roises, le feutre en bataille, la moustache herissee, le nez
terrible." I will not go so far as to say that when Bernard Shaw sprang
upon a chair or tub in Trafalgar Square he had the hat in battle, or
even that he had the nose terrible. But just as we see Cyrano best when
he thus leaps above the crowd, I think we may take this moment of Shaw
stepping on his little platform to see him clearly as he then was, and
even as he has largely not ceased to be. I, at least, have only known
him in his middle age; yet I think I can see him, younger yet only a
little more alert, with hair more red but with face yet paler, as he
first stood up upon some cart or barrow in the tossing glare of the gas.

The first fact that one realises about Shaw (independent of all one has
read and often contradicting it) is his voice. Primarily it is the voice
of an Irishman, and then something of the voice of a musician. It
possibly explains much of his career; a man may be permitted to say so
many impudent things with so pleasant an intonation. But the voice is
not only Irish and agreeable, it is also frank and as it were inviting
conference. This goes with a style and gesture which can only be
described as at once very casual and very emphatic. He assumes that
bodily supremacy which goes with oratory, but he assumes it with almost
ostentatious carelessness; he throws back the head, but loosely and
laughingly. He is at once swaggering and yet shrugging his shoulders, as
if to drop from them the mantle of the orator which he has confidently
assumed. Lastly, no man ever used voice or gesture better for the
purpose of expressing certainty; no man can say "I tell Mr. Jones he is
totally wrong" with more air of unforced and even casual conviction.

This particular play of feature or pitch of voice, at once didactic and
yet not uncomrade-like, must be counted a very important fact,
especially in connection with the period when that voice was first
heard. It must be remembered that Shaw emerged as a wit in a sort of
secondary age of wits; one of those stale interludes of prematurely old
young men, which separate the serious epochs of history. Oscar Wilde was
its god; but he was somewhat more mystical, not to say monstrous, than
the average of its dried and decorous impudence. The _two survivals_ of
that time, as far as I know, are Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. Graham
Robertson; two most charming people; but the air they had to live in was
the devil. One of it