uffling of the calm when
Bernard Shaw said some quite sensible things about Sir Henry Irving. But
on the whole we confront the composure of one who has come into his own.

The method of his life has remained mostly unchanged. And there is a
great deal of method in his life; I can hear some people murmuring
something about method in his madness. He is not only neat and
business-like; but, unlike some literary men I know, does not conceal
the fact. Having all the talents proper to an author, he delights to
prove that he has also all the talents proper to a publisher; or even to
a publisher's clerk. Though many looking at his light brown clothes
would call him a Bohemian, he really hates and despises Bohemianism; in
the sense that he hates and despises disorder and uncleanness and
irresponsibility. All that part of him is peculiarly normal and
efficient. He gives good advice; he always answers letters, and answers
them in a decisive and very legible hand. He has said himself that the
only educational art that he thinks important is that of being able to
jump off tram-cars at the proper moment. Though a rigid vegetarian, he
is quite regular and rational in his meals; and though he detests sport,
he takes quite sufficient exercise. While he has always made a mock of
science in theory, he is by nature prone to meddle with it in practice.
He is fond of photographing, and even more fond of being photographed.
He maintained (in one of his moments of mad modernity) that photography
was a finer thing than portrait-painting, more exquisite and more
imaginative; he urged the characteristic argument that none of his own
photographs were like each other or like him. But he would certainly
wash the chemicals off his hands the instant after an experiment; just
as he would wash the blood off his hands the instant after a Socialist
massacre. He cannot endure stains or accretions; he is of that
temperament which feels tradition itself to be a coat of dust; whose
temptation it is to feel nothing but a sort of foul accumulation or
living disease even in the creeper upon the cottage or the moss upon the
grave. So thoroughly are his tastes those of the civilised modern man
that if it had not been for the fire in him of justice and anger he
might have been the most trim and modern among the millions whom he
shocks: and his bicycle and brown hat have been no menace in Brixton.
But God sent among those suburbans one who was a prophet as well as a