George Bernard Shaw

(IN HIS OWN WORDS)

[Mr. Patibanda Sundara Rao, the seniormost member with more than fifty years standing at the Bar at Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, is an erudite scholar in Sanskrit, Telugu and English. He is a great admirer of George Bernard Shaw and the founder of the Shaw Society. He had the good fortune of meeting with Shaw in the early ’Thirties at Bombay when he visited India. Instead of contributing an article on Shaw (as requested by the Editor), Mr. Sundara Rao thought it would be more useful to the present generation if he made Shaw speak for himself. The quotations selected by him are from the whole range of Shaw’s works. He says, “The best way to introduce Shaw is to make him introduce himself.” Mr. Sundara Rao translated into Telugu, a few works of Shaw. They remain unpublished.  –Editor]

Parents

My parents will be found in my autobiography which will be published fifty years after my death.

...

Shaw is almost a hopeless subject, because there is nothing interesting to be said of him, that he has not already said about himself.

…

If you leave this world without knowing me, you will be sent to accomplish that destiny.

Birth

Shaw was born in Dublin on 26th July 1856. He is an Irishman.

…

I am, and always have been, and ever shall be, by pre-eminent brevity and common sense, simply–Shaw.

…

I was probably the product of a drunken brawl!

...

That I germinated outside lawful procreation.

...

I protest I am the unquestioned lawful heir of my mother’s property and my father’s debts; and if Jones will come to tea with me, not only will he be cordially welcomed, but he can inspect the family photographs, which will convince him that extraordinary as I am, I am none the less unmistakably the son of my reputed father.
…
I was a downstart and the son of a downstart.
…
My father in theory is a teetotaller.
…
I did not throw myself into the struggle for life. I threw my mother into it.
…
My father, by the way, found something in a funeral which tickled his sense of humour; and this characteristic I have inherited. I never grieve but I do not forget.
…
In short, my mother was, from the technical point of view, a modern welfare worker, neither a mother nor a wife, and could be classed only as a Bohemian anarchist with ladylike habits.
…
He must have had some elementary education; for he could       read and write and keep accounts more or less inaccurately.
...
My family, though kindly, might be called loveless.

Education:

I have no recollection of being taught to read and write. So I presume I was born with both faculties.
…
As for his schooling, failed the 4th standard. He said, “I am unteachable.”
…
I am as to classical education another Shakespeare.
…
...to me the whole vocabulary of English literature, from Shakespeare to the latest edition of Encyclopaedia, Britannica is so completely and instantaneously at my call, that I have never had to consult even a thesaurus except once or twice when for some reason I wanted a third or fourth synonym.
…
When I have to make an arithmetical calculation I have to do it step by step, with pencil and paper, slowly, reluctantly, and with so little confidence in the result that I dare not act on it without proving the same by a further calculation involving more ciphering.
…
The English language was my weapon.
…
I work as my father drank.
…
I have risen by sheer gravitation.

London

... and in 1876, I walked out and threw myself recklessly into London.

Marriage

As a man and wife we found a new relation in which sex had no part. It ended the old gallantries, flirtations, and philanderings for both of us.
…
Real married life is the life of the youth and maiden who pluck a flower and bring down an avalanche on their shoulders. Thirty years of the work of Atlas and then rest as pater and mater families. What can childless people with independent incomes marrying at forty as I did tell you about marriage. I know nothing about it except as a looker on.

Orator

My own accent is that of a finicky old maid.
…
When I hear ugly speech I am driven to murder.
…
My longest oration lasted for four hours in the open air on a Sunday morning to crowds at Trapped Bridge in Manchester.
…
I made a speech that would have made a Bishop swear or a sheep fight.
…
I am the most spontaneous speaker in the world, because every word, every gesture and every retort have been carefully rehearsed.

Plays

My plays are not for the eye but for the mind. You can feast the eye with blue skies, yellow sands, pyramids and bazaars, but one sentence of mine is as good as any visual feast.
…
Lucidity is one of the most precious of gifts, the gift of explanation. I can explain anything to anybody and I am doing it.
…
I tried slum landlordism, doctrinaire free love, prostitution, militarism, marriage, history, current politics, natural Christianity, national and individual character, paradoxes of conventional society, husband hunting, questions of conscience, professional delusions and impostures, all worked into a series of comedies of manners in a classic fashion, which was then very much out of fashion.
…
I am ashamed neither of my work nor the way it is done. I like explaining its merits to the huge majority who don’t know good work from bad. It does them good and it does me good, curing me of nervousness, laziness and snobbishness. I write prefaces...because I can. I would give half-a-dozen of Shakespeare’s plays for one of the prefaces he ought to have written. I leave the delicacies of refinement to those who are gentlemen first and literary workmen afterwards. The cart and trumpet for me.
…
In my plays there is not a word I have not brooded over until it expressed the exact meaning.

Shakespeare

He has never claimed to be better than Shakespeare though he does claim to be his successor.....as Shakespeare in drama reached the summit of his art, nobody can be better than Shakespeare though anybody may now have things to say that Shakespeare did not say any outlooks on life and character which were not open to him.
…
The war has turned into a struggle between Shakespeare and Shaw. Shall the stage be strewn with corpses or can we get the characters to sit down and talk things over in the true Shavian manner?
…
With the single exception of Homer, there is, no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.
…
All my life I wanted to grip the essential poetry of living and it has always eluded me. In fact I wanted to be a Shakespeare and I became a Shaw.

Politics

All demonstrations of the virtues of foreign Government, though often conclusive, are as useless as demonstrations of the superiority of artificial teeth, glass eyes, silver wind pipes and patent wooden legs to the natural products.
…
A horse that kicks everyone who tries to harness and guide him may be a pioneer of liberty, but he is not a pioneer of Government.
…
A typical politician looks like an imperfectly reformed criminal, disguised by a good tailor.
…
A rope round a statesman’s neck is the only constitutional safeguard that really safeguards.

The seven deadly sins

The seven deadly sins:
Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability. and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.

Hinduism

…to offer to a Hindu so crude a theology as ours in exchange for his own, or our Jewish canonical literature as an improvement on Hindu Scripture, is to offer old lamps for older ones in a market where oldest lamps are the most highly valued.

Personality

Reputation, which? I am a philosopher, novelist, sociologist, critic, statesman, dramatist and theologian.
…
Everything I have has come from poets; I picked up my vegetarianism from Shelley, my simplicity from Carpenter, my forthright speech from William Morris and my passion for fun from Oscar Wilde. As nobody reads these people, I am regarded as “my horrible unique self.”
…
It may be that full many a flower is born to blush unseen,­ but that fact should not take away from the pleasure we have in seeing the flowers which unblushingly reveal themselves.
…
I have “risen” by sheer gravitation and the accident of possessing a lucrative talent.
…
I have never aimed at style in my life. Style is a sort of melody that comes into my sentences by itself.
…
I am supposed to have nine brains and no heart. At my post-mortem the world may be shocked to find that I had nine hearts and no brain.
…
If I cannot say that Shaw touches nothing that he does not adorn, I can at least testify that he touches nothing which he does not dust and polish and put in its place much more carefully than the last man who handled it.

(Shaw died on 2nd November, 1950)