136 George Bernard Shaw [1906 



alism. He was fearless, unselfish, and absolutely honest, with an 

 inexhaustible fund of wit and rough eloquence, an old-fashioned Cum- 

 berland squire of the best possible type. 



" 10th April. — Neville sent me word this morning that Bernard 

 Shaw was sitting to him for his portrait, and I looked in (his house is 

 next to mine), and spent an hour with him. Shaw was in the papal 

 robes in which Neville is painting him, seated in an ancient cinque- 

 cento chair, a grotesque figure, with his trousered legs showing through 

 the lace cotta transparent to his knees. He is an ugly fellow, too, his 

 face a pasty white, with a red nose and a rusty red beard, and little 

 slatey-blue eyes. Neville's portrait is wonderfully like. Shaw's ap- 

 pearance, however, matters little when he begins to talk, if he can 

 ever be said to begin, for he talks always in his fine Irish brogue. His 

 talk is like his plays, a string of paradoxes, and he is ready to be 

 switched on to any subject one pleases, and to talk brilliantly on all. 

 He was talking about his marriage when I entered. ' I should never 

 have married at all,' he said, * if I had not been dead at the time. I 

 tumbled off my bicycle, and the surgeons made a hole in my foot which 

 they kept open for a year, and me in bed. I thought I was dead, for it 

 would not heal, and Charlotte had me at her mercy. I should never 

 have married if I had thought I should get well. Then I tumbled again, 

 this time downstairs from top to bottom. When I found myself on 

 the floor in the hall with every bone broken I felt satisfied. I could not 

 do more and I took to my bed again.' These particulars were a propos 

 of my having said that there were two quite happy moments in one's 

 life, the first when one took to one's deathbed, and the other when 

 one got up from it. He told us next his experiences in public speaking, 

 and how shy he had been, and described his first open-air speech in 

 Hyde Park when he had practised on three loafers lying on their backs 

 on the grass, and how one of them without getting up had called out 

 ' ' ear ! ' ear ! ' He said the great art of speaking was to get somebody 

 to interrupt you with a question, and for you to misunderstand it, 

 and he gave us some funny instances. I then got him to give his 

 views on land reform, which he said was a very simple matter. You 

 had only to get all the agricultural labourers to migrate into the towns, 

 where they would make themselves useful by loafing in the streets and 

 attending music halls, the only thing they understood, and by sending 

 the townspeople down into the country to cultivate it by electricity and 

 explosives. If he had a farm he thought he would plough it by firing 

 cannon up and down it — amusing rubbish, which I fancy concealed a 

 complete ignorance of the agricultural branch of the socialistic case. 

 Shaw is a capital fellow all the same, and one I should like if I knew 

 him better. He showed himself personally kind and of much practical 



