The Critical Shaw: On Literature

for I have given up novel writing these many years, during which I have lost the impudence of the apprentice without gaining the skill of the master

I have written but five novels in my life; and of these there will remain then unpublished only the first—a very remarkable work, I assure you, but hardly one which I should be well advised in letting loose whilst my livelihood depends on my credit as a literary workman

Yet somehow my conscience stuck at it; for I am not a professional liar: I am even ashamed of the extent to which in my human infirmity I have been an amateur one.

Love among the Artists is what is called a novel with a purpose; I will not undertake to say at this distant me what the main purpose was; but I remember that I had a notion of illustrating the difference between that enthusiasm for the fine arts which people gather from reading about them, and the genuine artistic faculty which cannot help creating, interpreting, and unaffectedly enjoying music and pictures

When as much is told concerning them as seemed to me at the time germane to my purpose, the novel breaks off. But, if you prefer something more conclusive, pray do not scruple to add a final chapter of your own invention.

If a writer says what he has to say as accurately and effectively as he can, his style will take care of itself, if he has a style

It is of particular importance to understand that Shaw was an extremely well-read man who never had much formal education, a paradox that accounts for some of the unconventional opinions expressed in these pieces

The same combination is often employed to scrutinize complex literary techniques, with equally uproarious results. See, for example, how he deals with self-proclaimed naturalist novelists who have no first-hand experience of the setting they describe:

And it must be added, at the risk of giving a violent shock to literary slummers, that every middle-class novelist who professes to arrive at his descriptions of that daily life by the inductive or Zolaistic method, is to that extent a flagrant humbug, although he may, through the ignorance of his readers, be as safe from exposure as an East-end dog-stealer would be if he undertook the fashionable intelligence for a paper circulating exclusively in Bethnal-green.

Above all else, the witty satire and the astute eye for human nature, together with a style that is full of shocking, extended metaphors and convoluted parallelisms, confer on these reviews a literary quality in their own right. Acid satire livens up many a passage, and Shaw needs no excuse to stick pins into his favorite targets, be they individual or collective

It was the lack of this last qualification that lamed me in those early days in Victoria Grove, and that set limits to this ungainly first novel of mine, which you will not lose very much by skipping.