Each tries to reduce his neighbour's, The Problem of Disarmament. The Military Powers are feigning friendship, but are jealous of each other's armaments. Inquirer.] The Baghdad Railway. HARMON [Vienna, Minneapolis Journal. "I will never desert Micawber." [Philadelphia. Plain Dealer.] [Cleveland. Is there a Loophole? Hands Across the Sea. CHARACTER SKETCH. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, ALIAS GWYNPLAINE.* An Appreciation by Dr. Henderson, alias Dea. THI HIS is not my Character Sketch. I humbly confess myself unequal to the task. It is a Character Sketch by two very different hands. The first, by Victor Hugo, who in prophetic mood foreshadowed, in "L'Homme qui Rit," the coming of "G. B. S."; the other by his devoted worshipper and authorised biographer, Dr. Archibald Henderson, who has spent years of adoring study in endeavouring to form some adequate conception of the Colossus of Five Centuries, whom, he declares, is the Molière, the Voltaire, the Swift, the Heine, etc., etc., of our time.-W. T. S. (1)-"G. B. S." GWYNPLAINE. BY VICTOR HUGO. "De Denasatis, bucca fissa usque ad aures, genezivis denudatis, nasoque murdridato, masca eris, et ridebis semper." Gwynplaine was a child abandoned one winter evening on the coast of Portland, in the reign of Queen Anne, and received into a poor caravan at Weymouth. He was the legitimate son of Linnæus, Lord Clancharlie. In his infancy he had fallen into the hands of Comprachicos, and had been brought up as a mountebank. The Comprachicos, or Comprapequeños, were a hideous and nondescript association of wanderers, famous in the seventeenth century, forgotten in the eighteenth, unheard of in the nineteenth. The Comprachicos had a genius for disfiguration which recommended them to State policy. To disfigure is better than to kill. You are masked for ever by your own flesh-what can be more ingenious? The Comprachicos worked on man as the Chinese work on trees. Gwynplaine was tall, well-made, and agile, and no way deformed, excepting in his face. Gwynplaine, beautiful in figure, had probably been beautiful in face. At his birth he had no doubt resembled other infants. They had left the body intact, and retouched only the face. The dog Latin of the Middle Ages had a reason for its creation of the verb denasare. Industrious manipulators of children had worked upon his face. It seemed evident that a mysterious and probably occult science had chiselled his flesh, evidently at a very tender age, and manufactured his countenance with premeditation. That science, clever with the knife, skilled in obtusions and ligatures, had enlarged the mouth, cut away the lips, laid bare the gums, distended the ears, cut the cartilages, displaced the eyelids and the cheeks, enlarged the zygomatic muscle, pressed the scars and cicatrices to a level, turned back the skin over the lesions whilst the face was thus stretched, from all which resulted that powerful and profound piece of sculpture, the mask, Gwynplaine. *"George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Works. A Critical Biography (Authorised)." By Archibald Henderson, M.A., Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina. With thirty-three illustrations and numerous facsimiles. (Hurst and Blackett.) remove. However it may have been, the manipulation of Gwynplaine had succeeded admirably. Gwynplaine was a gift of Providence to dispel the sadness of man. The laugh which he had not placed, himself, on his brow, on his eyelids, on his mouth, he could not It had been stamped for ever on his face. It was automatic, and the more irresistible because it seemed petrified. No one could escape from this rictus. By virtue of the mysterious operation to which Gwynplaine had probably been subjected in his infancy, every part of his face contributed to that rictus; his whole physiognomy led to that result, as a wheel centres in the nave. All his emotions, whatever they might have been, augmented his strange face of joy, or to speak more correctly, aggravated it. If he wept, he laughed; and whatever Gwynplaine was, whatever he wished to be, whatever he thought, the moment that he raised his head, the crowd, if crowd there was, had before them one impersonation : an overwhelming burst of laughter. It was like a head of Medusa, but Medusa hilarious. All feeling or thought in the mind of the spectator was suddenly put to flight by the unexpected apparition, and laughter was inevitable. Antique art formerly placed on the outside of the Greek theatre a joyous brazen face, called Comedy. It laughed and occasioned laughter, but remained pensive. The burthen of care, of disillusion, anxiety and grief were expressed in its impassive countenance, and resulted in a lugubrious sum of mirth. One corner of the mouth was raised, in mockery of the human race; the other side, in blasphemy of the gods. One might almost have said that Gwynplaine was that dark, dead mask of ancient comedy, adjusted to the body of a living man. That infernal head of What implacable hilarity he supported on his neck. a weight for the shoulders of a man-an everlasting laugh! An everlasting laugh! However, his laugh was to Gwynplaine quite a talent. He could do nothing with it, so he turned it to account. By means of it he gained his living. Gwynplaine was brought up by a vagabond philosopher named Ursus, and a wolf called Homo. In the following description of Ursus we may see a foreshadowing of Schopenhauer, and in the wolf Homo the prototype of Nietzsche. |