Some Impressions of My Elders

In "Back to Methusaleh," he seems to me to have suffered a spiritual set-back, and to be preoccupied by material considerations. We are no longer concerned with Man's destiny an...

I remember, more than ten years ago, reading a notice of the first performance of "Justice" in an English Sunday newspaper in which the critic, who must have been terribly drunk...

I wondered often, when I was in America, why I saw so many old or middle-aged husbands with girl-wives. People told me that the cost of living is so high in America that young m...

I was in Dublin on the day when the news of the Battle of Jutland was announced in such abrupt terms that most people imagined the British Fleet had been irretrievably defeated....

He is a tall man, with dark hanging hair that is now turning grey, and he has a queer way of focussing when he looks at you. I do not know what is the defect of sight from which...

Mr. Wells differs very sharply from Mr. Shaw in his doctrine. Mr. Shaw believes that the progress from bad to good is not inevitable: Mr. Wells believes that it is, and he produ...

If a man found a coil of rope in a desert he could at least think of all the things that can be done with a coil of rope; and some of them might be practical. He could tow a boa...

The matter which appears in the following pages was originally contributed, in the shape of a series of articles under the general title of "Some Impressions of My Elders," to t...

It is indisputable that a peasant will fight for his own land, the tiny portion which he owns and cultivates, but will he fight for another man's land when that man is unjustly...

I can imagine Mr. Shaw refusing to go out of the room before the Bishop has done so, in sheer humility or indifference, but I cannot imagine him refusing to do so because of his...

One night, some years before the outbreak of the European War, I arrived in the town of Hanley in the County of Stafford in the midlands of England to deliver a lecture on some...

There is a phrase in the play which is intended to illuminate Clare's nature. "You're too fine," Mrs. Fullarton says to her, "and you're not fine enough to endure things." How c...

I may, perhaps, note another matter of technical interest to the student of the Shavian drama, namely, Mr. Shaw's economy in characters. He has or had a strong sense of the thea...

"A Mummer's Wife" is a powerful story, told in a skilful and impressive fashion, but it leaves the reader less conscious of life than of mechanics. As a piece of construction it...

Oddly enough, there was another dramatist, also an Irishman, whose practice was precisely the opposite of Mr. Shaw's: a shy, nervous man who permitted himself to be cheated of a...

I remember that when he had manipulated Mr. Yeats's model theatre to his liking, he stood back from the scene, and said, "What a good thing it would be if we were to take all th...