[105] Mr. T. P. O'Connor.

[106] In speaking of his first appearance as a journalistic writer—in a “London Letter,” written, at the age of fifteen, for a well-known journal in Scarborough—Max Beerbohm once wrote (the Saturday Review, January 26th, 1901): “I well remember that the first paragraph I wrote was in
reference to the first number of the Star, which had just been published. Mr. T. P. O'Connor, in his editorial pronunciamento, had been hotly philanthropic. 'If,' he had written, 'we enable the charwoman to put two lumps of sugar in her tea instead of one, then we shall not have worked in vain.' My comment on this was that if Mr. O'Connor were to find that charwomen did not take sugar in their tea, his paper would, presumably, cease to be issued.... I quote it merely to show that I, who am still regarded as a young writer, am exactly connate with Mr. Shaw. For it was in this very number of the Star that Mr. Shaw, as 'Corno di Bassetto,' made his first bow to the public.” This latter statement, although inaccurate, is essentially correct.

[107] The name of a musical instrument which went out of use in Mozart's time.

[108] In his introduction to the Dramatic Essays of John Forster and George Henry Lewes.

[109] In the Days of Our Youth. In the Star, February 19th, 1906.

[110] The reference is to Rubinstein.

[111] Music, signed G. B. S., in the World, June 7th, 1893.

[112] In this connection compare Shaw's article: A Word More about Verdi, in the Anglo-Saxon Review, Vol. VIII., March, 1901.

[113] De Mortuis, signed G. B. S., in the Saturday Review, July 4th, 1896.

[114] In the letter Mr. Tucker wrote to Mr. Shaw at Easter, 1895, Shaw once told me, he said that he knew Shaw was the only man in the world capable of tackling Nordau on his various fields of music, literature, painting, etc.: “He said that if I would find out the highest figure ever paid by, say, the Nineteenth Century for a single article to any writer, not excluding Gladstone or any other eminent man, he would pay me that sum for a review of 'Degeneration' for his little paper. This, mind you, from a man who was publishing a paper at his own expense, without a chance of making anything out of it, and with a considerable chance of finding himself in prison some day for telling the truth about American institutions. Mr. Tucker probably worked double shifts and ate half meals for the next two or three years to pay off what the adventure cost him.” This essay, somewhat amplified, was recently (February, 1908) published in America by Benjamin R. Tucker, N. Y.—in England by the New Age Press, London—under the title, The Sanity of Art: an Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate.

[115] Is Shaw, the anti-romantic, consistent in championing Wagner, the head and front of European romanticism? Shaw, the individualist, recognized that Wagner was a great creative force in art; that was sufficient cause for his championship. It may be interesting in this connection to consult Julius Bab's acute analysis of Shaw's Wagnerism: Bernard Shaw (S. Fischer, Berlin), pp. 210-214.

[116] The 'Elektra' of Strauss and Hofmannsthal. A letter to the editor of the Nation (London), March 19th, 1910.

[117] Music, in the World, February 18th, 1893.