Major Critical Essays [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Bernard Shaw was in his mid-seventies when he chose, and i revised for the last time, 'The Quintessence of Ibsenism', 'The Perfect Wagnerite' and 'The Sanity of Art' to represent his ! Major Critical Essays in the Collected and Standard editions of ^ his works. But the three essays had originally been composed between thirty and forty years earlier, when he was at the 5 height of his powers as a polemicist and critic of the arts. , In 1876, aged not quite twenty, he had left Dublin for i London determined to set himself up as 'a professional man of genius'. His upbringing in Dublin had been a torture to him; London represented hope. But after almost ten years of ( failure, rejection and obscurity, during which he later esti- ¦ mated he had earned a little under ten pounds from his own writings, the flame of his ambition had sunk low. He wrote a thousand words a day, but his five novels were turned down by every publisher in Britain and America who read them; and he could find no journalistic employment. Every opening seemed to be an accident, and waiting for accidents ¦ was a hardening process 'from which I have never quite recovered'. In 1884, as a result of his increasing interest in socialism, j he had joined the Fabian Society and was kept well-exercised writing unpaid pamphlets and making unpaid speeches. But j it was not for another year that he 'slipped into paid ; journalism'. This came about as a result of his friendship with William Archer, the theatre critic and translator of Ibsen. Working in the British Museum Reading Room, Archer's attention had been drawn to what appeared to be a damaged brown paper parcel in the next seat. This was Shaw. 'My interest was excited not only by his appearance,' Archer wrote, 'but by the