GEORGE BERNARD KORNHABER DAVID SHAW - MAJOR CULTURAL ESSAYS.

Had George Bernard Shaw never written a single play, he would still be remembered as a pivotal figure of the late nineteenth-century British stage, and of turn-of-the-century culture more generally, due to the impact of his voluminous criticism. Before he was Bernard Shaw, dramatist, he was Bernard Shaw, drama critic. And before that, music critic. And before that still, art critic. In one sense, Shaw left behind these appointments relatively early in his career. His last day as a drama critic was on 21 May 1898 more than fifty-one years before the premiere of his last completed play, Shakes versus Shav, in August 1949. In another sense, he never left behind these early roles at all. Forty-nine years after departing from his perch at the Saturday Review, the prominent London weekly, Shaw, age 92, would reflect on the importance of that early journalistic work to the trajectory of his career: It was this equipment that saved me from being starved out of literature... as a critic I came to the top irresistibly (p. 364).

The critics eye would always remain with him. These years of criticism, he later observed, advanced my mental education by compelling me to deliver carefully considered judgments, and to discriminate between the brilliant talents... and the genius that is not for an age but for all time (p. 365). And so too would the journalistic impulse remain, the intellectual pugilists need to hash out ideas in print as he had so frequently done in the rowdy world of London newspaper publishing in the 1890s. One of Shaws very last pieces of writing would be an article in the New Statesman and Nation defending his plays against an attack by Terence Rattigan, published in the same paper two months earlier. That article, titled simply The Play of Ideas and published in May 1950, appeared just months before Shaw passed away in November. It was as vibrant and combative as ever. The difference between [Rattigans] practice and mine, he writes, is that I reason out every sentence I write to the utmost of my capacity before I commit it to print, whereas he slams down everything that comes into his head without reasoning about it at all (p. 367). He was a drama critic still.

Cultural criticism was Shaws entry point into the life of letters he so desperately sought as a young man. Moving to London at the age of 19, following his mother who had relocated there from Dublin, Shaw originally thought he might be a novelist. When not working in the London offices of the Edison Telephone Company, he took a desk at the reading room of the British Museum the precursor to the British Library and the same locale where Karl Marx had written