Although Bernard Shaw idled away his time at school, the very real education he received through other broader and deeper channels has since saved him, he stoutly maintains, from being “at the smallest disadvantage with men who only know the grammar and mispronunciation of the Greek and Latin poets and philosophers.” The other great motor of educational influence in his youth was the National Gallery of Ireland; to that cherished asylum, which he haunted in the days of his youth, he has often expressed his unmeasured gratitude. Whenever he had any money, he bought volumes of the Bohn translation of Vasari; and at fifteen he knew enough of a considerable number of Italian and Flemish painters to recognize their work at sight. His communion with the masterpieces preserved in the Dublin Gallery was so solitary that he was once driven to say, with comically extravagant egoism, that he believed he was the only Irishman, except the officials, who had ever been there. This acquaintance with art and the history of art “did more for him,” he once asserted, than the two cathedrals in Dublin so magnificently “restored” out of the profits of the drink trade. I think we must conclude, with the ever modest autobiographer, that, thanks to communism in pictures, he was really a very highly educated boy.

Through lack of means, the Shaws were unable to give their son a university education; perhaps no regret need be felt on this score, since it is not unlikely, in view of his attitude towards a university education, that he would have taken refuge in idleness at Oxford, Cambridge, or Dublin, just as he had done at the schools he had already attended. Unlike his future colleagues in dramatic criticism, William Archer and Arthur Bingham Walkley, graduates of Edinburgh and Oxford respectively, Shaw despised, half ignorantly, half penetratingly, the thought of a university education, for it seemed to him to turn out men who all thought alike and were snobs. So in 1871, at the age of fifteen, he entered the office of an Irish land agent, Mr. Charles Uniacke Townshend, and remained there until March, 1876. Perhaps the Ibsenite, the Nietzschean of after years was thus beginning a course of preliminary training: Henri Beyle used to say that to have been a banker was to have gone through the best preparatory school for philosophy. During this period Bernard Shaw lived in lodgings in Dublin with his father, who had by this time given up that furtive drinking, of which his son in after life spoke with such frank levity. The lad's salary at first was eighteen pounds a year, his position that of junior clerk. He had no fondness for his work, and took no interest in land agency; nevertheless, he made a very satisfactory clerk. At the end of about a year, a sudden vacancy occurred in the most active post in the office, that of cashier. As this involved a sort of miniature banking business for the clients, and the daily receipt and payment of all sorts of rents, interests, insurances, private allowances and so on, it was a comparatively busy post, and a position of trust besides. The junior clerk was temporarily called upon to fill the sudden vacancy pending the engagement of a new cashier of greater age and experience. He performed his numerous duties so successfully that the engagement of the new man was first delayed and then dropped. The child of fifteen, laboriously and successfully struggling to change his sloped, straggly, weak-minded handwriting into a fair imitation of his predecessor's, is father of the man of forty, carefully drawing up elaborate contracts with theatre managers, who never kept them. By this initial exhibition of enterprise, young Shaw's salary, now twenty-four pounds a year, was doubled, which meant a considerable step ahead. The clear-cut chirography of the Shaw of to-day and the neatness of arrangement so noticeable in his apartments at Adelphi Terrace are the results of his early training; indeed, he was a remarkably correct cashier and accountant, as one of Mr. Shaw's colleagues in the office once told me. While he was always ignorant of the state of his own finances, and to-day troubles little about his personal accounts, he was never a farthing out in his accounts at the office.

Land agency in Ireland was, and is still, a socially pretentious business. Although the position Shaw held was regarded as a very genteel sort of post, yet to him this was no gratification, but quite the reverse. It was saturated with a class feeling for which, even at that time, he had an intense loathing. The position carried with it, nevertheless, certain obvious advantages. It secured for him the society of a set of so-called apprentices, who were, in fact, idle young gentlemen who had paid a big premium to be taught a genteel profession. Though the premium was not paid to Shaw, still he took delight in teaching his co-workers various operatic scenas, which were occasionally in full swing when the principal or a customer would enter the office unexpectedly. On one occasion, Mr. Shaw once told me gleefully, a certain apprentice sang: “Ah, che la morte” in his tower—standing on the washstand with his head appearing over a tall screen—with such feeling and such obliviousness to all external events, that the whole office force was suddenly struck busy and silent by the arrival of Mr. Townshend, the senior partner, who stared, stupended, at the bleating countenance above the screen and finally fled upstairs, completely beaten by the situation. The young clerk thus found plenty of fun and diversion in his association with young men of culture and education; this did not make him hate his work any the less. His natural antipathy to respectability asserted itself very early in his career: he once said that land agency was too respectable for him. Moreover, the enforced repression concerning his religious beliefs bred in him a spirit of discontent and revolt. Although he realized that silence on the subject was undoubtedly an indispensable condition of sociability among people who disagreed strongly on such a matter, yet he chafed under the restraint. To such a restraint he felt he could never permanently submit. This incident alone would have had the ultimate effect of making him a bad employee. Fortunately for the world, it put land agency and business as a serious career out of the question for him. The author of Widowers' Houses collecting rents as a lifelong profession is a ludicrous, an incredible incongruity. Shaw retained his place simply for the sake of financial independence. When he gave up his position, his employer was sorry to lose him, and, at the request of Shaw's father, readily gave him a handsome testimonial. In speaking of the circumstance one day, Mr. Shaw told me that he was furious that such a demand should have been made. Nothing could have shown more clearly his distaste for the position he held. “Once or twice,” commented Mr. Shaw, “my employer showed himself puzzled and annoyed when some accident lifted the veil for a moment and gave him a glimpse of the fact that his excellent and pecuniarily incorruptible clerk's mind and interest and even intelligence were ten thousand leagues away, in a region foreign, if not hostile.” Surely this was another age of “inspired office boys.”[6]

In 1872, Mr. Lee left Dublin for London, the joint household broke up, and all musical activity ceased. The return to a single household on Mr. Shaw's income was all but impossible, for his affairs were as unprosperous as ever. At this time there was even some question of Bernard Shaw's two sisters becoming professional singers. With characteristic energy and decisiveness, Mrs. Shaw boldly cut the Gordian knot by going to London and becoming a professional teacher of singing. This domestic débâcle robbed young Shaw of his mother's influence, which was always stimulating and inspiring, if somewhat indirectly and impersonally so. It deprived him also of music, which, up to that time, had been his daily food. This sudden deprivation of the solace of music came to him as a distinct surprise. He had never dreamed of such a contingency. Fortunately the piano remained. Although he had never until then touched it except to pick out a tune with one finger, he now set to work in earnest to learn the art of piano playing. It was in a spirit of desperation that he went out and bought a technical handbook of music, containing a diagram of the keyboard. No finger exercises, no études de vélocité for Shaw: he at once got out Don Giovanni and tried to play the overture! It took him ten minutes to arrange his fingers on the notes of the first chord. “What I suffered, what everybody in the house suffered, whilst I struggled on, labouring through arrangements of Beethoven's symphonies, of Tannhäuser, and of all the operas and oratorios I knew, will never be told.” It was in vain now, he said, merely to sing: “my native wood-notes wild—just then breaking frightfully—could not satisfy my intense craving for the harmony which is the emotional substance of music, and for the rhythmic figures of accompaniment which are its action and movement. I had only a single splintering voice, and I wanted an orchestra.” This musical starvation it was that drove him to the piano in disregard of the rights of his fellow-lodgers.

Although he did a good deal of accompanying, especially in the days of his intimacy with the Salt family, he never really mastered the instrument. Once, in a desperate emergency, he supplied the place of the absent half of the orchestra at a performance of Il Trovatore at a People's Entertainment evening at the Victoria Theatre—and, luckily, came off without disaster. To-day he goes to his little Bechstein piano, a relic of the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and fearlessly attacks any opera or symphony. He is his own Melba, his own Plançon, too, thanks, as his wife pathetically explains, to “a remarkable power of making the most extraordinary noises with his throat.” He even revels in the pianola! And I have shared his enjoyment in his own rendition of a Chopin nocturne upon that remarkable mechanical toy.

Bernard Shaw would have been a model young man at the desk but for the fact that, like Nathaniel Hawthorne at the Boston Custom House, like Ibsen at the apothecary's shop in Grimstad, his heart was not in the thing. “I never made a payment,” he once frankly confessed to me, “without a hope or even a half resolve that I should never have to make it again. In spite of which, I was so wanting in enterprise and so shy and helpless in worldly matters (though I believe I had the air of being quite the reverse), that six months later I found myself making the payment again.”

There gradually came to him a consciousness of the futility of his life, the consciousness of one who has been freed of illusion. In this young boy was none of the soft-blarney, the winning and dulcet melancholy, of the proverbial Irishman. He escaped that mystic influence of Roman Catholicism, which produces the phantast, the dreamer and the saint. Calvinism had taught him that “once a man is born it is too late to save him or damn him; you may 'educate' him and 'form his character' until you are black in the face; he is predestinate, and his soul cannot be changed any more than a silk purse can be changed into a sow's ear.” In the atmosphere of the Island of the Saints—“that most mystical of all mystical things”—he learned to realize the barrenness of all else in comparison with the supreme importance of realizing the purpose of his existence on this earth.

Hence it was that his work and position finally became unbearably irksome, unendurable. London imperatively beckoned to him. That way, perhaps, lay freedom from the obsession of hated respectability, freedom from repression of his convictions, freedom for self-development and spiritual expansion. At the age of twenty, this raw Irish lad, wholly ignorant of the great world, walked out of his office, and threw himself recklessly into London. There, immediately after the death of his sister Agnes in the Isle of Wight, in 1876, he joined his mother in la lutte pour la vie.[8] There he was to set the crystalline intellectual clarity, the philosophic consciousness of the brilliant Celt, into sharp juxtaposition with the plodding practicality, the dogged energy of the complacent Briton. There he was to find the arena for his championship of those advanced movements in art, music, literature and politics, which give significance and character to the closing quarter of the nineteenth century.

In these early years we may discern in Shaw the gradual birth of the social consciousness, the slow unfolding of deep-rooted impulses toward individualism and self-expression. Like other boys of his day and time, Shaw melted lead on Holieve, hid rings in pancakes, and indulged in the conventional mummeries of Christmas. But to him these were dreary, silly diversions, against which his nature rebelled. He once refused to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday—for the very good reason that he had never celebrated his own. 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 asceticism which left its indelible mark upon his character. The puritanic convictions which have animated his entire life find their origin in the half-instinctive, half-enforced aloofness of his childhood days.

Shaw was not brought up, as we might expect, a Nonconformist; he was a member of the Irish Protestant Church. He rebelled against the inhuman repression, the meaningless ritualism of his church; but the influences of his home, nevertheless, left their impress upon his nature. His whole long life is an outcry of soaring individualism against repressive authority; and yet the puritan intensity in condemnation of self-indulgence, the ascetic revolt from alcoholism, speaks forth unmistakably in the humanitarian, the vegetarian, the teetotaller of a later epoch.

The ingrained and constitutional protestantism of his forbears found expression in his boyish, yet rigorously atheistic protest against the religion of Moody and Sankey. In this audacious protest we can scarcely expect to find any sort of matured conviction; it is the first bold denial of his life. Thus early we observe the workings of polemic, of criticism and analysis—before he had ever left Irish soil. Even then, I fancy, he felt faint stirrings of a deeper religious protestant faith. In that protest, we may discern a forecast of the Plays for Puritans and The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet.

Thrown upon his own resources, sharing with his fellows none of the wholesome and joyous foolhardiness of youth, he developed a maturity of judgment, a detachment in observation, out of all proportion to his years. His puritanism expressed itself in silent condemnation of the social self-righteousness he saw around him, the distinctions so sharply drawn on lines, not of individual worth, but of social station and respectability. That arresting passage in Man and Superman in which he describes the birth of the social passion is a piece of spiritual autobiography: it changed the child into the man. There was already at work within him the leaven of the later social revolution of our own day. Intensity of political conviction was a family tradition and heritage. In the eighteenth century a Shaw had been leader of the “Orangemen”; and in the nineteenth century one of Shaw's uncles was the first Protestant priest in Ireland who, contrary to the convictions of his companions in creed, declared himself in favour of Home Rule. By heritage, by environment, by temperament, Bernard Shaw was destined to display throughout his life that intensity of political conviction, that depth of humanitarian concern, that passion for social service which will for ever remain associated with his name.