George Bernard Shaw, his life and works

“When did you first feel inclined to write?” Shaw was once asked. “I never felt inclined to write, any more than I ever felt inclined to breathe,” was his perverse reply. “I felt inclined to draw: Michelangelo was my boyish ideal. I felt inclined to be a wicked baritone in an opera when I grew out of my earlier impulse towards piracy and highway robbery. You see, as I couldn't draw, I was perfectly well aware that drawing was an exceptional gift. But it never occurred to me that my literary sense was exceptional. I gave the whole world credit for it. The fact is, there is nothing miraculous, nothing particularly interesting, even, in a natural faculty to the man who has it. The amateur, the collector, the enthusiast in an art, is the man who lacks the faculty for producing it. The Venetian wants to be a cavalry soldier; the Gaucho wants to be a sailor; the fish wants to fly, and the bird to swim. No, I never wanted to write. I know now, of course, the value and the scarcity of the literary faculty (though I think it over-rated); but I still don't want it.” And he added: “You cannot want a thing and have it, too.”

That Shaw did want to write, however, is clearly shown by the early outpourings of the artistic mood in the imaginative boy. When he was quite small, he concocted a short story and sent it to some boys' journal—something about a man with a gun attacking another man in the Glen of the Doons. In after years, spiritual adventures fired his soul; at this time, the gun was the centre of interest. The mimetic instinct of childhood in his case, however, found incentives to the development of almost every artistic faculty other than writing. His hours spent in the National Gallery of Ireland, his study of the literature of Italian art, filled him with the desire to be another Michelangelo; but he couldn't draw. Like Browning, Shaw wished to be an artist, and, like Browning also, he wished to be a musician. He heard music from the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same; he knew whole operas and oratorios. He wanted to be a musician, but couldn't play; to be a dramatic singer, but had no voice. The facile conqueror of every literary domain, mocked in later life with the accusation of being a sort of literary Jack-of-all-trades, was only puzzled as a youth to discover in himself a single promising potentiality.

A casual remark of an acquaintance first startled Shaw, then in his teens, into recognition of the fact that he lacked any sort of final consciousness in regard to his own position and destiny. The apprentice in the land agency office, eight or ten years Shaw's senior, who sang, “Ah, che la morte” with such deadly effect, one day happened to observe that every young fellow thinks that he is going to be a great man until he is twenty. “The shock that this gave me,” Mr. Shaw once confessed to me with perfect naïveté, “made me suddenly aware that this was my own precise intention. But a very brief consideration reassured me—why, I don't know; for I could do nothing that gave me the smallest hope of making good my calm classification of myself as one of the world to which Shelley and Mozart and Praxiteles and Michelangelo belonged, and as totally foreign to the plane on which land agents laboured.”

In Cashel Byron's Profession, the hero, a prize-fighter, remarks that it is not what a man would like to do, but what he can do, that he must work at in this world. Naturally enough, Bernard Shaw, the young lad in his teens, had not yet come to any sort of artistic self-consciousness. Shaw may be said to have spent half of his life in the search for the Ultima Thule of what he could do. And it is by no means certain, judging from the lesson of his career, that he has yet discovered all of his capabilities. Certain it is that, at this formative stage in his career, he had found only one: the ability to keep—not to write—books. Mr. Shaw once pictured for me his state of dejection at this time over his inefficiency and incompetence. “What was wrong with me then was the want of self-respect, the diffidence, the cowardice of the ignoramus and the duffer. What saved me was my consciousness that I must learn to do something—that nothing but the possession of skill, of efficiency, of mastery, in short, was of any use. The sort of aplomb which my cousins seemed to derive from the consciousness that their great-great-grandfather had also been the great-great-grandfather of Sir Robert Shaw, of Bushy Park, was denied to me. You cannot be imposed on by remote baronets if you belong to the republic of art. I was chronically ashamed and even miserable simply because I couldn't do anything. It is true that I could keep Mr. Townshend's cash, and that I never dreamt of stealing it; and riper years have made me aware that many of my artistic feats may be less highly estimated in the books of the Recording Angel than this prosaic achievement; but at this time it counted for less than nothing. It was a qualification for what I hated; and the notion of my principal actually giving me a testimonial to my efficiency as a cashier drove me to an exhibition of rage that must have seemed merely perverse to my unfortunate father.”

In these days of inarticulate revolt against current religious and social ideals, Shaw somehow found an outlet for that seething lava of his spirit, which was one day to burst forth with such alarming effect. This, Shaw's first published work, was the forthright letter in Public Opinion, in which he sought to stem the force of the first great Moody and Sankey revival by the announcement that he, personally, had renounced religion as a delusion! Besides this single public vent for his insurgency, he had found, in the friendship of a kindred spirit of imaginative temperament, the opportunity for the expression of all the doubts, hopes and aspirations of his eager and revolutionary intelligence. With one of his schoolfellows, Shaw struck up a curious friendship: this young fellow, Edward McNulty, was afterwards known as the author of Misther O'Ryan, The Son of a Peasant, and Maureen,[9] three very original and very remarkable novels of Irish life. Both boys possessed imaginative temperaments, and their association gave promise of ripening into close and lasting friendship. But circumstances separated them so effectually that, after their schooldays, they saw very little of each other. McNulty was an official in the Bank of Ireland, and had been drafted to the Newry branch of the institution, while Shaw, as we know, was in Mr. Townshend's land office in Dublin. During the period of their separation, between Shaw's fifteenth and twentieth years, they kept up a tremendous correspondence. In this way they probably worked off the literary energy which usually produces early works. The immense letters, sometimes illustrated with crude drawings and enlivened by brief dramas, which came and went with each post, served as “exhausts” for the superfluous steam of their literary force. It was understood between them that the letters were to be destroyed as soon as answered, as their authors did not relish the possibility of such unreserved soul histories falling into strange hands.

I believe that Shaw perpetrated one more long correspondence, this time with an unnamed English lady, whose fervently imaginative novels would have made her known, Shaw once asserted, had he been able to persuade her to make her name public, or at least to stick to the same pen name, instead of changing it for every book. Shaw also made one valuable acquaintance at this time through the accident of coming to lodge in the same house with him. This was Chichester Bell, of the family of that name distinguished for its inventive genius, a cousin of Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, and a nephew of Melville Bell, the inventor of the phonetic script known as Visible Speech. The author of the Standard Elocutionist, Chichester Bell's father, whom Shaw has described as by far the most majestic and imposing looking man that ever lived on this or any other planet, was the elocution professor in one of the schools attended by Shaw in his youth, the Wesleyan Connexional, now Wesley College, attendance at which, we may be sure from Shaw's case, by no means implied Methodism.[10] Although a qualified physician, Chichester Bell did not care for medical practice, and had gone to Germany, where he devoted himself to the study of chemistry and physics in the school of Helmholtz. Shaw's intercourse with Bell proved to be of great value to him. They studied Italian together, and while Shaw did not learn Italian with any final thoroughness, he learned a great deal else, chiefly about physics and pathology. It was through his association with Bell that he had come to read Tyndall and Trousseau's “Clinical Lectures.” But Bell is to be remembered chiefly in relation to Shaw, as first calling his serious attention to Wagner. When Shaw discovered that Bell, whose judgment he held in high regard, considered Wagner a great composer, he at once bought a vocal score of Lohengrin, which chanced to be the only sample to be had at the Dublin music shops. From this moment dates the career of the remarkable music critic, who, in after life, swept Max Nordau off the field with his brilliant and unanswerable defence of the master-builder of modern music. For the first few bars of Lohengrin completely converted him. He immediately became, and ever afterwards remained, the “Perfect Wagnerite.”

The days of Shaw's youth before he went to London, as we have seen, were poisoned because he was taught to bow down to proprietary respectability. But even in his “unfortunate childhood,” as he calls it, his heart was so unregenerate that he secretly hated, and rebelled against, mere respectability. In after life, he found it impossible to express the relief with which he discovered that his heart was all along right, and that the current respectability of to-day is “nothing but a huge inversion of righteous and scientific social order weltering in dishonesty, uselessness, selfishness, wanton misery, and idiotic waste of magnificent opportunity for noble and happy living.” Not the evangelist's but the true reformer's zeal was always Shaw's. He had too much insight not to recognize the futility of the effort to reform individuals; his humanitarian spirit was impersonal and found its freest manifestation in fulmination and revolt against social institutions. Concerning the unsocial system of setting class against class, and creed against creed, he has mordantly expressed himself:

The power which he found in Ireland religious enough to redeem him from this abomination of desolation was, fitly enough, the power of art. “My mother, as it happened, had a considerable musical talent. In order to exercise it seriously she had to associate with other people who had musical talent. My first childish doubt as to whether God could really be a good Protestant was suggested by my observation of the deplorable fact that the best voices available for combination with my mother's in the works of the great composers had been unaccountably vouchsafed to Roman Catholics. Even the divine gentility was presently called in question, for some of these vocalists were undeniably connected with retail trade.”

The situation in which Mrs. Shaw found herself offered no alternative. “There was no help for it; if my mother was to do anything but sing silly ballads in drawing-rooms she had to associate herself on an entirely republican footing with people of like artistic gifts, without the smallest reference to creed or class. Nay, if she wished to take part in the masses of Haydn and Mozart, which had not then been forgotten, she must actually permit herself to be approached by Roman Catholic priests and even, at their invitation, to enter that house of Belial, the Roman Catholic chapel (in Ireland the word church, as applied to a place of worship, denotes the Protestant denomination), and take part in their services. All of which led directly to the discovery, hard to credit at first, that a Roman Catholic priest could be as agreeable and cultivated a person as a Protestant clergyman was supposed, in defiance of bitter experience, always to be; and, in short, that the notion that the courtly distinctions of Dublin society corresponded to any real human distinctions was as ignorant as it was pernicious. 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.”

It was unerring common sense on the domestic plane, acquiescence in the sole solution of a flinty problem of life, which reveals Shaw's mother to us as the parent from whom he derived his determination, and his firm grip on practical affairs. In marked contradistinction to Lee, Mrs. Shaw made no concessions to fashion, firmly adhering to her master's old method in all its rigour. She behaved with complete independence of manner and speech in the mode of an Irish lady confronted with English people openly describing themselves as “middle-class.” On account of this characteristic independence her first experiences in London were unfortunate and disheartening. Not until she began to teach choirs in schools did she enter upon the road of complete success. The results she produced in these undertakings so pleased the inspectors—and more particularly the parents at the prize distributions—that the head mistresses were sensible enough to let her go her own way. Quite a conclusive proof of her ability is found in the fact that this remarkable woman, vigorous and young-minded to-day although now in the seventies, worked at that famous modern institution, the North Collegiate School for Girls, until quite recently. For some years she sought to retire for the same reason that she stopped singing: to her Irish sense of humour there was an element almost of the ridiculous in a first-rate school having an old woman of between seventy and eighty wave a stick and conduct a choir. But D. Sophia Bryant, the principal and an old friend of hers, could not see her way to change for the better, and it was only within the last year or two that Mrs. Shaw retired from her post. No doubt Mrs. Bryant was right; for Mr. Shaw once remarked to me that it was not an easy matter to find a woman in England who perfectly combines the ability to take command in music with the knowledge of music as an artist, and not as a school-mistress who has superficially studied the subject for the sake of the certificates and the position.

Mr. Shaw's mother is the most remarkably youthful person for her years I have ever known, with the possible exception of Mark Twain. I remember with vivid pleasure taking tea with her and her son one afternoon at her attractive little “retreat” in West London. Her eyes danced with suppressed mirth as she talked, and it was quite easy to see from whom her son derived his strong sense of humour. Mrs. Shaw told several delightful stories, one of which deserves repetition here. It seems that Mrs. Shaw is quite a medium and spiritualist, and takes a great deal of interest in communicating with “spirits” from the other world. One day she “called up” Mr. Shaw's sister and asked her what she thought of George being such a distinguished man. The spirit expressed surprise to hear the news. “But aren't you very proud of George?” queried his mother disappointedly. “Oh, yes,” replied the spirit; “it's all very well in its way. But,” she added, “that sort of thing doesn't count for anything up here”!

Many of Mr. Shaw's very distinctive traits are a direct inheritance from his mother, modified, to be sure, by the differences in education, temperament and views of life. In her teaching of music, Mrs. Shaw deliberately displayed total insensibility to the petty dignities so cherished in English school-life. Upon visiting rectors, head mistresses, local “personages,” and, in fact, upon all those who wished things done their own way, she made what her son called “perfectly indiscriminate onslaughts.” This aggressive assertion of her authority would often have made her position untenable, had it not been for her patent ability and unquestioned power of leadership. Her outspoken frankness of manner and conduct, reproduced with such comically extravagant excess in her son, always won her the support of the discriminating: it was always the real “bigwigs” who understood her manners. Mr. Shaw once said: “From my mother I derive my brains and character, which do her credit.” I remember asking Mr. Shaw's mother one day to what she attributed her son's remarkable success in the world of letters. “Oh,” she said, without a moment's hesitation, her eyes twinkling merrily the while, “the answer is quite simple. Of course, he owes it all to me.”

To his parents, his mother in particular, Mr. Shaw is also indebted for actual financial support during several years of an able-bodied young manhood. But he has warned us against supposing, because he is a man of letters, that he never tried to commit that “sin against his nature” called earning an honest living. We have followed his struggles from his fifteenth to his twentieth year—a period marking a social and spiritual growth on his part, he maintains, of several centuries. “I was born on the outskirts of an Irish city, where we lived exactly as people lived in the seventeenth century, except that there were gas-lamps and policemen in tall hats. In the course of my boyhood literature and music introduced me to the eighteenth century; and I was helped a step further through the appearance in our house of candles that did not need snuffing, an iron-framed pianoforte and typhoid sanitation. Finally, I crossed St. George's Channel into the decadence of the mid-nineteenth-century England of Anthony Trollope, and slowly made my way to the forefront of the age—the period of Ibsen, Nietzsche, the Fabian Society, the motor-car, and my own writings.” Very slowly indeed did he make his way to the forefront of the age of Shavianism. He felt that he was a man of genius, and coolly classified himself as such. With no effort of the imagination, and, likewise, with no prevision of his subsequent oft-repeated failures and the position of pecuniary dependence he was temporarily to occupy, he found himself looking upon London as his destiny. There is something at once amusing, inspiring, and pathetic in the spectacle of this bashful, raw, inexperienced boy, fortified only by the confident consciousness of his yet unproved superiority to the “common run” of humanity, throwing himself thus headlong into London.

Little of romantic glamour, fittingly enough, attaches to Shaw's early struggles in London. No rapt listening to the songs of rival nightingales, Keats and Shelley, as with Browning; no impetuous and clandestine marriage, as with Sheridan; no roses and raptures of la vie Bohème, as with Zola. It is, instead, for the most part a tale of consistent literary drudgery, rewarded by continual and repeated failures. The rare and individual style of the satirist, the deft fingering of the dramatist were wholly undeveloped, and even unsuspected, during this tentative period in his career. He turned his hand to various undertakings—to musical criticism, to versifying, to blank-versifying, to novel-writing; but all equally to no purpose. Asked once what was his first real success, he replied: “Never had any. Success in that sense is a thing that comes to you and takes your breath away. What came to me was invariably failure. By the time I wore it down I knew too much to care about either failure or success. Life is like a battle; you have to fire a thousand bullets to hit one man. I was too busy firing to bother about the scoring. As to whether I ever despaired, you will find somewhere in my works this line: 'He who has never hoped can never despair.' I am not a fluctuator.” His self-sufficiency, even at this time, was proof against all discouragement. Perhaps he found consolation also in the saying: “He who is down need fear no fall.”

Shaw never experienced any poverty of spirit, of determination, or of will; his poverty was pecuniary only. Until the time of his marriage he remained secure from the accusation of being the mould of fashion or the glass of form. While the Shaw of matrimonial respectability bears all the marks of his wife's civilizing influence in the matter of a costume de rigueur—fashionable clothes, patent-leather boots, and even, on rare occasions, a “stiff” collar—his dress in the late seventies and for twenty years thereafter was usually, like that of Marchbanks, strikingly anarchic. His outward appearance, as someone unkindly remarked, suggested that he might be a fairly respectable plasterer! “Now,” said Shaw in 1896, “when people reproach me with the unfashionableness of my attire, they forget that to me it seems like the raiment of Solomon in all his glory by contrast with the indescribable seediness of those days, when I trimmed my cuffs to the quick with scissors, and wore a tall hat and soi-disant black coat, green with decay.” But the poverty of which this attire was the outward, visible sign was “shortness of cash,” as numerous personal reminiscences show. From the depressing and devitalizing effects of “real poverty” he was strong enough to free himself, as the following autobiographical confidence clearly evidences:

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. Ah, if that play had only been finished! But Shaw never carried through these customary follies of young authors, unless we agree with those who classify his novels as follies of a green boy. “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.”

One finds it an easy matter to believe him when he tells us, not only that he was provincial, unpresentable, but, more broadly speaking, that he was in an impossible position. “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 didn't know or didn't believe.” Six pounds was a very small allowance for a growing young man, even a struggling author, to live on for nine years. Even if we match him with equal scepticism, at least we can discover, as will be seen, no error in his arithmetical calculations. After Shaw had hounded the musical critic and his paper to the grave, London absolutely refused to tolerate him on any terms. As the nine years progressed, he had one article accepted by Mr. G. R. Sims, who had just started a short-lived paper called One and All. “It brought me fifteen shillings. Full of hope and gratitude, I wrote a really brilliant contribution. That finished me.” During this period, he received his greatest fee—five pounds—for a patent medicine advertisement, a circumstance which may give some colour to Dr. Meyerfeld's early denunciation of Shaw as a “quacksalver.” On another occasion, a publisher asked Shaw for some verses to fit some old blocks which he had bought up for a school prize book. “I wrote a parody of the thing he wanted and sent it as a joke. To my stupefaction he thanked me seriously, and paid me five shillings.” Shaw was so much touched by the gift of five shillings for his parody that he wrote the generous publisher a serious verse for another picture. With the startling result that the publisher took it as a joke in questionable taste! Is it any wonder that Shaw's career as a versifier abruptly ended?

The analysis of the artistic temperament which Shaw puts in the mouth of John Tanner—an analysis which Mr. Robert Loraine finds to smack more of mania than of insincerity—is a cynical and distorted picture at best. And yet it gives us a refracted glimpse of the position which Shaw himself deliberately assumed. “The true artist,” Tanner rattles on, “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 deepest 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.” After various attempts “to earn an honest living,” Shaw gave up trying to commit that sin against his nature, as he puts it. His last attempt was in 1879, we are told, “when a company was formed in London to exploit an ingenious invention by Mr. Thomas Alva Edison—a much too ingenious invention, as it proved, being nothing less than a telephone of such stentorian efficiency that it bellowed your most private communications all over the house instead of whispering them with some sort of discretion.” His interest in physics, his acquaintance with the works of Tyndall and Helmholtz, and his friendship with Mr. Chichester Bell, of which mention has been made, gave him, he asserts, the customary superiority over those about him which he is in the habit of claiming in all the relations of life. While he remained with the company only a few months, he discharged his duties in a manner, which, according to his own outrageous and comically prevaricative assertion, “laid the foundation of Mr. Edison's London reputation.”

After this experience, he began, as he says, to lay the foundations of his own fortune “by the most ruthless disregard of all the quack duties which lead the peasant lad of fiction to the White House, and harness the real peasant boy to the plough until he is finally swept, as rubbish, into the workhouse.” Far from being a “peasant lad,” who climbed manfully upward from the lowest rung of the social ladder, he was in reality the son of a gentleman who had an income of at least three figures (four, if you count in dollars instead of pounds), and was second cousin to a baronet. “I never climbed any ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation; and I hereby warn all peasant lads not to be duped by my pretended example into regarding their present servitude as a practicable first step to a celebrity so dazzling that its subject cannot even suppress his own bad novels.”

Shaw seems intent upon convincing us that, like the artist of his own description, he was an atrocious egotist in his disregard of others; but we must take his confessions with the customary grain of salt. “I was an able-bodied and 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 (now eminent in literature as Mr. John Mackinnon Robertson) prefiguring me to some extent as a considerable author. I think, myself, that this was a handsome reward, far better worth having than a nice pension from a dutiful son struggling slavishly for his parents' bread in some sordid trade. Handsome or not, it was the only return he ever had for the little pension he contrived to export from Ireland for his family. My mother reinforced it by drudging in her elder years at the art of music which she had followed in her prime freely for love. I only helped to spend it. 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.”

In Shaw's opinion, his brain constituted the sum and substance of his riches. The projection and exposition of his experience came to be the most urgent need and object of his life. He recognized a higher duty than merely earning his living: the fulfilment of his individual destiny. He resolved to become a writer. In this resolve to dedicate all his powers to the art of self-expression, lies the explanation of his strange words: “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.”[12]

Although it was a “frightful squeeze” at times, Shaw was not wholly destitute. A suit of evening clothes and the knack of playing a “simple accompaniment at sight more congenially to a singer than most amateurs,” gave him “for a fitful year or so,” the entrée into the better circle of musical society in London.

In this latter day of his assertion that money controls morality, Shaw is perfectly consistent in speaking of his poverty and quotidian shabbiness as the two “disgusting faults” of his youth. But at the time he did not recognize them as faults, because he could not help them. “I therefore tolerated the gross error that poverty, though an inconvenience and a trial, is not a sin and a disgrace: and I stood for my self-respect on the things I had: probity, ability, knowledge of art, laboriousness, and whatever else came cheaply to me.” A certain pride of birth, a consciousness of worthy ancestry, also sustained him, and helped him to triumph over circumstance. It was this same feeling which gave him suavity and poise during the later campaigns of his revolutionary Socialism, and saved him from the excesses, the blind fury, of the mere proletarian. He had a magnificent library in Bloomsbury, a priceless picture-gallery in Trafalgar Square, and another at Hampton Court, without any servants to look after or rent to pay. During these years Shaw's gain in the cultivation of his musical and artistic tastes more than compensated for his lack of the advantages of wealth. Nor were his essays in literature and criticism—I do not refer to his playful dilettantism—profitless in any real sense. It is true that innumerable articles were consistently returned to him; and yet he went his way undismayed, slowly saturating himself with Italian art from Mantegna to Michelangelo, with the best music from London to Bayreuth. And while London had not “caught his tone,” musical or otherwise, at this time, the day was to come in which he should reap the reward for his critical knowledge of art and music, for the rare and individual style which he was slowly perfecting.

To the student of Shaw as the littérateur—the highwayman who “held up” so many different forms of art—the chief interest of this period is to be found in the five novels which he wrote during the five years from 1879 to 1883—an average of one a year. His first novel, written in 1879, and called, “with merciless fitness” as Shaw says, Immaturity, was never published; and we are told that even the rats were unable to finish it. George Meredith, the novelist, who was a reader and literary adviser for the publishing firm of Chapman and Hall, London, from 1860 to 1897, rejected the manuscript of Immaturity, sans phrase—quickly disposing of it with a laconic “No.” The remaining four have all been published, in magazines and in book-form, either in England or America. Shaw “turned them out,” one each year, with unvarying regularity and also with unvarying result: refusal by the publishers. That six pounds which Shaw earned in nine years must certainly have gone a long way—as postage stamps.