construct a
play; he talked through ten mouths or masks instead of through one. His
literary power and progress began in casual conversations--and it seems
to me supremely right that it should end in one great and casual
conversation. His last play is nothing but garrulous talking, that
great thing called gossip. And I am happy to say that the play has been
as efficient and successful as talk and gossip have always been among
the children of men.

Of his life in these later years I have made no pretence of telling even
the little that there is to tell. Those who regard him as a mere
self-advertising egotist may be surprised to hear that there is perhaps
no man of whose private life less could be positively said by an
outsider. Even those who know him can make little but a conjecture of
what has lain behind this splendid stretch of intellectual
self-expression; I only make my conjecture like the rest. I think that
the first great turning-point in Shaw's life (after the early things of
which I have spoken, the taint of drink in the teetotal home, or the
first fight with poverty) was the deadly illness which fell upon him, at
the end of his first flashing career as a Saturday Reviewer. I know it
would goad Shaw to madness to suggest that sickness could have softened
him. That is why I suggest it. But I say for his comfort that I think it
hardened him also; if that can be called hardening which is only the
strengthening of our souls to meet some dreadful reality. At least it is
certain that the larger spiritual ambitions, the desire to find a faith
and found a church, come after that time. I also mention it because
there is hardly anything else to mention; his life is singularly free
from landmarks, while his literature is so oddly full of surprises. His
marriage to Miss Payne-Townsend, which occurred not long after his
illness, was one of those quite successful things which are utterly
silent. The placidity of his married life may be sufficiently indicated
by saying that (as far as I can make out) the most important events in
it were rows about the Executive of the Fabian Society. If such ripples
do not express a still and lake-like life, I do not know what would.
Honestly, the only thing in his later career that can be called an event
is the stand made by Shaw at the Fabians against the sudden assault of
Mr. H. G. Wells, which, after scenes of splendid exasperations, ended in
Wells' resignation. There was another slight r