The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Letters and Essays E-Book
George Bernard Shaw
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw presents a comprehensive anthology of the playwright's vast literary oeuvre, encompassing his iconic plays, insightful essays, and fervent correspondence. Shaw's wit-infused style, characterized by sharp dialogue and lively debates on social issues, reflects the intellectual ferment of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period ripe with upheaval and transformation. The compilation not only highlights his dramatic masterpieces like "Pygmalion" and "Saint Joan" but also delves into his critiques of capitalism, feminism, and morality, showcasing his role as both a playwright and a progressive thinker. George Bernard Shaw was a multifaceted figure whose experiences as a social reformer, music critic, and ardent advocate for education deeply informed his writing. Born in Dublin in 1856, Shaw's formative years were steeped in the artistic and political movements of his time. His passion for challenging societal norms and his dedication to using the stage as a platform for social critique are foundational elements of his work, as he sought not only to entertain but to provoke thought and inspire change. This collection is essential for readers and scholars alike, offering an unparalleled insight into Shaw's genius and his enduring relevance. Whether you are a seasoned theatre-goer or new to Shaw's work, this anthology invites you to explore the vibrant tapestry of ideas that continues to resonate in contemporary discourse, making it a vital addition to any literary library. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Letters and Essays
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection assembles, in a single compass, the sweep of George Bernard Shaw’s career across fiction, drama, criticism, polemic, and public correspondence. From the apprentice novels of the 1880s to the ambitious stage cycles and essays of the 1910s and 1920s, it offers a continuous view of a writer who treated literature as a laboratory for social thought. Its purpose is both archival and interpretive: to bring together primary works and contemporary commentary so that readers may see how Shaw’s ideas moved between page and stage, and how his interventions in public debate were inseparable from his theatrical imagination.
The range of forms is unusually broad. It includes early and later novels such as Cashel Byron’s Profession, An Unsocial Socialist, Love Among the Artists, and The Irrational Knot. It presents a substantial dramatic corpus: comedies, history plays, one-act farces and comediettas, and the metabiological cycle Back to Methuselah with its five parts. There are theatrical skits and interludes, and a body of essays and lectures in criticism, theology, music, and dramaturgy. Shaw’s public writings appear in letters and war-time journalism, alongside pamphlet-like works such as The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Maxims for Revolutionists, balanced by critical appreciations from contemporaries.
Across these forms, Shaw is unified by intellectual comedy: argument staged as entertainment. He repeatedly tests conventions of class, gender, money, medicine, law, empire, and war, often inverting the expected moral so that a familiar situation sharpens into debate. His characters talk with wit because they think strenuously; his scenes are engines of paradox. The enduring significance of this body of work lies in how it treats drama and prose as civic instruments. Whether in a playhouse or a newspaper, Shaw addresses the audience as citizens, asking them to look again at the habits that govern power, conscience, and common sense.
The novels gathered here show Shaw learning to dramatize ideas before he had a stage. Cashel Byron’s Profession explores notoriety and respectability through a prizefighter in polite society; An Unsocial Socialist toys with radical conviction and domestic life; Love Among the Artists follows the claims of art upon conduct; The Irrational Knot examines marriage and misapprehension. Written across the 1880s and later issued in print, these experiments marry melodramatic premise to analytic purpose. They introduce the recurrent Shavian preoccupations with social masks, female intelligence, and the economics of virtue, and they anticipate the argumentative vigor that later animates the plays.
The transition to the theatre begins with the so-called unpleasant plays, where moral comfort is deliberately refused. Widowers’ Houses dissects the revenue streams of respectability; The Philanderer exposes fashion in science and feeling; Mrs. Warren’s Profession confronts the economics of vice and virtue. These works set Shaw’s pragmatic tone: scandal is not a gesture but a method for forcing practical questions. From the outset, the plays rely on clear situations, exact language, and extended dialogue that turns comedy into inquiry. Their stagecraft is lean, their social sights exact, and their laughter edged by the recognition of complicity.
The comic middle period expands that method into romance unromanticized. Arms and the Man opposes martial glamour with professional competence and common sense; Candida reframes domestic choice as a contest of moral imagination; You Never Can Tell delights in social misreadings; The Devil’s Disciple relocates heroism in unexpected conduct; Captain Brassbound’s Conversion plays with adventure and law. In each, Shaw stages charm without surrendering analysis. Sentiment is permitted but scrutinized; coincidence becomes an argument about character and circumstance. The result is comedy that entertains while clarifying motives, and characters who persuade as much by reason as by feeling.
The large comedies of ideas give this collection its philosophical height. Man and Superman couples social comedy with a companionable arsenal of maxims and a handbook, extending its argument about creative purpose. John Bull’s Other Island examines politics and perception across the Irish Sea. Major Barbara considers charity, industry, and moral arithmetic; The Doctor’s Dilemma tests professional duty and personal judgment; Caesar and Cleopatra treats history as a school for political intelligence. Pygmalion explores language and social construction. Back to Methuselah declares its metabiological ambitions across five plays, widening the timescale of Shaw’s inquiry while retaining his skeptical, lucid tone.
Shorter dramatic pieces punctuate these achievements and show Shaw’s quick, topical hand. Press Cuttings satirizes officialdom and agitation; How He Lied to Her Husband offers a compact comedy of pretense; Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction caricatures sensation; Overruled inspects romantic rationalizations; Great Catherine and The Music Cure exemplify high-spirited farce; O’Flaherty, V. C., The Inca of Perusalem, Augustus Does His Bit, and Annajanska reflect wartime preoccupations in comic keys. Heartbreak House, written in the aftermath of war, concentrates social critique in a single household. Together, these pieces show Shaw calibrating scale and tone to meet immediate occasions without losing depth.
Shaw’s engagement with public controversy appears not only on stage but also in journalism and letters. The 1915 cluster surrounding Common Sense About the War records an exchange of views among writers, editors, and readers, including responses by Arnold Bennett, Christabel Pankhurst, Herbert Eulenberg, and editorial comment, with Shaw’s own replies and an open letter to President Wilson. Presented here as a dossier, these items reveal how arguments were framed, challenged, and revised in real time. They complement the plays by showing the same habits of definition, provocation, and counterexample applied to policy, patriotism, and international responsibility.
The critical and theoretical writings place Shaw within broader intellectual and artistic conversations. Quintessence of Ibsenism articulates a reading of modern drama; The Perfect Wagnerite considers music drama and myth; The New Theology engages religious discourse; How to Write a Popular Play reflects on craft and audience. Mr. G. Bernard Shaw on Socialism and the letter to Beatrice Webb situate his politics in relation to contemporaries. Essays by G. K. Chesterton, James Huneker, and Robert Lynd, and Oliver Herford’s poem, provide external perspectives, framing the reception of Shaw’s work and sharpening a sense of his methods, provocations, and public image.
Certain stylistic hallmarks recur across genres. Shaw favors exact prose, pointed paradox, and scenes organized around conflict of ideas rather than concealment of information. Stage directions often carry interpretive intelligence; dialogue advances by challenge and counterexample; aphorism condenses argument into memorable turns. Even the briefer theatricals maintain this clarity, allowing satire to pierce without obscurity. In essays and handbooks, he states premises plainly, tests them against objections, and summarizes them in maxims. The unity of the collection is therefore less in subject than in procedure: a consistent habit of lucid disputation animated by comic energy.
Taken together, these works offer multiple points of entry. Readers may trace themes across forms or attend to a single period; the collection supports both. Its enduring relevance lies in the steadiness with which it interrogates institutions while preserving the pleasures of theatre and prose. Problems of class, gender, work, coercion, law, war, language, and belief are posed without special pleading and with unflagging wit. By gathering novels, plays, journalism, letters, handbooks, and contemporary assessments, this volume invites a full encounter with Shaw’s art and argument, and with the public conversations his work helped to generate.
Author Biography
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was an Irish dramatist, critic, and polemicist whose plays helped reshape modern English-language theatre. Emerging in the late Victorian era and remaining active through the mid-twentieth century, he blended social critique with comedic wit, using the stage as a forum for debate about class, gender, politics, and morality. Over a long career he wrote dozens of plays, as well as prefaces and essays that elaborated his ideas. His drama is often associated with realistic dialogue, paradox, and argumentative structure rather than melodramatic plotting. Celebrated internationally, he later received the Nobel Prize in Literature and, unusually for a playwright, an Academy Award for a film adaptation of his work.
Shaw grew up in Dublin and had intermittent formal schooling; he became largely self-educated through voracious reading and attendance at public lectures. In the late 1870s he moved to London, where he spent years developing his craft while supporting himself through journalism. His earliest books were novels, written in the 1880s, that found limited readers at first but honed his social concerns and satiric voice. He began as a music critic—famously signing as “Corno di Bassetto”—and soon turned to drama criticism for London newspapers. That apprenticeship taught him stagecraft and the deficiencies he sought to correct, preparing the ground for his emergence as a playwright.
Shaw’s intellectual formation owed much to nineteenth-century realism and to the influence of Henrik Ibsen. He championed the Norwegian dramatist in essays and lectures, most notably in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, arguing for plays that confronted contemporary problems. His own early dramas took aim at social hypocrisies: Widowers’ Houses scrutinized slum landlordism; Mrs Warren’s Profession examined the economics of vice and respectability; Arms and the Man satirized romantic militarism; while Candida and You Never Can Tell contrasted convention with independent thought. Initial productions sometimes met censorship or controversy, but the plays steadily established his reputation as a writer who made entertainment inseparable from argument.
By the early twentieth century Shaw had become a central figure in English-language theatre, extending his range while refining a distinctive mix of comedy and dialectics. Man and Superman combined courtship comedy with philosophical debate, including the often excerpted ‘Don Juan in Hell’ interlude. Major Barbara probed philanthropy, industry, and moral compromise, and The Doctor’s Dilemma explored medical ethics and the value of human life. He also revisited history in works such as Caesar and Cleopatra, using the past to refract modern concerns. His lengthy prefaces served as essays in their own right, explaining themes and provoking readers as much as audiences.
Pygmalion, first staged in the 1910s, became his most widely recognized play, a sharp study of language, class, and self-fashioning that later traveled readily into cinema. Shaw adapted it for the screen and received an Academy Award for the film version in the late 1930s. He also pursued large-scale experiments like Back to Methuselah, a cycle speculating on human longevity and social evolution, and reached a new critical peak with Saint Joan in the 1920s, which presented a serious tragic heroine through lucid, unsentimental argument. These works confirmed his capacity to fuse entertainment with ideas across modes, from intimate comedy to visionary sequences.
Beyond the stage, Shaw was a public intellectual associated with democratic socialism. He joined the Fabian Society in the 1880s, contributed to its pamphlets, and supported gradual reform through education, debate, and policy. His journalism and prefaces advocated women’s rights, criticized poverty and imperial pretensions, and questioned militarism. A noted vegetarian who relished provocation, he sometimes advanced arguments—on topics such as eugenics—that later readers have found troubling, yet he consistently used controversy to force moral and political scrutiny. The Fabian milieu with which he worked helped foster new institutions and policy conversations that shaped British public life in the early twentieth century.
Shaw received the Nobel Prize in Literature in the mid-1920s, formally honoring what audiences and critics had already recognized: a formidable, original voice in modern drama. He continued to write into old age, producing plays and prefaces that sustained debate even when reception was mixed. He died in 1950 in England, and his longtime home, now a museum, preserves his working environment for visitors. Today his plays are read and staged for their brisk dialogue, comic intelligence, and ethical inquiry. Directors often reframe them in contemporary settings, testimony to themes—power, money, speech, belief—that remain central to public conversation.
Historical Context
George Bernard Shaw came of age as Britain shifted from the high Victorian settlement into the volatile modern world. Born in Dublin in 1856 and resident in London from 1876, he wrote across the fin de siècle, the Edwardian years, and the First World War, the very decades represented by this collection of plays, novels, polemics, and letters. The intellectual climate around him combined scientific upheaval after Darwin, a mass expansion of literacy, militant politics from socialism to suffragism, and an embattled imperial state. Shaw answered with a drama of ideas and a public rhetoric designed to test institutions—marriage, medicine, empire, war—rather than to flatter them.
Shaw’s Irish origins mattered to his lifelong preoccupation with power, property, and identity. He was born at 3 Upper Synge Street, Dublin, into a Protestant family embedded in a city torn by the Land War of the late 1870s and the agitation for Home Rule under Charles Stewart Parnell. The collapse of Parnell’s leadership after 1890, the Gaelic Revival led by W. B. Yeats and Douglas Hyde, and the entanglement of Irish social and national questions formed the background to his depictions of Anglo-Irish relations and provincial satire. When he moved to London in 1876, he carried the Irish question with him into British debates and stages.
London in the 1880s offered Shaw both poverty and a university without fees: the Reading Room of the British Museum. There he undertook a program of self-education, reading political economy and the new European drama. He absorbed Marx’s critique, Auguste Comte’s positivist ambiance in the metropolis, and Henrik Ibsen’s insurgent dramaturgy, translated and championed by William Archer. The city’s debating clubs and secularist platforms provided rehearsal space for his pointed rhetoric. This apprenticeship—unwaged clerical jobs, journalism, public lecturing—forged the polemicist whose essays, reviews, and handbooks included here are inseparable from the arguments that ignite his fiction and plays.
The Fabian Society, founded in London in 1884 by figures such as Edward R. Pease, Frank Podmore, and Sidney Webb, was Shaw’s institutional home. He joined in 1884, contributed Fabian tracts through the 1890s, and helped shape gradualist socialist strategy: permeate institutions, capture municipal power, and reform the poor law. The Webbs’ London School of Economics opened in 1895 in close Fabian orbit. This civic, evidence-based socialism underwrites Shaw’s assaults on rentier wealth, military glamour, and medical profiteering, and energizes the sermons embedded in Man and Superman, Major Barbara, and the Revolutionist’s Handbook and Maxims for Revolutionists.
Shaw’s earliest sustained output was prose fiction written in the 1880s, when circulating libraries and weekly magazines mediated middle-class taste. Novels such as The Irrational Knot, Cashel Byron’s Profession, and An Unsocial Socialist were crafted against the grain of Mudie’s domestic romance, often serialized in radical periodicals linked to Henry Hyde Champion and other reformers. They test the bourgeois marriage market, the allure of celebrity, and the rhetoric of revolution through paradox rather than melodrama. The later republication of Love Among the Artists, and Shaw’s persistence in revising his early work, show a long arc in which novelistic experiment fertilizes theatrical technique.
The insurgent theatre that made Shaw possible crystallized in London when J. T. Grein founded the Independent Theatre Society in 1891 to present plays unsuitable for the commercial West End. Ibsen’s Ghosts and new social dramas broke the censor’s monopoly by private subscription. Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses emerged from this milieu in 1892, attacking slum landlordism. Over the 1890s the Stage Society and sympathetic managers pressed realism against romantic spectacle. In that clash, Shaw fashioned an anti-romantic comedy that replaced cavalry charges and curtain coups with dialectical duels, a style that would characterize Arms and the Man, The Philanderer, and later comedies of exposure.
From 1843 to 1968 British theatre required licensing by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, whose Examiner of Plays enforced public decorum. Shaw’s career unfolded under this regime. Mrs Warren’s Profession, written in 1898, was denied a public license in London until 1925, driving it to private clubs and foreign premieres. The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet and Press Cuttings were banned in 1909, and wartime pieces like O’Flaherty, V. C. encountered prohibitions. Censorship thus shaped not only premieres and venues but also style: Shaw’s reliance on prefaces, postludes, and companion essays turned the paratext into a public forum that the licensed stage could not always host.
Between 1904 and 1907 the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, managed by J. E. Vedrenne and Harley Granville Barker, became Shaw’s laboratory. There he saw John Bull’s Other Island, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, and The Doctor’s Dilemma staged for audiences newly receptive to argument onstage. Barker’s ensemble acting, simplified sets, and long runs altered production economics and audience habits. The Court’s repertory built a constituency for the drama of ideas that could then spill into the West End and the provinces. Collaboration with talented actors such as Mrs Patrick Campbell and producer-managers like Herbert Beerbohm Tree broadened the reach of his iconoclasm.
Shaw’s treatment of gender and marriage intersected with definable legal and political shifts. The Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, the agitation of the Women’s Social and Political Union founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst, and debates over the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act of 1907 formed the horizon for his comedies of conjugality. Press Cuttings directly raided the headlines of the suffrage campaign, while Getting Married and Fanny’s First Play satirized divorce law, parental authority, and sexual hypocrisy. After 1918 partial female suffrage and shifting moral codes confirmed his instinct that the stage could be a tribunal for domestic legislation.
European conflict and imperial reach supplied Shaw with historical mirrors for British conduct. Arms and the Man draws on the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War to puncture martial romance; The Devil’s Disciple uses the American Revolutionary War to examine colonial legitimacy; Caesar and Cleopatra reimagines Roman rule in Egypt—occupied by Britain since 1882—as a parable of imperial tutelage; Great Catherine mocks diplomatic prudery before autocratic power. Shaw deploys past wars and foreign courts to interrogate contemporary habits, from officer class mythologies to civilizing missions. His historical pieces are less antiquarian than diagnostic, inviting audiences to recognize themselves in costumes borrowed from other centuries.
Science, medicine, and language studies supplied Shaw with both themes and provocations. After Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species, disputes over evolution, heredity, and social policy entranced educated publics. Shaw engaged with Lamarckian currents and the vitalism of Henri Bergson and Samuel Butler, culminating in the metabiology of Back to Methuselah in 1921. The Doctor’s Dilemma reflects debates over fee-for-service incentives and bacteriological modernity within the British Medical Association. Pygmalion, conceived in 1912 and first staged in German in Vienna in 1913 before London in 1914, drew on the phonetic reforms associated with Henry Sweet and the new attention to class-coded speech.
Before he conquered the stage, Shaw made his name as a critic in the London press. From 1888 to 1890 he signed music reviews as Corno di Bassetto in The Star, then wrote criticism for The World and The Saturday Review under editor Frank Harris from 1895. The Perfect Wagnerite of 1898 decoded the Ring for a metropolitan public intoxicated by Wagnerism and emboldened by cheap railway fares to travel to Bayreuth. This critical apprenticeship sharpened his ear for cadence, his suspicion of mere sentiment, and his habit of using prefaces, interludes, and epilogues to instruct as well as entertain.
Shaw’s reputation was decisively transatlantic. New York and American touring circuits embraced his comedies in the first decade of the twentieth century, with entrepreneurial producers cultivating a public for candid talk about religion, marriage, and class. The Devil’s Disciple had an early American triumph; Candida and You Never Can Tell found ardent champions. Yet American moral vigilantism also struck back. In 1905 a New York staging of Mrs Warren’s Profession provoked police intervention and prosecutions, an episode that echoed British licensing constraints. These clashes hardened the sense, in Britain and the United States, that Shavian theatre was a test of liberal institutions.
War transformed Shaw’s platform. In 1914, soon after the Fabian-associated New Statesman was founded in 1913, he published Common Sense About the War, insisting on shared European culpabilities and warning against jingoism. The backlash was immediate and international. In 1915 The New York Times hosted a transatlantic dossier of replies: Arnold Bennett’s Shaw’s Nonsense About Belgium, Cunninghame Graham’s critique, Christabel Pankhurst’s denunciation, Herbert Eulenberg’s German letter, and Shaw’s own rejoinders, including an open letter to President Woodrow Wilson. The controversy frames the wartime pieces in this collection and reveals a public sphere in which drama, journalism, and diplomacy collided.
The climacteric of 1916 to 1921 darkened and enlarged Shaw’s historical sense. The Easter Rising in Dublin, the Somme and Passchendaele, the Russian revolutions of 1917, and the influenza pandemic of 1918 exposed the fragility of empires and certainties. Short wartime farces—O’Flaherty, V. C., The Inca of Perusalem, Augustus Does His Bit, Annajanska—navigate propaganda climates with evasive satire. After the Armistice, Heartbreak House diagnosed Edwardian drift as a national hazard, while Back to Methuselah projected an evolutionary escape from short-term politics. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the partitioning of Europe haunted his insistence that ideas, not cannons, must govern futures.
Shaw’s critical interlocutors and allies situate the works gathered here within a lively republic of letters. G. K. Chesterton, a friendly adversary since the 1900s, wrote both an introduction and a book-length study, countering Fabian utilitarianism with distributist paradox. American critic James Huneker distilled a Quintessence of Shaw; Irish essayist Robert Lynd placed him among Old and New Masters; Oliver Herford turned him into verse. William Archer tutored his Ibsenism; Granville Barker staged him; W. B. Yeats and the Abbey Theatre offered Irish stages when London bans bit. Together they demonstrate how argument was built into the circulation of his art.
From the early novels through the Court Theatre comedies, the wartime interludes, and the grand postwar speculations, Shaw fashioned a single enterprise: to make the English-speaking stage converse with modern history. The dates that punctuate this collection—1892, 1898, 1904–1906, 1913–1919, 1921—are also milestones in suffrage agitation, medical reform, imperial crisis, and scientific debate. His tactics shifted—tract, letter, preface, parody, pageant—but his target remained the same: unexamined habit. Recognition followed, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925, but the historical context remains the deeper laurel. These works endure because they are arguments staged within the very storms that occasioned them.
Synopsis (Selection)
Introduction by G. K. Chesterton
Chesterton frames Shaw as a master of paradox and debate, sketching his themes, temperament, and place in modern letters.
Cashel Byron’s Profession (1886)
A prizefighter seeks acceptance in polite society while courting an heiress, exposing class pretensions and the commerce of heroism.
An Unsocial Socialist (1887)
A wealthy radical goes undercover to wage war on capitalism and marriage conventions, entangling himself with a girls’ school and an inconvenient romance.
Love Among The Artists (1914)
An early novel tracing the interlaced careers and loves of musicians and painters, using salon talk to probe the value of art, celebrity, and patronage.
The Irrational Knot (1880)
A realistic study of marriage as a social contract, following mismatched partners whose ideals collide with economic and emotional constraints.
Widowers’ Houses (1892)
A young doctor discovers his fortune is tied to slum rents, forcing a reckoning with the ethics of property and philanthropy.
The Philanderer (1898)
A serial flirt caught between two lovers navigates a club of 'Ibsenites' and medical quackery, skewering modern notions of marriage and masculinity.
Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1898)
A daughter learns the source of her mother’s wealth in the sex trade, prompting a debate over morality, poverty, and individual choice.
The Man Of Destiny (1897)
A witty encounter between a young Napoleon and a resourceful stranger over stolen dispatches becomes a duel of strategy and character.
Arms And The Man: An Anti-Romantic Comedy in Three Acts (1894)
A pragmatic soldier disrupts a Balkan household’s romantic fantasies, deflating myths of war and love.
Candida (1898)
A minister and a young poet vie for the affections of the minister’s wife, who quietly reframes the terms of choice and power.
You Never Can Tell (1897)
An estranged family reunites at a seaside resort amid mistaken identities and social satire, guided by a philosophical waiter.
The Devil’s Disciple (1897)
In Revolutionary America, an apparent reprobate confronts British authority and received piety, revealing unexpected courage.
Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1900)
An English lady’s encounter with a Moroccan brigand turns a revenge plot into a debate about law, honor, and empire.
Caesar And Cleopatra: A History (1901)
A cool, ironic reimagining of Caesar’s mentorship of Cleopatra, focusing on statecraft over sentiment.
The Gadfly Or The Son of the Cardinal (1898)
A melodramatic satire of revolution and clerical power in which a masked agitator unsettles church and state.
The Admirable Bashville Or Constancy Unrewarded (1901)
A blank-verse burlesque that revisits Cashel Byron’s world, lampooning hero-worship, class, and stage conventions.
Man And Superman: A Comedy and A Philosophy (1903)
A battle of the sexes and ideas pits a reluctant revolutionary against a determined heiress, with the 'Don Juan in Hell' dream debating the Life Force and creative evolution.
John Bull’s Other Island (1904)
An English engineer’s Irish project exposes cultural illusions on both sides, mixing rustic charm with hard politics.
How He Lied To Her Husband (1904)
A brief farce that punctures high-flown adulterous rhetoric when poetic love letters fall into the wrong hands.
Major Barbara (1905)
A Salvation Army officer and her munitions-magnate father test whether moral ends can be bought with tainted means.
Passion, Poison, And Petrifaction (1905)
A lightning-fast parody of Victorian melodrama involving lethal passions, a poison plot, and statuesque consequences.
The Doctor’s Dilemma: A Tragedy (1906)
A celebrated physician with a scarce cure must choose who lives, exposing the hazards of medical privilege and artistic glamour.
The Interlude At The Playhouse (1907)
A short theatrical skit that teases audiences and managers about censorship, taste, and the commerce of entertainment.
Getting Married (1908)
A country-house summit on reforming marriage law turns into a talkative inquest on divorce, parental consent, and women’s rights.
The Shewing-Up Of Blanco Posnet (1909)
A frontier courtroom fable puts a horse thief on trial, staging a contest between rough justice and providence.
Press Cuttings (1909)
A topical revue lampooning militarism, suffrage politics, and bureaucratic panic during a mock 'state of emergency.'
Misalliance (1910)
An aeroplane crashlands a pair of adventurers into a complacent household, shaking up engagements and social certainties.
The Dark Lady Of The Sonnets (1910)
Shakespeare meets his 'Dark Lady' and Queen Elizabeth in a midnight plea for a national theatre.
Fanny’s First Play (1911)
A clandestine dramatist stages a comedy for critics who bicker over its morals, satirizing censorship and taste.
Androcles And The Lion (1912)
A fable about early Christians, a gentle tailor, and a grateful lion, weighing sincerity, martyrdom, and authority.
Overruled: A Demonstration (1912)
Two married couples flirt with infidelity and invent rules to justify it, exposing the etiquette of desire.
Pygmalion (1913)
A phonetics expert transforms a Cockney flower girl into a lady, testing the power of language to recast class and identity.
Great Catherine (Whom Glory Still Adores) (1913)
A brash British envoy blunders at Catherine the Great’s court, where wit and autocracy trump prudery.
The Music Cure (1913)
A jittery politician finds that an energetic pianist can treat more than nerves, in a comic sketch on therapy and finance.
O’Flaherty, V. C. (1915)
An Irish soldier’s wartime decoration clashes with his mother’s politics, satirizing recruitment and imperial loyalty.
The Inca Of Perusalem: An Almost Historical Comedietta (1916)
A vainglorious ruler—thinly veiled Kaiser—plots and blusters in a send-up of wartime autocracy.
Augustus Does His Bit (1916)
A self-important official is effortlessly duped by a clever woman, exposing the follies of red tape and chauvinism.
Skit For The Tiptaft Revue (1917)
A brief revue piece that pokes fun at legalistic pomposity and patriotic stage fare.
Annajanska, The Bolshevik Empress (1917)
A revolutionary princess upends a nervous regime, blending political farce with swift reversals.
Heartbreak House (1919)
In a crumbling country house, a shipwrecked set of Edwardians talk through looming catastrophe, diagnosing a culture’s drift before war.
Back To Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (1921)
A five-play cycle that imagines humanity evolving toward extreme longevity to escape political folly, from Eden to a distant future.
Back to Methuselah — In the Beginning
Adam and Eve confront mortality and the idea that longer life might yield wisdom.
Back to Methuselah — The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas
Two English politicians urge life extension as the prerequisite for competent statecraft.
Back to Methuselah — The Thing Happens
In the near future, long-lifers unsettle institutions built for short lives, generating bureaucratic stasis and surprise.
Back to Methuselah — Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman
A very old man’s quest ends in a meeting with ancient beings, testing the costs of endurance.
Back to Methuselah — As Far as Thought Can Reach
In an ultra-future, post-human artists reconsider sex, reproduction, and the purpose of consciousness.
What do Men of Letters Say? – The New York Times Articles on War (1915)
A dossier of Shaw’s wartime polemics and the responses they provoked—debating Belgium, neutrality, propaganda, and American policy through open letters, critiques, and editorials.
Mr. G. Bernard Shaw on Socialism
An accessible statement of Shaw’s Fabian socialism, outlining gradualist reform, municipal ownership, and the critique of laissez-faire.
Quintessence Of Ibsenism (1891)
A critical manifesto that reads Ibsen as a dramatist of social truth against 'ideal' lies, tracing the evolution of the emancipated individual.
The Impossibilities Of Anarchism (1895)
An argumentative essay rejecting anarchism as impractical while affirming the need for collective organization and law.
The Perfect Wagnerite, Commentary on the Niblung’s Ring (1898)
Shaw’s political reading of Wagner’s Ring cycle, interpreting its myths as a parable of capitalism, power, and redemption.
Letter to Beatrice Webb (1898)
A candid letter on socialist strategy, class, and policy that illuminates Shaw’s disagreements and affinities within the Fabian movement.
The Revolutionist’s Handbook And Pocket Companion (1903)
A polemical appendix to Man and Superman that codifies a tough-minded creed of creative evolution, politics, and personal conduct.
Maxims For Revolutionists (1903)
A set of aphorisms distilling Shaw’s provocations on art, religion, sex, and government.
The New Theology (1907)
An essay aligning religious modernism with ethical pragmatism, urging reinterpretation of doctrine in social terms.
How to Write A Popular Play: An Essay (1909)
Shaw’s contrarian advice to playwrights on structure, character, and the marketplace, warning against formula while explaining it.
Memories of Oscar Wilde (1916)
Recollections that sketch Wilde’s brilliance and contradictions, separating the man from the legend.
George Bernard Shaw by G. K. Chesterton
Chesterton’s extended critique-portrait balances admiration with dispute, examining Shaw’s logic, humor, and limits.
The Quintessence of Shaw by James Huneker
A lively appraisal that surveys Shaw’s plays and opinions, highlighting his paradoxes and stagecraft.
Old and New Masters: Bernard Shaw by Robert Lynd
A sympathetic critical profile situating Shaw among contemporaries and assessing his stylistic influence.
George Bernard Shaw: A Poem by Oliver Herford
A playful poem that lampoons and celebrates Shaw’s public persona.
The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Letters and Essays
Introduction by G. K. Chesterton
In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities, when genial old Ibsen filled the world with wholesome joy, and the kindly tales of the forgotten Emile Zola kept our firesides merry and pure, it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood. It may be doubted whether it is always or even generally a disadvantage. The man who is misunderstood has always this advantage over his enemies, that they do not know his weak point or his plan of campaign. They go out against a bird with nets and against a fish with arrows. There are several modern examples of this situation. Mr. Chamberlain, for instance, is a very good one. He constantly eludes or vanquishes his opponents because his real powers and deficiencies are quite different to those with which he is credited, both by friends and foes. His friends depict him as a strenuous man of action; his opponents depict him as a coarse man of business; when, as a fact, he is neither one nor the other, but an admirable romantic orator and romantic actor. He has one power which is the soul of melodrama—the power of pretending, even when backed by a huge majority, that he has his back to the wall. For all mobs are so far chivalrous that their heroes must make some show of misfortune—that sort of hypocrisy is the homage that strength pays to weakness. He talks foolishly and yet very finely about his own city that has never deserted him. He wears a flaming and fantastic flower, like a decadent minor poet. As for his bluffness and toughness and appeals to common sense, all that is, of course, simply the first trick of rhetoric. He fronts his audiences with the venerable affectation of Mark Antony—
"I am no orator, as Brutus is; But as you know me all, a plain blunt man."
It is the whole difference between the aim of the orator and the aim of any other artist, such as the poet or the sculptor. The aim of the sculptor is to convince us that he is a sculptor; the aim of the orator, is to convince us that he is not an orator. Once let Mr. Chamberlain be mistaken for a practical man, and his game is won. He has only to compose a theme on empire, and people will say that these plain men say great things on great occasions. He has only to drift in the large loose notions common to all artists of the second rank, and people will say that business men have the biggest ideals after all. All his schemes have ended in smoke; he has touched nothing that he did not confuse. About his figure there is a Celtic pathos; like the Gaels in Matthew Arnold's quotation, "he went forth to battle, but he always fell." He is a mountain of proposals, a mountain of failures; but still a mountain. And a mountain is always romantic.
There is another man in the modern world who might be called the antithesis of Mr. Chamberlain in every point, who is also a standing monument of the advantage of being misunderstood. Mr. Bernard Shaw is always represented by those who disagree with him, and, I fear, also (if such exist) by those who agree with him, as a capering humorist, a dazzling acrobat, a quick-change artist. It is said that he cannot be taken seriously, that he will defend anything or attack anything, that he will do anything to startle and amuse. All this is not only untrue, but it is, glaringly, the opposite of the truth; it is as wild as to say that Dickens had not the boisterous masculinity of Jane Austen. The whole force and triumph of Mr. Bernard Shaw lie in the fact that he is a thoroughly consistent man. So far from his power consisting in jumping through hoops or standing on his head, his power consists in holding his own fortress night and day. He puts the Shaw test rapidly and rigorously to everything that happens in heaven or earth. His standard never varies. The thing which weak-minded revolutionists and weak-minded Conservatives really hate (and fear) in him, is exactly this, that his scales, such as they are, are held even, and that his law, such as it is, is justly enforced. You may attack his principles, as I do; but I do not know of any instance in which you can attack their application. If he dislikes lawlessness, he dislikes the lawlessness of Socialists as much as that of Individualists. If he dislikes the fever of patriotism, he dislikes it in Boers and Irishmen as well as in Englishmen. If he dislikes the vows and bonds of marriage, he dislikes still more the fiercer bonds and wilder vows that are made by lawless love. If he laughs at the authority of priests, he laughs louder at the pomposity of men of science. If he condemns the irresponsibility of faith, he condemns with a sane consistency the equal irresponsibility of art. He has pleased all the bohemians by saying that women are equal to men; but he has infuriated them by suggesting that men are equal to women. He is almost mechanically just; he has something of the terrible quality of a machine. The man who is really wild and whirling, the man who is really fantastic and incalculable, is not Mr. Shaw, but the average Cabinet Minister. It is Sir Michael Hicks-Beach who jumps through hoops. It is Sir Henry Fowler who stands on his head. The solid and respectable statesman of that type does really leap from position to position; he is really ready to defend anything or nothing; he is really not to be taken seriously. I know perfectly well what Mr. Bernard Shaw will be saying thirty years hence; he will be saying what he has always said. If thirty years hence I meet Mr. Shaw, a reverent being with a silver beard sweeping the earth, and say to him, "One can never, of course, make a verbal attack upon a lady," the patriarch will lift his aged hand and fell me to the earth. We know, I say, what Mr. Shaw will be, saying thirty years hence. But is there any one so darkly read in stars and oracles that he will dare to predict what Mr. Asquith will be saying thirty years hence?
The truth is, that it is quite an error to suppose that absence of definite convictions gives the mind freedom and agility. A man who believes something is ready and witty, because he has all his weapons about him. He can apply his test in an instant. The man engaged in conflict with a man like Mr. Bernard Shaw may fancy he has ten faces; similarly a man engaged against a brilliant duellist may fancy that the sword of his foe has turned to ten swords in his hand. But this is not really because the man is playing with ten swords, it is because he is aiming very straight with one. Moreover, a man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope. Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity, because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of the world.
People accuse Mr. Shaw and many much sillier persons of "proving that black is white." But they never ask whether the current colour-language is always correct. Ordinary sensible phraseology sometimes calls black white, it certainly calls yellow white and green white and reddish-brown white. We call wine "white wine" which is as yellow as a Blue-coat boy's legs. We call grapes "white grapes" which are manifestly pale green. We give to the European, whose complexion is a sort of pink drab, the horrible title of a "white man"—a picture more blood-curdling than any spectre in Poe.
Now, it is undoubtedly true that if a man asked a waiter in a restaurant for a bottle of yellow wine and some greenish-yellow grapes, the waiter would think him mad. It is undoubtedly true that if a Government official, reporting on the Europeans in Burmah, said, "There are only two thousand pinkish men here" he would be accused of cracking jokes, and kicked out of his post. But it is equally obvious that both men would have come to grief through telling the strict truth. That too truthful man in the restaurant; that too truthful man in Burmah, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. He appears eccentric and grotesque because he will not accept the general belief that white is yellow. He has based all his brilliancy and solidity upon the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact that truth is stranger than fiction. Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.
So much then a reasonable appreciation will find in Mr. Shaw to be bracing and excellent. He claims to see things as they are; and some things, at any rate, he does see as they are, which the whole of our civilization does not see at all. But in Mr. Shaw's realism there is something lacking, and that thing which is lacking is serious.
Mr. Shaw's old and recognized philosophy was that powerfully presented in "The Quintessence of Ibsenism." It was, in brief, that conservative ideals were bad, not because They were conservative, but because they were ideals. Every ideal prevented men from judging justly the particular case; every moral generalization oppressed the individual; the golden rule was there was no golden rule. And the objection to this is simply that it pretends to free men, but really restrains them from doing the only thing that men want to do. What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people. And what is the good of telling a man (or a philosopher) that he has every liberty except the liberty to make generalizations. Making generalizations is what makes him a man. In short, when Mr. Shaw forbids men to have strict moral ideals, he is acting like one who should forbid them to have children. The saying that "the golden rule is that there is no golden rule," can, indeed, be simply answered by being turned round. That there is no golden rule is itself a golden rule, or rather it is much worse than a golden rule. It is an iron rule; a fetter on the first movement of a man.
But the sensation connected with Mr. Shaw in recent years has been his sudden development of the religion of the Superman. He who had to all appearance mocked at the faiths in the forgotten past discovered a new god in the unimaginable future. He who had laid all the blame on ideals set up the most impossible of all ideals, the ideal of a new creature. But the truth, nevertheless, is that any one who knows Mr. Shaw's mind adequately, and admires it properly, must have guessed all this long ago.
For the truth is that Mr. Shaw has never seen things as they really are. If he had he would have fallen on his knees before them. He has always had a secret ideal that has withered all the things of this world. He has all the time been silently comparing humanity with something that was not human, with a monster from Mars, with the Wise Man of the Stoics, with the Economic Man of the Fabians, with Julius Caesar, with Siegfried, with the Superman. Now, to have this inner and merciless standard may be a very good thing, or a very bad one, it may be excellent or unfortunate, but it is not seeing things as they are. It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with a hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two. It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of Argus with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots. And this is what Mr. Shaw has always in some degree done. When we really see men as they are, we do not criticise, but worship; and very rightly. For a monster with mysterious eyes and miraculous thumbs, with strange dreams in his skull, and a queer tenderness for this place or that baby, is truly a wonderful and unnerving matter. It is only the quite arbitrary and priggish habit of comparison with something else which makes it possible to be at our ease in front of him. A sentiment of superiority keeps us cool and practical; the mere facts would make, our knees knock under as with religious fear. It is the fact that every instant of conscious life is an unimaginable prodigy. It is the fact that every face in the street has the incredible unexpectedness of a fairy-tale. The thing which prevents a man from realizing this is not any clear-sightedness or experience, it is simply a habit of pedantic and fastidious comparisons between one thing and another. Mr. Shaw, on the practical side perhaps the most humane man alive, is in this sense inhumane. He has even been infected to some extent with the primary intellectual weakness of his new master, Nietzsche, the strange notion that the greater and stronger a man was the more he would despise other things. The greater and stronger a man is the more he would be inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle. That Mr. Shaw keeps a lifted head and a contemptuous face before the colossal panorama of empires and civilizations, this does not in itself convince one that he sees things as they are. I should be most effectively convinced that he did if I found him staring with religious astonishment at his own feet. "What are those two beautiful and industrious beings," I can imagine him murmuring to himself, "whom I see everywhere, serving me I know not why? What fairy godmother bade them come trotting out of elfland when I was born? What god of the borderland, what barbaric god of legs, must I propitiate with fire and wine, lest they run away with me?"
The truth is, that all genuine appreciation rests on a certain mystery of humility and almost of darkness. The man who said, "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed," put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised." The man who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see, and greener grass, and a more startling sun. Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains; blessed is the meek, for he shall inherit the earth. Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine. Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God, and can realize none of the trophies of His ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know nothing until we know nothing.
Now this is, I say deliberately, the only defect in the greatness of Mr. Shaw, the only answer to his claim to be a great man, that he is not easily pleased. He is an almost solitary exception to the general and essential maxim, that little things please great minds. And from this absence of that most uproarious of all things, humility, comes incidentally the peculiar insistence on the Superman. After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby. Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuable and lovable in our eyes is man—the old beer-drinking, creed-making, fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man. And the things that have been founded on this creature immortally remain; the things that have been founded on the fancy of the Superman have died with the dying civilizations which alone have given them birth. When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob a coward—in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.
Cashel Byron’s Profession(1886)
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
I
Moncrief House, Panley Common. Scholastic establishment for the sons of gentlemen, etc.
Panley Common, viewed from the back windows of Moncrief House, is a tract of grass, furze and rushes, stretching away to the western horizon.
One wet spring afternoon the sky was full of broken clouds, and the common was swept by their shadows, between which patches of green and yellow gorse were bright in the broken sunlight. The hills to the northward were obscured by a heavy shower, traces of which were drying off the slates of the school, a square white building, formerly a gentleman’s countryhouse. In front of it was a well-kept lawn with a few clipped holly-trees. At the rear, a quarter of an acre of land was enclosed for the use of the boys. Strollers on the common could hear, at certain hours, a hubbub of voices and racing footsteps from within the boundary wall. Sometimes, when the strollers were boys themselves, they climbed to the coping, and saw on the other side a piece of common trampled bare and brown, with a few square yards of concrete, so worn into hollows as to be unfit for its original use as a ball-alley. Also a long shed, a pump, a door defaced by innumerable incised inscriptions, the back of the house in much worse repair than the front, and about fifty boys in tailless jackets and broad, turned-down collars. When the fifty boys perceived a stranger on the wall they rushed to the spot with a wild halloo, overwhelmed him with insult and defiance, and dislodged him by a volley of clods, stones, lumps of bread, and such other projectiles as were at hand.
On this rainy spring afternoon a brougham stood at the door of Moncrief House. The coachman, enveloped in a white indiarubber coat, was bestirring himself a little after the recent shower. Within-doors, in the drawingroom, Dr. Moncrief was conversing with a stately lady aged about thirty-five, elegantly dressed, of attractive manner, and only falling short of absolute beauty in her complexion, which was deficient in freshness.
“No progress whatever, I am sorry to say,” the doctor was remarking.
“That is very disappointing,” said the lady, contracting her brows.
“It is natural that you should feel disappointed,” replied the doctor. “I would myself earnestly advise you to try the effect of placing him at some other—” The doctor stopped. The lady’s face had lit up with a wonderful smile, and she had raised her hand with a bewitching gesture of protest.
“Oh, no, Dr. Moncrief,” she said. “I am not disappointed with YOU; but I am all the more angry with Cashel, because I know that if he makes no progress with you it must be his own fault. As to taking him away, that is out of the question. I should not have a moment’s peace if he were out of your care. I will speak to him very seriously about his conduct before I leave to-day. You will give him another trial, will you not?”
“Certainly. With the greatest pleasure,” exclaimed the doctor, confusing himself by an inept attempt at gallantry. “He shall stay as long as you please. But” — here the doctor became grave again— “you cannot too strongly urge upon him the importance of hard work at the present time, which may be said to be the turning-point of his career as a student. He is now nearly seventeen; and he has so little inclination for study that I doubt whether he could pass the examination necessary to entering one of the universities. You probably wish him to take a degree before he chooses a profession.”
“Yes, of course,” said the lady, vaguely, evidently assenting to the doctor’s remark rather than expressing a conviction of her own. “What profession would you advise for him? You know so much better than I.”
“Hum!” said Dr. Moncrief, puzzled. “That would doubtless depend to some extent on his own taste—”
“Not at all,” said the lady, interrupting him with vivacity. “What does he know about the world, poor boy? His own taste is sure to be something ridiculous. Very likely he would want to go on the stage, like me.”
“Oh! Then you would not encourage any tendency of that sort?”
“Most decidedly not. I hope he has no such idea.”
“Not that I am aware of. He shows so little ambition to excel in any particular branch that I should say his choice of a profession may be best determined by his parents. I am, of course, ignorant whether his relatives possess influence likely to be of use to him. That is often the chief point to be considered, particularly in cases like your son’s, where no special aptitude manifests itself.”
“I am the only relative he ever had, poor fellow,” said the lady, with a pensive smile. Then, seeing an expression of astonishment on the doctor’s face, she added, quickly, “They are all dead.”
“Dear me!”
“However,” she continued, “I have no doubt I can make plenty of interest for him. But it is difficult to get anything nowadays without passing competitive examinations. He really must work. If he is lazy he ought to be punished.”
The doctor looked perplexed. “The fact is,” he said, “your son can hardly be dealt with as a child any longer. He is still quite a boy in his habits and ideas; but physically he is rapidly springing up into a young man. That reminds me of another point on which I will ask you to speak earnestly to him. I must tell you that he has attained some distinction among his schoolfellows here as an athlete. Within due bounds I do not discourage bodily exercises: they are a recognized part of our system. But I am sorry to say that Cashel has not escaped that tendency to violence which sometimes results from the possession of unusual strength and dexterity. He actually fought with one of the village youths in the main street of Panley some months ago. The matter did not come to my ears immediately; and, when it did, I allowed it to pass unnoticed, as he had interfered, it seems, to protect one of the smaller boys. Unfortunately he was guilty of a much more serious fault a little later. He and a companion of his had obtained leave from me to walk to Panley Abbey together. I afterwards found that their real object was to witness a prizefight that took place — illegally, of course — on the common. Apart from the deception practised, I think the taste they betrayed a dangerous one; and I felt bound to punish them by a severe imposition, and restriction to the grounds for six weeks. I do not hold, however, that everything has been done in these cases when a boy has been punished. I set a high value on a mother’s influence for softening the natural roughness of boys.”
“I don’t think he minds what I say to him in the least,” said the lady, with a sympathetic air, as if she pitied the doctor in a matter that chiefly concerned him. “I will speak to him about it, of course. Fighting is an unbearable habit. His father’s people were always fighting; and they never did any good in the world.”
“If you will be so kind. There are just the three points: the necessity for greater — much greater — application to his studies; a word to him on the subject of rough habits; and to sound him as to his choice of a career. I agree with you in not attaching much importance to his ideas on that subject as yet. Still, even a boyish fancy may be turned to account in rousing the energies of a lad.”
