not superficial. I therefore venture to put my critics in
possession of certain facts concerning my contact with modern
ideas.

About half a century ago, an Irish novelist, Charles Lever, wrote
a story entitled A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance. It was published
by Charles Dickens in Household Words, and proved so strange to
the public taste that Dickens pressed Lever to make short work of
it. I read scraps of this novel when I was a child; and it made
an enduring impression on me. The hero was a very romantic hero,
trying to live bravely, chivalrously, and powerfully by dint
of mere romance-fed imagination, without courage, without means,
without knowledge, without skill, without anything real except
his bodily appetites. Even in my childhood I found in this poor
devil's unsuccessful encounters with the facts of life, a
poignant quality that romantic fiction lacked. The book, in spite
of its first failure, is not dead: I saw its title the other day
in the catalogue of Tauchnitz.

Now why is it that when I also deal in the tragi-comic irony of
the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination, no
critic ever affiliates me to my countryman and immediate
forerunner, Charles Lever, whilst they confidently derive me from
a Norwegian author of whose language I do not know three words,
and of whom I knew nothing until years after the Shavian
Anschauung was already unequivocally declared in books full of
what came, ten years later, to be perfunctorily labelled
Ibsenism. I was not Ibsenist even at second hand; for Lever,
though he may have read Henri Beyle, alias Stendhal, certainly
never read Ibsen. Of the books that made Lever popular, such as