Bernard Shaw on the Split Infinitive

Here's some amusing proof that the great war over split infinitives has been raging for at least 110 years. In a letter to the editor of the London Daily Chronicle written in 1892, George Bernard Shaw dissed one of its journalists for upholding the split infinitive rule :
Sir,
If you do not immediately suppress the person who takes it upon himself to lay down the law almost every day in your columns on the subject of literary composition, I will give up taking The Chronicle. The man is a pedant, an ignoramus, an idiot, a self-advertising duffer. A little while ago, when somebody pointed out to him a case of the misuse of "and which", the creature, utterly missing the point, rushed about denouncing every sentence containing "and which" until some public-spirited subscriber of yours stopped him by a curt exposure which would have shamed any corrigible human being into humble silence for at least a month.
Yet he has already broken out in a fresh place. Mr. Andrew Lang, moved by a personal antipathy to "split infinitives" and to sentences ending with the word "such" (for example, Shakespeare's line, "No glory lives behind the back of such") once made a jocular attempt to bounce the public out of using them by declaring that they were bad English. Of course, all competent literary workmen laughed at Mr. Lang's little trick; but your fatuous specialist, driven out of his "and which" stronghold, is now beginning to rebuke "second-rate newspapers" for using such phrases as "to suddenly go" and "to boldly say".

I ask you, Sir, to put this man out. Give the porter orders to use such violence as may be necessary if he attempts to return, without, however, interfering with his perfect freedom of choice between "to suddenly go," "to go suddenly", and "suddenly to go". See that he does not come back; that is the main thing. And allow me, as one who has some little right to speak on the subject, to assure your readers that they may, without the slightest misgiving, use adverbed infinitives in any of the three ways given above. All they need consider is which of the three best conveys by its rhythm the feeling they wish to express.
Yours, &c.,
G. Bernard Shaw
Too bad GBS isn't still around. As you can see, he was almost obnoxious enough to pass for a typical Usenet poster.
Your pal,
Barney
Deprived of art, life instantly becomes so brutalized as to be devoid of interest. Further, there is a worse thing than no art at all - namely, the saccharine travesty of art supplied by Hollywood.
Wyndham Lewis