him than he deserved; but the Carmen music was--in places--exquisite of
its kind, and could enchant a man like me, romantic enough to have come
to the end of romance before I began to create in art for myself.

When I say that _I_ did and felt these things, I mean, of course, that
the predecessor whose name I bear did and felt them. The I of to-day is
(? am) cool towards Carmen; and Carmen, I regret to say, does not take
the slightest interest in him (? me). And now enough of this juggling
with past and present Shaws. The grammatical complications of being a
first person and several extinct third persons at the same moment are so
frightful that I must return to the ordinary misusage, and ask the
reader to make the necessary corrections in his or her own mind.

This book is not wholly a compound of intuition and ignorance. Take for
example the profession of my hero, an Irish-American electrical
engineer. That was by no means a flight of fancy. For you must not
suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an
honest living. I began trying to commit that sin against my nature when
I was fifteen, and persevered, from youthful timidity and diffidence,
until I was twenty-three. My last attempt was in 1879, when a company
was formed in London to exploit an ingenious invention by Mr. Thomas
Alva Edison--a much too ingenious invention as it proved, being nothing
less than a telephone of such stentorian efficiency that it bellowed
your most private communications all over the house instead of
whispering them with some sort of discretion. This was not what the
British stockbroker wanted; so the company was soon merged in the
National Telephone Company, after making a place for itself in the
history of literature, quite unintentionally, by providing me with a
job. Whilst the Edison Telephone Company lasted, it crowded the basement
of a huge pile of offices in Queen Victoria Street with American