The book contains all known so far 151 aphoristic entries in the diaries of Beatrice Webb about her lifelong friend, Nobel laureate and Oscar winner Bernard Shaw written between 1893 and 1943 and edited by a leading contemporary Shavian Vitaly Baziyan. Beatrice Webb’s keenest observations about the greatest Irish dramatist Bernard Shaw represent an important source for the study of British cultural, social and political history. They help to get a clearer picture of world-renowned playwright as well as other celebrities of his time. Here are some aphorisms from Beatrice Webb about Bernard Shaw: ‘He imagines that he gets to know women by making them in love with him. Just the contrary. His stupid gallantries bar out from him the friendship of women who are either too sensible, too puritanical or too much ‘otherwise engaged’ to care to bandy personal flatteries with him. He idealizes them for a few days, weeks or years, imagines them to be something utterly different from their true selves, then has a revulsion of feeling and discovers them to be unutterably vulgar, second-rate, rapscallion, or insipidly well-bred. He never fathoms their real worth, nor rightly sees their limitations.’ ‘One is so accustomed to GBS’s vanity and egotism. One used to watch these faults leading to all sorts of rather cruel philanderings with all kinds of odd females.’ ‘His sensuality has all drifted into sexual vanity, delight in being the candle to the moths, with a dash of intellectual curiosity to give flavour to his tickled vanity. And he is mistaken if he thinks that it does not affect his artistic work. His incompleteness as a thinker, his shallow and vulgar view of many human relationships, the lack of the sterner kind of humour which would show him the dreariness of his farce and the total absence of proportion and inadequateness in some of his ideas, all these defects come largely from the flippant and worthless self-complacency brought about by the worship of rather second-rate women. For all that, he is a good-natured agreeable sprite of a man, an intellectual cricket on the hearth always chirping away brilliant paradox, sharp-witted observation and friendly comments. Whether I like him, admire him or despise him most I do not know. Just at present I feel annoyed and contemptuous.’ ‘He is self-complacent—feels himself one of the world geniuses and is mortified by the refusal of his generation to take him seriously as a thinker and reformer.’ ‘G.B.S.’s dogmatic conclusion is that Socialism consists of two ends; equalisation of incomes and compulsory labour.’ ‘He has the illusion that he is and must be right, because he has genius and his critics are just ordinary men.’ ‘He is a delightful companion for an outing, always amusing and good-tempered, sufficiently exasperating in argument to avoid tameness in companionship—the curse of the comradeship of the old. He is a delightful raconteur—a perfect gossip, elaborating by witty exaggerations the life-stories of his friends into human comedies, and sometimes into inhuman tragedies.’ ‘GBS complains of hordes of journalists who dogged his steps as false publicity. ‘The great majority of those who crowd to see me have not read a word I’ve written, and those who have don’t understand, or disagree with my message to mankind.’ All the same, he enjoys it and rides triumphant over the mob of pressmen, attracted by the force, not of his message, but of his bewitching personality, the world-wide glamour of it.’
Over de auteur
Beatrice Webb née Potter was a British politician, sociologist, economist, one of the founders of the London School of Economics, socialist, labour historian, social reformer, fellow Fabian and Bernard Shaw’s long-standing friend.
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