Oh, Pshaw!

Violating the self-imposed rule of a lifetime, the venerable G.B.S. has chosen this April to visit American shores and to tell the "boobs" what he happens at the moment to think that he really thinks. It is often forgotten that he had to wait until he was well past forty before he finally captured the public ear. Then, all was velvet, and highly paid velvet at that. The faintest word of the Master was treated with guffaws. He rivalled the movies in the enormous variety of his audience. He proved conclusively that not he, hut his public, had changed. He held aggressively to the ideas which enchanted himself and other advanced thinkers in the 'eighties.

But soon people accepted as a matter of course ideas which were daring and novel when he and his faithful apostles first expressed them. The indifference of such people, coupled with a certain sense of boredom in his erstwhile admirers, produced a state of mind bordering on indignation. No matter what Shaw said or did, there was a tendency to resent his cock-sureness, to ignore the fundamental sameness of his underlying point of view in favor of the theory that he was a professional mountebank, capable of saying anything for effect. . . . What the pictures on these pages reveal is a cheerful and sweet-tempered great-grandpapa, ever willing to be photographed and admired. One cannot be indignant with a man who has for so long taken so keen and innocent a delight in himself.

ERNEST BOYD