5. See W. E. Henley's 'Invictus' (1888), line 16. 7. New life (Italian); here Dante's earliest work 6. From The Borderers (written 1796?97), lines (1292-94) about his love for Beatrice. I 543^14. 8. Rejecter of moral law.
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BERNARD SHAW / 1743
spiritual which makes its own form. If I may not find its secret within myself,
I shall never find it. If I have not got it already, it will never come to me.
Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am con
victed are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have suffered
a wrong and unjust system. But, somehow, I have got to make both of these
things just and right to me. And exactly as in Art one is only concerned with
what a particular thing is at a particular moment to oneself, so it is also in the
ethical evolution of one's character. I have got to make everything that has
happened to me good for me. The plank-bed, the loathsome food, the hard
ropes shredded into oakum till one's fingertips grow dull with pain, the menial
offices9 with which each day begins and finishes, the harsh orders that routine
seems to necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look
at, the silence, the solitude, the shame?each and all of these things I have
to transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single degradation of
the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualizing of the soul. I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say, quite simply and
without affectation, that the two great turning-points of my life were when my
father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison. I will not say
that it is the best thing that could have happened to me, for that phrase would
savour of too great bitterness towards myself. I would sooner say, or hear it
said of me, that I was so typical a child of my age that in my perversity,1 and
for that perversity's sake, I turned the good things of my life to evil, and the
evil things of my life to good. What is said, however, by myself or by others
matters little. The important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing
that I have to do, or be for the brief remainder of my days one maimed, marred,
and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to
make it part of me, to accept it without complaint, fear, or reluctance. The
supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realized is right.
1897 1962
9. Duties. 'Oakum': loose fiber from old hemp 1. I.e., obstinate desire to behave ropes, which prisoners were often made to shred. unconventionally. BERNARD SHAW 1856-1950
Winston Churchill described Bernard Shaw as a 'bright, nimble, fierce, and compre
hending being, Jack Frost dancing bespangled in the sunshine.' Born and raised in
the Victorian period, this extraordinary character was an important and engaged pub
lic intellectual. His experience encompassed the momentous historical changes of
the last half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, and he made
it his business to pronounce on them all in the witty epigrammatic style that char
acterizes his plays. Like Oscar Wilde, the other playwright whose work changed the course of British
drama, Shaw was an Irishman. Born in Dublin, he was, in his own words, 'the fruit
of an unsuitable marriage between two quite amiable people who finally separated in
the friendliest fashion.' His mother, an aspiring singer, went to London to pursue
her musical career; Shaw followed five years later, in 1876, quitting the job he had
.
174 4 / BERNARD SHAW
held since the age of fifteen at a land agent's office. He intended to become a novelist. He spent much of his time in the Beading Boom of the British Museum, where a young journalist named William Archer introduced himself because he was so intrigued by the combination of things Shaw was studying?Karl Marx's Das Kapital(vol. 1, 1867) and the score of Bichard Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde (1859). These two works indicate the main involvements of Shaw's life in London. Das
