O infinite virtue, comest thou smiling from The world's great snare uncaught?
She knows that in spite of her beauty and cleverness and her position as queen, she has been caught in the world's great snare: she knows that it would require "infinite virtue" to be successful-and all this realization of life is packed into a couple of lines. Shaw would not admit the extraordinary virtue of the passage.
Nothing to me is clearer than the fact that the highest mental effort is the creative intelligence; the greatest minds in the world are those that have created new world-figures:
Forms more real than living Man,
Nurslings of Immortality.
Shakespeare has given us Hamlet arid Cleopatra, and better still Falstaff;
Goethe, Mephistopheles, and better still, Gretchen; Cervantes, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; and Turgenev, Bazarof. No one ranks with these few creators of ever-living generic figures.
Yet it is unfair to say that Shaw has not created any character: he has given himself in twenty characters as a sharp witted man who sees things chiefly from the ludicrous side because he is not greatly gifted with body or heart.
Someone has said that "to the heart, life is a tragedy; and to the mind, it is a comedy." Shaw sees it usually as a comedy, but his Cleopatra exists for me, and the characters in Candida are something more than reproductions of his own personality; but to compare his mental faculties with the great ones is simply silly. He has done nothing comparable to Swift's best work, to say nothing of Shakespeare's.
In my portrait of Shaw I have spoken of his kindness to me at some length.
Here I wish to add that in America, too, when I asked him to write for my magazine Pearson's in New York, and begged him to tell me what I should have to pay him, he wrote me that Hearst was giving him five thousand dollars for everything he wrote, but that it was enough to know that I wanted him to write for me, to continue writing for me, for I had done him a great deal of good by giving him the pride of place on the Saturday Review.
He told a friend of mine the other day that he never felt any reverence for any one; and this amused me greatly, for it is a peculiarly Shavian trait. How could he feel reverence for any one, when the only person he really knows is Shaw; yet he is an admirable journalist, and in many ways a good and kindly man, and I enjoyed my intercourse with him on the Saturday.
How good any real power is! Some of Shaw's sayings have delighted me.
In the beginning of the war, when nearly every one had lost his head, Shaw spoke of "the British bull dog masquerading as an angel of peace"; and later he spoke of the "one hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent village idiot." Village idiot! I could have kissed him for the word.
I see that the Saturday Review has published an account of its editors and contributors on its seventy-fifth birthday. On my staff it left out Wells, Chalmers Mitchell, and D. S. McColl; and had the grotesque impudence to put a little Jew named Baumann to write about me as an editor. Baumann naturally began by saying that I had begged him to write for the Saturday Review, which is not the fact. A mutual friend, Lord Grimthorpe, begged me to help the little man; and I think I took a couple of articles from him, but he was never on the staff and never was able to rise to the ordinary level.
There is no such certain test of greatness as the dislike and denigration of the mediocre!
The Saturday Review, as I remodelled it, met with a good deal of opposition at first. Officious people by the score wrote to me, condemning Bernard Shaw as an illiterate socialist, and Wells as a sort of Jules Verne. But the circulation began to lift at once, and I was very glad of it, for very soon I came to loggerheads with the Oxford University Press.
They had published some book or other, and Professor Churton Collins brought me a review of it, in which he pointed out that in this book, issued by the University Press, there were some three hundred grave errors of fact. I published his review and immediately there was a terrible to-do; the exposure was shocking. The University Press wrote to me curtly that they wished to withdraw their advertisements. They had engaged space in the Saturday Review for some three years beforehand and, of course, they paid their bill regularly at the end of each year. I wrote to the University Press that if they had had any regard for truth, they would have written thanking me and my reviewer, but as they wished to enroll themselves among the powers of darkness and ignorance, I would allow them to withdraw their advertisements, which they accordingly did.
Shortly afterwards I got a notice from Longman's, complaining of a review of a Greek book they had published. The review was written by the first authority in England, Sir Richard Jebb. Longman's wrote that it was evidently written by some ignoramus, and as the Oxford University Press had severed their connection with the Saturday Review, the house of Longman would also like to withdraw their advertisements.
I had been thunderstruck at the unconscionable impudence of the Oxford University Press, but when I got Longman's letter as well, I went to see him. I knew him through Froude's introduction, who prized him highly. I therefore called upon Charles Longman, who told me he was sure the review was written by some incapable and envious person. I had got Professor Jebb's permission to tell him that he had written it, so at length I told Longman, in confidence, the critic's name; and we parted, apparently good friends, Longman saying he would reconsider the whole thing. A week after he wrote that I had changed the whole character of the Review and he agreed with the University Press, on the whole, and would like to withdraw his advertisements.
Their example was followed by several other publishers. In every case I gave the fools the permission to withdraw their advertisements, and at the end of a month or two saw myself face to face with the revenue of the Saturday Review diminished by three or four thousand pounds a year- the small profit I had managed to create turned into a heavy loss. What was to be done?
I went into the city and saw Alfred Beit, head of the great house of South African Mines. I pointed out to him that the Saturday Review went to all the best houses in England. I asked him to give me the balance sheet and yearly report of all his companies as an advertisement and I would write a note, if not an article, on each company when he sent me the balance sheet, the advertisement to cost fifty guineas. I came out of his office with his promise and the names of fifty-odd companies, so I had made up a good part of my loss in an hour.
I went to Barnato's, saw Woolfie Joel, and got a dozen of his companies on the same terms. I then went on to J. B. Robinson and got eight of his companies. In short, in that one day's work in the city I had filled the gap in my revenue made by the withdrawals of the English publishing houses, and had increased the yearly revenue of the Saturday Review by two thousand a year. I knew I could reckon on Cecil Rhodes's help to boot.
That was the reason, I think, why the book reviews of the Saturday Review from '94 on became famous for their truth, which is so much disliked by most English and American reviews.
I mentioned the whole incident just to teach people what sort of pressure is exercised by Mr. Bumble, the publisher, on his true critic. Bumble wants praise and nothing else.
Curiously enough, a little later I had a somewhat similar experience with an insurance company. I got one of the ablest insurance critics in the world to write an article on the methods of a certain company and their balance sheet-and the company wrote, withdrawing its advertisement. I thereupon let my critic loose on all the faults of their work, and the consequence was that five or six of the best insurance companies wrote to me that they would like to advertise in the Saturday Review. For the one advertisement I lost I gained several better ones. This brought me to the conclusion that the business men of England are more honest and clear-minded than those who deal with literature and publishing.