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ELT 41 : 1 1998 become a business by 1914. It seems to have been a business, however, from the first offerings of Shakespeare's "wooden 0." Stanley Weintraub ________________ Pennsylvania State University Shaw's Book Reviews Bernard Shaw's Book Reviews. Volume 2:1884-1950. Bryan Tyson, ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. χ + 588 pp. $115.00 WITH THE PUBLICATION of this golden second volume of Shaw's book reviews, Bryan Tyson's earthly task is done and his wages ta'en, for it was a large undertaking and the editor has performed admirably. Reading these book reviews arranged chronologically along with their annotations constitutes not only an outline of the development of Shaw's public and private personality and his thinking about many subjects but also a most entertaining and informative traversal of the economic, political, social, cultural, and literary history of the first half of the twentieth century. For Shaw's omnivorous intellect ingested knowledge from many fields, nearly all of which are represented in this companion volume to Shaw's collected Pall Mall Gazette reviews edited and annotated by Professor Tyson previously. The present volume differs from its predecessor in two chief ways: the first volume contained assigned reviews written for the same journal during a four-year period, many of them on works Shaw considered a waste of time, particularly the multi-tome novels; the second volume of much wider scope has mostly reviews that Shaw wanted to write and covers a period of some sixty-six years. Yet Tyson notes in his introduction, as Shaw approaches his nonage the reviews increasingly become occasions for him to voice his opinion on sundry cosmopolitan topics, sometimes only distantly related to the subject of the book in question (rather like many reviewers in the New York Times Book Review nowadays). This book it seems to me will appeal to three classes of reader. The first is someone with an interest in social, economic, cultural, or political history, for Shaw places various figures such as H. M. Hyndman, Ferdinand Lassalle, Dean Inge, Nietzsche, the Webbs, Marx, Herbert Spencer, Trotsky, as well as their thinking, in historical context. He also gives his highly idiosyncratic views of these personages, the most interesting of which are on Tolstoy because Shaw while allowing Tolstoy his genius does not blind himself to the madness of Tolstoy's dotage. Shaw reviews several books on economic theory, and these were a chore 68 BOOK REVIEWS for this reader to get through; others may find them more enchanting. Shaw likewise reviews books on legislation designed to improve health and safety standards in factories, and so on. The second class of readers this volume will interest much is students of Shaw's plays, for the volume is replete with ideas, paradoxes, images, even verbal formulae, that will re-appear in the plays. Most such instances Tyson notes, but not all. One curious omission occurs in the annotations for Shaw's review of the publication of Wagner's prose works. A particular passage anticipates the witty description of English concert-goers in Heaven from Man and Superman (1903): "It is the glory of an Englishman never to know when he is beaten. Since he knows he ought to like Art, his first care is to go on doggedly swallowing it with a Spartan air of relish." This indictment turns into the Statue's simile for the type of people who choose dull heaven over beautiful hell: "At every one of these concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it." Another such oversight occurs, I believe, in Tyson's annotations to Shaw's review of a book of love verses by Richard Le Gallienne (quite the most hilarious review in the collection by the way). Tyson quotes from a letter in which Shaw expresses in turn misgivings for having hurt Le Gallienne's feelings, but satisfaction because Le Gallienne "was getting spoiled," and finally, impatience with Le Gallienne's response to Shaw's review, "his little poem in the Star was pathetic in its squeak of pain...

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