A SHAVIAN CONFESSION

Gisborne Times, Volume LXXXII, Issue 12525, 10 April 1935, Page 7

A SHAVIAN CONFESSION

WHY HE KEPT LETTERS ER.OM ELLEN TERRY His reasons for keeping the lettiers. of Ellen 'Terry—almost alone among the large number of letters ho had received from famous people —are confessed bv Mr George Bernard Shaw i'll a- memorandum published in (lie latest issue of the British Museum Quarterly. The correspondence extended over a period of exactly 80 years, 18921922, and in November, 1034, Mr. Shaw presented the letters written by Miss Terry to the British Museum It may be remembered that a selection from tho correspondence on both sides was published in 1931, and aroused wide interest. In Ids memorandum, which ineeomponied the gift of the letters, Mr Shaw writes : “These letters owe their preservation tq the unique handwriting which made every page written hv Ellen Terry a picture which I could no more destroy than I could tear up the loaves of the Lutti'cll Psalter.” Later, he adds; “A hare statement that the reason was purely caligraphic would perhaps he an oversimplification, but if you add to the beauty of her handwriting its vivid expression of the spontaneity, frankness and impetuosity with which she flung her thoughts and feelings °n paper you will understand that her fetters were too much a, part of herself to he torn up and sent to. the bustbin.” In his youth-. Mr Saw says, he was impressed by Charles Dickens’s action in burning, as things pregnant wit!) incalculable mischief, a great accumulation of letters from almost all the most celebrated peop.e of the time. "Since then I have received even more letters than Dickens, because 1 have lived longer; and I cannot, believe that the best of them were lesa interesting and prods pus ftha n the best of his. , But, acting on that earfy hint'from him, T have destroyed them, all as they came, except when there was some quite unsentimental reason fc-r preserving them.” Every one of these letters from Miss Terry, he says, elicted a reply from him., written on any scrap of paper that came to hand; “and if was certainly not their beauty as material objects that saved 1 them from EHen’s dustbin.”