is softened."

A plan to relieve struggling authors and secure the earlier recognition of genius by means of an endowment fund and a system of substantial prizes was once proposed by Upton Sinclair, author of "The Jungle", who wrote to a number of authors, asking their opinion of the scheme. Among those who responded were Wells, Bennett, De Morgan, Philpotts, Galsworthy, London, and Shaw.[6] I quote part of what Shaw said about it because of its biographical interest:

There is only one serious and effective way of helping young men of the kind in view, and that is by providing everybody with enough leisure in the intervals of well-paid and not excessive work to enable them to write books in their spare time and pay for the printing of them. Nothing else seems to me to be really hopeful. I myself seem an example of a man who achieved literary eminence without assistance; but as a matter of fact certain remnants of family property made all the difference. For fully nine years I had to sponge shamelessly on my father and mother; but even at that we only squeezed through because my mother's grandfather had been a rich man. In fact, I was just the man for whom Upton wants to establish his fund. Yet for the life of me I cannot see how any committee in the world could have given me a farthing. All I had to show was five big novels which nobody would publish, and as the publishers' readers by whose advice they were rejected included Lord Morley and George Meredith, it cannot be said that I was in any worse hands than those of any committee likely to be appointed. Of course Sinclair may say to this that if Morley and Meredith, instead of having to advise a publisher as to the prospects of a business speculation, had only had to consider how to help a struggling talent without reference to commercial consideration, they might have come to my rescue. Unfortunately, I have seen both their verdicts; and I can assure Sinclair that I produced on both of them exactly the impression that is inevitably produced in every such case: that is, that I was a young man with more cleverness than was good for me and that what I needed was snubbing and not encouraging. No doubt there are talents which are not aggressive and do not smell of brimstone; but these are precisely the talents which are marketable, except, of course, in the case of the highest poetry, which, however, is out of the question anyhow as a means of livelihood. William Morris, when he was at the height of his fame as a poet, long after the publication of his popular poem, "The Earthly Paradise", told me that his income from his poems was about a hundred a year; and I happen to know that Robert Browning threatened to leave the country because the Income Tax Commissioners assessed him with a modest but wholly imaginary income on the strength of his reputation. Poetry is thus frankly a matter of endowment, but for the rest I think a writer's chance of being helped by the fund would be in inverse ratio to his qualifications as conceived by Upton Sinclair.

Shaw's first essays in the field where he was to attain his greatest success were as discouraging as his efforts at novel writing. His first play, "Widower's Houses", dealing with tainted money, shocked but did not attract the public. His "The Philanderer" was published before a theater would accept it. His third play, "Mrs. Warren's Profession", was prohibited by the censor. Of the seven that followed only one could be called a decided success on its first presentation in London. But in book form, with attractively written stage directions and argumentative prefaces, they found a host of readers who wanted to see them in the theater. "Candida" was not presented in London till 1904, nearly ten years after it was written. It was with "Candida" that Arnold Daly introduced Shaw to the theater-going public of America, and for the last few years there have often been three Shaw plays running at the same time in New York.

Shaw's plays were popular in America when they were tabooed or pooh-poohed in England. His "Pygmalion" had its première in the Hofburg-theater in Vienna instead of London. I saw it, or rather heard it, since it is a phonetic instead of a spectacular play, at the Deutsches Theater of Irving Place, New York, in March, 1914, six months before Mrs. Patrick Campbell gave it here in English. In spite of the fact that the play depends upon variations in English dialects, it was given better in the German than in the English.

Shaw is in fact an internationalist, much more honored in America, Russia, Germany, France, Scandinavia, and Japan than in his own country, that is, Ireland. It must be interesting to see "You Never Can Tell" or "Man and Superman" on the Tokyo stage. The Kobe Herald says: "He appeals to the Japanese of progressive ideas because he prefers potatoes, cabbages and beans to porter-house steak and lamb chops."

The reason why Shaw's prefaces read so well and his plays go better on the stage than would be anticipated is because they are composed by ear. Since reading aloud has gone out of fashion, there has arisen a generation of young writers who do not realize that language is intended to be spoken. Consequently one has to read them by eye only, switching off for the time the internal auditory apparatus so as to avoid their discords and dull rhythm. A little girl who was trying to read to herself a story by one of our pyrotechnic authors suddenly threw down the magazine with the cry: "I can't read this any more! It dazzles my ears."

Shaw is a musician, and he writes musical prose. He uses shorthand in composing, which is the next best thing to dictating to a phonograph. Naturally he resents the established spelling of English which preserves the form of words while allowing the words themselves to decay, thus sacrificing speech to print. He has often argued for phonetic spelling,[7] and has used as much of it in his works as his publisher would permit. The point he makes in the following passage is undeniably proving true:

All that the conventional spelling has done is to conceal the one change that a phonetic spelling might have checked; namely, the changes in pronunciation, including the waves of debasement that produced the half-rural cockney of Sam Weller and the modern metropolitan cockney of Drinkwater in "Captain Brassbound's Conversion."... Refuse to teach the Board School legions your pronunciation, and they will force theirs on you by mere force of numbers. And serve you right.

Shaw's treatment of the Salvation Army in "Major Barbara" showed that he knew more about religion than some of his churchly critics. So, too, his defense of the Salvation Army music in the London Standard in 1905 proved that he knew more about music than those who sneered at the Army bands. The Germans, who are now fond of analyzing the English character, have discussed at length the question of why such an unmusical people should have good music in the Salvation Army.[8]

The 125-page preface to "Androcles and the Lion" is devoted to a rereading of the Gospels and a rewriting of the life of Christ. Shaw interprets the New Testament like a higher critic but applies it like an early Christian. He rejects the resurrection but accepts the communism. He believes in the Life Force and Its Superman as others do in God and His Messiah. Shaw's Superman obviously belongs to another genus from Nietzsche's Uebermensch. He says in the preface to