, no English author was better represented in the productions of the winter of 1904–5. In addition Shaw is much in demand as a lecturer and has no difficulty in finding a publisher for whatever he chooses to write. In 1898 he inherited the entailed estate of his maternal grandfather, Walter Bagnall Gurley. He was married the same year to Miss Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend.
“Who’s Who” says that Shaw’s favorite exercises are swimming and cycling and that his recreation is “anything except sport.” He is tall, lanky, and wears a shaggy, red beard. He affects loose fitting flannel shirts and heaps his curses upon the dress suit. He is a vegetarian, a socialist, and many other things of a heterodox, fearsome sort. He uses the typewriter in preference to a pen, even for correspondence. He has travelled in Europe and the Levant, and may soon come to America. He refuses to use apostrophes in such words as don’t and can’t, and affects thin spacing, after the German style, instead of italics, to emphasize words. “Last season,” says the sapient Mr. Daly, “he was a social freak; now he is a legitimate amuser (sic!) of the people.”
And so much for George Bernard Shaw.