GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  

FROM SAMPATH’S DESK:

 

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

(26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950)

 

WORDS WIZARD WITH WEALTH OF WIT AND WISDOM!

 

George Bernard Shaw, born on 26 July 1856 in Portobello, Dublin, Ireland, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, and political commentator/activist, all rolled into one. Of all his attributes and characteristics, he was more praised and well-received as a polemicist (a person known to make criticisms to the core), who aggressively yet jovially advanced controversial arguments, discussions, and debates against some generally-recognized and popularly-prevalent opinions, doctrines, etc.

 

Shaw moved to London in 1876, at the age of 20, to join his sister and mother who had shifted a little earlier in 1873. He set about becoming a writer, relying on a very small allowance from his father. Shaw wrote five novels in quick succession between 1879 and 1883, all of which were rejected by publishers, although his fifth novel was published in serial form in the socialist magazine To-Day. In 1885, he began to get steady work as an arts reviewer, and in 1895, he became a drama critic for The Saturday Review. It was another two years, when Shaw was 41, before his first financially successful play, 'The Devil’s Disciple' was produced, earning Shaw £2000. Shaw himself was circumspect about his lack of early financial success, writing to another critic in 1894 saying "If your board and lodging are guaranteed, you may consider yourself a king."

Shaw was married to Charlotte Payne-Townshend, who predeceased him.

 

Influenced and inspired by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (18th-century music composer of Austra), Shaw gained the ability to say important things conversationally. He even adopted 'Don Giovanni' as his nickname during his early London days.

 

Whenever Bernard Shaw’s name comes to my memory or is mentioned to me, I  readily recall an anecdote relating to him that demonstrated his good-humored, fun-spirited, self-possessed, calm and composedly-unfazed, equanimously-poised, well-balanced and buddy-buddy-natured witty wisdom. Once a young, gorgeous actress approached Bernard Shaw and cooed into his ear, “Wouldn’t it be marvelous if we got married and had a child with your brains and my beauty?” Pat came the reply from him, “My dear, that would be marvelous indeed, but on the flip-side, what if the child had your brains (foolish) and my beauty (ugly-looking).”

 

Shaw's areas of interest in writing included plays/dramas, music, fiction, letter/diary writing, political/social writings, autobiography, and other miscellaneous articles.

 

He was considered the greatest writer of his age. Though an agnostic (not an atheist), he still remained a spiritualist besides being a vegetarian.  He declared that “A man of my spiritual intensity doesn't eat corpses”. Shaw considered eating to be a “troublesome necessity”, and was a firm advocate of clean living - as well as shunning meat, he didn't drink alcohol or smoke, and he drank neither tea nor coffee! A total teetotaller indeed! 

 

Shaw is one of only two people to have won both an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. The committee commented then that his work was “marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty”. With typical Shavian wit, he initially declined to accept, saying “I can forgive Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a ‘fiend’ in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize”, though it was a different matter that he later relented and agreed to accept the award, but not the prize money, suggesting that it be used instead to fund the translation of works by the Swedish playwright August Strindberg into English. Wow, what a Good Samaritan that he was!

 

Some of his famous critically-commenting, thought-provoking, unusually surprising, and mind-boggling quotes are mentioned below:

• Some men see things as they are, and say why? I dream of things that never were, and say why not.

• A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

 

• There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

 

• Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

 

• I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

 

• The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

 

• I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

 

• Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change.

 

• We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

 

• Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

 

His Memorable quotes on the jovial plank are:

 

• I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

 

• Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

 

• A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth. 

 

• Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

 

• Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

 

• The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

 

In 1950, Shaw fell off a ladder while trimming a tree on his property at Ayot St. Lawrence in Hertfordshire, outside of London succumbing to his injuries a few days later, at the ripe age of 94.

 

(R.SAMPATH)

29/1/2024