common arithmetician prefers music to
poetry. Words are his scientific instruments. It irritates him that they
should be anyone else's musical instruments. He is willing to see men
juggling, but not men juggling with his own private tools and
possessions--his terms. It is then that he turns with an utter relief to
music. Here are all the same fascination and inspiration, all the same
purity and plunging force as in poetry; but not requiring any verbal
confession that light conceals things or that darkness can be seen in
the dark. Music is mere beauty; it is beauty in the abstract, beauty in
solution. It is a shapeless and liquid element of beauty, in which a man
may really float, not indeed affirming the truth, but not denying it.
Bernard Shaw, as I have already said, is infinitely far above all such
mere mathematicians and pedantic reasoners; still his feeling is partly
the same. He adores music because it cannot deal with romantic terms
either in their right or their wrong sense. Music can be romantic
without reminding him of Shakespeare and Walter Scott, with whom he has
had personal quarrels. Music can be Catholic without reminding him
verbally of the Catholic Church, which he has never seen, and is sure he
does not like. Bernard Shaw can agree with Wagner, the musician, because
he speaks without words; if it had been Wagner the man he would
certainly have had words with him. Therefore I would suggest that Shaw's
love of music (which is so fundamental that it must be mentioned early,
if not first, in his story) may itself be considered in the first case
as the imaginative safety-valve of the rationalistic Irishman.

This much may be said conjecturally over the present signature; but more
must not be said. Bernard Shaw understands music so much better than I
do that it is just possible that he is, in that tongue and atmosphere,
all that he is not elsewhere. While he is writing with a pen I know his
limitations as much as I admire his genius; and I know it is true to say
that he does not appreciate romance. But while he is playing on the
piano he may be cocking a feather, drawing a sword or draining a flagon
for all I know. While he is speaking I am sure that there are some
things he does not understand. But while he is listening (at the Queen's
Hall) he may understand everything, including God and me. Upon this part
of him I am a reverent agnostic; it is well to have some such dark
continent in the character of a man