Preface to Major Barbara, George Bernard Shaw [inspiring books for teens TXT] 📗

o which many of my critics have fallen.Whenever my view strikes them as being at all outside the rangeof, say, an ordinary suburban churchwarden, they conclude that Iam echoing Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoy,or some other heresiarch in northern or eastern Europe.

I confess there is something flattering in this simple faith inmy accomplishment as a linguist and my erudition as aphilosopher. But I cannot tolerate the assumption that life andliterature is so poor in these islands that we must go abroad forall dramatic material that is not common and all ideas that arenot superficial. I therefore venture to put my critics inpossession of certain facts concerning my contact with modernideas.

About half a century ago, an Irish novelist, Charles Lever, wrotea story entitled A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance. It was publishedby Charles Dickens in Household Words, and proved so strange tothe public taste that Dickens pressed Lever to make short work ofit. I read scraps of this novel when I was a child; and it madean enduring impression on me. The hero was a very romantic hero,trying to live bravely, chivalrously, and powerfully by dintof mere romance-fed imagination, without courage, without means,without knowledge, without skill, without anything real excepthis bodily appetites. Even in my childhood I found in this poordevil's unsuccessful encounters with the facts of life, apoignant quality that romantic fiction lacked. The book, in spiteof its first failure, is not dead: I saw its title the other dayin the catalogue of Tauchnitz.

Now why is it that when I also deal in the tragi-comic irony ofthe conflict between real life and the romantic imagination, nocritic ever affiliates me to my countryman and immediateforerunner, Charles Lever, whilst they confidently derive me froma Norwegian author of whose language I do not know three words,and of whom I knew nothing until years after the ShavianAnschauung was already unequivocally declared in books full ofwhat came, t