his critical
attack in so many different ways, because there seem to be a greater
vital force and spirit in his pulling down of gods than ever existed
in the gods themselves. Socrates, one would suppose, was not more
insistent and unexpected in his gadfly attacks upon the Athenian
sophists than is Mr. Shaw in his raids upon the Pharisees of
sophisticated London. His biography, when it is written, will be a
very fascinating and a very large book, and Mr. Shaw himself thinks
that it will be identical with the history of his time. There is
already in existence a book which claims to be an authorised "Critical
Biography;" and, needless to say, it was written by an American--Dr.
Archibald Henderson--who stepped in with superb confidence and
compelled Mr. Shaw to criticise, overhaul, and contribute to his
daring enterprise. "You can force my hand to some extent," said Mr.
Shaw, "for any story that you start will pursue me to all eternity."

This valiant American describes with gusto the active, talking,
debating, propagating, protesting life that Mr. Shaw has lived. It has
not been a "domestic" life; not even a specially "literary" life. We
feel it has been a life in which there has been little privacy or
intimacy, that it has seldom been wholly shut off from the
market-place and the theatre; that if he is a man entirely destitute
of "company manners," this is because he has lived always "in
company." He was, of course, born in Ireland, not very far from
Dublin. His parents were Protestants belonging to that middle class
which is hampered by social pretensions and insufficient worldly
means. He was taught at Protestant schools, where he was expected to
believe that "Roman Catholics are socially inferior persons, who will
go to hell when they die, and leave Heaven in the exclusive possession
of ladies and gentlemen." At the age of fifteen he went into a land
office and helped to collect rents, without realising, it is to be
presumed, that he was contributing to an iniquitous system. He studied
pictures in the Irish National Gallery, became interested in music
through his mother and her friends, and made his first appearance in
print when moved to protest against the evangelistic services of
Sankey and Moody. At the age of twenty he turned his back upon
Ireland, and started a literary career in London. In the first nine
years of "consistent literary drudgery" he succeeded in earning six
pounds.

To put it frankly, Mr. Shaw