Shaw

“ This word alone was borne on the wings of the wind, weak as a sigh, and, in spite of the horrible yells of the Apaches, was distinctly heard by Shaw.
In moments of frenzy, or when a man is at bay, the senses acquire a perfection for which it is impossible otherwise to account. Like the giant Antæus, Shaw drew himself up, and seemed restored to that life which was on the point of leaving him. ”

“ Shaw and father extend their hands, and shake a warm good night: and while they linger at the outer door in friendly conversation, I slyly crawl through father’s legs, to get into the street as soon as possible, and away from Shaw’s victorious presence; the last shake of hands transpire between father and Shaw, who slowly closes the door with a beatific smile; father, myself, and Bill muffle ourselves in our fervent garments; it snows and blows very hard ”

“ Shaw, the life-guardsman, a Hercules in appearance, a man of undeniable courage, and with strength to match his mighty heart, was dead-beat with the gloves by Tom; although this son of Mars, but a day or two before, in a bout with Captain Barclay, had put the captain’s upper works to much confusion, and made his teeth chatter again. ”

“ Once in a generation a Shaw may rise, who, by a twist of his pen, can make the public think, while he wears a guileful smile as he propounds philosophy from under a jester's cap; but even then his plays must be edited—as some of Shaw's are—of all but the most dramatic of his belligerently impudent notions. ”

“ Sir Charles Shaw was himself a typical soldier by nature and by practice. Circumstances alone would determine whether it should be as a soldier of fortune, a patriot defending hearths and homes, or as an Ishmaelite adventurer, that his sword would be unsheathed. The sporting and adventurous instinct scents danger afar, like the war-horse in the book of Job which laughs at the spears. ”

“ There was not a speck of colour, nor any moving thing to vary the glazed unbroken surface, except on one distant hillock, where a single human figure was seen, wandering to and fro, as if in a maze, like some one bereft of reason. The male inhabitants of the house were all out looking after the stock belonging to the grazing farm; and, as Mrs. Shaw was in doubt whether the person she beheld might not in reality be some one who was deranged, as his movements rather seemed to indicate, she was afraid to venture to approach him. ”

“ Shaw, it is a loudly shouted personality, a conscious rebellion against everything conventional in sight. Instead of whatever is, is right, his guiding principle seems to be—so far as he is guided or has any principles at all—whatever is, is wrong. If you see a head, hit it. That is his chief stock in trade. He is the walking delegate of the social organism, the professional striker, the naughty boy of the school of civilization, who plays truant and scrawls his opinions devilishly on the fence. ”

“ Half leading, half carrying her, he got her to the car and into it. He had actually raised one foot to follow her when something stirred in the shadows near them, and the familiar, squat figure of Shaw stepped forth.
Though in his sudden appearance he had followed the dramatic instinct that seemed so strong in him, he had wholly lost the effect of unleashed fury he had worn in the afternoon. He was even smiling with an affectation of good-humored tolerance. He had the air of a man who, with the game in his hands, can afford to be patient and affable. ”

“ Into this riot of all imaginary innovations Shaw brought the sharp edge of the Irishman and the concentration of the Puritan, and thoroughly thrashed all competitors in the difficult art of being at once modern and intelligent. ”

“ Shaw then comes on tiptoe to my desk, and grabs and drags me to the aisle, with one hand clutched in my throat, and the other in my long hair, when I grab him in a tender spot, and make him squeal; and so severe and unrelenting is my grasp, that he gladly gives freedom to my throat and hair, and implores, in tones of excruciating agony, to release my hands. I slowly do so, when he re-seizes me, and, dragging me several feet by my hair, kicks away the scuttle, and casts me headlong beneath the schoolhouse, closing the scuttle over me; I can hardly sit upright in my new abode; all is darkness ”

“ All the powers of Shaw, and all the sceptical raillery of those who laughed his father's credulous belief in dreams and divinations to scorn, could not, he was satisfied, drive from his mind the effects produced by the appearance and language of this extraordinary visiter. He began to think that the wisdom of his father, whose maxim was, that there is more in nature than man's shallow philosophy can fathom, was truer and better lore than the self-sufficient and profane knowledge of his noble advisers ”

“ Shaw has not only proved himself incapable of shaking a single one of the various arguments advanced by me, but that whilst flattering himself that, in his own phrase, he has been taking his opponent’s scalp, the scalp which he holds, and has really taken, is his own. ”

“ CHARTERIS (taking Craven's hand) . No offence, my dear Craven: none in the world. I didn't mean to shew any temper. But (aside, after looking round to see whether the others are listening) only just consider!—the spectacle of a rival's happiness!
CRAVEN (aloud, decisively) . Charteris: now you've got to behave like a man. Your duty's plain before you. (To Cuthbertson.) Am I right, Jo?
CUTHBERTSON (firmly) . You are, Dan.
CRAVEN (to Charteris) . Go straight up and congratulate Julia. And do it like a gentleman, smiling.
CHARTERIS. Colonel: I will. Not a muscle shall betray the conflict within. ”

“ He saw Shaw as an Irishman, yet lacking the roots of nationality since he belonged to a mainly alien governing class. He saw him as a Puritan yet without the religious basis of Puritanism. And thirdly, he saw him as so swift a progressive as to be ahead of his own thought and ready to slay it in the name of progress.
All these elements in Shaw made for strength but also created limitations, "Shaw is like the Venus of Milo; all that there is of him is admirable." Where he fails is in being unable to see and embrace the full complexity of life. ”

“ Bernard Shaw himself has never penned a more bitter one. "Even if you were the world's greatest genius," the old man cries to the young one, "all your scribbling would be worthless in comparison with a single one of those hours of real life that saw your mother seated in that chair, talking to us, or merely listening, perhaps." ”

“ A characteristic flirt of Shaw's humor. He is a great caricaturist and not a portrait-painter.
When he thinks of my Celtic face and aggressive American frankness he talks of me as pugnacious and a pirate: "a Captain Kidd": in his preface to "The Fair Lady of the Sonnets" he praises my "idiosyncratic gift of pity"; says that I am "wise through pity"; then he extols me as a prophet, not seeing that a pitying sage, prophet and pirate constitute an inhuman superman.
I shall do more for Shaw than he has been able to do for me; he is the first figure in my new volume of "Contemporary Portraits." ”

“ Shaw is blinded with tobacco bile, and wipes his cheeks, and nose, and mouth, and eyes, and commands me to go to his desk; I refuse; he then expostulates, and breathes kind words, which allay my anger, and check the flow of tobacco and salt water bile; I go to his desk; he dismisses the few scholars that remain, save my weeping brother Bill, curled in the corner; Shaw laments the sad occurrence; hopes we will be better boys, and permits us to go home; on our arrival, father is at tea, listening to brother Albert’s version of the story ”

“ That calm, sweet countenance, with those big, wonderful eyes, was ever before me, sleeping or waking, and yet I knew not from hour to hour that she might not be arrested and placed in a criminal dock, as accomplice of that arch-adventurer Shaw—that man who led such a strange dual existence of respectability and undesirability. ”

“ In the next instant something in him, alert, watchful, and suspicious, addressed him like an inner voice.
"Shaw will threaten," this voice said. "He will fight, and he will even chloroform. But when it comes to a show-down, to the need of definite, final action of any kind, he simply won't be there. He is venomous, he'd like to bite, but he has no fangs, and he knows it."
The vision of Shaw's face, when he had choked him during the struggle of last night, again recurred to Laurie. He knew now the meaning of [Pg 187] the look in those projecting eyes. It was fear. ”

“ It seemed to me that Shaw, of all men, would be useful for propaganda, if the genius of his pen were inspired by the valor and endurance of our fighting men. Anyhow, he would, I thought, tell the truth about the things he saw, with deeper perception of its meaning than any other living writer.
Bernard Shaw, in a rough suit of Irish homespun, and with his beard dank in the wet mist of Flanders, appeared suddenly to my friend Tomlinson as a ghost from the pre-war past. ”

“ Marian hesitated painfully.
"Do not mind giving me plenty of bother," he said. "I am so accustomed to superintend the transit of machines as cumbersome as trunks and as fragile as bonnet boxes, that the care of a houseful of ordinary luggage would be a mere amusement for me."
"Thank you; but it is not that. I was only thinking—Are you likely to see my cousin, Mr. Marmaduke Lind, whilst you are in London?"
"N—no. Unless I call upon him, which I have no excuse for doing." ”

“ When he followed Shaw into the cabin he could not repress a sense of enjoyment or hide a faint and malicious smile.
“Gone away—did you say? And carried off the lady with him?” discoursed Shaw very loud in the doorway. “Did he? Well, I am not surprised. What can you expect from a man like that, who leaves his ship in an open roadstead without—I won't say orders—but without as much as a single word to his next in command? And at night at that! That just shows you the kind of man. Is this the way to treat a chief mate? ”

“ Humanity suggests to me that I ought to coax them back with sophistry as far as the garden-gate, and then holler for help.’ Shaw was the best hearted of men; he would not hurt a human being in the world, cruel as he was to bugs, and to centipedes an ‘outer barbarian.’ In the course of ten minutes he was at the base of a large rock, scooping out garnets, and thinking casually of that ‘great work which his country would not willingly let die,’ when a rope was let over his head and shoulders from above, and the professor was noosed. ”

“ However this may be, it was in fact and profession the quintessence of Shaw's theory of the morality or propaganda of Ibsen.
The book itself is much longer than the book that I am writing, and as is only right in so spirited an apologist, every paragraph is provocative. I could write an essay on every sentence which I accept and three essays on every sentence which I deny. Bernard Shaw himself is a master of compression; he can put a conception more compactly than any other man alive. ”

“ CHARTERIS. I feel as if my body had turned into the toughest of hickory. That is what comes of reminding me of Julia Craven. (Brooding, with his chin on his right hand and his elbow on his knee.) I have sat alone with her just as I am sitting with you—
GRACE (shrinking from him) . Just!
CHARTERIS (sitting upright and facing her steadily) . Just exactly. She has put her hands in mine, and laid her cheek against mine, and listened to me saying all sorts of silly things. (Grace, chilled to the soul, rises from the sofa and sits down on the piano stool, with her back to the keyboard.) ”

“ Shaw, who is a Puritan by temperament, has, after his master, Ibsen, cracked with his slingstone many nice little glass houses wherein complacent men and women sit and sun their virtues in the full gaze of the world. ”

“ Bill is stout, knows well the physical weakness of his adversary, and proves himself fully equal to the awful crisis before him. For, while Shaw strives to get Bill across his knees to switch and spank him, Bill, by a sudden and very elastic movement, gets between, and coils himself, like a snake, around Shaw’s legs, and pinches, and bites, and tears his pants, and finally trips him, and down they go, with Bill on Shaw, and with both hands so firmly and desperately clenched in Shaw’s white cravat, as to make his tongue protrude. ”

“ Mr Shaw, as he was apparently known there, was dressed very different from the occasion when we had met at Totnes. Then he had assumed the appearance of a racing man, but in his guise of country gentleman he was dressed in morning-coat of a rather old-fashioned cut, and pepper-and-salt trousers, an attire which gave him a quiet and somewhat distinguished appearance. ”

“ A singularly clear thinker and writer, and a high-principled administrator, Shaw died in Dublin on 27 April 1910, and was buried in the Mount Jerome cemetery there. In 1911 his portrait by Sydney Rowley was placed in the hall of the Queen's University of Belfast, together with a memorial brass; a Shaw prize in economics was also founded in his memory. ”

“ RAINA (over her shoulder, from the top of the two steps) . Oh, poor father! As if he could help himself! (She turns the corner and passes out of sight.)
CATHERINE (looking after her, her fingers itching) . Oh, if you were only ten years younger! (Louka comes from the house with a salver, which she carries hanging down by her side.) Well?
LOUKA. There's a gentleman just called, madam—a Servian officer—
CATHERINE (flaming) . A Servian! How dare he— (Checking herself bitterly.) Oh, I forgot. We are at peace now. I suppose we shall have them calling every day to pay their compliments. ”