Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: —off the stage—of romantic Italian opera. There is, too, another resemblance, puzzling for a moment, till of a sudden it flashes out. As portrayed in the photographs of Histed or Beresford—not in the color-plates of Steichen or Coburn—Bernard Shaw is often to be encountered upon the Rue Clichy or the Boulevard des Capuctnes. Look again, and you note the Germanic type—red beard and blue eyes— suggesting the Wagnerian comic opera, "Die Meis- tersinger." And as you look again, and observe the pointed beard, the upward curling moustachios, and the peaked eyebrows turning sharply outward and upward, there comes a vision of a cadaverous Celtic fidouard de Reszke—a genial Mephistopheles of the cock feather, the living impersonation of a Max Beerbohm cartoon. One is struck by Mr. Shaw's intense pallor, the gleaming whiteness and delicate texture of his skin, and the clear steel-blue of his eyes. The frame for an artist's sketch would be an elongated rectangle —a curious cephalic conformation illustrated in more than one of the Coburn prints. His brow— "the brow of a Madonna," as one of his acquaintances described it—is fine and noble; but his eyes are his most significant and characteristic feature. When he is engaged in serious conversation, particularly in the effective enunciation of an idea, his eyes have all the commanding directness of the soldier;but the greater part of the time they are dancing with the light of irrepressible humor. One idea, utterly mistaken, but fondly cherished by the many, is the supposition that Shaw's costume is excessively outre or bizarre. And yet it is quite true that his clothes, as well as his face and figure, serve to mark him out in any crowd. He wears, usually, brown woollens, a soft shirt with a rolled collar, a four-in-hand tie of inconspicuo...