METHUSELAH is dead. In Shaw goes the last of the Victorian prophets, the last of the long line of young beards who became the great, bearded old gentlemen. Yet, in important ways, Shaw had no connection with the igth Century at all. He was really a man of the 18th Century, closer to Voltaire and Swift than to Marx and Morris. The Anglo-Ireland of 1856, when he was born, was an ossified 18th Century society. It was elegant yet genteel; it was ruled by the blistering aristocratic candor and the simple aristocratic naivety; it...
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