appeal for which he stood; which might be defined as an
eccentric healthy-mindedness. But something of the vagueness and
equivocation of his first fame is probably due to the different
functions which he performed in the contemporary world of art.

He began by writing novels. They are not much read, and indeed not
imperatively worth reading, with the one exception of the crude and
magnificent _Cashel Byron's Profession_. Mr. William Archer, in the
course of his kindly efforts on behalf of his young Irish friend, sent
this book to Samoa, for the opinion of the most elvish and yet
efficient of modern critics. Stevenson summed up much of Shaw even from
that fragment when he spoke of a romantic griffin roaring with laughter
at the nature of his own quest. He also added the not wholly unjustified
postscript: "I say, Archer,--my God, what women!"

The fiction was largely dropped; but when he began work he felt his way
by the avenues of three arts. He was an art critic, a dramatic critic,
and a musical critic; and in all three, it need hardly be said, he
fought for the newest style and the most revolutionary school. He wrote
on all these as he would have written on anything; but it was, I fancy,
about the music that he cared most.

It may often be remarked that mathematicians love and understand music
more than they love or understand poetry. Bernard Shaw is in much the
same condition; indeed, in attempting to do justice to Shakespeare's
poetry, he always calls it "word music." It is not difficult to explain
this special attachment of the mere logician to music. The logician,
like every other man on earth, must have sentiment and romance in his
existence; in every man's life, indeed, which can be called a life at
all, sentiment is the most solid thing. But if the extreme logician
turns for his emotions to poetry, he is exasperated and bewildered by
discovering that the words of his own trade are used in an entirely
different meaning. He conceives that he understands the word "visible,"
and then finds Milton applying it to darkness, in which nothing is
visible. He supposes that he understands the word "hide," and then finds
Shelley talking of a poet hidden in the light. He has reason to believe
that he understands the common word "hung"; and then William
Shakespeare, Esquire, of Stratford-on-Avon, gravely assures him that the
tops of the tall sea waves were hung with deafening clamours on the
slippery clouds. That is why the