George Bernard Shaw - Wikiquote
George Bernard Shaw
Jump to: navigation , search
I hear you say "Why?" Always "Why?" You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity .
See also:
Quotes[ edit ]
My specialty is being right when other people are wrong .
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world ; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
All great truths begin as blasphemies .
Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination ?
One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
Statue of Shaw in Niagara-on-the-Lake
1890s[ edit ]
Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it…
The World (15 November 1893)
Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it…
The World (18 July 1894), Music in London 1890-1894 being criticisms contributed week by week to The World (New York: Vienna House, 1973)
But no public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means; and I have no reason to hope that Mr Coote may be an exception to the rule.
"The Living Pictures", The Saturday Review, LXXIX (April 6, 1895), 443, reprinted in Our Theatres in the Nineties (1932). Vol. 1. London: Constable & Co. 79-86
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity .
Answers to Nine Questions (September 1896), answers to nine questions submitted by Clarence Rook, who had interviewed him in 1895
Socialists must be in favor of an aristocratic form of government. We must have the best men for the job . . . In the dictator you must have a man who has not only the power to govern but the force of character to impose himself as dictator whether you like him or not.
“Socialism urged to find dictator,” Berkeley Daily Gazette (Nov. 30, 1927)
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
Candida , Act I (1898)
The Devil's Disciple , Act II (1901)
Martyrdom , sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
The Devil's Disciple, Act II
I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian . It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet.
Interview "Who I Am, and What I Think", in Frank Harris 's periodical The Candid Friend (May 1901), reprinted in Sixteen Self Sketches, 1949, p. 53; quoted in Desmond King-Hele , Shelley: His Thought and Work, 1984, p. 42
You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
The Irrational Knot, Preface (1905)
[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.
The Irrational Knot (1905)
To understand a saint , you must hear the devil 's advocate; and the same is true of the artist .
The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate (1908)
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship ; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.
The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet (1909): The Rejected Statement, Pt. I : The Limits to Toleration
Love Among the Artists (1900)[ edit ]
If you leave your art , the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling...
The way to deal with worldly people is to frighten them by repeating their scandalous whisperings aloud.
The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.
There are some men who are considered quite ugly, but who are more remarkable than pretty people. You often see that in artists.
All very fine, Mary; but my old-fashioned common sense is better than your clever modern nonsense .
If you leave your art , the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling. Corrupt successes , disgraceful failures , or sheeplike vegetation are all it has to offer. I prefer Art, which gives me a sixth sense of beauty , with self-respect : perhaps also an immortal reputation in return for honest endeavour in a labour of love .
Perhaps woman's art is of woman's life a thing apart, 'tis man's whole existence; just as love is said to be the reverse — though it isn't.
I hate singers, a miserable crew who think that music exists only in their own throats.
A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.
Composers are not human; They can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartet for a family.
Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with.
Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.
If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
Episode I
A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)[ edit ]
When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.
Death is for many of us the gate of hell ; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.
A nation should always be healthily rebellious ; but the king or prime minister has yet to be found who will make trouble by cultivating that side of the national spirit. A child should begin to assert itself early, and shift for itself more and more not only in washing and dressing itself, but in opinions and conduct; yet as nothing is so exasperating and so unlovable as an uppish child, it is useless to expect parents and schoolmasters to inculcate this uppishness. Such unamiable precepts as Always contradict an authoritative statement, Always return a blow, Never lose a chance of a good fight, When you are scolded for a mistake ask the person who scolds you whether he or she supposes you did it on purpose, and follow the question with a blow or an insult or some other unmistakable expression of resentment, Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders, are just as important as those of The Sermon on the Mount; but no one has yet seen them written up in letters of gold in a schoolroom or nursery.
You are so careful of your boy's morals , knowing how troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Milo only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse. You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's Tristan are not suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallingly unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parental protection. You have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single danger: you have depraved the passions by starving them, and broken down all the defences which so effectively protect children brought up in freedom.
The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it.
1930s[ edit ]
No public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means.
Our Theatres In The Nineties (1930)
I have defined the 100 per cent American as 99 per cent an idiot.
New York Times (19 December 1930) remarks on Sinclair Lewis receiving the Nobel Prize
I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly tell our children that honesty is the best policy.
"Rungs of the Ladder" , BBC Radio broadcast, 11 July 1932
As a red hot Communist I am in favour of fascism. The only drawback to Sir Oswald’s movement is that it is not quite British enough.
As quoted in Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of Bernard Shaw by Gareth Griffith (1993). Originally from Bernard Shaw, The News Chronicle, “The Blackshirt Challenge,” (Jan. 1934)
An American has no sense of privacy . He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country.
Speech at New York (11 April 1933)
You in America should trust to that volcanic political instinct which I have divined in you.
Speech at New York (11 April 1933)
I don’t want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I might want to kill…I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board just as he might come before the income tax commissioner and say every 5 years or every 7 years…just put them there and say, ‘Sir or madam will you be kind enough to justify your existence…if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little bit more then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive. Because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.’
“George Bernard Shaw reopens capital punishment controversy”, Paramount British Pictures (March 5, 1931)
On the Rocks (1933)[ edit ]
On the Rocks : A Political Comedy
Take the case of the extermination of Jesus Christ . No doubt there was a strong case for it. … By every argument, legal, political, religious, customary, and polite, he was the most complete enemy of the society of his time ever brought to the bar.
I am the embodiment of a thought of God: I am the Word made flesh … Beware how you kill a thought that is new to you. For that thought may be the foundation of the kingdom of God on earth.
In this play a reference is made by a Chief of Police to the political necessity for killing people: a necessity so distressing to the statesmen and so terrifying to the common citizen that nobody except myself (as far as I know) has ventured to examine it directly on its own merits, although every Government is obliged to practise it on a scale varying from the execution of a single murderer to the slaughter of millions of quite innocent persons. Whilst assenting to these proceedings, and even acclaiming and celebrating them, we dare not tell ourselves what we are doing or why we are doing it; and so we call it justice or capital punishment or our duty to king and country or any other convenient verbal whitewash for what we instinctively recoil from as from a dirty job. These childish evasions are revolting. We must strip off the whitewash and find out what is really beneath it. Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly.
Preface; Extermination
Ignoring the satirical elements of Shaw's rhetoric, and that he is presenting many arguments of sometimes questionable sincerity for the "humane" execution of criminals, the last sentence here has sometimes been misquoted as if it as part of an argument for exterminations for the sake of eugenics , by preceding it with a selected portion of a statement later in the essay: "If we desire a certain type of civilization, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it … Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly".
In law we draw a line between the killing of human animals and non-human ones, setting the latter apart as brutes. This was founded on a general belief that humans have immortal souls and brutes none. Nowadays more and more people are refusing to make this distinction. They may believe in The Life Everlasting and The Life to Come; but they make no distinction between Man and Brute, because some of them believe that brutes have souls, whilst others refuse to believe that the physical materializations and personifications of The Life Everlasting are themselves everlasting. In either case the mystic distinction between Man and Brute vanishes; and the murderer pleading that though a rabbit should be killed for being mischievous he himself should be spared because he has an immortal soul and a rabbit has none is as hopelessly out of date as a gentleman duellist pleading his clergy. When the necessity for killing a dangerous human being arises, as it still does daily, the only distinction we make between a man and a snared rabbit is that we very quaintly provide the man with a minister of religion to explain to him that we are not killing him at all, but only expediting his transfer to an eternity of bliss.
Preface; The Sacredness of Human Life
The extermination of what the exterminators call inferior races is as old as history. "Stone dead hath no fellow" said Cromwell when he tried to exterminate the Irish. "The only good nigger is a dead nigger" say the Americans of the Ku-Klux temperament. "Hates any man the thing he would not kill?" said Shylock naively. But we white men, as we absurdly call ourselves in spite of the testimony of our looking glasses, regard all differently colored folk as inferior species. Ladies and gentlemen class rebellious laborers with vermin. The Dominicans, the watchdogs of God, regarded the Albigenses as the enemies of God, just as Torquemada regarded the Jews as the murderers of God. All that is an old story: what we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it. There is a difference between the shooting at sight of aboriginal natives in the back blocks of Australia and the massacres of aristocrats in the terror which followed the foreign attacks on the French Revolution. The Australian gunman pots the aboriginal natives to satisfy his personal antipathy to a black man with uncut hair. But nobody in the French Republic had this feeling about Lavoisier , nor can any German Nazi have felt that way about Einstein . Yet Lavoisier was guillotined; and Einstein has had to fly for his life from Germany. It was silly to say that the Republic had no use for chemists; and no Nazi has stultified his party to the extent of saying that the new National Socialist Fascist State in Germany has no use for mathematician-physicists. The proposition is that aristocrats (Lavoisier's class) and Jews (Einstein's race) are unfit to enjoy the privilege of living in a modern society founded on definite principles of social welfare as distinguished from the old promiscuous aggregations crudely policed by chiefs who had no notion of social criticism and no time to invent it.
Preface; Previous Attempts Miss the Point.
There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates , who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery.
Preface; Cruelty's Excuses
I dislike cruelty , even cruelty to other people, and should therefore like to see all cruel people exterminated. But I should recoil with horror from a proposal to punish them. Let me illustrate my attitude by a very famous, indeed far too famous, example of the popular conception of criminal law as a means of delivering up victims to the normal popular lust for cruelty which has been mortified by the restraint imposed on it by civilization. Take the case of the extermination of Jesus Christ . No doubt there was a strong case for it. Jesus was from the point of view of the High Priest a heretic and an impostor. From the point of view of the merchants he was a rioter and a Communist. From the Roman Imperialist point of view he was a traitor. From the commonsense point of view he was a dangerous madman. From the snobbish point of view, always a very influential one, he was a penniless vagrant. From the police point of view he was an obstructor of thoroughfares, a beggar, an associate of prostitutes, an apologist of sinners, and a disparager of judges; and his daily companions were tramps whom he had seduced into vagabondage from their regular trades. From the point of view of the pious he was a Sabbath breaker, a denier of the efficacy of circumcision and the advocate of a strange rite of baptism, a gluttonous man and a winebibber. He was abhorrent to the medical profession as an unqualified practitioner who healed people by quackery and charged nothing for the treatment. He was not anti-Christ: nobody had heard of such a power of darkness then; but he was startlingly anti-Moses. He was against the priests, against the judiciary, against the military, against the city (he declared that it was impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven), against all the interests, classes, principalities and powers, inviting everybody to abandon all these and follow him. By every argument, legal, political, religious, customary, and polite, he was the most complete enemy of the society of his time ever brought to the bar. He was guilty on every count of the indictment, and on many more that his accusers had not the wit to frame. If he was innocent then the whole world was guilty. To acquit him was to throw over civilization and all its institutions. History has borne out the case against him; for no State has ever constituted itself on his principles or made it possible to live according to his commandments: those States who have taken his name have taken it as an alias to enable them to persecute his followers more plausibly.
It is not surprising that under these circumstances, and in the absence of any defence, the Jerusalem community and the Roman government decided to exterminate Jesus. They had just as much right to do so as to exterminate the two thieves who perished with him.
Preface, Leading Case of Jesus Christ
All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity.
Pilate, as portrayed in Preface, Difference Between Reader And Spectator
I am no mere chance pile of flesh and bone: if I were only that, I should fall into corruption and dust before your eyes. I am the embodiment of a thought of God: I am the Word made flesh: that is what holds me together standing before you in the image of God. … The Word is God. And God is within you. … In so far as you know the truth you have it from my God, who is your heavenly father and mine. He has many names and his nature is manifold. … It is by children who are wiser than their fathers, subjects who are wiser than their emperors, beggars and vagrants who are wiser than their priests, that men rise from being beasts of prey to believing in me and being saved. … By their fruits ye shall know them. Beware how you kill a thought that is new to you. For that thought may be the foundation of the kingdom of God on earth.
Jesus, as portrayed in Preface, Difference Between Reader And Spectator
The kingdom of God is striving to come. The empire that looks back in terror shall give way to the kingdom that looks forward with hope. Terror drives men mad: hope and faith give them divine wisdom. The men whom you fill with fear will stick at no evil and perish in their sin: the men whom I fill with faith shall inherit the earth. I say to you Cast out fear. Speak no more vain things to me about the greatness of Rome. … You, standing for Rome, are the universal coward: I, standing for the kingdom of God, have braved everything, lost everything, and won an eternal crown.
Jesus, as portrayed in Preface, Difference Between Reader And Spectator
Law is blind without counsel. The counsel men agree with is vain: it is only the echo of their own voices. A million echoes will not help you to rule righteously. But he who does not fear you and shews you the other side is a pearl of the greatest price. Slay me and you go blind to your damnation. The greatest of God's names is Counsellor; and when your Empire is dust and your name a byword among the nations the temples of the living God shall still ring with his praise as Wonderful! Counsellor! the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
Jesus, as portrayed in Preface, Difference Between Reader And Spectator
The last word remains with Christ and Handel ; and this must stand as the best defence of Tolerance until a better man than I makes a better job of it.
Put shortly and undramatically the case is that a civilization cannot progress without criticism, and must therefore, to save itself from stagnation and putrefaction, declare impunity for criticism. This means impunity not only for propositions which, however novel, seem interesting, statesmanlike, and respectable, but for propositions that shock the uncritical as obscene, seditious, blasphemous, heretical, and revolutionary.
Preface, The Sacredness Of Criticism
1940s and later[ edit ]
The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation.
letter, 24 June 1930, to Frank Harris "To Frank Harris on Sex in Biography" Sixteen Self Sketches (1949)
The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.
"The Play of Ideas", New Statesman (6 May 1950)
The apparent multiplicity of Gods is bewildering at the first glance; but you presently discover that they are all the same one God in different aspects and functions and even sexes. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendent God includes all possible Gods… Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the profoundest Methodist and the crudest idolater are equally at home in it.
Islam is very different, being ferociously intolerant. What I may call Manifold Monotheism becomes in the minds of very simple folk an absurdly polytheistic idolatry, just as European peasants not only worship Saints and the Virgin as Gods, but will fight fanatically for their faith in the ugly little black doll who is the Virgin of their own Church against the black doll of the next village. When the Arabs had run this sort of idolatry to such extremes … they did this without black dolls and worshipped any stone that looked funny, Mahomet rose up at the risk of his life and insulted the stones shockingly, declaring that there is only one God, Allah, the glorious, the great… And there was to be no nonsense about toleration. You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by someone who did accept him, and who went to Paradise for having sent you to Hell. Mahomet was a great Protestant religious force, like George Fox or Wesley ….
There is actually a great Hindu sect, the Jains , with Temples of amazing magnificence, which abolish God, not on materialist atheist considerations, but as unspeakable and unknowable, transcending all human comprehension.
Letter to the Reverend Ensor Walters (1933), as quoted in Bernard Shaw : Collected Letters, 1926-1950 (1988) by Dan H. Laurence, p. 305; Shaw actually errs here in characterizing Jainism as simply a sect of Hinduism, as it is usually regarded as a separate and independent tradition, though Hindu and Jain philosophers have long had influence on each other, as well as other traditions
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
Everybody's Political What's What (1944), Ch. 30, p. 256
We have no reason to suppose that we are the Creator's last word.
The Bible is most dangerous book ever written on earth, keep it under lock and key.
From Why You Should Never be a Christian (1987) by Ishaq 'Kunle Sanni and ‎Dawood Ayodele Amoo.
The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
Widely attributed to Shaw, this quotation is actually of unknown origin.
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
The attribution to Shaw comes from Leadership Skills for Managers (2000) by Marlene Caroselli, p. 71. But this quote seems more likely to come from William H. Whyte.. The Biggest Problem in Communication Is the Illusion That It Has Taken Place . Quote Investigator (2014-08-31). Retrieved on 2015-11-09.
Success does not consist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one a second time.
H. W. Shaw ( Josh Billings ), as quoted in Scientific American, Vol. 31 (1874), p. 121, and in dictionaries of quotations such as Excellent Quotations for Home and School (1890) by Julia B. Hoitt, p. 117 and Many Thoughts of Many Minds: A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age (1896) by Louis Klopsch, p. 266 .
I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. ... You get dirty and besides the pig likes it.
Initially attributed to Cyrus S. Ching in Time, Vol. 56 (1950), p. 21.
﻿
Quotes about Shaw[ edit ]
Shaw is perhaps the most consciously conscious mind that has ever thought … ~ Jacques Barzun
I never read a reply by Shaw that did not leave me in better and not worse temper or frame of mind … ~ G. K. Chesterton
I found many men to whom I felt deeply grateful … but the man I liked most and the man who seemed to remind me of myself — of what I really was and would surely become — was George Bernard Shaw. ~ William Saroyan
Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.
James Agate , diary entry (10 March 1933)
Shaw knows at any moment, on any subject, what he thinks, what you will think, what others have thought, what all this thinking entails; and he takes the most elaborate pains to bring these thoughts to light in a form which is by turns abstract and familiar, conciliatory and aggressive, obvious and inferential, comic and puzzling. In a word, Shaw is perhaps the most consciously conscious mind that has ever thought — certainly the most conscious since Rousseau ; which may be why both of them often create the same impression of insincerity amounting to charlatanism. Yet it is by excess of honesty that Shaw himself lent color to his representation as an inconsequential buffoon bent on monopolizing the spotlight.
Jacques Barzun , in "Bernard Shaw in Twilight" in The Kenyon Review (Summer 1943)
Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly.
Jacques Barzun , in "Bernard Shaw in Twilight" in The Kenyon Review (Summer 1943)
Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory.
Jacques Barzun , in "Bernard Shaw in Twilight" in The Kenyon Review (Summer 1943)
He never invested his whole moral capital in a man, a book, or a cause, but treasured up wisdom wherever it could be picked up, always with scrupulous acknowledgment … His eclecticism saving him from the cycle of hope-disillusion-despair, his highest effectiveness was as a skirmisher in the daily battle for light and justice, as a critic of new doctrine and a refurbisher of old, as a voice of warning and encouragement. That his action has not been in vain, we can measure by how little Shaw's iconoclasm stirs our blood; we no longer remember what he destroyed that was blocking our view.
Jacques Barzun , in "Bernard Shaw in Twilight" in The Kenyon Review (Summer 1943)
Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.
Jacques Barzun "Bernard Shaw," in A Jacques Barzun Reader: Selections from his works (2002), p. 231
Mr. Shaw cannot realise his own pertness, nor can he preserve his own gravity, for more than a few moments at a time. Even when he sets out to be funny for fun's sake, he must needs always pretend that there is a serious reason for the emprise; and he pretends so strenuously that he ends by convincing us almost as fully as he convinces himself. Thus the absurdity, whatever it be, comes off doubly well. Conversely, even when he is really engrossed in some process of serious argument, or moved to real eloquence by one of his social ideals, he emits involuntarily some wild jape which makes the whole thing ridiculous — as ridiculous to himself as to us; and straightway he proceeds to caricature his own thesis till everything is topsy-turvy; and we, rolling with laughter, look up and find him no longer on his head, but on his heels, talking away quite gravely; and this sets us off again. For, of course, when seriousness and frivolity thus co-exist inseparably in a man, the seriousness is nullified by the frivolity. The latter is fed by the former, but, graceless and vampire-like, kills it. As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality he is immortal.
Posterity will not, I fancy, read his writings. He has not enough of the specific art-sense for writing. I will not exasperate him by complaining that he has no sense of beauty in the use of his medium: the idea of beauty is a red rag to him, as we know. I will merely suggest that he has in his writing the qualities of a public speaker rather than of a writer. He does not write with that closeness which is the result not of haste but of leisure, and which is the main secret of good literature. He is too glib, too fluent, too diffuse, and too loud. Glibness and fluency, loudness and diffusion, are just the qualities needed for addressing an audience. But between speaking and writing there is a vast difference. A good writer cannot make good speeches, and Mr. Shaw's seems an instance to prove that a good speaker cannot write well. We, his contemporaries, can read him with delight, even though we seem to miss the reporter's interpolation of "laughter", "cheers", "interruption", and so forth. But relentlessly, in course of time, lack of solid form "tells on" writing. However interesting a writer may be, he will not, unless he be a strict artist, be read by posterity. Style, as has been said, is the one antiseptic. But, though Mr. Shaw's writing be not good enough for the next generation, he himself, being so signally unique, is good enough for all time. I wish I had the leisure to be his Boswell , and he the kindness to be my Johnson .