and overlaid
with those most misleading of all traditions, the traditions founded on
the lies a man tells, and at last comes to believe, about himself _to_
himself. Certain things, however, I remember very well. For instance, I
am significantly clear as to the price of the paper on which I wrote The
Irrational Knot. It was cheap--a white demy of unpretentious quality--so
that sixpennorth lasted a long time. My daily allowance of composition
was five pages of this demy in quarto; and I held my natural laziness
sternly to that task day in, day out, to the end. I remember also that
Bizet's Carmen being then new in London, I used it as a safety-valve for
my romantic impulses. When I was tired of the sordid realism of
Whatshisname (I have sent my only copy of The Irrational Knot to the
printers, and cannot remember the name of my hero) I went to the piano
and forgot him in the glamorous society of Carmen and her crimson
toreador and yellow dragoon. Not that Bizet's music could infatuate me
as it infatuated Nietzsche. Nursed on greater masters, I thought less of
him than he deserved; but the Carmen music was--in places--exquisite of
its kind, and could enchant a man like me, romantic enough to have come
to the end of romance before I began to create in art for myself.

When I say that _I_ did and felt these things, I mean, of course, that
the predecessor whose name I bear did and felt them. The I of to-day is
(? am) cool towards Carmen; and Carmen, I regret to say, does not take
the slightest interest in him (? me). And now enough of this juggling
with past and present Shaws. The grammatical complications of being a
first person and several extinct third persons at the same moment are so
frightful that I must return to the ordinary misusage, and ask the
reader to make the necessary corrections in his or her own mind.

This book is not wholly a compound of intuition and ignorance. Take for
example the profession of my hero, an Irish-American electrical
engineer. That was by no means a flight of fancy. For you must not
suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an
honest living. I began trying to commit that sin against my nature when
I was fifteen, and persevered, from youthful timidity and diffidence,
until I was twenty-three. My last attempt was in 1879, when a company
was formed in London to exploit an ingenious invention by Mr. Thomas
Alva Edison--a much too ingenious invention as it proved, being